In Out of the Horrors of War, Audra Jennings tells the story of the American Federation for the Physically Handicapped (AFPH), an activist organization founded by Paul Strachan in 1942 to advocate for the rights of Americans with physical disabilities. While the New Deal had guaranteed the rights of predominantly white, able-bodied American men to work and receive social insurance, such guarantees did not extend to Americans with disabilities during the Depression. Under Strachan's leadership, the AFPH capitalized on wartime labor shortages to bring Americans with physical disabilities into the workforce and advocate for their economic, social, and political rights as US citizens. Often focussing on the roles played by Strachan as president and Mildred Scott as national secretary of the AFPH, Jennings narrates the organization's efforts to promote the rights of Americans with physical disabilities and to shape federal disability policy, sometimes in concert, and sometimes in conflict, with other disability stakeholders, government bureaucrats, union leaders, and professionals in the emerging field of rehabilitative medicine.

Jennings's narrative of the AFPH extends from its inception in 1942 to its demise in 1954, with a focus on the war and reconversion periods. Jennings thus offers an early and little-known chapter in the history of the disability rights movement, which many historians inaccurately regard as emerging after the African American civil rights movement and other liberation movements of the 1960s. In casting light on the war and postwar periods, Jennings also reveals that disability was then, as it is now, a contested issue, and that tensions between disabled people themselves and so-called experts in the fields of medicine and rehabilitative therapy are long-standing. In focussing on the AFPH, Jennings also highlights an agency that attempted to draw together a wide range of Americans with physical disabilities, cross-cutting not only all manner of disability, but also differences of race, gender, class, and region. As a pioneering cross-disability organization, Jennings argues, the AFPH merits careful consideration because it preceded the contemporary disability rights movement in ways that single-disability groups like the National Federation for the Blind and the National Association for the Deaf did not.

A strength of Jennings's analysis is her detailed account of federal disability policy. Following the war, two federal agencies vied for control over policy with regard to physical disability: the Department of Labor (DOL) and the Federal Security Agency (FSA). With its primary goal of providing stable, remunerative employment for Americans with physical disabilities, the AFPH forged an alliance with labor unions and advocated for a jobs-based approach to physical disability to be administered by the DOL. Rehabilitative medical experts, whose careers had flourished due to high rates of war casualties and industrial accidents, advocated for a treatment-based approach to be overseen by the FSA. While the AFPH under Strachan's leadership strongly advocated for the DOL's jobs-based approach, the FSA model preferred by rehabilitation professionals ultimately prevailed. This marked a failure of Strachan's leadership and the AFPH disbanded in 1954. Nevertheless, Strachan continued to advocate for the rights of people with physical disabilities until his death in 1972, and the AFPH forged a model of cross-disability activism that would reemerge in later decades.

Certainly, a central feature of the AFPH was its advocacy of full economic citizenship for Americans with physical disabilities. But Jennings emphasizes that the AFPH had other goals as well, such as better educational access for people with significant physical disabilities and representation of physically disabled people on deliberative bodies charged with determining their opportunities and rights. As Jennings notes, the AFPH also functioned locally as a transformative space where people with physical disabilities learned to see their own and others’ disabilities more affirmatively, and where they forged bonds both personal and political that empowered them to act and to flourish as members of their communities. In an era deeply devoted to the conventions of marriage and family formation, some members even found romance and matrimony through their participation in the AFPH. Whatever its ultimate policy accomplishments, the AFPH transformed and enriched the lives of its participants.

Jennings addresses the disparate status and experience of disabled veterans, as distinct from physically disabled civilians, in the war and postwar periods. However, I would have liked to see even more discussion of the veteran–civilian divide, as well as how that divide constrained opportunities for physically disabled women in the postwar period. Also, as Jennings notes, the AFPH restricted its purview to physical disabilities and defined its members’ civic capacity against the dependent status of people with mental and intellectual disabilities. Jennings herself might have been more rigorous in using the language of physical disability, rather than referring to the AFPH's constituents simply as “disabled people.”

Jennings clearly spent countless hours in numerous archives in order to document her detailed and convincing account of the AFPH, other disability stakeholders, and the policies they negotiated. Jennings writes beautifully and she enlivens her detailed policy history by following the dedicated activism of particular figures, most notably Strachan and Scott. Out of the Horrors of War is thus an impressive work that will engage historians of disability, of civil rights, and of the US welfare state, as well as their graduate and undergraduate students.