had been told time and time again that workers’ compensation laws in Pennsylvania prevented employers from hiring “a crippled person.”35 Likewise, Helen J. Apgar of St. Louis, Missouri, wrote to the subcommittee about the difficulties she and other disabled people faced on the job market. She had found work during the war, a job she hoped “to hold” with the transition to peace, “but during the depression,” she wrote, “I was laid off because they could have their choice of healthy and better-looking girls who were willing to work for low wages.” Apgar had fractured her back as a toddler, which resulted in “some deformity” of her spine. “The personnel heads,” she noted, “take one glance at a crippled person and say: ‘The job has been filled,’ ‘No more applications are being taken.’ Nine out of ten offices have told me that (when same firms have advertisements in the next day’s paper).” Apgar opined that if disabled people were “too ‘terrible’ to stand seeing around, then the healthy taxpayer should give them a pension to live on.” She concluded, “The poor injured returning veterans certainly have my sympathy if they meet the cool atmosphere I come up against time after time in job hunting.”36 Cynthia May Lurie of Arlington, Virginia, criticized employers for their attitude toward her disability. She noted, “Some of those who interviewed me asked me if I had a warm home and plenty to eat. After telling them I did, they couldn’t understand why I wanted to work.” Still other employers, she argued, “treated me as though I was out of my mind and would rush me out of their office at the beginning of the interview.”37
AFPH members and other people with disabilities who wrote to the subcommittee described experience after experience of informal, yet widespread, employment discrimination. The employers they encountered rarely explained that they were passing on an individual because of a disability, but instead rushed through interviews or told disabled applicants the position had been filled, while continuing to advertise for employees. Employers routinely blamed insurance companies for their refusal to hire people with disabilities, insisting that insurance rates would be higher if they did so or that insurance policies were unavailable for disabled workers. Insurance companies, however, claimed that employers misinterpreted their policies and were unnecessarily restrictive in their hiring policies when it came to disabled individuals. For example, one insurance company reported, “Some employers assume that physical examinations are had for the purpose of discrimination.” In reality, the company required the examinations prior to employment to protect employers from paying for existing injuries.38 Whether employers or insurance companies were actually to blame, people with disabilities often heard that ineligibility for insurance or high rates prevented their employment.
Educational inequality often exacerbated the difficulties that AFPH members and other disabled Americans experienced as they searched for work. A lack of educational opportunities was central to AFPH testimony before the subcommittee and its broader developing agenda. Representing the AFPH committee of the deaf, Alan B. Crammatte pointed out that “schools for the deaf provide an elementary education or less for their students, plus a few years (3 to 7) of vocational education, for 2 to 4 hours a day, and necessarily at an elementary school level.” This level of education, Crammatte asserted, prepared deaf children “for little other than menial labor.”39 AFPH leaders shared with the subcommittee a 1944 report produced by the organization’s national leadership council that emphasized widespread educational failures. The report suggested that many states had been “remiss in their scrutiny of services to handicapped children, especially in relation to school set-ups.” It noted the need for better facilities, instruction, and teachers. Of particular concern to the members who drafted the report was the fact that disabled children were often “being taught by second-rate teachers who are not—sad to relate—deemed of sufficient quality, in several instances, to teach in nonhandicapped schools.”40
Indeed, disabled children and young adults encountered considerable barriers to obtaining an education. Before Congress enacted the Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975, public schools could deny children access to education based on their disabilities. Most states maintained separate, residential facilities for blind and deaf children, where they were educated away from their homes and families.41 Still, the availability of instruction through special classes or schools was woefully inadequate. In 1937, the U.S. Office of Education estimated that of the approximately two million disabled children in the country only one in every ten benefited from a special education program.42 Access to public or special schools for children with physical disabilities largely depended on the city and state the child lived in, the individual child’s disability, family resources and advocacy, and decisions of school administrators. For example, Melvin E. Schoonover, AFPH member and editor of the Shut-In’s Companion, wrote to other AFPH members, “The shut-in fraternity as a whole probably constitutes the largest single unit of illiterate and semi-literate persons within our national community.” He claimed that “very few” homebound people with disabilities were “able to complete even grammar school.” Schoonover concluded, “It seems foolhardy to refuse to the shut-in what is compulsorily given to others.”43
While white children with disabilities encountered serious barriers to their education, the conditions African American children with disabilities faced were worse. Writing for the Journal of Negro Education in 1937, educator James A. Scott argued that blind and deaf African American children had the greatest access to education, but that even the education that these children received was “distinctly inferior.” Many southern states maintained completely separate schools for blind and deaf African American children, while others provided instruction for African American pupils in segregated classes within the states’ blind and deaf schools. Scott declared, “Practically no effort is made to enforce compulsory attendance laws for either Negro blind or deaf pupils.” Moreover, he maintained that in the South public education programs for white children with other physical disabilities were “practically non-existent,” and conditions were much worse for African American children. Finally, Scott contended that racial discrimination against African American children with disabilities also extended to some programs in the North. On the whole, racial discrimination dramatically reduced the already slim educational opportunities open to children with disabilities, and in most cases, the institutions open to African Americans suffered from chronic underfunding, with the quality of instruction falling far below what was available to white children.44
People with disabilities also faced considerable barriers to higher education. For example, Lurie told the subcommittee that she had tried for more than a year to attend college, applying for admission to several schools. Lurie complained, “Not one of these colleges would accept me because of spastic paralysis.” At least one of the schools was direct about rejecting Lurie because of her disability. The dean, Lurie reported, thought that the school would be too crowded for her and “feared that I would not fit into the college due to the fact that all of my classmates would be physically fit and I would be the only one handicapped.”45 As late as 1949, an effort to find a college or university to accept a group of disabled students, mostly veterans, who had been attending the temporary Galesburg campus of the University of Illinois, yielded telling results. Of the approximately 150 schools contacted, fifteen expressed a willingness to admit the students but only four could offer an accessible campus.46
The quality and availability of prosthetic limbs and mobility aids, necessary for many people with disabilities to gain an education or employment, figured prominently in disability activists’ testimony—both on the military and civilian side. Like members of the AFPH, veterans and the organizations that represented them used the House investigation to draw attention to the difficulties that they faced. As early as 1942, the American Legion had begun a campaign to pressure the government to conduct research into better prosthetics. During the war, the Army Medical Corps alone performed successful amputations on roughly 14,000 soldiers. Amputees overwhelmed the system caring for them. Early in the war, the army provided initial treatment for its amputees who were then transferred to the VA for further care, rehabilitation, and training. By 1943, the army—soldiers suffered the bulk of injuries during the war that required amputations—had to offer definitive care for its amputees, as the VA could not handle the
