League Of The Physically Handicapped
In this image: Three-part photograph circa 1935, showing people tending to disabled protesters on crutches who have been knocked down by police.
The League of the Physically Handicapped, or LPH, was the first direct-action civil disobedience disability organization in the United States. Founded in New York City in 1935, during the depths of the Depression, the LPH had a single goal--to redirect a sliver of New Deal employment programs towards people with physical disabilities. Although they did not succeed, and although they failed to seed an ongoing activist movement, the LPH set a precedent for civil disobedience that would be taken up, decades later, by then-children with disabilities who went on to pioneer the modern New York City Disability Rights Movement. The LPH invented the sit-in as a form of protest, and created an unprecedented written statement that remains a powerful critique of American society and its relationship to people with disabilities.
Aside from the radical journalists at The Daily Worker, LPH met with a largely hostile indeed mocking reaction. The local New Deal Administrator, for example, simply could not understand that people with disabilities were in a unique predicament: “If a group of redheads came in here as a league and demanded work,” he asked, “could we justifiably give it to them?”
After days of picketing and sitting in at the Administrator’s office, the LPH membership was arrested. The judge assigned their case was a locally famous, noise phobic eccentric, well known for his harsh views of strikes and picketers. The trial was low comedy, and all of the accused were convicted. Undeterred, more demonstrations followed, and they made their way to Washington to continue their sit-in. The head of the national New Deal office demanded that they state their claim in writing—and the response was “Thesis on Conditions of Physically Handicapped.” This was a first-of-its-kind statement that combined a political and economic critique with a manifesto of survival and independence—something like a Seneca Falls Declaration for people with disabilities. Sadly, though, as Prof. Paul Longmore put it, “FDR never adopted the league’s analysis or advice. He apparently never even responded to its ‘Thesis.’”
Utterly thwarted, the League soon dwindled away. The Thesis quickly sank out of sight, and it remained there for more than eighty years. Only in late 2016, at my urging among others, was a copy of the Thesis finally digitized and posted on the internet. Even now, attached to an obscure archive at a little-known community college, the Thesis remains essentially invisible and unavailable to the public--a sad but fitting conclusion to the tale of the League of the Physically Handicapped.
by Warren Shaw