Out of the Horrors of War Politics and Culture in Modern America

Out of the Horrors of War POLITICS AND CULTURE IN MODERN AMERICA Series Editors: Margot Canaday, Glenda Gilmore, Michael Kazin, Stephen Pitti, Thomas J. Sugrue Volumes in the series narrate and analyze political and social change in the broadest dimensions from 1865 to the present, including ideas about the ways people have sought and wielded power in the public sphere and the language and institutions of politics at all levels—local, national, and transnational. The series is motivated by a desire to reverse the fragmentation of modern U.S. history and to encourage synthetic perspectives on social movements and the state, on gender, race, and labor, and on intellectual history and popular culture. Out of the Horrors of War Disability Politics in World War II America Audra Jennings UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS PHILADELPHIA Copyright © 2016 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104– 4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data ISBN 978- 0- 8122- 4851- 7 For my parents and grandparents Contents Introduction 1 1. Salvaging People: Disability in a Nation at War 13 2. From the Depths of Personal Experience: Disability Activists Demand a Hearing 53 3. Toward a New Freedom from Fear: Disability and Postwar Uncertainty 91 4. It’s Good Business: Disability and Employment 132 5. Work or Welfare: The Limits of the Body Politic 157 6. Götterdämmerung: Rehabilitating Rights in the 1950s 188 Epilogue 218 Notes 225 Index 271 Acknowledgments 283 Introduction In early 1943, Mildred Scott, who was in her early thirties and living in Dal- las, Texas, at the time, came across a pamphlet for a new organization—the American Federation of the Physically Handicapped (AFPH). Intrigued by what she had read, she wrote for more information and eventually joined the organization, whose emblem promised “Justice,” “Opportunity,” “Unity,” and “Equal Rights.” Her own experiences had taught her that people with disabilities could not expect opportunity, equal rights, or justice in the same way able- bodied individuals could. Growing up in Cecil, Pennsylvania, just out- side Pittsburgh, disabled by polio and one of seven children, she rarely felt “different” or “looked upon as a ‘novelty.’ ”1 That changed shortly before she graduated from high school, when she learned that she would be denied the career path of the women she “knew and admired best.” Her home state, like many others, banned people with visible disabilities from teaching. Scott attended a teachers college but could not get a job as a teacher. Eventually, she landed work as a stenographer with the U.S. Bureau of Mines, a job that would ultimately take her to Dallas, but she would later say that her experience searching for “what I might do” taught her that people with disabilities needed to work for better laws and greater opportunity. Discovering that she was legally barred from following her am- bitions, and experiencing what must have been a difficult search for some other path, surely made the AFPH commitment to ending “all unfair discrimination against the employment of otherwise qualified but physically handicapped applicants” particularly appealing.2 For a while, Scott did little beyond joining the fledgling organization, which by the following year already boasted forty- five lodges and an exten- sive at- large membership.3 As a member, however, Scott began to receive mailings from the AFPH. She grew increasingly interested in the organization that she would later describe as “pioneering in a virtually unknown 2 Introduction field.” When she moved to Washington, D.C., after having saved money to return to school, Scott began volunteering with the AFPH in the evening, learning more about the organization, its aims, and its agenda. She decided to invest her “time and money into [the AFPH] instead.” Later, Scott recalled that she “had never met anyone before who was so convinced and deter- mined that there must be a real program for the Nation’s millions of handicapped, and, a militant organization to back it up,” as Paul Strachan, the organization’s founder and president.4 A man with impressive government and union connections from his days as an organizer and legislative representative for the American Federation of Labor (AFL), Strachan had founded the AFPH to improve the economic and social lot of disabled Americans. Chartered in Washington, D.C., in 1942 as a nonprofit, educational, and beneficent organization, the AFPH grew out of Strachan’s personal experiences of being “broke and dependent” after an au- tomobile accident and several prolonged illnesses, and his vivid memories of how disabled World War I veterans had been cast aside once the embers of war and victory celebrations had faded.5 Eventually, Scott’s determination and commitment grew to match Strachan’s. She began working for the AFPH full- time as the national organization’s secretary. Scott described the AFPH as full of “faith and hope,” working “for things that are right and just,” and her own activism as working toward “a program which someday would bring about better conditions for the handicapped and the members of their families.”6 In discovering that Pennsylvania law prevented her from fulfilling a call- ing toward which she had worked and for which she felt able, Mildred Scott began to understand that society imposed limits on her beyond any physical limitation associated with her disability. Disability was imbued with social consequences and meaning that extended far beyond the lasting physical, mental, or intellectual consequences of disease, accident, or birth defect. Scott’s personal experiences speak to this larger story, not just of the organization she helped to run, but of American society, law, and the state. Disabil- ity is, and has always been, evolving, defined variously by religious leaders, physicians, policymakers, philanthropists, social workers, and disabled people themselves. Scholars in the fields of disability studies and history have come to understand disability as a social construction and a powerful tool for understanding relationships of power and systems of exclusion. Disability studies scholar Rosemarie Garland- Thomson maintains “that disability, like femaleness, is not a natural state of corporeal inferiority, inadequacy, excess, Introduction 3 or a stroke of misfortune. Rather, disability is a culturally fabricated narrative of the body.”7 In the 1940s, AFPH members, like Scott, began to recognize and confront socially constructed narratives of disability that limited their participation in the workforce and their lives as citizens. The AFPH enabled members to look beyond individual struggles and identify a broader pattern of disability exclusions that belied narratives of individual failure and faults. More than an end to disability discrimination, AFPH leaders and members imagined a society in which state policy made possible disabled individuals’ full participation in civic life. While its de- mands changed over time, the AFPH sought a range of federal services to facilitate the employment of people with disabilities, advocating for greater access to government employment, employment placement assistance, and legislation requiring employers to hire people with disabilities. The organization further called for a federal pension program for people with disabilities years before Congress extended social insurance to disability or aid to people with disabilities beyond blindness, which had been written into the original Social Security Act. AFPH activists demanded improved access to health care and education, increased building access, better safety and hygiene programs, and federally funded research on various disabilities and potential treat- ments. Moreover, they envisioned a state in which people with disabilities participated in the development and administration of the policies that would shape their lives.8 As a national, cross- disability social movement organization, the AFPH represented something new. TheAF PH pulled thousands of disabled citizens—civilians and veterans with a range of physical disabilities—into the national political arena, demanding equal access to economic security and its corollary, economic citizenship, where older organizations had grown around a single disability, a local community, or military service.9 AFPH leaders claimed that all Americans with disabilities had much in common. Indeed, AFPH chapters facilitated a more universal notion of disability as members’ interactions with one another sensitized them to the challenges of others’ disabilities. These interactions fostered a sense that disability exclusions tran- scended the specific type of disability or the way it was acquired and that only national activism and federal action could create a better situation. Beyond its disabled constituents, the organization won the powerful support of labor leaders in the AFL, Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), International Association of Machinists (IAM), and other unions.10 4 Introduction This vision had its limitations. As the organization’s name suggests, AFPH leaders and members imagined

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