Preventing “Public Charges”: The Disability Politics of Public Health and Work in the New Deal State

In crafting the New Deal, President Franklin D. Roosevelt sought to relieve the immediate suffering caused by the Great Depression and create long-term economic security. New Dealers identified disability as “one of many misfortunes which often result in destitution.”[1] Disability shaped New Dealers’ ideas about dependency and citizenship. Even as policymakers began to identify disability as an important cause of poverty, Depression-era society and New Deal policy increasingly interpreted disabled people’s dependency as problematic. Work-relief programs excluded disabled people, and the Fair Labor Standards Act’s subminimum wage for people with disabilities reflected assumptions about impaired productivity.

This presentation examines the disability politics of work and public health by examining the Social Security Act’s Services for Crippled Children program and New Deal-funded public health projects. Nearly half of the states offered no treatment programs for disabled children, and those that did served a fraction of children in need. High costs, limited facilities, and lengthy treatments left many children without care. Described as an investment in preventing the development of a class of “public charges,” Services for Crippled Children recorded information about the prevalence of childhood disability and provided medical, surgical, and rehabilitative care to disabled children. The Works Progress Administration launched numerous public health projects, ranging from vaccination clinics to disease-control campaign to medical and dental clinics, many of which aimed to prevent, cure, or mitigate disability. Reflecting the state’s growing reliance on medical approaches to disability, these initiatives reveal New Dealers’ assumption that disability threatened both individual and national efficiency and economic security. By prioritizing care and prevention and privileging able bodies in work policy, the New Deal reinforced the link between disability and dependency.

[1] U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Committee on Ways and Means, Hearings: H.R. 4120, H.R. 7260, 74th Cong., 1^st sess. (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1935), 19.