

     Mobilization and Momentum: The Founding of the Blind of the
Nation: The time has come to organize on a national basis!

     So declared the first President of the National Federation of
the Blind, in an appeal broadcast to blind Americans from the site
of the organizing convention at Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, in
mid-November of 1940. The speaker was a 29-year-old Californian,
Jacobus tenBroek, who had lost his sight in childhood and went on
undeterred to earn no less than five college degrees, three of them
postgraduate diplomas in law. He would go on further to become a
distinguished constitutional scholar, chairman of the California
Social Welfare Board, chairman of his department at the University
of California, and author of award-winning books (among them a
definitive study of public welfare programs for the blind, Hope
Deferred). But at the time he spoke in 1940, tenBroek was a junior
instructor at the University of Chicago Law School, just beginning
his twin careers as university professor and leader of the
organized blind. This is what he said to his fellow blind in that
first year of mobilization:

       In dealing with the public, especially in its many
governmental forms, we, as handicapped persons, have long known the
advantage and even the necessity of collective action.
Individually, we are scattered, ineffective and inarticulate,
subject alike to the oppression of the social worker and the
arrogance of the governmental administrator. Collectively, we are
the masters of our own future and the successful guardian of our
own common interests. Let one speak in the name of many who are
prepared to act in his support, let the democratically elected
blind representatives of the blind act as spokesmen for all, let
the machinery be created to unify the action and concentrate the
energies of the blind of the nation. The inherent justice of our
cause and the good will of the public will do the rest.

       When the problems of the blind first began to be regarded as
a proper subject of public concern, they fell within the
jurisdiction of the county or township authorities. At that time,
local organizations of the blind were adequate. But when, in the
course of time, our problems were taken over by the state
legislative and executive authorities, the local organizations of
the blind had to be associated in a larger group capable of
statewide action. Now that the national government has entered the
field of assistance to the blind we must again adjust our
organizational structure to the area of the governmental unit with
which we must deal. The time has come to join our state and local
blind organizations in a national federation. Only by this method
can the blind hope to cope with the nationwide difficulties at
present besetting us.

       There are many goals upon which we can unite: the ultimate
establishment of a national insurance program which will eliminate
the diversities of treatment of the blind among the states and
insure an adequate support to all; the correction of the vices that
have crept into the administration of the Social Security Act by
seeking its amendment in Congress; the proper and reasonable
definition of the blind persons who should receive public
assistance; governmental recognition of the fact that the blind are
not to be classified as paupers and that they have needs peculiar
to and arising out of their blindness; the proper type of statutory
standards by which eligibility for public assistance should be
determined; adequate methods for restraining the influence and
defining the place of the social worker in the administration of
aid laws; proper safeguards to prevent administrative abuse and
misinterpretation of statutes designed for our benefit; legislative
and administrative encouragement of the blind who are striving to
render themselves self-supporting; legal recognition of the right
of a blind aid recipient to own a little, earn a little, accept a
little; governmental recognition of our inalienable right to
receive public assistance and still retain our economic, social,
and political independence, our intellectual integrity, and our
spiritual self-respect these are but a few of the problems that are
common to the blind throughout the nation. But the mere listing of
them shows the imperative need for organization upon a national
basis, for creating the machinery which will unify the action and
concentrate the energies of the blind, for an instrument through
which the blind of the nation can speak to Congress and the public
in a voice that will be heard and command attention. Until the
blind become group-conscious and support such an organization, they
will continue to live out their lives in material poverty, in
social isolation, and in the atrophy of their productive powers.

     With that call to action and to mobilization, tenBroek
captured the sense of urgency with which the new movement of the
blind was imbued in the year of its birth. In 1940 the condition of
blind people in America was a barren landscape of impoverishment
and frustration, and an inner state of desolation and despair. In
one of the largest states, California, no more than 200 blind men
and women were (by official estimate) actually at work in normal
occupations. Thousands upon thousands who were able and willing to
work were without jobs, forced to live on public aid grants which
in most states were beneath the level of minimum subsistence. Of
those lucky enough to be employed at all, most eked out a
starvation wageas low as five cents an hourlaboring in sheltered
workshops at ancient trades (commonly known as blind trades) such
as chair caning and broom making, with little hope of moving
outward and upward into regular jobs. The very few sightless
persons who held decent positions then were typically either
teachers at the schools for the blind or employees of agencies in
the blindness system. Only a token number had been able to secure
vending stands under the Randolph-Sheppard Act of 1936, which had
been enacted to give preference to blind persons in the
establishment of these modest business enterprises within federal
buildings.

     Vocational rehabilitation service for the blind was even more
ineffective and rudimentary. In fact, although there were limited
state and local efforts at rehabilitating the blind, and even an
occasional gesture in that direction from the national government,
the blind did not become officially feasible for services under the
federal-state rehabilitation program until the enactment of the
Barden-LaFollette Act in 1943. As for education, in 1940 only a
handful of blind youth were attending colleges and universities
while for the vast majority of students who graduated from schools
for the blind the prospects of a normal life and livelihood were
virtually as dismal as they had been a century beforewhen the
annual report of one such school had lamented that our graduates
have begun to return to us, soliciting employment at our hands.

     This was the bleak climate in which a scattering of blind men
and women from seven states assembled at Wilkes-Barre, late in
1940, for the purpose of realizing a dream of national unity and
self-expression. To be precise, there were sixteen delegates
present at the founding convention of the NFB, representing these
states: California, Illinois, Minnesota, Missouri, Ohio,
Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. The sixteen men and women who were the
delegates in at the creationthe founding fathers and mothers of the
National Federation of the Blindwere Jacobus and Hazel tenBroek of
California; Gayle and Evelyn Burlingame of Pennsylvania; David
Treatman, Robert Brown, Enoch Kester, Harold Alexander, and Frank
Rennard, all of Pennsylvania; Ellis Forshee and Marlo Howell of
Missouri; Mary McCann and Ed Collins of Illinois; Emil Arndt of
Wisconsin; Frank Hall of Minnesota, accompanied by Lucille deBeer;
and Glenn Hoffman of Ohio.

     In an early order of convention business, the delegates
elected tenBroek as the first President of the National Federation
of the Blind, and chose a slate of officers to serve with him which
included Robert Brown, First Vice President; Frank Hall, Second
Vice President; and Emil Arndt, Treasurer. The first meeting of the
National Federation of the Blind was also a constitutional
convention; in one of their most significant actions the delegates
drafted and adopted a constitution, which announced in its second
article that the purpose of the National Federation of the Blind is
to promote the economic and social welfare of the blind. This
original constitution, which was to be amended in details over the
years but never altered in spirit or purpose, was brief enough to
be typed on a single page. (The complete text of the original
constitution is reprinted as Appendix C to this volume, together
with the constitution as last amended in 1986  as Appendix D.)

     Of all the memorable events of this inaugural convention of
the organized blind, the most impressive to many delegates was the
powerful and brilliantly argued address delivered at the banquet by
their young President. Confronting the question Have Our Blind
Social Security?, tenBroek answered no in thunderand proceeded to
enunciate a vigorous, sweeping attack on the actions of the federal
Social Security Board in betraying the principles and the promise
of the Social Security Act. For all its rhetorical power and
unmistakable passion, this maiden speech by the newly chosen leader
of the movement was also an expert demonstration of his prowess as
a constitutional scholar; and it remains significant after fifty
years as a ringing declaration of the Federation's dominant concern
during the first decade with the bedrock issues of economic and
social security. Beyond that, the speech was a striking
demonstration of the new tone and manner of the organized blind
leadership in its dialogue with the world (and in particular with
the custodial agencies). Here was no trace of the supplicant, let
alone of the mendicant; no appeals to pity; no talk of the tragedy
of blindness or the permanent dependence of its victims. Norperhaps
even more astonishingwas there any echo of the traditional
genuflection and ritual praising of the agency authorities (such as
the Social Security Board) who then held over the blind the power
of life or death. The note that was struck by President tenBroek at
the outset of his first convention speechthat of independence,
aggressiveness, and determinationset the tone for the body of
presidential speeches to come in the years and decades ahead, those
not only of Jacobus tenBroek but of his successors Kenneth Jernigan
and Marc Maurer as well.

     The full text of the 1940 presidential address follows:

      TITLE  HAVE OUR BLIND SOCIAL SECURITY?

      BYLINE  by Jacobus tenBroek 

       Five years ago, in 1935, the Congress of the United States
passed and the President of the United States signed what was
widely regarded as the most progressive and humanitarian social
legislation since the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution
emancipated the slaves. Two years later, in 1937, the Supreme Court
of the United States sustained this enactment against a charge of
constitutional invalidity. Because the primary aim of this liberal
legislation was security against certain of the major social and
economic hazards of life, it was called the Social Security Act. It
aspired to nothing less than protection against the pennilessness
of unemployment, security against the destitution of age, and
mitigation of the desolation of blindness. In its passage, the
worker found release from apprehension, the aged found physical
comfort, and the blind found hope.

       After five years of experience with the Social Security Act,
what has become of these lofty purposes that were thus expressed by
the nation's Legislature, approved by its Chief Executive, and
sanctified by its highest Court?

       Ladies and gentlemen, I come before you tonight, in the
first place, to say that so far as the blind are concerned the
Social Security Act has not only failed to attain its plainly
expressed goals but it has been used as a weapon to compel the
states to treat their blind in a more niggardly fashion; and I come
before you in the second place to proclaim to the wide world that
the reason for this failure and the wielder of this weapon against
you has been the Social Security Board at Washington. Proceeding in
profound ignorance of the problems of the class with which it has
dealt, moved by an intolerable authoritarian arrogance, the Social
Security Board at Washington has constituted itself a supreme
tribunal to judge whether the states are treating their blind badly
enough. If they are not, these administrative despots in the
nation's Capital apply compulsion by way of open threat and
subversive action. So damaging have the activities of this Board
become that it represents the greatest single menace to the welfare
of the blind now in existence. Our salvation depends upon our
ability to confine its operations within the limits of the law. Its
unauthorized exercise of discretionary power must be terminated.
This can only be accomplished by a militant, aggressive,
group-conscious national organization of the blind. By this means
we may diminish the Board's arrogance if we cannot reduce its -
ignorance.

       To speak now more particularly, I levy three specific
charges against the Social Security Board at Washington: First, it
has unlawfully arrogated to itself the power to define the
expression needy individuals who are blind as used in the Social
Security Act; second, having illegally usurped this power, the
Social Security Board has exercised it in a narrow, restrictive,
and untenable way; third, the Social Security Board has
arbitrarily, unlawfully, and oppressively insisted that the states,
in order to gain or retain federal participation in their plans for
aid to the blind, must determine need on an individual basis and
not on a basis of legislatively fixed general standards.

       (1)The illegality of the Board's assumed power to define the
expression needy individuals who are blind in the Social Security
Act can easily be demonstrated by a resort to the Congressional
record. Title X of the Social Security Act which deals with the
blind was amended into the Act by the Senate Finance Committee of
which Senator Harrison was chairman. The report of the committee to
the Senate and the statements of this chairman when introducing the
Act were very emphatic as to the location of the authority to
define the term needy individuals who are blind. Senator Harrison
said, We have laid down the conditions (in the Act) and we leave to
the states to say who shall be the persons selected to receive the
federal assistance. As if to place the matter beyond all
controversy or doubt as to the intention of Congress, Chairman
Harrison made the following carefully worded statement: It must be
recalled that when this proposal was first made to the Senate
Finance Committee it gave much more power to officials in
Washington, so far as pensions were concerned. The authorities were
to pass on state plans with respect to amount of pensions, who
should get pensions and so forthbut we subsequently effected a
complete change. I know it was the opinion of the Committee on
Finance that the whole order should be changed and that the
authority should be vested in the states. It is hard to imagine how
the power of speech could be more accurately employed in describing
what was within the mind of Congress.

       Equally forceful is the procedural history. Under Section
1002 (a) of that Act a state plan for the blind must, in order to
gain participation by the federal government, provide for seven
specifically set forth conditions. In the Senate, Senator Wagner
moved to amend Section 1001 (a) by adding two additional
requirements which must be present in a state plan if it is to have
federal approval. They were (8) provide that money payments to any
permanently blind individual will be granted in direct proportion
to his need; and (9) contain a definition of needy individuals
which will meet the approval of the Social Security Board. The
amendments were accepted by the Senate without discussion. However,
when the Social Security Act reached the conference committee of
the House and Senate for a resolution of their differences, these
amendments were stricken out at the insistence of the House, and
the Senatorial conferees readily concurred in the omission when
attention was called to their significance. Is it possible that
anything more illuminating could have been done? This procedural
history indicates that amendments were framed and proposed for the
purpose of compelling states to provide a definition of need which
was satisfactory to the Social Security Board, and upon reflection
these amendments were deliberately withdrawn from the Act. Hence it
is not possible to have any doubt that Congress intended that the
Social Security Board should not have the specific power which it
now claims.

       (2)The definition of a needy blind person which the Social
Security Board has foisted upon a number of reluctant states and
upon the outraged blind of the nation has been that he is one who
lacks the physical necessities of life, one whose needs will be
satisfied by the provision of a bare animal minimum in food,
shelter, and clothes. Thus, according to the Social Security Board
a needy blind person is one whose need is the same as that of
paupers, indigents, and the aged, for concerning these latter the
state intends only to relieve material poverty.

       This definition must be rejected by anyone having even the
slightest acquaintance with the needs of the blind. A needy blind
person has a greater need than paupers, indigents, and the aged,
because there are additional elements comprising it. Besides the
physical necessities of life, his need consists in some fair
utilization of his productive capacity. This can only be obtained
by restoring him to economic competence in a competitive world.
Without it his need will never have been terminated. With it he is
a normal, useful, self-respecting citizen. Hence his need is as
broad as the effects of his blindness. It can only be met by a
rehabilitation that is social, economic, and psychological, and
these are the objectives within the intentions of the legislatures
of many of our states in their statutory schemes providing aid to
the blind.

       In order that the blind recipients of aid may enlarge their
economic opportunities and may be rehabilitated into independent
livelihood these statutory schemes provide that the blind may
possess a certain amount of tangible and intangible assets and may
accumulate a certain amount of earnings without penalty. These
statutory schemes recognize that one of the purposes of aid to
needy blind persons is to remove them from the class of needy blind
persons and one of the means of enabling them to so remove
themselves is to permit them a reasonable sum of personal property.
They acknowledge that this, in the last analysis, must be the
distinction between aid and relief. These state plans were well
designed and deliberately worked out to fulfill the demands of
these comprehensive purposes. That a cry should now be heard from
Washington that these plans should be dedicated to less than this
is only explained by the famous remark of Justice Brandeis about
the zealots who even if well-meaning are without understanding.

       (3)In providing that needy blind persons should be afforded
financial assistance two courses were open to the legislatures of
the states: They might have left the welfare departments to
determine who were needy persons within the meaning of the word
needy as generally used, or the legislature might have defined the
word needy with particularity, setting up definite tests, and
leaving the welfare authorities no function but to determine
whether each particular applicant complied with those tests. As
between these two alternatives some of the legislatures had no real
choice in view of the extensive rehabilitative objectives they
wished to accomplish. If these were to be realized it was apparent
to the legislatures that a system would have to be created in which
there was a minimum of administrative interference with the conduct
and funds of the recipients. Administrative personnel, whether by
reasons of training or native ineptitude, were notoriously
considered to be unqualified as discretionary agents in such
matters. Furthermore, if the blind were to be given a chance to
enlarge their economic opportunities, and if their efforts to
render themselves self-supporting were to mean anything, they would
have to be given complete freedom of choice as to the direction of
the rehabilitative effort, and entire flexibility within prescribed
limits, as to their economic arrangements and position.

       Accordingly, the legislatures of such states as
Pennsylvania, Illinois, and California set up in the aid statutes
themselves a complete system of standards on the crucial issue of
what need is and what blind persons should receive assistance.
Thus, under these statutes, the sole function of the welfare
authorities is to find out whether an applicant falls within the
categories specified by the legislatures. Senator Wagner's proposed
amendment (8) would have given the Board some discretionary power
to determine whether the state plan made payments in direct
proportion to the blind person's need, and that amendment was also
stricken out. The fact of this deliberate omission is proof of the
absolute intention of Congress to leave the matter as to who was
needy and as to what blind persons should receive assistance to the
judgment of the states. It is further proof that Congress intended
that the judgment of the states in that matter should be so free
that it could set up a statutory system with a complete set of
standards for the payment of aid and thus obviate the fettering
restrictions of a social service budgetary system which would
interfere with rehabilitative efforts. It is proof that state plans
in order to gain Social Security Board approval do not have to
grant aid to blind persons in direct proportion to their need and
may make flat payments to all persons who come within the
classification. Consequently, the expressed attitude of the Social
Security Board that it may refuse to approve state plans because
they grant aid not in accordance with individual need is utterly
and palpably untenable and is an assumption of the power which
Congress, by omitting the proposed amendment (8), specifically
aimed to prevent.

       In this discussion, I have concentrated attention chiefly
upon the Social Security Act and the Social Security Board's
interpretation of it. I have done so because that subject
represents one of the primary problems now confronting the blind
and because that subject shows, in an acute form, the need for
unified action and national organization on the part of the blind.
It is a problem of vital importance both to those states now
receiving federal funds and to those which have been denied the
participation of the federal government. It is not a problem that
can be handled by one state or by a small group of states. All the
blind in all the states must combine and concentrate their energies
upon it in order to reach a workable and satisfactory solution.

       Another reason for spending so much time and attention upon
the Social Security Act and the Social Security Board's
interpretation of it is that that subject points to a number of
other problems that are common to the blind throughout the nation.
The proper definition of blind persons who should receive state
assistance is one such problem; the proper type of standards to be
set up in the state statutory schemes is a second; the proper
function and place of the social worker in the administration of
the state and national legislation is still a third. Finally, the
whole idea of a national pension or annuity is involved in this
discussion. The problems arising in connection with the
administration of the Social Security Act will undoubtedly recur in
connection with the administration of a national pension when that
is obtained. It is important for us to build up a national body of
common and transmissible experience upon these subjects in order to
avoid the errors of the past and make secure our future. Upon all
of these problems it is necessary for the blind to organize
themselves and their ideas upon a national basis, so that blind men
the nation over may live in physical comfort, social dignity, and
spiritual self-respect.

     So spoke Jacobus tenBroek, in the first of a long series of
presidential addresses delivered at the Federation's yearly
conventions (his last was to be in 1967 at Los Angeles). In a
letter written only days after the 1940 inaugural convention,
tenBroek further clarified the purpose of his speech and spelled
out the intimate connection between the rise of the organized blind
movement and the issues of security facing the nation's blind. The
National Federation of the Blind is intended, he wrote to a
correspondent, to be a permanent organization devoted to the
advancement of the social and economic welfare of the blind; but
the immediate impulse in its creation arose out of the necessity to
bring concerted pressure to bear on Congress and the Social
Security Board on behalf of the blind of the nation.

     TenBroek pointed out in his letter that the National
Federation of the Blind convention at Wilkes-Barre had passed two
closely related resolutions: the first calling for a national
pension for the blind, and the second seeking congressional action
to block the Social Security Board from obstructing the purposes of
the Social Security Act. On both subjects the delegates were
unanimous and emphatic, he wrote. Practically all of the delegates
present at Wilkes-Barre felt that the ultimate solution to many of
these difficulties lay in the establishment of a federal pension
act which would contain adequate safeguards against the type of
thing we have experienced under the Social Security Act, but they
all agreed that for immediate and practical purposes we should
concentrate our energies upon the passage of an amendment to the
Social Security Act reserving to the states the right to define
need and the right to determine what should result from a
consideration of an aid recipient's other resources and income. He
concluded with these positive words: Without being unduly
optimistic, I personally feel that we are now striking out along
the right lines, and I can assure you that the new organization is
in the hands of energetic blind persons who thoroughly understand
the problems of the blind.

     Jacobus tenBroek's exuberant confidence in the durability and
mission of the fledgling Federation found expression in a letter he
sent in early January, 1941, to his California mentor and senior
colleague, Dr. Newel Perry. With the National Federation of the
Blind not yet two months old, he wrote, its permanence is
definitely assured. The factor guaranteeing that permanence is the
closely knit nucleus composed of Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and
California. What tenBroek might well have said, but of course did
not, was that the main factor guaranteeing that permanence was his
own tireless organizing efforts throughout the stateswhich embraced
not only finding and recruiting new members but galvanizing the
leaders of existing local groups. What he did say was that several
states, among them Washington and Colorado, were then on the point
of joining the Federation while others still stubbornly resisted
his continuous efforts to bring them into the fold. The Utah-Idaho
group, he told Dr. Perry, has been confoundedly slow about
answering my letters, as has been the case with an organization in
Omaha, Nebraska. In the same letter tenBroek singled out half a
dozen other groups and individuals with whom he was in regular
contact. He barely mentioned in passing that all of this activity
was taking place at the same moment that his own teaching career at
the University of Chicago Law School was just resuming. The
Christmas holidays, he said in closing, ended with the second of
January, and I am again deeply immersed in the problems of legal
research and writing with students with whom I have been unable to
teach very much of either as yet.

     Barely two months later, tenBroek reported to Dr. Perry on the
results of a week's intensive lobbying in Washingtononly the first
half of a campaign (in which he was joined by Gayle Burlingame) to
change the hearts and minds of officials in the Roosevelt
administration regarding the needs of blind recipients of public
assistance under the Social Security program. Gradually working our
way upwards, he wrote, Burlingame and I first presented our case to
Jane Hoey, director of the Bureau of Public Assistance, and her
associate, a lawyer named Cassius. Next we went to Oscar Powell,
executive director of the Social Security Board; and finally to
Paul V. McNutt, administrator of the Social Security Agency.
TenBroek then added these terse characterizations: Hoey, he said,
is simply another social worker of the familiar type but with a
higher salary than most. Cassius has lost none of his qualities
since Shakespeare described him, except that his wit has been
sharpened by a little legal training. Powell is a very high-caliber
man with a fine sense of argumentative values, a considerable store
of good nature, and unusual perception. He simply is not a believer
in our fundamental assumptions.

     TenBroek then turned his attention to the top man in the
agency hierarchy. McNutt, on the other hand, he said, is a lesser
Hitler by disposition and makes our California social workers look
like angels by comparison. However, tenBroek was not intimidated by
this authoritarian personality and persisted in pressing him for a
clear-cut statement of the agency's position. Are you saying to us,
he asked McNutt at one point, that blind men should have their
grants reduced no matter how small their private income and no
matter how great their actual need? McNutt's answer was that he was
saying precisely that. I formulated the question in several other
ways only to get the same reply, tenBroek wrote. I can't say that
I wasn't glad to get this declaration from McNutt since it provides
us with an official declaration by the highest administrator of
them all that ought to be of immense propagandistic value to us.
Moreover, he added sharply, McNutt's conduct during the conference
has provided us with the most perfect example of the arbitrary and
tyrannical methods of the Board that we could hope to have.

     Nor was tenBroek content to end his petitioning at the top of
the agency hierarchy. In the remaining week that I shall stay in
Washington, he wrote, we shall attempt to carry our appeal the last
administrative step. Senator Downey of California and Senator
Hughes of Delaware are attempting to secure for us appointments
with President and Mrs. Roosevelt. Unfortunately, those White House
appointments were not forthcoming; and no meeting was ever held
between the vigorous President of the United States, who was
disabled but scarcely handicapped by polio, and the equally
vigorous President of the National Federation of the Blind, who was
disabled but scarcely handicapped by blindness. It is fruitless, of
course, to speculate on the possible results of such a meeting
between the two national leaders, each of whom was then the
champion of a new deal for the people whom he served. But it is
plausible at the least to suppose that there would have been
between these two men an unusual degree of mutual regard born out
of their shared experience of triumph over physical afflictions of
a severity that in their day, shattered the lives of ordinary
people.

     The efforts of tenBroek and his fellow Federationists to
reform the policies of the Social Security Board were unsuccessful
in the short run. But not in the longer run. During the next two
decades virtually all of their demands for the improvement of aid
to the blind were to become law, and by the mid-sixties the program
was so broadly liberalized as to represent a model for other public
assistance programssuch as aid to the aged and aid to the
disabledto strive to emulate. The Federation's early campaign had
greater success on another front: as a rallying cry for the blind
of the nation. During the months following the inaugural
convention, the word spread widely of a new organization in the
field of blindness unlike any othera national organization of the
blind rather than for the blind, a democratic association made up
of blind persons rather than an appointive agency made up (despite
its occasional blind showpieces) mostly of sighted specialistsin
short, a blind people's movement.

     By the time of the National Federation of the Blind's second
annual convention, held in August of 1941 at Milwaukee, the
atmosphere had begun to changemost notably the climate of opinion
among the blind themselves. Where there had been a total of sixteen
delegates from seven states at the Wilkes-Barre convention the year
before, there were 104 persons from eleven states in attendance at
Milwaukee. The prevailing mood of the delegates was conveyed in a
post-convention bulletin by the president of the Michigan
Federation of the Blind, Wayne Dickens, who wrote: A lively
interest among the delegates in the progress of the blind and
particularly their enthusiasm for the legislative program of the
Federation carried the business of the convention through to
completion with thoroughness and dispatch;and the volume as well as
the quality of the work accomplished was a source of general
satisfaction.

     Dickens pointed to a social interlude during the convention to
illustrate his observation: Late Friday afternoon, just before the
banquet, he wrote, the delegates mingled on the mezzanine. Leaders
in blind affairs in their home states, and well informed on all
phases of blind welfare, the delegates readily began that exchange
of ideas, plans, and suggestions which characterized the convention
both on the floor and behind the scenes and which supplied the
delegates with a wealth of information with which to direct their
respective state programs for the coming months. An observer would
have readily perceived that people of ability and intelligence had
rallied to the support of the Federation.

     An observer at the next year's convention at Des Moines would
have noted that even more people of ability and intelligence were
rallying to the Federation's support. In 1942 (at the third
convention) no fewer than 150 delegates representing fifteen states
were in attendance. The convention featured a banquet address by
Dr. Newel Perry and a crowded agenda of committee reports,
resolutions, and speeches followed by spirited debate. After
Raymond Henderson, newly elected executive director, spoke on
future legislative policy, the delegates were provoked to extended
discussion. It was generally agreed, wrote Wayne Dickens in his
convention report, that some deliverance from the pauper's oath
should be attained if the blind are to receive adequate help. Some
members wanted this deliverance to be carried to such a point that
eligibility for the pension would be judged by the fact of
blindness alone. (It may be noted here that deliverance from the
pauper's oath, which under Social Security took the form of a means
test based on individual need individually determined, would become
the major plank in the Federation's legislative program during the
next few years, and that the idea of a flat grant or pension based
on blindness alone would become the preferred formulation.)

     Although the issue of public assistance remained at the
forefront of attention at the 1942 convention, other concerns which
were to gain importance in later years began to be apparent. As
Raymond Henderson was to write in a post-convention bulletin: The
delegates decided that the time had come when the Federation should
no longer limit its activities to improvement in the Social
Security situation. Problems of employment, and more especially of
job discrimination, surfaced at least mildly in resolutions dealing
with such matters as civil service barriers and sheltered workshop
maneuvers to exploit blind workers through exemptions from the Fair
Labor Standards Act. (Again, it should be noted that these issues
of employment opportunity and discrimination would eventually
supersede the problems of Social Security on the Federation's
agenda, and in one case at leastthat of exclusion from the civil
servicethe organized blind would, in barely more than a decade,
begin to break down the barriers and end the discrimination.) The
growing spread of interest in the cause of Federationism among
blind people everywhere in the land was illustrated during the 1942
convention by a host of reports of new organizing activities on the
community and statewide levels. Wayne Dickens told of his own
efforts in Michigan to mount a statewide membership drive, which
had already netted 170 members. In Connecticut, three local blind
groups were reportedly seeking to establish a statewide association
for the purpose of joining the National Federation. And a social
club in Birmingham, Alabama, was said to have redefined its
purposes and organized upon a statewide basis with the intention of
entering the Federation as soon as the assessment can be raised.
The convention delegates, however, were not content with these
encouraging signs of activity and interest. They enthusiastically
endorsed a motion by Dr. Newel Perry, the venerable dean of the
movement in California, to the effect that (as the convention
bulletin put it) every delegate present assume that it is his
obligation to make a definite, personal, active effort to induce in
any way all non-member states to join the Federation as soon as
possible, and that we make ourselves each a committee of one to
enlarge the organization as rapidly as possible.

     The decade of the forties, as Jacobus tenBroek was to recall
in later years, was a time of building: and build we did, from a
scattering of seven state affiliates at our first convention to
more than four times that number in 1950. In the decade of the
forties we proved our organizational capacity, established our
representative character, initiated legislative programs on the
state and national levels, and spoke with the authority and voice
of the blind speaking for themselves.

     Early in that inaugural decade tenBroek and his handful of
fellow founders had formulated the basic principles underlying the
organized blind movement. In their essence these principles were to
endure unscathed through half a century of change and growth; but
of necessity, their felt priority and degree of emphasis shifted
over time. As the presidential speech delivered by tenBroek at the
1944 convention banquet serves to demonstrate, the attention of the
organized blind in that early period was still mainly focused on
subsistence centering upon public assistancein the face of the
stark reality that the vast majority of blind men and women were
still regarded as unemployable (other than in sheltered workshops)
and were therefore dependent upon the public aid provisions of the
Social Security Act. The issue of securityone of the classic
trinity of Federation goals (Security, Opportunity, Equality)would
gradually yield the high ground of attention to other needs,
notably those of employment and opportunity, as blind men and women
through the inspiration and momentum of the Federation came to move
by the thousands off the public assistance rolls into the
competitive job market. But in the war-torn forties President
tenBroek and his colleagues felt compelled to devote as much
emphasis to bedrock security and survival as to the other urgent
imperatives of early Federationism; those of organization and
expression. His convention address of 1944 follows:

      TITLE  THE WORK OF THE NATIONAL FEDERATION OF THE BLIND

      BYLINE  by Jacobus tenBroek

       It is somewhat less than four years ago since a small group
of us met at Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and organized the National
Federation of the Blind. The years that lie between that original
meeting and this convention have been marked by arduous labor and
by what I think are many successful accomplishments. They have been
marked also by many new and increasingly difficult problems, by
temporarily increased economic opportunities for the blind, and by
tremendous changes in the world to which we must adjust ourselves.

       It is a pretty safe guess that the world and this nation
will not return after the war to conditions as we knew them before
1941. It therefore behooves us as an organization to review our
work, re-examine our program, and consider what modifications, if
any, need to be made to meet the new world that is to come.

       In thinking over the activities of the National Federation
of the Blind, a considerable number of highly diverse and varying
projects come to mind. We have, of course, had a prolonged struggle
with the Social Security Board and the Federal Security Administra-
tor, Paul V. McNutt. We have had our squabbles with the Civil
Service Commission. We have had our squabbles with the
Administrator of the Fair Labor Standards Act. We have put forth
extended efforts before the Congress of the United States and
before the legislatures of some of the states. We have had problems
with respect to sheltered shops and replacement and rehabilitation
and stands. We have had personal problems and general problems, we
have had problems of every sort and variety, and at one time or
another, we have turned some of our time and energy to their
attempted solution.

       The problems of the National Federation of the Blind are as
numerous and diverse as the total problem of blindness, and
consequently they reach into every phase of the life of our people
and the life of our community and of the nation. But in looking
over these different activities, it seems to me that underlying
them have been a relatively small number of important principles
which can be more or less simply stated.

       The first of these guiding precepts has been the principle
of organization. We have come to realize that we must organize. We
know now that we cannot solve our problems on an individual basis.
We cannot face the power of government single-handed, nor the
tyranny of unthinking, groundless discrimination, nor the
desolation and frustration of enforced idleness, nor the absence of
organized opportunity to earn a livelihood and to become
self-respecting, active participants in the life of our
communities. We cannot face these things single-handed if we hope
to overcome them. Individually, we are scattered, ineffective and
inarticulate. We have come to realize that we must organize, that
we must act collectively, that we must supply ourselves with the
machinery to unify the action and concentrate and direct the
energies of the blind for a common goal.

       Once we have this basic organizational faculty in mind,
certain other things follow more or less automatically. Since the
blind, because of their experience, know their problems better than
anyone else, better than social workers or teachers or government
administrators, since they alone fully understand the problems of
blindness, their organization must be democratic. There must be
general participation by the blind in the determination of policies
and in all major decisions, and the officers of the organizations
must be subject periodically to removal if they do not perform
their duties satisfactorily.

       The second fundamental thing that follows, once we have
fully grasped the meaning of the organizational principle, is that
the organization must be as large and as broad as the problems with
which we must deal. There was a time when local organizations were
sufficient because the problems of the blind were handled locally.
There was a time when state organizations were adequate. But the
problems of the blind are now national in character, and the
organization of the blind must also be national in character.

       I think it is now possible for us to say without possibility
of contradiction that we are national in character. When we met at
Wilkes-Barre to form the organization, seven states were
represented: Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Missouri, Ohio,
Pennsylvania, and California. We now number eighteen. In addition
to the original seven charter members there are Iowa, Nebraska,
Colorado, Michigan, South Dakota, Washington, and Alabama. They
constituted fourteen at the time of our Des Moines convention.
Since that time, we have added four other members: Delaware, New
Jersey, North Dakota, and Oregon.

       Besides these members, every active organization of the
blind themselves in the United States is either a member or
affirmatively supports our program. It is therefore possible for us
to say that the National Federation of the Blind is the
organization through which the blind of the nation, through
collective action and unified, articulate self-expression, can
improve the conditions under which they live. The National
Federation of the Blind is not an organization speaking for the
blind; it is the blind speaking for themselves.

       The second of the fundamental principles underlying our
program and guiding our activities substantially is our demand for
equality. Now, the idea of equality lies at the basis of modern
democratic organization and is commonly thought to apply to all
groups except such minority groups as the blind. It does not mean,
of course, that all men are equal in physical, mental, or moral
qualities. In modern society, the idea that men are created equal
and that they should be treated equally is simply this:

       Every man should be given an opportunity to fit himself into
the economic organization of the country in a way which his
qualities and his training provide for. It is the opportunity to be
tested on our merits. This is the idea of the United States Supreme
Court, which has often said that the idea of equality is the idea
that men should be treated equally unless there is a sufficient
difference between them which is related to social purposes and
bears upon the objective then in contemplation; that is to say,
that the color of hair is utterly a matter of no concern whatsoever
if you want a man to drive a railroad locomotive. If what you want
is a man to use a typewriter, you don't need to worry how many feet
he has. Likewise, visual acuity is not the basis upon which any man
should be employed who has to use his head or his hands. This is
the principle upon which we have conducted our fight to secure for
the workers in the sheltered shops the same protection with respect
to minimum wages that other workers are guaranteed by the Fair
Labor Standards Act.

       Labor should be compensated according to its value or its
skill or something else. It does not depend on the amount of sight
you have. It is on this principle that we have introduced our
amendment to the Civil Service Act of the United States, by which
we prohibit discrimination on account of blindness, and it is on
this principle that we are fighting a new vicious form of
discrimination because of blindness which has recently arisen in
California, and which will likely spread to other states.

       The Board of Chiropractors of that state recently provided
that no person with less than fifty per cent of visual acuity would
be allowed to take the examinations or to enter the profession.
This utterly crude, arbitrary, and unreasonable action was taken
despite the fact we have many successful chiropractors and despite
the fact also that lack of sight is in many ways an asset in the
profession, because that profession depends on manipulation, which
depends on dexterity, which is a quality that the blind must
cultivate.

       Therefore, our second fundamental principle is the principle
of equality, and it underlies practically all of the claims that we
make, because it is not based upon any notion that all men are
physically or mentally equal, but that they have an equal right to
insist upon opportunities for which they are properly qualified.

       The third of the principles has to do with public
assistance. It is the proposition that public assistance should be
granted upon a blanket grant basis to all the members of a class,
that is to say, that the statutes granting public assistance should
simply provide general categories and all blind persons falling
within those categories should receive as automatically as possible
the uniform amount of assistance which is provided for in the law.
We have favored this system for very important reasons.

       One of them is this: that blind people are normal,
intelligent persons, who have the problem of adjusting themselves
physically, spiritually, and mentally to a handicap which is
permanent. In the process of readjustment, there are no general
formulae, no regularly established procedures. It is an individual
process, and any method of assistance which puts the blind under
guardianship, which places them at the discretion of social workers
for their guidance, is a system which destroys that individual
personal process of reconstruction. It is for these reasons that we
oppose a system of relief which insists upon the means test,
budgeting, individual need individually determined, and large
social worker discretion, which in our experience have been
veritable instruments of oppression.

       The fourth of the principles which underlie our work and
guide our activities also relates to public assistance. It is this:
that the statutes providing public assistance for the blind should
contain an exempt earnings clause; that is to say, they should
provide that the earnings of a blind person, at least up to a
certain point, should be his, and his pension, his grant, his
public aid should not be reduced by the amount of those earnings.
Generally speaking, we favor this proposal because other systems,
particularly the present ones, encourage idleness with all the
evils that attend idleness.

       A man is not going to work to earn a penny if he knows that
that penny will be taken from him in terms of a reduction of his
pension and if he knows that penny will not in any way increase his
total income. It is only by permitting a man to accumulate a
certain amount of money, preferably through encouraging earnings,
that the blind will be able to get themselves off the relief rolls
through rehabilitation, investment in stands or professional
education, or any other of similar ways.

       The final principle about which I would like to make a few
remarks has to do with our relationship to other organizations in
the nation. Naturally, we are happy to invite any group to help us
and assist us if they believe in our program and the principles for
which we are fighting, but as our program has gone forward, we have
come to realize that there is one segment of the community which,
more than any other, has responded generously to our appeal. That
segment is organized labor. The reason for this is not far to seek.

       In organizational structure and in purpose, we have many
things in common. The blind have organized their local
organizations and their state organizations into a National
Federation which is modeled in many ways after the national
organizations of organized labor. Through forces over which we have
no control, we are forced to extend to each other a good deal of
mutual aid and to ask society for protection and to some extent for
assistance. That is exactly what organized labor must do. In modern
industrial conditions, the individual worker is helpless without
the cooperation of his fellow workers.

       Therefore, because of these reasons, because we are trying
to do for our people what organized labor is trying to do for its
people, because of the similarity in organizational structure, in
purpose and in work, and because of the laboring man's inherent
sympathy for the underprivileged and the conditions under which
they live, organized labor has responded more than generously,
materially, morally, and with political support.

       These are the principles underlying all the diverse, various
activities which we have undertaken. Whether we should now adhere
to them will depend upon our estimate of the world that is to come,
and will depend upon decisions of this organization which will be
democratically arrived at. Those decisions will be reached tomorrow
and on the next day. Thank you!

     The 1944 convention of the National Federation of the Blind
may be regarded as typical of the annual meetings held during the
organization's first decade. Attending the three-day sessions in
Cleveland, Ohio, were fewer than 200 delegates from 18 statesa
sizable gain from the prior convention two years before (none was
held in 1943 due to wartime travel bans) but still a small enough
group to hear the banquet oratory without the aid of loudspeakers.
For reasons of economy, the Federation's National Convention was
held jointly with the state convention of the Ohio affiliatea
situation that misled several guest speakers into supposing that
they were merely at a state meeting. (One of them called it a party
and others expressed surprise at the presence of blind persons from
out of state.) Even more discouraging was the substitution of
alternative speakers (at least four times) in place of the invited
luminariesgraphic evidence of the unimportance, not to say
irrelevance, of the organized blind in the eyes of most politicians
and public figures of the time.

     Few of the guest speakers at that wartime convention appeared
to be aware at all of the Federation's objectives or philosophy;
most spoke of matters entirely unrelated to the concerns of the
blind, or failed to perceive the relationship where it did exist.
At one point a representative of the Navy women's auxiliary, the
WAVES, spoke at length about the great diversity of skills and
characteristics among the girls recruited into military service but
made no reference to the conspicuous absence (through exclusion) of
blind women in either the WAVES or the WACS. Another speaker,
representing the Red Cross, spoke glowingly of the contributions of
blind people to the war effort; but his reference was merely to
giving blood and making donations, not to participation in
war-related occupationsfrom which in fact blind workers, however
well trained, were still largely excluded even in the wartime
absence of able-bodied males.

     More curious even than the indifference and ignorance of these
convention guestsviewed from the standpoint of a later generationis
the appearance of passivity and acquiescence on the part of the
National Federation of the Blind delegates themselves in the face
of such patronizing oratory. The convention proceedings reveal not
a single retort or rebuke, nor even a polite question, from the
assemblage of delegates at the banquet. Their prevailing silence
might be variously interpreted; but it would seem evident that
these early Federationists, with few exceptions, had come to the
convention not to educate but to be educated. (Indeed that is what
one of their own officers told them they were there for.) They were
still new at self-organization, not altogether comfortable with
self-expression, not even sure yet of their worthiness and
dignitylet alone of their equality. But, with each passing year and
each annual convention, these members of the National Federation of
the Blind would become more confident of themselves and of their
movement, and less willing to be seen but not heard. Even in that
early year of 1944, in the incipient phase of the organized blind
movement, the leadership of the Federation was speaking out and
talking back; before much longer, an increasingly active and
involved membership would be doing the same.

     Again in 1945, because of the dislocations caused by the
Second World War and its conclusion, the Federation did not hold a
convention. The 1946 convention was held in St. Louis, Missouri,
and the 1947 meeting was convened in Minneapolis, Minnesota. And
the Federation increasingly continued to speak out and talk back.

     Even the leaders of the Federation, however, were still
relatively restrained in their declaration of the movement's goals
and objectives. As late as 1948 President Jacobus tenBroek stated
that the Federation proposes to enable blind men and women of this
country to live as near normal lives as possible, and that it is
dedicated to the proposition that the blind can become productive
members of society. That restraint was only realistic, to be sure;
at a time when only a fraction of blind people were employed at
all, it was sufficient to aim at being simply productive rather
than fully competitive and to hope for lives as near normal as
possible. Yet the same spokesman felt confident enough, at the 1948
convention in Baltimore, to proclaim A Bill of Rights for the Blind
containing an ambitious roster of new demands for recognition and
respect. In addition to its eloquent appeal for equality and
normality, this convention address by President tenBroek represents
a turning-point in its unusual emphasis on employment opportunity
and transformation of relief into rehabilitation. The text follows:

      TITLE  A BILL OF RIGHTS FOR THE BLIND

      BYLINE  by Jacobus tenBroek

       I have a serious question to ask the sighted persons
presentwould you swap vision for a good chicken dinner? On the face
of it this is an absurd question, for no one who has vision would
swap it for anything. But for those of us who are blind, this
question is not necessarily absurd. It is not that we prefer to
have lost our eyesight, but having been deprived of it, we have
discovered it is dispensable. There are even some blind among us
who assert that blindness is a joy; for, as they point out, those
who lose their heads are decapitated; those who lose their clothes
are denuded; does it not follow, therefore, that those who lose
their eyesight are delighted?

       Let us suppose that as we leave this meeting our sighted
guests were to be involved in an accident which destroyed their
vision. This is not an idle supposition. Every year, without regard
for social or economic background, color or creed, through accident
and illness, blindness is forced on thirty thousand men and women
in the United States. What problems would you face as a newly
blinded person? What needs would be yours? You would probably spend
months or years consulting doctors and eye specialists in futile
efforts to regain your precious vision. But after your patience and
certainly your pocketbook had been exhausted, you probably would
wish for death. The world we live in is a visually oriented world,
and for the sighted eternal darkness seems unthinkable. You
probably would resign yourself to be set aside from ordinary
pleasures and accustomed pursuits. But if you were lucky enough to
know something about blindness or were properly guided in the early
days of your sightlessness, your adjustment would be swift. After
initial orientation to self-locomotion and self-care, the world
would become familiar through the auditory and tactual senses.

       There are a quarter of a million blind persons in the United
States, but this statistic fails to tells us that the blind man or
woman has the same feelings and desires, the same sorrows and joys
as sighted persons. You would probably be no different after
adjustment to blindness from what you had been before you became
blind. To be sure, there are physical limitations to blindness, but
most of these are of no more than nuisance value. You bump into
things; you occasionally lose your way home; you even, in the
mistaken notion that you are following the clicking of high heels
out of a crowded railroad station, wind up in the ladies' rest
room. But with proper orientation you would develop techniques for
overcoming this physical limitation in blindness. The Braille sys-
tem would replace script in your books, tape measures,
thermometers, carpenters' levels, and speech notes.

       What I have said so far will illustrate the wide-spread
misconceptions about the nature of the physical handicap of
blindness. If sighted people find it hard to get an accurate notion
of what blindness is in its relatively obvious physical aspects,
how much more must they misapprehend its subtler psychological,
social, and economic ramifications? It may, therefore, be
worthwhile to try to clear up some of these misconceptions; for us
to say what the principal problems of blindness are; for us to tell
the story of blindness as we live it daily. Since we do it without
bitterness or malice and knowing full well that the sighted
community bears towards us nothing but the best will in the world
and the most generous impulses, it might not be inappropriate to do
this in the form of a Bill of Rights which we ask the sighted
community to grant usa Bill of Rights, not declaring our
independence from society but our need of being integrated into it;
a Bill of Rights, not guaranteeing special favors and position, but
equality of treatment; a Bill of Rights, not glossing over our
weaknesses or our limitations, but recognizing us for what we are,
normal human beings, or at least as normal as human beings are; a
Bill of Rights according us a fair chance to live socially useful
lives.

       First among the rights which we seek from our sighted
friends is the right to their understanding. Of their willingness
to work for our welfare and their activity on our behalf we are
assured. But what we need is their understanding. This is an
assertion of our normality (if I may disagree with President
Harding about a suffix). We are ordinary peoplesome little, some
average, some great. But, in any event, we have the same strengths,
the same reactions, the same desires, the same ambitions as the
rest of humanity.  In California in recent years two of our blind
people have been inmates in the state penitentiary, one convicted
of embezzlement, the other of second-degree murder. At the same
time another blind man was Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of
Illinois; two others were Senators of the United States. The vast
majority of us achieve neither of these extremes of success. Like
most other people, we are neither criminals nor political leaders
nor anything else that the average man is not.

       I cannot speak of the right to your understanding that we
are normal people without recalling the well-known lines from The
Merchant of Venice, spoken in another context but applicable with
equal force here: Have we not organs, dimensions, senses,
affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same
weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means,
warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer. If you prick us,
do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison
us, do we not die?

       The normality of blind people has an important bearing on
the second right we would wish to see sanctified in a Bill of
Rights for the Blind, namely, the right to security. What happens
to normal people when they are permanently without business or
employment, when they are subjected to unremitting economic
dependence on others? The answer is that in the course of time
their initiative disintegrates; they lose their social, political,
and spiritual independence; they either suffer unendurable
privation or become the easy victims of the hand that feeds them.
This is what happens to normal men whether blind or sighted. But in
the case of the blind an additional element is present. Over and
above the economic problem, they face the necessity of making
adaptationspsychological, social, and physicalto blindness.
Anything which tends to hamper the process of individual personal
reconstruction weakens the personal integrity and reliance of the
blind individual.

       Now all of this is something more than abstract social
doctrine. It has an immediate and a significant application to
programs of public assistance. A program of public assistance which
is to be consistent with these facts must be so arranged as to
leave the recipient's independence unimpaired. He must be free to
spend his grant as he pleases. He must be left to make his own
decisions about where and how he shall live and what he shall do.
He must have the divine election, so far as social existence and
his own talents permit, of making the choices which determine his
own worldly destinies, not without guidance, if he wishes it, but
without intrusion, if he does not. Man does not forfeit the rights
of individuality and the dignity of the person by economic neces-
sity or physical handicap; and the injunction to be thy brother's
keeper is not an order to become his master.

       The public assistance acts of the various states and the
Social Security Act of the Federal Government, as administered,
violate and degrade these principles. Under them too often the
blind are virtually made wards under social worker guardianship.
The means test, individual budgeting, and social worker discretion
on which all of these acts are based, strike down the very inde-
pendence and self-respect of the recipients which must be developed
if they are to build a personality and character which will enable
them to live with a reasonable degree of usefulness and assurance.
These acts first assume that blind people are necessarily paupers
and then perpetuate them in that condition. The principle of
individual need individually determined opens the way to, if it
does not require, an inquisition into the most intimate affairs of
the recipient of blind aid. This archaic system of pauper relief
not only fails to stimulate recipients to become self-supporting,
which should be a primary aim of any system of public assistance to
the blind, but it also continually impresses upon them a sense of
their own helplessness and dependence. This treatment of the blind
is all the more remarkable since aid has been increasingly granted
to other groups in our economy on an alternative basis, quite
regardless of individual needto farmers by price support and parity
payments, to industrialists by tariffs, to laborers by minimum wage
and maximum hours provisions, to youth by public education. Blind
persons as a class, no less than these other groups, require the
helping hand of government to carry them to a healthy life embodied
in active contribution to their communities.

       The third right that we would seek to establish in our great
charter of liberties is one that is not peculiar to the blind, but
one which is common to allequality; but the special circumstances
of blindness, particularly the lack of understanding about it, make
it desirable to re-assert the right and show its relevance. The
idea of equality has been associated with all the great struggles
of the masses of mankind to better their lot in the history of
Western civilization. It is viewed by the philosophers of democracy
as the most enduring impulse and authentic demand of the human
spirit. It has been established by our own national experience as
the indispensable condition of liberty. It was placed at the base
of our constitutional system from Lockean and Jeffersonian sources
and placed in the Constitution as the culmination of the greatest
humanitarian movement in our history, namely, abolitionism. It
reaches back deeply into ethical, religious, humanistic, and
libertarian origins.

       Yet this fundamental part of our system and our heritage is
daily denied to the blind. We are denied equal treatment under the
rule of law, equal right to the self-respect which derives from a
sense of usefulness, and equal opportunity to compete for the
normal means of livelihood. More often than not a denial of
equality involves a denial of opportunity, and this, the right to
equality of opportunity is the fourth and the last of the rights we
should seek to have included in our Bill of Rights.

       Full and equal membership in society entitles the
individual, says the report of the President's Committee on Civil
Rights, to the right to enjoy the benefits of society and to
contribute to its progress.Without this equality of opportunity the
individual is deprived of a chance to develop his potentialities
and to share in the fruits of society. The group also suffers
through the loss of the contributions which might have been made by
persons excluded from the main channels of social and economic
activity.

       Exclusion from the main channels of social and economic
activity and thereby a lack of opportunity for self-supportthese
constitute the real handicap of blindness, far surpassing its
physical limitations. The government service is frequently closed
to us through groundless discrimination on account of blindness. In
some states this has been ameliorated by corrective legislationnot
so, incidentally, in the federal governmentbut even in those states
enforcement is spotty, difficult, and almost non-existent. In some
professions, at which the blind have excelled, such as osteopathy
and chiropractic, there have been persistent efforts to exclude the
blind by administrative ruling. Teaching, especially in junior
colleges and universities, where blindness is not a factor in
performing the work, has as yet opened up only to a relatively few.
In private employment the same story is to be told; the usual
experience is for the blind man to be brushed aside as incompetent,
as unable, as the fellow you could never expect to perform that job
unless he could see. With respect to self-employment, which almost
always involves some capital, the investor regards the blind man as
a bad financial risk.

       The absence of economic opportunity is more than the absence
of economic security.  It is the disintegration of the personality. 
It is men living out their lives in social isolation and the
atrophy of their productive powers. The curse of blindness is
idlenessidleness which confines the blind to the sidelines of life,
players warming the bench in the game that all should play.

       For equality of opportunity to be a reality to the blind,
competent blind persons must be admitted without discrimination to
the common callings and professions as well as to positions in the
Civil Service. We do not ask that blind men should be given jobs
because they are blind; we do not ask that they be given
preferential treatment or handicap allowances. We ask only that
when a blind man has the training, the qualifications, the de-
pendability, and the aptitude, he be given an equal chance with the
sightedthat the bars to public and private employment interposed by
legislative enactment, administrative whim, and managerial
prejudice and misunderstanding be removed.

       These problems too have a significant and an immediate
application to the public assistance laws. Those laws, once again,
are not geared to meet the real needs of blindness. It should
follow from what has been said that every effort needs to be made
to rehabilitate the blind into active endeavor, social
contribution, and remunerative employment. Far from achieving these
ends, or even from permitting them, the public assistance acts
generally tend to perpetuate the blind permanently on the relief
rolls. Earnings and other income are automatically deducted from
the amount of the grant made, and thus much of the motive for
rehabilitation, self-improvement, and active endeavor is removed.
If the blind recipients of relief were permitted to retain a
reasonable portion of their earnings and to accumulate a small
amount of capital, they would have incentive to be active, to do
something; their rehabilitation and productive effort would be
encouraged; and the ultimate goals of self-support and independence
of the public assistance rolls would open up to the realistic
vision of men who cannot see.

       Nor is this hope a dream of the future. The Congress of the
United States unanimously passed a measure, unfortunately vetoed by
the President, allowing the states, without loss of federal funds,
to exempt forty dollars of the monthly earnings of blind aid
recipients. For this measure we do honor to Congressman Reed of New
York, Senator Martin of Pennsylvania, and Senator Ives of New York.
They took the lead and put it across. They deserve and do receive
the eternal gratitude of the blind. As Senator Ives explained on
the floor of the United States Senate, this was but a short step in
the right direction; but of all the steps, it is the most
important, for it establishes a principlea principle whose ultimate
fulfillment will drive to the shambles the soul-stifling conception
of the needs basisa principle which, with public understanding,
with security, equality, and opportunity, will convert blindness
into a mere physical nuisance and blind men into social assets.

     So, with the ringing words Security; Equality; Opportunity
President tenBroek at once coined the famous motto of the
Federation and prepared the way for new goals and commitments. The
objective of security has since found expression and partial
realization in improved programs of Social Security; but the goals
of opportunity and equality have had their focus on another
frontthat of productive employment in the full range of normal
occupations and professions. The drive for jobsfor more and better
jobshad been foreseen from the birth of Federationism; as early as
1941 a speaker at the National Convention declared that before
further progress can be made toward a solution of our employment
difficulties, our attitude and standard in this field will have to
undergo complete revamping. He predicted that we shall have to
ascertain whether or not blind people's capacity is limited to a
few standard occupations such as chair caning, broom and mop
making, piano tuning and music, and news dealing. In short, we
shall have to ask ourselves the question, `Is the blind man a
producer or a permanent dependent?'

     The answer which the Federation gave to that question was
direct and unequivocal: the organized blind were to be committed to
the task of dissolving all barriers to the acceptance of blind
persons in private industry, in the professions (notably including
teaching), and the skilled trades. From the outset the National
Federation of the Blind repudiated the traditional and widespread
stereotype of blind persons as permanent dependents and natural
inferiors limited to the routine blind trades of the sheltered
workshopsthose twentieth-century relics of the infamous Victorian
workhouses exposed and excoriated in the novels of Charles Dickens.
During the Federation's second decade, in the 1950s, the battle
against the sheltered workshops and custodial agencies (themselves
no less organized and determined than the National Federation of
the Blind) was to take on the proportions of a mortal struggle
perceived by the agencies as a struggle for survival and by the
blind as a struggle for liberation.

     Underlying this conflict was a profound difference of
philosophy, and of psychology, regarding the nature of blindness
itself. Until the advent of the organized blind movement, there had
been little or no dispute about that; the entire world appeared
agreed that blindness was a total and tragic blight which left its
victim mentally incompetent and physically immobilizedin short, a
permanent dependent. Virtually all of the institutions created by
society to care for its blind wardsinstitutions which by the
mid-twentieth century numbered in the hundreds and extended their
supervision literally from cradle to gravewere based on that
negative stereotype and had acquired a vested interest in its
perpetuation. Plainly put, what this meant was that if the blind
should ever come to be redefined as normal human beings, with the
full range of ordinary abilities and possibilities, these custodial
agencies would become irrelevant and obsolete. It was as simple,
and critical, as that. The battle lines were drawn, then, not
merely around specific practices and policies of the agencies but
upon fundamental assumptions of philosophy bearing on the meaning
of blindness and the character of the blind.

     Nowhere were these issues more deeply explored or eloquently
articulated than in a 1951 convention address by President Jacobus
tenBroek entitled The Neurotic Blind and the Neurotic SightedTwin
Psychological Fallacies. In this landmark speech, tenBroek departed
from his customary style of public address to launch an incisive
scholarly attack upon the psychological theories and assumptions
supporting the structures of custodialism. His address follows:

      TITLE  THE NEUROTIC BLIND AND THE NEUROTIC SIGHTED<R> TWIN
PSYCHOLOGICAL FALLACIES

      BYLINE  by Jacobus tenBroek

       Long and significant strides have been taken by the nation's
blind in the eleven years since the first convention of the
National Federation of the Blind. Through successive advances in
public assistance and social welfare, by improvements in vocational
guidance and placement, and with increasing gains in economic
opportunity and cultural participation, the blind are moving
steadily closer to the ultimate goal of full and equal membership
in American society. A very great deal, of course, remains to be
done; and it may be well to remind ourselves, on this anniversary,
of the several dominant features of the Federation program with
which we are today most actively and immediately concerned.

       Perhaps first in any listing of the ends to which our
organization is pledged, is the goal of understandingwhich, in
negative terms, means nothing less than the total eradication of
the ancient stereotype of the helpless blind man, that age-old
equation of disability with inability which remains today, as ever,
the real affliction of blindness. Second, and closely dependent
upon the first, is the assertion of our normality: the elementary
truth that the blind are ordinary people, and more exactly that
they are personsunique individuals each with his own particular as
well as his general human needs. Third among our objectives is
security, representing a normal human striving which is only
accentuatednot transformedby the fact of blindness, and to which
the programs of public assistance are especially addressed. But
security remains a static and even a stultifying concept without
the further element of opportunity, which is the fourth of our
objectives: opportunity to participate and to develop, to become
useful and productive citizens. Fifth in line (but not in
importance) is the goal of equality, which is both a precedent and
a product of all the rest: equality which flows from the sense of
belonging, from the frank acceptance of the community, and which
entails equal treatment under the law, equal opportunity to
employment, and equal rights within society. Sixth is the objective
of education: education of the blind in terms of social adjustment
and vocational rehabilitation; and education of the sightedparents,
teachers, employers, and the communityin terms of the several goals
already mentioned. Seventh and last is the platform of adequate
legislation, permanent safeguards based on rational and systematic
evaluation of our needs and erasing once and for all the
restrictive barriers of legal discrimination and institutionalized
ignorance.

       These are only the most general and conspicuous of the goals
to which we are committed. Within each area, of course, there are
concrete problems and particular emphases. In public assistance,
for example, the overriding need is to secure adequate protection
while actively encouraging the efforts of recipients to surmount
the relief rolls by way of self-sufficiency; and in the field of
rehabilitation, the objective is to improve the services of
training and placement while retaining administration by those
qualified to understand the distinct needs and problems of the
sightless. On every level the accent varies; but when all parts
work together in harmony under skilled direction, they express the
underlying theme of Integrationsocial, psychological, and economic.
And the dominant note that emerges is one of hope; for if it is
true that we are a long way still from equal partnership with the
sighted in the continuing experiment of democracy, it is also true
that by contrast with our status only eleven years ago we are a
long way toward it.

       In this brief summation of goals and achievements, there is
however an implicit assumption which is so generally taken for
granted that it is only rarely recognized. The assumption is that
the blind are fit to participate in society on a basis of equality;
that there is nothing inherent in their handicap, or invariable in
their psychology, which renders them incapable of successful
adjustment and adaptation to their society. And the corollary of
this assumption is that there is nothing fixed or immutable about
the obstacles encountered by the blind in their progress toward
integration; that social attitudes and opinions are essentially on
our side, and that where they appear otherwise they are based on
ignorance and error and can be changed.

       These are large assumptions; and they carry an immense
responsibility. For upon them rests the entire structure of social
programming and welfare services to which this organization is
dedicated. But suppose, for a moment, that these assumptions are
false. Suppose that the blind are not just ordinary people with a
physical handicap, but psychological cripples; and suppose,
further, that the complex of attitudes and beliefs about the blind
entertained by the general public are at bottom completely hostile
and immune to change. If these suppositions should somehow receive
scientific sanctionor even if they should become widely accepted
among the public and among the blindit is easy to see that the
consequences for programs of education, assistance, rehabilitation,
and employment (to name only the most conspicuous) would be
profoundly different from those we now pursue. The long campaign to
integrate the blind into society on a basis of equality would have
to be discarded as naive and utopian; the effort to enlighten
public opinion and to erase its gross discriminations would have to
be abandoned as illusory and futile. The blind would become again,
as they have been so often in the past, a caste apart, a pariah
class; and our efforts on their behalf would be reduced to the
administration of palliatives designed to make their social prison
as comfortable as possiblebut not to help them escape.

       To all this it may be replied that there is after all no
danger of such reactionary suppositions gaining credence in
informed circles; that the weight of scientific and theoretical
opinion is altogether on the other side. And so in fact it has
appeared; as recently as last year's convention I should have
agreed wholeheartedly with this belief. Today, however, I am
compelled to announce that this confidence is no longer justified.
For the suppositions I have outlined are precisely those avowed and
put forward by two recent writings that lay serious claim to
scientific status: one of which asserts that the conditions of
blindness invariably impose a neurotic personality structurea
psychological crippling; and the other of which declares that
social attitudes toward the blind are fundamentally a sublimation
(a deflection) of aggressive instinctual drives, carrying an
inescapable undercurrent of hostility. The first of these may be
called the thesis of the neurotic blind; the second, the thesis of
the neurotic public.

       What is most surprising about these theories, at first
glance, is that they are the work of two outstanding individuals
who are themselves blind, and whose sympathetic and generous
contributions in the field have earned distinguished reputations
for both. One of these gentlemen, Dr. Thomas Cutsforth, is a
prominent psychologist and authority on problems of the blind,
whose classic work The Blind in School and Society, published over
fifteen years ago, has been credited with greatly modernizing the
fundamental concepts of the psychology of blindness. The other, Mr.
Hector Chevigny, is the author of two notable books on blindness,
besides being a reputable historian and a skilled professional
writer. About the complete integrity and considerable ability of
both these men there can be no question; but about the truth and
value of their respective theories there can be and there is a very
large question indeed.

       The first of the two viewsas expressed by Dr. Cutsforth in
a symposium on blindness published last year1maintains that the
response to blindness under modern conditions results invariably in
a pattern of behavior indistinguishable from that of neurotics. To
his credit, Dr. Cutsforth does not say, as so many psychologists
have said in the past, that it is the physical defect which created
the disturbance; rather he says what amounts to much the same
thing, that the conditions imposed by blindness make such
personality distortion inevitable. The blind person, we are told,
comes to evaluate himself as society in its ignorance evaluates
him; and as a result he soon feels inferior and alone. In his
effort to regain both self-respect and social esteem, he reacts in
either of two waysand two ways onlythe way of compulsive
compensation, or the way of hysterical withdrawal. Both responses,
according to Cutsforth, are fundamentally neuroticwhich means,
among other things, that they hinder rather than assist the
individual to adjust to his handicap and to society.

       Such terms as compulsive and hysterical, of course, plainly
beg the question; they are neurotic by definition. Most of us,
however, would probably agree that the ostrich reaction of
withdrawing from reality and retreating into infantile dependence
is no solution to the problem of adjustment; but the author's
attitude toward the familiar adjustive mechanism known as
compensation is less easily accepted. We shall say more about
compensation later on; for the moment it is enough to point out
that even the psychoanalyst Alfred Adler, whose rigid theory of
organ inferiority made neurosis a virtually inevitable
accompaniment of physical handicap, nevertheless maintained that
the defect could be overcome and complete adjustment achieved
through compensatory activity.2 Not so, however, Dr. Cutsforth. In
following this pattern [of compensation], he asserts, the
individual develops along the lines of the compulsive
personality.Therapeutic or educational emphasis upon compulsive
symptoms leads in the dangerous direction of creating lopsided
personalities, monstrosities, or geniuses as the case may
becompensations are as much evidence of personality pathology as
the less approved and more baffling hysterical reactions.3

       Clearly, there is little hope for the blind person within
the terms of this analysis. He is committed to behaving either
compulsively or hystericallyand both ways are equally neurotic.
What is more, any attempt to combine the two mechanisms only makes
matters worse. Nor is there much hope to be derived from clinical
treatment of this blind neurotic; for it is obvious, says
Cutsforth, that any therapeutic program for the adjustment of the
blind personality that concerns itself only with the correction of
either or both of these personality malformations is doomed to
failure.4 Since these malformations are the only ones allowed, it
is a bit difficult to know what else a therapeutic program might be
concerned with. But it may be supposed that what the author has in
mind is a broader program aimed at the modification of
unsympathetic social attitudes, which are admitted to lie at the
root of what he calls the neurosis involved in blindness. This is,
however, very far from his purpose. Observing that until recently
the blind and those interested in them have insisted that society
revise and modify its attitude toward this specific group, he
continues: Obviously, for many reasons, this is an impossibility,
and effort spent on such a program is as futile as spitting into
the wind.5 

       Only two of the many reasons, evidently the most clinching,
are vouchsafed to us. The first is that society has formulated its
emotional attitudes not toward blindness itself, but toward the
reaction pattern of the blind toward themselves and their own
condition.6 But since the reaction of the blind to their own
condition has already been defined as a reflection of social
attitudes, this amounts to saying that the social attitudes are
formed in terms of something which itself is formed by social
attitudesa neat bit of circular reasoning which avoids coming out
anywhere. The second reason advanced against this spitting into the
windthat is, trying to change social attitudesshould be of
particular interest to members of the National Federation of the
Blind: it is extremely doubtful, claims Dr. Cutsforth, whether the
degree of emotional maturity and social adaptability of the blind
would long support and sustain any social change of attitude, if it
were possible to achieve it.7 And finally, he declares: It is
dodging the issue to place the responsibility on the unbelieving
and non-receptive popular attitudes. The only true answer lies in
the unfortunate circumstance that the blind share with other
neurotics the nonaggressive personality and the inability to
participate fully in society.8

       The implications of this extremist theory for the broad
field of social programming are not difficult to make out. In its
assignment of the primary responsibility for maladjustment to the
blind individual alone, it discourages attention to the home and
community environment in which character is formed and personality
develops; and, even more specifically, in its emphasis on the
immutability of social attitudes, it disparages all attempts to
modify or revise them as futile and even dangerous. Indeed, Dr.
Cutsforth labels as hypocritical distortions all efforts to, as he
puts it, propagandize society with the rational concept that the
blind are normal individuals without vision.9 If the blind are not
normal, there is obviously little point in attempting to educate or
prepare them for a normal life. If they are compulsive and
hysterics, far from seeking equal treatment and full participation
in society they should be content with the exiled status of the
misfit and the deranged. There is no need to spell out in specific
terms the numerous ways in which this verdict would operate to
undermine the progress of the blind toward equality and
integration. The only one of our programs which might in some sense
survive its test is that of public assistancebut it would be an
assistance shorn of opportunity and bereft of dignity, an empty
charity without faith and without hope. The Cutsforth thesis of the
neurotic blind, in short, would seem to rule out any and all
solutions to the problems of rehabilitation and adjustment other
than that of prolonged psychotherapeutic treatment on the
individual leveland even here, as we have seen, it is not at all
clear what there is to be treated.

       Fortunately, there is an answera scientific answerto this
defeatist theory. But before turning to that it is necessary to
consider the other recent theory which by implication supports the
reactionary suppositions we have outlined: namely, Hector
Chevigny's thesis of the neurotic public. (This viewpoint, as set
forth in a book called The Adjustment of the Blind,10 is the joint
property of Chevigny and his co-author, Sydell Braverman; but
because he is the senior author and because his name is most widely
associated with the ideas in the book, we shall refer to the
formulation as Chevigny's.) Observing that the emotion which is
most commonly encountered in attitudes toward the blind is that of
pity, Chevigny subjects the pity concept to a psychoanalytic
examination along the lines of classical Freudian theory, coming to
the conclusion that pity derives from an original cruelty impulse
through either sublimation or reaction formation.11 This original
impulse is variously and ambiguously defined as fear, guilt, and
sadism; but the implication is plain throughout that expressions of
pity always represent a deflection of deep-seated feelings of
hostility. Chevigny next attempts to distinguish between pity and
kindness, maintaining that kindness has a different origin in the
psyche and represents beneficent rather than hostile feelings.
Curiously, however, kindness itself is later conceded to be a
sublimation of the aggression toward one another present in all
children, [and] it may also be the end product of a less sound
defense system against the same drives.12 In short, kindness, like
pity, is essentially a sublimation of aggressive drives; from which
it would appear that the distinction between the two emotions, if
any, is one of degree rather than kind. Far from distinguishing
pity from kindness, Chevigny has succeeded only in making the point
that all attitudes toward the blind, however apparently
well-meaning, are founded on a subterranean rock of antipathy and
aggression.

       The inconsistency of this psychoanalysis of attitudes
becomes understandable when it is seen as a particular instance of
the paradox inherent in the whole system of Freudian instinctivism:
the paradox that, as Freud himself expressed it, the things of
highest value to human culture are intelligible as a consequence of
frustrated instincts.13 The most virtuous emotionslove and
affection, toleration, sympathy, and compassionall are explainable
in terms of the sublimation of innate aggressive drives; even the
sense of justice, as Erich Fromm has pointed out, was traced by
Freud to the envy of the child for any one who possesses more than
he.14 Freud's psychological determinism does not consist however,
as popular writers often suppose, in the reduction of all behavior
to the sex drive, but rather in the conception of a dialectical
struggle between the forces representative of life and deatha
struggle underlying all human history, individual and cultural. The
tendency to aggression, he insisted, is an innate, independent,
instinctual disposition in man andconstitutes the most powerful
obstacle to culture.15 But if the existence of culture depends on
the suppression of natural instinctsif, as Freud put it, the core
of our being consists of wishes that are unattainable, yet cannot
be checked16then cultural equilibrium is at best precarious, if not
foredoomed to destruction. Indeed Freud came to wonder whether
civilization might not be leading to the extinction of mankind,
since it encroaches on the sexual function in more than one way.17
As he saw it, observes a prominent modern psychoanalyst, man is
doomed to dissatisfaction whichever way he turns. He cannot live
out satisfactorily his primitive instinctual drives without
wrecking himself and civilization. He cannot be happy alone or with
others. He has but the alternative of suffering himself or making
others suffer.18 Short of destruction of the species, then, the
conflict of man and society must remain forever unresolved.
Whenever the inhibiting social forces are for a moment relaxed, we
see men as savage beasts to whom the thought of sparing their own
kind is alien.19 But on the other hand, whenever the inhibitions
become too severe, or the frustrated instincts pile up against the
blocksas periodically they mustthen, says Freud, the organized
explosion known as war becomes inevitable. A period of general
unleashing of man's animal nature must appear, wear itself out, and
peace is once more restored.20

       So much for the Freudian theory of instincts, and the
extreme cultural pessimism to which it gives rise. It is relevant
to our present purpose insofar as it illuminates the consequences
for social programming which might be expected to follow its
application to the psychology of social attitudes. For if Chevigny
is correct, and all social attitudes toward the blind,
antagonistic, or benevolent, are explainable as the consequence of
frustrated instincts, then by Freudian standards two conclusions
may be said to follow: First, that the services and programs based
upon these attitudes, like all cultural products, are achieved only
at the cost of general neurosis and are therefore unhealthy and
precarious; and second, that the submerged hostile feelings toward
the blind must periodically erupt over the barriers in outbreaks of
persecution and aggression. It would seem evident that this
thesisthe thesis of the neurotic publicaffords little hope of any
rational and sustained progress in the social welfare of the blind;
at least until such time as the general population may be induced
to undergo extended psychoanalytic therapy. In the face of
universal hostility, however well-disguised, there can be no
serious thought of achieving recognition and integration; and the
solution to the problems of the blind must perforce be sought in
the reinforcement, rather than the removal, of the medieval
barriers of isolation and segregation.

       It may however be flatly stated that the Chevigny thesis of
the neurotic public is not widely entertained by serious students.
The validity of its Freudian assumptions has been sharply and
effectively challenged by major developments over the past ten
years within psychology and the social sciencesmost notably,
perhaps, in the sphere of the cultural anthropologists. An
impressive number of psychiatrists and psychoanalysts as well,
concluding that man's biological nature need not condemn him to
conflict with society, declare that in fact anxiety and conflict
are largely the product of institutions which, being manmade, are
subject to alteration. In the words of Harry Stack Sullivan, the
present social order operates destructively on human beings, not
only as it sets limits within which the patient's interpersonal
relations may succeed, but as the source from which spring his
problems, which are themselves signs of difficulties in the social
order.21 The relevant conclusion for our purpose is that the
personality problems of the blind may not be placed at the door of
their defect or even of their personal frustration, but rather have
their focus in the arena of social relations and institutions.
Again, in rejecting the theory of innate aggressive propensities,
these post-Freudian social scientists interpret attitudes of
genuine affection, sympathy, and compassion as the healthy
expressions of natural human attributes. It may be suggested that,
according to this modern formulation, the concept of adjustment as
extended to the blind would signify not their conformity to
immutable outer circumstance but rather the adjustment and
arrangement of social conditions and attitudes in closer harmony
with the established physical needs of the blind.

       With this we return to the Cutsforth thesis of the neurotic
blindthe thesis that denies the possibility of altering social
attitudes and places the blame for maladjustment squarely upon the
blind. Nothing would be gained, of course, by rejecting these
contentions on moral or sentimental grounds. They make their claim
on a scientific basis: the only relevant test is whether they are
sustained by the scientific evidence. And it may at once be said
that the main contentions of the Cutsforth theory are not supported
by the available data compiled by research psychologists and social
scientists. His claim that inner responses to blindness are
reductible to the two mechanisms of compulsive compensation and
hysterical withdrawal is questionable on several counts. Hans von
Hentig22 has pointed out that the loose habit of referring to
aggression and withdrawal as the main reactions to disability is of
course a simplification. There are many intermediate responses. And
he notes especially, what many in today's gathering have long since
discovered for themselves, that there is a matter-of-fact attitude,
taking the handicap as it is, [like] poverty, hunger, bad luck, and
neglect, making no fun of the handicap, yet not stressing it by
trying vainly and painfully to disregard the infirmity. Another
observer, Vita Stein Sommers, discovered after intensive study of
blind adolescents that her subjects displayed a variety of
adjustive behavior. Some showed mechanisms of adjustment which
served to reduce emotional strain and tension, and contributed to
a solution of their mental conflicts. No apparent harm to their
personality development was indicated.23 Sommers found no less than
five major types of response to blindness; and, in direct
refutation of Dr. Cutsforth, she concluded that the most
satisfactory was that of compensation. The cases, she writes,
support the belief of many psychologists that compensation is the
most healthful form of adjustment, frequently resulting in superior
forms of accomplishment.24 This conclusion coincides with the
conviction of those psychologists influenced by the teachings of
Adler, who himself maintained that by courage and training,
disabilities may be so compensated that they even become great
abilities. When correctly encountered a disability becomes a
stimulus that impels toward a higher achievement.25 A recent survey
of research in the field of disability has reported that the
Adlerians find that both compensatory behavior and inferior
attitudes do occur in physically disabled persons, but that they
are by no means of universal occurrence. Some investigators, the
report continues, question whether these symptoms are any more
frequent than in the general population.26 From all of this it may
be concluded, in reference to the Cutsforth thesis, not only that
there appear many other responses to blindness than those of
compensation and withdrawal, but that compensation itselfan
ambiguous and little-understood phenomenonhas generally the
appearance of a positive and adjustive, rather than a neurotic,
form of behavior.

       As to the claim that the conditions imposed by blindness
necessarily lead to personality disturbance, the available evidence
points strongly in the opposite direction. One European
psychologist who has devoted particular attention to the problem of
physical impairment declares that even the most serious physical
disability does not necessarily result in a distorted personality.
Although there are often factors in the environment of the crippled
person which tend to produce distortion, other factors operate at
the same time to lessen the probability of its occurrence.27 Again,
a wartime study based on the neuropsychiatric examination of 150
blinded soldiers found that emotional disturbances do not always or
necessarily occur and that the soldier of sound personality
structure, free from pre-existing neurotic or psychopathic traits,
is fully capable of making an adequate emotional adjustment to his
disability providing adequate orientation and rehabilitation
facilities are available. The authors further conclude that
blindness, as a mental stress, does not appear to be capable, by
itself, of producing abnormal mental or emotional reactions.28

       Dr. Cutsforth's assertion that it is dodging the issue to
place the blame on social attitudes, and that these are somehow out
of bounds to investigators, receives even shorter shrift from the
findings of research psychologists and social scientists working
with the handicapped. Instead there is general agreement that, in
the words of Lee Myerson, the problem of adjustment to physical
disability is as much or more a problem of the non-handicapped
majority as it is of the disabled minority29; and, unlike Dr.
Cutsforth, the data uniformly indicate the practicability, as well
as the need, of changing the attitudes of parents, teachers,
employers, and the community generally. Some students, such as
Roger Barker, emphasize the similarity between the minority status
of the blind and that of racial and religious subgroups, and
suggest that the solutions found to problems of prejudice in
generalthrough such means as education, psychology, propaganda,
learning, and politicsmay be equally applicable to the physically
handicapped.30 An opinion area of primary importance, of course, is
the home environment. Sommers, among others, asserts that parental
attitudes and actions constitute the most significant factors in
setting the fundamental habit patterns of the blind child; but,
since parents themselves reflect the attitudes of the community,
she concludes that our main concern in dealing with the problems of
personality development in such an individual must be an effort to
shape the reactions of his environment. The training of the
handicapped and the education of those with whom he is most closely
associated and of society at large must take place simultaneously.31
Her concluding words are especially worthy of quotation: The
ultimate results will depend on the extent to which the home, the
school, the community, and society at large coordinate and direct
their efforts toward giving [the blind child] sympathetic
understanding but not undue pity, encouraging independence and
initiative, and helping him to achieve success and happiness as a
contributing member of the family group and as an adult member of
society.32

       In summary, it may be said that this view of the relation of
blindness to personality development, espoused by the great
majority of research psychologists and workers with the blind,
denies that any single personality pattern is invariably associated
with blindness, holding rather that individual responses depend
primarily upon such variable, and modifiable, factors in the
environment as the attitudes of parents and the community. The
practical implications of this more optimistic explanation lie
definitely in the direction of encouraging the modification of
public attitudes and relationships toward the blind, and of
fostering programs directed toward the greater all-around
participation of the blind in society. The great objective of
public understandingfirst among our seven organizational
goalsemerges in the light of this empirical evidence as not only
necessary but eminently practicable; and along with it the erasure
of false stereotypes and the establishment of our normality. The
various specific programs of education and legislation, of
rehabilitation and social security, are similarly supported by
these findings as indispensable means toward achievement of the
ends we have set for ourselvesthe ends of full equality, of
unlimited opportunity and of total integration.

       This, then, is the scientific evidence that underlies the
growing structure of programs and services supported by the
National Federation of the Blind. It is this evidence that finally
gives the lie to the antique notions of inferiority and
incapability which have surrounded the blind from earliest times.
And it is this evidence that effectively refutes the reactionary
thesis of the neurotic blind and its corollary of the neurotic
public; for it asserts that there is nothing in the psychology of
the blind which miscasts them for the role of equal partners with
the sighted and that there is nothing in the psychology of the
sighted which prevents their recognition of this demand. It would
of course be prematureas in scientific matters it is always
prematureto claim either that present knowledge is complete or that
the achievement of integration will follow automatically from its
publication. But it is not too much or too soon to declare, with
all the conviction at our command, that the blind are capable of
fulfilling the equalitarian destiny they have assigned
themselvesand that society is capable of welcoming them.

FOOTNOTES

1. Paul A. Zahl, ed., Blindness: Modern Approaches to the Unseen
Environment  (Princeton University Press, 1950).

2. See Rudolf A. Dreikurs, The Social- Psychological Dynamics of
Physical Disability. Journal of Social Issues, Vol. 4, No. 4
(1948), p. 42.

3. Op. cit. supra note 1, pp. 176-177.

4. Id. at p. 176.

5. Id. at p. 179.

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid.

8. Id. at p. 183.

9. Id. at p. 179.

10. Hector Chevigny and Sydell Braverman, The Adjustment of the
Blind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950).

11. Id. at p. 148.

12. Id. at p. 149.

13. Quoted in Joseph Jastrow, Freud: His Dream and Sex Theories
(Cleveland: World Publishing Co., 1932), p. 290.

14. Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (New York Norton Co., 1941),
p. 294.

15. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (London:
Hogarth Press, l946), p. 102.

16. Quoted in Jastrow, op. cit. supra note l3, p. 290.

17. Quoted in Franz Alexander, Fundamentals of Psychoanalysis (New
York: Norton Co., 1948) p. 323.

18. Karen Horney, Neurosis and Human Growth (New York: Norton Co.,
1950), p. 377.

19. Freud, op. cit. supra note 15, p. 86.

20. Clara Thompson, Psychoanalysis: Its Evolution and Development
(New York: Hermitage, 1950), p. 140.

21. H. S. Sullivan, Conceptions of Modern Psychiatry (Washington,
D.C.: William Alanson White Psychiatric Foundation, 1947), p. 87.

22. Hans von Hentig, Physical Disability, Mental Conflict and
Social Crisis, Journal of Social Issues, Vol. 4, No. 4 (l948), p.
27.

23. Vita Stein Sommers, The Influence of Parental Attitudes And
Social Environment on the Personality Development of The Adolescent
Blind (New York: American Foundation for the Blind, 1944), p. 65.

24. Ibid.

25. Alfred Adler, Problems of Neurosis (New York: Cosmopolitan Book
Company, 1930), p. 44.

26. R. G. Barker, Beatrice A. Wright, and Mollie Gonick, Adjustment
to Physical Handicap and Illness (New York: Social Science Research
Council, Bulletin 55, 1946), p. 84.

27. Id. at p. 85.

28. B. L. Diamond and A. Ross, Emotional Adjustment of Newly
Blinded Soldiers, American Journal of Psychiatry, (1945), vol. 102,
pp. 367-371.

29. Lee Myerson, Physical Disability as a Social Psychological
Problem, Journal of Social Issues, Vol. 4, No. 4, (1948), p. 6.

30. Roger G. Barker, The Social Psychology of Physical Disability,
Id. at p. 31.

31. Sommers, op. cit. supra note 23 p. 104. See also Stella E.
Plants, Blind People are Individuals, The Family, Vol. 24, No. 1
(March, 1943), pp. 8, 16.

32. Sommers, Id. at p. 106.

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