and placed another fifteen with other firms in just one year.24
AFPH member Edith Povar of Dorchester, Massachusetts, wrote to Strachan, asking him to share her experience with rehabilitation with the subcommittee. She concluded that the program was all “politics and red tape.” Povar wrote, “They said I had the mental ability to hold a position but because I was a spastic they could not help me.” Having a form of cerebral palsy, despite being “able to get about well” and not having impaired speech, meant that rehabilitation counselors deemed her not feasible for the program.25 Warren D. Wright of Rockwell City, Iowa, had a similar experience of being too “seriously handicapped” for rehabilitation. He wrote the subcommittee that “for every person they are able to help in any way, there are many more for whom they can do nothing.” In rehabilitation, Wright saw a stymied path to the opportunities “most of us are interested in—to be able to be more independent from our family, and to work out some method of making our own living, not to mention medical aid, or better health.”26
Beyond the rejections, McMahon complained that rehabilitation officials in Buffalo refused to work with other agencies and were out of touch with the realities people with disabilities faced in the community. McMahon reported being “astounded” by a wartime press release from the head of the Buffalo rehabilitation office, which claimed that, if one thousand disabled individuals came to the office for rehabilitation the next day, he could place them in jobs. For McMahon, the announcement was startling because the Erie County Welfare Council and the Employment Service had a backlog of disabled job seekers and the rehabilitation director had not taken “the time to call either one of these other two agencies.” Further, he claimed that the rehabilitation program directly undermined the work of the Employment Service as some employers had been led to believe that they should not hire disabled individuals through the Employment Service unless the rehabilitation program approved the applicant.27
Other AFPH members complained about the “superior and patronizing attitude” of rehabilitation counselors, who, they believed, understood little about the labor market, job training, or job placement. “There is a tendency,” Margaret Nickerson Martin argued, “of certain groups working with handicapped people to feel that their exposure to the upper brackets of learning, their attainment of certain educational set standards, entitles them to a private halo, which they wear very straight upon their heads.” J. A. Strohmeyer, a national vice president and leader in the AFPH in Chicago, suggested that the individuals involved in the rehabilitation program were “more interested in gratuities and cheap publicity for themselves than for common-sense aid to the physically handicapped.”28
Rehabilitation counselors made judgments about the possibilities and fitness of the individual to work. Rejection meant that the counselor deemed the individual unfit for work and that reasonable educational, medical, and vocational help would not make the person employable. The gap between the number of cases registered and the number of individuals rehabilitated was wide. In 1944, the first year of the investigation, the civilian rehabilitation program registered 269,960 cases but rehabilitated only 43,997 persons, only 16 percent of those who applied.29 These figures indicate, at least in part, that the very agency charged with preparing and placing people with disabilities in employment found employment potential in only a small percentage of the disabled individuals it encountered.
Rejection meant that the sole federal agency that served disabled people’s interests had deemed them unemployable, cutting them off from the resources that might have improved their employability and access to social resources and civic life. Rejection from rehabilitation equaled rejection from the opportunity to secure the full rights and benefits of citizenship, let alone any sense of economic security. Pauline Solomon, who served as financial secretary of one of the Washington, D.C., AFPH chapters, described people with disabilities as being “unfairly condemned to a life of idleness and despair because of injury or disease which we do not have the means to remedy.”30
Rejection from rehabilitation often spelled dependence on charity or family, or even institutionalization. A disabled resident of Whitinsville, Massachusetts, wrote, “It is unfair that we should be the responsibility of charitable organizations and the burdens of relatives or family however willing or able they are to stand the financial strain which is always great to all but the very rich.” A disabled person who was rejected from rehabilitation “does not want or expect his or her family to give up comforts or convenience that should normally be their’s [sic] to give them to him. A person cannot feel anything but a burden under such circumstances.”31
The vocational rehabilitation program provided the only broad-based form of aid for adults with disabilities, but families played an integral role in closing the gaps in social services. Families provided not only the first defense against poverty and need but also the safety net when the rehabilitation program failed people with disabilities. The absence of family resources could spell disaster for a person with a disability. The failures of the rehabilitation service and welfare policy cemented disabled people’s dependent status. George Booth wrote, “I was refused any public assistance other than the county home for the poor.” At sixteen, he began work in the mines, but he fractured his pelvis in an automobile accident. After nearly two years in the hospital, Booth continued to use a crutch for mobility. His mother died during the Depression, leaving his aging father to support him and three young children. Booth tried to work and helped care for his younger brothers, but his father struggled to make ends meet on a public works project wage. Booth applied for relief because he was unemployed, but he was told that “if my father refused to keep me I should sue him for nonsupport.” The response from relief officials made clear that Booth, who was in his twenties at the time, was regarded as a dependent. His disability negated his previous working history and blocked him from accessing the protections against uncertainty that the New Deal had created.32
The gaps in New Deal protections also shaped Mildred Willis’s life. Living in Otwell, Indiana, Willis depended on her sixty-one-year-old father for support. At forty, she had “been bedfast 23 years with tuberculosis of the bone.” Her father’s ill health prevented him from working on a regular basis, and the cost of her care, which required dressing her hip each day, was becoming a greater burden on the family. Willis’s father did not yet qualify for Social Security, and the program did not yet provide financial assistance to people with disabilities beyond Aid to the Blind. Willis eked out an existence selling greeting cards, but she reported growing difficulties in making ends meet as more organizations sold cards and others could be purchased at stores. She described others in her situation who were able to get bedding or other minor assistance from a charity organization, but Willis wrote that they needed “other things just as bad and all the time.”33
The availability of family resources and willingness to expend them on a disabled relative could mean the difference between living in an institution and receiving an education, between confinement and mobility. Children with physical disabilities, without family support, might have been institutionalized in state or county homes for the “feebleminded” or aged. Adults with disabilities who were unable to secure employment and without family support also feared being institutionalized. Susan Polk Graves of St. Louis, Missouri, wrote the subcommittee that she was “handicapped by spastic paralysis to the extent that I cannot even sign my own name, dress, or feed myself; I do not walk alone, either.” She described the “dreadful situation” common when a person, like her, with cerebral palsy, “is left alone in the world or for some reason cannot be cared for in his own home, he is sent to State institutions for the feeble-minded, regardless of his intelligence.”34 Ultimately, without family support or the assistance of rehabilitation or charities, the economic marginalization of people with disabilities could end in their institutionalization—a dreaded fate.
Members’ testimony emphasized that difficulties in finding employment were a critical component of their economic marginalization. For example, Charles J. Hobbins, an AFPH member from Pennsylvania, had worked for much of his life but had nearly always struggled to find employment. An accident at
