Out of the Horrors of War. Audra Jennings

of the New Deal state spurred the organization of the NFB in 1940. At the state level, blind activists had fought for pensions and other aid programs for blind citizens throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These successes, in part, led New Deal policymakers to include Aid to the Blind in the Social Security Act of 1935. Moreover, Congress passed a series of laws that aimed to create employment opportunities for blind citizens. Blind activists, whose efforts had been focused at the state level, shifted strategy to the national level. The new organization’s president, Jacobus tenBroek, criticized the “intolerable authoritarian arrogance” of the Social Security Board and insisted blind people had to organize nationally to protect blind people’s interests. The NFB objected to nonblind professionals’ authority over programs for blind Americans and demanded representation for blind people. The organization also fought against employment discrimination.⁶⁰

      These disparate organizations would push for a broad range of goals during World War II and the immediate postwar years, but greater employment opportunities, particularly amid the war-fueled job boom, would be a shared priority for disability activists. These organizations would also all demand a role for disabled people in the development and administration of disability policy. Taken together, these organizations would seek to channel the promise of the war moment to gain access to full citizenship.

       Wartime Federal Disability Policy

      As disability rights activists responded to the changing political landscape, policymakers confronted new realities that would make disability more visible and the problems that activists sought to address more pressing. In March 1942, John J. Corson, director of the Employment Service, declared that recruiting and placing the 10.5 million additional workers who would be necessary to meet the production demands of the war that year was “the biggest job of its kind ever imposed on a democracy.”⁶¹

      By early 1942, the nation faced the difficult dilemma of growing the size and strength of the armed forces and meeting the ever-increasing production demands to outfit these new soldiers, sailors, and marines and our Allies with the tools of war. Before Pearl Harbor, the navy and marine corps relied on recruits, and the army had nearly drafted the 900,000 men it sought for preparedness. Overnight, military needs exploded and Selective Service, or draft, calls followed suit. Indeed, the army had called for 20,000 men in December 1941, but by December 1942 the monthly call came in at almost 500,000. Roughly a year after Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt ended voluntary enlistment to allow local Selective Serve boards to determine where best a man might serve the nation—in the military or on the home front. In 1943, the Selective Service aimed to bring the size of the army to 7.7 million, the navy to 3.6 million, and the marine corps to 500,000. The process of drawing millions of men into the armed forces—hundreds of thousands of women also volunteered—shrank the labor pool, compounding the complex problem of making the materials of war. Indeed, even before Pearl Harbor, the demands of producing for the Allies and preparing for the possibility of war had created labor difficulties. As early as May 1940, FSA official Wayne Coy warned President Roosevelt, “The expansion of war industries is already creating local shortages of skilled labor.” By 1942, Corson emphasized the need for workers on the nation’s farms and in defense production. He also outlined the need for new thinking—drawing older and disabled individuals and people of color into the workforce, for example. So acute was the need for defense workers, Corson explained, that people would be shifted away from unnecessary jobs into war production.⁶²

      The process of drafting men for military service also brought the extent of disability in the nation into focus. In September 1941, Lewis B. Hershey, director of the Selective Service System, wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt, “The operation of Selective Service during the past twelve months has uncovered certain practical problems that are matters of the gravest concern to our Nation.” He noted that members of the Selective Service System had “been deeply concerned because of the numbers of men who do not meet the physical and mental standards prescribed by the Army.” Hershey felt that many could be rehabilitated for military service while “undoubtedly many of the others can be brought to a physical standard which would make them far more efficient as citizens of this nation.”⁶³ As Hershey’s letter suggests, the draft made disability more visible and imbued it with greater consequence.

      The need for labor on the home front and soldiers on the frontlines, many of whom would become disabled at work or in combat, shaped the federal government’s response to disability during the war. Within days of the December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt wrote to FSA head Paul McNutt, instructing him to work with various federal agencies to develop a plan for expanding vocational rehabilitation. Roosevelt hoped that the rehabilitation program could be retooled to both meet the needs of the disabled soldiers the war was sure to create and contribute to solving the nation’s man- and womanpower crisis.⁶⁴ McNutt responded quickly, meeting with officials from the military, VA, Selective Service System, War Production Board, DOL, Public Health Service, Office of Education and Division of Rehabilitation, and American Red Cross, among other agencies and groups. By February 1942, he had developed a plan to intensify the use of disabled workers in war industry and put some of it in motion.⁶⁵

      The slow pace of the rehabilitation process, the fact that officials did not know the extent of disability in the nation, the rehabilitation program’s reliance on matching dollars from the states, and the lack of trained rehabilitation caseworkers made McNutt’s task all the more difficult. In 1941 and 1942, the service rehabilitated only 15,000 to 20,000 persons each year and placed just one in three clients in a job. Furthermore, McNutt recognized that the lack of knowledge about U.S. disabled citizens contributed to the difficulty of developing an effective plan. He admitted that he could not estimate “with any degree of accuracy” the number of disabled individuals of appropriate age who could benefit from rehabilitation. The Employment Service estimated that some 20 percent of its four million applicants had some sort of disability that contributed to their unemployment. Public Health Service data suggested that four million Americans had a permanent physical disability.⁶⁶

      Ultimately, McNutt concluded that the program’s reliance on states’ matching dollars and the lack of caseworkers meant that it would be impossible to provide rehabilitation for every disabled citizen who could benefit from the service and be fitted for war work. Indeed, drafted individuals who were deemed not fit or able to be made fit for military service had already enhanced the pool of potential clients. McNutt predicted that military causalities and the explosion of industrial accidents would increase the existing caseload by up to 300,000 in the coming year alone. In early 1942, around 100,000 Americans were at some stage in the rehabilitation process, and McNutt believed that “possibly 150,000 additional persons can be accepted for direction toward and into war industry during this calendar year, though not all of these can be conditioned to stable and useful war work.” Still, he argued, many others could be placed directly into work. Regardless of the number of disabled citizens and the increase in disability, the fact that state rehabilitation agencies employed only about three hundred caseworkers in early 1942 limited the speed and size of potential growth. Moreover, any growth depended on federal dollars. Historically, the federal government had matched state contributions, but as McNutt pointed out, growing the program was “war service” and that growth could not wait for additional state appropriations, as many state legislatures would not be in session.⁶⁷

      Despite these limitations, McNutt crafted a plan that would maximize rehabilitation’s potential for wartime aims. He worked with the National Labor Supply Committee of the Office of Production Management to develop a plan “to secure the widest possible acceptance by war industry of handicapped persons directly into plants for pre-job training or initiation into the job at once.” Then, he argued that the Employment Service, “because of its wide acquaintance with workers, employers, and labor market conditions,” must be central to the effort. He mandated that the agency, then part of the FSA, work with the rehabilitation service to place into jobs clients who had been rehabilitated and disabled individuals fit for direct employment. For individuals not quite ready for direct employment, McNutt suggested that the federal government encourage trade schools to accept disabled applicants, and he called on the rehabilitation program to intensify training courses to make them shorter and speed the entry of clients into the