Subject: Re: Fwd: The Minimum Wage Distraction
The point here is that there is a small percentage of Americans who believe
that they are living the average American life. Anyone living outside the
gates to their exclusive communities are not really Americans. They are the
rubble or the masses. And yes, it is easier for those privileged people to
live in America. But what they don't understand is that they are doing it
at the expense of the rabble and the masses. And the day is fast
approaching when their life style will be abolished. It always amazes me
that the super rich, who believe themselves to be so much smarter than the
riff raff, never see the end coming.
Carl Jarvis
----- Original Message -----
From: "ted chittenden" <tchittenden@cox.net>
To: "blind-democracy" <blind-democracy@octothorp.org>
Sent: Wednesday, August 07, 2013 2:45 PM
Subject: Fwd: Fwd: The Minimum Wage Distraction
Hi to all.
While there are some areas where I agree with both Laisez Fair and Mr.
Bonner, I want to explore three misunderstandings that Mr. Bonner has that
really make his points about rising wages and productivity absolutely
worthless.
1) According to Mr. Bonner, it doesn't take a lot to live in the U.S. these
days. In the next sentence, he clearly points out what is wrong with his
argument without realizing it--he refers to talking with his sons on the
verandah of his Paris chateau. Because he is wealthy enough to own a Paris
chateau (or at least rent one), he really has no idea how little people
actually make and how expensive things really are in the U.S. for those at
the lower end of the economic spectrum. Mr. Bonner, I urge you to give away
all your money and then try to live (let alone rent or purchase) in that
West Virginia cottage for a month. I think you'll realize very quickly that
what money the poor do get doesn't go very far.
2) With regard to productivity, two points need to be made. First, our
economists continue to tell us that Americans are the most productive they
have ever been and that they have been this way for quite a while. If
anything (and this is my second point), we may be falling into the trap of
overproduction in some areas--producing more services (and some goods) than
can actually be sold in the marketplace (personal note Mr. Bonner: you
really ought to read more of Naomi Klein and less of Milton Friedman--you
might learn a little something you didn't realize before).
3) This prattling about gold is absolutely stupid. When the U.S. was using
the gold standard during the 1870s (a decade these people want us to go back
to, by the way), the majority of U.S. citizens were just as poor as they are
today. The use of the gold standard didn't have any effect on poverty
rates--only the amount that one could earn and still be considered poor.
What Bonner says is frightening not so much because he says it but because
so many people, especially Republicans and their backers, absolutely believe
it.
--
Ted Chittenden
Every story has at least two sides if not more.
Subject: Fwd: The Minimum Wage Distraction
From: David Chittenden <dchittenden@gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 8 Aug 2013 09:03:31 +1200
To: Ted Chittenden <tchittenden@cox.net>
David Chittenden, MSc, MRCAA
Email: dchittenden@gmail.com
Mobile: +64 21 2288 288
Sent from my iPhone
Begin forwarded message:
> From: Laissez Faire Today <lftoday@lfb.org>
> Date: 8 August 2013 5:05:25 NZST
> To: <dchittenden@gmail.com>
> Subject: The Minimum Wage Distraction
>
> Why the clamor over raising the minimum wage hides the country's real
> problems.
>
> If you are having trouble viewing this email please try our web version.
>
>
> LFB SITE BROWSE ARCHIVES WHITELIST UNSUBSCRIBE
> August 7, 2013
>
> The Claptrap Behind the Minimum Wage Debate
>
> Dear Laissez Faire Today Reader,
>
> Baltimore, MD -- Sometimes, it'd be nice if they'd at least pretend to lie
> to us. We're kidding, of course. But considering the latest story coming
> out of D.C. -- how President Obama personally brokered a deal for the
> political elite -- it might be easier to accept it if they at least
> pretended they weren't playing favorites.
>
> We went over this a little last week, but let's set the stage again.
>
> It all started back in the planning stages of the Affordable Care Act. The
> architects of the law were desperately trying to put something together
> that they could pass before the public caught on. While they were trying
> to piece together the 900-page health care overhaul, Sen. Chuck Grassley
> (R-Iowa) inserted an amendment requiring congressional members and their
> staff to participate in the exchanges they were in the process of
> creating.
>
> On the surface, it sounds like a good idea. What better way to create the
> best, most efficient reforms than to have the creators themselves
> participate in them. Supporters of the law rallied behind it, saying it
> showed that both sides were working on coming up with sensible solutions.
> Except, as the law went through a number of revisions, federal subsidies
> given to the political elite were eliminated.
>
> You see, there's something you need to know about how congressional staff
> members pay for their health insurance. The American taxpayer actually
> picks up 75% of their premium. That's correct: Members of Congress and the
> professional working class of lawmakers who work beneath them have
> three-quarters of their premiums paid for by working-class Americans.
>
> But Chuck Grassley's seemingly harmless amendment threatened to end that.
> The way the law was written when it was signed by the president meant that
> these subsidies would disappear. Congressional staffers were most at risk,
> considering that most members of Congress are financially well-off. The
> lawmakers on Capitol Hill feared that the increased health care costs
> would lead to a "brain drain" of professional staffers who would leave for
> more lucrative jobs elsewhere.
>
> On the surface, it looked like poetic justice. But everyone in D.C. knew
> that nothing of the sort would ever happen. Behind closed doors, the
> president assured Democratic leaders that he would personally take care of
> the situation.
>
> There was a problem. Nowhere in the law does it allow the president to do
> such a thing. But considering that didn't stop the White House from
> exempting the employer mandate for a year, they weren't going to let
> something like that stop them. The worst thing about this entire debacle
> is that the president could have found a legal way around this problem.
>
> They could have fixed the matter legislatively. Supporters of the ACA
> wouldn't have preferred this course of action, however. It would have
> risked opening up the debate about health care reform. And considering
> that public opinion about the law has steadily been declining, that's a
> risk they'd rather not take.
>
> So instead, the people in charge circumvented the laws, rules, and
> procedures the country has in place to protect a law they've banked so
> much political capital in. You'd think this would get more attention in
> the news cycle, but considering that the government is in another NSA
> surveillance scandal, we're not surprised that no one's talking about it.
>
> Sadly, this is business as usual. Thoughtful legislation that leads to
> efficient outcomes gets shunned while sound bites and juicy talking points
> get replayed over and over again. And it doesn't apply only to hot-button
> topics. Take, for example, the other policy issue that the White House
> wants you to focus on so you stop paying attention to the real problems.
>
> We're talking about the latest push to increase the minimum wage.
>
> For most people, the argument is simple. Increase the minimum wage and
> you'll help out the workers of the economy who need it the most. Except,
> like the politicians who hastily passed the ACA, no one really understands
> the implications of this "simple" act.
>
> But Bill Bonner knows. Founder and president of Agora Publishing, Bill
> built a professional career uncovering the stories that mainstream
> journalists and talking heads seem to always miss. And in today's article
> about the minimum wage debate, he shows that ignorance of the issues that
> directly affect us still exists.
>
> CANCELLATION REQUEST >>
>
> Did you see our publisher's odd request last week?
>
> It's already causing quite the stir.
>
> He's asking readers of Lifetime Income Report, Outstanding Investments,
> Penny Stock Fortunes, Addison Wiggin's Apogee Advisory and Capital &
> Crisis... to cancel their subscriptions.
>
> Hundreds of readers have already taken him up on this unusual offer. But
> we didn't see your name on the "unsubscribe" list. So here's a reminder to
> please cancel your subscription as soon as possible.
>
> Click here to find out why he's making this odd request.
>
>
> Introducing Bill Bonner's... The Claptrap Behind the Minimum Wage Debate
>
>
> Bill Bonner
> New York seems to have more than its fair share of knuckleheads.
>
> Paul Krugman and Tom Friedman are both stalwart columnists in The New York
> Times. And there's staff writer James Surowiecki at The New Yorker.
>
> More about that in a minute...
>
> First, investors are taking it easy... distracted by barbeques, family
> reunions, and the heat of summer. They're hesitating, cogitating,
> wondering what it's all about.
>
> Later this month, we should begin to see some activity. But for now,
> nothing much is happening.
>
> In the meantime, we take advantage of these dog days of summer to do some
> thinking of our own.
>
> For example, we were wondering why they are called "dog days." So we
> looked it up. Turns out it goes back to ancient Rome... and before. The
> Romans called the midsummer period dies caniculares -- or "days of the
> dog."
>
> This refers to the prominence of the constellation Canis Major, or the
> Greater Dog, in the night sky. The biggest star in the complex is named
> Sirius, also known as the Dog Star. It is the brightest star we see.
>
> Can Money Buy You Happiness?
>
> That out of the way, we return to wondering about money.
>
> Not that we care especially about money. We are more interested in what it
> represents... and how it helps us understand the world we live in.
>
> Money establishes a relationship between people. One owes. One is owed.
> One can buy. One must sell. One employs. Another is employed.
>
> You don't really need much to live. Food, clothing, shelter, a Wi-Fi
> connection. After you have the basics, everything else is no longer about
> survival. It's about status: the relationship between you and your fellow
> men.
>
> Here in the French countryside, we were sitting on the veranda thinking...
>
> "You don't really need much to live well," we explained to the children
> (who have come for a couple weeks of vacation).
>
> "All you need is a nice country house... with a well-stocked wine cellar.
> "And a good garden. You need homegrown food to eat. So you need a
> gardener... at least part time... and a good cook.
>
> "Yes, you don't need much."
>
> It takes more than money to live well. You could live much better than
> most people live... on little money. Just get a quaint cottage in West
> Virginia. Plant a nice garden. And learn to cook!
>
> But most people figure they need more money. They want large suburban
> houses, sleek automobiles, mobile phones and big-screen TVs... not to
> mention health insurance.
>
> Poverty-Level Pay
>
> You can buy that sort of stuff by getting a job that pays well. But why do
> so many jobs pay so poorly? Here's James Surowiecki in The New Yorker:
>
> "In inflation-adjusted terms, the minimum wage, though higher than it was
> a decade ago, is still well below its 1968 peak (when it was worth about
> $10.70 an hour in today's dollars), and it's still poverty-level pay.
>
> "To make matters worse, most fast-food and retail work is part-time, and
> the weak job market has eroded what little bargaining power low-wage
> workers had: Their earnings actually fell between 2009 and last year,
> according to the National Employment Law Project...
>
> "As a recent study by the economists John Schmitt and Janelle Jones has
> shown, low-wage workers are older and better educated than ever. More
> important, more of them are relying on their paychecks not for pin money
> or to pay for Friday-night dates but, rather, to support families.
>
> "Forty years ago, there was no expectation that fast-food or
> discount-retail jobs would provide a living wage, because these were not
> jobs that, in the main, adult heads of household did. Today, low-wage
> workers provide 46% of their family's income. It is that change which is
> driving the demand for higher pay."
>
> Surowiecki almost always misunderstands things. Years ago, he wrote an
> article on gold, pointing out that gold prices go up and down. He
> concluded that this made gold no better for preserving wealth than any
> other investment.
>
> But Surowiecki missed the point. Although the gold price goes up and down,
> gold never goes away and always has value. Shares in Kodak don't. More
> importantly, gold keeps an economy honest... and productive.
>
> Until 1971, when President Nixon took the U.S. off the gold standard,
> America's largest employers were companies that made things. In Baltimore,
> the General Motors assembly plant and Beth Steel at Sparrows Point could
> afford to pay high wages because they were very productive.
>
> Say's law: You buy products with products. If you want to buy stuff, in
> other words, you've got to produce stuff.
>
> But after 1971, the new money system changed the nature of the U.S.
> economy.
>
> The Nirvana of Rising Prices
>
> Today's largest employers don't make stuff. They are low-margin businesses
> in the service sector, retailers and fast-food chains. As Surowiecki
> points out, they can't afford much higher wages.
>
> What, then, is the solution to low-paying service-sector jobs? Tax
> credits, he says. And national infrastructure projects: new highways,
> bridges, tunnels, airports, and so forth. A higher minimum wage. "And we
> really need the economy as a whole to grow faster."
>
> Great!
>
> And get this: "You have to get consumers to accept significantly higher,
> and steadily rising, prices."
>
> Hmmm...
>
> How are people who don't earn much going to be able to pay higher prices?
> No explanation given. No mention of making things. No mention of
> productivity or investment.
>
> It is amazing how little thinking goes into this sort of claptrap. It
> wouldn't take Surowiecki long to realize that higher wages do not get you
> anywhere if prices rise too.
>
> What you really need is higher productivity. How do you get that? You need
> to save money (rather than spend it) and invest in things that produce
> more -- providing the profits necessary to pay more to the people who
> produce them.
>
> Really. Is that so difficult to understand?
>
> For the last 42 years, the feds have encouraged Americans to spend their
> money, rather than save it. And they've encouraged people to buy things
> made by foreigners, rather than make things themselves.
>
> This was the consequence (perhaps unintended) of Tricky Dicky's pure paper
> money system. When you can print up pieces of paper... and call it
> "money"... you don't need to make things! You can just go straight out and
> buy them!
>
> The irony is that taking gold out of America's money system led to the
> very problems -- low wages in the service sector -- that Surowiecki is now
> trying to solve.
>
> -- Bill Bonner
>
> [Ed. note: Tinkering with the minimum wage isn't the only way our elected
> politicians are using to "fix" our country. They've got a handful of other
> plans that will right the economic ship, and get us back on the path to
> prosperity.
>
> At least that's what they claim. But they've been claiming that for years
> now, haven't they?
>
> Bill's prediction about the unintended consequences of raising the minimum
> wage isn't the only one's made over his career. In fact, if you've been
> watching the economic meltdown happening in the Motor City, recently,
> you've seen another prediction he and a colleague have already made. The
> bankruptcy of Detroit is only the beginning.
>
> Click here to find out how bad he thinks things will get. But more
> importantly, find out what you can do to make sure you're not another
> financial casualty when things really get bad.]
> When My Accountant Wants Tax-Free Income... This is What He Does
>
> Accountants know the law. They also know that any American could legally
> get paid up to three times per month... 100% tax-free. That's 36 tax-free
> checks each year. Even the IRS says it's legal. And It doesn't matter what
> you make already. This simple strategy could work for anybody.
>
> Click here to find out how...
>
>
> Club Chatter
>
> "The ACA is fascist to the core,"writes Club member, Edward B., "because
> at its core is corporate welfare; at its core is force... If you approve
> of this piece of legislation, if you approve of the government grabbing
> that much more power over everyone's health care, everyone's bodies,
> everyone's lives, then you are pro-force. If you approve of the
> government's health insurance scheme in all its glory (all its
> IRS-enforced glory), yet continue to say that you are pro-life or
> pro-choice, then you are a liar. You are the one putting out BS."
>
> LFT: There is an alternative to the ACA. One that could save you from the
> hardships that's sure to come in the coming months (and maybe even
> years...). Click here to find out what it is.
>
> And another Club member adds, "[Saturday's] article on the Affordable Care
> Act and the president doing something with the program that is probably
> unconstitutional... well, let's just say the whole article made my blood
> pressure medicine work overtime as I continued to read. You relayed how
> many of the elected officials in the legislative body are lawyers. Well,
> that answers a lot of my questions when it comes to 'thought control,'
> err... I mean laws. Then the capper: You mentioned our judicial branch...
> the same judicial branch that was asked to rule on this program when it
> was first enacted because citizens were being forced to buy 'insurance.'
> Oh, yeah, that pack of thieves was in bed with the other thieves then. And
> here we sit now, still complaining about the whole damn thing."
>
> LFT: Sometimes, all we can do is complain. It's cathartic in a way.
>
> Thank you for reading Laissez Faire Today. We greatly value your questions
> and comments. Click here to send us feedback.
>
>
>
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Wednesday, August 7, 2013
Serious Affiliate Concern And Some Questions
Hi,
First, Jacobus tenBroek was mostly an elitist, not a dictator in the sense
that Kenneth Jernigan became. I'm not sure that I would call Jernigan a
dictator in his early years as president.
Certainly the early NFB felt the need for a tightly controlled leadership
setting the organizations course. But when you go back to those days and
realize it was a much different world, perhaps that approach made some
sense. Certainly I bought into it in 1969. I'd been blind four years, gone
through the Rehab Unit, attended the University of Washington, and done lots
of volunteer work. Mostly I recall people feeling hopeless and depressed
over being unable to find work outside of the sheltered shops. The
attitudes of blind people reflected those of the general population. All of
us, blind and sighted alike, bowed before the Universal Blind Stereotype.
We blind folks did not believe in ourselves. Forget the NFB's philosophy of
the Independent Blind Guy, manning the barricades and never going back.
Most of us snickered at that sort of silliness. We knew we were inferior.
So of course it made sense for a group of bold blind people to say that they
would need to set a higher standard. And of course many of the rank and
file blind people would oppose such talk.
And remember, the agencies working in the field were full of professional
do-gooders who believed that their job was to help through doing for the
blind.
If you ever feel you have a bit of time, go on line and look up the speeches
by Jacobus tenBroek. Those speeches are what turned me around.
Later, Jernigan pulled all control away from the state affiliates and made a
tight central government. He was the "all Knowing" leader. Jernigan and I
had several discussions in which we were strongly opposed to one another.
But he had the control, and he always won.
In the end, the NFB has morphed into a national agency for the blind. It
still claims to be a membership organization, but the focus is on developing
the Jernigan Center and making strong ties with the corporate world.
Anyway, while I do tend to be ddown on the NFB, it served a valuable role in
the development of a new, stronger blind population. The very fact that we
can now challenge the old ways of the NFB is proof that we've come a long
way.
Carl Jarvis
From: "Tuan Nguyen" <ngtapop925@hotmail.com>
To: "Abby Vincent" <aevincent@ca.rr.com>; "'Ken Metz'"
<kenmetz1946@gmail.com>; <rmilliman@twc.com>; <leadership@acb.org>;
<acb-l@acb.org>
Cc: <gduiboard@gdui.org>
Sent: Wednesday, August 07, 2013 11:04 AM
Subject: Re: [acb-l] [leadership] Serious Affiliate Concern And Some
Questions
Hello ACB,
The behavior of the GDUI President, as far as the disclosing of information
is concerned, is almost similar to the behavior of NFB's first dictator
TenBrook. I have learned about this when I was reading the first five or
six chapters of People of Vision; the dictator did a lot of activities
secretly, ranging from increasing executive director's pay to financial
matters. The very disturbing thing is the dictator did not inform or advise
his executive committee of the happenings. I have no doubt that the other
two dictators, Jornigan and Maurer would act in the same manner. I'm now
very angry! Whoever the President of GDUI must step down forthwith.
Best,
Tuan Nguyen President, CCB Students
> From: aevincent@ca.rr.com
> To: kenmetz1946@gmail.com; rmilliman@twc.com; leadership@acb.org;
> acb-l@acb.org
> Date: Wed, 7 Aug 2013 10:09:45 -0700
> CC: gduiboard@gdui.org
> Subject: Re: [acb-l] [leadership] Serious Affiliate Concern And Some
> Questions
>
> I went to GDUI's web site to see if I could read the minutes of the board
> meetings. I can't. I'm not authorized. In the good old days, there was no
> log in required. Now there is a way to log in. I got my username from the
> system and am now waiting to get a password. First there's a code they
> send you to get the password, if you're really the owner of the account.
> I'll see how long it takes, then see if I can read the minutes when logged
> in. Also, the latest board meeting listed was last January.
> Abby Vincent
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: acb-l-bounces@acb.org [mailto:acb-l-bounces@acb.org] On Behalf Of
> Ken Metz
> Sent: Wednesday, August 07, 2013 9:03 AM
> To: rmilliman@twc.com; leadership@acb.org; acb-l@acb.org
> Cc: gduiboard@gdui.org
> Subject: Re: [acb-l] [leadership] Serious Affiliate Concern And Some
> Questions
>
> Hi Ron and all.
>
> Let me state for the record that you are correct. I am a paid GDUI member,
> and the link you referred to in your message below also tells me that I am
> not authorized to see the January, 2013 GDUI Board minutes. STherefore,
> whatever they may be trying to hide is a definite issue, and the GDUI
> leadership ought to go into that link and find out why it says
> unauthorized.
>
> I agree that GDUI is incorporated, and, in my opinion, we will now begin
> to work towards getting our organization back for the purpose of providing
> help to guide dog handlers as was the intent and fine work of this
> affiliate over 40 years.
>
> Ken Metz
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: acb-l-bounces@acb.org [mailto:acb-l-bounces@acb.org] On Behalf Of
> Dr. Ronald E. Milliman
> Sent: Wednesday, August 07, 2013 7:22 AM
> To: leadership@acb.org; acb-l@acb.org
> Cc: gduiboard@gdui.org
> Subject: Re: [acb-l] [leadership] Serious Affiliate Concern And Some
> Questions
>
> For the record, I never stated that I got error messages when attempting
> to access any of the pages on the GDUI website. Admittedly, I did not
> check every single page. However, what I did state is that some pages were
> not available to me, and I received the following message when trying to
> read them:
>
> "You are not authorised to view this resource."
>
> I received this notice when I tried to access and read the meetings for
> the following meetings:
>
> GDUI Board Meeting Minutes
>
> The following documents are approved minutes of the GDUI Board of
> Directors.
>
> January 9, 2013
> December 20, 2012
> December 12, 2012
>
>
> However, the following meeting minutes were available for me to read:
> November 1, 2012
> August 23, 2012
> August 2, 2012
>
> I assume the rest of the older dated minutes were also available, but I
> did not check them all. If you want to see if you can duplicate my
> experience, go to:
>
> http://www.gdui.org/index.php/GDUI/gdui-board-meeting-minutes.html#main
>
> I have herewith supported my point; thus, let the evidence speak for
> itself! I am not making any accusations. I am only presenting the facts.
> You can draw your own conclusions. For me, personally, I have to question
> why I am "not authorised to view this resource." In my mind, it raises the
> issue of transparency and openness. In my mind, it makes me suspicious
> that there is something to hide or cover up or something that someone
> doesn't want the rest of us to know about. Maybe, there is a very simple
> explanation; that is, I am not a paid member of GDUI; thus, I am "not
> authorised to view this resource." In which case, it seems like it would
> simply say "this section of our website is available to GDUI paid members
> only," and if that were the case, then, it seems logical that it should
> apply to all meeting minutes, not just select minutes.
>
> Also, for the record, I posted my initial message regarding this topic to
> only the ACB-L email list. I am not the one who expanded this to the
> leadership list or beyond the ACB-L list.
> Ron M.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: leadership-bounces@acb.org [mailto:leadership-bounces@acb.org] On
> Behalf Of Laurie Mehta
> Sent: Tuesday, August 06, 2013 1:30 PM
> To: leadership@acb.org
> Cc: gduiboard@gdui.org
> Subject: [leadership] Serious Affiliate Concern And Some Questions
>
> Hello,
>
> I am addressing ACB leadership today to inform you of the interference
> that some ACB leaders are apparently imposing (or have imposed) on an
> organization that is currently affiliated with ACB. This interference and
> malicious public propaganda is unacceptable and it places ACB at risk of
> public scrutiny that could be damaging to ACB and its reputation.
>
> A message was posted publicly by an ACB official and has been widely
> circulated (please see below) which makes several irresponsible
> statements.
>
> Firstly, this gentleman, who is NOT a member of GDUI, lodges significant
> criticism of GDUI's duly elected leadership in his public e-mail.
>
> For the information of anyone who may be interested, GDUI is currently
> affiliated with ACB, however, GDUI is also an incorporated organization in
> and of itself. GDUI is a law-abiding corporation that responsibly follows
> its governance documents and all laws that it is obliged to follow.
>
> It is widely known that ACB has repeatedly, officially asserted that its
> governing philosophy is one of absolute non-interference with the business
> of any of its affiliates.
>
> Yet, in the e-mail (below) the following statement is made regarding the
> author's perception of some opposition to the legitimate officers of GDUI:
>
> (quoting Dr. Ronald E. Milliman from the message which appears in its
> entirety below) "Among those who are included in this opposition group are
> GDUI's last five former presidents."
>
> In response to that, I have the following questions please:
>
> Is this individual asserting that the current ACB President wishes herself
> to be classified as part of an opposition group involving itself in an ACB
> affiliate's business?
>
> If so, does the ACB President (one of the five individuals alluded to in
> the quoted statement) wish to be considered as involving herself in an
> affiliate's business by being part of an opposition to any of that
> affiliate's duly elected leadership?
>
> Please share, what do other ACB leaders think about how the public e-mail
> and any involvement of the ACB president represent ACB's stated philosophy
> of absolute non-interference in any affiliate's business?
>
> Thank you all for your attention in this matter which is so very important
> for the future of ACB-affiliate relations.
>
> Finally, this individual (who should be familiar with appropriately
> reporting any technical problems he might encounter) has stated in his
> e-mail that he allegedly had some difficulty while visiting GDUI's
> website.
> He has not reported his experience to anyone who can investigate the
> matter, however.
>
> I invite him to write out the details of what page he visited (its url)
> and what link or links he clicked, which resulted in him getting an error
> message (and what that error message was), and then to send that
> information to webmaster@gdui.org for the issue to be investigated.
> It is the standard method of reporting encountered problems to any
> organization operating a website to detail the issues encountered and send
> to the webmaster.
>
> Sincerely,
> Laurie Mehta
> President, GDUI
> president@gdui.org
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Dr. Ronald E. Milliman" <rmilliman@twc.com>
> To: <acb-l@acb.org>
> Sent: Tuesday, August 06, 2013 8:36 AM
> Subject: Re: [acb-l] SERIOUS ISSUES REGARDING FREE SPEECHWITH GUIDE DOG
> USERSINC.
>
>
> As many of you know, GDUI received several awards or certificates of
> recognition for its website from the PR Committee; that is, their website
> as it was in the spring of 2012. Since then, it has changed and is no
> longer the award winning site that it was at the time it was recognized
> for its outstanding layout and design. For instance, when I recently tried
> to access it, I ran into this caution, a caution that was not present on
> any of their pages when their site was recognized by our PR Committee:
>
> You are not authorised to view this resource.
>
> To make another point, all one has to do is ask this one simple question:
>
> Can our most outstanding, most active ACB members and former GDUI members
> all be wrong about the GDUI leadership, its president in particular? Among
> those who are included in this opposition group are GDUI's last five
> former presidents. These were highly devoted, loyal, and dedicated members
> of GDUI, an affiliate they cared deeply about. Can they all be wrong and a
> small number of current GDUI leaders be right?
>
> Ron M.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> leadership mailing list
> leadership@acb.org
> http://www.acb.org/mailman/listinfo/leadership
>
> _______________________________________________
> acb-l mailing list
> acb-l@acb.org
> http://www.acb.org/mailman/listinfo/acb-l
>
> _______________________________________________
> acb-l mailing list
> acb-l@acb.org
> http://www.acb.org/mailman/listinfo/acb-l
>
> _______________________________________________
> acb-l mailing list
> acb-l@acb.org
> http://www.acb.org/mailman/listinfo/acb-l
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
_______________________________________________
acb-l mailing list
acb-l@acb.org
http://www.acb.org/mailman/listinfo/acb-l
First, Jacobus tenBroek was mostly an elitist, not a dictator in the sense
that Kenneth Jernigan became. I'm not sure that I would call Jernigan a
dictator in his early years as president.
Certainly the early NFB felt the need for a tightly controlled leadership
setting the organizations course. But when you go back to those days and
realize it was a much different world, perhaps that approach made some
sense. Certainly I bought into it in 1969. I'd been blind four years, gone
through the Rehab Unit, attended the University of Washington, and done lots
of volunteer work. Mostly I recall people feeling hopeless and depressed
over being unable to find work outside of the sheltered shops. The
attitudes of blind people reflected those of the general population. All of
us, blind and sighted alike, bowed before the Universal Blind Stereotype.
We blind folks did not believe in ourselves. Forget the NFB's philosophy of
the Independent Blind Guy, manning the barricades and never going back.
Most of us snickered at that sort of silliness. We knew we were inferior.
So of course it made sense for a group of bold blind people to say that they
would need to set a higher standard. And of course many of the rank and
file blind people would oppose such talk.
And remember, the agencies working in the field were full of professional
do-gooders who believed that their job was to help through doing for the
blind.
If you ever feel you have a bit of time, go on line and look up the speeches
by Jacobus tenBroek. Those speeches are what turned me around.
Later, Jernigan pulled all control away from the state affiliates and made a
tight central government. He was the "all Knowing" leader. Jernigan and I
had several discussions in which we were strongly opposed to one another.
But he had the control, and he always won.
In the end, the NFB has morphed into a national agency for the blind. It
still claims to be a membership organization, but the focus is on developing
the Jernigan Center and making strong ties with the corporate world.
Anyway, while I do tend to be ddown on the NFB, it served a valuable role in
the development of a new, stronger blind population. The very fact that we
can now challenge the old ways of the NFB is proof that we've come a long
way.
Carl Jarvis
From: "Tuan Nguyen" <ngtapop925@hotmail.com>
To: "Abby Vincent" <aevincent@ca.rr.com>; "'Ken Metz'"
<kenmetz1946@gmail.com>; <rmilliman@twc.com>; <leadership@acb.org>;
<acb-l@acb.org>
Cc: <gduiboard@gdui.org>
Sent: Wednesday, August 07, 2013 11:04 AM
Subject: Re: [acb-l] [leadership] Serious Affiliate Concern And Some
Questions
Hello ACB,
The behavior of the GDUI President, as far as the disclosing of information
is concerned, is almost similar to the behavior of NFB's first dictator
TenBrook. I have learned about this when I was reading the first five or
six chapters of People of Vision; the dictator did a lot of activities
secretly, ranging from increasing executive director's pay to financial
matters. The very disturbing thing is the dictator did not inform or advise
his executive committee of the happenings. I have no doubt that the other
two dictators, Jornigan and Maurer would act in the same manner. I'm now
very angry! Whoever the President of GDUI must step down forthwith.
Best,
Tuan Nguyen President, CCB Students
> From: aevincent@ca.rr.com
> To: kenmetz1946@gmail.com; rmilliman@twc.com; leadership@acb.org;
> acb-l@acb.org
> Date: Wed, 7 Aug 2013 10:09:45 -0700
> CC: gduiboard@gdui.org
> Subject: Re: [acb-l] [leadership] Serious Affiliate Concern And Some
> Questions
>
> I went to GDUI's web site to see if I could read the minutes of the board
> meetings. I can't. I'm not authorized. In the good old days, there was no
> log in required. Now there is a way to log in. I got my username from the
> system and am now waiting to get a password. First there's a code they
> send you to get the password, if you're really the owner of the account.
> I'll see how long it takes, then see if I can read the minutes when logged
> in. Also, the latest board meeting listed was last January.
> Abby Vincent
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: acb-l-bounces@acb.org [mailto:acb-l-bounces@acb.org] On Behalf Of
> Ken Metz
> Sent: Wednesday, August 07, 2013 9:03 AM
> To: rmilliman@twc.com; leadership@acb.org; acb-l@acb.org
> Cc: gduiboard@gdui.org
> Subject: Re: [acb-l] [leadership] Serious Affiliate Concern And Some
> Questions
>
> Hi Ron and all.
>
> Let me state for the record that you are correct. I am a paid GDUI member,
> and the link you referred to in your message below also tells me that I am
> not authorized to see the January, 2013 GDUI Board minutes. STherefore,
> whatever they may be trying to hide is a definite issue, and the GDUI
> leadership ought to go into that link and find out why it says
> unauthorized.
>
> I agree that GDUI is incorporated, and, in my opinion, we will now begin
> to work towards getting our organization back for the purpose of providing
> help to guide dog handlers as was the intent and fine work of this
> affiliate over 40 years.
>
> Ken Metz
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: acb-l-bounces@acb.org [mailto:acb-l-bounces@acb.org] On Behalf Of
> Dr. Ronald E. Milliman
> Sent: Wednesday, August 07, 2013 7:22 AM
> To: leadership@acb.org; acb-l@acb.org
> Cc: gduiboard@gdui.org
> Subject: Re: [acb-l] [leadership] Serious Affiliate Concern And Some
> Questions
>
> For the record, I never stated that I got error messages when attempting
> to access any of the pages on the GDUI website. Admittedly, I did not
> check every single page. However, what I did state is that some pages were
> not available to me, and I received the following message when trying to
> read them:
>
> "You are not authorised to view this resource."
>
> I received this notice when I tried to access and read the meetings for
> the following meetings:
>
> GDUI Board Meeting Minutes
>
> The following documents are approved minutes of the GDUI Board of
> Directors.
>
> January 9, 2013
> December 20, 2012
> December 12, 2012
>
>
> However, the following meeting minutes were available for me to read:
> November 1, 2012
> August 23, 2012
> August 2, 2012
>
> I assume the rest of the older dated minutes were also available, but I
> did not check them all. If you want to see if you can duplicate my
> experience, go to:
>
> http://www.gdui.org/index.php/GDUI/gdui-board-meeting-minutes.html#main
>
> I have herewith supported my point; thus, let the evidence speak for
> itself! I am not making any accusations. I am only presenting the facts.
> You can draw your own conclusions. For me, personally, I have to question
> why I am "not authorised to view this resource." In my mind, it raises the
> issue of transparency and openness. In my mind, it makes me suspicious
> that there is something to hide or cover up or something that someone
> doesn't want the rest of us to know about. Maybe, there is a very simple
> explanation; that is, I am not a paid member of GDUI; thus, I am "not
> authorised to view this resource." In which case, it seems like it would
> simply say "this section of our website is available to GDUI paid members
> only," and if that were the case, then, it seems logical that it should
> apply to all meeting minutes, not just select minutes.
>
> Also, for the record, I posted my initial message regarding this topic to
> only the ACB-L email list. I am not the one who expanded this to the
> leadership list or beyond the ACB-L list.
> Ron M.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: leadership-bounces@acb.org [mailto:leadership-bounces@acb.org] On
> Behalf Of Laurie Mehta
> Sent: Tuesday, August 06, 2013 1:30 PM
> To: leadership@acb.org
> Cc: gduiboard@gdui.org
> Subject: [leadership] Serious Affiliate Concern And Some Questions
>
> Hello,
>
> I am addressing ACB leadership today to inform you of the interference
> that some ACB leaders are apparently imposing (or have imposed) on an
> organization that is currently affiliated with ACB. This interference and
> malicious public propaganda is unacceptable and it places ACB at risk of
> public scrutiny that could be damaging to ACB and its reputation.
>
> A message was posted publicly by an ACB official and has been widely
> circulated (please see below) which makes several irresponsible
> statements.
>
> Firstly, this gentleman, who is NOT a member of GDUI, lodges significant
> criticism of GDUI's duly elected leadership in his public e-mail.
>
> For the information of anyone who may be interested, GDUI is currently
> affiliated with ACB, however, GDUI is also an incorporated organization in
> and of itself. GDUI is a law-abiding corporation that responsibly follows
> its governance documents and all laws that it is obliged to follow.
>
> It is widely known that ACB has repeatedly, officially asserted that its
> governing philosophy is one of absolute non-interference with the business
> of any of its affiliates.
>
> Yet, in the e-mail (below) the following statement is made regarding the
> author's perception of some opposition to the legitimate officers of GDUI:
>
> (quoting Dr. Ronald E. Milliman from the message which appears in its
> entirety below) "Among those who are included in this opposition group are
> GDUI's last five former presidents."
>
> In response to that, I have the following questions please:
>
> Is this individual asserting that the current ACB President wishes herself
> to be classified as part of an opposition group involving itself in an ACB
> affiliate's business?
>
> If so, does the ACB President (one of the five individuals alluded to in
> the quoted statement) wish to be considered as involving herself in an
> affiliate's business by being part of an opposition to any of that
> affiliate's duly elected leadership?
>
> Please share, what do other ACB leaders think about how the public e-mail
> and any involvement of the ACB president represent ACB's stated philosophy
> of absolute non-interference in any affiliate's business?
>
> Thank you all for your attention in this matter which is so very important
> for the future of ACB-affiliate relations.
>
> Finally, this individual (who should be familiar with appropriately
> reporting any technical problems he might encounter) has stated in his
> e-mail that he allegedly had some difficulty while visiting GDUI's
> website.
> He has not reported his experience to anyone who can investigate the
> matter, however.
>
> I invite him to write out the details of what page he visited (its url)
> and what link or links he clicked, which resulted in him getting an error
> message (and what that error message was), and then to send that
> information to webmaster@gdui.org for the issue to be investigated.
> It is the standard method of reporting encountered problems to any
> organization operating a website to detail the issues encountered and send
> to the webmaster.
>
> Sincerely,
> Laurie Mehta
> President, GDUI
> president@gdui.org
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Dr. Ronald E. Milliman" <rmilliman@twc.com>
> To: <acb-l@acb.org>
> Sent: Tuesday, August 06, 2013 8:36 AM
> Subject: Re: [acb-l] SERIOUS ISSUES REGARDING FREE SPEECHWITH GUIDE DOG
> USERSINC.
>
>
> As many of you know, GDUI received several awards or certificates of
> recognition for its website from the PR Committee; that is, their website
> as it was in the spring of 2012. Since then, it has changed and is no
> longer the award winning site that it was at the time it was recognized
> for its outstanding layout and design. For instance, when I recently tried
> to access it, I ran into this caution, a caution that was not present on
> any of their pages when their site was recognized by our PR Committee:
>
> You are not authorised to view this resource.
>
> To make another point, all one has to do is ask this one simple question:
>
> Can our most outstanding, most active ACB members and former GDUI members
> all be wrong about the GDUI leadership, its president in particular? Among
> those who are included in this opposition group are GDUI's last five
> former presidents. These were highly devoted, loyal, and dedicated members
> of GDUI, an affiliate they cared deeply about. Can they all be wrong and a
> small number of current GDUI leaders be right?
>
> Ron M.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> leadership mailing list
> leadership@acb.org
> http://www.acb.org/mailman/listinfo/leadership
>
> _______________________________________________
> acb-l mailing list
> acb-l@acb.org
> http://www.acb.org/mailman/listinfo/acb-l
>
> _______________________________________________
> acb-l mailing list
> acb-l@acb.org
> http://www.acb.org/mailman/listinfo/acb-l
>
> _______________________________________________
> acb-l mailing list
> acb-l@acb.org
> http://www.acb.org/mailman/listinfo/acb-l
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
_______________________________________________
acb-l mailing list
acb-l@acb.org
http://www.acb.org/mailman/listinfo/acb-l
More Pioneers in the fight for disability rights__The League of the Physically Handicapped
Subject: Re: More Pioneers in the fight for disability rights__The League of
the Physically Handicapped
The Universal Blind Stereotype.
And we blind people are just as much influenced by it as are our sighted
brothers and sisters.
We Blind People are different. How can we not be, when the world at large
runs on eyesight?
But we do not need to be "Separate but Equal.
We can be "Differently Equal".
Here, in my remote rural world, my neighbors all know that I am blind. But
they interact with me as an equal. We talk shop, dream dreams, worry about
the same things and help one another in times of need. Of course they can't
help but know that I'm blind. Just as I can't help but notice that most of
them are much younger than I am, or that some of them are female and others
are male. Some have deep Faith, and others have none. None of them are
what we would call Conservative, but some are more frugal than others. In
short, we are all different, and yet we are all the same.
But when I go out into the world, I am not so well known. People are not
familiar with Carl Jarvis, but they do know lots of misconceptions about
"The Blind Man".
We are forced to spend far too little time with our clients to ever hope to
change their attitudes toward blindness, but we have no other choice but to
keep plugging away.
The day will probably never come when we blind people are truly integrated
into our larger society, but that is no reason to give up hope.
Carl Jarvis
----- Original Message -----
From: "Miriam Vieni" <miriamvieni@optonline.net>
To: <ceverett@dslextreme.com>; "'Blind Democracy Discussion List'"
<blind-democracy@octothorp.org>
Sent: Wednesday, August 07, 2013 6:23 AM
Subject: RE: Pioneers in the fight for disability rights__The League of the
Physically Handicapped
Actually, I think it has to do with the feeling of most people that
blindness is the most devastating of all disabilities and that they tend to
separate themselves from it and from those who are blind. Unlike the deaf
community, blind people have always striven for integration and inclusion.
NFB wants the fewest accomodations possible in the physical environment
because, they assert that blind people are just like everyone else. But this
theme is evident throughout the blind community. So even though blind people
have been trying to change the attitudes of sighted people toward them for
years and years unsuccessfully, blind people cannot accept that the
attitudes of sighted people, with or without disabilities, toward them, are
what they are.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounces@octothorp.org
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounces@octothorp.org] On Behalf Of Claude Everett
Sent: Tuesday, August 06, 2013 8:52 PM
To: 'Blind Democracy Discussion List'
Subject: RE: Pioneers in the fight for disability rights__The League of the
Physically Handicapped
Desire of Power, Insensitivity and greed!!
Claude Everett
"First of all: what is work?
Work is of two kinds:
first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface
relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so.
The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and
highly paid."
From The collection of essays "In Praise of Idleness" by Bertrand Russell
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounces@octothorp.org
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounces@octothorp.org] On Behalf Of Miriam Vieni
Sent: Tuesday, August 06, 2013 3:52 PM
To: 'Blind Democracy Discussion List'
Subject: RE: Pioneers in the fight for disability rights__The League of the
Physically Handicapped
Every disabled group has its own specific needs. I don't think that that is
the reason. I think it is a much deeper and less palatable reason.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounces@octothorp.org
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounces@octothorp.org] On Behalf Of ted chittenden
Sent: Tuesday, August 06, 2013 5:49 PM
To: Blind Democracy Discussion List
Subject: RE: Pioneers in the fight for disability rights__The League of the
Physically Handicapped
Blind people make up a very small part of the disability population, and
many of the things they/we need to be independent are very different from
the types of things needed by other disabilities, most notably the deaf and
paraplegics and quadraplegics. Probably the biggest difference between the
blind, especially the totally blind, and the other disabilities in terms of
their needs is the need to learn how to replace the printed word. This is
something that no other disability group has to deal with, and most of the
centers for independent living (CILs) do not have the means or the financing
to train blind people how to read again.
--
Ted Chittenden
Every story has at least two sides if not more.
---- Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
This is a really fascinating article. Aside from the interesting history, I
had a few random thoughts in response to it. FDR was disabled, but made sure
that the public didn't identify him as such or with other disabled people.
Barack Obama is black and although he can't hide this fact as FDR could
disguise his disability, Obama makes sure that the public does not identify
him with the underclass of black Americans. Now-a-days, disabled is the
good word that replaces handicapped. But "handicapped" was the word of
choice back in 1935.
And although later in the article, blind people are mentioned as walking arm
in arm with deaf people in a demonstration, it is clear in most of the
article that the term, "the disabled" did not include blind people. Blind
people are almost always set apart, either by their own choice or by the
choice of others. This was what struck me about Andrew Solomon's book, Far
From The Tree. He wrote about all these complicated relationships between
parents and their children who are different from them, in many cases,
children with various disabilities. But he managed to omit blindness
although he mentioned one blind woman in passing. It bothered me so much
that I finally sought out his website and wrote to him about it. He was kind
enough to answer me, but I find his non reason for omitting blindness to be
strange. This is what he said.
Dear Miriam,
I originally wanted to do so, but lost my way at a certain point and wasn't
able to. I think it's a fascinating topic. Should I have the chance to
write about it, I'll be sure to be in touch with you. Thanks for your kind
words about what I've done; I wish I could write five more volumes dealing
with dozens of conditions!
Warmest,
Andrew
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounces@octothorp.org
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounces@octothorp.org] On Behalf Of Claude Everett
Sent: Tuesday, August 06, 2013 4:07 PM
To: 'Blind Democracy Discussion List'
Subject: Pioneers in the fight for disability rights__The League of the
Physically Handicapped
.....Social Movements.History.
Pioneers in the fight for disability rights
By Keith Rosenthal
Issue #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.
In the days following, while the eleven awaited trial, protesters continued
to confront Knauth at a number of public appearances he made around the
city. Things escalated further when the trial began later that month. On the
first two days of the ten-day trial, large protests were held at the
courthouse and at the ERB office, which led to yet more arrests. Inside the
courtroom, things were just as tumultuous, with the defendants and their
supporters generally creating a ruckus, shouting slogans, and making
speeches.
By this time, the coverage of the struggle by the local media had morphed
from a sort of mild, if not bewildered, contempt into outright bigotry. The
newspapers and ERB officials began derisively referring to the defendants as
"the Communist cripples." On the one hand, it was argued that the disabled
activists were mere helpless dupes being used by the CP for "dramatic
effect." On the other hand, they were portrayed as sly manipulators who were
"taking advantage of their physical disabilities" in order to further their
irrational cause. In all cases they were presented as pathetic and
inferior.7
The day after the initial police raid, the New York Herald Tribune smugly
reported "the crippled picketers screamed hysterically and fought with forty
patrolmen who did everything they could to avoid violence." A few days later
the New York Post described a protest against Knauth held at city hall in
this way: "Ten vociferous cripples and a handful of onlookers comprised a
mass meeting . . . to protest treatment of invalids on relief rolls."
For its part, the Daily Worker, the official newspaper of the CP, regularly
covered and publicized the protests in generally partisan terms. This was
not always unproblematic, however, as the articles would sometimes take a
paternalistic tone, for instance describing "helpless crippled people" being
beaten by police. Nonetheless, the Daily Worker's message was always
unambiguously one of support for the struggle.8
On June 28, the trial finally came to a close with the judge declaring all
of the defendants guilty of disorderly conduct. However, betraying his own
confused prejudice, he only sentenced the three nondisabled defendants to
serve time in jail. The upshot was that, regardless of the judge's
intentions, the eight remaining disabled defendants were now immediately
free to rejoin their comrades protesting in the streets.
Later that evening, an angry throng of protesters once again stormed the ERB
office in outrage at the court's verdict. This time a phalanx of police had
been stationed at the ready and a protracted melee ensued, ending with the
arrest of fifteen more protesters. With these final mass arrests, the
dramatic opening phase of the struggle had drawn to a close. But the
activists who had been involved were just getting started.
The occupation, the protests, the trial and its aftermath, all served to
significantly propel the group's public notoriety. They had attracted a
sizable number of adherents and supporters to their movement and had
established themselves as serious fighters. On this basis, they decided to
formally organize on a permanent basis. They adopted the name, the League of
the Physically Handicapped (LPH).
People had never before seen anything quite like the League. They completely
defied the prevailing one-dimensional image of disabled people as pitiful or
powerless. They demanded respect and equality, and in collectively fighting
back against their oppression, had come to construct a new identity for
themselves that rejected their supposed inferiority. This was reflected in
the slogans they used at protests, such as, "We don't want tin cups. We want
jobs," "We are lame but we can work," and, "Handicapped workers must live,
give us jobs."9
As one League member, Florence Haskell, later recalled, "You have to
understand 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. . . I think [the protests] not only gave us jobs, but
it gave us dignity, and a sense of, 'We are people too.'"10
During the rest of 1935 the League held regular meetings, addressed labor
union gatherings, and recruited more members. In November a new WPA office
was opened in New York City and the League immediately subjected it to fresh
rounds of picketing. They distributed leaflets that read, "In private
business the Physically Handicapped invariably are discriminated against.
They work harder for less wages.. . . 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."11
After three weeks of picketing, the League's efforts finally bore fruit. The
local director of the WPA conceded to hiring forty of its members. But the
League was not satisfied. "The [WPA] officials figured if they hired the
most active of us . . . it might kill the thing," one League member
recounted. "But instead of killing it, more handicapped came to the picket
line."12
The LPH had demonstrated that progress could be won through struggle. For
many, this discovery proved contagious. Over the course of the following
year, the WPA would be forced to give close to fifteen hundred jobs to
disabled New Yorkers.13
Drawing confidence from its local successes-and no longer content with
winning a limited number of jobs for its members-the League soon set its
sights even higher. It was now determined to directly challenge the WPA's
discriminatory federal policy itself.
By early 1936, League pickets outside of the New York WPA office explicitly
began to raise precisely this demand. Then, in May of that year, thirty-five
League members traveled to Washington, DC, in order to bring their grievance
directly to Roosevelt and the national head of the WPA, Harry Hopkins. When
League activists arrived in DC they quickly discovered that neither
Roosevelt nor Hopkins were willing to meet with them. They then decided to
employ their tried-and-true tactic and commenced a sit-in occupation of the
federal headquarters of the WPA.
The newly-elected president of the League, twenty-one-year-old Sylvia Flexer
Bassoff, explained to reporters,
Unable to get any satisfaction in New York, we resolved to come here and ask
the aid of Mr. Hopkins in providing WPA employment. They class us as
unemployables, despite the fact that our members include. . ., teachers,
chemists, . . . and others who are professionally skilled. We are going to
stay here until Mr. Hopkins does see us. Until then nothing can make us
leave." League members, she said the next day, were "sick of the humiliation
of poor jobs at best [and] often no work at all." They were tired too of
"getting the same old stock phrases that the handicapped have been getting
for years." They wanted, she said, "not sympathy-but a concrete plan to end
discrimination . . . on WPA projects"14
The occupation continued over the next foty-eight hours until Hopkins
finally relented to a meeting with the League representatives. Yet he still
remained obstinate. He defended the administration's position, maintaining
that disabled people were indeed "unemployable," and completely dismissed
the League's basic argument that disabled people were in any way being
oppressed, discriminated against, or otherwise disenfranchised as a social
group within society. The League representatives then left DC, smoldering
from the experience.
The League took the ignorance expressed by Hopkins as a sort of challenge.
It was in no small part as a result of this that the League decided to
publish an important manifesto on disability in August 1936. Titled, "Thesis
on Conditions of Physically Handicapped," copies of the document were
distributed to Roosevelt, Hopkins, the press, and the public.15
The stated purpose of the "Thesis" was to detail the reality of the
oppressive conditions faced by disabled people in the United States-their
constant "struggle for social and economic security." Moreover, it advanced
the notion that this struggle was not a consequence of their impairment, but
rather "unjust restrictions" and "unfounded prejudices"-in other words,
discriminatory policy and perception.
The "Thesis" pointed out the incongruity of the fact that the federal
government practiced affirmative action in employment with respect to
disabled veterans, yet maintained that all other disabled people were
"unemployable." Of course, the only difference between these two groups was
the source of their impairment. Thus, the government on the one hand
demonstrated that disabled people could be brought into the workforce, while
on the other hand "deterring and hindering" all those whose disabilities
were nonmilitary in origin.
Indeed, though the "Thesis" did not further expand upon this, the false
divide created by the government between disabled veterans and civilians was
extremely important. For instance, studies show that during World War I, far
more Americans were killed or injured while working in the mines of West
Virginia than while fighting abroad in Europe. During the first few years of
World War II, a similar phenomenon held, with the industrial accident rate
hitting an all-time high amidst wartime production speedups.16 This meant
that the war and its concomitant increase in the domestic rate of
exploitation of workers produced a dramatic increase in the number of
disabled Americans. Yet the types of aid extended by the government to
different groups of disabled people varied greatly according to a rigid
hierarchy of disability classifications, with war wounded at the top,
injured workers in the middle, and those born with severe disabilities at
the bottom. Of course, the whole scale shifted, too, when factoring in
considerations of race, gender, and class.
Next, the "Thesis" proceeded to detail the ramifications of the harmful bias
inherent in government work-relief policies and projects. Disabled people
generally faced one of three fates at the hands of state employment
agencies. Either they were declared "unemployable" and rejected outright;
they were given temporary jobs at "miserably low wages," which sometimes
included being sent "out as strike-breakers"; or finally they might be
placed in a dreaded sheltered workshop.
Originally, sheltered workshops developed as a sort of charitable venture in
which disabled people were employed in various nonprofit enterprises.
However, this practice soon expanded into the private and government sector
as well. These workshops were generally completely segregated, had poor
working conditions, and paid next to nothing. Then, as now, sheltered
workshops were exempted from minimum wage requirements and other labor
regulations. They used "the guise of social service," the "Thesis" argued,
while actually engaging in "shameful exploitation." In particular, the
"Thesis" pointed to those workshops run by the Red Cross under its Institute
for Crippled and Disabled as especially deserving of scorn in this area.
Beyond the issue of employment bias, the "Thesis" criticized the limited
welfare assistance, or "home relief," provided by state and government
agencies. Such aid was usually insufficient for nondisabled recipients, and
"doubly insufficient" for those with disabilities, owing to the greater
costs associated with their use of assistive technology and health care
needs. The "Thesis" pointed out that such meager relief forced many
recipients to resort to begging on the street, yet the proliferation of
antibegging ordinances-many of which were specifically directed at disabled
beggars-prevented them from undertaking even this desperate measure, on pain
of imprisonment.
Finally, the "Thesis" leveled a generalized attack on "the whole Emergency
Program and all the social legislation of the New Deal" for being
"consistently neglectful" of the needs and problems of disabled people. "As
far as the [Roosevelt] Administration was concerned," the "Thesis" charged,
"there were no such persons, there was no handicapped problem."
The "Thesis" represents one of the most important historical documents in
the disability rights movement. It was the first treatise of its kind to be
both explicitly political-even militant-in its condemnation of the
oppression of disabled people. In addition, it was a product of the efforts
of disabled people themselves, fighting to articulate their own demands and
their own needs.
Much like those who would come after them, the disability rights activists
in the League had struggled to redefine disability as a social, rather than
a medical or pathological, phenomenon. The problems faced by disabled people
in society thus required collective political action rather than personal
rehabilitation.
The publication of the "Thesis" marked the apex of the League's activity.
During the fall and winter of 1936 the League continued to protest against
WPA discrimination as well as fight to maintain the jobs they had already
won. However, in the spring of 1937, WPA offices nationwide began massive
layoffs, cutting hundreds of thousands of workers from its ranks. In
response, WPA workers across the country engaged in large strikes,
demonstrations, and marches. Once again, the CP played an outsized role in
this resistance, while the League figured prominently in various actions in
New York City.
At one massive demonstration against WPA cuts held in May in New York City,
League activists marched alongside other disabled workers at the head of a
procession numbering in the tens of thousands. The Daily Worker reported
that the "front ranks of the 9 hour long demonstration" were populated by "a
group of deaf mute and blind workers. . . . Deaf workers marched arm in arm
as escorts for the militant blind strikers."
The article further quoted a number of disabled marchers angry at pay and
job discrimination on WPA projects. One person interviewed felt that, if any
wage difference were to exist, it should be that disabled people get more
pay, not less, than their nondisabled counterparts, because their costs of
living were greater. "We are handicapped badly-and handicapped further with
the wages we get," he argued.17
In August 1937, the Workers Alliance of America-a group closely affiliated
with the CP-organized a large action in Washington, DC, in which thousands
of people descended on the Capitol lawn. The stated aim of the action was to
demand that Roosevelt stop the WPA cutbacks and reinstate the half million
WPA workers whose jobs had already been cut.
Thirty-three delegates from the League made the trip down to DC in order to
participate in the action. While there, they were also able to secure
another meeting with WPA chief, Harry Hopkins. Perhaps they held out hope
that he had been moved by their "Thesis." In fact, the meeting proved to be
just as unproductive as the previous one. The League delegates grudgingly
returned home empty-handed, though promising to "return in larger numbers
within a short time."18
As it turns out, this promise never materialized. By 1938 the League appears
to have dissolved completely. So what accounts for this sudden drop-off in
activity? It might be helpful to look at the broader context.
As discussed above, the CP exerted a strong influence on the League. The CP
in turn was influenced heavily by the foreign policy needs of the Stalinist
regime then in power in the USSR. This meant that throughout the course of
the 1930s the CP went through a number of sudden and dramatic
transformations. In particular, by the end of 1936 the CP had begun to
drastically curtail its open criticism of the Roosevelt administration. As
fascism grew in power throughout Europe, the USSR began looking for allies
among the "progressive" nations of the world. Therefore, the CP was directed
to ingratiate itself with Roosevelt in order to create a "popular front"
against fascism.
Thus, even as the CP played a key role in organizing protests against the
WPA cuts in 1937, it did so in an increasingly diffident manner. So, for
instance, the very next day following the mass mobilization on Washington,
DC, in August 1937, the Daily Worker announced in unqualified terms that the
workers had won a complete "victory" insofar as Roosevelt had delivered a
written promise to the Workers Alliance to stop any further cuts. The
original demand to reinstate the half million laid off WPA workers had
quietly disappeared overnight.19 Moreover, even this supposed "victory"
proved illusory as WPA cuts continued unabated over the next several years.
Before long, the CP would become a stalwart defender of Roosevelt against
his critics on both the political left and the right, even going so far as
to actively suppress war industry strikes and work stoppages, which the CP
deemed detrimental to the "national war effort."
While it is clear that the League was in no way controlled by the CP, League
activists nonetheless would have been affected by changes in the politics,
tactics, and arguments of those CP members around them. League activists
would have been discouraged by this latter group from continuing their
protests directed at Roosevelt; they would have been told that their narrow
fight for disability rights was now trumped in importance by the greater
fight against fascism.
The further tragedy of this whole episode was that the League's loose
connection to the CP meant that its memory and legacy were virtually erased
in the wave of anticommunist witch hunts and McCarthyite repression that
swept the nation in the 1940s and 1950s. Years later, League members would
cite the increase in redbaiting and bitter divisions over political ideology
as the source of the group's degeneration.20 Like much of the radical left
during and after the war, the League was crushed under the weight of
domestic repression on the one hand, and the political twists-and-turns of
the CP on the other. This is the primary reason for the total lack of
continuity between the League's activities of the 1930s and the new
disability rights movement that reemerged in the 1970s.
Today, the disability rights movement can pride itself on having won
important gains over the years, not the least of which was the passage of
the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990. Yet the fundamental oppression
of disabled people in this country persists, including high unemployment,
poverty, homelessness, and police brutality; the re-emergence of mass
institutionalization in prisons and nursing homes; and discriminatory laws
limiting the rights of disabled people to marry, have children, and exercise
total autonomy over their lives.
Truly, the fight for disabled people's liberation remains an urgent project
of the present. And it is for this reason that the significance of the
League of the Physically Handicapped endures.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----
1.Joseph Shapiro, No Pity: People with Disabilities Forging a New Civil
Rights Movement (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1994), Kindle edition.
2.Kim Nielsen, A Disability History of the United States (Boston: Beacon
Press, 2012), 134.
3.Paul K. Longmore, and David Goldberger, "The League of the Physically
Handicapped and the Great Depression: A Case Study in the New Disability
History," The Journal of American History, Vol. 87, No. 3 (Dec., 2000), 888.
4.Ibid., 899.
5.Ibid., 901-902.
6.Fleischer, Doris Zames, and Frieda Zames, The Disability Rights Movement:
From Charity to Confrontation (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001).
1-4.
7.Longmore, 902-903.
8.Ibid., 903-904.
9.Ibid., 904.
10.Ibid., 904-905.
11.Ibid., 905.
12.Ibid., 906.
13.Ibid.
14.Ibid., 907.
15.Ibid., 908.
16.Nielson, A Disability History of the United States, 149, 158.
17."36,000 on Projects Demonstrate Demonstrate Against Threat of WPA Cuts,"
Daily Worker, May 28, 1937, Harvard University Library microfilm.
18.Longmore, 919.
19."How Workers Alliance Forced WPA To Stop Slashing Rolls," Daily Worker,
August 27, 1937: 5, Harvard University Library microfilm.
20.Longmore, 920.
Share Facebook Twitter Google+ Tumblr Digg Reddit StumbleUpon....Issue
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Regards,
Claude Everett
"A corporation is "an ingenious device for obtaining profit without
individual responsibility."
Ambrose Bierce
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the Physically Handicapped
The Universal Blind Stereotype.
And we blind people are just as much influenced by it as are our sighted
brothers and sisters.
We Blind People are different. How can we not be, when the world at large
runs on eyesight?
But we do not need to be "Separate but Equal.
We can be "Differently Equal".
Here, in my remote rural world, my neighbors all know that I am blind. But
they interact with me as an equal. We talk shop, dream dreams, worry about
the same things and help one another in times of need. Of course they can't
help but know that I'm blind. Just as I can't help but notice that most of
them are much younger than I am, or that some of them are female and others
are male. Some have deep Faith, and others have none. None of them are
what we would call Conservative, but some are more frugal than others. In
short, we are all different, and yet we are all the same.
But when I go out into the world, I am not so well known. People are not
familiar with Carl Jarvis, but they do know lots of misconceptions about
"The Blind Man".
We are forced to spend far too little time with our clients to ever hope to
change their attitudes toward blindness, but we have no other choice but to
keep plugging away.
The day will probably never come when we blind people are truly integrated
into our larger society, but that is no reason to give up hope.
Carl Jarvis
----- Original Message -----
From: "Miriam Vieni" <miriamvieni@optonline.net>
To: <ceverett@dslextreme.com>; "'Blind Democracy Discussion List'"
<blind-democracy@octothorp.org>
Sent: Wednesday, August 07, 2013 6:23 AM
Subject: RE: Pioneers in the fight for disability rights__The League of the
Physically Handicapped
Actually, I think it has to do with the feeling of most people that
blindness is the most devastating of all disabilities and that they tend to
separate themselves from it and from those who are blind. Unlike the deaf
community, blind people have always striven for integration and inclusion.
NFB wants the fewest accomodations possible in the physical environment
because, they assert that blind people are just like everyone else. But this
theme is evident throughout the blind community. So even though blind people
have been trying to change the attitudes of sighted people toward them for
years and years unsuccessfully, blind people cannot accept that the
attitudes of sighted people, with or without disabilities, toward them, are
what they are.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounces@octothorp.org
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounces@octothorp.org] On Behalf Of Claude Everett
Sent: Tuesday, August 06, 2013 8:52 PM
To: 'Blind Democracy Discussion List'
Subject: RE: Pioneers in the fight for disability rights__The League of the
Physically Handicapped
Desire of Power, Insensitivity and greed!!
Claude Everett
"First of all: what is work?
Work is of two kinds:
first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface
relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so.
The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and
highly paid."
From The collection of essays "In Praise of Idleness" by Bertrand Russell
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounces@octothorp.org
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounces@octothorp.org] On Behalf Of Miriam Vieni
Sent: Tuesday, August 06, 2013 3:52 PM
To: 'Blind Democracy Discussion List'
Subject: RE: Pioneers in the fight for disability rights__The League of the
Physically Handicapped
Every disabled group has its own specific needs. I don't think that that is
the reason. I think it is a much deeper and less palatable reason.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounces@octothorp.org
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounces@octothorp.org] On Behalf Of ted chittenden
Sent: Tuesday, August 06, 2013 5:49 PM
To: Blind Democracy Discussion List
Subject: RE: Pioneers in the fight for disability rights__The League of the
Physically Handicapped
Blind people make up a very small part of the disability population, and
many of the things they/we need to be independent are very different from
the types of things needed by other disabilities, most notably the deaf and
paraplegics and quadraplegics. Probably the biggest difference between the
blind, especially the totally blind, and the other disabilities in terms of
their needs is the need to learn how to replace the printed word. This is
something that no other disability group has to deal with, and most of the
centers for independent living (CILs) do not have the means or the financing
to train blind people how to read again.
--
Ted Chittenden
Every story has at least two sides if not more.
---- Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
This is a really fascinating article. Aside from the interesting history, I
had a few random thoughts in response to it. FDR was disabled, but made sure
that the public didn't identify him as such or with other disabled people.
Barack Obama is black and although he can't hide this fact as FDR could
disguise his disability, Obama makes sure that the public does not identify
him with the underclass of black Americans. Now-a-days, disabled is the
good word that replaces handicapped. But "handicapped" was the word of
choice back in 1935.
And although later in the article, blind people are mentioned as walking arm
in arm with deaf people in a demonstration, it is clear in most of the
article that the term, "the disabled" did not include blind people. Blind
people are almost always set apart, either by their own choice or by the
choice of others. This was what struck me about Andrew Solomon's book, Far
From The Tree. He wrote about all these complicated relationships between
parents and their children who are different from them, in many cases,
children with various disabilities. But he managed to omit blindness
although he mentioned one blind woman in passing. It bothered me so much
that I finally sought out his website and wrote to him about it. He was kind
enough to answer me, but I find his non reason for omitting blindness to be
strange. This is what he said.
Dear Miriam,
I originally wanted to do so, but lost my way at a certain point and wasn't
able to. I think it's a fascinating topic. Should I have the chance to
write about it, I'll be sure to be in touch with you. Thanks for your kind
words about what I've done; I wish I could write five more volumes dealing
with dozens of conditions!
Warmest,
Andrew
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounces@octothorp.org
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounces@octothorp.org] On Behalf Of Claude Everett
Sent: Tuesday, August 06, 2013 4:07 PM
To: 'Blind Democracy Discussion List'
Subject: Pioneers in the fight for disability rights__The League of the
Physically Handicapped
.....Social Movements.History.
Pioneers in the fight for disability rights
By Keith Rosenthal
Issue #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.
In the days following, while the eleven awaited trial, protesters continued
to confront Knauth at a number of public appearances he made around the
city. Things escalated further when the trial began later that month. On the
first two days of the ten-day trial, large protests were held at the
courthouse and at the ERB office, which led to yet more arrests. Inside the
courtroom, things were just as tumultuous, with the defendants and their
supporters generally creating a ruckus, shouting slogans, and making
speeches.
By this time, the coverage of the struggle by the local media had morphed
from a sort of mild, if not bewildered, contempt into outright bigotry. The
newspapers and ERB officials began derisively referring to the defendants as
"the Communist cripples." On the one hand, it was argued that the disabled
activists were mere helpless dupes being used by the CP for "dramatic
effect." On the other hand, they were portrayed as sly manipulators who were
"taking advantage of their physical disabilities" in order to further their
irrational cause. In all cases they were presented as pathetic and
inferior.7
The day after the initial police raid, the New York Herald Tribune smugly
reported "the crippled picketers screamed hysterically and fought with forty
patrolmen who did everything they could to avoid violence." A few days later
the New York Post described a protest against Knauth held at city hall in
this way: "Ten vociferous cripples and a handful of onlookers comprised a
mass meeting . . . to protest treatment of invalids on relief rolls."
For its part, the Daily Worker, the official newspaper of the CP, regularly
covered and publicized the protests in generally partisan terms. This was
not always unproblematic, however, as the articles would sometimes take a
paternalistic tone, for instance describing "helpless crippled people" being
beaten by police. Nonetheless, the Daily Worker's message was always
unambiguously one of support for the struggle.8
On June 28, the trial finally came to a close with the judge declaring all
of the defendants guilty of disorderly conduct. However, betraying his own
confused prejudice, he only sentenced the three nondisabled defendants to
serve time in jail. The upshot was that, regardless of the judge's
intentions, the eight remaining disabled defendants were now immediately
free to rejoin their comrades protesting in the streets.
Later that evening, an angry throng of protesters once again stormed the ERB
office in outrage at the court's verdict. This time a phalanx of police had
been stationed at the ready and a protracted melee ensued, ending with the
arrest of fifteen more protesters. With these final mass arrests, the
dramatic opening phase of the struggle had drawn to a close. But the
activists who had been involved were just getting started.
The occupation, the protests, the trial and its aftermath, all served to
significantly propel the group's public notoriety. They had attracted a
sizable number of adherents and supporters to their movement and had
established themselves as serious fighters. On this basis, they decided to
formally organize on a permanent basis. They adopted the name, the League of
the Physically Handicapped (LPH).
People had never before seen anything quite like the League. They completely
defied the prevailing one-dimensional image of disabled people as pitiful or
powerless. They demanded respect and equality, and in collectively fighting
back against their oppression, had come to construct a new identity for
themselves that rejected their supposed inferiority. This was reflected in
the slogans they used at protests, such as, "We don't want tin cups. We want
jobs," "We are lame but we can work," and, "Handicapped workers must live,
give us jobs."9
As one League member, Florence Haskell, later recalled, "You have to
understand 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. . . I think [the protests] not only gave us jobs, but
it gave us dignity, and a sense of, 'We are people too.'"10
During the rest of 1935 the League held regular meetings, addressed labor
union gatherings, and recruited more members. In November a new WPA office
was opened in New York City and the League immediately subjected it to fresh
rounds of picketing. They distributed leaflets that read, "In private
business the Physically Handicapped invariably are discriminated against.
They work harder for less wages.. . . 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."11
After three weeks of picketing, the League's efforts finally bore fruit. The
local director of the WPA conceded to hiring forty of its members. But the
League was not satisfied. "The [WPA] officials figured if they hired the
most active of us . . . it might kill the thing," one League member
recounted. "But instead of killing it, more handicapped came to the picket
line."12
The LPH had demonstrated that progress could be won through struggle. For
many, this discovery proved contagious. Over the course of the following
year, the WPA would be forced to give close to fifteen hundred jobs to
disabled New Yorkers.13
Drawing confidence from its local successes-and no longer content with
winning a limited number of jobs for its members-the League soon set its
sights even higher. It was now determined to directly challenge the WPA's
discriminatory federal policy itself.
By early 1936, League pickets outside of the New York WPA office explicitly
began to raise precisely this demand. Then, in May of that year, thirty-five
League members traveled to Washington, DC, in order to bring their grievance
directly to Roosevelt and the national head of the WPA, Harry Hopkins. When
League activists arrived in DC they quickly discovered that neither
Roosevelt nor Hopkins were willing to meet with them. They then decided to
employ their tried-and-true tactic and commenced a sit-in occupation of the
federal headquarters of the WPA.
The newly-elected president of the League, twenty-one-year-old Sylvia Flexer
Bassoff, explained to reporters,
Unable to get any satisfaction in New York, we resolved to come here and ask
the aid of Mr. Hopkins in providing WPA employment. They class us as
unemployables, despite the fact that our members include. . ., teachers,
chemists, . . . and others who are professionally skilled. We are going to
stay here until Mr. Hopkins does see us. Until then nothing can make us
leave." League members, she said the next day, were "sick of the humiliation
of poor jobs at best [and] often no work at all." They were tired too of
"getting the same old stock phrases that the handicapped have been getting
for years." They wanted, she said, "not sympathy-but a concrete plan to end
discrimination . . . on WPA projects"14
The occupation continued over the next foty-eight hours until Hopkins
finally relented to a meeting with the League representatives. Yet he still
remained obstinate. He defended the administration's position, maintaining
that disabled people were indeed "unemployable," and completely dismissed
the League's basic argument that disabled people were in any way being
oppressed, discriminated against, or otherwise disenfranchised as a social
group within society. The League representatives then left DC, smoldering
from the experience.
The League took the ignorance expressed by Hopkins as a sort of challenge.
It was in no small part as a result of this that the League decided to
publish an important manifesto on disability in August 1936. Titled, "Thesis
on Conditions of Physically Handicapped," copies of the document were
distributed to Roosevelt, Hopkins, the press, and the public.15
The stated purpose of the "Thesis" was to detail the reality of the
oppressive conditions faced by disabled people in the United States-their
constant "struggle for social and economic security." Moreover, it advanced
the notion that this struggle was not a consequence of their impairment, but
rather "unjust restrictions" and "unfounded prejudices"-in other words,
discriminatory policy and perception.
The "Thesis" pointed out the incongruity of the fact that the federal
government practiced affirmative action in employment with respect to
disabled veterans, yet maintained that all other disabled people were
"unemployable." Of course, the only difference between these two groups was
the source of their impairment. Thus, the government on the one hand
demonstrated that disabled people could be brought into the workforce, while
on the other hand "deterring and hindering" all those whose disabilities
were nonmilitary in origin.
Indeed, though the "Thesis" did not further expand upon this, the false
divide created by the government between disabled veterans and civilians was
extremely important. For instance, studies show that during World War I, far
more Americans were killed or injured while working in the mines of West
Virginia than while fighting abroad in Europe. During the first few years of
World War II, a similar phenomenon held, with the industrial accident rate
hitting an all-time high amidst wartime production speedups.16 This meant
that the war and its concomitant increase in the domestic rate of
exploitation of workers produced a dramatic increase in the number of
disabled Americans. Yet the types of aid extended by the government to
different groups of disabled people varied greatly according to a rigid
hierarchy of disability classifications, with war wounded at the top,
injured workers in the middle, and those born with severe disabilities at
the bottom. Of course, the whole scale shifted, too, when factoring in
considerations of race, gender, and class.
Next, the "Thesis" proceeded to detail the ramifications of the harmful bias
inherent in government work-relief policies and projects. Disabled people
generally faced one of three fates at the hands of state employment
agencies. Either they were declared "unemployable" and rejected outright;
they were given temporary jobs at "miserably low wages," which sometimes
included being sent "out as strike-breakers"; or finally they might be
placed in a dreaded sheltered workshop.
Originally, sheltered workshops developed as a sort of charitable venture in
which disabled people were employed in various nonprofit enterprises.
However, this practice soon expanded into the private and government sector
as well. These workshops were generally completely segregated, had poor
working conditions, and paid next to nothing. Then, as now, sheltered
workshops were exempted from minimum wage requirements and other labor
regulations. They used "the guise of social service," the "Thesis" argued,
while actually engaging in "shameful exploitation." In particular, the
"Thesis" pointed to those workshops run by the Red Cross under its Institute
for Crippled and Disabled as especially deserving of scorn in this area.
Beyond the issue of employment bias, the "Thesis" criticized the limited
welfare assistance, or "home relief," provided by state and government
agencies. Such aid was usually insufficient for nondisabled recipients, and
"doubly insufficient" for those with disabilities, owing to the greater
costs associated with their use of assistive technology and health care
needs. The "Thesis" pointed out that such meager relief forced many
recipients to resort to begging on the street, yet the proliferation of
antibegging ordinances-many of which were specifically directed at disabled
beggars-prevented them from undertaking even this desperate measure, on pain
of imprisonment.
Finally, the "Thesis" leveled a generalized attack on "the whole Emergency
Program and all the social legislation of the New Deal" for being
"consistently neglectful" of the needs and problems of disabled people. "As
far as the [Roosevelt] Administration was concerned," the "Thesis" charged,
"there were no such persons, there was no handicapped problem."
The "Thesis" represents one of the most important historical documents in
the disability rights movement. It was the first treatise of its kind to be
both explicitly political-even militant-in its condemnation of the
oppression of disabled people. In addition, it was a product of the efforts
of disabled people themselves, fighting to articulate their own demands and
their own needs.
Much like those who would come after them, the disability rights activists
in the League had struggled to redefine disability as a social, rather than
a medical or pathological, phenomenon. The problems faced by disabled people
in society thus required collective political action rather than personal
rehabilitation.
The publication of the "Thesis" marked the apex of the League's activity.
During the fall and winter of 1936 the League continued to protest against
WPA discrimination as well as fight to maintain the jobs they had already
won. However, in the spring of 1937, WPA offices nationwide began massive
layoffs, cutting hundreds of thousands of workers from its ranks. In
response, WPA workers across the country engaged in large strikes,
demonstrations, and marches. Once again, the CP played an outsized role in
this resistance, while the League figured prominently in various actions in
New York City.
At one massive demonstration against WPA cuts held in May in New York City,
League activists marched alongside other disabled workers at the head of a
procession numbering in the tens of thousands. The Daily Worker reported
that the "front ranks of the 9 hour long demonstration" were populated by "a
group of deaf mute and blind workers. . . . Deaf workers marched arm in arm
as escorts for the militant blind strikers."
The article further quoted a number of disabled marchers angry at pay and
job discrimination on WPA projects. One person interviewed felt that, if any
wage difference were to exist, it should be that disabled people get more
pay, not less, than their nondisabled counterparts, because their costs of
living were greater. "We are handicapped badly-and handicapped further with
the wages we get," he argued.17
In August 1937, the Workers Alliance of America-a group closely affiliated
with the CP-organized a large action in Washington, DC, in which thousands
of people descended on the Capitol lawn. The stated aim of the action was to
demand that Roosevelt stop the WPA cutbacks and reinstate the half million
WPA workers whose jobs had already been cut.
Thirty-three delegates from the League made the trip down to DC in order to
participate in the action. While there, they were also able to secure
another meeting with WPA chief, Harry Hopkins. Perhaps they held out hope
that he had been moved by their "Thesis." In fact, the meeting proved to be
just as unproductive as the previous one. The League delegates grudgingly
returned home empty-handed, though promising to "return in larger numbers
within a short time."18
As it turns out, this promise never materialized. By 1938 the League appears
to have dissolved completely. So what accounts for this sudden drop-off in
activity? It might be helpful to look at the broader context.
As discussed above, the CP exerted a strong influence on the League. The CP
in turn was influenced heavily by the foreign policy needs of the Stalinist
regime then in power in the USSR. This meant that throughout the course of
the 1930s the CP went through a number of sudden and dramatic
transformations. In particular, by the end of 1936 the CP had begun to
drastically curtail its open criticism of the Roosevelt administration. As
fascism grew in power throughout Europe, the USSR began looking for allies
among the "progressive" nations of the world. Therefore, the CP was directed
to ingratiate itself with Roosevelt in order to create a "popular front"
against fascism.
Thus, even as the CP played a key role in organizing protests against the
WPA cuts in 1937, it did so in an increasingly diffident manner. So, for
instance, the very next day following the mass mobilization on Washington,
DC, in August 1937, the Daily Worker announced in unqualified terms that the
workers had won a complete "victory" insofar as Roosevelt had delivered a
written promise to the Workers Alliance to stop any further cuts. The
original demand to reinstate the half million laid off WPA workers had
quietly disappeared overnight.19 Moreover, even this supposed "victory"
proved illusory as WPA cuts continued unabated over the next several years.
Before long, the CP would become a stalwart defender of Roosevelt against
his critics on both the political left and the right, even going so far as
to actively suppress war industry strikes and work stoppages, which the CP
deemed detrimental to the "national war effort."
While it is clear that the League was in no way controlled by the CP, League
activists nonetheless would have been affected by changes in the politics,
tactics, and arguments of those CP members around them. League activists
would have been discouraged by this latter group from continuing their
protests directed at Roosevelt; they would have been told that their narrow
fight for disability rights was now trumped in importance by the greater
fight against fascism.
The further tragedy of this whole episode was that the League's loose
connection to the CP meant that its memory and legacy were virtually erased
in the wave of anticommunist witch hunts and McCarthyite repression that
swept the nation in the 1940s and 1950s. Years later, League members would
cite the increase in redbaiting and bitter divisions over political ideology
as the source of the group's degeneration.20 Like much of the radical left
during and after the war, the League was crushed under the weight of
domestic repression on the one hand, and the political twists-and-turns of
the CP on the other. This is the primary reason for the total lack of
continuity between the League's activities of the 1930s and the new
disability rights movement that reemerged in the 1970s.
Today, the disability rights movement can pride itself on having won
important gains over the years, not the least of which was the passage of
the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990. Yet the fundamental oppression
of disabled people in this country persists, including high unemployment,
poverty, homelessness, and police brutality; the re-emergence of mass
institutionalization in prisons and nursing homes; and discriminatory laws
limiting the rights of disabled people to marry, have children, and exercise
total autonomy over their lives.
Truly, the fight for disabled people's liberation remains an urgent project
of the present. And it is for this reason that the significance of the
League of the Physically Handicapped endures.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----
1.Joseph Shapiro, No Pity: People with Disabilities Forging a New Civil
Rights Movement (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1994), Kindle edition.
2.Kim Nielsen, A Disability History of the United States (Boston: Beacon
Press, 2012), 134.
3.Paul K. Longmore, and David Goldberger, "The League of the Physically
Handicapped and the Great Depression: A Case Study in the New Disability
History," The Journal of American History, Vol. 87, No. 3 (Dec., 2000), 888.
4.Ibid., 899.
5.Ibid., 901-902.
6.Fleischer, Doris Zames, and Frieda Zames, The Disability Rights Movement:
From Charity to Confrontation (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001).
1-4.
7.Longmore, 902-903.
8.Ibid., 903-904.
9.Ibid., 904.
10.Ibid., 904-905.
11.Ibid., 905.
12.Ibid., 906.
13.Ibid.
14.Ibid., 907.
15.Ibid., 908.
16.Nielson, A Disability History of the United States, 149, 158.
17."36,000 on Projects Demonstrate Demonstrate Against Threat of WPA Cuts,"
Daily Worker, May 28, 1937, Harvard University Library microfilm.
18.Longmore, 919.
19."How Workers Alliance Forced WPA To Stop Slashing Rolls," Daily Worker,
August 27, 1937: 5, Harvard University Library microfilm.
20.Longmore, 920.
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Pioneers in the fight for disability rights__The League of the Physically Handicapped
Subject: Re: Pioneers in the fight for disability rights__The League of the
Physically Handicapped
Miriam,
Well, we do need to educate the sighted world...as soon as we've come to
grips with reality.
Your points are well taken. As I said earlier, "Differently Equal", but not
independent as if we were sighted.
Having lived both as a single blind parent, and as a blind man in an
integrated marriage, I can totally agree with those accommodations we too
often take for granted.
Sure, as a single blind dad, I got along pretty well. But I did need
certain accommodations in running a household. I had no scanner to read my
bills, nor any of today's fine equipment that would allow me to pay my bills
on-line.
And how do you know if your children slopped gooey stuff on the carpet or
smears on the walls unless someone said, "Ugh!"?
Life got so much easier when Cathy drove into our lives.
Carl Jarvis
----- Original Message -----
From: "Miriam Vieni" <miriamvieni@optonline.net>
To: "'Blind Democracy Discussion List'" <blind-democracy@octothorp.org>
Sent: Wednesday, August 07, 2013 8:21 AM
Subject: RE: Pioneers in the fight for disability rights__The League of the
Physically Handicapped
And the fact is that those sighted people could not function if they lost
their sight. They are absolutely correct. They would have to receive
training and they would have to be capable of benefiting from the training.
And after the training was completed, they would need to arrange their
living environments in such a way that they could function comfortably in
them. They'd need tactile markings. They would need a way to identify colors
of clothing. In the old days, tags that were sewn onto clothing that had
colors written on them, now, computarized devices. They would need
accessible appliances or a way to make the appliances accessible. They would
need to train their sighted friends, relatives, etc. not to move things
around in their homes without informing them of what they were doing. They
would need to find transportation and assistance with shopping, and
assistance with choosing appropriate clothing. I could go on and on. The
importance of our familiarity with our environment and the accomodations
that have been made for us in that environment were made very clear to me
when I used to go on trips arranged for blind people. Take a group of very
competent blind people and drop them into a completely unfamiliar
environment, perhaps in a foreign country for a week, and it quickly becomes
evident how much assistance they require. We are so busy defending ourselves
against sighted people's definition of us as incapable beings, that we tend
to completely deny the real limitations that blindness imposes. And if one
of us dares to voice this, another one of us immediately talks about how we
can and should educate sighted people, as if that will negate the truth.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounces@octothorp.org
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounces@octothorp.org] On Behalf Of ted chittenden
Sent: Wednesday, August 07, 2013 10:12 AM
To: Blind Democracy Discussion List
Subject: RE: Pioneers in the fight for disability rights__The League of the
Physically Handicapped
Blindness scares sighted people because of the reliance that sighted people
have on their eyes not only for doing things but also for judging other
people. Many sighted people cannot conceive that it is even remotely
possible to perform many of the tasks they do without sight (in fact, this
view of the blind might save some blind services from the Tea Party types
who are otherwise out to destroy government services of any kind, but I
digress).
Unfortunately, the NFB's view of the matter, though 180 degrees from that of
the sighted, can be just as destructive. Training a blind person to believe
that he/she can do everything that a sighted person can do without
assistance not only raises the expectations of blind people beyond the realm
of reality, it also turns off many sighted people who would otherwise might
be willing to offer needed assistance.
We have discussed this topic previously, but I can recall attending NFB
state and national conventions where the focus would be on total
independence for blind people while noting many blind people there receiving
assistance in one form or another. I think that Carl Jarvis got it right in
a previous post when he said that the ultimate goal should be the ability to
interdependently coexist with our sighted colleagues, being willing to
accept assistance when it is needed and being able to (nicely) tell our
sighted friends and relations when it is not.
--
Ted Chittenden
Every story has at least two sides if not more.
---- Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
Actually, I think it has to do with the feeling of most people that
blindness is the most devastating of all disabilities and that they tend to
separate themselves from it and from those who are blind. Unlike the deaf
community, blind people have always striven for integration and inclusion.
NFB wants the fewest accomodations possible in the physical environment
because, they assert that blind people are just like everyone else. But this
theme is evident throughout the blind community. So even though blind people
have been trying to change the attitudes of sighted people toward them for
years and years unsuccessfully, blind people cannot accept that the
attitudes of sighted people, with or without disabilities, toward them, are
what they are.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounces@octothorp.org
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounces@octothorp.org] On Behalf Of Claude Everett
Sent: Tuesday, August 06, 2013 8:52 PM
To: 'Blind Democracy Discussion List'
Subject: RE: Pioneers in the fight for disability rights__The League of the
Physically Handicapped
Desire of Power, Insensitivity and greed!!
Claude Everett
"First of all: what is work?
Work is of two kinds:
first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface
relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so.
The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and
highly paid."
From The collection of essays "In Praise of Idleness" by Bertrand Russell
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounces@octothorp.org
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounces@octothorp.org] On Behalf Of Miriam Vieni
Sent: Tuesday, August 06, 2013 3:52 PM
To: 'Blind Democracy Discussion List'
Subject: RE: Pioneers in the fight for disability rights__The League of the
Physically Handicapped
Every disabled group has its own specific needs. I don't think that that is
the reason. I think it is a much deeper and less palatable reason.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounces@octothorp.org
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounces@octothorp.org] On Behalf Of ted chittenden
Sent: Tuesday, August 06, 2013 5:49 PM
To: Blind Democracy Discussion List
Subject: RE: Pioneers in the fight for disability rights__The League of the
Physically Handicapped
Blind people make up a very small part of the disability population, and
many of the things they/we need to be independent are very different from
the types of things needed by other disabilities, most notably the deaf and
paraplegics and quadraplegics. Probably the biggest difference between the
blind, especially the totally blind, and the other disabilities in terms of
their needs is the need to learn how to replace the printed word. This is
something that no other disability group has to deal with, and most of the
centers for independent living (CILs) do not have the means or the financing
to train blind people how to read again.
--
Ted Chittenden
Every story has at least two sides if not more.
---- Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
This is a really fascinating article. Aside from the interesting history, I
had a few random thoughts in response to it. FDR was disabled, but made sure
that the public didn't identify him as such or with other disabled people.
Barack Obama is black and although he can't hide this fact as FDR could
disguise his disability, Obama makes sure that the public does not identify
him with the underclass of black Americans. Now-a-days, disabled is the
good word that replaces handicapped. But "handicapped" was the word of
choice back in 1935.
And although later in the article, blind people are mentioned as walking arm
in arm with deaf people in a demonstration, it is clear in most of the
article that the term, "the disabled" did not include blind people. Blind
people are almost always set apart, either by their own choice or by the
choice of others. This was what struck me about Andrew Solomon's book, Far
From The Tree. He wrote about all these complicated relationships between
parents and their children who are different from them, in many cases,
children with various disabilities. But he managed to omit blindness
although he mentioned one blind woman in passing. It bothered me so much
that I finally sought out his website and wrote to him about it. He was kind
enough to answer me, but I find his non reason for omitting blindness to be
strange. This is what he said.
Dear Miriam,
I originally wanted to do so, but lost my way at a certain point and wasn't
able to. I think it's a fascinating topic. Should I have the chance to
write about it, I'll be sure to be in touch with you. Thanks for your kind
words about what I've done; I wish I could write five more volumes dealing
with dozens of conditions!
Warmest,
Andrew
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounces@octothorp.org
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounces@octothorp.org] On Behalf Of Claude Everett
Sent: Tuesday, August 06, 2013 4:07 PM
To: 'Blind Democracy Discussion List'
Subject: Pioneers in the fight for disability rights__The League of the
Physically Handicapped
.....Social Movements.History.
Pioneers in the fight for disability rights
By Keith Rosenthal
Issue #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.
In the days following, while the eleven awaited trial, protesters continued
to confront Knauth at a number of public appearances he made around the
city. Things escalated further when the trial began later that month. On the
first two days of the ten-day trial, large protests were held at the
courthouse and at the ERB office, which led to yet more arrests. Inside the
courtroom, things were just as tumultuous, with the defendants and their
supporters generally creating a ruckus, shouting slogans, and making
speeches.
By this time, the coverage of the struggle by the local media had morphed
from a sort of mild, if not bewildered, contempt into outright bigotry. The
newspapers and ERB officials began derisively referring to the defendants as
"the Communist cripples." On the one hand, it was argued that the disabled
activists were mere helpless dupes being used by the CP for "dramatic
effect." On the other hand, they were portrayed as sly manipulators who were
"taking advantage of their physical disabilities" in order to further their
irrational cause. In all cases they were presented as pathetic and
inferior.7
The day after the initial police raid, the New York Herald Tribune smugly
reported "the crippled picketers screamed hysterically and fought with forty
patrolmen who did everything they could to avoid violence." A few days later
the New York Post described a protest against Knauth held at city hall in
this way: "Ten vociferous cripples and a handful of onlookers comprised a
mass meeting . . . to protest treatment of invalids on relief rolls."
For its part, the Daily Worker, the official newspaper of the CP, regularly
covered and publicized the protests in generally partisan terms. This was
not always unproblematic, however, as the articles would sometimes take a
paternalistic tone, for instance describing "helpless crippled people" being
beaten by police. Nonetheless, the Daily Worker's message was always
unambiguously one of support for the struggle.8
On June 28, the trial finally came to a close with the judge declaring all
of the defendants guilty of disorderly conduct. However, betraying his own
confused prejudice, he only sentenced the three nondisabled defendants to
serve time in jail. The upshot was that, regardless of the judge's
intentions, the eight remaining disabled defendants were now immediately
free to rejoin their comrades protesting in the streets.
Later that evening, an angry throng of protesters once again stormed the ERB
office in outrage at the court's verdict. This time a phalanx of police had
been stationed at the ready and a protracted melee ensued, ending with the
arrest of fifteen more protesters. With these final mass arrests, the
dramatic opening phase of the struggle had drawn to a close. But the
activists who had been involved were just getting started.
The occupation, the protests, the trial and its aftermath, all served to
significantly propel the group's public notoriety. They had attracted a
sizable number of adherents and supporters to their movement and had
established themselves as serious fighters. On this basis, they decided to
formally organize on a permanent basis. They adopted the name, the League of
the Physically Handicapped (LPH).
People had never before seen anything quite like the League. They completely
defied the prevailing one-dimensional image of disabled people as pitiful or
powerless. They demanded respect and equality, and in collectively fighting
back against their oppression, had come to construct a new identity for
themselves that rejected their supposed inferiority. This was reflected in
the slogans they used at protests, such as, "We don't want tin cups. We want
jobs," "We are lame but we can work," and, "Handicapped workers must live,
give us jobs."9
As one League member, Florence Haskell, later recalled, "You have to
understand 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. . . I think [the protests] not only gave us jobs, but
it gave us dignity, and a sense of, 'We are people too.'"10
During the rest of 1935 the League held regular meetings, addressed labor
union gatherings, and recruited more members. In November a new WPA office
was opened in New York City and the League immediately subjected it to fresh
rounds of picketing. They distributed leaflets that read, "In private
business the Physically Handicapped invariably are discriminated against.
They work harder for less wages.. . . 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."11
After three weeks of picketing, the League's efforts finally bore fruit. The
local director of the WPA conceded to hiring forty of its members. But the
League was not satisfied. "The [WPA] officials figured if they hired the
most active of us . . . it might kill the thing," one League member
recounted. "But instead of killing it, more handicapped came to the picket
line."12
The LPH had demonstrated that progress could be won through struggle. For
many, this discovery proved contagious. Over the course of the following
year, the WPA would be forced to give close to fifteen hundred jobs to
disabled New Yorkers.13
Drawing confidence from its local successes-and no longer content with
winning a limited number of jobs for its members-the League soon set its
sights even higher. It was now determined to directly challenge the WPA's
discriminatory federal policy itself.
By early 1936, League pickets outside of the New York WPA office explicitly
began to raise precisely this demand. Then, in May of that year, thirty-five
League members traveled to Washington, DC, in order to bring their grievance
directly to Roosevelt and the national head of the WPA, Harry Hopkins. When
League activists arrived in DC they quickly discovered that neither
Roosevelt nor Hopkins were willing to meet with them. They then decided to
employ their tried-and-true tactic and commenced a sit-in occupation of the
federal headquarters of the WPA.
The newly-elected president of the League, twenty-one-year-old Sylvia Flexer
Bassoff, explained to reporters,
Unable to get any satisfaction in New York, we resolved to come here and ask
the aid of Mr. Hopkins in providing WPA employment. They class us as
unemployables, despite the fact that our members include. . ., teachers,
chemists, . . . and others who are professionally skilled. We are going to
stay here until Mr. Hopkins does see us. Until then nothing can make us
leave." League members, she said the next day, were "sick of the humiliation
of poor jobs at best [and] often no work at all." They were tired too of
"getting the same old stock phrases that the handicapped have been getting
for years." They wanted, she said, "not sympathy-but a concrete plan to end
discrimination . . . on WPA projects"14
The occupation continued over the next foty-eight hours until Hopkins
finally relented to a meeting with the League representatives. Yet he still
remained obstinate. He defended the administration's position, maintaining
that disabled people were indeed "unemployable," and completely dismissed
the League's basic argument that disabled people were in any way being
oppressed, discriminated against, or otherwise disenfranchised as a social
group within society. The League representatives then left DC, smoldering
from the experience.
The League took the ignorance expressed by Hopkins as a sort of challenge.
It was in no small part as a result of this that the League decided to
publish an important manifesto on disability in August 1936. Titled, "Thesis
on Conditions of Physically Handicapped," copies of the document were
distributed to Roosevelt, Hopkins, the press, and the public.15
The stated purpose of the "Thesis" was to detail the reality of the
oppressive conditions faced by disabled people in the United States-their
constant "struggle for social and economic security." Moreover, it advanced
the notion that this struggle was not a consequence of their impairment, but
rather "unjust restrictions" and "unfounded prejudices"-in other words,
discriminatory policy and perception.
The "Thesis" pointed out the incongruity of the fact that the federal
government practiced affirmative action in employment with respect to
disabled veterans, yet maintained that all other disabled people were
"unemployable." Of course, the only difference between these two groups was
the source of their impairment. Thus, the government on the one hand
demonstrated that disabled people could be brought into the workforce, while
on the other hand "deterring and hindering" all those whose disabilities
were nonmilitary in origin.
Indeed, though the "Thesis" did not further expand upon this, the false
divide created by the government between disabled veterans and civilians was
extremely important. For instance, studies show that during World War I, far
more Americans were killed or injured while working in the mines of West
Virginia than while fighting abroad in Europe. During the first few years of
World War II, a similar phenomenon held, with the industrial accident rate
hitting an all-time high amidst wartime production speedups.16 This meant
that the war and its concomitant increase in the domestic rate of
exploitation of workers produced a dramatic increase in the number of
disabled Americans. Yet the types of aid extended by the government to
different groups of disabled people varied greatly according to a rigid
hierarchy of disability classifications, with war wounded at the top,
injured workers in the middle, and those born with severe disabilities at
the bottom. Of course, the whole scale shifted, too, when factoring in
considerations of race, gender, and class.
Next, the "Thesis" proceeded to detail the ramifications of the harmful bias
inherent in government work-relief policies and projects. Disabled people
generally faced one of three fates at the hands of state employment
agencies. Either they were declared "unemployable" and rejected outright;
they were given temporary jobs at "miserably low wages," which sometimes
included being sent "out as strike-breakers"; or finally they might be
placed in a dreaded sheltered workshop.
Originally, sheltered workshops developed as a sort of charitable venture in
which disabled people were employed in various nonprofit enterprises.
However, this practice soon expanded into the private and government sector
as well. These workshops were generally completely segregated, had poor
working conditions, and paid next to nothing. Then, as now, sheltered
workshops were exempted from minimum wage requirements and other labor
regulations. They used "the guise of social service," the "Thesis" argued,
while actually engaging in "shameful exploitation." In particular, the
"Thesis" pointed to those workshops run by the Red Cross under its Institute
for Crippled and Disabled as especially deserving of scorn in this area.
Beyond the issue of employment bias, the "Thesis" criticized the limited
welfare assistance, or "home relief," provided by state and government
agencies. Such aid was usually insufficient for nondisabled recipients, and
"doubly insufficient" for those with disabilities, owing to the greater
costs associated with their use of assistive technology and health care
needs. The "Thesis" pointed out that such meager relief forced many
recipients to resort to begging on the street, yet the proliferation of
antibegging ordinances-many of which were specifically directed at disabled
beggars-prevented them from undertaking even this desperate measure, on pain
of imprisonment.
Finally, the "Thesis" leveled a generalized attack on "the whole Emergency
Program and all the social legislation of the New Deal" for being
"consistently neglectful" of the needs and problems of disabled people. "As
far as the [Roosevelt] Administration was concerned," the "Thesis" charged,
"there were no such persons, there was no handicapped problem."
The "Thesis" represents one of the most important historical documents in
the disability rights movement. It was the first treatise of its kind to be
both explicitly political-even militant-in its condemnation of the
oppression of disabled people. In addition, it was a product of the efforts
of disabled people themselves, fighting to articulate their own demands and
their own needs.
Much like those who would come after them, the disability rights activists
in the League had struggled to redefine disability as a social, rather than
a medical or pathological, phenomenon. The problems faced by disabled people
in society thus required collective political action rather than personal
rehabilitation.
The publication of the "Thesis" marked the apex of the League's activity.
During the fall and winter of 1936 the League continued to protest against
WPA discrimination as well as fight to maintain the jobs they had already
won. However, in the spring of 1937, WPA offices nationwide began massive
layoffs, cutting hundreds of thousands of workers from its ranks. In
response, WPA workers across the country engaged in large strikes,
demonstrations, and marches. Once again, the CP played an outsized role in
this resistance, while the League figured prominently in various actions in
New York City.
At one massive demonstration against WPA cuts held in May in New York City,
League activists marched alongside other disabled workers at the head of a
procession numbering in the tens of thousands. The Daily Worker reported
that the "front ranks of the 9 hour long demonstration" were populated by "a
group of deaf mute and blind workers. . . . Deaf workers marched arm in arm
as escorts for the militant blind strikers."
The article further quoted a number of disabled marchers angry at pay and
job discrimination on WPA projects. One person interviewed felt that, if any
wage difference were to exist, it should be that disabled people get more
pay, not less, than their nondisabled counterparts, because their costs of
living were greater. "We are handicapped badly-and handicapped further with
the wages we get," he argued.17
In August 1937, the Workers Alliance of America-a group closely affiliated
with the CP-organized a large action in Washington, DC, in which thousands
of people descended on the Capitol lawn. The stated aim of the action was to
demand that Roosevelt stop the WPA cutbacks and reinstate the half million
WPA workers whose jobs had already been cut.
Thirty-three delegates from the League made the trip down to DC in order to
participate in the action. While there, they were also able to secure
another meeting with WPA chief, Harry Hopkins. Perhaps they held out hope
that he had been moved by their "Thesis." In fact, the meeting proved to be
just as unproductive as the previous one. The League delegates grudgingly
returned home empty-handed, though promising to "return in larger numbers
within a short time."18
As it turns out, this promise never materialized. By 1938 the League appears
to have dissolved completely. So what accounts for this sudden drop-off in
activity? It might be helpful to look at the broader context.
As discussed above, the CP exerted a strong influence on the League. The CP
in turn was influenced heavily by the foreign policy needs of the Stalinist
regime then in power in the USSR. This meant that throughout the course of
the 1930s the CP went through a number of sudden and dramatic
transformations. In particular, by the end of 1936 the CP had begun to
drastically curtail its open criticism of the Roosevelt administration. As
fascism grew in power throughout Europe, the USSR began looking for allies
among the "progressive" nations of the world. Therefore, the CP was directed
to ingratiate itself with Roosevelt in order to create a "popular front"
against fascism.
Thus, even as the CP played a key role in organizing protests against the
WPA cuts in 1937, it did so in an increasingly diffident manner. So, for
instance, the very next day following the mass mobilization on Washington,
DC, in August 1937, the Daily Worker announced in unqualified terms that the
workers had won a complete "victory" insofar as Roosevelt had delivered a
written promise to the Workers Alliance to stop any further cuts. The
original demand to reinstate the half million laid off WPA workers had
quietly disappeared overnight.19 Moreover, even this supposed "victory"
proved illusory as WPA cuts continued unabated over the next several years.
Before long, the CP would become a stalwart defender of Roosevelt against
his critics on both the political left and the right, even going so far as
to actively suppress war industry strikes and work stoppages, which the CP
deemed detrimental to the "national war effort."
While it is clear that the League was in no way controlled by the CP, League
activists nonetheless would have been affected by changes in the politics,
tactics, and arguments of those CP members around them. League activists
would have been discouraged by this latter group from continuing their
protests directed at Roosevelt; they would have been told that their narrow
fight for disability rights was now trumped in importance by the greater
fight against fascism.
The further tragedy of this whole episode was that the League's loose
connection to the CP meant that its memory and legacy were virtually erased
in the wave of anticommunist witch hunts and McCarthyite repression that
swept the nation in the 1940s and 1950s. Years later, League members would
cite the increase in redbaiting and bitter divisions over political ideology
as the source of the group's degeneration.20 Like much of the radical left
during and after the war, the League was crushed under the weight of
domestic repression on the one hand, and the political twists-and-turns of
the CP on the other. This is the primary reason for the total lack of
continuity between the League's activities of the 1930s and the new
disability rights movement that reemerged in the 1970s.
Today, the disability rights movement can pride itself on having won
important gains over the years, not the least of which was the passage of
the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990. Yet the fundamental oppression
of disabled people in this country persists, including high unemployment,
poverty, homelessness, and police brutality; the re-emergence of mass
institutionalization in prisons and nursing homes; and discriminatory laws
limiting the rights of disabled people to marry, have children, and exercise
total autonomy over their lives.
Truly, the fight for disabled people's liberation remains an urgent project
of the present. And it is for this reason that the significance of the
League of the Physically Handicapped endures.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----
1.Joseph Shapiro, No Pity: People with Disabilities Forging a New Civil
Rights Movement (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1994), Kindle edition.
2.Kim Nielsen, A Disability History of the United States (Boston: Beacon
Press, 2012), 134.
3.Paul K. Longmore, and David Goldberger, "The League of the Physically
Handicapped and the Great Depression: A Case Study in the New Disability
History," The Journal of American History, Vol. 87, No. 3 (Dec., 2000), 888.
4.Ibid., 899.
5.Ibid., 901-902.
6.Fleischer, Doris Zames, and Frieda Zames, The Disability Rights Movement:
From Charity to Confrontation (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001).
1-4.
7.Longmore, 902-903.
8.Ibid., 903-904.
9.Ibid., 904.
10.Ibid., 904-905.
11.Ibid., 905.
12.Ibid., 906.
13.Ibid.
14.Ibid., 907.
15.Ibid., 908.
16.Nielson, A Disability History of the United States, 149, 158.
17."36,000 on Projects Demonstrate Demonstrate Against Threat of WPA Cuts,"
Daily Worker, May 28, 1937, Harvard University Library microfilm.
18.Longmore, 919.
19."How Workers Alliance Forced WPA To Stop Slashing Rolls," Daily Worker,
August 27, 1937: 5, Harvard University Library microfilm.
20.Longmore, 920.
Share Facebook Twitter Google+ Tumblr Digg Reddit StumbleUpon....Issue
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Regards,
Claude Everett
"A corporation is "an ingenious device for obtaining profit without
individual responsibility."
Ambrose Bierce
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Physically Handicapped
Miriam,
Well, we do need to educate the sighted world...as soon as we've come to
grips with reality.
Your points are well taken. As I said earlier, "Differently Equal", but not
independent as if we were sighted.
Having lived both as a single blind parent, and as a blind man in an
integrated marriage, I can totally agree with those accommodations we too
often take for granted.
Sure, as a single blind dad, I got along pretty well. But I did need
certain accommodations in running a household. I had no scanner to read my
bills, nor any of today's fine equipment that would allow me to pay my bills
on-line.
And how do you know if your children slopped gooey stuff on the carpet or
smears on the walls unless someone said, "Ugh!"?
Life got so much easier when Cathy drove into our lives.
Carl Jarvis
----- Original Message -----
From: "Miriam Vieni" <miriamvieni@optonline.net>
To: "'Blind Democracy Discussion List'" <blind-democracy@octothorp.org>
Sent: Wednesday, August 07, 2013 8:21 AM
Subject: RE: Pioneers in the fight for disability rights__The League of the
Physically Handicapped
And the fact is that those sighted people could not function if they lost
their sight. They are absolutely correct. They would have to receive
training and they would have to be capable of benefiting from the training.
And after the training was completed, they would need to arrange their
living environments in such a way that they could function comfortably in
them. They'd need tactile markings. They would need a way to identify colors
of clothing. In the old days, tags that were sewn onto clothing that had
colors written on them, now, computarized devices. They would need
accessible appliances or a way to make the appliances accessible. They would
need to train their sighted friends, relatives, etc. not to move things
around in their homes without informing them of what they were doing. They
would need to find transportation and assistance with shopping, and
assistance with choosing appropriate clothing. I could go on and on. The
importance of our familiarity with our environment and the accomodations
that have been made for us in that environment were made very clear to me
when I used to go on trips arranged for blind people. Take a group of very
competent blind people and drop them into a completely unfamiliar
environment, perhaps in a foreign country for a week, and it quickly becomes
evident how much assistance they require. We are so busy defending ourselves
against sighted people's definition of us as incapable beings, that we tend
to completely deny the real limitations that blindness imposes. And if one
of us dares to voice this, another one of us immediately talks about how we
can and should educate sighted people, as if that will negate the truth.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounces@octothorp.org
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounces@octothorp.org] On Behalf Of ted chittenden
Sent: Wednesday, August 07, 2013 10:12 AM
To: Blind Democracy Discussion List
Subject: RE: Pioneers in the fight for disability rights__The League of the
Physically Handicapped
Blindness scares sighted people because of the reliance that sighted people
have on their eyes not only for doing things but also for judging other
people. Many sighted people cannot conceive that it is even remotely
possible to perform many of the tasks they do without sight (in fact, this
view of the blind might save some blind services from the Tea Party types
who are otherwise out to destroy government services of any kind, but I
digress).
Unfortunately, the NFB's view of the matter, though 180 degrees from that of
the sighted, can be just as destructive. Training a blind person to believe
that he/she can do everything that a sighted person can do without
assistance not only raises the expectations of blind people beyond the realm
of reality, it also turns off many sighted people who would otherwise might
be willing to offer needed assistance.
We have discussed this topic previously, but I can recall attending NFB
state and national conventions where the focus would be on total
independence for blind people while noting many blind people there receiving
assistance in one form or another. I think that Carl Jarvis got it right in
a previous post when he said that the ultimate goal should be the ability to
interdependently coexist with our sighted colleagues, being willing to
accept assistance when it is needed and being able to (nicely) tell our
sighted friends and relations when it is not.
--
Ted Chittenden
Every story has at least two sides if not more.
---- Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
Actually, I think it has to do with the feeling of most people that
blindness is the most devastating of all disabilities and that they tend to
separate themselves from it and from those who are blind. Unlike the deaf
community, blind people have always striven for integration and inclusion.
NFB wants the fewest accomodations possible in the physical environment
because, they assert that blind people are just like everyone else. But this
theme is evident throughout the blind community. So even though blind people
have been trying to change the attitudes of sighted people toward them for
years and years unsuccessfully, blind people cannot accept that the
attitudes of sighted people, with or without disabilities, toward them, are
what they are.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounces@octothorp.org
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounces@octothorp.org] On Behalf Of Claude Everett
Sent: Tuesday, August 06, 2013 8:52 PM
To: 'Blind Democracy Discussion List'
Subject: RE: Pioneers in the fight for disability rights__The League of the
Physically Handicapped
Desire of Power, Insensitivity and greed!!
Claude Everett
"First of all: what is work?
Work is of two kinds:
first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface
relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so.
The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and
highly paid."
From The collection of essays "In Praise of Idleness" by Bertrand Russell
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounces@octothorp.org
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounces@octothorp.org] On Behalf Of Miriam Vieni
Sent: Tuesday, August 06, 2013 3:52 PM
To: 'Blind Democracy Discussion List'
Subject: RE: Pioneers in the fight for disability rights__The League of the
Physically Handicapped
Every disabled group has its own specific needs. I don't think that that is
the reason. I think it is a much deeper and less palatable reason.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounces@octothorp.org
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounces@octothorp.org] On Behalf Of ted chittenden
Sent: Tuesday, August 06, 2013 5:49 PM
To: Blind Democracy Discussion List
Subject: RE: Pioneers in the fight for disability rights__The League of the
Physically Handicapped
Blind people make up a very small part of the disability population, and
many of the things they/we need to be independent are very different from
the types of things needed by other disabilities, most notably the deaf and
paraplegics and quadraplegics. Probably the biggest difference between the
blind, especially the totally blind, and the other disabilities in terms of
their needs is the need to learn how to replace the printed word. This is
something that no other disability group has to deal with, and most of the
centers for independent living (CILs) do not have the means or the financing
to train blind people how to read again.
--
Ted Chittenden
Every story has at least two sides if not more.
---- Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
This is a really fascinating article. Aside from the interesting history, I
had a few random thoughts in response to it. FDR was disabled, but made sure
that the public didn't identify him as such or with other disabled people.
Barack Obama is black and although he can't hide this fact as FDR could
disguise his disability, Obama makes sure that the public does not identify
him with the underclass of black Americans. Now-a-days, disabled is the
good word that replaces handicapped. But "handicapped" was the word of
choice back in 1935.
And although later in the article, blind people are mentioned as walking arm
in arm with deaf people in a demonstration, it is clear in most of the
article that the term, "the disabled" did not include blind people. Blind
people are almost always set apart, either by their own choice or by the
choice of others. This was what struck me about Andrew Solomon's book, Far
From The Tree. He wrote about all these complicated relationships between
parents and their children who are different from them, in many cases,
children with various disabilities. But he managed to omit blindness
although he mentioned one blind woman in passing. It bothered me so much
that I finally sought out his website and wrote to him about it. He was kind
enough to answer me, but I find his non reason for omitting blindness to be
strange. This is what he said.
Dear Miriam,
I originally wanted to do so, but lost my way at a certain point and wasn't
able to. I think it's a fascinating topic. Should I have the chance to
write about it, I'll be sure to be in touch with you. Thanks for your kind
words about what I've done; I wish I could write five more volumes dealing
with dozens of conditions!
Warmest,
Andrew
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounces@octothorp.org
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounces@octothorp.org] On Behalf Of Claude Everett
Sent: Tuesday, August 06, 2013 4:07 PM
To: 'Blind Democracy Discussion List'
Subject: Pioneers in the fight for disability rights__The League of the
Physically Handicapped
.....Social Movements.History.
Pioneers in the fight for disability rights
By Keith Rosenthal
Issue #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.
In the days following, while the eleven awaited trial, protesters continued
to confront Knauth at a number of public appearances he made around the
city. Things escalated further when the trial began later that month. On the
first two days of the ten-day trial, large protests were held at the
courthouse and at the ERB office, which led to yet more arrests. Inside the
courtroom, things were just as tumultuous, with the defendants and their
supporters generally creating a ruckus, shouting slogans, and making
speeches.
By this time, the coverage of the struggle by the local media had morphed
from a sort of mild, if not bewildered, contempt into outright bigotry. The
newspapers and ERB officials began derisively referring to the defendants as
"the Communist cripples." On the one hand, it was argued that the disabled
activists were mere helpless dupes being used by the CP for "dramatic
effect." On the other hand, they were portrayed as sly manipulators who were
"taking advantage of their physical disabilities" in order to further their
irrational cause. In all cases they were presented as pathetic and
inferior.7
The day after the initial police raid, the New York Herald Tribune smugly
reported "the crippled picketers screamed hysterically and fought with forty
patrolmen who did everything they could to avoid violence." A few days later
the New York Post described a protest against Knauth held at city hall in
this way: "Ten vociferous cripples and a handful of onlookers comprised a
mass meeting . . . to protest treatment of invalids on relief rolls."
For its part, the Daily Worker, the official newspaper of the CP, regularly
covered and publicized the protests in generally partisan terms. This was
not always unproblematic, however, as the articles would sometimes take a
paternalistic tone, for instance describing "helpless crippled people" being
beaten by police. Nonetheless, the Daily Worker's message was always
unambiguously one of support for the struggle.8
On June 28, the trial finally came to a close with the judge declaring all
of the defendants guilty of disorderly conduct. However, betraying his own
confused prejudice, he only sentenced the three nondisabled defendants to
serve time in jail. The upshot was that, regardless of the judge's
intentions, the eight remaining disabled defendants were now immediately
free to rejoin their comrades protesting in the streets.
Later that evening, an angry throng of protesters once again stormed the ERB
office in outrage at the court's verdict. This time a phalanx of police had
been stationed at the ready and a protracted melee ensued, ending with the
arrest of fifteen more protesters. With these final mass arrests, the
dramatic opening phase of the struggle had drawn to a close. But the
activists who had been involved were just getting started.
The occupation, the protests, the trial and its aftermath, all served to
significantly propel the group's public notoriety. They had attracted a
sizable number of adherents and supporters to their movement and had
established themselves as serious fighters. On this basis, they decided to
formally organize on a permanent basis. They adopted the name, the League of
the Physically Handicapped (LPH).
People had never before seen anything quite like the League. They completely
defied the prevailing one-dimensional image of disabled people as pitiful or
powerless. They demanded respect and equality, and in collectively fighting
back against their oppression, had come to construct a new identity for
themselves that rejected their supposed inferiority. This was reflected in
the slogans they used at protests, such as, "We don't want tin cups. We want
jobs," "We are lame but we can work," and, "Handicapped workers must live,
give us jobs."9
As one League member, Florence Haskell, later recalled, "You have to
understand 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. . . I think [the protests] not only gave us jobs, but
it gave us dignity, and a sense of, 'We are people too.'"10
During the rest of 1935 the League held regular meetings, addressed labor
union gatherings, and recruited more members. In November a new WPA office
was opened in New York City and the League immediately subjected it to fresh
rounds of picketing. They distributed leaflets that read, "In private
business the Physically Handicapped invariably are discriminated against.
They work harder for less wages.. . . 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."11
After three weeks of picketing, the League's efforts finally bore fruit. The
local director of the WPA conceded to hiring forty of its members. But the
League was not satisfied. "The [WPA] officials figured if they hired the
most active of us . . . it might kill the thing," one League member
recounted. "But instead of killing it, more handicapped came to the picket
line."12
The LPH had demonstrated that progress could be won through struggle. For
many, this discovery proved contagious. Over the course of the following
year, the WPA would be forced to give close to fifteen hundred jobs to
disabled New Yorkers.13
Drawing confidence from its local successes-and no longer content with
winning a limited number of jobs for its members-the League soon set its
sights even higher. It was now determined to directly challenge the WPA's
discriminatory federal policy itself.
By early 1936, League pickets outside of the New York WPA office explicitly
began to raise precisely this demand. Then, in May of that year, thirty-five
League members traveled to Washington, DC, in order to bring their grievance
directly to Roosevelt and the national head of the WPA, Harry Hopkins. When
League activists arrived in DC they quickly discovered that neither
Roosevelt nor Hopkins were willing to meet with them. They then decided to
employ their tried-and-true tactic and commenced a sit-in occupation of the
federal headquarters of the WPA.
The newly-elected president of the League, twenty-one-year-old Sylvia Flexer
Bassoff, explained to reporters,
Unable to get any satisfaction in New York, we resolved to come here and ask
the aid of Mr. Hopkins in providing WPA employment. They class us as
unemployables, despite the fact that our members include. . ., teachers,
chemists, . . . and others who are professionally skilled. We are going to
stay here until Mr. Hopkins does see us. Until then nothing can make us
leave." League members, she said the next day, were "sick of the humiliation
of poor jobs at best [and] often no work at all." They were tired too of
"getting the same old stock phrases that the handicapped have been getting
for years." They wanted, she said, "not sympathy-but a concrete plan to end
discrimination . . . on WPA projects"14
The occupation continued over the next foty-eight hours until Hopkins
finally relented to a meeting with the League representatives. Yet he still
remained obstinate. He defended the administration's position, maintaining
that disabled people were indeed "unemployable," and completely dismissed
the League's basic argument that disabled people were in any way being
oppressed, discriminated against, or otherwise disenfranchised as a social
group within society. The League representatives then left DC, smoldering
from the experience.
The League took the ignorance expressed by Hopkins as a sort of challenge.
It was in no small part as a result of this that the League decided to
publish an important manifesto on disability in August 1936. Titled, "Thesis
on Conditions of Physically Handicapped," copies of the document were
distributed to Roosevelt, Hopkins, the press, and the public.15
The stated purpose of the "Thesis" was to detail the reality of the
oppressive conditions faced by disabled people in the United States-their
constant "struggle for social and economic security." Moreover, it advanced
the notion that this struggle was not a consequence of their impairment, but
rather "unjust restrictions" and "unfounded prejudices"-in other words,
discriminatory policy and perception.
The "Thesis" pointed out the incongruity of the fact that the federal
government practiced affirmative action in employment with respect to
disabled veterans, yet maintained that all other disabled people were
"unemployable." Of course, the only difference between these two groups was
the source of their impairment. Thus, the government on the one hand
demonstrated that disabled people could be brought into the workforce, while
on the other hand "deterring and hindering" all those whose disabilities
were nonmilitary in origin.
Indeed, though the "Thesis" did not further expand upon this, the false
divide created by the government between disabled veterans and civilians was
extremely important. For instance, studies show that during World War I, far
more Americans were killed or injured while working in the mines of West
Virginia than while fighting abroad in Europe. During the first few years of
World War II, a similar phenomenon held, with the industrial accident rate
hitting an all-time high amidst wartime production speedups.16 This meant
that the war and its concomitant increase in the domestic rate of
exploitation of workers produced a dramatic increase in the number of
disabled Americans. Yet the types of aid extended by the government to
different groups of disabled people varied greatly according to a rigid
hierarchy of disability classifications, with war wounded at the top,
injured workers in the middle, and those born with severe disabilities at
the bottom. Of course, the whole scale shifted, too, when factoring in
considerations of race, gender, and class.
Next, the "Thesis" proceeded to detail the ramifications of the harmful bias
inherent in government work-relief policies and projects. Disabled people
generally faced one of three fates at the hands of state employment
agencies. Either they were declared "unemployable" and rejected outright;
they were given temporary jobs at "miserably low wages," which sometimes
included being sent "out as strike-breakers"; or finally they might be
placed in a dreaded sheltered workshop.
Originally, sheltered workshops developed as a sort of charitable venture in
which disabled people were employed in various nonprofit enterprises.
However, this practice soon expanded into the private and government sector
as well. These workshops were generally completely segregated, had poor
working conditions, and paid next to nothing. Then, as now, sheltered
workshops were exempted from minimum wage requirements and other labor
regulations. They used "the guise of social service," the "Thesis" argued,
while actually engaging in "shameful exploitation." In particular, the
"Thesis" pointed to those workshops run by the Red Cross under its Institute
for Crippled and Disabled as especially deserving of scorn in this area.
Beyond the issue of employment bias, the "Thesis" criticized the limited
welfare assistance, or "home relief," provided by state and government
agencies. Such aid was usually insufficient for nondisabled recipients, and
"doubly insufficient" for those with disabilities, owing to the greater
costs associated with their use of assistive technology and health care
needs. The "Thesis" pointed out that such meager relief forced many
recipients to resort to begging on the street, yet the proliferation of
antibegging ordinances-many of which were specifically directed at disabled
beggars-prevented them from undertaking even this desperate measure, on pain
of imprisonment.
Finally, the "Thesis" leveled a generalized attack on "the whole Emergency
Program and all the social legislation of the New Deal" for being
"consistently neglectful" of the needs and problems of disabled people. "As
far as the [Roosevelt] Administration was concerned," the "Thesis" charged,
"there were no such persons, there was no handicapped problem."
The "Thesis" represents one of the most important historical documents in
the disability rights movement. It was the first treatise of its kind to be
both explicitly political-even militant-in its condemnation of the
oppression of disabled people. In addition, it was a product of the efforts
of disabled people themselves, fighting to articulate their own demands and
their own needs.
Much like those who would come after them, the disability rights activists
in the League had struggled to redefine disability as a social, rather than
a medical or pathological, phenomenon. The problems faced by disabled people
in society thus required collective political action rather than personal
rehabilitation.
The publication of the "Thesis" marked the apex of the League's activity.
During the fall and winter of 1936 the League continued to protest against
WPA discrimination as well as fight to maintain the jobs they had already
won. However, in the spring of 1937, WPA offices nationwide began massive
layoffs, cutting hundreds of thousands of workers from its ranks. In
response, WPA workers across the country engaged in large strikes,
demonstrations, and marches. Once again, the CP played an outsized role in
this resistance, while the League figured prominently in various actions in
New York City.
At one massive demonstration against WPA cuts held in May in New York City,
League activists marched alongside other disabled workers at the head of a
procession numbering in the tens of thousands. The Daily Worker reported
that the "front ranks of the 9 hour long demonstration" were populated by "a
group of deaf mute and blind workers. . . . Deaf workers marched arm in arm
as escorts for the militant blind strikers."
The article further quoted a number of disabled marchers angry at pay and
job discrimination on WPA projects. One person interviewed felt that, if any
wage difference were to exist, it should be that disabled people get more
pay, not less, than their nondisabled counterparts, because their costs of
living were greater. "We are handicapped badly-and handicapped further with
the wages we get," he argued.17
In August 1937, the Workers Alliance of America-a group closely affiliated
with the CP-organized a large action in Washington, DC, in which thousands
of people descended on the Capitol lawn. The stated aim of the action was to
demand that Roosevelt stop the WPA cutbacks and reinstate the half million
WPA workers whose jobs had already been cut.
Thirty-three delegates from the League made the trip down to DC in order to
participate in the action. While there, they were also able to secure
another meeting with WPA chief, Harry Hopkins. Perhaps they held out hope
that he had been moved by their "Thesis." In fact, the meeting proved to be
just as unproductive as the previous one. The League delegates grudgingly
returned home empty-handed, though promising to "return in larger numbers
within a short time."18
As it turns out, this promise never materialized. By 1938 the League appears
to have dissolved completely. So what accounts for this sudden drop-off in
activity? It might be helpful to look at the broader context.
As discussed above, the CP exerted a strong influence on the League. The CP
in turn was influenced heavily by the foreign policy needs of the Stalinist
regime then in power in the USSR. This meant that throughout the course of
the 1930s the CP went through a number of sudden and dramatic
transformations. In particular, by the end of 1936 the CP had begun to
drastically curtail its open criticism of the Roosevelt administration. As
fascism grew in power throughout Europe, the USSR began looking for allies
among the "progressive" nations of the world. Therefore, the CP was directed
to ingratiate itself with Roosevelt in order to create a "popular front"
against fascism.
Thus, even as the CP played a key role in organizing protests against the
WPA cuts in 1937, it did so in an increasingly diffident manner. So, for
instance, the very next day following the mass mobilization on Washington,
DC, in August 1937, the Daily Worker announced in unqualified terms that the
workers had won a complete "victory" insofar as Roosevelt had delivered a
written promise to the Workers Alliance to stop any further cuts. The
original demand to reinstate the half million laid off WPA workers had
quietly disappeared overnight.19 Moreover, even this supposed "victory"
proved illusory as WPA cuts continued unabated over the next several years.
Before long, the CP would become a stalwart defender of Roosevelt against
his critics on both the political left and the right, even going so far as
to actively suppress war industry strikes and work stoppages, which the CP
deemed detrimental to the "national war effort."
While it is clear that the League was in no way controlled by the CP, League
activists nonetheless would have been affected by changes in the politics,
tactics, and arguments of those CP members around them. League activists
would have been discouraged by this latter group from continuing their
protests directed at Roosevelt; they would have been told that their narrow
fight for disability rights was now trumped in importance by the greater
fight against fascism.
The further tragedy of this whole episode was that the League's loose
connection to the CP meant that its memory and legacy were virtually erased
in the wave of anticommunist witch hunts and McCarthyite repression that
swept the nation in the 1940s and 1950s. Years later, League members would
cite the increase in redbaiting and bitter divisions over political ideology
as the source of the group's degeneration.20 Like much of the radical left
during and after the war, the League was crushed under the weight of
domestic repression on the one hand, and the political twists-and-turns of
the CP on the other. This is the primary reason for the total lack of
continuity between the League's activities of the 1930s and the new
disability rights movement that reemerged in the 1970s.
Today, the disability rights movement can pride itself on having won
important gains over the years, not the least of which was the passage of
the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990. Yet the fundamental oppression
of disabled people in this country persists, including high unemployment,
poverty, homelessness, and police brutality; the re-emergence of mass
institutionalization in prisons and nursing homes; and discriminatory laws
limiting the rights of disabled people to marry, have children, and exercise
total autonomy over their lives.
Truly, the fight for disabled people's liberation remains an urgent project
of the present. And it is for this reason that the significance of the
League of the Physically Handicapped endures.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----
1.Joseph Shapiro, No Pity: People with Disabilities Forging a New Civil
Rights Movement (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1994), Kindle edition.
2.Kim Nielsen, A Disability History of the United States (Boston: Beacon
Press, 2012), 134.
3.Paul K. Longmore, and David Goldberger, "The League of the Physically
Handicapped and the Great Depression: A Case Study in the New Disability
History," The Journal of American History, Vol. 87, No. 3 (Dec., 2000), 888.
4.Ibid., 899.
5.Ibid., 901-902.
6.Fleischer, Doris Zames, and Frieda Zames, The Disability Rights Movement:
From Charity to Confrontation (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001).
1-4.
7.Longmore, 902-903.
8.Ibid., 903-904.
9.Ibid., 904.
10.Ibid., 904-905.
11.Ibid., 905.
12.Ibid., 906.
13.Ibid.
14.Ibid., 907.
15.Ibid., 908.
16.Nielson, A Disability History of the United States, 149, 158.
17."36,000 on Projects Demonstrate Demonstrate Against Threat of WPA Cuts,"
Daily Worker, May 28, 1937, Harvard University Library microfilm.
18.Longmore, 919.
19."How Workers Alliance Forced WPA To Stop Slashing Rolls," Daily Worker,
August 27, 1937: 5, Harvard University Library microfilm.
20.Longmore, 920.
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