The League of the Physically Handicapped and the Great Depression:
A Case Study in the New Disability History

Paul K. Longmore and David Goldberger

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	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	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	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	. . .