Out of the Horrors of War: Disability Politics in World War II America by Audra Jennings (review)

Most Americans probably first became aware of disability as a political issue in the 1980s with the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Others who follow the news more closely or who take a particular interest in the subject might have first noticed disability activism in the late 1970s during the nationwide protests demanding enforcement of the federal Rehabilitation Act of 1974. In recent years, as historians have begun to explore disability as a category of analysis and disabled people as a minority group, an earlier history of agitation for disability rights is gradually coming to light.

Most earlier activism was carried out by groups organized around specific disabilities, such as the National Association of the Deaf and the National Federation of the Blind, or veterans' organizations such as Disabled American Veterans. The American Federation of the Physically Handicapped (AFPH), founded during World War II, was different. The problems it addressed were not narrowly confined to specific issues—sign language in the schools, white cane laws, rehabilitation programs—but rather to the pervasive discrimination experienced by the physically disabled (as is evident in its name, the group's vision did not extend to people with cognitive or psychiatric disabilities). The AFPH organized not only across lines of disability, but also those of race, class, and gender. The solutions they advocated were similarly wide-ranging—accessibility standards, rehabilitation programs, financial supports, legal requirements to hire disabled workers, a federal agency to oversee national disability policy—and were framed not as requests for assistance, but demands for rights of citizenship.

Audra Jennings's superb new book, Out of the Horrors of War, recovers in fascinating detail the story of how the AFPH, led by its mercurial founder, Paul Strachan, emerged as an influential voice for disabled Americans in the postwar era, laying the foundation for an explosion of activism in the 1970s. World War II created both hardships and opportunities for disabled Americans. Gas rationing had a greater impact on people whose mobility impairments, in a time of inaccessible mass transit, made them especially dependent on the automobile. Materials for assistive devices were diverted to the war effort, as were many of the people who had been care providers. At the same time, war inexorably brought disability issues into public and governmental consciousness. Workforce shortages made maximum utilization of all available workers imperative, while at the same time a massive speedup of industrial production was producing disabilities at an unprecedented rate. A universal draft accompanied by the medical examination of millions of recruits raised awareness of the prevalence of disability, while an ever growing stream of veterans were returning from war with bodies that no longer appeared or functioned as they once had.

With sixty chapters nationwide and a presence in every state by war's end, the AFPH rode the wave of war-related disability consciousness to a position of influence that lasted well into the post-war era. Of the organization's varied demands, the one that achieved the greatest success was that most clearly aligned with national security and productivity: the expansion and improvement of rehabilitation services. As Jennings argues, this was in some ways a pyrrhic victory for the AFPH. On the one hand, the services were much needed, and the core message of the rehabilitation movement was explicitly that disabled people belonged in the workforce and in public. That was invaluable. On the other hand, it served to "further mark people with disabilities as others" (51) and reinforced the authority that medical professionals increasingly claimed over the meaning and management of disability.

Other AFPH accomplishments, such as National Employ the Physically Handicapped Week, though effective by some measures, fell far short of its aspirations for radical change. By the late 1950s, after a series of bad decisions and damaging fights with organized labor—which...