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 age twelve resulted in the amputation of his left arm at the elbow and a right arm that was “pretty badly crippled.” He reported that he 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