Disability Activists Demand a Hearing
In 1946, at congressional hearings demanded by the American Federation of the Physically Handicapped (AFPH), Margaret Nickerson Martin, a national vice president of the organization, argued that the AFPH platform represented “a sincere endeavor by handicapped people to raise the level of their own group to that of ‘people.’” She lamented the common inclination to assume people who did not “have their full quota of physical equipment” were “mentally disabled, or at least incapable.” Martin placed this desire for the recognition of disabled individuals’ personhood in a longer history. Arguing that while society no longer killed disabled people, she asserted that Americans—and American governance—did so figuratively. “But we do forget them, willfully,” Martin claimed. “We burn them at the stake of public opinion when we throw the stigma of charity at them and expect them to smile and thank us for it.” She described the “wasted existence” of individuals whose disabilities prevented any independence in the existing legal and social framework and individuals “thrown upon the unwilling care of relatives” or institutionalized and who lacked real control over their lives, bodies, and choices. She argued that the AFPH agenda could allow these individuals to bring “real worth and value to society.”1
Martin testified before the House of Representatives Subcommittee to Investigate Aid to the Physically Handicapped, a subcommittee of the Committee on Labor. The two-year investigation sought, as its chair Augustine B. Kelley (D-PA) put it, to determine the scope of disability in the United States, where disabled Americans lived, how best “to group and classify” them, the causes of various disabilities and “the means to cure or alleviate them,” best practices in education and job training for people with disabilities, and “an over-all program for assistance to this enormous segment of our population.”2 The AFPH had fought for the subcommittee as an opportunity for disabled individuals to share their “own story.” Just days before the investigation began in late August 1944, Paul Strachan told AFPH members at the organization’s second biennial convention, “we will tell our own story, and we will tell it from the depths of our personal experience with our afflictions and with the difficulties we have encountered in meeting the problems of economic life, and participating, if we could, on equal footing with the nonhandicapped.”3 The investigation represented the AFPH’s first victory in Congress. Over the course of two years, the subcommittee amassed a substantial record of the problems people with disabilities encountered and the types of federal, state, and local aid they received. It interviewed disability activists, employers, government officials, physicians, social workers, and labor leaders and collected thousands of pages of testimony.4
Through the AFPH, members developed and articulated, at these hearings, a critique of the ways that the American state and American society privileged able bodies and excluded disabled ones. By insisting that Congress listen to their stories and the organization’s agenda, AFPH members transformed personal experiences into political action. As Martin’s testimony suggests, the AFPH argued that federal policy, or the lack of coordinated federal policy, prevented disabled individuals from controlling their lives, their bodies, and their destinies, from making contributions to society, and from being recognized as full citizens. Martin, like many activists in the AFPH, demanded recognition of much more than the humanity of people with physical disabilities. In framing the AFPH’s proposals for federal action as an attempt to elevate the status of physically disabled individuals “to that of ‘people,’” she sought a place for disabled individuals as citizens and contributing members of the national body.5
Through the AFPH, disability activists came to the realization that the shared challenges that prevented their full participation in the economic and civic life of the nation extended beyond the personal and were changeable—essentially, that the meaning, privileges, and exclusions tied to (dis)ability were not fixed. Activists drew links to other social movements that had shown identities to be more fluid. For example, Martin reminded congressmen of their colleague who had recently said “brains had no sex.” She argued, “Well, neither have they physical attributes which inhibit them because their owner happens to sit in a wheelchair.” She claimed, “In the past humanity has been roughly divided into classes or categories: people, women, idiots, and the handicapped—in that order.” For Martin, society had begun to rethink the position of women and people of color, and it was now “the handicap’s [sic] turn.”6 By drawing connections between disability, gender, and race, Martin tied disability to broader social change and emphasized that the realities people with disabilities faced could be changed.
In 1944, the year the congressional investigation on aid to the physically handicapped began, President Roosevelt argued in his State of the Union address that Americans had “accepted as self-evident” a new series of rights, among them “the right to a useful and remunerative job,” “the right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation,” “the right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health,” “the right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment,” and “the right to a good education.”7 Roosevelt deemed these rights “a second Bill of Rights.” As the speech suggested, New Deal and wartime policy had led citizens to look increasingly to the federal government to guarantee access to opportunity. The right to earn a living, to work, and to a broadly defined sense of security emerged as an entitlement of citizenship—one that was, as scholars have shown, mitigated by race, gender, and sexuality.8
For people with disabilities, the war played an important role in creating a new sense that these rights were also theirs to claim. The House investigation and national news coverage of the home front shone a light on disability employment practices during the war. Wartime employment opportunities helped to ignite disability rights activism and the AFPH. Hiring practices that aimed to cope with labor shortages and make space for disabled veterans, along with the state’s efforts to encourage and facilitate those practices, created a new sense of what was possible. World War II policy and employment realities suggested the state could make the New Deal promise and protections of Roosevelt’s Second Bill of Rights accessible to Americans with disabilities. Numerous federal agencies worked with employers across the country to create new opportunities and find new ways to utilize the skills of people with disabilities. Those efforts, the jobs that grew out of them, and the meaning invested in those jobs created a new sense of rights. The AFPH grew out of and channeled those new expectations.
But even with wartime employment opportunities, those rights remained an unrealized promise for many people with disabilities. As AFPH members would work to demonstrate to the subcommittee, the patchwork of state and federal laws designed to improve the status of disabled Americans left large gaps of discrimination and need. Even as the New Deal and World War II fundamentally altered Americans’ expectations for the federal government, people with disabilities remained on the margins, underserved and classed as dependents. Through their interactions with the subcommittee, AFPH members sought to demonstrate how people with disabilities had been excluded from the promises of employment, security, and opportunity.
New Deal policy had tied access to security and the rights of citizenship to work.9 In this context, disabled people’s ability and right to work became central to AFPH arguments for inclusion and demands for state action. Access to work and state support of that access cut across much of the AFPH agenda. Work could secure for members greater access to economic security and health care. Improved access to education, expanded rehabilitation services, medical treatments, and physical spaces could mean greater employability. The emphasis on productive capacity and work stood in direct opposition to charity. Indeed, Martin linked charity to stigma and a figurative death. In essence, people with disabilities had become objects of charity because they were assumed to be unable to work without assistance. The connection reified the notion that people with disabilities were not citizens. Instead, charity marked people with disabilities as others, whose bodies prevented them from contributing to the national body. As AFPH members translated their personal frustrations and those of their fellow members into an agenda, a social movement, they demanded that the state recognize and facilitate their full citizenship by supporting their access to employment, rather than consigning them to charity—a prospect they viewed as dehumanizing. The realities