| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Crippled Justice: The History of Modern Disability Policy in the Workplace. By Ruth O'Brien. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. xiv, 288 pp. Cloth, $50.00, ISBN 0-226-61659-2. Paper, $19.00, ISBN 0-226-61660-6.)

American policy toward the disabled changed radically in the last quarter of the twentieth century--from warehousing and medical treatment to civil rights. Ruth O'Brien asks a question that could arise only after a considerable period of implementation of the various rights-based policies. To wit: how and why have courts gutted the job protections that Congress and the disability rights movement fought so hard to inscribe into law? 1

Judges, O'Brien argues, have interpreted the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA) through the lens of an early-twentieth-century culture established by the rehabilitation profession. That culture sees individual psychological problems as the primary cause of disabled people's exclusions and incapacities. O'Brien shows how that theory was incorporated into federal disability policy in the 1940s and 1950s, especially in the Social and Rehabilitation Services agency run by Mary E. Switzer. In a fascinating chapter, O'Brien reveals how Switzer expanded her ideas to a vision of antipoverty policy, claiming the poor and long-term unemployed needed the same kind of psychological rehabilitation as the disabled. Three chapters then examine how the civil rights idea has been articulated, legislatively defined, and adjudicated. . . .

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