Wheelchairs on the Lawn: White House Garden Parties and the Visual Production of Disabled Veterans

The lives, stories, and places of disabled veterans are over-represented in American disability history.  Of all disability groups, their experiences are most frequently chronicled, their impairments deemed most worthy of public admiration, social accommodation, and state assistance.  This is hardly a coincidence.  Since the 1860s, (white male) disabled veterans and their allies have sought to distinguish themselves—socially, spatially, and economically—from other disabled populations. 

In this presentation, I examine the history of one of the most popular political rituals of early twentieth century America: White House garden parties for disabled veterans. The practice of fêting disabled vets began with the Harding administration and, throughout the 1920s and 1930s, was a part of every president’s social calendar.  Although sometimes portrayed as cozy get-togethers, White House garden parties were, at their heart, acts of political and visual theater, photographed and filmed for audiences across the nation.  Their primary purpose was to demonstrate the president’s devotion to America’s “wounded warriors.”  In addition, they functioned as a form of civic training, teaching the public how, when, and why disabled veterans should be honored. 

Drawing upon both written and visual sources, I analyze White House garden parties for disabled veterans within a broader cultural struggle about the meaning of disability in twentieth century America.  Such events, I argue, played an important role in reinforcing disabled veterans’ demands for social belonging and economic compensation, demands that would go largely unrecognized for other groups of disabled people.  At the same time, they contributed to a racialized and gendered politics of disability, one that privileged the impairments of white men over those of women and people of color.  Ultimately, though, I examine these parties as contested spaces where both veterans and the White House sought to define (visually) the place of disabled veterans in postwar society.