By Nate Holdren
This is the second post in our theme for October 2023, Urban Disability
In 1966, attorney and disability activist Jacobus tenBroek published “The Right to Live in the World.” The brilliant California Law Review article ranges widely in its eighty pages, canvassing as it does the great many factors that contribute to denying disabled people the right identified in its title. To truly have a right to be in the world, tenBroek wrote, people need “free and safe physical access to it through the use of streets and sidewalks, roads and highways, and the common modes of transportation, communication, and interchange. It includes as well full and equal access to places of public accommodation.”[1] That freedom and equality is shaped by many factors, including policy, nondisabled people’s attitudes, and the built environment. The article remains insightful reading about a right yet to be fully realized.
While tenBroek didn’t thematize cities specifically, the portion I quoted makes it clear that this right has a great deal to do with the social organization of space, and so is a fruitful matter to consider as part of urban history. In what follows, I briefly lay out how I understand disability history—as the conflict-ridden history of this right’s denial—with some examples making connections to urban history in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States. (I hope it’s clear I don’t mean to take the US as universally representative, it’s just the time and place I happen to know about.)
A key point for understanding disability is that it is not the individual condition of a person which determines their social fate, but the social context around them. That is: disability is a social relationship, a political condition, like class—and often class and disability are closely intertwined. Among other things, this means disability is a social relationship in which people aspire to live one way while being constrained to live in another way that limits their flourishing. Disability history often involves tracing those demands and constraints. More broadly, it means attending to how disability is lived, concretely in specific times and places. “How disability is lived” is easily read as a matter of the experience, self-understanding, and activism of disabled people themselves, and fruitfully so. That said, it’s worth emphasizing that disability is relational, so that “how disability is lived” is also a matter of how nondisabled people constrain the disabled and construct the category of disability and are themselves made into who they are.
This has a great deal to do with cities, in part simply because over time more people have come to live in cities, and so they become places where disabled people live. Every place has disabled people, processes of disablement, and so has a disability history—or really, many disability histories, which can be pursued through many different scholarly approaches. The city—a material and physical landscape in which social, cultural, and political structures are constantly being modulated and transformed—is, historically, another site where actors have thought out what disability is, who the disabled are and could and should be, and sought to impose that conception through city-level politics.
In a justly infamous example, in the late nineteenth century, many American cities passed so-called “unsightly beggar” ordinances or “ugly laws” as Susan Schweik has examined in her book. In this example, disability was constructed in knowledge as an objectionable condition—within the dominant understanding constructed by law, a disabled person could take on status as intuitively, obviously a nuisance who was unpleasant to look at—as part of authorizing police to push disabled people out of public space. Doing so deprived disabled people of the right to be in the world and, by enforcing sequestration, reduced nondisabled people’s commitment to disabled people’s rights.
Another example is the “Survey of all the Cripples of Cleveland,” conducted in 1915 and 1916 by the Welfare Federation of Cleveland. The survey claimed to be the first city-wide census of a disabled population and the second census of that population of any kind in the United States, the first being a state-level effort in Massachusetts. The published survey noted that the Welfare Federation began its work expecting to find a clear causal relationship between impairment and unemployment, but instead found that disabled people had much higher rates of employment and self-employment and lower rates of economic dependency than they expected. They noted their surprise in finding that “the same disability was a measurable economic handicap in one case and apparently none at all in another.”[2] They can be understood as people starting to grasp the reality of disability being a social condition, and they drew a range of practical conclusions involving a mixture of trying to change the disabled individual via training and devices (efforts which later disability activists and scholars have rightly criticized as often oppressive and exploitive), trying to change employers through education and policy, and trying to create more robust rights to social inclusion for the disabled. The survey and its findings were published in a dynamic period when employers’ attitudes toward disabled people were changing, largely for the worse, a transition that my book and even more so Sarah Rose’s No Right to be Idle have examined in close detail. In a terrible historical irony, as Doug Crandell has recently documented, employers’ increasingly locking disabled people out of employment also facilitated locking some disabled people into institutions that forced them to labor in especially exploitive working conditions.
The ugly laws and the Cleveland survey are both examples of how larger social and economic processes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries generated changing forms of disablement and, in response, changing ways of conceptualizing disability and managing disabled people. Both increasingly dangerous industrial work and the ills of poverty created new harms that left many people impaired, while uncertain economic conditions in the most oppressed ends of the labor market left people in relative economic desperation and especially in need of being in public to work, to beg, and because many could not afford private space in the housing market.
The ugly laws and the Cleveland survey are also examples of how these realities manifested with particular visibility in cities, meaning that for the late nineteenth and early twentieth century United States urban history and disability history (at least of the kind I’ve gestured toward here) have a particular affinity. This is, in part, due to the sheer increase in urban population over time, but also because in cities the well-to-do and those with official political power were more likely to encounter the disabled and to see the disabled as a problem.
Having said that, these examples are as much or more the result of my own proclivities as a historian of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States; all eras include important and dynamic social and economic patterns, and it is those social patterns that generate disablement, and urban. That is to say, once we take disability seriously as a category of analysis, it becomes clear that like all cities, all eras have their disability histories, largely unwritten.
The Cleveland survey was one of several examples of social investigation that informed policy making. These investigations happen at many levels of government with different conceptual and geographic units in mind. (Examining when and why social investigation has taken the city vs. the state vs. the national or other scales as its basic geographic unit is itself an interesting subject of inquiry.) Thus, local municipal knowledge making about disabled people is an especially exciting avenue for future research by urban historians—especially understood as being networked together in what Shel Stromquist has recently called a translocal politics.
Part of what makes this work exciting is that it permits the diffusion of disability as a category of analysis into further areas of study, analogous to how many historians have come to think about gender as one facet of multifaceted inquiries, which can be integrated into studies alongside other categories of analysis. Furthermore, examination of the translocal politics of disability could be productively conducted with an emphasis on either the top-down and more oppressive side or from the bottom-up activist side of disabled people demanding respect for their right to be in the world.
So far I have suggested using the city as a concretizing category—the city is often where disability is lived in its specificity—and as an institutional category—municipal actors and built environment have made disability; disability has often been made locally, even though translocally. It is fruitful as well to flip the order of the categories, by noting how disability has constructed the city and made urban space. Schweik’s work on the so-called ugly laws generatively opens onto how notions of “good” and “bad” neighborhoods often have a great deal to do with whether or not disabled people are publicly visible to nondisabled people in that space. The appalling, inhumane efforts to push disabled people out of public places and limit their access to important private places frequented by nondisabled people—like bars, restaurants, grocery stores, or workplaces—are simultaneously projects of making urban spaces, sometimes in the literal physical sense of “making,” as in design choices about accessibility. At the same time, as Schweik documents, in response to being sequestered from many other spaces, disabled people often created their own spaces for conviviality, just as African Americans and queer persons have done in the past in response to their legal oppression. Exclusion is spatially organized and simultaneously organizes and constructs urban and social space. We can then think of tenBroek’s assertion of a right to live in the world as necessarily implying a right to take part in the making and remaking of the world.
On a final note: the still unfolding COVID-19 pandemic has significantly been distributed in space along racial, class, and disability lines, with higher rates of injury and death inflicted on lower-income people, working-class people, and racialized minorities. Many of those COVID sufferers are finding themselves newly disabled due to the lingering harms of COVID. (Here the pandemic expresses and intensifies patterns of more people becoming disabled over time, tied to how race and class structure the aging process or lifecourse.) Furthermore, those disabled people for whom COVID poses a greater health risk have been forced out of public space as mitigations have been rolled back—a process which has been somewhat uneven by municipality. Disabled people have yet to fully achieve the right to be in the world. As such, it remains important for historians to write the history of the forces operating to deny that right and disabled people’s collective efforts to force respect for that right.
Nate Holdren holds a PhD in History from the University of Minnesota and is the author of Injury Impoverished: Workplace Accidents, Capitalism, and Law in the Progressive Era. He is employed as an Associate Professor in the Program in Law, Politics, and Society at Drake University.
Featured image (at top): “Industrial Home for the Blind, Lloyd Harbor, Weaving at the Loom” (1956), Gottscho-Schleisner, Inc., Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress
[1] Jacobus tenBroek, “The Right to Live in the World: The Disabled and the Law of Torts,” California Law Review 54 (1966): 841-919, 917-918.
[2] Welfare Federation of Cleveland, Education and Occupations of Cripples Juvenile and Adult: A Survey of All the Cripples of Cleveland, Ohio, in 1916 (Cleveland: Welfare Federation of Cleveland, 1918), 12.
The Metropole 