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Jean-Christian Vinel, Audra Jennings. Out of the Horrors of War: Disability Politics in World War II America., The American Historical Review, Volume 123, Issue 1, February 2018, Pages 252–253, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/123.1.252
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From 1933 to 1945, the U.S. was led by a president who had contracted polio and yet managed to steer the country through its worst economic crisis and build a modern state around the politics of security. However, as Audra Jennings reminds us in the rich and important book Out of the Horrors of War, Americans with disabilities were actually left out of the New Deal welfare state, which mostly protected male workers employed full time. While the 1935 Social Security Act extended benefits to the blind, Americans suffering from other disabilities had no entitlement to social support and remained dependent on their families. The only venue available to them to escape economic marginalization was a means-tested federal/state civilian rehabilitation program so limited that it reinforced cultural notions of fitness for work and employment.
Jennings starts her fascinating story at the onset of U.S. participation in World War II, when the urgent need for manpower on the home front allowed disabled Americans to prove their productive capacity and claim the full employment from which economic security accrued. This was when Paul Strachan founded the American Federation of the Physically Handicapped (AFPH), which boasted eighty-five chapters, seventeen thousand members, and more than a million donors nationwide in 1947. Unlike the National Association of the Deaf (NAD), which advocated for Americans afflicted by a specific disability, the AFPH sought to unite all disabled Americans, with Strachan and other leaders arguing forcefully that Americans with disabilities were all victims of discrimination and economic exclusion sanctioned and reinforced by the state. Nonetheless, the AFPH replicated this pattern of exclusion by focusing only on the stigma of physical disability. Still, as Jennings demonstrates, the AFPH was the main organizational vehicle of a movement seeking to expand the sociological boundaries of the American welfare state.
