“We must not forget the sons of Vulcan”: Disability Activism, “War Service,” and the Quest to Define Entitlement in the Postwar United States

During a 1945 American Federation of the Physically Handicapped (AFPH) mass meeting, J. Cooke Howard, AFPH member and Director of the Division of the Deaf and Deafened in the Michigan Department of Labor, touted the war work of people with disabilities but warned the group that they had to continue to pressure the federal government to hold onto the employment gains of the war. With production needs skyrocketing and millions of able bodied men leaving industry for the military, the war forced the nation, as Howard put it, “to scrape the bottom of its manpower barrel” and call on people with disabilities to man war production factories. In fact, a majority of the nation’s industries had workers with disabilities on their payrolls by the close of the war.  Because of their service, producing the implements of war, Howard argued that the federal government had a responsibility to disabled people in the postwar era. “A nation enlisting everyone for war,” he claimed, “assumes a responsibility to provide work for its people in peace.” Like Howard, disability activists throughout the postwar era sought federal assistance in increasing the employment opportunities available for people with disabilities. Civilians with disabilities laid claims to benefits similar to those available for disabled veterans by pointing to their industrial and volunteer wartime “service.” This paper explores the ways that civilian disability activists of the AFPH sought to appropriate the imagery of service and the widespread concern for disabled soldiers to force the federal government to address employment discrimination and further expand services available to civilians with disabilities. Through the rhetoric service, the organization managed to keep the issue of disability on policymakers’ minds for more than a decade after the close of the Second World War.