THE FIRST GREAT ALLY
Douglas Crawford McMurtrie was born in 1888, the son of a prominent chemist, in Belmar, New Jersey. He was a star sprinter and high jumper—surprising for a young man described by his biographer as “a veritable giant... well over six feet tall, seemingly almost a yard across the shoulders and weighing, in his prime, approximately 400 pounds.”
In Image No. 1, a photograph of Dougles C. McMurtrie, c. 1938-1939.
McMurtrie’s work as a reporter, businessman and print designer rapidly earned him a career in printing and magazine publishing and editing. He designed several typefaces, and later helped establish the trademark look for a fashionable new magazine, The New Yorker. He was a bon vivant, a lover of food and fine wine, a well-liked, engaging man. Though he never finished college, he had strong scholarly leanings. In years to come he would publish highly-regarded books on the history of printing, bookmaking and typography.
In 1910 McMurtrie moved to New York City where, his biographer reports, a chance encounter led to extraordinary repercussions. He met a woman who was connected with one of the many organizations then working on behalf of children with disabilities. Her group had received a sizable donation, which she proposed to use for fundraising. How about ads in the subway? McMurtrie answered that people who had that kind of money didn’t use the subway. Instead, the young man penned a short story, “Dorothy’s Dilemma,” about a disabled woman in the able-bodied world. Printing it up in pamphlet form, he distributed it to a list of wealthy New Yorkers, then followed up a few weeks later with fundraising letters, achieving results that were “astounding.”
“Dorothy’s Dilemma” was an unusual piece for its time, published a year before Randolph Bourne’s ground-breaking first-person essay, “The Handicapped – By One of Them.” But it was only the beginning of McMurtrie’s transformation into the first great ally of the disability population.
Two years later, McMurtrie published a booklet, “The Care of Crippled Children In The United States.” Its most notable finding was that there were 67 organizations around the country dedicated to disabled children--far higher than anyone had suspected, and more than enough to constitute a movement. The problem was that these organizations had for the most part developed independently, in response to local issues and under unique individual leadership. There was little cross-communication and even less coordination. Changing that situation was one of the primary intentions behind the little book.
One of the significant features of “The Care of Crippled Children” was its bibliography, which listed over a hundred recent works on the subject (including a dozen pieces by the author). Over the next decade McMurtrie would collect as many as ten thousand ancient and modern works about disability, the largest such collection anywhere.
In 1914 appeared the first issue of “The American Journal of Care For Cripples,” a new professional journal for social workers, medical practitioners, educators and administrators. It was an effort to seed a national network for what was coming to be called “the rehabilitation movement.” The new journal was published quarterly for nine years. McMurtrie was editor-in-chief. It was the beginning of a more frontal attack on answering the riddle, as the new phrase put it, of “crippledom.”
The rehabilitation movement surged with the nation’s entry into the First World War. Ever since its beginnings at the hands of the pioneering activist May Darrach, circa 1898, the movement had mainly focused on disabled children. But with World War One, suddenly disabled adults came into the picture--credible projections showed huge numbers of veterans were likely to come home with combat-related disabilities.
The upshot was a new, preventive focus on soldiers who were not yet veterans, and not-yet-veterans who were not yet disabled. The Surgeon General and the Red Cross created a new semi-public body to handle the anticipated flood of returning vets--the Red Cross Institute for Crippled and Disabled Men. It was a national effort, undertaken with the involvement of the Federal Board for Vocational Education.
The director was none other than Douglas C. McMurtrie.
McMurtrie attacked this new project with his customary gusto, constantly in view as a spokesman, author, and editor. Between 1917 and 1919 the Red Cross Institute’s publications appeared in newspapers, popular magazines, professional journals, and book-length collections. It direct-mailed some eight million pieces of literature into American homes, including three million that were included in telephone bills.
The basic argument was straightforward. Veterans had proven themselves to be tough and resourceful. They were likely to transition successfully given public support, and that support was well warranted given the sacrifices the men had made for their country. The publications of the Red Cross Institute spoke of the public’s “duty to the war cripple,” and encouraged readers to understand that the refusal to employ disabled veterans confronted them with “a more baffling difficulty than the loss of a limb.” Together with a massive veterans’ pension program that was being debated in Congress, a new dawn for disabled Americans seemed near at hand.
The Red Cross Institute quickly found measurable improvements in employment of disabled adults in the New York City area. By 1919 Henry Ford had hired over nine thousand disabled employees. There were even men with disabilities playing Major League baseball.
But the new dawn failed to materialize. The Progressive Movement lost much of its force under the combined weight of the Great Polio Epidemic of 1916, the First World War, the Flu Pandemic of 1917-1918, and the Red Scare that began in 1919. The disaster-dulled public’s interest in people with disabilities evaporated. The author of “The Handicapped,” Randolph Bourne, died in the Flu Pandemic. Ford stopped hiring disabled employees. And not long after, McMurtrie quit the rehabilitation movement, never to return.
McMurtrie remains an authoritative figure in the history of printing. The Red Cross Institute for Crippled and Disabled Men lingered on for more than a century, most recently under the name Institute for Career Development, until it finally closed its doors in 2024. But awareness of our first great ally’s pioneering disability advocacy all but disappeared, long ago.
Until now.
Note: A version of this entry appeared in Able News, https://ablenews.com/
by Warren Shaw
