Indeed, the home front was a dangerous place. In June 1942, William A. Irvin, head of the National Safety Council’s War Production Fund to Conserve Manpower, declared, “One of the most destructive attacks on our nation last year was not made by a foreign enemy. The attack came from within, and left in its wake 102,500 dead—more than twice the 49,475 killed in the AEF [American Expeditionary Forces] ranks during World War I. Moreover, it left 350,000 persons permanently disabled and inflicted 9,000,000 other lesser casualties.”36 Irvin’s figures paint a broad portrait of accidents on the home front, including those that happened on the factory floor and highways and in homes and recreation. Still, wartime production exacted a heavy toll. Safety director at Pullman Company and member of the DOL National Committee for Conservation of Manpower in War Industries Harry Guilbert reported that industrial accidents in 1941 had killed enough draft-aged men to fill two full army divisions. Prior to World War II, industrial accidents typically claimed 16,000 lives and disabled, at least temporarily, around 1.5 million annually. Over the course of 1940, that figure shot up at least 10 percent. Data from early 1942 suggested that the situation had grown much worse. In Illinois, monthly figures pointed to a 20 percent increase in fatal accidents from 1941 to 1942.37
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the rate of disabling and deadly industrial accidents would remain above two million per year for the duration of the war. In 1943, the worst year for industrial workers on the home front, over 128,000 Americans died or developed a permanent disability and another 2.28 million experienced a temporary disability because of a workplace accident.38 In July 1942, Louis F. Buckley of the Bureau of Employment Security wrote that the war created a disastrous cluster of unsafe conditions through “the speeding up of production, employment of inexperienced help and women, long hours, expansion into two or three shifts leaving little time for maintenance work, hasty renovation of old machinery and crowding in of new machinery, the opening of long-closed factories and of new ones planned in haste, and the use of poisonous chemicals.”39
Activists Emerging from the Human Scrap Pile
The goals, strategy, connections, and style of the AFPH drew on the personal history of Paul Strachan. The organization’s founder and president had had more than his fair share of “hard knocks,” as one journalist phrased it. The hardest, perhaps, came in a deadly automobile crash in November 1929. Strachan, thirty-seven, was driving with his father in East Point, Georgia, just southwest of Atlanta. According to a witness, despite attempts to warn them, neither man saw the switch engine and line of railway cars until it was too late. The accident at the railroad crossing killed his father and left Strachan injured. Newspaper coverage of the incident reported that he was “badly bruised and cut.” Later accounts described more extensive injuries and a long recovery. Strachan emerged from the accident with a broken spine. At fifty-five, he reported that he had spent seven years of his life in and out of the hospital because of the accident, operations, and a host of other illnesses. Childhood diphtheria had damaged his hearing in one ear, and as a younger man, he had had a brush with death during the Spanish influenza pandemic. Later, he came down with amoebic dysentery from drinking polluted water. By the post-World War II period, Strachan was deaf and anemic; had chronic heart, kidney, and sinus troubles; had had a double hernia; and walked with a cane.40
Strachan described his activism as “born of personal experience, as one 85 percent physically disabled, and who, because of that disability was cast upon the human scrap pile, despite a fierce and intense desire to live, to work, and to achieve.” Beyond his personal experience, he rooted his activism in “vivid and poignant recollections” of disabled veterans being “pushed around and ignored as soon as the parades stopped and the bands no longer played” and of other disabled individuals “who were the discards of society.”41 Strachan challenged what he termed an “unreasoning, unjust prejudice against millions of Handicapped people.” Questioning the injustice he perceived around him, he asked, “Why cannot Industry, and the public, generally, realize that we, too, aspire to the comforts, the feeling of security that comes from fair recognition of our rights, as citizens, and our needs, as Handicapped?”42
Strachan’s colorful past took him across the country, gave him access to government officials and labor leaders, provided connections in Hollywood, and helped him to develop a magnetic personal style and a skillset well-suited to launching a movement. Born in Perry, Michigan, in February 1892, Strachan grew up in Michigan and Georgia. He learned an important skill early in life—typing—most likely from his father, who was a journalist. By age sixteen, he had left school and was working as a stenographer at a law office. From there, he took to traveling, pursuing a host of jobs that took him around the world. He claimed to have prospected for gold in Alaska and worked as a stevedore, sailor, and steamship agent.43
Strachan moved to Washington, D.C, during World War I and would eventually find work in the Bureau of War Risk Insurance. The bureau initially insured ships and crews navigating the Atlantic war zone but grew dramatically with the War Risk Insurance Act, which issued payments to servicemen’s dependents during and in the immediate years following World War I. This work led Strachan to become active in the National Federation of Federal Employees, serving as a legislative representative and general organizer as well as a consultant on federal employees to Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor (AFL). From 1917 to 1922 and intermittently after 1931, he worked for the AFL, helping to organize the American Federation of Government Employees, of which he was still a member in the 1950s, and assisting several other unions, including the Post Office Clerks. His work in the Bureau of War Risk Insurance and the labor movement led to an interest in vocational training, which inspired him to help Arthur Holder of the International Association of Machinists (IAM) and the AFL on federal vocational education initiatives.44 His own experience as laborer, labor organizer, and labor lobbyist as well as his knowledge about and interest in vocational education and rehabilitation not only shaped the rhetoric, tactics, and demands of the movement he led but also solidified ties between organized labor and the disability rights movement.
During the 1920s, Strachan held a range of positions in the burgeoning film industry, experience that helped him cultivate a dynamic personal style and a new set of personal connections. By 1924, he had returned to Georgia and was living in Atlanta and working as a salesman for First National Pictures, which would later merge with Warner Brothers. Later in the decade, he worked for Pathé Exchange. At various points, he would describe himself as a film salesman, press agent, theater operator, producer, tour manager, and correspondent for theatrical papers.45 His work in the film industry gave him the skills to captivate an audience, sell an idea, and promote a cause.
Strachan’s life again shifted course in the aftermath of his 1929 accident. He was unable to work and moved with his family from Georgia back to the Washington, D.C., area to live with relatives, relying on his wife’s income and shelter and support from her relatives until the family could get “back on their feet.”46 Strachan worked intermittently with organized labor during the 1930s. A family member reflected that “life was a struggle” during the Depression for the Strachans.47
That struggle was compounded in 1931. While traveling and doing organizational work for the AFL, Strachan stopped at a hotel in Chicago. Somewhere along the way, he drank polluted water and developed amoebic dysentery, which began a nearly ten-year period