Madison Barker

Mr. Kogan

Disability In The Past

December 15th 2015

Rehabilitation or Nothing: Visual Representations of Disabled World War One Veterans

The concept of veterans in disability history provides a unique ability to analyze society’s views towards disability. Society simultaneously hailed veterans for their sacrifices and stigmatized veterans if they had physical or mental disabilities. Paul K. Longmore in his book Why I Burned My Book and Other Essays on Disability elucidates that the veteran holds a unique position because of the cause of their disabilities. They are differentiated from a civilian with disabilities because they obtained their disabilities not from some flaw of their parents to conceive and raise healthy offspring or a sickness during their childhood but from a disability attained while fighting for their country^[1]. Longmore also argues that some of the very first U.S. government policy changes in regards to disability and rehabilitation responded to the wishes of the large amount of disabled veterans post World War One^[2].

My research would focus on what ways post World War One advertisements and visual media represent the romanticization of war and the glorification of a disabled veteran’s “sacrifice” for their country. In this research proposal the analysis focuses specifically on World War One, however, the proposal could be expanded to analyze how this depiction of veterans changed after World War Two and the other conflicts of the mid to late twentieth century and what that says about the consumer culture that bought into those advertisements, additionally, what the war posters translate about the society that commissioned them.
        Additionally the work of David A. Gerber in his article, “Disabled Veterans, The State, and The Experience of Disability in Western Societies,” complements Longmore’s analysis of the unclear conceptions of veterans in social policy.^[3] Gerber argues that veterans are unique because, as opposed to many other people with disabilities, they share a common experience and therefore a bond with other disabled veterans. Gerber argues that the veterans of World War One had a deep psychological investment in maintaining the legacy of World War One and glorifying their experiences as soldiers.^[4] Many World War One advertisements visually support the idea that Gerber posits about the veteran’s wishes to maintain the legacy of the war and also to pursue what Gerber refers to as the “remasculinization” of the veterans.^[5] The advertisements and visual representations of veterans after World War One clearly portray the attempts of the public to glorify the veterans while simultaneously attempting to reintegrate them into post-World War One society. The aftermath of World War One resulted in a large number of disabled soldiers and a response by the population that encouraged or arguably created the ethic that disabilities could be cured.

Fig. 1. Facing the future Uncle Sam offers training to every man disabled in the service--See that your man takes it--Ask the Red Cross from American Treasures of the Library of Congress. C.F. Chambers, 1919.

        The war poster above by C.F. Chambers depicts some of the classic characteristics of the romanticization of disabled veterans and a relative ignorance of their struggle to find work in society. The disabled veteran is depicted standing above women and children looking out onto a vibrant landscape. The vibrancy of the poster draws attention to the bright future that disabled veterans have in front of them. This poster also clearly attempts to depict the disabled veteran as hyper-masculine and in a dominant position above the women and children who look up to the veteran literally and as implied metaphorically. The veteran’s glorification goes contrary to the stigmatization of disability in early-nineteenth century, for example barring them from access to jobs. The American public after World War One pushed veterans to be self sufficient and rehabilitate because the consequences of the Civil War made it clear to them that they could not yet again have a large population of wounded veterans dependent upon the state. Orthopedic surgeons and a growing population of Americans after World War One pushed the concept that disabled veterans could become productive citizens if given the right medical care.^[6] The veteran in the picture is depicted with a crutch to show that with the proper medical care and technology the disabled veterans could move on with their lives and have a future filled with opportunities. The man stands on his own which clearly highlights the wishes of the American people to have disabled veterans enabled to live independent of government assistance. Additionally the rhetoric used when discussing veterans “facing their future” continually emphasizes the over simplistic narrative of veterans overcoming their disabilities.

Fig. 2. Advertisement for Neurasthenia Cured By Electricity, in Illustrated London News, 1918.

        The advertisement above highlights several of the critical ways advertisements portrayed shell shocked veterans. The advertisement also exemplifies the methods companies used to capitalize on  a population of disabled veterans but also a population of veterans that they categorized as mentally ill. The ad cites war time conditions as a reason why more and more men returned with “disorders” such as neurasthenia that make them, as the man depicted in the picture, nervous and unstable. The ad is clearly directed towards veterans of World War One, as made clear by the publication date in 1918 and the explicit statement in the intro that the device could cure men suffering from nervous disorders. A group of men that went off to war in a state physicians would have considered mentally stable would return from war “shell shocked” and as a result physicians pushed to cure the mental illness and provide the men with confidence. The advertisement advances a rhetoric that mental illnesses such as anxiety could be cured. However, the ad does not directly address the men in the war because the psychological trauma of the war was continually ignored in official government posters and in the minds of the public^[7].

The advertisement emphasizes men that did not meet the nineteenth century standard of masculinity could be cured of their pseudo-scientific diagnosis of neurasthenia by utilizing electroshock therapy. The man on the right side of the picture seems noticeably larger than the man on the left and does not appear frightened by the car behind the two because he owns the belt to cure neurasthenia. The man on the left, in contrast, appears smaller and much less self-assured than the man on the right, he cowers in fear at the sight of a car. This advertisement elucidates the ways that companies attempted to re masculinize the men of World War One. Because neurasthenia, a mental illness typically diagnosed in women, increasingly presented itself in men coming home from the war, the diagnosis therefore emasculated the men that had nervous anxiety^[8]. This advertisement advances the medical model of disability which states that only the medical world can diagnose and cure disability. The advertisement additionally highlights the attempts of the public to advance an attitude towards disabled veterans that emphasized rehabilitation.

Fig 3. Learning to Walk for the Second Time from American Treasures of the Library of Congress. 1919.

        The war poster above exists as another example of the ways publishers used visual media to advance the rhetoric of rehabilitation for disabled veterans. The ultimate goal of images like this was to comfort men with disabilities, to reassure them that other people had reintegrated into society and correspondingly so could they. The way the picture depicts the men is an example of the obsession in post war photography with the rehabilitation of amputees^[9]. The photographers of World War One show disability as one of two things, amputations or injuries. The depictions of amputees always features prosthetics or clean white bandages, and a focus on the rehabilitation of the amputee and not their injury^[10]. The poster above emphasizes that prosthetics could restore the ability of a man to walk at the capacity they did prior to the war, showcasing the trend in World War One posters of restoring the productivity of disabled veterans^[11].

It is important to investigate the visual depictions of veterans after World War One because veterans hold a unique place in disability history. The status of a disabled veteran was inherently one with an internal contradiction, how can the country glorify the acts of any man that fought in the war and simultaneously stigmatize and prevent those with disabilities from accessing work? It is also crucial to consider advertisements when doing an analysis of visual representations of a certain population because advertisements are unique in their ability to showcase the goals of a culture. The way that advertisements sell products says a lot about the people and society they are targeting.   If advertisements appeal to an attitude of rehabilitation and curing disability after World War One then correspondingly the people must have had that attitude in order for the products to be created at all. Additionally, analyzing advertisements plays into the notion that many disability scholars have focused on, that the concept of disability in the twentieth century arose as a product of industrialization and the increasing need for uniformity in the work force. Men who did not fit the societal standard of a “normal” body could not be used on the production lines and therefore failed to achieve one of the tenets of masculinity^[12].

        The analysis of advertisements and visual depictions of disability can serve as a method of taking all of the theories about the attitudes towards World War One veterans and using that media to prove that the advertisements support those theses. Additionally, visual media clearly elucidates the changing ways in which wounded soldiers are depicted and how those depictions influenced the way society saw disabled veterans.

Bibliography

Longmore, Paul K. Why I Burned My Book and Other Essays on Disability. Philadelphia:

Temple University Press, 2003.

 Linker, Beth. War’s Waste: Rehabilitation in World War I America. Chicago; London:          

University of Chicago Press, 2011.

Gerber, David A. “ Disabled Veterans, the State, and the Experience of Disability in Western Societies, 1914-1950,” Journal of Social History 36, no. 4. Virginia: George Mason University Press, 2003.

Kinder, John M. Ed. James, Pearl. “Iconography of Injury: Encountering The Wounded Soldiers

Body in American Poster Art and Photography of World War I.”  Picture This: World War I Posters and Visual Culture. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009.