industries expanded and industry faced labor shortages, McMahon moved forward with his plan to establish a factory managed and run by disabled people, noting “I could not help but believe that these handicapped boys and girls who had been hired in defense plants would be the first to be dismissed as soon as war production ceases.” He also recognized that many disabled people remained unemployed even as factories were desperate for workers. The war economy presented both challenges and opportunities for McMahon’s idea. Regulations designed to increase defense production limited available materials for consumer goods, but because many factories had shifted from consumer to defense production, there was an opening in the market. In the summer of 1942, he launched the Toymakers Guild, a division of his broader company, Handicapped Persons Industries, Inc., to produce wooden toys. McMahon recruited other successful disabled individuals to serve on the board, ranging from teachers to a master watchmaker, a housewife, and a defense worker. The group designed toys, produced samples, and secured $100,000 in orders at a toy fair in New York City.15
McMahon and the board of Handicapped Persons Industries, Inc., employed individuals from the relief rolls, all deemed not feasible for rehabilitation by the civilian rehabilitation program. The first twenty-one people he hired had spent a combined total of 125 years existing on meager public aid and private charity. Handicapped Persons Industries, Inc., paid workers full wages, despite the fact that the Fair Labor Standards Act allowed employers to pay people with disabilities less than the minimum wage. McMahon also ensured that his employees had access to Social Security benefits and were paid time and a half for overtime work.16 Through Handicapped Persons Industries, Inc., and McMahon’s organizing efforts, Buffalo’s disabled citizens had already begun to demand something more than charity, and the AFPH’s message of justice, opportunity, and equal rights found an eager constituency.
By the end of 1942, the AFPH’s national campaign for legislation was underway. In June 1942, Representative Jerry Voorhis (D-CA) had introduced a joint resolution to establish National Employ the Physically Handicapped Week (NEPHW), Strachan’s plan for a formal public education campaign.17 The AFPH had also begun the drive for a federal investigation of the needs of Americans with disabilities and the aid programs that benefitted them. Voorhis told AFPH members that such a committee “would be the means of focusing public attention” on the problems people with disabilities faced, reveal their needs, and contribute to “the formulation of a national policy.” Additionally, the organization had begun to develop plans for a federal agency for disabled individuals, a federal ban on employment discrimination, representation in government agencies serving people with disabilities, and mandates for special services through the U.S. Civil Service Commission and U.S. Employment Service.18 By 1944, the AFPH had found sponsors for four different bills. In the House, the AFPH got two different bills introduced: one, instructing the Committee on Labor to “investigate, survey, and develop a national program for all the physically handicapped,” and another that would have established a personal catastrophe loan system. The organization succeeded in finding sponsors in both the House and Senate for bills to establish NEPHW and to create a division in the Employment Service for disabled job seekers.19
The House of Representatives voted to launch the AFPH proposed investigation in June 1944. The resolution directed the Committee on Labor “to conduct thorough studies and investigation of the extent and character of aid now given by the Federal, State, and local governments and private agencies to the physically handicapped” and “employment opportunities” to “aid the Congress in any necessary remedial legislation.” It gave the committee and any subcommittees it formed the power to subpoena records, hold hearings, compel testimony, and access Selective Service System, War Manpower Commission, and Bureau of the Census records.20
As chair of the Committee on Rules, Representative Adolph Sabath D-IL) introduced the measure for consideration, noting his support and that he had “received a very large number of communications, telegrams, and resolutions from nearly every section of the United States favoring the passage of this worthy resolution.” While promoted by Democrats, Republicans, including the minority leader Joseph Martin (R-MA), also expressed approval. The AFPH figured in the discussion on the House floor. Henderson Carson (R-OH) contended, “It is imperative that we immediately plan a national program to provide a cushion against the unhappy days of post-war chaos and possible unemployment and want which a large number of these people have experienced in the past.” He noted that people with disabilities “are patriotic in the extreme,” having committed “to all war activities.” Carson’s words were shaped by his personal connection to the AFPH. He was an honorary member of the organization and knew one of the national vice presidents well, both hailing from Canton, Ohio.21
Committee on Labor member Richard J. Welch (R-CA) argued that the investigation would focus on “the human rights of physically handicapped individuals” and that Congress “should give them fair consideration.” Representative Kelley, who would chair the committee, said that Congress confronted “an astonishing lack of knowledge” on the problems that contributed to the unemployment of people with disabilities. Without an investigation, he maintained, Congress would not have the information necessary “to deal with the problem.” Beyond the question of rights, members of the House repeatedly referenced labor shortages and the need to assist disabled veterans, as Jennings Randolph (D-WV) phrased it, “fit themselves into our peacetime day-by-day economy.”22
The House Committee on Labor established a subcommittee to conduct the investigation, which lasted from August 1944 until June 1946. In 1944, Randolph, Welch, Thomas E. Scanlon (D-PA), Stephen A. Day (R-IL), and Joseph Clark Baldwin (R-NY) formed the subcommittee with Kelley serving as the chair. After the 1944 election, the subcommittee grew to seven members, and Ellis E. Patterson (D-CA), William J. Green, Jr. (D-PA), and Sherman Adams (R-NH) replaced Scanlon and Day. The subcommittee conducted twenty-five hearings, focusing on aid to amputees; blind, deaf, and “spastic” individuals; as well as people with poliomyelitis, tuberculosis, orthopedic disabilities, cancer, and epilepsy. The hearings examined conditions in New York City, Pittsburgh, Detroit, and Philadelphia and studied disability through the lenses of accident prevention, monopolies and advertising, international activities, Library of Congress programs, drug addiction, employment, federal aid, rural conditions, coordination of federal programs, federal employment for blind individuals, and maternal and child health. The subcommittee also held hearings on the AFPH’s proposed federal agency.23
When Personal Became Political
Through the AFPH, the mosaic of members’ individual struggles to access health care, education, rehabilitation services, employment, and a broad range of physical spaces formed a broader picture of state and social failures. Members who lacked familial or community support existed on the margins of society and faced the threat of being placed in institutions. All these factors led to chronic fears, and regular experiences, of economic insecurity. By demanding a federal investigation and sharing their stories, members transformed their personal experiences of discrimination, exclusion, and frustration with a lack of services into a collective, political statement.
Civilian rehabilitation policy was central to the critique offered by AFPH members. In many ways, it came to represent a broad range of social and economic problems people with disabilities often faced and the failures of government policy to address these issues. Like many AFPH members, McMahon had been deemed a poor candidate for rehabilitation because his disability was too severe when he sought assistance in the 1920s. His own experiences, and those of other disabled members of the Buffalo community, many of whom worked with or for him at Handicapped Persons Industries, Inc., led him to conclude, “Entirely too many physically handicapped individuals are being considered not feasible for rehabilitation.” One of his secretaries, who had “a progressive paralysis,” had been denied rehabilitation, and when the counselor who had rejected her visited her home a year later, he did not believe her mother’s report that she was working. Like his secretary, more than half McMahon’s employees had been refused rehabilitation. Through his own business and connections in the community, McMahon tried to demonstrate that the rehabilitation
