care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health,” “the right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment,” and “the right to a good education.”7 Roosevelt deemed these rights “a second Bill of Rights.” As the speech suggested, New Deal and wartime policy had led citizens to look increasingly to the federal government to guarantee access to opportunity. The right to earn a living, to work, and to a broadly defined sense of security emerged as an entitlement of citizenship—one that was, as scholars have shown, mitigated by race, gender, and sexuality.8
For people with disabilities, the war played an important role in creating a new sense that these rights were also theirs to claim. The House investigation and national news coverage of the home front shone a light on disability employment practices during the war. Wartime employment opportunities helped to ignite disability rights activism and the AFPH. Hiring practices that aimed to cope with labor shortages and make space for disabled veterans, along with the state’s efforts to encourage and facilitate those practices, created a new sense of what was possible. World War II policy and employment realities suggested the state could make the New Deal promise and protections of Roosevelt’s Second Bill of Rights accessible to Americans with disabilities. Numerous federal agencies worked with employers across the country to create new opportunities and find new ways to utilize the skills of people with disabilities. Those efforts, the jobs that grew out of them, and the meaning invested in those jobs created a new sense of rights. The AFPH grew out of and channeled those new expectations.
But even with wartime employment opportunities, those rights remained an unrealized promise for many people with disabilities. As AFPH members would work to demonstrate to the subcommittee, the patchwork of state and federal laws designed to improve the status of disabled Americans left large gaps of discrimination and need. Even as the New Deal and World War II fundamentally altered Americans’ expectations for the federal government, people with disabilities remained on the margins, underserved and classed as dependents. Through their interactions with the subcommittee, AFPH members sought to demonstrate how people with disabilities had been excluded from the promises of employment, security, and opportunity.
New Deal policy had tied access to security and the rights of citizenship to work.9 In this context, disabled people’s ability and right to work became central to AFPH arguments for inclusion and demands for state action. Access to work and state support of that access cut across much of the AFPH agenda. Work could secure for members greater access to economic security and health care. Improved access to education, expanded rehabilitation services, medical treatments, and physical spaces could mean greater employability. The emphasis on productive capacity and work stood in direct opposition to charity. Indeed, Martin linked charity to stigma and a figurative death. In essence, people with disabilities had become objects of charity because they were assumed to be unable to work without assistance. The connection reified the notion that people with disabilities were not citizens. Instead, charity marked people with disabilities as others, whose bodies prevented them from contributing to the national body. As AFPH members translated their personal frustrations and those of their fellow members into an agenda, a social movement, they demanded that the state recognize and facilitate their full citizenship by supporting their access to employment, rather than consigning them to charity—a prospect they viewed as dehumanizing. The realities of discrimination, economic marginalization, and failing policy would both foster and shape the AFPH and disability activism more broadly in the mid-twentieth century.
In the Context of War
The AFPH grew rapidly as people with disabilities sought opportunities to contribute to the war efforts on the home front, participate in the prosperity fueled by the war economy, and claim rights from the state as it sought their service in meeting the production needs of war. Between August 1942 and May 1945, the organization grew from the small, committed group who founded it and secured a charter to an organization with around 2,000 dues-paying members. The AFPH had established some sixty chapters and recruited members in every state before the war ended.10
As Martin’s testimony suggests, the AFPH represented people with physical disabilities. The distinction helped to define the movement’s strategies, claims, and goals, and perhaps limited its transformative potential. In arguing for people with physical disabilities’ working and citizenship capacity, members often highlighted their abilities in comparison to people with intellectual disabilities. In so doing, they defined their citizenship claims in opposition to people with intellectual and cognitive disabilities, implying that the exclusion of one group was unjust and the other just. Historian Douglas C. Baynton maintains, “When categories of citizenship were questioned, challenged, and disrupted, disability was called on to clarify and define who deserved, and who was deservedly excluded from, citizenship.”11 AFPH members did not fully challenge a system of exclusion based on disability. Instead, they challenged a system of exclusion based on physical disability.
In 1944, Strachan told members that organization was the key to progress for people with disabilities and countering the “political indifference and ignorance on the part of the great mass of people.” He warned against focusing too much attention on local issues. Organizations of people with disabilities, he argued, floundered when “they persist in seeing things only in their immediate neighborhood; they persist in thinking entirely in terms of local problems; we must think in terms of the Nation.”12 As Strachan’s speech suggests, the AFPH’s developing agenda sought to position disability as a national problem—no longer a problem solely of families, communities, charities, and local and state governments but one of national significance requiring federal action.
Organizationally, the AFPH drew on that message of the importance of national politics, tapped into existing, local networks of people with disabilities, and worked to broaden and politicize those networks. For example, participants in a swimming class for disabled men and women at the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Young Women’s Christian Association had formed a club, the Keystone Arrow Club, in the spring of 1941. In May 1943, a national AFPH officer attended a club meeting, and the group that had begun around a swimming class voted to become an AFPH chapter. The national AFPH’s presence at that May 1943 meeting drew George Lehr, Jr., to the event. Lehr, a disabled veteran of World War I, served as personnel director of Pennsylvania’s Bureau of Motor Vehicles, and through his status as a disabled veteran, his involvement in the new Harrisburg AFPH chapter would expand the group’s organizational reach to include disabled veterans and government networks.13
In other cases, the AFPH offered a national network for local disability organizations already politically and economically engaged. Harold J. McMahon of Buffalo, New York, would become a national vice president of the AFPH, but his organizational work in Buffalo, before and after the AFPH was founded, had primed the city’s residents to be active members in a national movement. McMahon’s personal experiences shaped his work in Buffalo. As a young man he had developed osteomyelitis, a bone infection, and lost his left leg above the knee and a bone in his left arm; he also nearly lost his right leg. After recovering, McMahon worked in the printing trade, holding numerous positions from work in the composing room to sales. During World War I, he worked in a war plant outside of New York City. McMahon convinced his employer that other people with disabilities could meet the factory’s labor demands, and the factory eventually hired sixty disabled workers. After the war, McMahon returned to the printing industry. A few years later, however, he visited the plant where he had worked during the war to discover that all the disabled folks he had worked with there had “been discarded and replaced by able-bodied people.” That experience stuck with McMahon, but another sharpened the feeling that he had to do something to improve the opportunities for people with disabilities. He recalled seeing a bread line in Philadelphia in 1930 and realizing that nine of the thirty people in line had visible disabilities. That breadline, he later said, represented a truth he had known for some time: “the handicapped worker is always the last hired and the first fired.” McMahon decided that freedom from charity and public aid would come through organization of businesses owned by people with disabilities.14
