Tom Harkin retired from the U.S. Congress in 2015 after deciding not to seek a sixth term as a Democratic Senator from Iowa. Before joining the Senate, he spent ten years in the U.S. House of Representatives from what was then Iowa’s Fifth District. Harkin still owns the home where he was born and raised, the youngest of six children, in the town of Cumming.
Harkin says he left the Senate because he “decided to get on and do other things with my life” rather than being a “Senator until I die.” Then seventy-five, Harkin faced no challenger in 2014 and likely would have been easily re-elected.
During his time in the Senate, Harkin gained a reputation as one of the legislative body’s leading progressives. He’s perhaps best known as one of the lead sponsors of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which was signed into law in 1990. Harkin had developed deep empathy for, and a connection to, the disability community after witnessing the struggles of his own family members.
Today, Harkin remains as active as ever. He founded the Harkin Institute for Public Policy and Citizen Engagement at Drake University. The institute is located at the Tom and Ruth Harkin Center, an accessible two-story building across the street from the university’s Des Moines, Iowa, campus.
“I had two conditions,” Harkin says, referring to the building’s construction. “It had to be built with union labor, and it had to be state-of-the-art accessible for all people with disabilities, not just ADA-compliant.”
When I visited the center during a recent trip, I’d never seen such an accessible building. I didn’t have to take an elevator to the second floor, for example. Instead, I rolled my wheelchair up a gently sloped ramp that wraps around the lobby’s perimeter. Even the lobby’s concrete floor is buffed with access in mind, to maximize foot traction.
The Harkin Institute is also dedicated to developing effective public policy in other areas the Senator is passionate about: retirement security, labor and employment, and wellness and nutrition. He’s particularly excited about a pilot project on universal basic income.
Since May, the institute has given $500 a month, with no strings attached, to each of 110 Iowa families with incomes that are 50 percent or less of the region’s median income. The selected families will receive funding for two years, then data will be collected and disseminated about the difference it has made in these families’ lives.
“I’ve always been a fan of having a guaranteed annual income you just don’t fall below,” Harkin says. “A lot of conservatives say, ‘Well if you just give money to people, they’ll waste it and they’ll buy alcohol and blah, blah, blah.’ But that’s not true at all. People are using [the funding] to buy food, school clothes, and to pay rent.”
Harkin recently spoke with The Progressive via Zoom from the Virginia home he bought when he was still a U.S. Representative, and where he currently lives with Ruth, his wife of fifty-five years. Excerpts follow.
Q: Do you miss the Senate?
Tom Harkin: No! I had forty years in Congress. That’s enough.
Q: Of all that you accomplished, what are you most proud of?
Harkin: Without a doubt, my signature legislation is the Americans with Disabilities Act. Of course, a lot of people were involved in helping to get it through [Congress]. My staff and I drafted the final version. It’s been wonderful to see all the changes that have taken place in our society [because of the law].
Q: Any particular frustrations from your time in the Senate?
Harkin: There always are, aren’t there? Getting a solid minimum wage bill that was indexed to inflation is one. I never accomplished that. Secondly, the biggest disappointment with the Affordable Care Act [was] that we didn’t get a single-payer system. President Obama wouldn’t fight for it. I still think we could have gotten it. That was a big, big disappointment.
Q: In terms of the Harkin Institute, what have you accomplished, and what do you hope to achieve down the road?
Harkin: Our premier work is in the disability area. We sponsor annual summits. The last one we had was in Northern Ireland. We had more than 500 people from about thirty countries. We bring together the private sector and government and disability groups and advocates with one goal in mind: to increase competitive employment for persons with disabilities. And we’ve made some great progress. We’re now getting the investor community involved. We’ve gotten businesses that have broken through the barrier of hiring people with disabilities. They’ve found that people with disabilities are their best workers.
Q: Tell me about your brother Frank and his influence on you.
Harkin: Frank went deaf from spinal meningitis when he was about six years old. We lived in a small town in Iowa, and there was no place for him to go to school. So [education officials] basically took him halfway across the state to the Iowa School for the Deaf, which everyone referred to as the “Iowa School for the Deaf and Dumb.” I remember my brother saying, “I may be deaf, but I’m not dumb.”
When he was in high school, they told him he could be a shoe cobbler, a baker, or a printer’s assistant. He said, “I don’t want to be any of those things.” So they said, “All right, you’re a baker.”
Frank had a pretty good life except he really didn’t like to bake. He went to work for a manufacturing company. He worked there for a long time and belonged to the United Auto Workers union. These investors came in, and here’s what they figured out: We can get rid of all these people who have been here a long time, like Frank Harkin, and we can hire younger people, train them, get tax breaks for training, and pay them a lot less than we were paying Frank Harkin.
So the union went on strike. [Company directors] brought in the scabs, and after one year, they decertified the union, and that was the end of the union. My brother had this great middle-class job. After that, he had nothing. Where does a fifty-five-year-old deaf man find a job? He found one cleaning toilets and being a janitor at a shopping mall. [It was] minimum wage, [with] no health benefits, no retirement benefits, no union, nothing. He never got over it. I never got over it, either.
Q: That’s where you got your sensibility about disability issues?
Harkin: That’s what first got me understanding. Later, when I was in the House, I began working on deafness issues. My sister’s boy, Kelly, became a paraplegic. His dad had to build a ramp so [Kelly] could get in the house. He had to widen the doors. He had to change the bathroom. We wanted to go to a restaurant and Kelly couldn’t go. He couldn’t even go across the street. All of a sudden, it dawned on me that there’s another group of people with disabilities that I hadn’t thought about, and that’s people with mobility problems.
Q: What did the battle entail to get the ADA passed?
Harkin: One of the first problems we had was with [President George H.W.] Bush’s chief of staff, [John] Sununu. He was always screwing us up. On the other hand, Bush never waivered. It’s great to have the President on your side. On the Republican side, we had people like Orrin Hatch [of Utah]. John McCain [of Arizona] was always great on this. Dave Durenberger, of Minnesota, was my chief co-sponsor.
The biggest problems had to do with the National Federation of Independent Business. They represent Main Street businesses. They were out there telling these mom-and-pop businesses that the bill could destroy them. They would have to spend thousands and thousands of dollars. I tell you, they made life miserable. And Sununu was sort of on their side. But we got around them.
Q: Were you at the White House the day the ADA was signed into law?
Harkin: Oh yeah.
Q: How did you feel?
Harkin: I felt that we’d just about climbed the mountain. A lot of people had done so much: the people who demonstrated throughout the 1980s, those who laid down under the wheels of Greyhound buses. They did all this civil disobedience. There were so many people out there. It was a feeling of, “By gosh, we got it done.” But if the ADA were on the floor of the House or the Senate today, it would never pass.
Q: Why not?
Harkin: Because too many people would say, “This is giving privileges to certain people. It’s going to cost too much.” It would just be an entrenchment [along party lines]. As I said, we had a number of progressive Republicans who were willing to break away. I don’t know who’d be there on the Republican side today.
Q: How would you assess the ADA’s impact?
Harkin: There’s a much better understanding [today] that it’s not a person’s disability that inhibits them from doing something—it’s the built environment. We’re still not quite there, but, boy, it’s sure a lot better than it was thirty years ago. The economic impact [of the ADA] has been tremendous. More and more people with disabilities are entering professions. The unemployment rate of persons with disabilities is still unacceptably high, but we’re making progress.
Q: Are there areas where you thought we could’ve made more progress?
Harkin: My biggest disappointment is in the area of employment. When we drafted the ADA and put five titles in it, I insisted that the first title be employment, because I thought employment was the key to achieving the other goals of the ADA. The unemployment rate of people with disabilities shouldn’t be any different than for anybody else. The Obama Administration, the Trump Administration, and the Biden Administration have been a great disappointment by not using the Justice Department to be more aggressive in going after what I call the “ADA laggers.” We need the Justice Department and state governments to be more aggressive. People have had thirty-three years [to implement the ADA]. Don’t tell me that it’s a surprise to them that they have to do something.
The biggest disappointment with the Affordable Care Act [was] that we didn’t get a single-payer system. President Obama wouldn’t fight for it.
Another big disappointment is that when we drafted the ADA, we compromised on a lot of stuff. We made it so that all new buildings had to be accessible. I wanted the same thing for housing, but I didn’t get it. The realtors and homebuilders were all opposed to it. We need to have something in the ADA that mandates that all new housing is accessible.
I met a young woman in Washington, D.C. last year. She’s a professional and uses a motorized wheelchair. She told me that it took her almost three years to find a decent apartment that was accessible for her. I just cringe when I see new houses built and they aren’t accessible.
Like so many big social and economic movements, you make some progress, it slows down a bit, and then you make more progress. But I think that, unless we take some really backward steps in terms of who we elect as President of the United States, the next ten years could see another surge in the development of disability rights.