[nfbmi-talk] important history now for our times too?

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The League of the Physically Handicapped and the Great Depression: A case study in the new disability history

 

by Paul K Longmore, David Goldberger.  

 

The Journal of American History.  Bloomington:  December, 2000.  Vol. 87, Iss. 3, p. 888-922 (35 pp.) 

 

ISSN: 00218723 

 

ProQuest document ID: 65909219 

 

http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=65909219&Fmt=3&clientId=11206&RQT=309&VName=PQD 

 

On Wednesday, May 29, 1935, six young adults--three women and three men--entered New York City's Emergency Relief Bureau (ERB, demanding to see Director Oswald W Knauth. Told he would be unavailable until the next week, they declared they would sit there until he met with them or, one vowed, until "hell freezes over." The next day a large crowd backed the demonstrators and demanded jobs for themselves. Five and a half years into the Great Depression, such protests were common. But this one presented something different. The six protesters and some supporting picketers had physical disabilities. They claimed that they and other handicapped job seekers suffered disability-based discrimination at the hands of work-relief agencies and the federal government's Works Progress Administration (WPA). Their protest marked the beginning of the League of the Physically Handicapped. In the next few years, the militant league fought job discrimination and contested the ideology of disability that dominated early-twentieth-century public policies, professional practices, and societal arrangements. 1

 

An examination of the league reveals not only how that ideology prescribed the social roles and identities of people with disabilities but also how some such people politicized disability as they sought to redefine their identities and the nature of the obstacles they faced. That inquiry illuminates the interplay between social policy and cultural values by exploring the use of disability to mark its opposite, normality, and thereby to manage social-particularly class-relations in modern society. Finally, it deepens comparative historical analysis of American social reform movements by investigating one of many disability-based political crusades. 2

 

Studying the league also directs attention to an emerging scholarship that shows disability's pervasive presence in history and its conspicuous absence from historiography. Since colonial times exclusion of aliens with disabilities has been a central, if uncontroversial, goal of American immigration law, yet immigration historians have failed to examine that practice, except to disparage attribution of disability as an excuse to bar certain ethnic groups. Likewise, though workers have frequently experienced disability, labor historians have typically ignored how cultural values regarding work, gender, and class have shaped working-class perceptions of disability and responses to it. Recent research confirms the historian Douglas Baynton's observation: "Disability is everywhere in history, once you begin looking for it." 3

 

Why then have historians omitted disability from their accounts? They may have assumed a dearth of primary sources; in fact, new research demonstrates sources in abundance. Scholars may also have avoided the subject because, as psychological studies have substantiated, disability often elicits "existential anxiety." Most important, an ideology of disability as a product of nature has seemed to obviate the need or possibility of studying disability as an artifact or construct. The medical paradigm dominant in modern societies has framed disability as limitation in social or vocational functioning due to chronic medical problems. By casting it as a matter of pathology, the medicalized perspective has individualized and privatized disability, effectively restricting historical investigation or interpretation. A merely "personal" condition, it defies systematic study. 4

 

While some medical historians have reconstructed the sociocultural experience of illness and the impact on public discourse and policy making of social values concerning disease and health care, they have largely focused on the functioning of health care institutions and responses to epidemics and the critical phase of diseases. Few people with disabilities spent much time in hospitals or institutions. The perception of them as socially impaired by medical pathology did impinge on them in other social settings in their contact with social workers, educators, vocational rehabilitation counselors, and other nonmedical professionals, but scholars have usually failed to look in those places. Historians of workers' health have examined workplaces, but the medical paradigm has focused their analyses on the evolving explanations of the causes and courses of occupational diseases and disabilities and on safety, treatment, and compensation measures. Though that scholarship frequently mentions job discrimination against workers regarded as disabled, it does not delve into that theme. Nonetheless, public health historiography bears importantly on disability history. 5

 

In addition, the medical approach, by typically regarding disabled people as patients or dependent objects of charity, has thereby rendered them historically inert or invisible. Older histories of "the deaf" or "the blind" made them passive recipients of the benevolence of those regarded as the real historical agents: hearing or sighted professionals and philanthropists. Policy historians have similarly traced creation of the "disability category," but disabled people generally enter the story as historical actors only when, in the late twentieth century, a broad-based disability rights movement compels attention. 6 In many fields of historical inquiry where disability was significant, the medical pathology perspective has located the causes of alleged social incapacity within "afflicted" individuals, thereby excluding consideration of cultural, social, and political factors in the construction of disabled people's identities and roles and overlooking disabled persons as historical actors.

 

Recent scholarship has identified the early twentieth century as the moment when policy makers and health care, charity, social service, and education professionals institutionalized the medical definition of disability that thereafter dominated public policy and professional practice. Emphasizing more than individual diagnosis, this paradigm produced disability as a social problem that required policy makers' and professionals' attention while simultaneously depoliticizing it by placing it under the authority of medical and quasi-medical experts. On both the diagnostic and societal levels, the medical model also constructed the social identities and roles of millions of people with disabilities, not to mention hosts of professionals in various emerging fields. Moreover, that paradigm made disability a major category of social organization, policy formulation, and "cultural signification." Not just a label on groups with various conditions, disability, argues Baynton, served as "the primary term in a fundamental binary opposition-'normal' versus 'disabled' . . . a signifier for relations of power." It has functioned as a ubiquitous, though unacknowledged, organizing concept and symbol in the modern world, operating synergistically as public problem, cultural metaphor, social identity, and mechanism for managing social relations. Disability, then, is at once a neglected set of historical experiences, an important theme overlooked in many fields, and a central component of history in general. As such, like gender, race, and class, it must become both a subject of comparative historical study and a standard, indispensable tool of historical analysis. 7

 

Many people in the League of the Physically Handicapped limped or wore leg braces and used crutches or canes as a result of polio. A few had cerebral palsy, tuberculosis, or heart conditions. At least two had lost limbs in accidents. One had been gassed as a soldier in the Great War. None rode wheelchairs. None was deaf or blind. 8 League members did not identify with people whose disabilities differed substantially from their own, but neither did they dwell on the varying origins of members' physical conditions. Forming, not as the League of Polio Survivors, but as the League of the Physically Handicapped and rarely even mentioning impairment, they concentrated on discrimination rather than diagnosis. Their activism sought to alter public understanding of disabilities, shifting the focus from coping with impairment to managing identity, from experiencing polio to engaging in politics.

 

The league's approach highlights the basic features and dilemmas of disability as a historical phenomenon. The physical effects of illness or injury constitute merely one dimension of disability. At its crux is the sociocultural meaning attributed to physiological conditions. Despite the medical paradigm's pretensions to scientific certitude, from the beginning of that paradigm's reign the lived experience of disability generated knotty questions about just what disability is. All modern public policies regarding people with disabilities, whether benefits programs or civil rights laws, have had to grapple with that issue, for the answer would determine who qualified for coverage and who did not. For example, benefits administrators relied on clinical medical examinations not merely to ascertain the presence of a physical or mental impairment, but to extrapolate from it "disability," limitation in socioeconomic functioning. Despite what David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz call "the allure of the medical expert," many policy makers, program administrators, medical and rehabilitation professionals, and laypeople recognized not only that impairment and disability are two different things but also that social contexts can largely create, mitigate, or eliminate disability. Although the experience of disability varies partly because individuals react differently to the same conditions, those responses stem from more than personal temperament. Ethnicity, class, generation, gender, and other factors always mediate individual responses. Physical and architectural environments, medical and technological developments, and public policies significantly shape how people experience disability. Further, cultural values and social ideas about impairment and disability have changed over time. A "cripple" on a public thoroughfare might have been seen as a divinely punished sinner in the 1830s, a potential rehabilitant in the 1950s, a political activist in the 1990s, and, in any era, a mendicant. The intricate interplay of those factors indicates that disability is never simply limitation in social or vocational functioning, never an objectively determinable, pathological clinical entity originating in the bodies of individuals. Rather, defying simple definition, it is an elastic social category shaped and reshaped by cultural values, societal arrangements, public policies, and professional practices. It is always an array of culturally constructed identities and highly mutable social roles. 9

 

In the early twentieth century, the predominant social identity enjoined on people with physical disabilities was "the crippled." A persona with a long cultural history in the West, it began in the modern era to be aggregated with an array of other traditional classifications ("the blind," "the deaf," "the feebleminded," "the insane") into a generic category, "the disabled." Modern policy makers and administrators viewed those diverse groups as sharing enough to warrant lumping them under a single rubric. Still, outside of public policy, the crippled and the other ancient personas remained distinct. 10

 

Public policies often devalued cripples and other disabled people. While some crippled adults were relegated to the long-established poor relief system, some crippled children, including a few founders of the league, were segregated in the "special" classes and schools that had been expanding since their advent around the turn of the century. The vast majority of handicapped youngsters were completely excluded from public schools. Rehabilitation professionals favored educating them in more "appropriate" settings such as hospitals. Moreover, public resistance to educating them at all, whether in special or general classes, seems to have intensified during the 1930s. Those allowed entry were often stigmatized, although, as we shall see, special classes could also generate a sense of solidarity among handicapped youth. The courts and the laws frequently excluded handicapped people from other spheres of society. Court rulings upheld the right of railroads and public transit systems to refuse to carry disabled passengers. While some cities, such as New York, licensed cripples to beg, others adopted "unsightly beggar" ordinances to bar them from public places. Chicago's law warned, "No person who is diseased, maimed, mutilated, or in any way deformed so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object or improper person to be allowed in or on the public ways or other public places in this city, shall therein or thereon expose himself to public view." Policemen often refused to enforce the latter laws, but whether local ordinances banned or allowed alms seeking, all regarded cripples as natural beggars. 11

 

If school policies, court rulings, and local laws often segregated handicapped people within American communities, national immigration laws banned them from the country. Though officials labored throughout the nineteenth century to bar "the halt, the lame, and the blind," the "deformed, crippled, or maimed," immigration laws passed during the decades surrounding 1900 increasingly "lowered the threshold for exclusion and expanded the latitude" of examining officers to reject immigrants with disabilities. The Immigration Act of 1907 made the ban open ended by barring anyone with a "mental or physical defect ... which may affect the ability of such alien to earn a living." One officer remembered a young couple barred because the husband was thought "likely to become a public charge" due to his "game leg" and crutch. Such exclusion typified the treatment of handicapped immigrants. The disability-based bans turned away not only those considered potential public burdens but also those perceived as threats to the national genetic stock. Though most league members were native-born, immigration policies declared people like them unworthy of citizenship. 12

 

Restrictive immigration laws barred disabled people from the United States; eugenic laws aimed to prevent their existence. Model statutes sought sterilization, marriage restriction, and even incarceration to stop reproduction by the 11 unfit," among them the "Deformed (including the crippled)." None of the twenty-eight state statutes adopted by 1937 covered cripples, but eugenicists' calls for their sterilization indicated the thinking of many influential people about who was fit to be a citizen or even to live. Eugenics, as Martin S. Pernick has shown, was always closely associated with euthanasia. In 1915 public controversy erupted when a Chicago surgeon, Dr. Harry J. Haiselden, revealed that he had caused several disabled newborns to die. To promote euthanasia of "defective" infants, he produced The Black Stork, a motion picture about a doctor who foresees a life of rejection, misery, and murderous rage for a "deformed" boy and convinces the mother to let the baby die. Released in 1916, the year of a polio epidemic in which some future league leaders became disabled, the film portrayed its main character, Pernick tells us, "as a mentally normal hunchbacked boy who grows up to become an insane criminal" because of--according to an intertitle--"the constant humiliation and embarrassment caused by his deformity." Haiselden and his film were prominent in euthanasia advocacy during the 1910s, supported by some leading Progressives (Lillian Wald, Judge Ben Lindsey, Helen Keller) and opposed by others (Jane Addams). The euthanasia movement receded during the 1920s but regained momentum during the 1930s, allying with euthanasia advocates in Nazi Germany. Proponents used The Black Stork into the 1940s. Its intertitles labeled the handicapped character "The Monster." Reviews called him "The Defective" or "The Cripple." His appearance strongly resembles that of male league members in photos of them picketing. 13

 

In other films actors portrayed cripples as incapacitated for any valid social role. Lon Chaney reigned as a major star of the 1910s and 1920s by playing a variety of cripples, the vast majority of them villains. In the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, movies presented characters with disabilities similar to those of league members as either uncontrollable villains or helpless victims. This continued a cultural motif in which disabled figures embodied the loss of control and the dependency Americans have found so troubling and displaced onto outsider figures. Whether represented as menacing or pathetic, physically handicapped people were thereby defined as unfit for normal social roles. 14

 

Professional charity fund raisers also deployed the image of the cripple to generate donations for medical rehabilitation that allegedly would validate individuals discredited by disability. Instead, their techniques further branded physically handicapped people as the inversion of socially legitimate persons. In 1934, Paul King, the National Society for Crippled Children finance chairman, issued a stamp benefactors could purchase for a penny. That first Easter Seal showed a sad boy wearing leg braces and leaning forward on crutches in front of a white cross and the words "Help Crippled Children." The enthusiastic public response ensured the annual appearance of this fund-raising tool. Also in 1934, the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, founded by Franklin D. Roosevelt, sponsored some six thousand President's Birthday Balls using the slogan "Dance so that others may walk." In 1938, the foundation launched the even more successful March of Dimes. All of these solicitations established as a standard mode of disability-related fund raising one version of the cripple image: a dependent child as an object of charity. The young adults in the league opposed such charity. One remarked acidly, "The old custom was to take the crippled children on a boat ride and have it reported that 'a good time was had by all."' He condemned this practice as "the run-around," self-congratulatory philanthropy that avoided the real issues. 15

 

If cultural image making symbolically segregated cripples and statutory law often formally excluded them, social practices might informally shut them out as well. In Dayton, Ohio, in the mid-1930s, Tom Hockenberry, a power company employee who had lost an arm in a power line accident, applied to join the Freemasons. That anti-Catholic, racially segregated fraternity overwhelmingly voted against him because of his disability. Families with disabled members also often imbibed society's prejudices. "In those days if you were handicapped you were hidden," recalled one league member. "And the parents cooperated in that. Many of them were ashamed of having handicapped children." Another remembered painfully: "My father brought me up with the idea that he was punished for someone's sins and that's why he had a handicapped child.... [He] would walk out every time I walked into the room." Internalizing society's prejudices, handicapped individuals sometimes avoided public contact with other disabled people. One man recalled: "There was only one other handicapped boy in high school and when he saw me he used to go the other way. And when I saw him I would go the other way ... because I didn't want to embarrass him and I didn't want to embarrass myself." 16

 

In its several forms, the cripple image limned a set of interlocking traits. Cripples appeared variously as victims and villains in popular culture, dependent sentimentalized children in charity fund raising, mendicants who should be allowed to beg, 11 unsightly or disgusting objects" who should be banned from public places, potentially dependent or dangerous denizens of society, worthy subjects of poor relief but unworthy citizens of the nation. Whatever the guise, they were represented as incapacitated for real participation in the community and the economy, incapable of usefully directing their lives, disruptive and disorderly, antithetical to those defined as healthy and normal They were socially invalid. Given all that "cripple" signified, no wonder Tennessee Williams's semi-fictional Amanda Wingfield instructs her crippled daughter Laura never to use that word, and no wonder the real-life young adults who formed the League of the Physically Handicapped spurned it. A friend of Sara Roosevelt, pondering Franklin Roosevelt's new disability in 1921 and thinking less about his physical condition than about his social identity, touched on layers of social and cultural meaning when she asked: "Now he is a cripple, will he ever be anything else?" 17

 

Both Franklin Roosevelt and the young adults active in the League of the Physically Handicapped resisted relegation to that negative status, but they adopted different modes of altering their social fates. FDR made himself and allowed himself to be made into the avatar of an emerging system of rehabilitation. Rehabilitation ideology refined and systematized already existing ideas about disability. It attested that disability was a medically caused limitation in the individual's capacity to achieve economic self-sufficiency and to fulfill expected social roles, as it prescribed a route to productive independence and a socially legitimate identity. Disabled individuals must engage in continuous cheerful striving to recapture some semblance of social normality, a quest at once physical, psychological, and moral. FDR devoted years of strenuous effort to physical therapy, kept his disability largely hidden, and disclosed it only in ways that would display him as an indomitable victor over personal adversity. In the process, he became the classic role model of what succeeding generations of rehabilitation professionals and physically disabled Americans referred to as "overcoming." He made his way back to a socially valid identity and role, but he succeeded by largely denying and hiding the disabled parts of himself while ignoring societal prejudice and shouldering an enormous burden of stigma management. He and rehabilitation professionals promoted this mode of social validation. 18

 

Meanwhile, in New York City a group of physically disabled young adults who also sought a route to social validity blazed a different, ultimately political, path. Rejecting both the crippled and overcomer identities, they redefined themselves as "handicapped." Yearning for the self-dependence and dignity prized by able-bodied workers, they prepared to go to work. But they found that the biases about cripples in every other sphere of society had spawned discrimination in the job market too. 19

 

Some businesses required applicants to take physical examinations unrelated to a job's tasks. Florence Haskell walked with crutches. Upon graduating from high school, she applied for a secretarial position. "The man told me. . . `I'm afraid you'll have to take a physical.' . . . I was really hit between the eyes. I never visualized that [my handicap] would be a reason for me not to get a job.... He disqualified me.... I was very hurt, upset, and mad." Sylvia Flexer Bassoff, who used crutches and wore a leg brace, explained to a reporter at the time, "I wanted to teach English, or be a librarian, until I found out I couldn't get a job if I were trained for it." The memory was still vivid decades later. "Well, I found I couldn't get a job. But not because there was a Depression. I found I couldn't get a job because I was handicapped." So she enrolled at the Drake Business School, where she excelled at stenography and typing and on the adding machine. "In my naivete, I figured, `I'll graduate from the Drake Business School and they're all going to grab me.' . . . Well, nobody grabbed me.... Some people who graduated got jobs who weren't, they didn't begin to be as good as I was." Denied work in private business, she and other handicapped people felt humiliated at having to take jobs in charity-run sheltered workshops. "And finally I got a job," she remembered indignantly, "at the Brooklyn Bureau of Charities, who only hired handicapped people." She was paid three dollars and fifty cents for every thousand envelopes she addressed. "It was a mail-order, and it was the Brooklyn Bureau of Charities.... What a terrible name to work for... It was a great injustice. And I didn't know what to do. I didn't know what to do." 20

 

If a handicapped individual did land a job in private business, it might be only part-time or temporary and at lower pay. Born with cerebral palsy, Lou Razler attended business college for a year after high school, then spent five years fruitlessly searching for permanent work. By the spring of 1935, he was thoroughly fed up with his situation. Handicapped people who found work felt they suffered from wage discrimination. In 1927 Jack Isaacs, who had lost a leg in an industrial accident, worked as a linotypist. He told a journalist that he "turned out just as much work" as the men alongside him, but they got three times his fifteen-dollar-a-week wages. He claimed his lower pay was because of his disability. 21

 

Blocked by such barriers, those and other handicapped people looked to New Deal work programs to give them jobs just like those given to unemployed non-handicapped workers. Instead, they found the culturally dominant image of the crippled inscribed in the avowedly innovative federal policies. In January 1935 President Roosevelt proposed the Works Progress Administration to provide jobs for the unemployed, but the roughly 1.5 million individuals categorized as "unemployable"-mothers with dependent children, old people, and handicapped people-would be shunted to local relief. New York City's Emergency Relief Bureau had routinely selected some disabled home relief recipients for city jobs. Now, in line with the new federal policy, it automatically rejected handicapped persons for municipal work relief. 22

 

Until the 1930s, local relief remained limited in scope, with the federal government playing only a small role in social welfare. But as millions of unemployed people overwhelmed private charities and state and local governments, the unprecedented crisis forced many Americans to rethink the federal government's role in ensuring the general welfare. Many working-class citizens decided that the state must guarantee social equity and economic justice by providing both adequate welfare and work relief. 23

 

Handicapped job seekers too came to expect government action on their behalf. The news that their government would aid unemployed "able-bodied" Americans while classifying out-of-work handicapped persons as unemployable violated this newfound sense of their rights. When a group of young adults who frequented a Manhattan recreation center for handicapped people learned that WPA policy defined them as unable to work, shutting them out of both federal and local work relief, they felt outraged. "What started it," remembered one, was finding out

 

that jobs were available, that the government was handing out jobs.... everybody was getting jobs: newspaper people, actresses, actors, painters, and only handicapped people weren't worthy of jobs.... Those of us who ... were militant just refused to accept the fact that we were the only people who were looked upon as not worthy, not capable of work. 24

 

Common backgrounds and shared experiences had already generated solidarity among members of the recreation center group. Besides having similar disabilities, most were children of working-class southern and eastern European immigrants. Most were Jewish. Their parents had encouraged some of them toward education and employment. As high school graduates, in some cases with additional vocational or college study, they were better educated than most physically handicapped people. Some had become friends in New York City's public elementary special education classes during the 1920s, thereafter attending mainstream high schools. After graduation, they extended their web of friendships by socializing at summer camps and recreation centers run by social service agencies or at "basement clubs" organized by handicapped young people. As the historian Lizabeth Cohen reports, such basement clubs were common among the young in Chicago's working-class ethnic communities. Members who grew up in families with leftist and labor ties were also predisposed to radical political analyses of social problems. Their common background spurred the group to action. Through activism they could combat both bias and the construction of disability as medical pathology, vocational incapacitation, and social invalidation by redefining them in political terms. As group members applied labor radicalism to their situation, they would push radical politics in new directions. 21 One of the group was Florence Haskell, who had already found herself disqualified for a clerical job because of her disability. Another was a twenty-eight-year-old unemployed watch repairman, Hyman Abramowitz, who used leg braces and crutches due to childhood polio. His wife too had a disability, and the couple had a child to support. Abramowitz had been arrested for sitting in at a Brooklyn relief center. By late May 1935, he had emerged as a leader of the group. 26

 

Abramowitz evidently argued that a delegation should go to the ERB and demand an end to disability-based discrimination in work relief On Wednesday, May 29, 1935, Florence Haskell, age 19, Pauline Portugalo, 21, Sara Lasoff, 22, Harry Friedman, 24, and Morris Dolinsky, 26, went with Abramowitz to ERB headquarters. Director Knauth's aides said he could see them the following week, but the six rejected the delay as unacceptable. Angry and frustrated and, it seems, without any real plan, they did what Abramowitz had warned them they might have to do: they 41 refused to budge" until Knauth met with them. 27

 

For the next twenty-four hours, they sat there without attracting public attention. On Thursday afternoon, Abramowitz's wife tried to enter the building. When the watchman, following orders, refused to let her in, she departed for a Communist sponsored United Youth Day parade in nearby Madison Square and returned "with a score of husky young men." Soon hundreds of protesters, then thousands of onlookers, thronged before the Eats. Members of the Writers Union, the Young Communists of America, and the City Committee of the Unemployment Council picketed to support the sit-in and to demand jobs for themselves. Some demonstrators "besieged" the building for an hour, tried to rush the doors, and ended their "riot" with a snake dance in the street. As quickly as it had gathered, the crowd evaporated. By late afternoon, only Mrs. Abramowitz and "a crippled friend" remained. But the turmoil in the street alerted the press to the disabled protesters upstairs. Hyman Abramowitz charged the Eats with discriminating against handicapped people in assigning relief jobs. He told reporters, "We are not able to go out seeking manual labor . . . , but we still feel that the city should provide us with jobs." The day before they had sought merely to see Knauth. Now Abramowitz announced: "We are going to stay here until fifty of our organization get jobs." In fact, there was no organization as yet. They were playing the protest by ear, developing their strategy and demands as they went along. They had accidentally captured media attention. 28 Trying various stratagems to force the protesters to give up, ERB officials at first refused to allow any food to be brought in. The tactic backfired. By Friday, three of the protesters had quit the sit-in, but Abramowitz, Dolinsky, and Portugalo hung on. While leftist supporters engaged in "mass and 'marathon' picketing," "the strikers" conducted "a series of interviews." In response, ERB officials switched their strategy, apparently to put themselves in a more sympathetic light. They would now feed the protesters but at no greater cost to the city than home relief. They would not forcibly evict them, ostensibly for fear of injuring them, but would no longer permit visitors. Perhaps "isolation of the cripples" would end the sit-in by cutting them off from public attention. The new tactics failed too. 29

 

By Saturday, the number of non-handicapped protesters on the sidewalk had dwindled, but nine handicapped picketers, five men and four women, conspicuously walked the line. They called themselves the Committee of Action for the Support of the Handicapped Unemployed. Lou Razler, the frustrated ex-business college student with cerebral palsy, learned of the protest in the Daily News. "As soon as I read about it I went down," he recalled. Sara Lasoff spotted him "standing on the other side of the street. And I went over to him and said to him, 'Why don't you join the picket line?' . . . And he joined, and he became very active." Said Razler: "I joined the line. I figured, 'I got nothing to lose.'" All that Saturday, the neighborhood echoed with their chant to ERB director Knauth: "Knauth, come out, wherever you are!" That evening, continuing to emulate labor radicals, the protesters strategized for "mass support and mass demonstrations." 30

 

On Monday, June 3, the sixth day, Knauth finally met with the three strikers. Again hiking their demands, they rejected both charity and segregated workshops. Abramowitz warned that unless its demands were met "the league of 100 cripples would expand to 1,000, and that jobs would have to be found for all of them." He demanded fifty jobs immediately and ten more each week, at wages of at least $27 a week for married workers, $21 for single workers. Those hired must also be integrated with non-handicapped workers, not shunted into separate projects. Knauth rejected the demands but promised to "investigate." "That's not a good enough answer," Abramowitz shot back. "We are not just as any other group. We are all handicapped and are being discriminated against." Probably with the WPA policy regarding "unemployables" in mind, he charged President Roosevelt with "trying to fix things so that no physically handicapped person can get a job, so that all of us will have to go on home relief" At least one handicapped person and probably others already felt disillusioned with FDR, the champion of American workers. "We don't want charity," demanded Abramowitz, "we want jobs." But Knauth hewed to the new policy. The city owed nothing beyond home relief, he said. "This is not an organization to give work to those who are permanently unemployable." Then, contradicting himself, he advised them to seek work from private businesses. Abramowitz blasted those who offered handicapped people charity instead of work. "We'll have to be carried out," he declared. 31

 

For three days more, the strikers stayed put. And each day the picketers, most of them handicapped, marched below. By Thursday, June 6, the ninth day, the noise of the "shouting and singing on the sidewalk" had become intolerable to workers in the building. Knauth directed the superintendent to call the police, who arrested eleven protesters, eight of them handicapped. Among the arrestees was Jack Isaacs, the one-legged ex-linotypist. Upstairs, the three strikers ended their sit-in. But that afternoon "about twenty-five crippled protesters and 300 sympathizers" rallied at Fifty-fourth Street and Eighth Avenue. Dispersed by police, they regrouped at the VA radio station, where Oswald Knauth was to deliver a speech celebrating the ERM's first anniversary. The group "stormed the lobby" and tried "to seize an elevator, but police drove them out of the building." 32

 

On Friday evening, June 7, the handicapped activists again met with Knauth. He said he could not promise jobs immediately but hoped federal funds would include some aid for that purpose. Downstairs, handicapped picketers passed out handbills announcing a Saturday demonstration at city hall. The next morning, ten to twelve disabled demonstrators and as many as fifty non-handicapped supporters circled in City Hall Plaza. After unsuccessfully demanding an interview with Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, they moved to Foley Square for some speech making, then dispersed. That marked the end of the first actions of these novice activists. For eleven days, they had captured the city's attention and forced relief officials to bargain with them. 33

 

The eleven picketers arrested on June 6 were soon brought to trial. Judge Overton Harris seemed bewildered about how to handle the militant young handicapped defendants who shouted slogans in his courtroom. For ten days, the often tumultuous trial of "the Communist cripples" gave New Yorkers comic relief from the depression. On the trial's first day, disabled protesters picketed at the ERB. On the second day, five were arrested. One was Lou Razler. "My family almost went nuts," he remembered. "I said, 'I don't give a damn. This is too much already."' The five were paroled without bail. Two of them, along with four other handicapped protesters, got themselves arrested at the Eats the following day. On June 28, Judge Harris convicted the original protesters of disorderly conduct. Perhaps revealing his confusion over the incongruous notion of "crippled pickets," he suspended the eight handicapped defendants' sentences but gave their non-handicapped supporters five days in jail. That evening, police arrested fifteen handicapped demonstrators who "stormed" the ERB protesting those punishments. 34

 

Judge Harris was not the only one struggling to resolve the seeming oxymoron of disabled protesters. Municipal and media reaction reiterated common but conflicting stereotypes about cripples. ERB officials tried to discredit the demonstrators by charging that Communists had staged the sit-in and were using the "cripples... for dramatic effect." Shifting tactics, they then accused the strikers of "taking advantage of their physical disabilities, knowing they will not be forced from the building." The cripples were thus portrayed first as dupes and then as manipulators. The police too claimed that "the [June 6] riot ... was Communist-inspired and planned." Not simply a standard way to discredit protesters, this narrative reinforced the notion that cripples were incapable of carrying out such an action on their own. The press largely presented the "crippled protesters" as shrill, irrational, and out of control, while it painted the police and bureaucrats as patient and carefully compassionate. The New York Herald Tribune reported that "the crippled picketers screamed hysterically and fought with forty patrolmen who did everything they could to avoid violence." The New York Post, covering the June 8 city hall demonstration, displayed an even more barbed antipathy toward league actions: "Ten vociferous cripples and a handful of onlookers comprised a mass meeting... to protest treatment of invalids on relief rolls." Thus, antagonistic newspapers and public officials sought to discredit the disabled protesters by reinforcing culturally dominant stereotypes about the crippled. 35

 

The handicapped protesters' ostensible supporters on the Left also used the crippled persona to promote their own political agenda. The Daily Worker repeatedly depicted them in horrific stigmatizing language, describing them as "dragging their own lame bodies back and forth," bodies "twisted by infantile paralysis." It also inaccurately reported that the ERB strikers had been "crippled at birth or in bosses' factories." In one instance, it fabricated police "brutality" against the picketers. A photograph of the June 6 demonstration that ran in both the mainstream and radical press showed Florence Haskell sprawled on the sidewalk. Some witnesses said the cops had kicked her crutches from under her. Others claimed she had thrown them away. Years later Sylvia Bassoff recalled that several picketers had deliberately fallen. But the Daily Worker claimed: "Brave LaGuardia Police Beat, Club, Jail Crippled Jobless." Just as public officials and the mainstream press used the cripple stereotypes of incompetency and manipulativeness to denigrate militant handicapped activism, the Communist paper exploited the stereotype of pathetic vulnerability to discredit the capitalist system. The radicals who supplied a model for the handicapped protesters and supported their demand for jobs also reinforced prejudice against them. 36

 

The Left apparently understood no better than the establishment that the activists wanted not just jobs but valid social identities. The mainstream media labeled them "cripples," "paralytics," or "invalids." The Daily Worker sometimes referred to them as "paralysis victims" or "helpless crippled people." League leaders consistently identified themselves as "handicapped." The differences in language reflected opposition between conceptions of disability identity and between definitions of "what is to be done." The league's activist approach also tacitly addressed how the majority viewed physically handicapped people. Slogans such as "We Don't Want Tin Cups. We Want Jobs" and "We Are Lame But We Can Work" called for more than employment. They demanded respect, social dignity. League picketers who deliberately fell in order to discredit the police and to elicit public support did reinforce the very stereotypes of feebleness and manipulativeness they claimed to oppose. Despite such occasional inconsistency, however, the handicapped activists declared their rejection of society's devaluing verdict. That in itself was culturally radical. 37

 

Their audacity is surprising given that era's attitudes toward cripples. To resist society's prejudice, they had to engage in public acts of defiance at a time when the president of the United States found it necessary to keep his disability largely hidden. "It was a very traumatic experience to even decide to get on a picket line, because we all shuffled along with braces and crutches," recalled Sylvia Bassoff. Public protests challenged not only the non-handicapped majority's perceptions but league members' views of themselves. Explained Florence Haskell: "You have to understand that among our people, they were self-conscious about their physical disabilities.... They didn't like being stared at. They didn't want to be looked at.... I think it not only gave us jobs, but it gave us dignity, and a sense of, `We are people too."' In combining the issue politics of protesting job discrimination with an implicit identity politics of redefining disability, the league exemplified the character of disability-based political movements. 38

 

The month-long series of actions in June 1935 generated a tremendous amount of public attention that spurred the protesters to formal organization and further agitation. They quickly settled on the name League of the Physically Handicapped. Hosting fund-raising parties and speaking at labor union meetings, they collected enough money to rent an office. They had already begun to recruit members among their handicapped acquaintances. "Pauline Portugalo came to me at the Brooklyn Bureau of Charities," recalled Sylvia Bassoff. "She says . . . `there is a group of handicapped people organized for jobs. Suppose you come to the meeting tonight.' And I said, `Jobs? Anything to get out of here."' Electing officers, the group met weekly to talk strategy. 39

 

The ERB protest in June 1935 was a spur-of-the-moment action springing from pent-up grievances and shaped more by militant enthusiasm than careful planning. Half a year later, league leaders were more skilled. Aware that the ERB had transferred some one hundred thousand work relief employees to the newly created New York City WPA, a group of picketers led by Jack Isaacs began marching in front of WPA headquarters on November 9. Seeking recognition as one contingent of the unemployed, the marchers wore sandwich-board signs that any unemployed workers might have borne. One proclaimed: "WE DON'T WANT THE RUNAROUND-WE WANT JOBS." Another placard played off the common image of the jobless workers as "the Forgotten Man" by protesting: "WE HAVE NOT BEEN FORGOTTEN-WE'VE BEEN IGNORED." But, using their personal stories to explain the issues, the activists also insisted on acknowledgment of the bias handicapped job seekers faced. "The Physically Handicapped," declared their flyers,

 

cannot get regular jobs as teachers or librarians in New York State.... Even a typist must pass a physical examination.... In private business the Physically Handicapped invariably are discriminated against. They work harder for less wages. [Given this disability-based employment bias,] our League demands that handicapped people receive a just share of the millions of jobs being given out by the government.... 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.

 

Operating more shrewdly than it had the previous June, the league now not only identified with unemployed workers in general by adopting the rhetoric and tactics of labor radicalism, but it also extended radical ideology to draw attention to disability-based discrimination and to politicize disability. 40

 

Three weeks of picketing prodded local WPA director Victor Ridder to promise to hire approximately forty league members. Six months after their first demonstration, virtually all of the original protesters would get jobs. But Ridder had not conceded their claim of a government obligation to hire handicapped workers discriminated against by private industry. He just wanted to set up a "sort of demonstrating project... to show employers what the handicapped can do." League leaders saw an ulterior motive. The officials "figured if they hired the most active of [us] . . . it might kill the thing," claimed Lou Razler. "But instead of killing it, more handicapped came to the line." The momentum of success now propelled the activists not just to get jobs for themselves but to change local and federal policies toward all physically handicapped job seekers. By January 1936 they were again picketing the New York WPA.41

 

At last, on April 5, Ridder granted that obstacles in the job market entitled handicapped people to government attention. He also admitted that handicapped people made up some 5 percent of New York's adult population but less than 1 percent of local WPA employees. So a new Bureau for the Physically Handicapped would be "the first step in a comprehensive plan to give closer attention to the employment problems of these people," while a special ERB "handicapped interviewing unit" would refer handicapped home relief recipients to the WPA. The New York Times announced "5,000 Physically Handicapped to Get WPA. Jobs," but league leaders called this "pure newspaper talk." The WPA did not guarantee jobs, only that handicapped workers would be considered for them. Five thousand was the number of handicapped home relief recipients the ERB classified as employable. Still, during the next year the WPA did give jobs to some fifteen hundred handicapped New Yorkers. 42

 

Advised by Ridder's assistant that only Washington could address their concerns, league leaders sought a meeting with WPA chief Harry Hopkins and President Roosevelt. Getting no response, they boldly announced to Hopkins's staff on Friday, May 8, 1936, that they would arrive the next morning, "as per appointment through President Roosevelt." That evening, thirty-five delegates (fourteen women and twenty-one men), some of them risking their hard-won relief jobs, rode all night on a borrowed flatbed truck to the nation's capital. At WPA headquarters, Labor Relations Director Nels Andersen explained that the WPA concerned itself only with work relief for "employables." Their problem, he said, was one for New York's municipal relief agencies. The delegates erupted. Twenty-one-year-old Sylvia Flexer Bassoff, now the league's president, took a vote and announced to reporters: "Unable to get any satisfaction in New York, we resolved to come here and ask the aid of Mr. Hopkins in providing WPA employment. They class us as unemployables, despite the fact that our members include. . . teachers, chemists ... and others who are professionally skilled. We are going to stay here until Mr. Hopkins does see us. Until then nothing can make us leave." League members, she said the next day, were "sick of the humiliation of poor jobs at best [and] often no work at all." They were tired too of "getting the same old stock phrases that the handicapped have been getting for years." They wanted, she said, "not sympathy-but a concrete plan to end discrimination . . . on WPA. projects." League press spokesman Harry Friedman demanded that the WPA set nationwide quotas for hiring handicapped workers. That night the protesters slept on office furniture. WPA officials ignored them all day Sunday. On Sunday evening, as they began settling in, Deputy Administrator Aubrey Williams promised to do "everything reasonable" but issued an ultimatum: Leave immediately for hotel accommodations at era expense or face the consequences of refusing to vacate a federal building. As they debated what to do, Hopkins telephoned. He agreed to meet five of them the next day. 43

 

The meeting with Hopkins did not go as they had hoped. They demanded five thousand WPA jobs for handicapped New Yorkers, "a permanent relief program for the physically handicapped and a Nation-wide census of the physically handicapped" conducted by the league but funded by the WPA. Hopkins rejected the charge that his agency was discriminating against handicapped people. He doubted that five thousand employable handicapped New Yorkers existed. He suggested that the league survey the New York situation, on its own. If they came back with proof, "a thesis ... show[ing] such discrimination," he would "correct those conditions at once." As Friedman's questioning of Hopkins "grew sharper," "Hopkins' replies grew more impatient." At last the WPA chief abruptly picked up his famous hat and walked out. An assistant told the delegates that their hotel bill would be paid only until 6 P.Ht. League leaders unsuccessfully sought a conference with the president, though Presidential Secretary Marvin McIntyre did assure them that "in view of the President's long and sincere interest in the problem of physically handicapped persons ... any constructive suggestions you may have will be given his personal consideration and study." With little money and nowhere else to go, they took the train home but promised to return to Washington with the "thesis" suggested by McIntyre as well as Hopkins. 44

 

In early August 1936, the league sent its "Thesis on Conditions of Physically Handicapped" to Roosevelt and Hopkins and distributed it to the press. Drawing on members' own experiences, that ten-page memorandum analyzed handicapped persons' "struggle for social and economic security." It attributed their economic disadvantages, not to their disabilities, but to job discrimination, unjust policies, and haphazard, unfair rehabilitation and relief programs. Moving toward a comprehensive critique of policies and programs affecting handicapped Americans and implicitly rejecting the premises of modern policy making, it presented a handicapped perspective distinct from that of non-handicapped policy makers and professionals. 45

 

While their disabilities "automatically closed ... many fields of manual labor" to handicapped job seekers, the "Thesis" argued that "unjust restrictions" and "unfounded prejudices" shut them out of private sector jobs in which "physical qualifications were irrelevant." "The Municipal, State and Federal Governments" also required "the most illogical and unnecessary physical qualifications ... for positions, which the physically handicapped person, if given a chance, could fill most competently." In fact, noted the "Thesis," federal hiring did extend preference to disabled veterans. Since the only difference between them and disabled civilian job seekers was the cause of their disabilities, the league asked how "deterring and hindering" the latter could "be reconciled with [the] special consideration" of the former. Indeed, "the preference" to disabled veterans provided "ample precedent for giving [the civilians] some added consideration" in civil service hiring. Associations of the Deaf made similar arguments about civil service restrictions on hiring Deaf people. Both the "Thesis" and the Deaf groups also criticized government work relief policies and projects for bias in indiscriminately classifying handicapped and Deaf individuals as "unemployable." 46

 

The "Thesis" next complained that state-sponsored vocational rehabilitation was "not only inadequate but also detrimental" as it created "the illusion that something constructive is being accomplished." Due to under-feeding, New York State's Rehabilitation Bureau "had to turn thousands away," could offer only "very limited training" to "those few it did reach," and during the training "failed" to supply them with sufficient aid for "daily necessities." Meanwhile, the state employment agency typically placed handicapped workers in temporary jobs that paid "miserably low wages" and even went "so far as to send [them] out ... as strike-breakers." 47

 

Reflecting league members' suspicion of social service professionals, the "Thesis" was especially critical of sheltered workshops. It censured three in particular: the Brooklyn Bureau of Charities, where Sylvia Flexer Bassoff had labored in frustration; the Altro Workshop, "an institution created for the rehabilitation of tuberculers" and probably the "workshop for the TB" in which one league member had felt "very much exploited"; and the Institute for Crippled and Disabled, established by the Red Cross in 1917 as a model of vocational rehabilitation. Those workshops paid a meager three to five dollars a week. "Under the guise of social service," the league charged, they "actually engage in shameful exploitation." Sheltered workshops then and later won exemptions from minimum-wage requirements. Leading charity and rehabilitation professionals supported such exemptions, but the league condemned them, as did the "organized blind" movement and the Deaf associations. Disputes between professionals and advocates over workshops' sub-minimum wages have continued to the present. Such clashes caused the league to regard professionals as self-serving. Sylvia Bassoff recollected that the day after she attended her first league meeting, her boss at the sheltered workshop threatened to fire her if she went to any more. "I don't think they were too happy at handicapped people becoming independent. Because if handicapped people became independent economically and were able to get jobs, what do you need the Brooklyn Bureau of Charities for?" The "Thesis" proposed no reforms of vocational rehabilitation but did repeat its recommendations to Hopkins about work relief The WPA should create jobs for the "thousands of unemployed handicapped" people and should conduct a survey to "gather the necessary information upon which to outline a permanent program." Because the league distrusted social service agencies and professionals, it recommended that handicapped persons conduct the survey. Suspicion of non-handicapped policy makers and service providers and the demand for a voice in policy making and program administration appeared in other disability-based political movements, becoming increasingly emphatic over time and reaching a crescendo in the late-twentieth-century declaration, "Nothing about us without us." 48

 

Turning to home relief, the "Thesis" again delivered a distinctive handicapped critique. Denied the chance "to take their proper place in society to support themselves," many handicapped people were thrown back on their families, private charities, or home relief As much as the league wanted jobs, it also wanted home relief expanded. If the home-relief allowance was inadequate for able-bodied recipients, it was "doubly insufficient" for handicapped persons who needed added funds for 14 mechanical appliances and medical care." Worse, even "this mere pittance" was often denied because of stringent eligibility requirements. Hundreds rejected for home relief were forced into "municipal lodging houses, while vast numbers of others [were] reduced to vagrancy . . . and [sank] to the level of beggars." And yet beggar ordinances banned or regulated cripples' alms seeking. "Something must be done to eliminate the necessity of any handicapped individual being forced to resort to begging," declared the "Thesis." 49

 

As for federal efforts, the "Thesis" condemned "the whole Emergency Program and all the social legislation of the New Deal" as "consistently neglectful" of the problems of physically handicapped citizens. The league incorrectly claimed that the Social Security Act provided only for rural handicapped children. In fact, the act also had small components supporting state vocational rehabilitation programs and providing welfare for blind people. The administration had resisted including the latter, while blind activists would criticize it for its humiliating investigations and means test and for failing to promote employment. Those complaints paralleled the league's critique of home and work relief policies. Given the act's limited attention to disability issues, the league scornfully declared, "as far as the Administration was concerned, there were no such persons, there was no handicapped problem." In conclusion, the "Thesis" called its proposals "the very minimum necessary to alleviate the present grave situation of the handicapped," then added ironically, "Certainly the situation must be grave if [it has] finally made the handicapped articulate." The league had, in effect, articulated its rejection of the "disability category" in modern public policy. 50

 

To create that category, modern policy makers combined old English Poor Law classifications of impairment to define disability rigorously as an absolute inability to engage in productive labor. Deborah Stone has elegantly explained this as an attempt in capitalist economies to demarcate a "need based" system and a "work based" system in order to limit access to the former and to keep "able-bodied" workers in the labor market. Thus, relief policies dichotomized the "worthy" and "unworthy," the "deserving" and "undeserving," poor. While scholars have noted how those labels regulated poor and working-class people, some have seen the disability category as a "privileged" position that granted disabled people a "ticket" out of the labor force by "excusing" them from work. This ignores that those policies stigmatized and marginalized the "deserving" disabled poor. The category's formulators not only established allegedly objective clinical criteria to verify impairment and detect fraud; they also sought to make relief the "least eligible" option by subjecting applicants to humiliating investigations. Assuming that only the truly needy would submit to such social degradation, legislators aimed to limit access to welfare funds." State authorities dichotomized people with disabilities from "able-bodied and self-dependent" workers in order to regulate poor and laboring people, but they did so by presenting "the disabled" as "worthy" of poor relief but socially defiled. More than a medical and vocational classification, the designation imposed a socially delegitimating identity and role. The disability category thereby institutionalized the opposition of normal versus disabled that modern states have deployed to signify and manage relations of power and status, both between "able-bodied" and disabled people and among socioeconomic classes.

 

The New Deal incorporated this dichotomy, simultaneously proposing the WPA and the Social Security Act. The work program would assist "employables"; special assistance relief would provide for various "unemployables": poor mothers with young children, the elderly, and "the disabled." The WPA would be federal; "the dole" would continue under state and local governments. The twin policies not only installed mechanisms to determine eligibility for the two types of public aid. They also defined two types of Americans. 12

 

One could hardly exaggerate the alarm of depression-era Americans across the political spectrum at the indignity of relief and the corrosive effects of dependency on it. In proposing the WPA, the president warned that "to dole out relief is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit.... We must preserve not only the bodies of the unemployed from destitution but also their self-respect." Later he told the nation,

 

In this business of relief, we are dealing with properly self-respecting Americans to whom a mere dole outrages every instinct of individual independence. Most Americans want to give something for what they get. That something, in this case, honest work, is the saving barrier between them and moral disintegration. We propose to build that barrier high.

 

Harry Hopkins also feared that handouts would demoralize the unemployed and set them apart from other Americans by stigmatizing them as charity cases. A work program, he believed, would restore their self-esteem. Many unemployed men shared this view. "You've got to be a goddamn charity case," complained some. "The relief mill has to put the stamp of a legalized pauper on your forehead." The depression had forced "able-bodied and self-dependent" Americans who wanted work to submit to the humiliation of "baskets of groceries," "pantry snooping," "means tests," and "pauper's oaths." WPA officials worried that men who remained long on relief might "crack up." In response, government work programs not only offered unemployed men economic security but sought to restore their self-esteem, their reputations as family providers, their sense of control over their destinies. WPA jobs in fact proved a tonic to the self-image of many. 53

 

New Dealers promoted the work programs by reinforcing the stigma of relief. If the programs supplied jobs partly to repair identities, those identities were young and middle-aged, white, male, and "able-bodied." And they were mended by assiduously contrasting them with the counter-image of "unemployables," or "natural dependents," who presumably belonged on relief Concerns about the need for "self-respect" through work and the danger of "moral disintegration" due to "dependency" on the dole applied only to "employables." As a result, complained the league, New York's Emergency Works Program labeled handicapped applicants "indiscriminately as `unemployables,"' while the New York WPA rejected them. Many state WPAs officially barred handicapped job seekers. Like able-bodied workers, league picketers declared, "WE PROTEST THE PAUPER'S OATH," yet they were opposing, not temporary, but permanent relegation to the demeaning status of relief Likewise, the Deaf community sought work relief jobs, not only abhorring and resisting poor relief but at first even opposing Social Security for Deaf people. Both groups implicitly fought being used by New Dealers as a negative counter-image  to revalidate the "normal. "54

 

In practice the work programs contradicted the alleged gulf between employables and unemployables. Despite New Dealers' intentions, WPA workers were tarred with the stigma of relief, while "able-bodied" applicants whose skills did "not fit into the WPA work program"-that is, into currently available WPA jobs-might be categorized as "unemployable." Contradictions in New Deal policy about the employability of handicapped people further muddled the vaunted dichotomy. A presidential executive order directed that "no one whose age or physical condition is such as to make his employment dangerous to his health or safety, or to the health and safety of others, may be employed on any work project-" It added, however, that "this paragraph shall not be construed to work against the employment of physically handicapped persons, otherwise employable, where such persons may be safely assigned to work which they can ably perform." Despite this directive, the WPA classified all handicapped persons as "unemployable." Another policy prohibited recipients of Aid to the Blind (AMB) from taking WPA jobs, but blind persons not on ATB or living in areas without a federally approved ATB program might be certified for WPA employment if they were determined to have "the required skills and training which qualify them for employment and the problem is one of unemployment rather than of blindness." Then, in 1940, Congress determined that ATB recipients could temporarily substitute WPA employment for Am. But Congress blocked recipients of Old Age Assistance and mothers getting Aid to Dependent Children from doing the same. Federal policies operated from conflicting definitions of disability and employability. 55

 

Disabled people pushed on one side of that contradiction. Handicapped and Deaf activists used FDR's executive order as leverage to gain access to WPA jobs. The league's thesis cited it as "a ruling forbidding discrimination on account of physical disability." Deaf associations invoked it to protest WPA discrimination against their members. Meanwhile, numerous individuals with disabilities got around the WPA policies and won jobs. Studies found that while many handicapped applicants were rejected, more than a fifth of WPA workers had disabilities. Across the country, Deaf, physically handicapped, and blind people gained jobs with the WPA and other work programs. 56

 

The inconsistency about disability and employability arose again when the WPA responded to the activists' campaigns by setting up special jobs and projects, despite the activists' opposition to such projects. During periods of retrenchment, special projects workers were among the first laid off. Administrators sought to bar handicapped workers from regular WPA jobs because they believed those workers unsuited for the regular positions' temporary transitional employment. They assumed that most handicapped people could not meet private employers' stringent hiring and employment requirements and so could never transfer to the private sector. New Dealers failed to question the reasonableness or fairness of the practices activists criticized as disability-based discrimination. 17

 

The WPA'S inconsistent policies and practices typified the confusion about the nature of "disability" in twentieth-century policy. Social welfare policies defined "the disabled" as incapacitated for productive work, unemployable, and therefore legitimate recipients of home relief. Such policies sought to enforce an either/or definition of disability. This uncomplicated formula had the advantages of simplifying welfare administration, restricting access to benefits, and limiting expenditures. But it ignored the variability of disability in particular social milieus. Far from being fixed and objective, disability is fluid, dynamic, complicated, and significantly shaped by context. While some individuals needed public aid in order to retire from the job market, others demanded government backing to make their way in it. Opposing the dominant dichotomous policy thinking, leaders of many disability movements through much of the twentieth century called for non-stigmatizing and adequate welfare, effective vocational rehabilitation, and an end to both public and private job discrimination. The league and the nascent "organized blind" movement advocated those measures during the 1930s and 1940s, while Deaf associations backed some of those steps and employment bureaus as well. Later movements continued to battle against a definition of disability that, they believed, reinforced the economic and social marginalization of people with disabilities. In the league's opinion and contrary to recent scholars, categorization as unemployable did not charitably exempt them from having to work. It deliberately excluded them. They believed that that label simultaneously stigmatized and segregated them, codifying job market discrimination into law. Overturning conventional notions of cripples' worthiness for poor relief, league activists redefined themselves as "handicapped people" "worthy" of getting work. The persistent perspectives of disabled activists about public policies suggest a new angle from which to examine policy history. 58

 

The league also challenged gender bias in policy. New Deal work programs aimed to provide a family wage that would restore husbands as breadwinners and keep wives out of the labor force. A WPA rule limited its jobs to a family's "principal breadwinner," who was presumedly male. But if a husband were deemed "unemployable," his wife might qualify. A study of female WPA workers in rural Missouri counted 40 percent of subjects as married women with sick, disabled, or elderly husbands. Disability had thrust on these wives the male role, making them eligible for WPA work.

 

Thus, though the WPA hired some women, its policies reinforced traditional notions of both gender and disability. Labor activists too upheld traditional gender roles, advocating jobs for men rather than women. In contrast, the league, with significant numbers of female members, sought work for both sexes. The prominence of women in both the Jewish community and leftist political groups probably promoted women's active role in the league, but gendered ideas about disability were undoubtably a key factor. Physically disabled women have often been stigmatized as unsuited for the traditional wife-and-mother role. Some women growing up with physical disabilities have, with parental urging, sought to establish alternative valid identities through school and career. Sylvia Flexer's mother wanted her to go to college and become a pharmacist or lawyer so she could "earn her own living, whether she ever gets married or doesn't get married." The perceived failure of physically disabled women to meet conventional gender standards and the consequent parental emphasis on school and career may help explain the prominence of women in movements of physically disabled people. Sylvia Flexer became the league's president. Finding themselves defined as both unmarriageable and unemployable, dozens of other young handicapped women joined the league to demand jobs. At the intersection of gender and disability, their activism moved beyond the limits of both reform policy and labor radicalism. 59

 

If the league challenged conventional thinking about hiring physically handicapped workers, it failed to probe disability's function in labor-management and, more deeply, socioeconomic class relations. Protean deployment of the disability concept appeared not only in social welfare and work relief policies but in employment practices, industrial insurance plans, workers' compensation programs, even medical research and practice. For example, in their pathbreaking Deadly Dust, David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz recount debates over definitions of disease and disability by industry, insurance, and labor leaders, politicians and government officials, medical doctors and researchers. In shaping that discourse, business interests successfully shifted silicosis-a lung disease caused by the inhalation of silica dust-from the political arena to the purview of doctors and scientists, many of whom had direct ties to the industries that produce such dust. Those medical professionals explained silicosis in ways that reduced the scope of the problem and the liability of the companies. Yet insurers mandated medical examinations that screened out not only workers with early symptoms of silicosis but also those with other diseases and disabilities that might eventually incur costs to both the insurers and the manufacturers. Workers identified as having those conditions were often discharged. Tagged as diseased or disabled, they had great difficulty finding other work. In another stratagem to reduce employers' liability and to remove occupational disease from the political realm by putting it in the hands of experts, business interests promoted coverage of silicosis by state workers' compensation programs, but under such restrictive eligibility requirements that few workers with silicosis could qualify for benefits. Thus, compensation programs denied them classification as disabled because many were still physically able to work, even while employers refused to hire them because they were labeled as diseased. The discourses of disability in the politics of silicosis, as in the politics of home and work relief, alert us to the material interests and the political content underlying medicalized speech. If the league's attempt to politicize disability discourse fell short, it implicitly points to the importance of medical constructions of disability in class relations under modern capitalism. 60

 

FDR never adopted the league's analysis or advice. He apparently never even responded to its "Thesis." Instead he presided over the beginnings of a federal-state welfare system that sequestered growing numbers of handicapped Americans as "unemployable" and a medical-vocational rehabilitation system that prescribed individual corrective treatments as the only means for them to achieve employability and social integration. The divergence of perspective between the league and FDR grew out of differing disability identities and ideologies. It is best explicated by contrasting it with the contemporaneous political experiences of African Americans and women.

 

Within the New Deal, networks of black and female appointees emerged to advocate the interests of African Americans and women. The "Black Cabinet," composed of an unprecedented number of African American administrators, pressed the concerns of the constituency it both represented and helped generate. This circle, along with civil rights organizations, mobilized protests against federal and private job discrimination and forged a black voting bloc that became a key component of the Democratic party coalition. Eleanor Roosevelt's support gained black administrators access to the president. She stood even more prominently at the apex of the New Deal's network of female reformers who had defined women's and children's issues as their special domain. They became personally influential in Democratic politics but avoided political feminism or directly addressing gender discrimination. While the black constituency made notable though limited political gains that paved the way for postwar activism, the female reformers' successes were not institutionalized. Still, both networks prodded the president and key white male officials to make the work programs more responsive to the needs of unemployed African Americans and women by hiring black and female workers and by putting black and female administrators in charge of special WPA outreach efforts. 61

 

The political experience of handicapped people differed markedly. Though a handicapped man headed the New Deal and handicapped men held WPA executive positions, no network of politicized disabled advocates emerged. In late 1935, as Jack Isaacs, who had lost one leg to amputation, led the picketing at New York WPA headquarters, Orrick Johns, also a one-leg amputee, headed the WPA Writers Project in New York. Johns apparently neither identified with nor supported the demonstrators. Meanwhile New York City WPA administrator Victor Ridder, who wore a "built-up shoe" to compensate for a shortened leg, publicly clashed with the disabled activists, calling them "mentally as well as physically handicapped." Insulted by their charge that he was "callous to the needs" of handicapped persons, he declared that his own "infirmity" made him "particularly considerate of others afflicted." 62

 

Ridder's hostility and Johns's apparent apathy toward handicapped activism reflected experiences that contrasted with those of league members. Though Ridder, Johns, and FDR differed from one another ethnically, religiously, and politically, all came from higher-status and more affluent backgrounds than league activists and were a generation older. 63 Most league members were in their twenties, children of working-class immigrants, and Jewish; labor and leftist backgrounds had predisposed some toward radical politics. The affluent, older men and the activists differed also in their connections with other handicapped people. Johns's autobiography never mentions relationships with other disabled people. Whether Ridder had affiliations with other disabled people is unknown. FDR's connections occurred in the context of medical rehabilitation or charity fund raising. The core league leaders had formed friendships in special education classes, basement clubs, summer camps, and recreation centers.

 

These differing experiences probably fostered diverging disability identities and ideologies. Roosevelt, Ridder, and Johns likely viewed disability as a private tragedy best dealt with by sympathetic public support for individuals striving to overcome adversity. League members' similar backgrounds and shared experiences fostered a group identity that generated an oppositional political consciousness. Their social network provided opportunities to discuss common experiences of job discrimination, to express and bolster shared indignation toward employer and government biases, and to fashion strategies for challenging those practices and policies. They came to regard disability as a social and political, more than a medical and moral, condition, one that required collective political action on their part and redress of discrimination by the government.

 

The contrast between the identities and ideologies of the league members and those of the three older men highlights the need to examine the historic varieties of disability experience as they interacted with class, ethnicity, education, age/generation, and types of association among people with disabilities. The evolution of a network of handicapped friends into a political action organization also exemplifies a motif in nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States disability history. Graduates of residential schools for Deaf or blind people formed alumni associations and social clubs to perpetuate friendships and provide mutual support. Over time those organizations began to address vocational, economic, and policy issues that affected their members. They became politicized. Deaf community organizations defended the use of sign language against the "oralist" campaign to suppress it. They lobbied state and federal governments for deaf vocational bureaus, against denial of driver's licenses, and against discrimination in civil service and work relief hiring. Blind associations opposed means-tested poor relief and segregation in sheltered workshops. All of those groups resisted professional domination. All opposed reigning cultural stereotypes of blindness, deafness, and physical handicap. By the mid-1930s, the Deaf associations had developed into an increasingly well-organized and well-connected national network. The organized blind movement was poised to emerge at the national level. And some physically handicapped people were just beginning to mobilize at the local level. Educational and service institutions founded by non-handicapped benefactors inadvertently enabled people with disabilities to overcome their natural geographical dispersion and lack of generational continuity and to create informal social networks and formal self-directed organizations. Those structures ultimately became sites of oppositional consciousness and political resistance to culturally dominant ideas about disability. 64

 

Spurred by that new outlook, members of the league agitated to protect their hard-won WPA jobs. Into fall 1936, they continued to charge the New York WPA with failing to give handicapped persons "sufficient consideration." In September, Ridder's successor, Col. Brehon B. Somervell, promised that handicapped workers would receive a minimum 7 percent of future WPA jobs. But the following spring, WPA offices nationwide began massive layoffs. The league claimed that Somervell had pledged to dismiss no more than 48 handicapped workers locally; over 600 lost their jobs. On June 29 the leaders telegraphed Harry Hopkins, threatening "drastic actions unless all cuts [were] stopped and dismissed persons reinstated." The firings continued. In mid-August, thirty-three delegates took a bus to Washington hoping to see Hopkins or Roosevelt. With only twenty dollars for food and lodging, they camped out on a small lawn in front of the WPA and at the Washington Monument. A conversation with two of Hopkins's deputies and a meeting with Hopkins himself, obtained through the intercession of Workers Alliance of America president David Lasser, yielded nothing. The delegates left for home, pledging to "return in larger numbers within a short time." It seems, however, that league activists never came back to the capital. 65

 

Though the league failed to redirect federal policies, it continued to oppose job discrimination in New York City and to open the public sector to workers with disabilities. At its peak, its militant tactics forced the WPA to hire nearly fifteen hundred New Yorkers with disabilities, an impressive achievement for a small band of handicapped activists in the depths of the depression. The most active leaders moved from the PA into civil service careers. Successful employment, along with internal political differences, soon led to the league's demise. 66

 

League officers from leftist backgrounds were probably the organization's "sparkplugs," but, as with many working-class white and black Americans in the 1930s, league members followed such leaders pragmatically and only for a time. The rank and file pursued specific objectives militantly rather than seeking to transform the system radically. They welcomed support from the Young Communists of America, the Communist-controlled Unemployed Councils, and the Socialist-Communist hybrid Workers Alliance of America. The American Civil Liberties Union and the Communist-backed International Labor Defense, usually antagonistic toward each other, together defended them in court. The greatest influence on their political thinking and strategizing was the depression-era climate of crisis and desperate activism. Most league members, like most working-class Americans, were not committed radicals. They too sought, not societal transformation, but limited personal goals. They too wanted the economic security, social validity, and personal control of their destinies that they expected jobs to ensure.

 

In emulating and pragmatically borrowing from other activist groups, the league exemplified another pattern in disability-based political movements. League leaders battled disability discrimination by adopting ideas and tactics from labor and leftist organizers. Likewise, blind leaders in the 1940s and disabled activists from the 1970s on adapted to their own situation the critical analyses and militant tactics of contemporaneous social-change movements. In the 1940s and 1950s, National Federation of the Blind president Jacobus tenBroek drew support for his organization from labor unions, asserting a parallel between the two. Later activists became involved with or inspired by the black civil rights, feminist, antiwar, and labor movements. All disability movements have borrowed and adapted the analyses and tactics of contemporaneous movements. Whatever the sources of influence, those movements have typically espoused liberal reformist, rather than radical transformative, political agendas. 68

 

The shared experience of discrimination had united league members, spurring their militancy. Employment made some more cautious and then fearful of their compatriots' leftist politics. Looking back, league veterans found it too painful or too threatening to talk freely about the fierce political disagreements. Sylvia Bassoff said: "I think there was some red-baiting going on, and we got cold feet. It's easy to get cold feet when you've sort of won what you want for yourself." Disagreements over tactics and ideology degenerated into divisiveness. The "red-baiting" mirrored the wave of such charges in other movements in the late 1930s, as the New Deal commitment to reform unraveled. 69

 

The league also illustrated recurrent difficulties of American reform campaigns and patterns typical of disability-based political movements. It advocated piecemeal gains-jobs, effective vocational rehabilitation, adequate home relief-rather than systematic reconstruction of disability policies and programs, let alone of society. Likewise, its analysis touched only the surface of the problem of disability in twentieth century policies. It never probed disability's function in modern society and culture as the counter-image  of "normality" to aid in managing social, and especially class, relations. In that era, few Americans shared even its exposition of disability in institutional and political, rather than individual and pathological, terms. As an outsider group, the league simply lacked the public voice to reshape the terms of public discourse. Finally, the league did not try to fashion a larger disability-based political coalition. The handful of handicapped people who joined forces in activist groups enlisted in disability-specific advocacy groups. The Deaf associations and the organized blind protested job discrimination too, but none of these groups identified or allied with the others. Later disability-specific political groups continued to organize around issues of concern to those with their members' particular disabilities. This pattern reflected the perceived interests, the focused agendas, and the collective identities of those groups. Late-twentieth-century disability politics departed from this pattern as cross-disability coalitions formed to promote universalistic disability rights legislation such as the Americans with Disabilities Act. Such confederated efforts asserted that all people with disabilities, confronting a common set of cultural prejudices and social hazards, should act in political solidarity. That inclusive definition of interests and identity embraced a more diverse constituency than those of disability-specific groups, prompting attention to a much wider range of issues. By the 1980s, a cross-disability minority-group consciousness had emerged among a younger generation. As a political result, networks of disabled appointees finally appeared in the Bush and Clinton administrations. 70

 

In the late 1930s, those long-term developments in identity, ideology, and agenda were neither foreseeable nor inevitable. Whereas the labor, African American, and women's movements laid the groundwork for later efforts, the league failed to establish an institutional base upon which to build further activism by physically handicapped people. Former members stayed in touch as friends, but few ever joined another disability-rights group. There was no direct line of descent, no institutional or even individual continuity, from the league to any later activist organization. It appears that sometime in 1938 the League of the Physically Handicapped dissolved. 71

 

The brief episode of the League of the Physically Handicapped highlights major themes of modern disability history, with its complicated interactions among institutional, group, and individual actors and its complex interplay of public policies, professional practices, and cultural values. The league's history should prompt scholars to shift from medical to sociocultural and political definitions of disability. We need also to broaden our focus to add the views of people with disabilities to those of policy makers and professionals. Though disabled people usually wielded significantly less power than other historical agents, they were not passive. Nor were their experiences homogeneous. There were varieties of disability experience, identity, and ideology. We must also explore the role of disability, not only in the many fields of history where it has appeared, but as central to modern history. Finally, historians should learn to handle disability as a necessary tool of historical analysis. Perhaps the final accomplishment of these long-forgotten activists will be to help spur a new history of disability.

 

Footnotes

 

1 New York Post, May 31, 1935, p. 2; New York Herald Tribune, May 31, 1935, p. 26; Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail (New York, 1979), 41-95. 

 

2 The term "disabled" is currently preferred by most disability-rights activists. During the 1930s, the individuals who formed the League of the Physically Handicapped, along with many other people with physical disabilities, preferred "handicapped." For that reason, we often use "handicapped" when discussing the events of that era. 

 

3 For critiques of these omissions, see Lauri Umansky and Paul K. Longmore, "Disability History, from the Margins to the Mainstream," in The New Disability History: American Perspectives, ed. Lauri Umansky and Paul K. Longmore (New York, forthcoming, 2000); Douglas Baynton, "Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History," ibid.; John Williams-Searle, "Courting Risk: Disability, Masculinity, and Liability on Iowa's Railroads, 1868-1900," Annals of Iowa, 58 (Winter 1999), 27-77, esp. 28-31; Douglas Baynton, "Defectives in the Land: Disability and Federal Immigration Policy, 1882-1924," paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association, Seattle, Jan. 1998 (in Paul K. Longmore's possession); and Karen Hirsch and Jerrold Hirsch, "Paternalism and Disability: Rethinking the History of the Southern Mill Village Community," paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association, Seattle, Jan. 1998, ibid. For recent research, see Umansky and Longmore, eds., New Disability History; and Douglas Baynton, Forbidden Signs: American Culture and the Campaign against Sign Language (Chicago, 1996); Robert Bogdan, Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit (Chicago, 1988); Robert M. Buchanan, Illusions of Equality: Deaf Americans in School and Factory 1850-1950 (Washington, 1999); Hugh Gallagher, FDRs Splendid Deception (New York, 1985); Nora Groce, Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language: Hereditary Deafness on Martha's Vineyard (Cambridge, Mass., 1985); Harlan Lane, When the Mind Hears:A History of the Deaf(New York, 1985); Claire H. Liachowitz, Disability as a Social Construct: Legislative Roots (Philadelphia, 1988); Paul K. Longmore, "The Life of Randolph Bourne and the Need for a History of Disabled People," Reviews in American History, 13 (Dec. 1985), 581-87; Paul K. Longmore, "Uncovering the Hidden History of Disabled People," ibid., 15 (Sept. 1987), 35564; James W Trent Jr., Inventing the Feeble Mind: A History of Mental Retardation in the United States (Berkeley, 1994); Peter L. Tyor and Leland V Bell, Caring for the Retarded in America: A History (Westport, 1985); John Vickrey Van Cleve, ed., Deaf History Unveiled Interpretations from the New Scholarship (Washington, 1993); and John Vickrey Van Cleve and Barry Crouch, A Place of Their Own: Creating the Deaf Community in America (Washington, 1989). 

 

4 On reactions to disability, see Harlan Hahn, "The Politics of Physical Differences: Disability and Discrimination," Journal of Social Issues, 44 (no. 1, 1988), 39-47; Gary L. Albrecht, Vivian G. Walker, and Judith A. Levy, "Social Distance from the Stigmatized: A Test of Two Theories," Social Science Medicine, 16 (no. 13, 1982), 1319-27; Karen Dion, Ellen Berscheid, and Elaine Walster, "What Is Beautiful Is Good," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 24 (Dec. 1972), 285-90; R. William English, "Correlates of Stigma towards Physically Disabled Persons," Rehabilitation Research & Practice Review, 2 (Fall 1971), 1-17; Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (Englewood Cliffs, 1963); Marcia D. Horne and Jerry L. Ricciardo, "Hierarchy of Response to Handicaps," Psychological Reports, 62 (Feb. 1988), 83-86; Reginald L. Jones, "The Hierarchical Structure of Attitudes toward the Exceptional," Exceptional Children, 40 (March 1974), 430-35; Robert Kieck, Hiroshi Ono, and Albert H. Hastorf, "The Effects of Physical Deviance upon Face-to-Face Interaction," Human Relations, 19 (Nov. 1966), 425-36; Rhoda Olkin and Leslie J. Howson, "Attitudes toward and Images of Physical Disability," Journal of Social Behavior and Personality, 9 (no. 5, 1994), 81-96; Clifford R. Schneider and Wayne Anderson, "Attitudes toward the Stigmatized: Some Insights from Recent Research," Rehabilitation Counseling Bulletin, 23 (June 1980), 299-313; John L. Tringo, "The Hierarchy of Preference toward Disability Groups," Journal of Special Education, 4 (Summer/Fall 1970), 295-306; and Harold E. Yuker, ed., Attitudes toward Persons with Disabilities (New York, 1988). 

 

5 For revisionist approaches in medical, public health, and occupational disease history, see Roy Porter, "The Patient's View: Doing Medical History from Below," Theory and Society, 14 (March 1985), 175-98; Susan Reverby and David Rosner, eds., Health Care in America: Essays in Social History (Philadelphia, 1979); Charles E. Rosenberg and Janet Golden, eds., Framing Disease: Studies in Cultural History (New Brunswick, 1992); Morris J. Vogel, "Patrons, Practitioners, and Patients: The Voluntary Hospital in Mid-Victorian Boston," in Victorian America, ed. Daniel Walker Howe (Philadelphia, 1976), 121-40; Morris J. Vogel and Charles Rosenberg, eds., The Therapeutic Revolution: Essays in the Social History of American Medicine (Philadelphia, 1979); and David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz, eds., "Slaves of the Depression".' Workers' Letters about Life on the Job (Ithaca, 1987), 115-20, 141, 148. On job discrimination, see David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz, Deadly Dust: Silicosis and the Politics of Occupational Disease in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, 1991), 74-75, 79-80, 96,113,130,146,165. 

 

6 Van Cleve, ed., Deaf History Unveiled, ix; Floyd Matson, Walking Alone and Marching Together: A History of the Organized Blind Movement in the United States, 1940-1990 (Baltimore, 1990), iii-iv; Edward D. Berkowitz, Disabled Policy: America's Programs for the Handicapped (New York, 1987); Liachowitz, Disability as a Social Construct; Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, Mass., 1992); Deborah Stone, Disabled State (Philadelphia, 1986). For exceptions to the usual policy historiography, see Richard K. Scotch and Edward D. Berkowitz, "One Comprehensive System? A Historical Perspective on Federal Disability Policy," Journal of Disability Policy Studies, I (Fall 1990), 1-19; and K. Walter Hickel, "Medicine, Bureaucracy, and Social Welfare: The Politics of Disability Compensation for American Veterans of World War I," in New Disability History, ed. Umansky and Longmore. 

 

7 Douglas C. Baynton, "Disability: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis," Disability Studies Quarterly 17 (Spring 1997), 82; Umansky and Longmore, "Disability History, from the Margins to the Mainstream." 

 

8 Herman Joseph interviewed Sylvia Flexer Bassoff and Florence Haskell for Disabled in Action of New York City. Sylvia Flexer Bassoff interview by Herman Joseph, Dec. 7, 1985, audiotape (in Longmore's possession), side 1; Florence Haskell interview by Joseph, March 29, 1986, audiotape, ibid., side 1; Florence Haskell telephone interview by Paul K. Longmore and David Goldberger, March 2, 1991, ibid., side 1; Sylvia Flexer Bassoff and Isadore Bassoff interview by Goldberger, June 21, 1991, ibid., side 2; Sara Lasoff Applebaum telephone interview by Longmore and Goldberger, May 26, 1991, ibid., side 1; Sylvia Fishman telephone interview by Longmore and Goldberger, June 9, 1991, ibid, side 1; Bob Brown, "March of the Cripples," New Masses, Nov. 26, 1935, p. 10; Frances Lide, "Girl Leader of Cripples Asks Plan to End `Discrimination,'" Washington Star, May 11, 1936. In the following notes, the fullest versions of their surnames (that is, both maiden and married names) are used for Sara Lasoff Applebaum and Sylvia Flexer Bassoff. 

 

9 Rosner and Markowitz, Deadly Dust, 86, 87-89, 118-20, 179-80; Hickel, "Medicine, Bureaucracy, and Social Welfare." On the medical and social-construction paradigms and their applications, see Paul Abberley, "The Concept of Oppression and the Development of a Social Theory of Disability," Disability, Handicap, and Society, 2 (no. 1, 1987), 5-21; Colin Barnes, Geof Mercer, and Tom Shakespeare, Exploring Disability: A Sociological Introduction (London, 1999); Len Barton, Keith Ballard, and Gillian Fulcher, Disability and the Necessity for a Socio-Political Perspective (Durham, N.H., 1992); Lennard Davis, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body (New York, 1996); Michelle Fine and Adrienne Asch, "Disability beyond Stigma: Social Interaction, Discrimination, and Activism," Journal of Social Issues, 44 (no. 1, 1988), 3-21; Victor Finkelstein, Attitudes and Disabled People: Issues for Discussion (New York, 1982); B. J. Gleeson, "Disability Studies: A Historical Materialist View," Disability and Society, 12 (no. 2, 1997), 179-202; John Gliedman and William Roth, The Unexpected Minority: Handicapped Children in America (New York, 1978); Harlan Hahn, "Disability Policy and the Problem of Discrimination," American Behavioral Scientist, 8 (Jan./Feb. 1985), 293-318; Simi Linton, Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity (New York, 1998); Longmore, "Life of Randolph Bourne and the Need for a History of Disabled People"; Longmore, "Uncovering the Hidden History of Disabled People"; Michael Oliver, The Politics of Disablement: A Sociological Approach (New York, 1990); William Roth, "Handicap as a Social Construct," Society, 20 (March/ April 1983), 56-61; and Tom Shakespeare, ed., The Disability Reader: Social Science Perspectives (London, 1998). For examples of early recognition that "disability" is artificially constructed and that prejudice frames the experience of disability, see Roger G. Barker et al., Adjustment to Physical Handicap and Illness: A Survey of the Social Psychology of Physique and Disability (New York, 1953); and Jacobus tenBroek and Floyd W Matson, "The Disabled and the Law of Welfare," in Changing Patterns of Law: The Courts and the Handicapped, ed. William R. F. Phillips and Janet Rosenberg (New York, 1980), 811-16. 

 

10 " Stone, Disabled State; tenBroek and Matson, "Disabled and the Law of Welfare," 811; Martha L. Edwards, "Infanticide in the Classical Greek World and Two Disability Studies Models," paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association, Seattle, Jan. 1998 (in Longmore's possession). 

 

11 Marvin Lazerson, "The Origins of Special Education," in Special Education," in Special Education Policies: Their History, Implementation, and Finance, ed. Jay G. Chambers and William T. Hartman (Philadelphia, 1983), 34-39; Brad Byrom, "A Pupil and a Patient: Hospital-Schools in Progressive America," in New Disability History, ed. Umansky and Longmore; Berkowitz, Disabled Policy, 184; Barbara P Ianacone, "Historical Overview: From Charity to Rights," in Changing Patterns of Law, ed. Phillips and Rosenberg, 957; Marcia Pearce Burgdorf and Robert L. Burgdorf Jr., "A History of Unequal Treatment: The Qualifications of Handicapped Persons as a `Suspect Class' under the Equal Protection Clause," ibid., 865; Jacobus tenBroek, "The Right to Live in the World: The Disabled and the Law of Torts," California Law Review, 54 (May 1966), 885-94. On the public schooling of physically handicapped children, see David Hinshaw, Take Up Thy Bed and Walk (1948; New York, 1980), 18-19, 11. New York City's Charity Organization Society kept a "Directory of Cripples" to help the police distinguish legitimate from illegitimate beggars. The Chicago ordinance was finally repealed in 1974, but in that same year a disabled man was arrested under a similar law in Omaha. Brad Byrom, "Of Backrooms, Basements, and Beggars: Mendicancy and Disability in Late-Nineteenth-Century America," 1999 (in Longmore's possession), 4; Burgdorf and Burgdorf, "History of Unequal Treatment," 863-64. 

 

12 Immigration Act of Feb. 20, 1907, ch. 1134, 34 Stat. 898 (1907); Baynton, "Defectives in the Land." 

 

13 "The Black Stork, dir. W R. Strafford (1916); retitled Are You Fit to Marry? (1918; Quality Amusement Corporation, 1927); Ianacone, "Historical Overview," 955; Robert L. Burgdorf Jr. and Marcia Pearce Burgdorf, "The Wicked Witch Is Almost Dead: Buck v. Bell and the Sterilization of Handicapped Persons," in Changing Patterns of Law, ed. Phillips and Rosenberg, 1000; Martin S. Pernick, The Black Stork: Eugenics and the Death of "Defective" Babies in American Medicine and Motion Pictures since 1915 (New York, 1996), esp. 72-73, 238n17; Flexer Bassoff and Bassoff, side 1; Fishman interview, side 1, tape 1; Haskell interview by Longmore and Goldberger, side 1, tape 1. Photos supplied by Florence Haskell (in Longmore's possession). 

 

14 For examples of movies from the 1930s that portray characters with disabilities similar to those of most league members as vengeful, manipulative, cruel, or weak, see The Mad Genius, dir. Michael Curtiz (Warner, 1931); West of Zanzibar, dir. Todd Browning (MGM, 1928); Kongo, dir. William Cowen (MGM, 1932); The Mystery of the Wax Museum, dir. Michael Curtiz (Warner, 1933); Have a Heart, dir. David Butler (MGM, 1934); Of Human Bondage, dir. John Cromwell (RKO, 1934); and Dick Tracy, dir. Alan James and Ray Taylor (Republic, 1937). On the dichotomy between disabled and "normate" figures in American culture and literature, see Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York, 1997), o zi 

 

15 Scott M. Cutlip, Fundraising in the United States: Its Role in America's Philanthropy (New Brunswick, 1965), 351-87; New York Post, June 3, 1935, p. 6; Flexer Bassoff and Bassoff interview, side 2. As if to point out that "the old custom" was still in practice, the Daily News reported: "Rain yesterday failed to dampen the spirits of 5,000 crippled and orphan children" taken to Coney Island by the Long Island Automobile Club. New York Daily News, June 5, 1935, Brooklyn section, p. 6. 

 

16 John Hockenberry, Moving Violations: War Zones, Wheelchairs, and Declarations of Independence (New York, 1995), 64-66; Flexer Bassoff and Bassoff interview, side 2; Frederica Goldsmith telephone interview by Longmore and Goldberger, May 27, 1991, audiotape (in Longmore's possession), side 1; Lou Razler telephone interview by Longmore and Goldberger, June 8, 1991, ibid., side 1. For another example of a physically disabled individual distancing himself from other cripples, see Leonard Kriegel, The Long Walk Home (New York, 1964), 45-46, 119, 121-22, 203-12. 

 

17 U Tennessee Williams drew upon his sister's polio disability in his semiautobiographical play: Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie: A Play (New York, 1945). Haskell interview by Longmore and Goldberger, side 1, tape 1; Flexer Bassoff and Bassoff interview, side 2, tape 1. Sara Roosevelt's friend is quoted in Gallagher, FDR's Splendid Deception, 28. 

 

18 Gallagher, FDR ' Splendid Deception; Franklin D. Roosevelt, The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, comp. Samuel Rosenman (13 vols., New York, 1938), I, 334; Franklin D. Roosevelt, "Why Bother with the Crippled Child?," Crippled Child, 5 (no. 6, 1928), 140-43. We thank Brad Byrom for the last reference. On the ideology and history of overcoming, see Byrom, "Pupil and a Patient*; David Gerber, "Anger and Affability: The Rise and Representation of a Repertory of Self-Presentation Skills in a WWII Disabled Veteran," Journal of Social History, 27 (Fall 1993), 5-27; Daniel J. Wilson, "Crippled Manhood: Infantile Paralysis and the Construction of Masculinity," Medical Humanities Review, 12 (Fall 1998), 9-28; and Kriegel, Long Walk Home, esp. 5658, 72-75, 107-8, 127, 130-33, 150-64. Kriegel refers to himself as a "cripple," but his strategy for constructing a new "self," a new identity, is a classic instance of overcoming. Ibid, 212-13. 

 

19 Flexer Bassoff and Bassoff interview, side 1; Fishman interview, side 1. 

 

20 "Haskell interview by Joseph, side 1; Lide, "Girl Leader of Cripples Asks Plan to End `Discrimination."' Flexer Bassoff interview, side 1. Emphasis added to indicate Sylvia Flexer Bassoff's verbal inflection. 

 

21 Razler interview, side 1; Brown, "March of the Cripples," 10-12. Wage discrimination against workers with disabilities persisted into the late twentieth century. William G. Johnson and James Lambrinos, "Wage Discrimination against Handicapped Men and Women," Journal of Human Resources, 20 (1985), 264-77; Joseph Shapiro, No Pity. People with Disabilities Forging a New Civil Rights Movement (New York, 1993), 28- 29. 

 

22 Roosevelt, Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, comp. Rosenman, IV, 19-20; Edward D. Berkowitz, America's Welfare State: >From Roosevelt to Reagan (Baltimore, 1991), 91-92; William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932-1940 (New York, 1963), 124-25; Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Age of Roosevelt, vol. 11: The Coming of the New Deal (Boston, 1959), 296; "What Happens to `Unemployables,"' New Masses, Oct. 1, 1935, p. 6; New York Herald Tribune, June 4, 1935, p. 20; New York Post, May 11, 1936, p. 4. 

 

23 Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 (New York, 1990), 1 - 10, 251-89, 361-68. 

 

24 Flexer Bassoff and Bassoff interview, side 1. 

 

25 Flexer Bassoff interview, side 1; Flexer Bassoff and Bassoff interview, side 1; Haskell interview by Joseph, side 1; Haskell interview by Longmore and Goldberger, side 1; Lasoff Applebaum interview, side 1; Fishman interview, side 1; Brown, "March of the Cripples,' 10; Lide, "Girl Leader of Cripples Asks Plan to End `Discrimination"'"; Cohen, Making a New Dead 145. In a novel written in the 1930s, Jewish boys just out of high school in 1920s Chicago establish a basement club and invite local girls to it. Meyer Levin, The Old Bunch (New York, 1937), 4, 5-9, 18-26. 

 

26 Flexer Bassoff interview, side 1; Flexer Bassoff and Bassoff interview, side 1; Haskell interview by Joseph, side 1; Haskell interview by Longmore and Goldberger, side 1; New York Post, May 31, 1935, p. 2; New York Herald Tribune, May 31, 1935, pp. 26, 1. 

 

27 Flexer Bassoff interview, side 1; Haskell interview by Joseph, side 1; Haskell interview by Longmore and Goldberger, side 1; New York Post, May 31, 1935, p. 2; New York Herald Tribune, May 31, 1935, pp. 26, 1. 2g Daily Worker, May 31, 1935, p. 1; ibid, June 1, 1935, p. 8; New York Herald Tribune, May 31, 1935, pp. 1, 26; Washington Post, May 31, 1935, p. 10; New York Post, May 31, 1935, p. 2; Daily Worker, May 31, 1935, p. 1. Although Hyman Abramowitz claimed that the league had "200 members," Sylvia Flexer Bassoff remembered the original group as comprising only 35-40 members. But Abramowitz may not have been exaggerating greatly when he said the membership included "pharmacists, lawyers, clerks and stenographers." One newspaper identified Sara Lasoff Applebaum, Florence Haskell, and Pauline Portugalo respectively as a file clerk, a typist, and a clerical worker and listed Harry Friedman as a chemist, Morris Dolinsky as a pharmacist, and Abramowitz as a watchmaker. 

 

28 Washington Post, May 31, 1935, p. 10; Flexer Bassoff interview, side 1; Washington Post, May 31, 1935, p. 10; New York Herald Tribune, May 31, 1935, p. 26. It is unclear exactly when the league was officially organized. Haskell recalled formal organization coming soon after the initial protest. See Haskell interview by Joseph. Throughout that action, newspapers referred to the organization by various names. The group had probably not yet organized formally; perhaps different protesters were interviewed by various reporters, each protester giving a different name to their group. Washington Post, May 31, 1935, p. 10; New York Herald Tribune, May 31, 1935, p. 1; Daily Worker May 31, 1935, p. 1. 

 

29 Washington Post, May 31, 1935, p. 10; New York Herald Tribune, May 31, 1935, pp. 1, 26; New York Post, May 31, 1935, p. 2; New York American, June 1, 1935, regular edition, p. 3; ibid., June 1, 1935, evening edition, p. 3; New York Post, June 1, 1935, p. 3; New York Herald Tribune, June 1, 1935, p. 2. 

 

30 New York Post, June 1, 1935, p. 3; New York American, June 2, 1935, p. 3; New York Herald Tribune, June 2, 1935, p. 9; Daily Worker, June 3, 1935, p. 2; "Crippled Jobless Hold Firm despite Tremendous Odds," ibid., June 4, 1935; Razler interview, side 1; Lasoff Applebaum interview, side 1; Flexer Bassoff interview, side 1. 

 

31 New York Herald Tribune, June 4, 1935, p. 20; New York Post, June 3, 1935, p. 6. Abramowitz demanded a wage higher than the New York WPA would pay its employees but in line both with the demands of Mayor LaGuardia and labor leaders and with the cost of living. Barbara Blumberg, The New Deal and the Unemployed The View from New York City (Lewisburg, 1979), 52-54, 226. 

 

32 New York Herald Tribune, June 21, 1935, pp. 1, 13; New York Times, June 27, 1935, p. 14; "Harris Convicts Crippled Pickets," ibid, June 29, 1935; New York American, June 7, 1935, p. 1; New York Herald Tribune, June 7, 1935, p. 19; New York Daily News, June 7, 1935, p. 18B; "Jobless Cripples Storm Air Station as Knauth Speaks," New York Post, June 7, 1935; "Fourth of July 1935," Labor Defender, 9 (July 1935), 3. 

 

33 New York American, June 8, 1935, p. 6; ibid, June 9, 1935, p. 2L; New York Post, June 8, 1935, p. 2. 

 

34 The defense attorneys were Lee Hazen of the American Civil Liberties Union and Harry Alexander, Isadore Bassoff, and Samuel Goldberg from the International Labor Defense. Bassoff had already defended Abramowitz on a previous charge resulting from his action at a Brooklyn relief office. Flexer Bassoff and Bassoff interview, sides 1-2; Haskell interview by Joseph, side 1; Razler interview, side 1; New York Times, June 20, 1935, p. 4; Bronx and Manhattan Home News, June 20, 1935, p. 3; New York Times, June 21, 1935, p. 21; New York Daily News, June 20, 1935, p. 27; ibid., June 21, 1935, pp. 2, 9; New York Herald Tribune, June 21, 1935, pp. 1, 13; ibid, June 20, 1935, p. 6; ibid, June 21, 1935, pp. 1, 13; ibid., June 22, 1935, p. 30; "Crippled Pickets Released on Writ," New York Times, June 22, 1935; "Crippled Pickets Are Paroled Again," ibid, June 23, 1935; New York Herald Tribune, June 23, 1935, p. 13; "Harris Convicts Crippled Pickets," New York Times, June 29, 1935; New York Herald Tribune, June 29, 1935, p. 28. 

 

35 The authorities evidently feared another "riot" at the city hall demonstration. "To maintain peace ... there were 120 uniformed patrolmen" and 20 mounted officers. New York Herald Tribune, June 29, 1935, p. 28. See also ibid., June 2, 1935, p. 9; and New York American, June 2,1935, p. 3. The Herald Tribune and the Daily News had already declared the strike "Communist-supported": New York Herald Tribune, June 1, 1935, p. 2; New York Daily News, June 1, 1935, final edition, p. 4. New York Herald Tribune, June 21, 1935, pp. 1, 13; New York Times, June 27, 1935, p. 14; "Harris Convicts Crippled Pickets," ibid, June 29, 1935; Bronx and Manhattan Home News, June 7, 1935, p. 3; New York American, June 7, 1935, p. 1; New York Herald Tribune, June 7, 1935, p. 19; New York Daily News, June 7, 1935, p. 18B; New York Post, June 8, 1935, p. 2. 

 

36 Jack Isaacs had lost his leg in a factory accident, but he was not part of the sit-in. Daily Worker, May 31, 1935, p. 1; "Crippled Jobless Hold Firm despite Tremendous Odds"; New York American, June 7, 1935, p. 1; "Fourth of July 1935," p. 3; New York Herald Tribune, June 7, 1935, p. 19; New York 7-mes, June 20, 1935, p. 4; Daily Worker, June 7, 1935, p. 2; ibid, June 8, 1935, p. 8; Flexer Bassoff interview, side 1. See also ibid., Nov. 19, 1935, p. 6. 

 

37 Even the New Masses invoked these demeaning stereotypes. See Brown, "March of the Cripples." The Daily Worker veered back and forth between "crippled" and "handicapped." Herbert Benjamin, the Communist Party of the United States of America's principal organizer of unemployed and Works Progress Administration (WPA) workers, urged, "Fight discrimination against handicapped workers." Herbert Benjamin, A Handbook for Project Workers (New York, 1936), 23. Flexer Bassoff and Bassoff interview, side 2; Haskell interview by Longmore and Goldberger, side 1. 

 

38 Gallagher, FDR! Splendid Deception; Flexer Bassoff interview by Joseph, side 1; Haskell interview by Joseph, side 1. For examples of other disability activist groups engaging in "identity politics," see Renee R. Anspach, "From Stigma to Identity Politics: Political Activism among the Physically Disabled and Former Mental Patients," Social Science and Medicine, 13A (Nov. 1979), 765-73; and Matson, Walking Alone and Marching Together, 3638, 40-41, 44-45. 

 

39 Flexer Bassoff and Bassoff interview, side 1; Goldsmith interview, side 2; Lasoff Applebaum interview, side 1; Haskell interview by Joseph, side 1; Haskell interview by Longmore and Goldberger, side 1. 

 

40 Blumberg, New Deal and the Unemployed, 49; Brown, "March of the Cripples," 11 - 12. 

 

41 "New York Times, Nov. 30, 1935, p. 13; Blumberg, New Deal and the Unemployed, 71; New York Post, May 13, 1936, p. 6; New York Times, Dec. 6, 1935, p. 18; Razler interview, side 1; Haskell interview by Joseph, sides 1-2; Washington Evening Star, May 11, 1936, p. Al. 

 

42 The Emergency Relief Bureau reported a total of 12,000 handicapped persons on its rolls. New York Times, April 6, 1936, p. 16; Daily Worker, May 6, 1936, p. 6; Sylvia Flexer Bassoff to Harry Hopkins, April 23, 1936, folder L, box 2157, Complaints 1935-42, Nyc, 69.3-69.3.1 (Records of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration), WPA Central Files: State, Records of the Work Projects Administration, RG 69 (National Archives, Washington, D.C.). See also letters from the league's secretary: Sylvia Weissman to Franklin D. Roosevelt, April 23, 1936, ibid.; and Weissman to Royal S. Copeland, April 23, 1936, folder Nyc, J-Z, box 2034, Labor Complaints, Requests, Quota, etc., 1935-43, 69.4.1 (Records of the Works Projects Administration and Its Predecessors), ibid. 

 

43 Flexer Bassoff to Hopkins, April 23, 1936, folder L, box 2157, Complaints 1935-42, Nyc, 69.3-69.3.1 (Records of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration), WPA Central Files: State; Weissman to Copeland, April 23, 1936, folder NYC, J-Z, box 2034, Labor Complaints, Requests, Quota, etc., 1935-43, 69.4.1 (Records of the Works Projects Administration and Its Predecessors), ibid; League of the Physically Handicapped to Hopkins, May 5, 1936, folder L, box 2157, Complaints 1935-42, Nyc, 69.3-69.3.1 (Records of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration), ibid; Flexer Bassoff to Thad Holt, telegram, [May 1936], ibid; Holt to Flexer Bassoff, May 8, 1936, ibid; Daily Worker May 6, 1936, p. 6; Flexer Bassoff interview, side 1; Flexer Bassoff and Bassoff interview, side 1; Washington Post, May 10, 1936, p. 4; Washington Sunday Star May 10, 1936, pp. Al, A2; Washington Evening Star May 11, 1936, pp. 1, 2; New York Times, May 10, 1936, p. 42; Lide, "Girl Leader of Cripples Asks Plan to End `Discrimination,'" Daily Worker, May 12, 1936, p. 2; Washington Post, May 11, 1936, p. 1. See photo, ibid, p. 9. 

 

44 Washington Post, May 12, 1936, pp. 1, 14; Washington Evening Star, May 12, 1936, p. AZ; Daily Worker, May 12, 1936, p. 2; ibid, May 13, 1936, p. 2. 

 

45 "Thesis on Conditions of Physically Handicapped," typescript, n.d., p. I (in Longmore's possession). The memorandum is likely from early August 1936, as it matches an account of a league "memorandum" in New York Times, Aug. 10, 1936, p. 2. 

 

46 "Thesis on Conditions of Physically Handicapped," 1-2; Robert Buchanan, "Deaf Students and Workers in the United States, 1800-1950" (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1995), 396-97. The argument about "illogical and unnecessary physical qualifications" anticipated by half a century the Americans with Disabilities Act's prohibition against denial of employment if a disabled person could perform the "essential functions" of a job. The terms "deaf" and "Deaf" are used by scholars to distinguish between persons who merely have impaired hearing and those who are "culturally Deaf," that is, belong to the Deaf community and use a sign language as their primary language. 

 

47 "Thesis on Conditions of Physically Handicapped," 3. 

 

48 "Thesis on Conditions of Physically Handicapped," 3-4, 5-6, 9-10; Haskell interview by Joseph, side 2; Flexer Bassoff interview, side 1. On the Red Cross Institute, see Douglas C. McMurtrie, The Organization, Work and Method of the Red Cross Institute for Crippled and Disabled Men ([New York, 1918]); Douglas C. McMurtrie, Rehabilitation of the War Crippled ([New York, 1918]); John Culbert Faries, Three Years of Work for Handicapped Men: A Report of the Activities of the Institute for Crippled and Disabled Men (New York, 1920); and Hinshaw, Take Up Thy Bed and Walk, 63, 71-72, 77-79, 226-29. On subminimum wages, see ibid., 76-77; New York Times, July 23, 1934, p. 26; Lewis Mayers, ed., A Handbook of NRA (New York, 1934), 219-21; United States Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, "Handicapped Workers under Public Contracts Act," Monthly Labor Review, 55 (Oct. 1942), 843-44;  Jacobus tenBroek and Floyd Matson, Hope Deferred- Public Welfare and the Blind (Berkeley, 1959), 224-68; C.  Edwin Vaughan, The Struggle of Blind People for Self Determination, the Dependency-Rehabilitation Conflict: Empowerment in the Blindness Community (Springfield, Ill.,1993), 67-69, 165, 173-79, 198-201; Buchanan, "Deaf Students and Workers in the United States," 404; and William Branigin, "Subminimum Wage among Issues as Advocates Convene," Washington Post, Dec. 12, 1999. On tension between advocates and professionals, see Berkowitz, Disabled Policy, 187-89; James I. Charlton, Nothing about Us without Us: Disability, Oppression, and Empowerment (Berkeley, 1998); Gliedman and Roth, Unexpected Minority, 35; Hockenberry, Moving Violations, 112-14, 116-17; Lane, Mask of Benevolence, 43-49; Matson, Walking Alone and Marching Together, 15, 27-28, 32, 41; William Roth, "The Politics of Disability: Future Trends As Shaped by Current Realities," in Social Influences in Rehabilitation Planning: Blueprint for 21st Century: A Report of the Ninth May E. Switzer Memorial Seminar, ed. Leonard G. Perlman and Gary E Austin (Alexandria, 1985), 4546; Shapiro, No Pity, 50-52, 72-73, 127-39; Randy Shaw, Activist Handbook (Berkeley, 1996), 235-50; Karen G. Stone, Awakening to Disability: Nothing about Us without Us (n.p., 1997); and Vaughan, Struggle of Blind People, 5-7, 17-56, 120-30, 144-59, 172-210. 

 

49 "Thesis on Conditions of Physically Handicapped," 4-5. 

 

50 "Thesis on Conditions of Physically Handicapped," 4-7, 9-10; Edward D. Berkowitz and Kim McQuaid, Creating the Welfare State: The Political Economy of Twentieth-Century Reform (Lawrence, 1992), 125-26; Scotch and Berkowitz, "One Comprehensive System?," 9-11; Matson, Walking Alone and Marching Together, 9-10, 14, 17-23, 27. 

 

51 Stone, Disabled State, 15-28, 42-54, 119-20. On the historical formulation of the disability category, see also Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare (New York, 1971), xvi-xvii, 3-5; and Mark Priestley, "The Origins of a Legislative Disability Category in England: A Speculative History," Disability Studies Quarterly, 17 (Spring 1997), 87-94. On "disability" as a privileged status, see Berkowitz, America's Welfare State, 98; Berkowitz, Disabled Polites 230; Scotch and Berkowitz, "One Comprehensive System?," 2-3, 6; and Stone, Disabled State, 28, 172-73. For an analysis of the function of "disability" in welfare programs that departs from the common scholarly view to offer one similar to that presented here, see Piven and Cloward, Regulating the Poor, 3-4, 33-34, 147-48. To compare the intrusive and humiliating investigations of women receiving Aid to Families with Dependent Children with case workers' investigations of disabled people, see Berkowitz, America's We#are State, 103-6; Piven and Cloward, Regulating the Poor, 165-71; and tenBroek and Matson, "Disabled and the Law of Welfare," 830-33. 

 

52 Anthony J. Badger, The New Deal: The Depression Years, 1933-40 (New York, 1989), 201; Robert H. Bremner, "The New Deal and Social Welfare," in Fifty Years Later: The New Deal Evaluated ed. Harvard Sitkoff (Philadelphia, 1985), 73; James T. Patterson, The New Deal and the States: Federalism in Transition (Princeton, 1969), 41, 74-80, 84, 99; Piven and Cloward, Regulating the Poor, 94-97. 

 

53 Roosevelt, Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, comp. Rosenman, tv, 19-20; Donald S. Howard, The WPA and Federal Relief Policy (New York, 1943), 779,785-86,805-13, 826-29; Berkowitz, America's Welfare State, 91-92; Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 124-25, 130; Schlesinger, Coming of the New Deal 296; Harry L. Hopkins, Spending to Save: The Complete Story of Relief(New York, 1936), 109-11, 114, 160-61, 163-64, 182-83; Badger, New Deal 32-37, 201-3, 210-11; E Charles Searle, Minister of Relief Harry Hopkins and the Depression (Syracuse, 1963), 128; Blumberg, New Deal and the Unemployed, 22-23, 37-41, 282-86; Forrest A. Walker, The Civil Works Administration: An Experiment in Federal Work Relief 1933-1934 (New York, 1979), 27-28; Terry A. Cooney, BalancingAct American Thought and Culture in the 1930s (New York, 1995), 1-2, 185. Earlier work programs had the same goals. Walker, Civil Works Administration, 45-46, 65. 

 

54 WTA policies also often excluded mothers with dependent children and older workers. Hopkins, Spending to Save, 110, 139, 180-81; Howard, WPA and Federal Relief Policy, 271-77, 425-34, 457-59, 463-64, 778, 806, 808-9, 829,834; Bremner, "New Deal and Social Welfare," 89; G. John Ikenberry and Theda Skocpol, "Expanding Social Benefits: The Role of Social Security," Political Science Quarterly, 102 (Fall 1987), 414; "Thesis on Conditions of Physically Handicapped," 6-7; Brown, "March of the Cripples," 11-12; Buchanan, "Deaf Students and Workers," 397-400, 415-16. 

 

55 Badger, New Deal, 208-13; Blumberg, New Deal and the Unemployed 45-47, 222-26; Bremner, "New Deal and Social Welfare," 75-76; Charles, Minister of Relief 225-26; Howard, WPA and Federal Relief Policy 228-36, 432, 448-52, 463-64, 466; Patterson, New Deal and the States, 74-76; Exec. Order No. 7046 (1935), in Presidential Executive Orders, Numbers 1-7403 (1845-June 1936) (microfilm, 11 reels, Trans-Media Publications Microfilms, 1983), reel 11. For a classic example of hostility to WPA workers, as well as class bias, that uses disabled figures to make its case, see John Faulkner, Men Working (New York, 1940). 

 

56 "Thesis on Conditions of Physically Handicapped," 1-2, 6-7; Buchanan, "Deaf Students and Workers in the United States," 376-97; Susan Burch, "Biding the Time: American Deaf Cultural History, 1900 to World War II" (Ph.D. diss., Georgetown University, 1999), 166-73; Badger, New Deal, 212, 218, 221; Blumberg, New Deal and the Unemployed, 62-63; Howard, WPA and Federal Relief Policy, 459-62, 464-65; William F. McDonald, Federal ReliefAdministration and the Arts (Columbus, 1969), 569. 

 

57 The special jobs included work done by guards, watchmen, checkers, and timekeepers. Howard, WPA and Federal ReliefPoliX 99-101, 462-65; Buchanan, "Deaf Students and Workers in the United States," 381-83. In his thorough review of the WPA, Donald Howard questioned private employers' practices toward handicapped job seekers. Howard, WPA and Federal Relief Policy, 469. 

 

58 Scotch and Berkowitz, "One Comprehensive System?"; Matson, Walking Alone and Marching Together, 910, 14, 17-23, 27, 32-33, 38-42; Berkowitz, Disabled Policy 77-78, 186, 230-36: Flexer Bassoff interview, side 1; Flexer Bassoff and Bassoff interview, side 1; New York Herald Tribune, June 7, 1935, p. 19. 

 

59 The proportion of female WPA workers, 1935-1941, fluctuated between 12.1% and 19.2%. The Louisiana WPA declared: "a woman with an employable husband is not eligible for referral, as her husband is the logical head of the family." Howard, WPA and Federal Relief Polit)cys 280-83; Badger, New Deal 204-8; Blumberg, New Deal and the Unemployed, 77-78; Lois Scharf, To Work and to Wed Female Employment, Feminism, and the Great Depression (Westport, 1980), 123, 126; Susan Ware, Beyond Suffage: Women in the New Deal (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), 110-11; Susan Ware, Holding Their Own: American Women in the 1930s (Boston, 1982), 21-37; Adrienne Asch and Michelle Fine, eds., Women with Disabilities: Essays in Psychology; Culture, and Politics (Philadelphia, 1988), 24-25, 132, 148-62, 307; Flexer Bassoff interview, side 1. At least one other woman in the league had grown up with similar prompting. Fishman interview, side 1. In contrast, male domination of Deaf and blindness organizations may have been linked to deaf and blind women's closer approximation to gender norms and tendency to assume more traditional female roles. Burch, "Biding the Time," 284-98; Susan Burch, "Reading between the Signs," in New Disability History; ed. Umansky and Longmore; Catherine J. Kudlick, "The Outlook of The Problem and the Problem with The Outlook: Two Advocacy Journals Reinvent Blind People in Turnof-the-Century America," ibid. If disablement has often been regarded as feminizing men, at other times, depending on the type and extent of disability and particularly on the manner in which it was acquired, it has been perceived as a masculine "red badge of courage." That complex moral economy of disability and gender requires investigation. Wilson, "Crippled Manhood"; Hockenberry, Moving Violations, 110; Williams-Searle, "Courting Risk," esp. 40-45. 

 

60 See Rosner and Markowitz, Deadly Dust, esp. 86-89, 118-20, 125-34, 148-49, 179-80. See also Rosner and Markowitz, eds., "Slaves of the Depression," 115-20, 141, 148. On disability and the politics of medical speech, see Roth, "Handicap as a Social Construct"; and William Roth, Almsgiving in the 1980's: Social, Political, and Policy Aspects of Being Disabled in an Able-Bodied World," Pediatric Social Work, 2 (no. 4, 1982), 106. 

 

61 Badger, New Deal 203-8, 254-60, 305; Blumberg, New Deal and the Unemployed, 78-83; Patterson, New Deal and the States, 197-98; Harvard Sitkoff, A New Deal for Blacks: The Emergence of Civil Rights as a National Issue, vol. I: The Depression Decade (New York, 1978), 52, 59-79, 84-97, 247-50, 254-67; Ware, Beyond Suffrage,- Ware, Holding Their Own, 89-101. 

 

62 Orrick Johns, Time of Our Lives: The Story of My Father and Myself(New York, 1937), 119-30, 167, 219, 342-51; Badger, New Deal 223; Washington Evening Star May 12,1936, p. A2; New York Post, May 13,1936, p. 6; New York Times, June 5,1936, p. 2; Brown, "March of the Cripples," 10; Blumberg, New Deal and the Unemployed, 70. 

 

63 Ridder was a German American, Catholic, conservative, Republican newspaper publisher; Johns a Scottish American, former Presbyterian, sometime Communist, journalist and writer; and FDiz a Dutch American, Episcopalian, liberal Democrat. Blumberg, New Deal and the Unemployed, 70; Johns, Time of Our Lives. 

 

64 Alan B. Spitzer, "The Historical Problem of Generations," American Historical Review, 78 (Dec. 1973), 1353-85; Van Cleve and Crouch, Place of Their Own, 47, 60-61, 87-103; Robert Buchanan, "The Silent Worker Newspaper and the Building of a Deaf Community, 1890-1929," in Deaf History Unveiled ed. Van Cleve, 172-97; Buchanan, "Deaf Students and Workers in the United States"; Burch, "Biding the Time"; Michael Reis, "Student Life at the Indiana School for the Deaf during the Depression Years," in Deaf History Unveiled ed. Van Cleve, 198-223; Kudlick, "Outlook of The ProbLem and the Problem and the Problem with The Outlook"' Matson, Walking Alone and Marching Together, 4-10; Sharon A. Groch, "Oppositional Consciousness: Its Manifestations and Development-The Case of People with Disabilities," Sociological lnquir3 64 (Nov. 1994), 369-95. 

 

65 New York Times, June 5, 1936, p. 2; ibid, June 21, 1936, sec. 2, p. 1; ibid., June 22, 1936, p. 2; ibid , June 21, 1936, sec. 2, p. 1; ibid., June 22, 1936, p. 19; ibid., Aug. 25, 1936, p. 21; ibid, Sept. 13, 1936, sec. 2, p. 10; New York Herald Tribune, Sept. 13, 1936, p. 20; League of the Physically Handicapped to Hopkins, June 28, 1937, folder L, box 2164, Complaints 1935-42, Nyc, 69.3-69.3.1 (Records of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration), aura Central Files: State; David R. Niles to League of the Physically Handicapped, June 30, 1937, ibid New York limes, Aug. 15, 1937, p. 24; New York Herald Tribune, Aug. 15, 1937, p. 15; Washington Sunday Star, Aug. 15, 1937, p. B2; Washington Evening Star, Aug. 16, 1937, p. Al; New York Times, Aug. 17, 1937, p. 7; Daily Worker, national edition, Aug. 17, 1937, p. 3; Washington Evening Star, Aug. 18, 1937, p. B1; New York Times, Aug. 20, 1937, p. 8; Washington Post Aug. 22, 1937, p. 2. 

 

66 Haskell interview by Joseph, side 1. 

 

67 The phrase "sparkplug" is Anthony Badger's. Badger, New Deal, 38-41, 138-40, 288-89; Cohen, Making a New Deal, 261-67; Cooney, Balancing Act, 57; James R. Green, The World of the Worker. Labor in TwentiethCentury America (New York, 1980), 137; Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression (Chapel Hill, 1990), xi-xii, 92-108; Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes, The American Communist Movement: Storming Heaven Itself(New York, 1992), 81-83, 89; Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem during the Depression (Urbana, 1983), xvi, 140-48, 187-88, 194-95, 257-59, 279-81; Robert H. Zieger, American Workers, American Unions (Baltimore, 1994), 15-19; Flexer Bassoff and Bassoff interview, side 1; Blumberg, New Deal and the Unemployed, 90-95, 228-35; Harvey Klehr, The Heyday of American Communism: The Depression Decade (New York, 1984), 6, 82-86, 104-5, 292-303; Marc S. Miller, ed., Working Lives, the 

 

67 Southern Exposure: A History of Labor in the South (New York, 1974), 44-45. We have been unable to determine the precise relationship of any league member to any other political or labor group. During the league's November 1935 picketing of the New York WPA Port Authority headquarters, a writer for New Masses reported: "though the pickets aren't in the Party yet, they are getting great training." Brown, "March of the Cripples," 10. An inquiry into the Federal Bureau of Investigations central records system under the Freedom of Information Act yielded no record of the league or its leading members. J. Kevin O'Brien to Paul K. Longmore, Aug. 1, 1991 (in Longmore's possession). 

 

68 Matson, Walking Alone and Marching Together 33-34; Richard K. Scotch, >From Good Will to Civil Rights: Transforming Federal Disability Policy (Philadelphia, 1985), 35, 41, 141, 152-53; Shapiro, No Pity; 47; Shaw, Activist Handbook, 239, 246. 

 

69 Badger, New Deal 140; Klehr, Heyday of American Communism, 106; Haskell interview by Joseph, side 2; Flexer Bassoff and Bassoff interview, side 2; Lasoff Applebaum interview, side 2. 

 

70 Flexer Bassoff interview, side 1; Haskell interview by Joseph, side 2; Anspach, "From Stigma to Identity Politics," 765-73; Buchanan, "Deaf Students and Workers in the United States," 376-410, 415-16; Burch, "Biding the Time," 166-73; Jack Gannon, The Week the World Heard Gallaudet (Washington, 1989); Lane, Mask of Benevolence; Matson, WalkingAlone and Marching Together; Vaughn, Struggle of Blind People-for Self-Determination; Scotch, From Good Will to Civil Rights, 31-34, 55-56, 82-85, 111-16; Shapiro, No Pity, 10, 24-25, 52-53, 67-69, 105-41; Shaw, Activist Handbook, 235-50; National Council on Disability, Equality of Opportunity: The Making of the Americans with Disabilities Act (Washington, 1998). A 1986 survey of adults with disabilities documented the emergence of a younger generation that identified as a cross-disability minority. Louis Harris and Associates for the International Center for the Disabled, ICD Survey (New York, 1986), 112-15; Robert J. Funk, "Lou Harris Reached Out and Touched the Disabled Community," Mainstream, 11 (May 1986), 18. For a literary account of this new minority consciousness, see Jean Stewart, The Body Memory (New York, 1989), 249-52, 258, 262-63, 271-73. 

 

71 In the 1980s and 1990s, Florence Haskell belonged to Disabled in Action of New York (DIA) but was not an active member. Haskell interview by Longmore and Goldberger, side 1. Sylvia Flexer Bassoff was an advocate for transportation for elderly disabled persons. Flexer Bassoff interview, side 2. When leaders of DiA learned about the league in the late 1980s, they arranged interviews with Haskell and Flexer Bassoff. 

 

[Author Affiliation] 

 

Paul K. Longmore is professor of history at San Francisco State University. David Goldberger is a senior director at the Advisory Board Company, a health care research firm in Washington, D.C. The authors thank the World Institute on Disability, Oakland, California, and in particular Judy Heumann and Steven Brown, both former executives there, for a travel grant that enabled David Goldberger to do research in the National Archives. Drafts benefited greatly from the comments of Edward Berkowitz, Robert Cherny, William Issel, Mark Leff, Barbara Loomis, Lauri Umansky, two anonymous readers, the U.S. History Workshop at Stanford University, and the World Institute on Disability Staff Forum. Brooke Wirtschafter and Barbara Berglund did additional research in New York newspapers. Most important, we thank the members of the League of the Physically Handicapped who shared their recollections. In addition, Florence Haskell supplied newspaper clippings, photos, and referrals; Sylvia Flexer Bassoff provided clippings; and Frederica Goldsmith sent a photocopy of the "Thesis on Conditions of Physically Handicapped." We thank Dr. Samuel Anderson and Frieda Zames of Disabled in Action of New York for providing audiotapes of two oral history interviews. 

 

Readers may contact Longmore at longmore at sfsu.edu.