Disability and the American Counterculture

Abstract

On 1 March 1945, President Franklin D. Roosevelt addressed Congress on his meeting with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin in Yalta, from which he had just returned. The conference was, of course, a pivotal moment in the shaping of post-War Europe and did much to establish the tense East-West relations that endured for most of the following half century. While the Cold War was indubitably a key shaper of the domestic and international environs within which the counterculture emerged and-for a short time-thrived in the United States, Roosevelt's address was significant in another way, more directly pertinent to this special issue. Since his illness (he was diagnosed with polio in 1921) and, more so, since he decided to run for president, Roosevelt had been careful to downplay the full extent of his lower-body paralysis, avoiding being seen in public using his wheelchair and developing considerable upper-body strength to keep himself upright when delivering speeches. The address to Congress was different: the President began by stating,I hope that you will pardon me for this unusual posture of sitting down during the presentation of what I want to say, but I know that you will realize that it makes it a lot easier for me not to have to carry about ten pounds of steel around on the bottom of my legs.While it would be far-fetched to suggest that Roosevelt's decision not only to sit, but also to explain why he was sitting, was the harbinger of a swift and painless revolution in the treatment and representation of disability in the United States, or to argue that it immediately tore down the barriers to full and equal participation in public life, it does serve as at the very least a symbolic start to a long, slow, and still ongoing process that has adopted a recognizably modern form since the end of the Second World War. Since then, the place of disabled people in national life has undergone many positive changes, both in terms of legislation and popular understanding; nevertheless, the Cold War culture of the 1950s also did much to codify certain forms of behaviour-most notably, homosexuality-as new kinds of freakery, replacing the popular fascination with the display of the physically othered freak that had been a central tenet of American popular culture from the 1890s to the 1930s.1There were few positive, central representations of physical (or mental) disability in the American popular culture of the post-War years, and key examples that did portray disability often focused on the return to normalcy of men injured in the line of duty. Fred Zinnemann's The Men (1950), for example, was a critically acclaimed if commercially unsuccessful representation of a paraplegic war vet (Marlon Brando), coming to terms with his new situation. Brando would become an iconic figure for two generations of the counterculture and, while The Men was hardly central to this process, his depictions of angry, disturbed outsiders certainly helped to create an environment in which figures straddling the boundary between sane and insane could acquire a hip presence for would-be rebels. In contrast, Ironside (1967-75), launched, ironically enough, during the Summer of Love, cast the (non-disabled) Raymond Burr as former detective Robert T. Ironside, forcibly retired after being paralysed by a sniper, before returning to the force as a special consultant and triumphing in case after case. While Ironside was very much an establishment figure, the series was significant in being aired prime-time while having a disabled central character represented positively and repeatedly triumphing over normal adversaries, often characterized by their own deviant criminal behaviour. At the other extreme, movies such as Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) and Robert Aldrich's What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) did little to challenge the notion that the mentally ill were a danger to everyday life, even if Hitchcock's vision also targeted the hypocrisies of that life and the limitations of psychoanalysis as a means to understanding the mind. …