Out of the Horrors of War. Audra Jennings

time on the problem in a fireside chat just days after McNutt and Hines testified before La Follette’s subcommittee. Roosevelt noted that the nation was “becoming one great fighting force,” with each individual—whether a soldier, sailor, or worker—“playing an honorable part in the great struggle to save our democratic civilization.” He said that the war was being fought “in airplanes five miles above the continent of Europe” and “in mines deep down in the earth of Pennsylvania or Montana.” The president painted war production as a central part of the war effort and necessary for victory, yet millions of new workers were needed. Essentially, the fate of the nation hinged on the intertwined problems of developing the nation’s fighting force and producing the weapons and food necessary for victory. A coordinated policy and sacrifice on the part of many, he suggested, would be required. Workers should no longer follow their whims about where to work, employers needed to think of the larger picture when hiring, war-focused production had to replace nonessential work, and more men had to be freed for military service by using “older men, and handicapped people, and more women, and even grown boys and girls, wherever possible and reasonable.” Roosevelt called on Americans to report to the Employment Service to find out where their “skills and labors are needed most” and to be referred “to an employer who can utilize them to best advantage in the war effort.”⁸⁵

      Disabled people themselves also expressed their desire to participate in the war effort. The War Production Board, and its predecessor agencies, received around a thousand letters a week from disabled people and friends and family members arguing that the nation, in the midst of war, needed to do more for disabled Americans so that they could do more for their country. Leonard Outhwaite specialized in services for individuals who were difficult to place in jobs, including people with disabilities, for the War Production Board. He would later say that the letters that flooded his office suggested that disabled Americans and the people closest to them “felt that they were entitled to” rehabilitation, that “it was the responsibility of the Federal Government in time of war to do something more for them.”⁸⁶

      Both the AFPH and NFB wrote to the Senate committee considering the La Follette measure, urging policymakers to consider the opinions of disabled Americans in their deliberations on rehabilitation policy. The NFB opposed the bill and chastised the committee for failing to include the organization in hearings. The organization argued, “The National Federation of the Blind, consisting of associations of the blind in the several States and being the only national organization of the blind, feels that it has more to contribute in the consideration of such legislation than any other group.” The organization maintained that rehabilitation should be administered by the DOL, using the Employment Service for placement. Any placement that happened through the rehabilitation program on its own, the organization asserted, would “probably consist of placing the blind in [sheltered shops].” Moreover, the NFB lambasted the bill’s reliance on “the sixteenth century pauper-law principle of individual need,” maintaining that “however broadly and literally Congressmen may construe the principle of individual need, our experience has shown that this concept in the hands of administrators and social workers has been narrow, restricted, and even niggardly.” Indeed, blind people’s experience with public assistance informed the NFB’s stance on the La Follette bill. In arguing against FSA leadership of rehabilitation, NFB leaders wrote that the Social Security Board and FSA had “forced a reduction of the standards of public assistance in many States” and had “saddled on the blind of the Nation a demoralizing and humiliating budgetary system by which social workers tyrannize over the lives of the blind.” This perceived tyranny led the NFB to call for “standards, principles, policies, limitations or control upon those who are to administer it” and a policymaking board with blind representatives not selected by the individuals who run rehabilitation. Finally, the NFB argued that the bill should mandate the employment “of a proportion of administrative and clerical workers and of practically all placement workers from among the blind,” declaring that “justice would require that the blind be given employment in an agency for their benefit and much of the work of such an agency could be done properly only if people with experience of blindness were included on the staff.”⁸⁷

      The AFPH, still in its early days of organizing and seeking the backing and membership of disabled veterans, wrote to the Senate Committee on Education and Labor in support of VA control of veterans’ rehabilitation. Moreover, the organization used the hearings to reassert its critique of “the lack of intelligent planning” by the federal government to utilize disabled workers’ labor. The AFPH’s national council argued that disabled Americans could and should be used to release physically fit individuals for military service or other war work “requiring full physical strength.” In particular, the AFPH offered a scathing critique of the WMC, the FSA, and the Civil Service Commission, noting that while the FSA sought to take credit for the growing number of disabled individuals in the workforce, the trend was the result of the labor crisis and not due to any “particular effort or design” of the FSA. Despite pressure from the AFPH and other disability rights organizations, the AFPH claimed, Civil Service Commission officials “still stubbornly refuse to map out and put into operation a practical program.” Additionally, the council accused the commission of perpetrating “a fraud upon the handicapped,” by encouraging disabled individuals to take the civil service examination but then refusing to hire them on the grounds of disability.⁸⁸

      The AFPH outlined eight key demands in its correspondence with the committee. The organization called for Congress to pass National Employ the Physically Handicapped Week, legislation that had been introduced by Representative Jerry Voorhis (D-CA) and Senator Richard B. Russell (D-GA), and to launch an investigation to gather information about the nation’s response to disability in order to develop “proper and feasible remedies” for the problems confronting disabled Americans and the nation. The national council suggested that such an investigation should result in legislation that “would render more effective service to the handicapped on a scale commensurate with the real size of the job, instead of the ‘piddling’ methods now generally observed.” Additionally, the AFPH demanded a Federal Bureau of Welfare for the Physically Handicapped, staffed as much as possible by disabled citizens, to serve the nation’s disabled population and greater services for people with disabilities in the Civil Service Commission and Employment Service. The AFPH called for “an all-out program of complete education, rehabilitation, including all essential medical care, and appliances, and placement in employment of the physically handicapped.” Finally, the AFPH’s national council staked a claim for the right of disabled individuals to shape their own destinies, arguing that government, at all levels, and private service providers should “afford the physically handicapped representation in all matters in which their interests are at stake.”⁸⁹

      While the NFB and AFPH’s concerns did little to shape the direction of federal efforts to expand rehabilitation, VA and veterans’ objections did prompt a rethinking. Initially, Barden had been working with the legislative counsel of the House of Representatives and the FSA drafting counsel. Given the disagreements between the FSA and the VA, the Bureau of the Budget brought in Outhwaite from the War Production Board and Dr. Floyd W. Reeves, a University of Chicago professor who held numerous federal positions during the Roosevelt administration, including a position with the National Resources Planning Board, to study the rehabilitation problem and work with attorneys from the FSA and the VA in drafting legislation. As Barden put it, the Bureau of the Budget “was not in line with me, and I was not in line with the Federal Security, and the veterans were not in line with anybody right at that particular time.” Barden’s third rehabilitation bill would be the “result of many, many conferences and the ideas of all being shaken down and worked out.”⁹⁰

      In January 1943, Barden and La Follette introduced new bills that left the VA administrator in control of veterans’ rehabilitation, in an attempt to address veterans’ criticisms. Still, the bills mandated that the VA “as far as practicable, utilize training provided under approved State plans”—essentially the VA would provide medical rehabilitation and assign veterans to rehabilitation training provided by states through the existing, civilian rehabilitation system.⁹¹

      The change did little to halt veterans’ protests. Senator Joel Clark (D-MO) argued the bill’s history had to be considered. In its initial form,