At a time when there is much angst over the future of Social Security for elder Americans, it is useful to remember the profound impact which children had on the Social Security Act of 1935. As the Committee on Economic Security noted in its report to President Roosevelt that year, "The core of any social plan must be the child." Under the Act, Congress allocated $8.15 million for children. Critical to that effort, and a focus of my research, were children with disabilities.
The Children's Bureau, founded in 1912, and its Associate Chief, a graduate
of the St. Louis Children's Hospital pediatrics residency, Martha May Eliot
(1891-1978), were crucial to the government's plan for improving the health of
the nation in 1935. Through the work of The Children's Bureau, Congress targeted
crippled children by allocating approximately 35% or $2.85 million (approx. $37.5 million in 2002)
for their care. In retrospect this sounds like a large sum during the Depression,
but at the time, 'crippled' children were given a high priority for promoting the
health of the country.
At the same time, in Nazi Germany, crippled children were also selected for particular attention. The Aktion T4 was an initiative designed to 'euthanize' children with disabilities in order to relieve the financial burden of their care from the government as well as to 'cleanse' their genes from the gene pool. The program rapidly extended to adults with disabilities and ultimately, the Holocaust.
My own research project, Childing the Cripple and Crippling the Child: A Comparative History of Children with Disabilities, describes such children, their experiences, care and the policies which countries like France, Germany, the UK, and the US generated around them from 1800 to 1950. The project involves a great deal of archival work in governmental documents. As with the Social Security Act, a number of federal laws, as well as numerous committees and administrative findings have embraced ways to improve the status of children with disabilities.
European and American governments struggled to integrate the multifaceted care of disabled children into their policy and funding structures. In part they were motivated by a sense of moral obligation, but they also saw the functional state of the 'weakest' of their society's members as representative of the 'strength' of the nation as a whole. Improving the function of disabled children inevitably required attention by parents, doctors, nurses, social workers, therapists, teachers, camp counselors, as well as changing the nature of streets, sidewalks, building access, hospital construction, and public attitudes. Such multi-faceted problems required multi-faceted solutions.
Seminal in this story is the emergent theme of multi-disciplinary cooperation, embodied in the team of professionals who assist children and their families to improve the function of a child with disabilities. While historians have previously described the medical team as coming from World War I's operating theaters, it now appears that early pediatricians, working with disabled children found it necessary to assemble teams of teachers, nurses, social workers and early physical and occupational therapists to act collectively for the welfare of the children. Martha Eliot and the Children's Bureau embraced this model in applying the monies of the Social Security Act to help disabled children in all fifty states.
This tale and many more are kept within documents maintained by Federal Depositories around the country, waiting to be uncovered. Here is a copy of the opening page of the 1935 Social Security Act, as kept in Federal Depositories. To read the Act in its entirety, click here.
This is the cover page from an early history of The Children's Bureau by Martha Eliot and Dorothy Bradbury. Click here to see page 40 of Eliot and Bradbury's history highlighting interest in interdisciplinary work with disabled children.
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