The United Handicapped Workers of America is formed after the League of the Physically Handicapped, dominated by the C.P., made peace with the LaGuardia administration of New York.

‘Handicapped Form New Trade Union’ from Socialist Appeal. Vol. 2 No. 11. March 12, 1938.

Old Organization Found Utterly Incapable Of Struggle

NEW YORK. A new organization, the United Handicapped Workers of America, created to embrace workers who to one degree or another suffer from physical handicaps and disabilities, has entered the fighting field of the militant labor movement. The program of the new organization and its plan of campaign were unfolded at its first public-meeting held recently in Damaszek’s Manor, 12 St. Mark’s Place.

In a circular calling for enrollments, Harry Friedman, provisional secretary, proclaims the new body “a fighting democratic organization…formed to fight for jobs for all handicapped workers.”

League Degenerates

While frankly admitting that the organization has entered the field against the League of Physically Handicapped the circular denies that it is pursuing a policy of dual unionism, pointing out that the League, which did good work for its members in the past, has become a bureaucratically-controlled body utterly incapable of advancing the interests of its members.

The League, says the circular, is tied through its leadership to “a political party” (not specified) and this leadership is placing the interests of that party before the interests of the handicapped. “Since the program of the political party called for making friends with the administration which has been slashing the W.P.A. payrolls, the leadership of the League…refused to fight the administration and instead called for a fight against the so-called reactionaries.”

“This is the policy which has reduced the League to a handful, results at every meeting in a spectacle of 6 or 7 delegations being elected to take up problems with the administration, while the 6 or 7 delegations at the previous meeting come back with reports of one failure after another.”

Plight of Handicapped

Pointed questions are asked in the circular: “How many times have you been turned away from a job because of your handicap? How many years of training have you received only to find yourself denied the right to use this training? How do you feel about being forced to be dependent upon your family for support? What future do you face?

“For years the handicapped have been asking themselves these questions and the answer continues to be–flop-houses, begging in the streets, run-arounds from one charitable organization to another, continued discrimnation in private industry, inability to lead a normal married life because of insufficient financial means, inability to secure crutches, braces and other orthopedic appliances, while each one struggles along upon the small allowance doled out to them by their parents.

“The handicapped have learned through experience that the betterment of their conditions has been secured through organization and militant action. It is only because no organization exists today which is carrying on a militant organized fight for security for the handicapped that the United Handicapped Workers of America has been formed.”

There have been a number of periodicals named Socialist Appeal in our history, this Socialist Appeal was edited in New York City by the “Left Wing Branches of the Socialist Party”. After the Workers Party (International Left Opposition) entered the Socialist Party in 1936, the Trotskyists did not have an independent publication. However, Albert Goldman began publishing a monthly Socialist Appeal in Chicago in February 1935 before the bulk of Trotskyist entered the SP. When there, they began publishing Socialist Appeal in August 1937 as the weekly paper of the “Left Wing Branches of the Socialist Party” but in reality edited by Cannon and other leaders. Goldman’s Chicago Socialist Appeal would fold into the New York paper and this Socialist Appeal would replace New Militant as the main voice of Fourth Internationalist in the US. After the expulsion of the Trotskyists from the the Socialist Party, Socialist Appeal became the weekly organ of the newly constituted Socialist Workers Party in early 1938. Edited by James Cannon and Max Shachtman, Felix Morrow, and Albert Goldman. In 1941 Socialist Appeal became The Militant again.

Link to PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/themilitant/socialist-appeal-1938/v2n11-mar-12-1938-SA.pdf