A Disability Rights Wartime Agenda
During the same month that the AFPH received its charter, Nazi forces unleashed an offensive on the city of Stalingrad, initiating a grueling monthslong battle that would break the German offensive in the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, the first U.S. bombers launched attacks in continental Europe. In the Pacific in August 1942, U.S. forces landed on the island of Guadalcanal, continuing the shift from defensive to offensive that began with the Allied victory at Midway in June. On the home front, disruption reigned. Millions of men and women moved for military service and better job opportunities. Housing grew scarce in military and industrial centers. Labor shortages helped to drive this mobility and scarcity, as labor needs drove wages up and drew a more mobile population. In this context, employers and the federal government struggled to reduce turnover and recruit new workers.11
The need for labor and the nation’s call for its citizens to sacrifice in the name of democracy precipitated a civil rights moment. African Americans had already demonstrated that discrimination was vulnerable to attack in the context of a war against fascism. In 1941, African Americans wrested important victories against racism in the form of Executive Order 8802, banning discrimination in defense employment, and the Fair Employment Practices Committee, charged with enforcing the order. This success came when A. Philip Randolph, leader of the African American union the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, threatened a march on Washington to protest segregation in the military and racial discrimination in defense employment. The threatened march was just the beginning of a larger campaign against racism at home in the context of the war abroad. Randolph and other activists leveraged the tight labor market and international reputation of the United States in negotiations with the White House.12 Ultimately, the need for labor would expand employment opportunities for people of color and women, and would provide opportunities for people with disabilities as well.13
Even before the organization secured its charter, the AFPH articulated an activist agenda that, like the civil rights movement, linked its campaign for greater rights for people with disabilities to the war effort. For example, AFPH founder Strachan appealed to Congress in May 1942 “not only to save scrap, but save and utilize men and women who have been, are, or may be scrapped by reason of disability.”14 In August 1942, the AFPH National Council slammed the federal government for its failure to fully utilize citizens with disabilities in war production. Despite pronouncements from the WMC, the Federal Security Agency (FSA), and the Civil Service Commission, the council’s report concluded, efforts to aid citizens with disabilities and draw on their work for national defense had yielded “far more promises than performance.”15
In a series of articles that appeared in the Congressional Record in April and May 1942, Strachan outlined a broad political agenda for the new organization—one that emphasized jobs and the war emergency. He declared that people with disabilities represented “a valuable and worth-while reservoir of hitherto almost untapped strength” to bring to the problem of labor shortages. He pointed out that while the nation saved aluminum, rubber, and oil, among other materials, little effort had gone toward “saving and utilizing men.” Strachan proposed five key initiatives that would form the core of the AFPH wartime agenda and that, he argued, would better serve a nation at war: expansion of the federal-state rehabilitation program, a federal agency for people with disabilities, a national education campaign focused on employment of people with disabilities, special consideration in public employment, and a national advisory council.16
For people with disabilities, the federal-state rehabilitation program represented an unrealized promise of inclusion and opportunity. Strachan cited Division of Vocational Rehabilitation statistics that nearly 800,000 Americans became permanently disabled each year, including congenital and disease- and accident-related disabilities. Yet, he pointed out, “despite all the effort and hullabaloo,” only around 30,000 individuals a year were rehabilitated, leaving “a huge army—approximating 770,000—for which there has been no rehabilitation.”17 In 1942, when Strachan penned his recommendations, the rehabilitation service was rapidly proving it was ill equipped for the war. One commentator in the field described the civilian rehabilitation program at the time as “beset by limitations” and “groping for a sound operational basis.”18 Indeed, before 1943, the program had served fewer than 210,000 people over the course of twenty-three years. State agencies had considerably limited financial and personnel resources. In 1942, most agencies had fewer than ten rehabilitation professionals; ten states employed just one. California, the largest state program at the time, employed thirty-seven people, not including clerical workers.19
The Smith-Fess Act of 1920, which had established the civilian rehabilitation program, defined the end goal of rehabilitation as making disabled individuals “fit to engage in a remunerative occupation.”20 In the shared federal-state administration of the civilian program, the U.S. Office of Education established standards, policies, and procedures for states; monitored state plans and their use of federal funds; and sponsored research in the field of rehabilitation. In turn, states handled the actual business of rehabilitating people with disabilities and promoting the program. The Office of Education required states to develop and maintain their own administrative structures and to work with other federal, state, and private agencies to rehabilitate clients. Ultimately, the Office of Education determined that the main job of the rehabilitation program would be to “eliminate or ameliorate” the underlying causes that made people with disabilities “unemployable,” which, the agency concluded, were linked to “loss, impairment, or lack of” physical function or skill and “loss of morale.”21
According to Office of Education guidance, the rehabilitation process began with case workers considering an individual’s background and personality and then helping the individual secure any treatments that might create “improvement in the individual’s physical fitness.” Next, case workers selected a vocational goal for the individual and the most appropriate training to meet that goal. The Office of Education advocated that case workers utilize the placement assistance of other agencies but warned that job placement and follow-up with rehabilitants was a duty that should not be ignored as the goal of the process was to ensure that people with disabilities secured employment at “self-supporting” wages—a warning that suggested that rehabilitation case workers were sometimes more focused on the process of rehabilitation than the job placement at the end. The case workers, or field agents, that rehabilitation applicants encountered had a college education and experience in vocational rehabilitation, education, personnel management, or other relevant work, a requirement that could be waived with one to two years of graduate education. Beyond being “aggressive” and “energetic,” the Office of Education recommended that case workers be “physically capable,” suggesting that people with disabilities who sought assistance from the civilian rehabilitation program would most likely encounter an able-bodied individual who would assess their eligibility; suggest treatments, procedures, or aids; determine vocational goals for them; and set out a rehabilitation program they should follow.22
Between the actual provisions of the law and the policies of the Office of Education, the rehabilitation program faced significant financial limitations. Funds could not be used for medical, surgical, or hospital care or on stipends to support rehabilitants during their training. Despite the designs of World War I orthopedic surgeons who sought to extend their authority into the field of vocational rehabilitation, Congress had implemented a clear separation between medical and vocational rehabilitation. It did so initially in its program for veterans, vesting the U.S. Army Medical Department with control over medical rehabilitation and the Office of Education with control over the vocational element until the 1921 establishment of the Veterans Bureau, the forerunner to the Veterans Administration (VA). This separation of the medical and vocational aspects of veterans’ rehabilitation shaped the provisions of the civilian program and would continue to do so until 1943.23
Federal funds also could not be used as capital for people with disabilities