“It is extremely difficult for the opposite race to see the colored soldier in a fair and impartial light. The fact is that we are invariably received and treated as a colored man and not as a disabled soldier.”
—Private James Sanford to Dr. J. R. Crossland, Veterans Bureau Negro Advisor, 1921
In August 1922, Buster Sunter, an African American veteran of World War I, informed the Veterans Bureau of alleged mistreatment at his local veterans training center. Previously diagnosed with tuberculosis, Sunter wrote, “I want to let you know that I have not been treated right here, when I take this training I was supposed to have four years here but they have cut my time down to two years . . . they bully me and have me work like I ain’t sick so I want you to look into the matter for me for I am not able to work like that.” The experience of Private Sunter—of officials refusing to treat, or even acknowledge his condition—reveals how ideas of race and disability shaped the policies and practices of rehabilitation in early twentieth-century America. Postwar models of disability were both medical discourses and social constructs, developed by physicians, legislators, administrators, and veterans within the broader networks of labor, gender, citizenship, and race.1 The cultural politics of remaking men for work in the “great industrial army” fused the health of ex-servicemen with that of the republican body politic in explicitly racial terms.2
Modern war brutalized bodies in shockingly new and gruesome ways. The First World War’s human cost was staggering: 8.5 million dead, 20 million wounded, and more than 8 million permanently disabled. Despite being a latecomer to the conflict, the United States lost 116,708 men, with an additional 210,000 classified as wounded or disabled. The disabled came in many forms: mentally ill (victims of “shell shock”), tubercular, syphilitic, blind, deaf, and amputees.3 The mechanized murder of the trenches irrevocably shattered Victorian ideals of heroism and war as a rejuvenating force for white Western masculinity. For Lothrop Stoddard, author of the bestselling work, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (1920), the war was nothing less than “a catastrophe” because its “racial losses were certainly as grave as the material loses.”4 For Stoddard and many of his racialist peers—those who saw race as the prime engine of historical change—the carnage of war and its ensuing economic and physical “waste” did not occur in an ideological vacuum. Historian David Gerber has noted that all soldiering bodies “were endowed with signs and declarations of age, generation, class, ethnicity and race” and within these frameworks, bodies lived, died, and were broken.5
Rehabilitation was a deeply political process that challenged prevailing ideologies and identities of race, gender, and work. But as Gerber reminds us, if “war is the extension of politics by other means, then only by making victims can war achieve its political aims.”6 The issue of rehabilitation ultimately rested on an assessment of the state’s obligation to its veterans. Either the state would secure the employment of tens of thousands of injured men, or it would abandon them to an unpredictable marketplace, and the pitying attitudes of their fellow citizens. Following World War I, science displaced sentimentalism as the core principle of veterans’ care. Throughout the West, the question of rehabilitation was “a theoretical, an economic, and finally a moral one, but its consequences for veterans were eminently practical.” Veterans groups argued that, “if the state had the power to draft men, it also had the responsibility to prevent the war from ruining the lives of those it conscripted.” Loath to encourage an emasculating culture of dependency, officials pledged that, “the government is resolved to do its best to restore him (veterans) to health, strength, and self-supporting activity.” Intellectuals such as John Dewey worried that “despite the struggle for the elimination of Prussianization, we are at the same time secretly admiring and envying it.”7 The reformist impulses of rehabilitation through the pursuit of physical perfectionism were ultimately constrained by America’s unique racial dynamics and historical distrust of an activist federal state.
Though the war did not create the impetus for state surveillance, it intensified and encouraged the proliferation of new regulatory institutions and practices such as the draft and vocational rehabilitation. One such institution, the Federal Board of Vocational Education (FBVE) was charged with rehabilitating the citizen-solider into the citizen-worker. FBVE officials developed catalogues of racial labor taxonomies to delineate which bodies could do which kinds of work. Rehabilitationists, fearful of rising labor radicalism, racial unrest, and increasing industrialization, sought to mend the social fabric one individual at a time. Yet, through the stages of diagnosis, job training, and hospitalization, officials struggled to determine whether they could, or even should, mend broken black bodies often understood as defective by definition.8 FBVE policy devalued and institutionalized disabled African American veterans and dismissed their claims to rehabilitation as spurious attempts “to unjustly profit from their natural inferiority.” Black ex-servicemen resisted these processes and contested their right to rehabilitation as soldiers, citizens, workers, and men.9
Rehabilitation sought to reconcile physiological form with labor function to distinguish the “deserving” from the “undeserving” disabled. Throughout this process, FBVE officials drew on prevailing theories of industrial evolution to connect racial development with labor fitness.10 Analysis of the FBVE’s policies towards African American veterans provides key insights into the production of interwar racial labor hierarchies, the rise of racial expertise and the drive to shape social policy along biological lines. This trend culminated in 1924 with the passage of the Johnson-Reed Immigration Restriction Act and Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act—the latter banned inter-racial marriage and authorized involuntary sterilization of the mentally and physically “unfit.” Historian Matt Price describes rehabilitation as an utopian exercise in which “many broken threads, representing physical, mental, and social factors, must be unraveled and rewoven to make a consistent pattern” of national health.11 Rehabilitation was fundamentally an exercise in individual and social perfectionism that was beholden to contemporary ideologies of gender, work, and race.
Rehabilitation also provided a conduit between national productivity and the preservation of racial integrity. The drive to remake broken black bodies was driven by a segregationist impulse to put the Negro in his proper occupational and social space. While the war shattered popular notions of progress, rehabilitationists sought to reconstitute Western civilization from the conflict’s human detritus. The soldiering body, which had once been viewed as a source of social contagion and vice, was reconfigured by the FBVE following the armistice—the crippled soldier’s body was now a source of national and racial regeneration. Reformers such as Elizabeth Upham argued that “the wide prevalence of defects found through the physical examinations of the draft justifies a careful consideration of physical and mental racial health when developing programs of reconstruction.”12 These medical models of disability were informed by the assumption that “pathological physiological conditions [were] the primary obstacle to disabled people’s social integration.”13 Elites conceded that while rehabilitation could remake the near-white immigrants of eastern and southern Europe into dutiful, efficient Americans, non-white peoples such as Asian, Native, and African Americans required social and occupational segregation to protect them from themselves and society at large. White elites were increasingly disturbed by the fact that the “Negro was fast becoming a factor in the nation’s industrial landscape.”14 Between America’s entry into the war and the stock market crash of 1929, African Americans left the South at an average rate of five hundred per day, or more than fifteen thousand per month: transforming an almost exclusively rural populace into an increasingly urban one.15
Following America’s entry into the war in April 1917, prevailing anxieties regarding blacks’ lack of martial fitness denied most a combat role. Army officials generally believed that “the poorer class of backward Negro has not the mental or physical stamina or moral sturdiness to put him in the line against opposing German troops of high average education and training.”16 Only thirty-eight thousand blacks served in overseas combat units, constituting only 3% of the army’s combat forces.17 The vast majority of black recruits were relegated to segregated service battalions laboring at the inglorious work of war as stevedores, cooks, and menial laborers. White officers assigned to these battalions often treated their charges as little more than beasts of burden and constantly endeavored to “work the hell out of the niggers.”18 After the war, tens of thousands of black troops were charged with the gruesome task of exhuming the American dead for re-internment in France or the United States. Blacks’ physical absence from the battlefield led to their figurative absence from postwar debates over the rights and responsibilities of rehabilitation.19
Emboldened by wartime rhetoric espousing democracy and self-determination and exposed to rising anti-colonial sentiment among African colonial troops in Europe, many black troops returned home determined to pursue full equality. W. E. B. DuBois gave voice to this ethos in eloquent terms, perhaps in part to absolve himself of his earlier pro-war leanings: “We return, We return from fighting, We return fighting; Make way for democracy! We saved it in France, and by the Great Jehovah, we will save it in the United States of America, or know the reason why.”20 Whites—especially those in the South—reacted to blacks’ newfound stridency with a mixture of bewilderment, indifference, and murderous violence. Reported lynchings rose throughout the nation—from sixty-four total in 1918 to eighty-three (76 of whom were black) in the bloody summer of 1919. Black veterans were popular targets for these most extreme acts of racial vigilantism; at least two dozen fell victim to the noose—often while still in uniform—during this period.21 Monroe Work, editor of the Negro Year Book, summarized the challenges facing the South, and indeed the nation, in the immediate postwar years, by “first the handling of demobilization in such a way to prevent racial friction or conflict; second the maintenance of those harmonious relations that have already established.” Despite Work’s dubious claim to prior “harmonious” race relations, he did echo a widespread belief among progressives that racial concerns were a key component of postwar Reconstruction. Work’s prescriptions for racial reconstruction, however, belied a profound anxiety shared by many of his peers regarding blacks’ transition from citizen-soldiers to citizen-workers. As he wrote in the pages of The Survey, “All the men seem glad to be home again, and on the surface at least to accept their social inferiority as a matter of course. What goes on in their minds beneath that surface cheerfulness and docility no one seems to know exactly?”22 Rehabilitation sought to make the increasingly unknowable Negro of the postwar progressive imagination knowable through the discipline and reconstruction of the black soldiering body.23
Shortly after the outbreak of hostilities in August 1914, the modern science of rehabilitation came to the fore through the efforts of a coalition of social, medical, and scientific reformers. Historians have noted that “the military requirements of modern warfare and industry provided governments with a powerful incentive to intervene in new areas of the economy including the construction of men’s bodies.”24 Advances in medical and surgical care in fields such as orthopedics meant that more men could be “salvaged” than in previous conflicts. Throughout the Western world, “aggressive normalization” through physical restoration and vocational education was conceived as a balm to the dysgenic effects of modern warfare.25 Prewar and postwar models of rehabilitation shared a distinctly naturalistic character evincing the era’s overarching attempts to view social dynamics through biological lenses. As early as 1909, Herbert Croly, in The Promise of American Life, had argued for a national system of vocational education, “so that the laborer be placed, just as timber, stone and iron, in the places for which their natures fit them.”26 Just less than five years after the armistice, the editors of the FBVE’s official organ, The Vocational Summary, remarked: “Conservation of our natural resources has been one of the most important developments of the twentieth century. We have reclaimed our arid lands; we have plowed our burned forests into fertile fields; we have taken our discarded metals from the scrap heap and remolded them to other uses. By a natural evolution, crystallized by the casualties of war we have come to the problem of salvaging our men.”27 Lieutenant Henry Mock of the Army Sanitary Corps cited “scientific human conservation” as one of the “greatest byproducts of the war.”28 By war’s end, the drive to sustain the best in nature coincided with a desire to conserve the best of humanity.
Rehabilitation was a transnational project, uniting reformers and elites from London, Paris, Toronto, and New York. Americans moved quickly to integrate themselves into these transnational networks even prior to their official entry into the war. Officials lamented that “no pioneer road was left for us to follow with respect to the physical reconstruction and vocational rehabilitation of our wounded . . . it was left for us to merely select a plan and to modify it to our own needs.” Consequently, American rehabilitationists drew heavily on British, Canadian, and even German models of reconstruction. Due to Canada’s proximity and prior experience with close to three years of war, the cities of Toronto, Montreal, and Halifax became key stops on Americans grand tour of foreign institutions of physical reconstruction. Americans were especially keen to expand on Canadians holistic forms of rehabilitation by blending physical with vocational reconstruction to facilitate the “training of the disabled man to again be a productive agent in spite of his handicap.” Major John Todd of the Canadian Pension Board envisioned rehabilitation as a communal practice “a matter of such wide extent that it can leave no phase of social organization untouched.”29 This was part of a broader attempt to substitute independence for dependence and move veterans’ care from the realm of the sentimental to that of the scientific—remaking both the individual and the body politic writ large. Douglas McMurtrie, along with W. M. Russie, co-founded the Institute for Crippled and Disabled Men in New York City in 1917 and framed rehabilitation, the nation’s “duty to the war cripple,” as an act of wholesale social regeneration. He urged surgeons in the various frontline base hospitals “to free themselves from their tendency to treat the wounds and forget the function; to make a well man but not a working one; to take the anatomical rather than the physiological point of view.” McMurtie believed that the “only compensation of real value for physical disability is rehabilitation for self support. Make a man capable again of earning his living and the chief burden of his handicap drops away.” FBVE member Dr. W. S. Bainbridge argued that “the rehabilitation of the soldier is a redemptive act for the nation—it demonstrates a nation’s moral fiber and authorizes that nation’s economic success”: morality and corporalities reimagined as a function of national efficiency.30
Following the U.S.’s entry in the vocational rehabilitation became law with the passage of the Smith-Hughes Act in February 1917. The act called for federal support to “train people who have entered upon, or are preparing to enter upon, the work of the farm.”31 Administration of the act at the state level was facilitated through a Federal Board of Vocational Education (FBVE). The FBVE expanded on the agricultural focus of the Smith-Hughes Act by empowering the states to promote vocational education in agriculture, home economics, and industry. To secure appropriations for teaching and institutional support, states were required to accept the provisions of Smith-Hughes through their legislatures or their governors. Moreover, states had to designate or create a board of at least three members with the necessary power to cooperate with the FBVE at the local level.32
Developing provisions for the rehabilitation of disabled soldiers and sailors was originally only one of the FBVE’s duties, but soon became its primary function. Beth Linker notes that “unlike Europe and Canada, where rehabilitation was largely a voluntary component of a disabled veterans benefits package, the U.S. compelled disabled servicemen to undergo long term medical treatment.”33 In January 1918, a bill was presented to Congress recommending rehabilitation work be administrated by a commission of five persons representing the Office of the Surgeon General, War Department, Department of Labor, Bureau of War Risk Insurance (BWRI) and the FBVE. On June 27, 1918, the Vocational Rehabilitation Act was passed with a federal approbation of approximately $2 million. The act provided for the vocational training of “persons disabled in the military or naval forces of the United States, and for their assistance in obtaining gainful employment” following their discharge from the service. Although the FBVE initially focused on restoring veterans’ disabled bodies, it soon extended to the conservation of “national energies” by providing services to civilian victims of industrial accidents—furthering the model of war as work.34
Postwar rehabilitation policy was a direct response to previous veterans’ programs characterized as inefficient, wasteful, and corrupt. At the turn of the century, over a million Americans were receiving pensions totaling $150 million a year, approximately 38% of the entire federal budget. By 1917, the federal government had spent $5 billion on military pensions since 1776, with the majority going to Union veterans of the Civil War. Progressive reformers wedded to the cult of efficiency, believed that the aging veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic were a drain on federal resources and the national work ethic. To prevent the swelling of this “dependent army of cripples,” the Vocational Rehabilitation Act stated that only “severely disabled” soldiers who qualified for compensation under the War Risk Insurance Act were entitled to retraining.35 One FBVE official bluntly defined the bureau’s policy as “one of conservation,” adding that “in the treatment and placing of disabled men back into industry, there is no room for the spectacular.”36 Dr. W. S. Bainbridge of the FBVE employed slightly loftier rhetoric: “The rehabilitation of the soldier is a heroic and redemptive act for the nation—it demonstrates a nation’s moral fiber and authorizes that nation’s economic success.”37
The FBVE was committed to expunging the culture of victimization from veterans’ policy. However, the relatively low educational and physical status of the average Doughboy—manifested through wartime intelligence and anthropometric testing—lowered the expectations of many FBVE officials. Consequently, FBVE models of rehabilitation vacillated between the pragmatic and the utopian. Many of the bureau’s personnel saw vocational rehabilitation as a means to transform the “lucky handicap” into a more productive version of his former self. The editors of The Vocational Summary noted, “Practically every man, no matter how handicapped he may be, can come back. In fact a handicap puts more fight into a man, makes him strive harder than ever before, and results quite often in his making good to a greater extent than if he had never been disabled.”38 Willpower was essential to escaping the dreaded state of deformed dependence. Officials triumphantly cited the case of a double amputee who remarked, “‘Watch me! I am going to make good with both feet.’ And he has. This is the spirit! Determination and grit—stick-to-itiveness—are the qualities which every disabled man must have or must acquire to crawl out or jump out of that hated class—The Disabled.”39 Only by embracing “a sober program of reconstruction” could veterans achieve a manly self-sufficiency. Most importantly, veterans had to be made aware of the “naked grim reality” facing them after all of the “well meaning sentiment and verbiage about heroism and gratitude and never forgetting” faded away.40 The FBVE initially placed veterans in educational institutions as opposed to on-the-job training to insulate them from the depressed wages and rapid shifts in industrial labor processes of the immediate postwar years. They feared such reality could potentially undermine the ethos of self-sufficiency that bureau officials were attempting to inculcate in their charges.41
The policies and practices of rehabilitation were also deeply informed by the era’s gendered politics. In the spring of 1918, the returning waves of crippled men and the rehabilitation they required gave reformers a chance to push women and blacks out of their “temporary” industrial jobs and back into the “ennobling protection of the home and the field.” Efforts to restore white male dominance in the labor market were based on the belief that because “the life of a nation springs from its motherhood,” women required protection from the debilitating environment of the shop floor. Despite women’s increasing role in wartime industries—an increase of approximately 20% increase from 1910 to 1918—many employers were hesitant to retain them in the postwar era.42 Dr. Francis Patterson, chief of the Division of Industrial Hygiene for the Pennsylvania Department of Labor, claimed, “While it is undoubtedly true that women can and are replacing men in some positions, by reasons of their sex there are limitations upon the work they can do. It needs no words of mine to emphasize the importance of the conservation of the health of those who are to be the mothers of our future race.” George Lipsitz notes that “patriotism has often been constructed in the United States as a matter of gendered and racialized obligation to paternal protection of the white family.”43 In the immediate postwar years, these obligations were reconfigured as a function of national efficiency.
Mass migration of African Americans to the industrial north along with women’s wartime entry into industry necessitated a reimagining of their respective fitness for modern industrial work. White elites in both the public and private sphere were generally forced to concede that African Americans’ wartime industrial labor had proven to be “quite as good as the foreign labor” that it had replaced.44 Yet in order to restore traditional gender and racial hierarchies in the industrial sector, FBVE officials could no longer simply cite the negative effects these environments had upon the “female and negro character.” Instead, they had to rely on locating female and black workers’ deficiencies within their respective physiologies. The weak postwar economy, increasing labor standardization, and the socioeconomic demands of white patriarchy required merging form with function to delineate the limits of gender and racial labor fitness.
Rehabilitationists focused as much attention on conserving the physical output of bodies—the natural kinetic power crucial to economic success—as they did on efforts to restore battered male psyches. The wartime “Creed of the Disabled Man” urged veterans to become “a MAN among MEN in spite of their physical handicap.”45 Throughout the West, social scientists conflated the male body with maleness, believing that “an incomplete version of the former could, without careful training and rehabilitation, destroy one’s sense of the latter.”46 Bodily integrity was both a function and a basis for a man’s identity. Lieutenant Henry Mock of the FBVE, argued that rather than casting disabled white veterans “upon the scrap heap,” the state must “restore them to suitable skilled positions now temporarily occupied by women and colored workers.”47 Mock claimed that the apparent unsuitability of “the unassimilable Chinese, East Indians and Negroes” as sources of additional labor meant that the nation’s greatest source of labor lay “in making that which we have [that is, white workers] doubly efficient.”48 Progressives were convinced that “manpower,” a gendered and racial vision of natural energies that linked masculinity to physical exertion, needed to be replenished at all costs along strictly defined racial lines.
For FBVE officials, the diagnosis of disability coincided with its commoditization. Veterans’ disabilities were rendered invisible outside the compensatory cash nexus established by the FBVE. According to the Vocational Rehabilitation Act of 1918, “Persons who had been disabled through their service in the military or naval forces of the United States—whether caused by injury, disease, or aggregation of a previous medical condition—were afforded vocational training and assistance in obtaining gainful employment.”49 Individuals could not enter training until awarded compensation by the Bureau of War Risk Insurance (BWRI). The services and facilities of the Public Health Service (PHS) were used to provide examination, medical care, treatment, and hospitalization for beneficiaries of the War Risk Insurance Act. Initially, the Rehabilitation Act was intended “to divorce compensation from patriotic sacrifice or physical or mental suffering and instead link it to the reimbursement of potential lost future income due to disability and the general disadvantages it caused the veteran in the labor market.”50 Vocational rehabilitation produced a disabled identity that, though rooted in the body, was essentially an aggregate of social relations relative to specific industrial occupations and hierarchies—an identity that was little more than the sum of its parts.
Given that few African American ex-servicemen suffered combat wounds, their experience of vocational rehabilitation differed from that of their white peers. African Americans’ initial diagnosis of disability did not occur during convalescence in domestic or overseas field hospitals, but upon submission of their disability claims through the BWRI. In the five years following the end of the war, approximately 930,000 veterans applied for disability benefits. Though applicants were required to indicate their race on their appraisal forms, the FBVE and its successors at the Veterans Bureau did not compile statistics on the filing and rejection of claims based on race. Walter Hickel notes that “racial segregation was integral to the social networks within which disability was diagnosed.”51 One bureau official observed, “Southern representatives who are of course always white, will not, as a matter of principle, forward us all the necessary evidence to complete the Negroes’ claim. As a rule, the fact that the claimant is a Negro in their eyes is sufficient evidence that he is not in need of disability assistance.”52 FBVE officials were generally disinclined to provide compensation to a people whose apparent worthlessness informed the adjudication of white entitlements.
Black veterans and their allies in the black press vociferously defended their right to rehabilitation. The Chicago Defender speculated that “out of this great world struggle may come industrial and civil freedom . . . certainly the colored soldier who fights side by side with the white American will hardly be begrudged a fair chance when the victorious armies return.” Robert R. Moton, Booker T. Washington’s successor at Tuskegee, told returning black soldiers, “America is a great laboratory which God is using to show the world how men and women of different races can succeed together.” The Crisis urged that “industry be extended to the colored American and the same unlimited opportunities to serve in Reconstruction as it did in war times when men of both races ‘went over the top’ often suffering the most grievous of wounds.” Some black veterans conflated their physical wounds with those inflicted by the “prejudices, insults, and duplicity of his white American ally.” Within the context of the New Negro ethos, these dual factors had made the black soldier into a “super-soldier and superman” deserving of compensation and the nation’s respect.53
Contrasted with traditional military pensions, the model developed by the BWRI was not calculated in relation to a veteran’s prewar or current occupation. Instead, it measured the average reduction in earning capacity that a veteran with a specific disability was likely to incur in any skilled or unskilled occupation. Since reduction in earning capacity varied with the type and severity of the impairment, disability was expressed as a percentage, representing the deviation between the estimated production of an “average” working body and the residual capacity of a disabled veteran. To help in the calculation of this percentage for “specific injuries of a permanent nature,” the BWRI developed a disability-rating schedule with a comprehensive index of amputations, injuries, diseases, and mental disorders. This schedule assigned percentages for each impairment based on its purported effect on the veteran’s ability to work. While rates of compensation varied according to marital status and dependents, veterans accorded a 10% rating or more for a temporary disability were entitled to approximately $80 to $120 a month. Those judged to be suffering from total disability, including blindness, multiple amputations, or the “helpless and permanently bedridden,” were assessed at a flat rate of $100 a month.54
Veterans’ benefits were dispensed as inducements for the disabled to redirect their productive energies in unprecedented and profitable ways. Westinghouse’s medical director, Charles Lauffer insisted that “in this age of specialization and diversified industry, arms and legs are really incidental, for with mechanical devices, such handicaps are virtually overcome.”55 For ex-servicemen with serious physical impairments, officials stressed the mental acuity needed to perform skilled industrial labor: “While from his neck down a man is worth about $1.50 a day; from his neck up, he may well be worth $100,000 a year.”56 Conversely, appeals to veterans experiencing mental disorder emphasized the need for physical vigor and resistance to fatigue required for modern industrial work. One army official noted, “A man is crippled only to that extent to which he allows his physical handicap to put him down and out. If he ceases to be an economic factor in society—an earning, serving unit—he is a cripple.”57 A postwar managerial elite weaned on industrial management and evolutionary theory framed disability as both an identity and a commodity: a corporeal index of composite labor capital or lack thereof.
FBVE officials believed that their disability-rating schedule democratized veteran entitlements by defining disability in relative terms—as a declension from a productive or “normal” body. However, the ethos of early twentieth century republican manhood dictated that the ideal or normative working body was that of a white man. Socioeconomic dependency and non-citizenship were traits most often associated with as seen as the purview of women, children, and people of color.58 Both FBVE officials and black veterans understood disability in relation to their respective social relationships and needs as men. In defining disability, both groups “emphasized the structure of local labor markets, racial segregation, and social norms, which assigned men their roles as workers, providers, and citizens.”59 For all veterans, disability denoted more than an individual medical condition or a purely legal entitlement to benefits. Black veterans saw their injuries as marks of patriotic sacrifice that entitled them to veterans’ benefits, whereas rehabilitation officials saw them as indelible proof of blacks’ pathological inferiority.
Medical models of racial disability drastically undermined African Americans’ claims to vocational rehabilitation programs. FBVE doctors contended that the majority of African American veterans were disproportionately afflicted with the hidden wounds of “colored diseases,” such as venereal disease and tuberculosis. Local officials—like the FBVE manager of District Five (comprising the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida, and Tennessee)—were suspicious of black veterans’ claims, and suggested that “the majority of the disabilities of the southern Negro are traceable to TB and VD which in the majority of cases were judged to have existed in the race as a whole before enlistment.”60 Black veterans vociferously rejected these characterizations with overt appeals to a common manhood. The NAACP urged that “industry be extended to the colored American and the same unlimited opportunities to serve in reconstruction as it did in war times when men of both races ‘went over the top’ often suffering the most grievous of wounds.” Black veterans called on the federal government to honor their wartime sacrifice by providing unfettered access to vocational rehabilitation.61
Notwithstanding their race-neutral posture, many FBVE officials recognized that benefits paid to black veterans could potentially undermine white dominance rooted in income distribution, regional labor markets, and citizenship rights. Compensation could amount to several times the thirty dollars a month black agricultural laborers earned on average in the South, and it could more than equal the $500 to $600 annual income of most rural black families. Though modest, these benefits would enable black veterans to temporarily forego poorly paid menial “colored” jobs, and gain a small measure of financial independence.62 The ensuing financial and educational opportunities accorded black veterans could also work to undermine many of the dubious property and literacy requirements that restricted black voting rights in the South. The FBVE’s characterizations of blacks as congenital racial cripples rationalized the economic and social self-interest of southern and national white supremacy.
African American veterans’ difficulties in drawing compensation—with its pernicious subtext of black dependency—invariably circumscribed their access to job training. Sympathetic observers linked war to work to argue for blacks’ right to rehabilitation: “The Negro soldier left a civil occupation to take up his gun. These recruits were not loiters, but laborers in the larger sense. They were contributing to the nation and the world’s work in various ways both skilled and otherwise.”63 In the initial stage of physical reconstruction conducted under the Office of the Army Surgeon General, disability was perceived as a source of entitlement to receive re-training. When the process shifted to vocational rehabilitation, disability was redefined as a chance to remake oneself. For FBVE officials, this represented an unprecedented opportunity for the “crippled Negro race” to work its way to civilized respectability. Vocational rehabilitation connected racial uplift to patriarchy through its efforts to “not only make the Negro a better workman, but also teach him to build a better home and live a more ideal life.” FBVE policy was motivated by “the idea to elevate the economic status of these [black] men sufficiently to enable their children to attend school and their women to give more time to the moral and hygienic development of the home.”64 Across the color line, the ethic of rehabilitation equated fit bodies with healthy homes.
Black veterans’ wounds were a form of social currency that supposedly entitled them to vocational rehabilitation. Initially, the state appeared willing to let blacks perform this transaction in the name of national efficiency. One bureau employee remarked, “The worth of our Negro veteran rests not in his racial nature but in his ability to work himself into an efficient and productive worker.”65 Another noted that “if the Negro is coming into our lives to stay—and we need him—we should recognize the fact that he is perfectly capable of profiting under vocational instruction and becoming a worker worthy of the name.”66 The Crisis was confident that the FBVE would “surely undertake—regardless of race—the training of a disabled soldier for a new occupation or retraining to better fit him for his former occupation.” Most FBVE officials were not so accommodating. Frederic Keough countered, “The fact that a man is a disabled soldier or sailor is not enough to place him in any systematic manufacturing plant. He must be productive.” Most importantly, Keough concluded that vocational rehabilitation “must terminate in an economic advantage to the community.”67 However, amid what historian Matt Guterl describes as a “southernization” of postwar national race relations, appeals to rehabilitation’s “communal advantages” drastically limited the kinds of work African Americans could do and where they could do it.68
In summer 1918, the FBVE established the Rehabilitation Division to undertake the vocational education and placement of veterans. This division maintained three types of offices: the Central Office in Washington, D.C., fourteen district offices composed of two or more states, and one hundred or more local offices. Each district office was headed by a district vocational officer who presided over two or more assistant district vocational officers. One of these officers was responsible for training supervision in the local offices, and another for industrial relations and employment aid.69 Dr. J. R. Crossland, a self described “fearless defender of the claims of the Negro,” was appointed by the FBVE as a “special expert on Negro affairs.”70 Though some in the black community saw Crossland’s post as misguided and little more than ceremonial, he was a key mediator between black ex-servicemen and the often-Byzantine workings of the FBVE.71
FBVE officials used the model of disability laid out in the BWRI disability schedule to train injured veterans in a variety of occupations. According to this model, a man was not “handicapped” by his physical condition but only by the specific limitation that condition placed on his employment. Although “one may find himself handicapped in one occupation he may not be in another.”72 Fears that disabled veterans, and the disabled in general, would become burdens on society led to repeated calls that integration, not segregation, was essential for any program of rehabilitation to be truly effective. Officials believed that “there is a danger inherent in the reservation of specific employment for disabled men. It makes a special class of cripples; employments reserved for them cannot fail to become characterized as subnormal occupations.”73 Having long been segregated into menial “subnormal occupations,” African American veterans now found them trapped in a double jeopardy of race and disability.
The FBVE’s “one size fits all” policy of reintegrating veterans into the general work force collapsed in the summer of 1921. Amid mounting allegations of corruption and inefficiency, the FBVE was absorbed into the Veterans Bureau in August 1921. Consequently, all federal officers were eliminated and complete authority for determining the eligibility of ex-service men for training was delegated to the district offices. In spring 1923, Crossland protested to bureau officials over cuts to his already limited staff, and the ominous disconnection of his office telephone. He argued that as the lone federal representative of black veterans, it was essential he “keep in close contact with local businesses, community centers, the Red Cross and various other rehabilitation institutions.” Crossland’s pleas went unanswered.74
The decentralization of the FBVE allowed local mores of race, labor, and disability to emerge as the dominant model in the bureaus’ day-to-day operations. Given that four out of five black veterans still lived south of the Mason-Dixon Line, southerners exercised a tremendous influence over FBVE policy. During the mass exodus of blacks to the North, east coast elites increasingly deferred to southern “racial expertise” to deal with the sudden “Negro problem” in their midst. Medical models of rehabilitation allowed southern FBVE officials to couch their traditional animus towards blacks in the more palatable rhetoric of scientific racism. Noting tubercular blacks’ apparent inability to undertake “strenuous vocational rehabilitation,” officials in the FBVE central office in Washington, D.C. concurred with their southern counterparts that “tuberculosis is in the colored race as a whole.”75 Consequently, any attempts to retrain tubercular blacks for industrial labor were dismissed as not only foolish but as contrary to the very laws of science and nature.
Vocational rehabilitation in the South was a key mechanism of racial labor division and control. Biological rationales for black inferiority bolstered the socioeconomic imperatives and hierarchies of Jim Crow. And though these rationalizations were undeniably racist, they were not irrational in the context of contemporary political economy. Blacks were indeed indispensable to the southern rural economy. Blacks comprised 48% of all southerners engaged in agriculture; cultivated two-thirds of the region’s land; owned or rented 41 million acres of farm land worth approximately one billion dollars; and tilled some 60 million more as laborers. Southern elites prevailed upon the FBVE to provide the “Negro with the kind of education that he needs and demands, namely, vocational agricultural education.”76 From November 1917 to November 1918, federal funds subsidized the creation of thirty-nine vocational education schools for black veterans and workers. FBVE agent H. O. Sargent proudly noted that “in these schools little attention is given to preparing students for college” and that “classes were directed solely to the productive field of farming,” thereby keeping the Negro in his proper place.77
FBVE officials drew on established forms of black industrial education in the design of vocational rehabilitation programs. Although Hampton-style education in the semiskilled “mechanical arts” had long been a staple of the prewar South, federal officials argued that there were too few teachers or institutions to facilitate the process. To fill this gap, the FBVE and its successors at the Veterans Bureau committed to the establishment of new vocational schools. These schools were divided into three types: urban schools for nonresident students, training centers for resident students, and reconstruction centers in Public Health Service hospitals. The curriculum was designed to meet the needs of the local white community. For black pupils—who generally functioned at a fifth to eighth grade level—at least three hours a day were devoted to vocational agriculture, half of which was spent on supervised study and laboratory work, while the other half was devoted to its practical application. Each student carried out a project that generally involved the raising of some farm crop or farm animals, usually at the home of the student. White officials never hesitated to note examples of blacks’ supposed affinity for farming. When two out of three disabled black veterans in training at Tuskegee “looked out over all the vocations open to them and chose the land” bureau, officials cited this as proof that “the call of the wild isn’t any stronger than the call of the land” and commended the two for their “courage” in answering to the latter. For Southern FBVE officials, the Negro agricultural worker was a necessary and natural entity.78
Violence—both real and imagined—sustained Jim Crow and invariably colored blacks’ experiences of rehabilitation. When FBVE officials assigned Oscar Woods to undertake tailoring training in Georgia despite his extensive background in auto mechanics, he protested to special Negro Advisor J. R. Crossland: “I would prefer to pass through Alabama in an aeroplane, driving fast at that, of course . . . on account I hear they have the KKK in Georgia and Alabama and I know how they hate working niggers.” Woods fearfully insisted that if he was sent to Alabama, “when you bring me back, I won’t need no meal ticket. My flag-draped casket will be enough.”79 This combination of regional racial labor mores and hierarchies, along with the constant threat of violence, forced many African American veterans to confront the brutal and practical limits of vocational rehabilitation.
Characterizations of blacks as cripples—the conflation of racial and physical impairment—were by no means confined to the South. Northern FBVE officials also maintained a proscribed list of semi- and unskilled trades for the minority of African American veterans who qualified for vocational rehabilitation. Throughout the nation, African American veterans were disproportionately placed in training for shoemaking and tailoring, with auto mechanics—the sole mechanical occupation—ranking a distant third. If blacks selected trades that did not appear on the approved list, bureau officials were instructed to keep them out of training indefinitely. When Mack Hudson of Philadelphia reported to his Local FBVE Office upon being certified for training with an undisclosed injury, he requested auto mechanics but was offered shoe repair. When Hudson refused, he was told that the board “could do nothing more for him.”80 J. R. Crossland protested, “It appears from the complaints which constantly pour into my office that several districts believe there are certain occupations in which they cannot afford colored men. And it is not always true that the necessary facilities are not present and readily available. The whole thing is working a great injustice upon the men of my racial group.”81
Notwithstanding these restrictions, the majority of disabled African American veterans—emboldened by their wartime service and perhaps accustomed to the occupational segregation of Jim Crow—complied with their vocational placements. One official observed that most men went “into training at the trades they are given not with the view to being rehabilitated, or even ever working at the particular trade, but simply to draw the training pay for the allotted time.” Like all veterans, African Americans placed more importance on their financial benefits than they did on the actual practices of physical rehabilitation. Bureau officials constantly complained that African American ex-servicemen were “lazy” in not taking up vocational training and should therefore be denied compensation. Similar charges of negligence were leveled against veterans of all backgrounds, but only African Americans were continually and disproportionally denied compensation and job training by the War Risk Insurance Act and the FBVE.82
Debates surrounding the racial dynamics of veterans’ policy culminated in the development and operation of United States Veterans Hospital No. 91 at Tuskegee, Alabama. Founded in 1923, the hospital’s guiding principle was on institutionalization, rather than rehabilitation. Hospital staff were less concerned with “making the Negro anew” than managing their patients’ disabilities. Palliative care was the norm, and segregation—occupational, residential, or social—became the rule of the day. In contrast, black veterans believed residence at Veterans Hospital No. 91 endowed their injuries with the stamp of federal authority that entitled them to the compensation needed for vocational rehabilitation.83 And indeed, contrary to the army’s rigorous enforcement of Jim Crow, racial segregation did not officially extend to rehabilitation hospitals. FBVE officials’ commitment to efficiency and standardization, and blacks’ real and imagined absence from the ranks of the “deserving disabled,” accounted for a seemingly integrationist and race-neutral policy. However, the Surgeon General’s Office repeatedly claimed that it had “no intention . . . to settle the so-called Race Question,” which paradoxically made it willfully blind to the day-to-day dynamics of race relations.84 Ultimately, the lack of de facto segregation did not preclude the practice of de jure racial segregation throughout the veterans hospital system.
Hospital authorities throughout the nation often refused to hospitalize black veterans in integrated institutions for fear that their mere presence would undermine patient morale and disrupt the local community. Especially troubling was the specter of “race mixing,” in which white female nurses or physiotherapists could find themselves in proximity to the crippled, diseased, and half clothed bodies of African American veterans.85 For those blacks “fortunate” enough to be admitted to Public Health Service (PHS) hospitals, treatment was typically administered in inferior segregated facilities. One veteran, Isaac Webb described his experience in a letter to The Crisis:
I am also one of the boys who volunteered in 1917 for services “over there” and I have spent six months in hospitals for the disabled. . . . At Mobile, I was handed my food out of a window, forbidden to use the front of the hospital to enter my ward, given no medical attention, and forced to use the same toilet facilities fellows in advanced stages of syphilis and gonorrhea used.
Consequently, many African American veterans refused to seek treatment at PHS facilities, driving black hospitalization rates down to almost 50 to 80% below that of whites.86
Tuskegee Veterans Hospital grew from the efforts of the Consultations on Hospitalization—or the aptly named White Committee—that convened in the spring of 1921 under Secretary of the Treasury, Andrew Mellon. Secretary Mellon enlisted a committee of medical experts who labored for two years to create a veterans hospital system that was “not only national, but rational” in scope. Dr. John Farris, head of the Red Cross Institute for the Blind and Disabled, echoed this commitment to dispassionate rationality. He argued that rehabilitation hospitals “should be the nursery of new hopes and ambitions, and not a Bridge of Sighs.”87 These new facilities would be organized and financed by the federal government and initially restricted to veterans with combat service-related diseases and injuries. The committee was assisted by an advisory group that included representatives from the PHS, the National Committee for Mental Hygiene, National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers, and the National Tuberculosis Association. The committee’s final report recommended that a separate national hospital for black veterans be established at Tuskegee, Alabama. Though the original legislation that established the hospital system did not mention separate facilities for black veterans, the committee noted early in its deliberations that “one of the great American problems—that of race—obtruded itself more and more.”88
Debates over whether to employ a white, black, or integrated staff spoke to broader issues of professional expertise, racial segregation, and the right to define disability. The black-focused National Medical Association and the NAACP aggressively lobbied the federal government to employ black staff at Tuskegee to maintain the school’s longstanding “commitment to race betterment.” Along with providing much needed jobs for African American physicians and nurses, it was also felt that blacks would provide better care to patients due to their mutual “racial affinity.” Dr. J. F. Lane of Lane College remarked, “If we cannot serve our own people, where shall we work and whom are we to serve?”89 The White Committee rejected Lane’s petition due to a lack of black orthopedic surgeons and a general aversion to recognizing any form of African American professional expertise. In the end, the committee elected to staff the hospital with all-white personnel.90 Much like their forebears, disabled black veterans at Tuskegee were often viewed as objects of pity, solely dependent on the paternalist largesse of whites.
Demands for an all-black staff increased in the wake of the hospital’s official dedication. In May 1923, General Frank T. Hines, Administrator of Veterans Affairs in Washington, D.C., asked Tuskegee’s Dr. Robert R. Moton whether he thought it advisable to staff the hospital with black doctors. Moton replied, “Inasmuch as all the patients will be Negroes and since Negro physicians are not allowed at present to practice in any large hospitals, it would be fair to give them this opportunity.”91 Tuskegee whites were infuriated at the prospect of “colored doctors,” and the local Ku Klux Klan (KKK) staged a number of dramatic and violent protests on the hospital grounds in the summer of 1923. The Klan denounced the presence of “carpet-bagging negro professionals” and demanded that the hospital maintain an all-white staff, even though this contravened a state law prohibiting white medical personnel—specifically female nurses—from treating blacks. Klansmen took the remarkable step of privileging white medical expertise over the alleged preservation of white womanhood, stating, “We do not want any niggers in this state who we cannot control.”92 While many in Washington were more than sympathetic to the Klan, most officials could not countenance attacks on federal property. The Republican administrations of Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge reluctantly agreed to turn the hospital administration over to African Americans, to curry favor with the growing bloc of urban black voters in the North.93 Tuskegee Hospital’s white director Dr. Robert Stanley was quickly replaced with Dr. John Ward, a leading figure in black medical circles who had served in France.94 Ward arrived at Tuskegee in July 1924 and directed his staff to maintain their focus on providing patients “sympathetic aid and comfort.” Ward also opposed occupational therapy, suggesting that “veterans would have little use [it], given the social strictures placed on their advancement”—further demonstrating postwar rehabilitation as a function of labor economy.95
The types of disabilities and diseases—primarily tuberculosis (TB)—found in the patients at Tuskegee Hospital largely informed its focus on paternalistic or palliative care. Though tuberculosis had exacted a debilitating toll on the wartime army as a whole, black troops suffered from the “white plague” at a rate nearly double that of whites. A 1921 study by the Army Surgeon General revealed that the highest admission rates for TB were found in black troops whether in Europe or stateside or solely white troops in Europe. Citing earlier environmental or climatic theories of racial difference, officials concluded that while the seasoned white soldier experienced “a marked advantage both as to the admission and death rates, the effect of seasoning on the colored soldier was much less marked, and indeed under the conditions he was called upon to face in Europe his admission rate was much higher than that of the relatively untrained colored men in this country.”96 Uprooted from their “natural” southern habitat and transported to the foreign climes of northern France, blacks were seemingly unable to ward off these new and more aggressive strains of the tubercular bacillus. Tuskegee Hospital No. 91 had accommodations for approximately three hundred veterans suffering from tuberculosis and just over three hundred spaces for those afflicted with neuropsychiatric disorders. For roughly the first two years of the hospital’s operation, approximately 60 to 70% of its patients were listed as tubercular.
Analysis of monthly reports from the resident American Red Cross Director at Tuskegee provides substantive insight into the daily workings of Veterans Hospital No. 91 and the racial politics of disease etiology. Initially, the Red Cross was intended to secure patients’ social histories, particularly in the neuropsychiatric service. However, as the hospital’s emphases on social welfare and non-surgical/curative methods of care increased, so, too, did the power of the Red Cross. These records—spanning the period from the hospital’s opening in April 1923 through to December 1926—chart the hospital’s shift from an all-white to an all-black staff and the consistent focus on palliative rather than rehabilitative care. Though black physicians, nurses, and various hospital officials did tend to provide patients with more “sympathetic forms of care,” they rarely, if ever, questioned the directives of the Veterans Bureau to manage rather than treat their patients. Occupational therapy and vocational rehabilitation were in short supply at Tuskegee throughout the 1920s. Ex-servicemen received only the most rudimentary vocational training in agriculture and the mechanical arts. FBVE officials concurred that tubercular blacks must be treated in the “healthful and restful climate to which they were accustomed, much like that at Tuskegee.”97 In late 1923, the FBVE, in conjunction with the National Tuberculosis Association, published a manual for vocational advisors detailing suitable occupations and vocations for tubercular veterans. The manual was the culmination of a two-year study on the negative physiological effects of tuberculosis on an individual’s labor capacity. The study’s authors were eager to incorporate the work of Jules Amar, Director of the Research Laboratory of Industrial Labor in Paris, who had developed a new method for measuring the lung capacity of individuals suffering from pulmonary tuberculosis. FBVE officials recommended that the U.S. government petition Amar to accept an advisory position at the Veterans Bureau to pursue studies on tubercular laborers. Given Amar’s work on colonial African troops, the Veterans Bureau expressed interest in commissioning a study at Tuskegee on African American veterans. Despite the failure to implement these studies, their very commission represented an intriguing attempt by FBVE and Veterans Bureaus officials to decipher the racial etiology within a broader transnational economy of racial labor fitness.
Red Cross records also revealed the modest ways in which black veterans attempted to counter characterizations of them as fundamentally disabled. In May 1924, just two months before turning over the hospital to an all-black staff, an occupational therapy department opened on the hospital’s grounds. Red Cross director E. M. Murray reported that “many of the men were loud in their expressions of delight in its beginning” and that the “work will do much toward abating any spirit of restlessness that might have existed among the men. Indeed it has already reduced the innumerable requests made upon this office for occupational supplies.” Through their persistent demands for occupational/vocational supplies, black veterans actively resisted the paternalistic regime of “enforced idleness” that had characterized their treatment.98 African American veterans saw such treatment as an affront to their identities as soldiers, workers, and men. Evelyn Z. Phelps, Director of the Red Cross Service at Tuskegee, remarked, “The patients rebel at the long rest hours, and many complaints are heard. They are kept in bed about twenty hours out of the twenty four, and feel keenly the lack of reading material, occupational therapy, vocational training and teachers.”99 Despite the introduction of an occupational therapy department and an all-black staff, Tuskegee continued to maintain a palliative rather than a rehabilitative focus, committed to the warehousing of broken black bodies.
Hospital officials defined broken black bodies as symptomatic of broken black homes. Reviewing the patient files of Mr. Tuttle Duke—a divorcee and “rather foppish fellow”—a Red Cross official remarked that his “enfeebled physical state as a tubercular” was matched “only by his predilection for vice so characteristic for a Negro of his type.”100 In their monthly reports, hospital officials routinely derided “deformed and malformed” patients as “unfit guardians” and “absentee fathers and husbands.”101 The diseased and deformed bodies of black veterans were read as evidence of their debased familial values, and a threat to the broader social fabric.102 One staff member noted that patients should be denied the opportunity to return to their families, even if “many feel that they can take the treatment as well at home and worry needlessly about their families, for if the truth were known, many of the families are far better off when the patient is away.” In early 1925, the new Red Cross director E. M. Murray cited the increasing “tendency of patients bringing their families to Tuskegee as something which we are endeavoring to prevent as much as possible.”103 Hospital officials traded on prevailing theories of African American degeneracy as social contagion to rationalize their restrictive forms of care.104
Tuskegee Hospital’s emphasis on palliative care reduced its patients to little more than wards of the state. At its peak in 1923, the FBVE was active in rehabilitating approximately 2,500 African American ex-service men, with an additional 1,500 in hospitals—the majority of whom were housed at Tuskegee. Shortly before the hospital’s shift to an all-black staff, Evelyn Z. Phelps of the Red Cross remarked, “It is our experience that the Trust Companies make the best guardians and that relatives of the patients make the poorest.” This was because “some of the families of the Negro patients are wholly ignorant and illiterate and pay no attention to the letters which we write them requesting aid for their kin.” Phelps observed that black families mistakenly “have the idea that the government is caring for the man and that every necessity is provided.”105 Officials’ disgust at poor blacks’ apparent lack of familial commitments reveals the chasm separating black and white understandings of veterans’ entitlements under Jim Crow. To the degree that black veterans and their families often viewed hospital care as their patriotic right and entitlement, whites—who were far more likely to receive care—nevertheless saw it as a privilege, dispensed by a beneficent state to an inferior people.
Tuskegee’s paternalist ethos also exposed intra-racial class tensions. Staff drawn from the African American elite—what W. E. B. DuBois deemed the “talented tenth”—worried that the mental and physical deficiencies of the “lower classes of Negro patients” would impede the race’s progress to respectability.106 From 1923 to 1927, Red Cross workers placed close to two hundred ex-servicemen in local trusts such as the Bank of Tuskegee.107 Hospital workers also took steps to confine some of the severely mentally and physically disabled to jails and insane asylums, effectively criminalizing perceived racial disabilities. An especially egregious example occurred when the Red Cross and Veterans Bureau sent thirty tubercular African American veterans to the Central State Hospital for the Criminal Insane in Nashville, on the spurious pretext that “their condition could be attributed to a uniquely racial mental affliction.”108 Tuskegee officials, whether black or white, eschewed vocational rehabilitation in favor of the various disciplinary institutions of the postwar state.
Postwar policies and practices of rehabilitation evoked antebellum techniques of the discipline of black bodies under state and federal auspicious. Yet rehabilitation was a decidedly modern phenomenon “born as a Progressive Era ideal that took shape as a military medical specialty, and eventually became a societal norm in the civilian sector.”109 The efforts of rehabilitationists to delineate the “deserving” from the “undeserving” disabled ultimately framed citizenship in corporeal terms. This, in turn, drastically circumscribed opportunities for injured black veterans whose physiognomy had historically marked them as defective—prisoners to their irredeemably primitive bodies.110 FBVE officials conflated blackness, disability, and dependence—the antithesis of republican citizenship—to consign black veterans to the margins of the interwar labor economy.
Rehabilitation—through its unique ability to link the public and the private sectors around issues of veterans’ provisions—redefined race, labor, and citizenship in postwar America. Henri-Jacques Stiker reminds us that models of rehabilitation that emerged from the Great War reconfigured disability from a curative condition tied to notions of “removal and individual health,” to a “lack to be overcome,” or a “deficiency to be remedied” through various legislative and institutional channels.111 Through these new forms of rehabilitation, race became a key marker of difference or deficiency to be overcome, in the real and symbolic postwar economy of disease and disability. Yet, given rehabilitationists’ oft-cited beliefs in African American inferiority, even limited forms of rehabilitation appeared to run counter to the core tenet of modern veterans care: autonomy before charity. Elites in both the public and private spheres worried whether the state should actively enable “the worst dependent traits of the colored race,” in a misguided and costly attempt to salvage the unsalvageable. Rather, the state should simply “cut the colored man loose” and let the dysgenic natures of war and industry finally do away with the burdensome “Negro problem.”112
FBVE policies, while profoundly racialist, were not driven by explicit racial prejudice. In fact, race hatred was quite beside the point for its architects. The successful management of the war effort emboldened social scientists to rationalize human systems along biological lines.113 Rehabilitationists saw themselves as self-appointed guardians of evolutionary processes—weeding the fit from the unfit and pruning society of its most undesirable elements. FBVE officials rationalized these practices as necessitated by wartime imperatives and not by racial animus. Managerial elites believed that limiting African American veterans’ compensation, consigning them to menial occupations, and isolating them in segregated health care facilities were all necessary interventions in the processes of social evolution.114
Official claims to scientific objectivity were belied by the use of widespread state coercion. Unlike their European counterparts, American rehabilitation policies were deemed mandatory in the hopes that more men restored to the workplace would result in reducing the costs of federal disbursements. But implicit in the practice of rehabilitation—the drive for “aggressive normalization”—was a regulatory impulse to contain bodily and social difference, so readily embodied in the figure of “the Negro.” Through these processes, evolutionary science combined with scientific management to reconcile racial form with labor function. Prewar ideas of race as a multihued phenomenon—a cacophony of races—gave way to a stark postwar biracialism of black versus white. These new forms of racial knowledge linked race and labor fitness to color and the body: the healthy, normative, white working body was juxtaposed with the degenerate, abnormal, black working body. The wounds of black veterans were seen not as badges of patriotic honor, but as the stigmata of atavistic agents threatening to poison the body politic from within. Vocational rehabilitation was ultimately a discursive and legislative tool deployed by postwar managerial elites to come to terms with an emerging black proletariat. New methods of racial labor division and control were required as the Negro moved from the farm to the city. For even the most liberal-minded reformer, the goal was never “to make the Negro anew,” but to contain, or at best alleviate, the far-reaching and dangerous socioeconomic effects of his inevitable slide into degeneracy.
FBVE models of vocational rehabilitation perpetuated and institutionalized prevailing notions of the Negro as diseased, deviant, and congenitally unfit for modern industrial life. But these ideas did not remain constant over time. Rather, they were repeatedly challenged by the exigencies of war, migration, urbanization, and African Americans themselves, in ways that eventually helped sever race from biology. But this gradual shift from biological to cultural understandings of racial difference did little to change the fortunes of the average African American veteran who remained on the margins of the postwar labor economy. For the ideological and institutional architects of postwar white supremacy, the crippled and deformed body of the disabled Negro veteran was a harbinger of America’s prospective racial decline: the canary in the nation’s evolutionary mineshaft.115