Out of the Horrors of War

In May 2017, President Donald Trump’s Office of Management and Budget released A New Foundation for American Greatness, a 62-page budget proposal for fiscal year 2018. Critics, including some top Republicans, declared the plan to be “dead on arrival,” pointing to the budget’s deep cuts to Medicaid, food stamps, and farm subsidies. Somewhat overlooked in media fallout, however, were the Trump Administration’s designs to reform federal disability programs. Citing an abundance of fraud in the current system, the Trump budget promised to cut billions of dollars of Social Security disability insurance, reserving money benefits only for those who are “truly eligible.” Further, it proposed a change in government priorities, away from helping people with permanent disabilities toward incentivizing “individuals with temporary work-disabilities” to rejoin the labor force.1 This line of thinking is hardly new. In her remarkably prescient book Out of the Horrors of War, historian Audra Jennings traces similar proposals back to the 1940s, when activists, medical professionals, and politicians waged fierce legislative battles to shape the federal government’s response to its disabled citizens. At the center of the book is the story of the American Federation of the Physically Handicapped (AFPH), a national, cross-disability political organization built on the belief that “the federal government had a responsibility to move disabled citizens from the economic and civic margins to the center of the welfare state” (218). The group was founded in 1940 by Paul Strachan, a former government administrator whose life was transformed following an automobile crash in 1929.

Administration (probate law) · Federal budget · Fiscal year · Government (linguistics) · Greatness · Health care · Medicaid · Political science · Politics · Sociology · State (computer science) · Subsidy · Disability Rights and Representation · Historical Psychiatry and Medical Practices · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Law · Psychology · Public Administration