The Americans with Disabilities Act ("ADA" or the "Act"), was signed by President George Bush on July 26, 1990. Title I, which covers employment of individuals with a disability, became effective twenty-four months after the date it was signed--that is, on July 26,1992. For the first two years after its effective date, the ADA will apply to all employers (except the United States and bona fide private membership clubs) who have twenty-five or more employees. After two years, the law covers employers with fifteen or more employees. (Fielder 100)
In the first part of the 20th century, a few individuals with significant disabilities began to be involved in issues like vocational rehabilitation, social services, and politics. Well known persons in this period include Mary Switzer and Helen Keller. Today, most activists locate the beginning of the contemporary disability rights movement in the early 1970s.
People with disabilities who were influenced by or directly involved with the student movement and civil rights movement began to organize around disability related issues. Many began to see the barriers to their independence as politically or socially determined. They came to understand that both external barriers like architectural and communication inaccessibility, poverty, and discrimination, and internal barriers like the lack of self-esteem, were the results of a social process, potentially subject to change. (DeJong 45-56)
Davis Houck and Amos Kiewe present a well-researched, compelling, chronological account of Roosevelt's strategic responses to keep him politically viable after the onset of infantile paralysis due to polio. Roosevelt's rhetorical strategies included careful concealments and silences as well as the use of both verbal and visual rhetoric to overcome the "whispering campaign" about his fitness for political office.
In particular, he relied on a verbal rhetoric that featured bodily metaphors that characterized his opponents' bodies as "diseased, crippled......
