Disability Policy and Politics, Considering Consumer Influences

>From the web page
http://www.mswitzer.org/sem99/papers/longmore.html

Paper presented to 1999 Switzer Seminar 

Disability Policy and Politics, Considering Consumer Influences

                                By
                        Paul K. Longmore

The dominant ideology of disability during the modern era has
been - and continues to be - a medical paradigm. That medical
model defines disability as incapacitation to perform typically
expected social roles because of chronic medical pathology. It
presents disability as a social problem, but it makes deviant
individual bodies the site and source of that problem. This
formulation inevitably prescribes as the solution individual
medical or quasi-medical treatments to cure or correct deviant
bodies and deviant behavior. By locating the causes of alleged
social incapacity within "afflicted" individuals, the medical
model thereby reduces disability to a series of individual case
histories and largely excludes consideration of cultural,
social, and political factors in the construction of
"disability." This production of disability as a medicalized and
individualized social problem occurred largely during the late
19th and early 20th centuries as policymakers and health-care,
charity, social-service, and educational professionals
institutionalized the medical model in both public policy and
professional practice.

In contrast, sociopolitical models of disability, among other
criticisms, question the explanatory power of the medical model.
These alternative analytical approaches reject as simplistic the
medicalized perspective that physiological impairments in and of
themselves determine the social experience we call disability.
Instead, they see the disability experience as shaped by the
interaction between people with such impairments and
sociocultural environments, architectural/technological designs,
and - especially relevant for this seminar - public policies.
>From this perspective, disability is not an array of
pathological clinical entities situated in individual deviant
bodies. It is not an objective thing that is - most important
for policy purposes - readily measured and verified by medical
or quasi-medical methods. Disability is instead an elastic
social category. It is formed and reformed by public policy and
professional practice, and underlying them, by societal
arrangements and cultural values. Thus, disability is a series
of changeable, indeed unstable, culturally constructed
identities and roles. In addition and of central importance,
during the modern era people with a diverse assortment of
disabilities have encountered a standard set of stigmatizing
cultural values and social hazards. Those biases and dangers
have been reflected and reinforced in public policies. (Gliedman
and Roth; Hahn; Longmore(a); Longmore(b); Oliver; Roth).

My purpose is to examine some of the ways in which people with
disabilities have contested and endeavored to alter the public
policies and social values that have impacted their social
identities and social careers. I also want to explore the
interconnections among policies, values, and disabled and
nondisabled identities. And I want to suggest that there may
have been an implicit disability-based political tradition. I
will do this through a historical case study of a long-forgotten
group that called itself the League of the Physically
Handicapped.

In New York City in the early and mid-1930s, a number of
physically disabled young adults yearned for the self-dependence
and dignity supplied by employment. But as they sought work,
they encountered bias. Some employers required job applicants to
take physical exams unrelated to the tasks of those jobs.
Florence Haskell, who walked with crutches, recalled a job
interview 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 used crutches and wore
a leg brace. She "wanted to teach English, or be a librarian,"
but found she "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,
excelling at stenography and typing and on the adding machine.
"[I]n 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."

Rejected by private businesses, Flexer and other handicapped
people took jobs in charity-run sheltered workshops. "And
finally I got a job," she remembered, still indignant decades
later, "at the Brooklyn Bureau of Charities, who only hired
handicapped people. 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."

Disabled individuals who managed to find work might well obtain
only part-time or temporary jobs and at lower pay. Lou Razler
had mild cerebral palsy. After graduating from high school, he
spent a year at a business college and then five years vainly
searching for a permanent job. Workers with disabilities from
then until now have also complained that they faced wage
discrimination. Jack Isaacs had lost his left leg in an
industrial accident. In 1927, he worked as a linotypist. He said
he "turned out just as much work" as the men alongside him, but
got only $15 a week, while they were paid three times those
wages. Isaacs claimed his lower pay was because of his
disability. In the 1980's, the economists William Johnson and
James Lambrinos confirmed that late 20th century workers with
disabilities continued to experience wage discrimination.
(Johnson and Lambrinos).

Blocked by bias in private industry, these and other physically
handicapped young adults turned to New Deal work programs,
expecting to get work-relief jobs just like nonhandicapped
workers. The unprecedented crisis of the Great Depression
compelled many Americans to rethink their expectations of the
federal government's proper role in ensuring the general
welfare. Millions of working-class citizens concluded that the
national state must provide adequate welfare and work relief.
Many handicapped job-seekers too came to expect government
action on their behalf. Instead they found that the professedly
reformist WPA was designed to create jobs for "able-bodied"
unemployed persons, but categorized handicapped workers as
"unemployable." The latter would be relegated to local relief.
New York City's Emergency Relief Bureau had been offering jobs
with the city to some home-relief recipients. But in the spring
of 1935, adhering to WPA policy, the ERB began automatically
rejecting handicapped persons for municipal work-relief jobs.
When a group of young adults who frequented a recreation center
for handicapped people in Manhattan discovered that their
government would willingly aid unemployed "able-bodied"
Americans but classified out-of-work handicapped persons as
unemployable, they decided to take action.

On Wednesday, May 29, 1935, six, physically disabled young
adults from the rec center group entered ERB headquarters and
demanded to see Director Oswald W. Knauth. One was Florence
Haskell, who had been "disqualified" for a secretarial job
because of her disability. Told that Mr. Knauth would be
unavailable until the following week, the six sat down and said
they would stay there until Knauth met with them or, vowed their
leader Hyman Abramowitz, "hell freezes over." The next day a
large crowd gathered to support them and to demand jobs for
themselves. The turmoil in the street alerted newspaper
reporters to the disabled protestors upstairs. Abramowitz
charged the ERB with discriminating against handicapped persons
in assigning relief jobs. The "strike" would continue for
another eight days, drawing extensive coverage in New York's
newspapers and even the Washington Post.

By Saturday, the fourth day of the sit-in, the number of
nondisabled demonstrators on the street had dropped
dramatically, but nine physically disabled picketers walked the
line. Lou Razler, the former business college student, read
about the protest in the Daily News. "As soon as I read about it
I went down," he recalled. "I joined the line. I figured, 'I got
nothing to lose.'" That evening, the picketers strategized and
called for "mass support and mass demonstrations."

On Monday, June 3rd, day six, Knauth finally met with the
strikers. Abramowitz demanded fifty jobs immediately for
"League" members and ten more each week thereafter. They must
get wages of at least $27 a week if they were married, $21 if
single. And disabled workers must be integrated with nondisabled
workers, not placed in special segregated projects. Knauth
rebuffed these demands but said he would "investigate." "That's
not a good enough answer," Abramowitz exclaimed. "We want jobs
and we're going to get them." We are "not just as any other
group. We are all handicapped and are being discriminated
against." But Knauth responded that the city owed unemployed
disabled people nothing beyond home relief. "This is not an
organization to give work to those who are permanently
unemployable," he said. Then he advised contradictorily: if they
wanted jobs they should go to private businesses. Abramowitz
ended the confrontation by blasting those who offered
handicapped people charity instead of work.

For another three days, Abramowitz and two other protestors
continued to occupy the ERB office. And each day, picketers on
the sidewalk, most of them handicapped, supported them. By
Thursday, June 6th, the ninth day, the "shouting and singing on
the sidewalk" had become unbearable to the office building's
occupants, so Knauth had the police called in. They arrested
eleven protesters, eight of them handicapped. One was Jack
Isaacs, the amputee ex-linotypist. ERB officials persuaded the
strikers upstairs to end the sit-in, but later that day "about
twenty-five crippled protesters and 300 sympathizers"
demonstrated at 54th Street and Eighth Avenue and then at the
WMCA radio station on Broadway.

On Friday evening, June 7th, the leaders met once more with
Knauth. This time Knauth said he could not promise jobs right
away, but hoped additional WPA funds would go for that purpose.
On Saturday, ten to twelve handicapped picketers and perhaps
fifty nonhandicapped supporters circled in City Hall Plaza.
Unsuccessfully demanding an interview with Mayor LaGuardia, they
moved on to Foley Square, heard some speeches, and went on their
way. Thus ended the first actions of the League of the
Physically Handicapped. For eleven days, they had seized New
York's attention and compelled relief officials to deal with
them.

The budding activists formally organized themselves and began to
recruit members among their acquaintances. "Pauline Portugalo,"
one of the original six "strikers," "came to me at the Brooklyn
Bureau of Charities," recalled Sylvia Flexer 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.'"

Half-a-year later in November 1935, the League evidenced growing
political shrewdness as it set up a picket line in front of the
newly created New York City WPA. Jack Isaacs directed this
better-planned protest. Their flyer declared: "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." League members
had learned to use their personal stories to explain the issues
to reporters: "The Physically Handicapped...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." Three weeks of picketing
prodded the local WPA to hire approximately forty members.

That success spurred the activists to agitate aboout local and
federal policies regarding all physically handicapped
job-seekers. By January 1936, they were again marching in front
of New York City's WPA. This new action induced the New York WPA
in April to promise still more jobs. During the next year, it
would hire some 1500 handicapped New Yorkers. But local WPA
officials advised that only Washington could address the
League's concerns about the policy categorizing workers with
disabilities as "unemployable." In an audacious series of moves
in late April and early May 1936, League leaders wrote and
telegraphed WPA chief Harry Hopkins and President Roosevelt and
maneuvered themselves into an apointment at WPA headquarters.

And so on Friday evening, May 8, 1936, thirty-five delegates,
(fourteen women and twenty-one men), rode all night on a
borrowed flatbed truck to the nation's capital. At WPA
headquarters, Labor Relations Director Nels Anderson told them
not only that Hopkins was away, but that the WPA offered work
relief only for "employables." New York City's local relief
would have to address their problems, he said. The delegates
exploded. Sylvia Flexer, 21 years old and the League's
president, announced: "We are going to stay here until Mr.
Hopkins does see us. Until then nothing can make us leave." The
next day she said that League members were "sick of the
humiliation of poor jobs at best [and] often no work at all."
They wanted "not sympathy - but a concrete plan to end
discrimination...on W.P.A. projects[.]" Harry Friedman, the
League's press spokesman, demanded that the WPA set nationwide
quotas for hiring workers with disabilities. The protesters
occupied the offices that entire weekend. At last on Monday
morning, Hopkins met with five leaders. They demanded 5,000 WPA
jobs for handicapped workers in New York, "a permanent relief
program for the physically handicapped[,] and a Nation-wide
census of the physically handicapped" paid for by the WPA but
managed by the League. Hopkins rejected the charge that the WPA
discriminated against people with disabilities. He did not
believe there were 5,000 employable handicapped people in New
York. But if they came back with proof, "a thesis...show[ing]
such discrimination," he promised to "correct those conditions
at once." As Harry Friedman became more confrontational, Hopkins
abruptly walked out. The delegates left for home, pledging to
return with a "thesis."

As League leaders prepared that thesis, they struggled to
safeguard the hard-won WPA jobs in New York and to open more. In
September 1936, the local WPA director promised to set aside a
minimum of 7 per cent of all future WPA jobs for workers with
disabilities. But that achievement was reversed in Spring 1937
when WPA offices nationwide began massive lay-offs. In New York
City, more than 600 handicapped WPA employees lost their jobs.
In late June, League leaders telegraphed Harry Hopkins, warning
of "drastic actions unless all cuts [were] stopped and dismissed
persons reinstated[.]" But the firings continued. So in
mid-August, another League delegation went to Washington, hoping
to met with Hopkins or Roosevelt, They did see Hopkins, issuing
to him both their earlier demands and some new ones. They now
wanted the WPA to pledge to hire all handicapped workers. This
lobbying effort failed.

And it seems that in about another year, the League of the
Physically Handicapped itself folded. In the end, the League
failed to change federal policies that impacted citizens with
disabilities, but it did have some success in opening public
sector jobs to workers with disabilities. Most of the core
leadership ultimately pursued civil-service careers.

The historical significance of the League of the Physically
Handicapped stems from its perspective on disability and
disability policy and from comparing the League and its
perspective with other disability-based political movements and
with the views of poicymakers and professionals. Who were the
members of the League? Why did they become political activists
about disability?

Most of the individuals who formed the League had low-spinal
polio in childhood. As a result, many of them wore leg braces
and used crutches or canes. A few members had cerebral palsy,
tuberculosis, or heart conditions. At least two were amputees
due to injuries. No members used wheelchairs or were deaf or
blind. More important than their similar physical conditions,
they shared similar backgrounds and experiences that engendered
a sense of solidarity among them. Most came from working-class,
Jewish, southern or eastern European, immigrant families. The
parents of some had urged them to pursue education and
employment. With high-school diplomas and in some cases
additional vocational or college study, they were better
educated than most physically handicapped people. In addition,
some League activists had met in elementary school
special-education classes. After high school, they continued and
enlarged their network of disabled friends through "basement
clubs" organized by handicapped young people and at summer camps
and recreation centers run by social-service agencies for
handicapped people. League members' similar disabilities,
similar backgrounds, and shared school and post-secondary
experiences promoted a sense of commonality. This nascent group
identity in turn provided the basis for development of an
oppositional political consciousness. Socializing with disabled
friends gave them opportunities to talk about encounters with
job discrimination, to verbalize and legitimize their resentment
about employers' biases and biased government policies, and to
discuss how they might oppose these practices and policies.

This progression of a social network of disabled people into a
political organization illustrates a pattern in 19th- and
20th-century U.S. disability history. Graduates of the deaf and
blind schools established alumni associations and social clubs
so that they could continue their school friendships and offer
mutual support. Over the years, these fellowships extended their
purposes to address economic and political issues. Deaf
associations lobbied for state deaf vocational bureaus and
fought against oralism, civil-service discrimination, denial of
driver's licenses, and New Deal policies about "unemployables."
Blind organizations condemned means-tested poor relief and
sheltered workshops and lobbied for guide-dog and white-cane
laws. All of these groups contested professionals' power. (Van
Cleve and Crouch; Matson). Thus, schools and other facilities,
usually created by nondisabled benefactors, inadvertently
enabled people with various disabilities to transcend their
natural geographical dispersion and lack of generational
continuity and to construct informal social networks and formal
self-directed organizations. Those formations then served as
sites for the fashioning of oppositional consciousness and
collective resistance to the dominant ideology of disability.

The League's challenge to that ideology was also encouraged by
the general activism spurred by the Depression crisis and by the
leftist and labor backgrounds of the League's key leaders. In
copying and adapting the arguments and strategies of labor and
leftist activists, the League typifies another pattern that has
appeared in disability-based political movements. League members
welcomed support from Communist, Socialist, and other radical
allies. But like many of their working-class white and black
contemporaries, League members followed radical leaders, not in
order to transform society, but pragmatically and only until
they gained their personal objectives: the economic security,
social validity, and personal control of their destinies they
believed jobs would ensure. Likewise, during the 1940s Jacobus
ten Broek, first President of the National Federation of the
Blind, drew parallels between the organized blind movement and
the labor movement and sought alliances with unions. Late in the
20th century, activists in various disability groups often
learned advocacy by participating in the black civil-rights,
feminist, antiwar, and labor movements. All disability movements
have borrowed and adapted to their own situation the analyses
and tactics of contemporaneous social-justice movements. But
whatever the sources of influence, disability movements have
typically espoused liberal reformist, rather than radical
transformative, political agendas. (Matson; Scotch)

Thus, at various moments in the modern era, drawing upon current
political models, various disability groups came to view their
condition as, not primarily medical, but more significantly,
social and political, a minority status that necessitated
collective political action to resist discrimination. The
details of Sylvia Flexer Bassoff's description of the League's
beginnings were unique, but its origins paralleled those of
other disability-based political movements. "What started it,"
she said, "was [finding] out that jobs were available, that the
government was handing out jobs....[E]verybody was getting jobs:
newspaper people, actresses, actors, painters, and only
handicapped people weren't worthy of jobs...without giving us a
chance." "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." Repudiating the view of
disability as individual medical pathology, vocational
incapacity, and social invalidity, these disabled young adults -
and other groups of people with disabilities at other times in
other places - engaged in activism that asserted it was instead
a minority status and a political issue.

The League's challenge to the dominant ideology of disability
points to another objective of all disability-based political
movements: they have addresed not only disability issues, such
as job discrimination, but also disability identities. New
York's City officials and newspapers purveyed common though
contradictory stereotypes about "cripples." At times displaying
notable hostility, they depicted the activists as pathetically
helpless and manipulated by Communists, as manipulative, or as
dangerously out of control. Meanwhile, the protestors' supposed
supporters on the Left exploited stereotyped views of the
helplessness, vulnerability, and pathetic condition of
"cripples." Public officials and the mainstream press used the
cripple stereotype to discredit disabled activism; the Daily
Worker used it to discredit capitalism. The mainstream media
referred to them as "cripples" and sometimes as "paralytics" or
"invalids," while the Daily Worker sometimes called them
"paralysis victims" or "helpless crippled people." League
leaders spurned all of those labels as stigmatizing and
consistently called themselves "handicapped." The differences in
terminology represented underlying competing views of disability
identity.

League activism in itself challenged the reigning
identity-defining stereotypes. Militant tactics, along with
slogans such as "We Don't Want Tin Cups. We Want Jobs,"
demanded, not just employment, but social dignity. League
members' boldness is even more noteworthy given that era's
opinion of "cripples." While the President of the United States
thought it necessary to hide or minimize his disability, League
members resisted social prejudice by engaging in public
protests. "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. "We were all terribly
embarrassed...[but] we wanted jobs more than we were
intimidated....It wasn't done easily." "You have to understand,"
explained another member, "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. But
after that experience, they decided, 'Let them look,' you know,
'Look back, stare back at them.'...I think it not only gave us
jobs, but it gave us dignity, and a sense of, 'We are people
too.'" The League's public actions thus foreshadowed later
disability movements by joining the issue politics of protesting
job discrimination with an implicit identity politics of
self-redefinition. (Anspach)

But the League's view of the issues and of disability identity
focused narrowly. They declared solidarity only with certain
kinds of physically handicapped people. They never allied with
the national and state Deaf associations that were also battling
WPA discrimination. This pattern of organizing those with
particular disabilities and keeping public distance from other
disability groups has appeared in many disability-specific
political associations, such as the National Association of the
Deaf, the National Federation of the Blind, and various activist
organizations of "psychiatric survivors." A new political
pattern appeared in the late 20th century as cross-disability
coalitions emerged to promote universalistic disability-rights
provisions such as Section 504, the Individuals with
Disabilities Education Act, and the Americans with Disabilities
Act. These confederated efforts claimed that all people with
disabilities face institutionalized discrimination rooted in a
common set of social prejudices and therefore should act in
political solidarity. By the mid-1980s, the Harris poll could
document a cross-disability minority-group consciousness
emerging among a younger generation of adults. (Harris) This
new, nascently politicized, disability constituency was much
more diverse than those represented in the League and other
disability-specific groups. Thus it advocated for a much wider
range of issues, such as universal accessibility. Meanwhile,
some health charities, such as the National Easter Seal Society,
the United Cerebral Palsy Associations, and the American
Diabetes Association, which were founded to support medical
research and treatment, took on political advocacy roles to
ensure protection of their constituents' civil rights. All of
these developments evidenced a shift away from a purely medical
model of disability to its increasing politicization within a
minority model.

The connection among identity, issues, and ideologies of
disability is further illuminated by comparing League members
with President Roosevelt. In contrast to their social network,
FDR's associations with a great many disabled people occurred
within the contexts of medical rehabilitation and charity
fundraising. His different experience fostered a different
identity and a different ideology of disability. He saw
disability as personal affliction and private tragedy best
addressed by individual striving to overcome this adversity.
Thereby he willingly became the literal embodiment of the
emerging medical-vocational rehabilitation system. Thus, while
the League explained the "Conditions" of physically handicapped
Americans in institutional and political terms, Roosevelt, along
with policy and rehabilitation professionals, explained them in
individual and medical pathological terms.

The diverging disability politics of FDR and the League is
further revealed by comparison with the presence in his
administration of two networks of black and female appointees.
The "Black Cabinet" or "Black Brains Trust," composed of an
unprecedented number of African-American administrators,
advocated for the interests of the constituency it both
represented and helped to generate and legitimate. Meanwhile,
Eleanor Roosevelt led the New Deal's network of female reformers
which defined women's and children's issues as its special
domain. The efforts of both networks opened administrative
positions in work-relief programs to black and female appointees
and produced special WPA outreach projects targeting unemployed
African-Americans and women. In contrast, although a physically
disabled man headed the New Deal and other physically disabled
individuals held executive positions in the WPA, no network of
politicized disabled advocates emerged. In Depression-era
America, the League's political definition of disability was not
widely shared, even among people with disabilities, or at least
among those from higher-status backgrounds. No network of
disabled advocates would form within any administration until
the Bush and Clinton presidencies half a century later. They
would grow out of a nationally organized disability rights
movement and an emergent disability community operating from a
politicized ideology of disability.

What was the League's ideology? How did it view disability
policies? The League's "Thesis on Conditions of Physically
Handicapped" drew on League members' own experience to offer a
broad-ranging analysis of handicapped persons' "struggle for
social and economic security." It attributed the economic
disadvantages endured by physically handicapped people, not to
physical impairments, but to discrimination in the private and
public job markets, to unjust public policies, and to haphazard
and unfair rehabilitation and relief programs. It implicitly
rejected the premises of modern policymaking from a distinctive
handicapped perspective.

Their disabilities "automatically closed...many fields of manual
labor" to handicapped job-seekers, but, argued the "Thesis,"
"unjust restrictions" and "unfounded prejudices" shut
handicapped people out of private-sector jobs in which "physical
qualifications were irrelevant." "[T]he 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." This argument foreshadowed the ADA's
provision prohibiting denial of employment if a disabled person
could perform the "essential functions" of a job. The "Thesis"
also argued that the federal hiring preference given to
veterans, including disabled veterans, provided "ample precedent
for giving [disabled civilians] some added consideration" in
civil-service hiring. But instead, government work-relief
policies and projects practiced bias by indiscriminately
classifying all handicapped individuals as "unemployable."

The "Thesis" next criticized both public and private vocational
rehabilitation as "not only inadequate but also detrimental in
that it creates the illusion that something constructive is
being accomplished." Due to underfunding, New York State's
Rehabilitation Bureau "had to turn thousands away," could
provide "very limited training" to "those few it did reach," and
during that training "failed" to give them enough assistance for
"daily necessities." Meanwhile, the State's Employment Agency
placed disabled workers in temporary jobs paying "miserably low
wages" and even went "so far as to send [them] out...as
strike-breakers."

The League also condemned sheltered workshops, singling out
three: the Brooklyn Bureau of Charities, where Sylvia Flexer had
worked; the Altro Workshop, "an institution created for the
rehabilitation of tuberculers" and probably the "workshop for
the TB" in which an unidentified League member had felt "very
much exploited"; and the Institute for Crippled and Disabled,
established in 1917 as a model of vocational rehabilitation.
Because the workshops paid only three to five dollars a week,
the "Thesis" accused them of "shameful exploitation" "under the
guise of social service." The League thus contested
rehabilitation professionals' opinions about sheltered workshop
wages. The National Industrial Recovery Act's "Substandard
Clause" permitted the workshops to pay employees less than the
minimum wage. Leading charity and rehabilitation professionals
endorsed that exemption. The League, the organized blind
movement, and the Deaf associations all condemned it. League
members considered professionals self-serving. Sylvia Flexer
Bassoff recalled that the day after 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" called for a survey to "gather the necessary
information upon which to outline a permanent program" of work
relief and rehabilitation. Because personal encounters with the
existing system had made League members distrustful of
social-service agencies and professionals, that survey should
employ handicapped persons. Distrust of policymakers and service
providers and the demand for a voice in policymaking and program
administration has appeared in all disability-rights movements
and has been expressed in the late-20th century declaration,
"Nothing about us without us."

Though the League advocated employment, its "Thesis" supported
"home relief." In fact, it wanted home relief expanded.
Prevented from taking "their proper place in society to support
themselves," many handicapped people were forced to rely on
their families, private charities, or home relief. The "Thesis"
thus ascribed economic dependency to injustice rather than
impairment. Yet the home-relief allowance, scanty for
able-bodied recipients, was "doubly insufficient" for
handicapped persons who needed supplementary aid for "mechanical
appliances and medical care." And many were refused even "this
mere pittance" because of strict eligibility rules. Hundreds
denied home relief had to enter "municipal lodging houses, while
vast numbers of others [were] reduced to vagrancy...and sink to
the level of beggars." "[S]omething [must] be done," demanded
the "Thesis," "to eliminate the necessity of any handicapped
individual being forced to resort to begging."

In conclusion, the League proclaimed that its recommendations
were "the very minimum necessary to alleviate the present grave
situation of the handicapped." Then it added sardonically:
"Certainly the situation must be grave if [it has] finally made
the handicapped articulate." The League had implicitly presented
a repudiation of the "disability category" in modern public
policy.

Deborah Stone has elegantly explained the creation of that
category. Its rigorous requirements defined "disability" as an
absolute inability to engage in productive labor. The aim was to
limit access to the "need based" system, to keep workers in the
"work based" system, and to disguise the true levels of
unemployment. Yet Stone and others have described that category
as offering a "privileged" position by "excusing" disabled
people from having to work and giving them a "ticket" out of the
labor force. (Stone; Berkowitz) They overlook that the policy
increasingly restricted people with disabilities from the labor
market and society. The disability category's formulators not
only established medical criteria of disability, they also
fashioned ceremonies of social degradation for persons seeking
legitimation of their "need." They aimed to make poor relief the
least desirable option and to ensure that only the "truly needy"
would submit to the humiliation and stigma of qualifying for
such aid. "Worthiness" of poor relief marked a disabled person
as "unworthy" of social respect. The modern state used the
disability category to regulate poor and laboring people, but
did so by declaring "the disabled" socially invalid. More than a
medical and vocational determination, it was a verdict of social
delegitimation that was made both a social identity and a
permanent social role.

These developments coincided with intensifying prejudice against
disabled people in the late-19th and early-20th centuries.
People with a wide range of disabilities were not only defined
as incapable of productive labor, but as incompetent to manage
their own social careers and even as socially dangerous. Many
came under the permanent supervision of professional experts.
Some were permanently sequestered in institutions. Thus, what in
one respect began as an attempt to control able-bodied laborers
by limiting access to social welfare benefits was also, or at
least became, the creation of a large, stigmatized and
segregated social grouping held in a permanent state of
clientage. In terms of social values, this category of persons
came to define the limits of legitimate need on the one hand and
of social normality on the other. They also served the
ideological and economic interests of a range of professional
groups in the modern welfare state. Development of the
disability category was thus part of a much broader redefinition
of the social roles and identities of people with disabilities.

At one level, public policies define who are socially legitimate
citizens. The WPA and the Social Security Act were a two-pronged
strategy that not only established mechanisms to determine
eligibility for two types of public aid, work-relief and
welfare, but also to define two types of Americans, valid and
invalid. In the Depression era, Americans across the political
spectrum expressed alarm about the indignity of relief and the
morally destructive effects of dependency on it. FDR declared,
"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." New
Dealers feared that men long on relief might "crack up." So
government work programs not only offered economic security, but
sought to restore unemployed men's self-esteem, reputations as
family providers, and sense of control over their destinies. But
this concern for "self-respect" through work and the worry about
"moral disintegration" because of "dependency" on relief only
pertained to "employables." The work programs sought to restore
the identities of young and middle-aged, white "able-bodied"
men, not only by giving them jobs, but also by contrasting them
with "unemployables," "natural dependents," who properly
belonged on local relief. As a result, the WPA in many states
refused to hire handicapped workers. The League protested the
WPA practice and that New York City's Emergency Works Program
classified handicapped people "indiscriminately as
'unemployables'."

But the attempted dichotomization of "able-bodied" employables
and disabled unemployables was undercut by a contradiction in
New Deal policy. FDR's Executive Order No. 7046 creating the WPA
instructed 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." But, said the next sentence, "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."

The League and Deaf leaders wielded that executive order to
force open WPA jobs. The League's "Thesis" referred to it as "a
ruling forbidding discrimination on account of physical
disability." Deaf associations cited it to oppose WPA
discrimination against Deaf workers. Though these groups opposed
segregated employment, Handicapped and Deaf activism prompted
the WPA in some localities to create special projects or special
jobs on regular projects and to establish quotas on some
projects. Meanwhile, many individuals with disabilities somehow
evaded WPA policies and obtained WPA jobs. Studies of the WPA
discovered that in various localities anywhere from an eighth to
a third of WPA applicants were rejected due to disabilities, but
that more than one-fifth of all WPA workers had disabilities.
Deaf, physically handicapped, and blind individuals around the
U.S. wormed their way into jobs on the WPA and other New Deal
work programs.

But WPA officials believed that giving jobs to "unemployables"
undermined the work program, the local wage structure, and the
stability of the local job market. They thought that, although
workers with disabilities might be able to do their WPA jobs
satisfactorily, they could never move along to private indusry
jobs because they would be unable to meet employers' stricter
hiring examinations and employment practices. These were the
very practices League members had condemned as disability-based
discrimination. They had hoped that WPA employment would enable
them to prove their capabilities to private employers. But
instead, the New Dealers failed to question the reasonableness
or fairness of those practices. They assumed that most people
with disabilities were inherently unsuited for private
employment and therefore were unsuitable for temporary
transitional employment on government work programs. As a
result, at times when WPA executives found it necessary to
economize by eliminating jobs, handicapped workers were among
the first to go. The intent to make the WPA a "real work,"
rather than a relief or rehabilitation, program, made hiring
"unemployables" undesirable. The WPA's inconsistent policies and
practices and FDR's executive order reflected the confusion in
federal disability policies regarding the employability of
disabled persons versus their necessary relegation to home
relief.

In the long run, the federal disability insurance/welfare system
that grew out of the New Deal institutionalized the
dichotomization of "able" versus disabled and the concept of
"unemployability." It implicitly reappeared in the definition of
disability later fashioned by the Social Security
Administration: an inability to engage in gainful activity. That
definition forced millions of people with disabilities out of
the job market and permanently onto welfare. And disability
activists continued to criticize it. In the 1940s, the new
National Federation of the Blind opposed such policies. In the
1970s and up to the present, disabled activists fought what had
come euphemistically to be called "work disincentives." They did
not know that the League of the Physically Handicapped had
launched this struggle when it protested a policy it had seen as
economically and socially marginalizing people with
disabilities. Disagreeing with policymakers and recent students
of policy, they did not think that policies such as the WPA
categorization of them as "unemployable" charitably excused them
from work. They believed such policies deliberately excluded
them from the job market and society, intentionally stigmatizing
and segregating them by codifying job discrimination into law.

The surprisingly similar views of disabled activists about
social welfare policies suggest a new approach to the study of
policy. Has an implicit tradition of disability politics about
policy existed without our recognizing it? Let me note one
thread of that possible tradition. Throughout the history of
disabled activism, advocates have simultaneously called for both
equal rights and exceptional treatment. The League demanded an
end to discrimination, but also job quotas and adequate home
relief. Richard Scotch and Ed Berkowitz report a similar stance
by the organized blind. In 1949 an NFB witness testified to a
Congressional committee in behalf of both civil rights and Aid
to the Blind. He argued that blindness incurred significant
expenses and limitations. Therefore it necessitated societal
aid. But as a social condition it evoked discrimination. The
real handicap of blindness, "far surpassing its physical
limitations," he declared, quoting Jacobus ten Broek's "Bill of
Rights for the Blind," was "exclusion from the main channels of
social and economic activity." So blind people needed protection
from discrimination. (Scotch and Berkowitz) Late-20th century
disability rights advocates advocated legal protection from
discrimination and introduced two new concepts into American
civil-rights theory, equal access and reasonable accommodations.
In addition, they opposed work and marriage "disincentives" and
called for publicly funded health insurance and personal
assistance services for employed people with significant
disabilities. Disability-based political movements seem always
to have advocated for both equal treatment and differential
treatment.

But their agendas have conflicted with both the medical model of
disability and the dominant ideology of equality. The
medicalized view has regarded accommodations such as
architectural modifications, adaptive devices, and assistive
services as special benefits charitably provided to
fundamentally dependent individuals in lieu of the preferred
objective, their restoration to some semblance of normality. But
the disability-rights tradition has viewed these provisions as
different modes of functioning, not signs of inferiority. The
reigning civil-rights theory has allowed differential treatment
of minorities as a temporary measure to facilitate eventual
parity. But the disability-rights tradition has implicitly
claimed the legitimacy of permanent differential treatment
because disabled persons require such accommodations to
participate in the economy and society on an equal or equivalent
basis.

Critics have complained that disabled people could not have it
both ways. They could not legitimately claim equal opportunity
and equal social standing while demanding "special" privileges.
To the critics, equality means identical arrangements and
treatment. From this dominant perspective, in American society
one cannot be equal and different. But within the
disability-rights tradition, there is no contradiction. It is
possible in America, that tradition has implicitly proclaimed,
to be equal and to require aid and accommodations, to be equal
and different. Indeed, for Americans with disabilities, any
other approach to equality seemed impossible. Disabled political
values were built out of the daily realities of the disability
experience. To ensure equal opportunity, disabled activists have
declared, civil rights protections, equal access, reasonable
accommodations, and appropriate support services must be
guaranteed as rights. This disabled perspective suggests the
need to move beyond the traditional framing of policy options as
employment versus income maintenance or welfare versus
rehabilitation versus civil rights. That dichotomization (or
trichotomization) is contradicted by the realities of the
disability experience and contested by the disability-rights
tradition. And it all again shows the importance of disabled
voices in policymaking and program development.

References

Anspach, R. (1979). From Stigma to Identity Politics: Political
Activism Among the Physically Disabled and Former Mental
Patients. Social Science and Medicine, 13: 765-73.

Berkowitz, E.D. (1987). Disabled Policy: America's Programs for
the Handicapped. (New York).

Gliedman, J., & Roth, W. (1982). The Unexpected Minority,
Handicapped Children in America. (New York).

Hahn, H. (1985). Disability Policy and the Problem of
Discrimination. American Behavioral Scientist, 8: 293-318.

Harris, Louis, and Associates, for the International Center for
the Disabled. (1986). ICD Survey. (New York).

Johnson, W.G. & Lambrinos, J. (1985). Wage Discrimination
Against Handicapped Men and Women. Journal of Human Resources,
20: 264-77.

Longmore(a), P.K. (1985). The Life of Randolph Bourne and the
Need for a History of Disabled People. Reviews in American
History, 13: 581-7.

Longmore(b), P.K. (1987). Uncovering the Hidden History of
Disabled People. Reviews in American History, 15: 355-64.

Matson, F. (1990). Walking Alone and Marching Together: A
History of the Organized Blind Movement in the United States,
1940-1990. (Baltimore).

Oliver, m. (1989). The Politics of Disablement. (New York).

Roth, W. (1983). Handicap as a Social Construct. Society, 20:
56-61.

Scotch, R.K. (1985). From Good Will to Civil Rights:
Transforming Federal Disability Policy. (Philadelphia).

Scotch, R.K. & Berkowitz, E.D. (1990). One Comprehensive System?
A Historical Perspective on Federal Disability Policy. Journal
of Disability Policy Studies, 1: 13-19.

Stone, D. (1986). The Disabled State. (Philadelphia).

Van Cleve, J.V. (Ed.). (1993). Deaf History Unveiled:
Interpretations From the New Scholarship. (Washington, D.C.).

Van Cleve, J.V., & Crouch, B. (1989). A Place of Their Own:
Creating the Deaf Community in America. (Washington, D.C.).

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