veteran, the war provoked a new and powerful awareness of disability.31 In 1945, a House joint resolution suggested that the “problem” of disability would “be more severe at the conclusion of World War II than at any other period in the history of our country.”32 Policymakers understood disability as a “problem” because of its perceived power to disrupt and strain the structures and relationships that tied citizens to the state—employer and employee, husband and wife, and family and child. AFPH leaders recognized the potential of this visibility and urgency. Indeed, AFPH president Strachan often pointed to insight he had gained during World War I from a fellow organized labor legislative representative that unions would secure gains in disability policy only when “the horrors of disablement” of the war were fresh in people’s minds.33
The history of the AFPH challenges existing narratives of the disability rights movement and our understanding of twentieth-century American social movements. I join with numerous scholars whose work, as historian Felicia Kornbluh has described it, “interrupts a metanarrative of civil rights struggles in the twentieth century that begins with the movement against legal Jim Crow and extends chronologically to the women’s, LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender), environment, and disability movements, with the latter usually treated as though it began in the 1970s.”34 Like historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, who argues for a “long civil rights movement” to more accurately describe the African American civil rights movement, I argue disability activism has a long history. And like the African American civil rights movement, the politics of World War II and the New Deal shaped the disability rights movement.35
AFPH leaders understood coalition building as a vital tool in enacting their vision for an accessible state, and the organization recruited the support of organized labor. The AFL, CIO, UMWA, IAM, and other unions helped to finance the AFPH and provided it with organizational and legislative support. Working-class members’ networks at the local level and Strachan’s connections from his work as a labor organizer helped to facilitate the disability rights-organized labor coalition, but the ties between movements ran deeper. As AFPH leaders and members cultivated the support of organized labor, they tapped into a deep history in which disability and safety concerns helped to fuel union organization and a sense that disability itself was a working-class problem, often caused by dangerous workplaces and a lack of health care. In their interactions with the AFPH, organized labor leaders drew connections between the AFPH agenda and labor’s broader vision for the state and democracy. The AFPH agenda offered a concrete link between traditional union concerns about health and safety and newer goals of expanding the protections offered by the welfare state and helped focus labor’s attention on both union and nonunion disabled people.36
Wartime necessities drove the Roosevelt administration and Congress to expand disability policy. In the postwar period, however, the sense of crisis surrounding disability remained. Both AFPH members and liberal policymakers sought to channel that feeling of crisis. Disability figured in President Harry S. Truman’s Fair Deal vision from his earliest articulations of his domestic agenda. To ensure “health security for all,” he called for social insurance to cover disability and sickness, national health insurance, government-sponsored medical and scientific research, federal funding to build health care facilities, and greater attention to public health. But his Fair Deal was larger than disability. It represented a commitment to a wider vision of economic security through full employment, affordable housing, and a higher minimum wage and civil rights.37 Postwar liberals who supported the Fair Deal agenda argued that the prevalence of disability and the conditions that disabled people faced justified a wide sweep of Fair Deal aims, but they supported disability activists’ arguments that the federal government needed to do more to make the promise of the New Deal accessible to people with disabilities. This ongoing sense of crisis around disability and the AFPH campaign for greater opportunities drew numerous voices—members of Congress, disabled people, organized labor leaders, physicians, a growing number of experts who claimed specialized knowledge in the field of disability, and leaders in the Department of Labor (DOL), Federal Security Agency (FSA), and the rehabilitation bureaucracy—into a national dialogue about disability and policy in the postwar state. Many questions emerged in this debate. Did the problems people with disabilities faced stem from discrimination or problems inherent in the individual? Should experience of disability or expert knowledge guide policy? Should it focus on providing jobs or medical support? Both AFPH leaders and experts in the field of rehabilitation offered answers to these questions that would ultimately shape the future of U.S. disability policy. Throughout much of the 1940s and 1950s, the AFPH sought to make the state, economic security, and citizenship accessible, but the horrors of war that had created a space for disability activists to be heard also lent weight to the authority of a growing body of professionals who claimed expertise over disability and people with disabilities. As postwar policymakers sought to extend disability policy and the welfare state more generally, they had to navigate a growing gap between disability activists’ demands and the prescriptions of disability experts.
The chapters that follow, organized in a roughly chronological order, trace the story of the AFPH—its claims, demands, and vision as well as its efforts to translate its vision into action, policy, and change. But they also tell a broader story about the growth of the disability rights movement; how policymakers, bureaucrats, activists, physicians, and a range of professionals grappled with disability during World War II and the immediate postwar years; how the (dis)ability binary continued to define citizenship; and how disability intersected with liberal policymakers’ postwar vision for an expanded welfare state.
Chapters 1 and 2 focus on the moment of World War II. Chapter 1 examines how disabled Americans fought to contribute to victory and for greater opportunities to participate in the growing prosperity on the home front during World War II. It also illustrates how the needs of the wartime economy and disabled veterans led the Roosevelt administration and Congress to push businesses to employ disabled workers and develop policies to facilitate disabled people’s entry into the workforce as well as disabled veterans’ integration into the peacetime economy. Chapter 2 focuses on the House of Representatives’ two-year investigation on aid to people with disabilities, beginning in August 1944. The subcommittee that led the investigation interviewed disability activists, government officials, organized labor leaders, physicians, and employers.38 The AFPH, which had fought for the investigation, used the hearings to highlight the failings of federal disability policy and the discrimination that disabled people faced on the job market and in education.
Chapter 3 turns to the reconversion moment. It examines how postwar anxieties contributed to the growth of the AFPH. As the organization worked to expand its base, leaders worked to foster unity and community and develop coalitions to put political weight behind the AFPH objectives. The chapter also analyzes how the policies put in place during World War II shifted in the postwar era. Chapters 4 and 5 focus on specific AFPH initiatives—National Employ the Physically Handicapped Week (NEPHW), the President’s Committee on NEPHW, and the AFPH legislative campaign to overhaul federal disability policy generally, but rehabilitation policy more specifically. Chapter 5 also examines the organization’s coalition with the labor movement that drew on union concerns about health and safety and labor’s postwar vision for a more robust welfare state. Chapter 6 analyzes the AFPH’s final years and disability policy under the Eisenhower administration.
A Note on Sources
No central collection of AFPH papers exists. In an effort to reconstruct the
