Pioneers in the fight for disability rights: The League of the Physically Handicapped

This article was originally published in ISR #90.



IT IS commonly held that the inception of the modern US disability rights movement occurred amidst the social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. Specifically, two major developments figure prominently in this narrative.

The first is the rise of the Independent Living Movement in Berkeley, California. This movement was born of the efforts of a group of disabled University of California students. Politicized by the civil rights struggles of the period, they became active on their Berkeley campus and later established the first independent living center in the United States in 1971. The aim of the center, of which hundreds of others would soon spring up across the country, was to create a space where disabled people could exercise control over all aspects of their lives—professional, medical, social, civic—rather than remain marginalized by a paternalistic society constructed around their exclusion.

The second major landmark of the new disability rights movement was the formation of the group, Disabled In Action (DIA) in New York City, in 1970. Like the independent living centers, DIA sought autonomy for disabled people, but was more explicitly political and organized confrontational protests against discriminatory laws, attitudes, and institutions.

Out of and alongside these two organizations flowed countless springs of disability rights awareness, activism, and organization. This all played a fundamental role in changing the way that society—and most importantly, disabled people themselves—viewed the question of disability. This transformation is best expressed in the articulation of what has come to be known as the social model of disability. In sum, this model explains disability oppression as a phenomenon which limits the self-determination and life opportunities of people with impairments, and which arises primarily from social and political—rather than medical or personal—factors.

In other words, it is not the existence of a physical or mental impairment itself which diminishes one’s life, but rather the systemic unemployment, poverty, discrimination, segregation, etc., imposed upon people with impairments by an inaccessible and unaccommodating society. As Judy Heumann, founder of DIA, put it, “Disability only becomes a tragedy for me when society fails to provide the things we need to lead our lives—job opportunities or barrier-free buildings, for example. It is not a tragedy to me that I’m living in a wheelchair.”¹

The disability rights movement of today can trace its immediate lineage—directly or indirectly—to these 1960s-era progenitors. Yet, it is possible to look even further back in US history to the Depression era of the 1930s, to see the very first emergence of a self-conscious movement for disability rights, organized by disabled people themselves, and promoting a view which closely foreshadows that of the social model.

It goes without saying that the Great Depression that began in 1929 had a devastating impact on the lives of all American workers, with official unemployment rates skyrocketing to 25 percent. But for disabled people the economic crisis hit even harder. One study found that 44 percent of deaf workers who had been employed prior to the crash had lost their jobs by 1935. The overall unemployment rate for disabled people was probably upwards of 80 percent, translating into crushing levels of poverty.²

Finding employment had been extremely difficult for disabled workers even in times of economic prosperity. Industrial capitalism had come to develop a tendency to discard all those whose labor was deemed insufficiently productive or too costly in relation to the amount of profit they could create for an employer.

The years leading up to and during the Great Depression saw a veritable explosion in the popularity of eugenicist ideas among the political, medical, and economic elite of the United States. These ideas posited all disabled people as so much worthless refuse to be cast aside in the “survival of the fittest” struggle that was free-market capitalism. As a consequence, millions of disabled people were subjected to forced institutionalization, sterilization, and/or death at the hands of both private and public officials.

Yet for all its nightmarish features, the 1930s were also marked by a great upsurge in working-class radicalism and resistance against exploitation and oppression. Strikes, occupations, sitdowns, pickets, and demonstrations for jobs, welfare relief, and against evictions, and for many other reasons became commonplace. Millions of workers formed labor unions to protect and extend their rights. Notably, the American Communist Party (CP) also grew during this period into a substantial force on the US left. It ballooned to a membership of approximately eighty thousand, with hundreds of thousands more passing through its ranks.

As a consequence of all this turmoil and struggle, the administration of Franklin Roosevelt had begun implementation of its New Deal program in the mid-1930s. A centerpiece of the New Deal was the creation of millions of federal jobs through the Works Progress Administration (WPA), inaugurated in January of 1935.

Yet even the WPA—as important a victory as it was for the working class—proved to be woefully limited in its scope. Among other flaws, state and federal WPA regulations barred disabled jobseekers from enjoying any of the program’s benefits, categorizing such individuals as “unemployable.” WPA advertisements underlined this point by explicitly stating that “only able-bodied American job-seekers” need apply.

To make matters worse, two additional pieces of New Deal legislation, following on the heels of the WPA, further codified federal discrimination against disabled people. The Social Security Act of August 1935 specifically defined “disability” as “inability to engage in substantial gainful work,” thus precluding anyone receiving any disability insurance from obtaining employment. The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which established a national minimum wage, exempted workers with disabilities from the law’s coverage, thus giving official sanction to the common practice of employing disabled people in “sheltered workshops” where they were paid a mere pittance for their labor.

For one particular group of disabled workers living in New York City, such blatant discrimination on the part of the putatively progressive Roosevelt administration was simply too much to endure passively. On May 29, 1935, six of these individuals presented at the local office of the Emergency Relief Bureau (ERB) and demanded equal access to jobs under the new federal relief program. When told they did not qualify, being “unemployable,” they demanded to speak with the ERB director, Oswald Knauth. When Knauth refused, they began a sit-in right then and there, initiating an indefinite occupation of the ERB office.³

This particular group of protesters was not yet part of any formal organization, but they had come to know each other through their previous involvement with radical politics and labor activism. Most had been at least peripherally involved in the activities of the CP.

Undoubtedly, this prior experience played a role in giving them the confidence to defy the prevailing bigotries regarding disabled people as social and medical “invalids.” Rather, they situated their struggle and their demands on an explicitly political terrain. They forthrightly referred to themselves as “handicapped” rather than “cripples,” “invalids,” or any of the other then-common derogatory euphemisms.

As one participant recalled, “What started it was finding out that jobs were available, that the government was handing out jobs . . .  everybody was getting 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.”⁴

When the second day of the occupation began, the protesters decided to drastically expand the action. They sent one of their numbers over to a nearby rally being held by the CP in Madison Square Garden in order to appeal for help. Immediately, the emissary returned with several dozen reinforcements. Before long, hundreds of people were picketing outside the ERB office, with thousands more looking on. By the day’s end, the action had drawn the support of members of the local Writer’s Union, the Young Communists of America, and the Unemployment Council. It had also drawn the attention of various media outlets, which reported on the protest in a predictably sensationalized manner.

Over the next several days, Knauth employed a number of tactics designed to break the occupiers’ resolve. Yet the sit-in persisted. A steady group of picketers—disabled and nondisabled—held constant vigil outside. Though the number of picketers slowly dwindled as the days wore on, newcomers continuously showed up to lend their efforts to the fight. This included visits from disabled people throughout the region who had read reports of the action and identified with it.

On the sixth day of the occupation, Knauth finally conceded to a meeting with the group at which point he was informed of their demands. First, they wanted fifty jobs to be immediately given to supporters of their as-of-yet unnamed organization, followed by ten more jobs every week following. Second, the jobs must be at or above minimum wage. Finally, the jobs must not be in segregated “sheltered workshops” or as part of a charity, but rather in an integrated setting with nondisabled workers.

Knauth peremptorily stated that he could not acquiesce and that, furthermore, his policies were merely in compliance with those of the federal government. At this point, one of the occupiers, a man named Hyman Abramowitz, angrily retorted, “That’s not a good enough answer. We are all handicapped and are being discriminated against.” He then proceeded to indict the Roosevelt administration. He accused Roosevelt of “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. . . . We don’t want charity. We want jobs.”⁵

Though few would have been aware of it at the time, the irony was that Roosevelt himself was also disabled. In fact, he was impaired in much the same way as Abramowitz—paralyzed from the waist down due to a childhood bout of polio. The only difference between these two men, one from the working class and one from the ruling class, was that Roosevelt and his presidential entourage were able to develop an elaborate system that kept his impairment all but completely hidden from the public. Thus, while Abramowitz fought for the right of all disabled people to obtain jobs, Roosevelt used the power of his position to deny this right to millions of other disabled people less fortunate than himself.⁶

Nine days after the occupation had begun, the police were finally called in to quell the protest. After roughing up the defiant occupiers and their supporters outside, they dragged away eleven protesters in handcuffs.

Socialism & Disability: The politics of Helen Keller

By Keith Rosenthal

This article was originally published at International Socialist Review.

Helen Keller is one of the most widely recognized figures in US history that people actually know very little about. That she was a serious political thinker who made important contributions in the fields of socialist theory and practice, or that she was a pioneer in pointing the way toward a Marxist understanding of disability oppression and liberation—this reality has been overlooked and censored. The mythological Helen Keller that we are familiar with has aptly been described as a sort of “plaster saint;” a hollow, empty vessel who is little more than an apolitical symbol for perseverance and personal triumph.¹

This is the story that most of us are familiar with: A young Helen Keller contracted an illness that left her blind and deaf; she immediately reverted to the state of a wild animal, as depicted in the popular movie The Miracle Worker; she remained in this state virtually unchanged until she was rescued by her teacher Anne Sullivan, who “miraculously” introduced her to the world of language. Then time passed, and Helen Keller died eighty years later: End of story.

The image of Helen Keller as a gilded, eternal child is reinforced at the highest levels of US society. The statue of Helen Keller erected inside the US Capitol building in 2009, which replaced that of a Confederate Army officer, depicts Keller as a seven-year-old child kneeling at a water pump. Neither the statue itself nor its inscription provides any inkling that the sixty-plus years of Keller’s adult life were of any particular political import.

When the story of Helen Keller is taught in schools today, it is frequently used to convey a number of anodyne “moral lessons” or messages: There is no personal obstacle that cannot be overcome through pluck and hard work; whatever problems one thinks they have pale in comparison to those of Helen Keller; and perhaps the most insidious of such messages, the one aimed primarily at people with disabilities themselves, is that the task of becoming a full member of society rests upon one’s individual efforts to overcome a given impairment and has nothing to do with structural oppression or inequality.

Ironically, this construction of the iconic, or mythological, Helen Keller has resulted in numerous essays and books written by individuals with disabilities who recount growing up feeling deeply resentful of her. They saw Keller as an impossibly perfect individual who personally overcame all limitations in order to become a world-famous figure—someone who pulled herself up by her bootstraps, so to speak, and did so with a polite smile.² In reality, such a narrative starkly contradicts the experiences of the vast majority of people with disabilities, then and now, who endure incredibly high rates of poverty, homelessness, discrimination, police brutality, and ostracism.

Distortions of Helen Keller, then and now

Keller fought her entire life against such bigoted notions and distortions of her life story. She constantly combated attempts to render her a hollow icon. Nonetheless, such images regarding Keller and disability continue to be reinforced everywhere. This can be found in primary school curricula, in the vast majority of children’s books on Helen Keller, and in most adult biographies of her. More often than not her radical politics are simply ignored. But even when they are acknowledged, it is usually to discount them.

One of the most authoritative recent biographies on Keller—written by the noted author Joseph Lash, and commissioned by the prestigious Radcliffe College and the American Foundation for the Blind—includes the following explanation of Keller’s involvement with socialist politics: “She needed to see the world as a contest between Good and Evil. Her imagination—cut off by blindness and deafness from many of the signals that brute experience sends most of us counseling caution, compromise, grayness instead of black and white—lent itself to dichotomies. . . . If she kept some grip on reality, it was because of her Teacher [Anne Sullivan], a woman of practical common sense.”³

This assessment, while expressed in milder terms, isn’t far from the accusations Keller regularly faced in her lifetime. Newspaper editors would use her disability as a means to dismiss her politics and to dissuade people from taking her seriously. Her radicalism, conservative writers would aver, was a product of the political “mistakes [which] spring out of the manifest limitations of her development.”⁴

Here is what the Detroit Free Press wrote about her in 1914:

As long as Miss Keller appears before the public in the light of a member of society struggling nobly under great handicaps and furnishing by her example inspiration for others who are unfortunately placed, she does a valuable work. But the moment she undertakes to speak ex cathedra, as it were, of all the political and social problems of the day, she receives a consideration out of all proportion to her fund of knowledge and judgment.

Helen Keller, struggling to point the way to the light for the deaf, dumb and blind is inspiring. Helen Keller preaching socialism; Helen Keller passing on the merits of the copper strike; Helen Keller sneering at the constitution of the United States; Helen Keller under these aspects is pitiful. She is beyond her depth. She speaks with the handicap of limitation which no amount of determination or science can overcome. Her knowledge is, and must be, almost purely theoretical, and unfortunately this world and its problems are both very practical.⁵

What is remarkable, however, is the power and tenacity Keller brought to bear in answering these attacks. She courageously defied any and all attempts to render her a second-class citizen. She would have her say, and woe unto those who would try to silence her.

The radicalization of Helen Keller

Helen Keller was born in 1880 in Alabama to an upper-class family. Her father had been a slave-owner before the Civil War in which he had served as a commanding Confederate officer. After the war, he became the editor of a major newspaper in Alabama. Keller’s mother hailed from a wealthy and connected New England family.

When Helen Keller was two years old she became permanently deaf and blind as the result of an unknown illness. It was not until she was seven years old that she began her formal education under Anne Sullivan, a twenty-one-year-old graduate of the Perkins School for the Blind, who had been hired by the Kellers as a live-in tutor.

Keller’s education proceeded rapidly under Sullivan’s guidance, and her development soon gained attention from increasingly far-flung quarters. When she enrolled in a college preparatory school with seeing and hearing girls in 1896, newspapers around the country—and even the world—ran articles detailing her course loads, semester grades, and attendance records. Her every move became the subject of intense scrutiny and gossip. By the time she had graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree from Radcliffe College in 1904, Keller had become something of a global celebrity.

Then, in 1908, Helen Keller took the seemingly unlikely step of joining the American Socialist Party (SP). She cites two major factors that led her to this: First, her widespread readings on society and philosophy, which had ultimately led her to the works of Karl Marx as well as those of contemporary socialists, such as H. G. Wells, William Morris, and Eugene Debs; and second, her growing interest in studying the specific conditions of people with disabilities in the United States, which led her to draw conclusions about society that dovetailed with the former.

She noticed that the leading causes of disability in the United States were largely attributable to industrial and workplace accidents and diseases, frequently caused by an employer’s greed and reluctance to prioritize workers’ safety lest it diminish profits. She found that other social factors contributed, too, such as the prevalence of poverty, unequal access to medicine, overcrowded and unsanitary slums, and an officially imposed societal ignorance regarding matters of reproductive and sexual health.

She discovered that, once disabled, such individuals constituted a class who “as a rule are poor,” cast aside and forgotten.⁶ They were thrown into institutions; mired in poverty and unemployment; cut off from educational opportunities; and segregated and marginalized at every turn. There was not a single census in any state or city of the country that even kept track of the numbers and needs of the disabled population. They simply did not exist as far as the powers-that-be were concerned.

“Step by step,” Keller recounted in 1912, “my investigation of blindness led me into the industrial world.”

And what a world it is! How different from the world of my beliefs! I must face unflinchingly a world of facts—a world of misery, degradation, blindness, sin, a world struggling against the elements, against the unknown, against itself. How to reconcile this world of fact with the bright world of my own imagining? My darkness had been filled with the light of intelligence, and behold the outer day-lit world was stumbling and groping in social blindness.⁷

“For a time I was depressed,” she told the New York Times in 1916, “but little by little my confidence came back and I realized that the wonder is not that conditions are so bad, but that humanity has advanced so far in spite of them. And now I am in the fight to change things. I may be a dreamer, but dreamers are necessary to make facts!”⁸

In short, she had come to conclude that “our worst foes are ignorance, poverty, and the unconscious cruelty of our commercial society. These are the causes of blindness; these are the enemies which destroy the sight of children and workmen and undermine the health of mankind.”⁹

One final factor that attended her decision to publicly commit to the socialist movement is less explicitly political but nonetheless important. In 1908, she wrote a sort of existential treatise titled The World I Live In. Keller felt that if she were to be taken seriously by society at large in the assertion of her right as a human being to discuss the affairs of that society, she would have to mount a fundamental intellectual self-defense against her many detractors.

[Scientific men] think that I can know very little about objects even a few feet beyond the reach of my arms. Everything outside of myself, according to them, is a hazy blur. Trees, mountains, cities, the ocean, even the house I live in are but fairy fabrications, misty unrealities.

Ideas make the world we live in, and impressions furnish ideas. My world is built of touch-sensations, devoid of physical color and sound; but without color and sound it throbs with life. Every object is associated in my mind with tactual qualities which, combined in countless ways, give me a sense of power, of beauty, or of incongruity.

It is not for me to say whether we see best with the hand or the eye. I only know that the world I see with my fingers is alive, ruddy, and satisfying. . . . The colors that glorify my world, the blue of the sky, the green of the fields, may not correspond exactly with those you delight in; but they are none the less color to me. The sun does not shine for my physical eyes, nor does the lightning flash, nor do the trees turn green in the spring; but they have not therefore ceased to exist, any more than the landscape is annihilated when you turn your back on it.

In sum, she asserted, “Between my experience and the experience of others there is no gulf of mute space which I may not bridge.”¹⁰

Review of "Lucy Parsons: An American Revolutionary"

This review first appeared in the May-June 2013 issue of the International Socialist Review.

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http://www.haymarketbooks.org/pb/Lucy-Parsons

Carolyn Ashbaugh
Lucy Parsons: An American Revolutionary
Haymarket Books, 2013 • 282 pages • $16

Review by Keith Rosenthal

With the republication of this long out-of-print 1976 work by Carolyn Asbaugh, Haymarket Books has provided a major boon for a new generation of radical and progressive activists. Lucy Parsons might very well be the most unsung of heroes among the pantheon of major American labor revolutionaries, such as Eugene Debs, William "Big Bill" Haywood, and Mother Jones.

As Ashbaugh informs us, Parsons was one of the first women to join the Knights of Labor in 1879 and the first woman of color to rise to prominence in the revolutionary left. She helped found the International Working People's Association, the U.S. Socialist Party, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and lent her efforts to the development of the U.S. Communist Party (CP). She also figured prominently in the events surrounding one of the most notorious episodes in the history of the American labor movement: the 1886-7 frame-up, trial, and execution of the Haymarket Martyrs, whose numbers included her husband, Albert Parsons.

Additionally, Parsons was one of the very first to seriously address the question of racism and the plight of Black people at the turn of the century in the pages of the socialist and anarchist press. And she was a pioneering advocate for women's rights, including unfettered access to abortion and birth control, the right to at-will divorce, to be free from rape -- marital and otherwise, and she organized domestic laborers and housewives into Working Women's Unions.

The Daily Worker, the WPA, and Disability in the 1930s

Protest outside of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) headquarters in New York City, circa 1936, Daily Worker. WPA federal regulations barred disabled people from securing employment, declaring them to be "unemployable."

Article attached to the above photograph.

Notice the section of the article highlighting the prominent role played by disabled workers and activists fighting against WPA discrimination and for good-paying jobs.

For months the Daily Worker had been criticizing the fact that hundreds of thousands of workers nationwide were being cut from the ranks of the WPA workforce. They demanded that all workers be reinstated. Instead, they declared a victory after FDR declared that no further workers' jobs would be cut from the WPA.

Collected proceedings of 1st-27th Party Congresses of the Russian RSDLP/Bolshevik/CP

http://publ.lib.ru/ARCHIVES/K/KPSS/_KPSS.html#010

(In English) http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&sl=ru&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fpubl.lib.ru%2FARCHIVES%2FK%2FKPSS%2F_KPSS.html%23010&act=url