A Disability History of the United States

by Kim E. Nielsen

  Thomas Johnston, perhaps, was lucky. The young black man employed at a Pittsburgh mill had both his arms broken by falling steel laths. His arms healed but “permanently took crooked and weak for any kind of mill work.” He lost significant income while recovering but had the good fortune to then gain employment as a private cook, earning approximately the same as he had before.39

  Samuel Jones’s experience was more common. A dinkey, a small locomotive, ran over his foot and “crushed it so badly that he had to lose his leg below the knee.” The Homestead Steel Works, his employer, gave him $150 and a watchman’s job, but his earnings were cut by almost 40 percent. Crystal Eastman, a labor lawyer, journalist, and contemporary of Jones, estimated that approximately 43 percent of the survivors of industrial accidents had to make do with a diminished income.40

  Too many men and women found themselves in situations similar to Andrew Antonik, a European immigrant who also worked at Homestead. He staffed the “skull-cracker,” a heavy iron weight dropped from a height in order to break up scrap pieces of steel. One night in April 1907 Antonik failed to dodge the heavy flying steel scraps. He had worked a twenty-four-hour shift the day before. As Eastman reported, “His leg was crushed and had to be taken off below the knee.” In October he had healed enough to appear at the company office with an interpreter (assumedly he didn’t speak English). He had been given $150 “and the promise of an artificial leg and light work as soon as he should be able to get round.” A year after his accident, Eastman found Antonik in the backyard of his boarding house. The artificial leg and the promised job had never materialized. He had sent $50 to his wife and five children in Europe, and was now out of money. Eastman estimated that approximately 13 percent of laborers who survived accidents were never again able to find work.41

  Both temporary and permanently disabling work accidents were shockingly routine. In her investigations of Pennsylvania steel mills, Eastman found one mother who could not even remember how or when her sixteen-year-old son had lost two fingers in the mill, because it was so unremarkable. One retired steel worker insisted to her, “I never got hurt any to speak of.” After persistent questions, “he recalled that he had once fractured his skull, that a few years later he had lost half of a finger, and that only three years ago he was laid up for nine weeks with a crushed foot.”42

  Investigators found similar statistics in every industrial field. An 1890 estimate was that 42 percent of Colorado railroad workers were injured on the job every year. Chinese immigrant laborers building the transcontinental railroads regularly lost their fingers and hands to both hammers and explosions. In 1907 protective labor legislation proposed by Robert “Fighting Bob” LaFollette, the progressive senator from Wisconsin, limited trainmen to only sixteen hours of labor per day, and telegraphers to nine hours. Complete accident numbers are difficult to attain. In 1907 death on the rails, for both passengers and employees, was nearly twelve thousand a year, and the number of serious injuries presumed to be several times larger.43

  Workplace accidents, and disability caused by workplace poisons, seemed omnipresent. Textile mill operatives lost fingers, hands, and arms due to elevator shafts and other rapidly moving machinery. Female factory operatives were subject to “horrific injuries to their scalps by having their hair caught in power-operated shafts.” Male and female cigar makers earned their own injury title, “cigarmaker’s neurosis,” caused by repetitive motion and a cramped working position—“characterized by severe pain in the shoulder, arm, and head . . . [and] might lose muscle control in their hands.” Boilermakers, shipbuilders, and train engineers often lost hearing due to their noisy surroundings. Clock and watch painters, most of them female, experienced the paralysis and mental debility caused by lead poisoning as well as throat and mouth cancer.44

  While industrialization had rapidly expanded the number of disabled US wage workers, adaptive technologies changed little until the onset of World War I. As nearly always, the return of heroic but disabled war veterans prompted technological change, improvements in prosthetics and other adaptive technologies, increased employment possibilities, and additional public attention. As one commentator wrote in 1918, the “peace-time cripple” had to “face an unkindly and prejudiced community because of a slightly physical difference.” The “returned crippled soldier,” however, had “force[d] the community to immediate action.”45

  At the end of World War I, the Committee on Vocational Training for Disabled Soldiers sought to provide recommendations for disabled soldiers but found that they had no idea about the lives of “peace-time” cripples: thus, the Cleveland Cripple Survey. The social service agencies of Cleveland “thought that they surely knew all the cripples in their city,” but were astonished to find that more than 65 percent had been previously unidentified—“the adult cripples,” researchers discovered with amazement, “are not the dependents” they had anticipated. The Cleveland investigators had begun their research with an assumption that all people with disabilities were incapable of financial self-support. The results astounded them, for they had been completely mistaken. For example, among armless men they found a beggar, a successful street peddler, and a District Court judge who had taken his bar examination by “holding a pencil between his teeth.” “The lives of unknown cripples are much more normal than had been supposed,” one researcher observed. This article concluded, however, by drawing a line between “the successful” cripples and “the begging type of cripples.”46 Class mattered.

  In the aftermath of World War I, rehabilitation experts urged disabled veterans to become successful cripples. Rehabilitation industries, vocational programs, and civil rights talk for people with disabilities expanded prolifically, but were not always extended to nonveterans. People increasingly distinguished between good disabled people and bad disabled people, good citizens and bad citizens; the largest distinguishing factor being whether or not one earned a living. At the US General Hospital in Fort Sheridan, Illinois, returning servicemen were told that “The Creed of the Disabled Soldier” was: “Once more to be useful—to see pity on the eyes of my friends replaced with commendation—to work, produce, provide, and to feel that I have a place in the world—seeking no favours and giving none—a MAN among MEN in spite of this physical handicap.”47 A poster of the Red Cross Institute for Crippled and Disabled Men insisted that one-armed veterans could find future employment as ship-workers or welders, if only they would accept vocational training.48 A manly cripple, a successful cripple, and a grateful disabled veteran could find and attain success if only they would cheerfully seek it.

  The reality, however, was not that easy. Disabled white women and people of color encountered substantial employment discrimination and social resistance, and they had much less success attaining the status of a successful cripple. And disabled veterans found that despite Red Cross posters proclaiming to employers that “the disabled man profitably employed is no longer handicapped,” employers often denied them employment.49

  President Calvin Coolidge ended his 1923 State of the Union address by calling for “good will and charity, confidence and peace.” The nation, he proclaimed, had “taken her place in the world as a Republic—free, independent, powerful.” The best thing its citizens could do, “the best service that can be rendered to humanity,” Coolidge challenged Congress and the nation, was to provide “the assurance that this place will be maintained.”

  The question of how best to maintain the nation has dominated all eras of US history. In the Progressive Era, perhaps more than in any other, however, that meant surveillance and containment of bodies considered deviant or degenerative. Policies were put in place to carefully monitor the bodies of those entering the United States and sterilize the deviant bodies of those already within the nation’s gates. Sexuality, class, race, gender, and ethnicity forcibly intersected with notions of disability and quality citizenship.

  The educational, industrial, and institutional developments of the Progressive Era had contradict
ory consequences for people with disabilities. The rapid expansion of industry brought employment and wealth to many, and its accompanying technological changes revolutionized adaptive equipment used by people with disabilities who could afford them, but it also wrought devastation on the bodies and minds of many American laborers. The rapid expansion of institutions had similar contradictory results. For some, particularly blind and deaf people, institutionalization created rich communities, sources of political organizing, and individual empowerment. For others, particularly those considered to have cognitive or mental disabilities, institutionalization often meant isolation and abuse. The wonder is that in nearly all circumstances, people with disabilities generated, to the best of their abilities, community. Like nearly all other Americans, people with disabilities sought the “good will and charity, confidence and peace” of which Coolidge spoke.”50

  SEVEN

  WE DON’T WANT TIN CUPS

  Laying the Groundwork, 1927–1968

  Just two years after the Supreme Court ruling of Buck v. Bell legalized, for the good of the nation, compulsory sterilization of the unfit, the US economy collapsed. Beginning with a 1929 stock market crash and continuing through the development of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and World War II, the majority of Americans struggled with economic devastation. Despite the economic wreckage and the personal and familial destruction it wrought, the activism of people with disabilities and the federal policy changes generated in response to the Great Depression created new opportunities for people with disabilities.

  When nineteen-year-old Miss H. P. wrote First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt from Cleveland, Ohio, in 1934, however, she saw few opportunities. She had left school at sixteen in order to help her mother. Her father, disabled by diabetes since 1928, was “not himself anymore.” He had “too many worrys [sic] . . . is always grouchy and scolding at us children.” Her seventeen-year-old sister had never been able to walk, had never attended school, and had “to be carried to bed at night and lifted up from bed in the morning.” As the older sister explained, “all she does is sit in a chair all day long.” The local “Relef Office” had not helped the family with seven children, so Miss H. P. sought the First Lady’s help, for “there is never peace and happiness in our home.” The disability of father and daughter, coupled with the nation’s economic woes, left the household with virtually no economic or emotional resources.1

  In Holland, Texas, the family household of eighteen-year-old E. C. was in similar straits in 1941. Four years earlier, then just fourteen years old, the young man’s left leg had been caught in the wheel of a field planter while he helped his tenant-farmer father. The mules had not stopped. His mangled leg was now stiff, sore, and drained fluid constantly; he had no muscle control over his foot. The family had spent all its money on hospital bills. He wrote to Mrs. Roosevelt about his steadfast desire to “get an education” and make his “life worthwhile to serve my home and my country.” How, he asked, could he do that?2

  These two young adults, both affected by disability, made preliminary activist moves by writing Eleanor Roosevelt—clearly given hope by the attention that both Eleanor and President Franklin Roosevelt had paid to issues of poverty, disability, and disadvantage. Throughout the country, slowly, inconsistently, but increasingly, other individuals lived out their own forms of activism.

  In the spring of 1935, for example, a group of largely white, physically disabled New Yorkers spent several weeks protesting at the city’s Emergency Relief Bureau. With slogans such as “We Don’t Want Tin Cups. We Want Jobs,” and “We Are Lame But We Can Work,” the group expressed their anger and disgust at city and federal policies that automatically rejected all people with disabilities from work relief programs—categorizing all people with disabilities as “unemployable.” The group, which came to be known as the League of the Physically Handicapped, handed out fliers that read, “The Handicapped still are discriminated against by Private Industry. It is because of this discrimination that we demand the government recognize its obligation to make adequate provisions for handicapped people in the Works Relief Program.” As the league’s president Sylvia Flexer Bassoff wrote to Harry Hopkins, head of the Works Progress Association, she wanted “not sympathy—but a concrete plan to end discrimination . . . on WPA projects.”3

  Similarly, in the late 1940s Henry Williams and fellow African American veterans of World War II organized a series of “wheel-ins” and “body pickets” in front of the Cleveland mayor’s office. They sought quality and racially equitable rehabilitation centers and housing for disabled veterans. Williams reflected later, “Though broken in body, I was fighting . . . to stamp out those same principles that we fought against during the war. Basically, sir, I was fighting for the civil rights of every disabled citizen.”4

  Like many other individuals and groups in the period from the beginning of the Great Depression in 1929 through the late 1960s, Henry Williams and the League of the Physically Handicapped embraced the language, the ideology, and the laws of rights and citizenship in order to advance the claims of people with disabilities. They also inched toward the argument that all people with disabilities—whatever the kind or cause of those disabilities—shared experiences of stigma and discrimination. Cross-disability organizations and alliances began, though haltingly and inconsistently, to draw connections between disability, race, and sex discrimination. Throughout the Depression and extending into the Cold War period, people with disabilities and their allies laid important groundwork that later disability rights activists would build on.

  CREATING COMMUNITY, DESPITE ALL

  The organized Deaf cultural community had grown increasingly stronger throughout the early twentieth century.5 Centered around a common linguistic identity, that of users of American Sign Language, deaf clubs flourished. Dramas, poetry, picnics, religious services, and athletic programs created community. Building on these strengths, the National Fraternal Society of the Deaf (founded in 1901) and the National Association of the Deaf (founded in 1880) actively confronted insurance discrimination, job discrimination, driving restrictions, lack of vocational training, and other issues the Deaf community identified as vital. Though both organizations were initially predominantly white and exclusionary, they became important centers of deaf activism.6

  Sarah Uhlberg later reminisced to her son about how she savored the community she found at New York City’s Lexington School for the Deaf in the early 1920s, where she lived during the weekdays. “When the lights were turned out,” she told him, “we went to the bathroom, where a light was always on, and we talked till our eyes refused to stay open. We loved to talk to one another in our language. We lived for sign, and the ability to communicate with one another was like the water of life, our oasis of language and meaning, in the midst of the huge expanse of desert silence and incomprehension that was the greater hearing world.” Every Friday evening she left this linguistic oasis and rode the subway to her family home, sitting beside her father while they sat without communicating—for he knew no sign language.7

  The Depression hit the deaf community hard. One study found that 44 percent of deaf workers who had been employed prior to the Depression had lost their jobs by 1935; compared to an overall national unemployment rate of 20 percent. By 1938 the DiMarco household of Dubuque, Iowa, had experienced unemployment for over eight years. Bernard DiMarco and his wife, who then had a three-year-old daughter named Shirley, had met at a deaf club picnic in Rockford, Illinois. Both adults expressed frustration at the discrimination they faced while finding and keeping employment. Mrs. DiMarco told an interviewer of the Works Project Administration that employers “don’t seem interested in a deaf man [and] won’t listen to us. I’ve been in the Candy Factory & Halls trying to get on also and they won’t talk [and] just shake their head as if I were a freak. I wish I could make them understand we have to live like others . . . But it’s awfully hard on us deaf—as they don’t seem to care for a deaf person when they can get one who can
hear.” She hoped that something good would come for deaf people from the WPA interview: “I am glad to help you in any way we can & the deaf in General if it will interest anyone in them. God knows we need it.” She asked the interviewer, “Do you suppose we ought to stay on here in Dubuque or try to get away[?]. I don’t know whether we’d be any better off somewhere else or not. If only I knew where there was a steady job.”8

  Louis Uhlberg was a fortunate man during the Depression. He worked as a printer at a New York newspaper for over forty years. Though money was tight, and though he sometimes feared the loss of his job, he remained employed, courted, married, and had two children in the midst of the national economic crisis. His son Myron, then a young boy, remembered passing a man, old and dirty, sitting on a curb, who had whispered to Myron that he was hungry. The father asked his hearing son what the older man had said, and then gave the older man some apples and a loaf of bread. Louis instructed his son, “Tell him I’m sorry . . . but tell him things are bound to get better.” The father and son then continued their walk home.9 Uhlberg undoubtedly knew of the difficulties he would face if he were to lose his job.

  Like other people with disabilities who sought employment through the Work Projects Administration and state or local work relief programs, deaf people found themselves categorically classified as “unemployable”—regardless of prior employment, vocational training, the conditions of their bodies, or educational background. As part of the New Deal developed by President Roosevelt as a solution to the economic problems of the Great Depression, the Work Projects Administration employed millions of unemployed Americans in the construction of public buildings and roads, literacy projects, cultural programs of art and music, as well as social services. WPA programs, however, as with nearly all other work relief programs, refused to hire people with disabilities. Just as the League of the Physically Handicapped had done, the National Association of the Deaf battled this. While exceptions were not made for most people with disabilities, in 1938 deaf workers became “employable” per WPA regulations. By 1939, however, policies shifted and deaf workers once again became “unemployable.”10