In the context of civilian rehabilitation, eligibility did not guarantee services, and before 1943, personal or family financial resources were almost always required for assistance. To be eligible for assistance, an individual had to be “unable because of a permanent physical handicap to earn a livelihood.” The agency maintained, however, that “such factors as advanced age, degree of physical disability, attitude of mind, or social status, sometimes make it inadvisable, uneconomic, or impossible to” rehabilitate an individual. “Feasible” applicants had disabilities that would still allow them to be trained and placed in full-time jobs. They were “mentally competent” and not in need of “constant supervision.” Their attitude suggested that they would “get along with others,” indicating “promise of cooperation” both through the rehabilitation process and in later employment situations. Feasible applicants had to have means for supporting themselves and their dependents during the rehabilitation process. Finally, an individual’s feasibility hinged on the availability of training programs in the area.25
Given these constraints, the AFPH’s Strachan argued that expanding rehabilitation alone would not yield a program that could effectively “conserve and develop” the human resources people with disabilities could bring to the war effort or meet the social and economic needs of people with disabilities in the postwar period. Legislating more rehabilitation, a “slow” process of training and education, Strachan insisted, would take too long to meet wartime labor needs. Additionally, he pointed out that various proposals in Washington to expand the program contemplated doubling funding, a prospect he felt fell short of meeting war needs or adequately serving people with disabilities but supported nonetheless.26
Strachan viewed establishing a federal agency for people with disabilities, either through legislative or executive action, as vital in achieving the organization’s most ambitious aims of ending disability discrimination in employment and education and promoting a comprehensive federal disability policy that would ensure people with disabilities could access opportunity and security. In this first articulation of a goal that would shape the organization’s agenda throughout its existence, Strachan argued that federal programs dealing with disability should be consolidated in an agency that would collect information about disability and disabled citizens’ welfare, research and publicize the types of employment in which they could excel, encourage equal employment in private industry, and help facilitate rehabilitation and job placement. Moreover, he asserted that people with disabilities should themselves control disability policy, suggesting that they staff the agency. When Strachan first described the proposed agency, he envisioned a bureau in the FSA, forerunner to the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Since its creation in 1939, the FSA had housed the Office of Education and the civilian rehabilitation program along with the Employment Service, Social Security Board, and the U.S. Public Health Service. As the AFPH and civilian rehabilitation developed during the war and postwar period, the organization would eventually seek a home for its proposed agency in the Department of Labor (DOL).27
In Strachan’s view, public education, built around a coalition effort, would be necessary to effect the changes the AFPH envisioned. He described efforts to enlist “every group at interest” in a national education campaign that would incorporate the press and radio. Strachan argued that few beyond people with disabilities understood the problems they faced and the significance of those problems to the nation. Through a national public education campaign, he believed “it would be thus possible to reach down into the subconscious minds of the average man and woman, and vividly portray just what the relation of the physically handicapped is to them as individuals.” In particular, he emphasized that such a campaign could highlight the fact that, if the majority of people with disabilities were “put to work,” tax burdens would be lightened for everyone and the nation’s productivity would increase—a key point given the realities of labor shortages.28 As part of this public education campaign, he called for the establishment of a “National Employ the Physically Handicapped Week.” Like his broader plans for public education, Strachan envisioned a cooperative effort that would engage political groups, women’s organizations, disability organizations, veterans’ associations, and industrial, business, labor, education, civic, and religious leaders along with stage and screen stars.29 In a national education campaign that sought to make other organizations and the public more generally understand disability as a problem that mattered to them and employment opportunities as the solution, Strachan recognized an opportunity to build coalitions and support for the AFPH agenda and to reach and organize a broader range of people with disabilities.
While employment broadly defined animated the AFPH agenda, the organization paid special attention to government employment. Strachan called on the Civil Service Commission and state-level commissions to establish special divisions for people with disabilities and to give them “special consideration” for public employment. For this effort to be successful, he proposed that the Civil Service Commission launch a study of government employees to determine how many, where, and how effectively people with disabilities were engaged in public service work.30
Finally, Strachan suggested extending this research on a much broader scale, and including people with disabilities in the process, to develop effective policies to benefit people with disabilities. He proposed a national advisory council, including disabled people and representatives of their organizations, to expand the employment of people with disabilities and the range of vocational options available to them, by studying employment patterns, vocational instruction, and existing laws and by providing legislative recommendations.31
At the heart of the organization’s short- and long-term goals was a demand to make the New Deal’s promises of economic security, opportunity, and work accessible to people with disabilities. In this promise of work and economic security, AFPH leaders saw the path to full citizenship. The organization’s emphasis on public education and its specific legislative proposals grew out of the central idea that the state had a responsibility to make its promises a reality for people with disabilities. The AFPH demanded that the state facilitate disabled citizens’ inclusion in the promise of the New Deal through a range of policies that would support their access to the workplace. Over time, the organization’s agenda would include better educational opportunities, health care, improved medical treatments, and physical access to public spaces.
AFPH organizing efforts hinged on the notion that personal experience of disability was necessary to form effective and just disability policy. Members, therefore, had a unique service to offer the nation. More than just demanding that their experiences and opinions be taken into account, the AFPH imagined a disability bureaucracy staffed as much as possible by people with disabilities themselves. In this context, the AFPH campaign represented both an implicit and explicit challenge to a range of experts who claimed authority in the field of disability services.
The organization drew on the patriotic fervor of the war to justify their demands, highlighting notions of freedom, justice, national defense, and victory, casting disability rights as imperative to the moral and actual survival of the nation. Strachan claimed that improving disabled people’s lives and prospects, bringing them into the workforce, and expanding federal programs were “vitally important to the continuance of our Nation as the citadel of freedom and social justice to the individual.”32 He argued that in the United States it was the “human beings who compose our citizenry” that formed the “first, and last, lines of defense” and “conserving and developing” that resource was as central to victory as it would be to postwar economic and social stability.33
Strachan pointed out that it cost $500 per year to support an