Chapter 1
Salvaging People: Disability in a Nation at War
In December 1942, the New York Times ran the thirty-first installment of its annual public appeal, “New York’s 100 Neediest Cases,” in which the Times, in partnership with eight relief organizations, sought contributions to “lift the Neediest out of despair.” As in other years, the Times sifted the lists of partner organizations to discover the one hundred neediest cases, individuals worthy of aid—“good people, brave people, people overwhelmed by conditions beyond their control.” The newspaper sought to answer the question its readers would surely ask: how “in these days of public relief and war employment” are there still individuals in need of aid? Even amidst wartime prosperity and with a system of public relief, the Times responded preemptively, there “is a kind of sorrow that knows no season.” These “neediest cases” fell into “a No-Man’s Land of human needs in which public relief does not operate,” and where the prosperity ignited by war industries did not touch.1
Ideas about worthiness for assistance, shaped by social and class values, gendered thinking, notions of dependency, and thoughts on poverty no doubt informed the selection of these cases as the “neediest” in the city. In the calculus of need, however, the limits of public relief weighed heavily. Permanent and temporary disability and ill health sat at the heart of seventy-seven of the one hundred cases and cast a shadow across nearly every case, as relief workers feared that poverty, stress, emotional turmoil, and poor housing would wreck the health and threaten the sanity of even those regarded as fit. That disability and illness figured so prominently on the list suggests that both shaped the no man’s land where public relief did not function or failed the individuals it sought to assist. For example, nineteen-year-old wheelchair user Jack B., case five among the neediest one hundred, needed hospitalization and special treatments for a bone disease that affected his legs before he could be eligible to participate in a job-training program for disabled individuals. Medical treatments and training for Jack B. were well beyond the financial means of his widowed mother, whose income barely met day-to-day expenses. Jack B.’s situation was typical among people with disabilities in the early 1940s. In fact, the federal-state rehabilitation program that existed to provide the type of training Jack B. needed to land a job often required clients undergo medical treatments, yet until 1943 federal law prevented the program from paying for those treatments. The New Deal had instituted new forms of aid for people with disabilities, including offering public relief for impoverished blind citizens, expanding funding for the federal-state rehabilitation program, and providing medical services for children with disabilities through the Social Security Act. Yet, as story after story in the Times attested, these policies only scratched the surface of need. Ill health of any family member could disrupt a home, exhaust a family’s savings, lead to spiraling debts, and require treatments many families simply could not manage.2
As the Times acknowledged, Americans, engaged in a global war, confronted a vastly different economic situation in 1942 than they had only a few years before. By December 1942, U.S. participation in World War II had transformed the nation’s economy, its society, and its citizens’ lives. Even before the United States declared war in 1941, unemployment lines had begun to disappear as the nation supplied the industrial and agricultural needs of its British and Soviet allies. In the wake of the December 1941 Japanese attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor that drew the nation into war, military spending exploded. In the first half of 1942, the military issued over one hundred billion dollars in purchasing contracts. Gone were the days of desperation and deprivation that characterized the Depression years. Employment and consumption shot upward, with American purchases of books, jewelry, records, cosmetics, and more at new highs during the war. The wartime economy facilitated the creation of seventeen million new jobs, and these new jobs paid well, including frequent overtime work.3
In the best of situations, the necessities of war constrained the prosperity it created. The federal government called on Americans to conserve, sacrifice, and work when and where they were needed in service to the defense of the nation. Production restrictions and efforts to conserve narrowed consumer options, even changing fashions, with hemlines moving upward and doublebreasted suits and trouser cuffs disappearing. The federal government limited the construction of homes and banned the manufacture of automobiles for private use. The transition from supplier to combatant created new burdens for the expanding economy as the war campaign not only heightened production needs but also drew millions of young men out of the workforce and into the military. The nation now confronted a new economic crisis—labor shortages.4
For people with disabilities, wartime prosperity was not always easily accessed, and the sacrifices demanded by the war often weighed heavily on them. Services to disabled children slowed as care providers joined the armed forces, the U.S. Children’s Bureau and the state programs it funded encountered “spiraling costs,” transportation to clinics and other care facilities became more difficult to arrange, and production restrictions limited the availability of assistive devices and braces.5 Gas and tire rationing made it difficult for people with mobility impairments to work, as accessible public transportation was decades away.6
At the same time, however, the war rendered disability legible to policymakers in new and powerful ways. The desperate need for workers forced the federal government to develop and expand policies to bring disabled citizens into the workforce. The speed of production, the massive growth of industry, the dangers inherent in war production, and the influx of unseasoned workers and new machinery combined to produce an explosion of industrial accidents, swelling the ranks of disabled citizens and increasing the need for disability services. The draft heightened the sense that disability presented a problem that must be solved for the success of the war as physical inspection of the nation’s men provided concrete evidence of the extent of disability in the United States. Moreover, policymakers were painfully aware that the war itself would create disability. Indeed, in a message to Congress in October 1942, President Roosevelt, himself an ever-present reminder of the threat of polio, pointed out that military casualties were already on the rise and predicted that “the tremendous strides in medical science during the past two decades” would mean that a great number of men would survive battle wounds and return home disabled.7 Finally, people with disabilities clamored to participate in the war effort and the growing prosperity around them.
These realities produced a wave of disability activism during the war. The American Federation of the Physically Handicapped (AFPH) was founded in 1940 and chartered in August 1942 as a nonprofit educational and beneficent organization in Washington, D.C., just months before the Times published its appeal.8 During the early years of the war, the AFPH demanded that the federal government facilitate disabled people’s entry into war work by pushing for expanded services from the federal-state rehabilitation program, the U.S. Employment Service, the U.S. Civil Service Commission, and the War Manpower Commission (WMC). Moreover, the organization demanded that people with disabilities have a say in shaping federal disability policy. While the AFPH represented something new—a national organization recruiting members across the spectrum of physical disabilities, civilian and veteran alike—older organizations built around the shared experience of a specific disability or military service also pushed for greater access to wartime prosperity and new services to promote equality and opportunity. The politics of aid, work, and representation inspired the National Federation of the Blind (NFB), a national social movement organization of blind Americans, also founded in 1940.9
As disability activists clamored for inclusion in the drive to defend the nation, in the prosperity the war created, and in the promises of the New Deal state, policymakers sought to address a cluster of issues—the need for military personnel, the shortage of workers, and how to provide services for disabled veterans.10 Disability cut across these issues. Drawing disabled Americans into the workforce could potentially free able-bodied men for military service and help solve the chronic labor shortages. Yet the spiraling accident rate on the home front compounded the labor