Newel Perry Teacher of Youth and and Leader of Men

Newel Perry Teacher of Youth and and Leader of Men

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Newel Perry - Teacher of Youth and and Leader of Men

by Jacobus

tenBroek

I come before you today indeed we are all gathered here to discharge a

public duty and to honor a private debt. Newel Perry was a public

figure. To us, he was also a personal friend. We can appraise his

public contribution. We can only acknowledge our private

obligation and personal attachment. We can detail his public

record, define his influential role, itemize his accomplishments,

recount his deeds, enumerate his statutes, specify his

doctrines, disentangle the elements of his social philosophy, identify the

general and the institutional fruits of his life's work,

analyze and psychoanalyze the personality traits that made him a

leader. Upon the life we shared, we can only dwell in memory, sifting

through the loose meshes of the mind the hours, the days, the nights,

the months, the years of our common experience; the fears, the

travails, the aspirations, the laughter that were ours together.

We were his students, his family, his

intimates, his comrades on a

thousand battlefronts of a social movement. We slept in his house, ate

at his table, learned geometry at his desk, walked the streets

interminably by his side, moved forward on the strength of his optimism

and confidence.

The boundless devotion to him of his wife

Lillie (to whom he was married

from 1912 until her death in 1935) spilled over onto us to balm our

institution-starved spirits, to lighten with gentle affection

the bewilderment of our eccentricity and the unnatural confinement

of our segregation. Upon a later generation of us, after the

death of Lillie, the same bounty was conferred in her turn by his

sister Emma Burnham, who lived with Doctor during the last 21

years of his life.

As a forward youngster of 12, who made so

bold as to address him as Doc,

I was once thrown out of a class by Doctor with such a lecture as

still rings in my ears. As a somewhat older youngster, still

forward but now also bored by the slow pace and the unimaginative

techniques of high school, I was expelled by him altogether

for incorrigible recalcitrance. Eventually, despite these

unpromising beginnings, I did graduate from high school. With plenty of

ambition but no money, I prepared to enter the University.

At that point I was denied state aid to the blind, a program then

newly instituted as a result of Doctor's efforts in sponsoring a

constitutional amendment and a comprehensive statute. The reason

was not that my need was not great. It was that I intended to

pursue a higher education while I was being supported by the

state. That was too much for the administrative officials. Almost

without discussion, Doctor immediately filled the gap. Just as Warring

Wilkinson had earlier done for him, he supplied me with tuition and

living expenses out of his own pocket for a semester while we all

fought to reverse the decision of the state aid officials.

It was ever thus with Doctor. The key to

his great influence with blind

students was, first of all, the fact that he was blind and

therefore understood their problems; and second, that he believed in

them and made his faith manifest. He provided the only sure

foundation of true rapport: knowledge on our part that he was genuinely

interested in our welfare.

Aside from these immediate personal

benefactions, there were three habits

of life one might almost say three elements of personality

which I formed out of his teaching and example when I was an

adolescent in his charge. First: an attitude towards my blindness, a

conception that it is basically unimportant in the important

affairs of life. A physical nuisance, yes! A topic of unembarrassed

conversation, a subject of loud questions by small children in

the street as you pass, certainly. But not something which shapes

one's nature, which determines his career, which affects his

usefulness or happiness. Second: a basic assumption that sighted

people generally have boundless good will towards the blind and an

utterly false conception of the consequences of blindness.

It is their misconception about its nature which creates the social

and economic handicap of blindness. Third: public activity as

a rule of life, a sense of responsibility to exert personal

effort to improve the lot of others. While I was still a lad in my

teens, I was attending meetings and doing work that Doctor

assigned me in the blind movement. He was a social reformer. He made me

one too. Through participation with him, these attitudes and

practices became habits of my life. So deeply instilled were they that

they have remained ever after an almost automatic behavioral

pattern potent and often governing factors in my outlook and

activity. Mature reflection in later years could only confirm through

reason what his influence had so surely wrought in my youth.

It is altogether fitting that we should

hold this memorial convocation

at the California School for the Blind. It was here that Newel

Perry came in 1883 as a ten-year-old boy penniless, blind, his

father dead, his home dissolved. Two years earlier, he had lost his

sight and nearly his life as the result of a case of poison oak

which caused his eyeballs to swell until they burst and which held him

in a coma for a month. It was here at the School that Warring

Wilklnson first met and took an interest in him, laying the

basis for future years of intimate relationship and mutual

endeavor. Warring Wilkinson was the first principal of the California

State School for the Deaf and the Blind. He served in that

capacity for 44 years, from 1865 to 1909. With his characteristic

interest in his charges, he soon saw young Newel's full

potentiality. He sent him from here to Berkeley High School to complete his

secondary education. It was he who overcame the numerous

obstacles to this arrangement, so fruitful in its understanding

of education and of the needs of the blind. Newel continued to

live here at the School while he attended the University

of California from 1892 to 1896. Again admission had to be secured

over strong resistance. Again Wllkinson was the pathfinder;

Newel his willing and anxious instrument. Wilkinson's role in

Newel's life as a youth can hardly be overestimated: father,

teacher, guide, supporter in Newel's own words, dear Governor.

As this Institution was not only the

school but the home of his boyhood

and the foundation of his manhood, so 16 years later, in 1912, at

the age of 39, Newel Perry returned here to take up his permanent

career as a teacher. He remained in that post until 1947 a third of a

century. It was here that his life's work was accomplished.

It was from this place as a base that he organized and

conducted a movement for social reform. It was here that many of us first

met him as his students. It was here that his impact upon us

first made itself felt. It was here that our lifelong association

with him began. How often in these halls have we heard his

footsteps? How often in this chamber, his voice? The sound of those

footsteps and that voice have now gone from the world as a physical

reality. How often hereafter will they continue to sound in the halls

and chambers of our lives!

In the years between departure from the

School in 1896 and return to it

in 1912, Newel Perry devoted himself to further education

and to the search for an academic job. He took graduate work at the

University of California, meanwhile serving successively

as an unpaid teaching fellow, a paid assistant and finally as

an Instructor in the Department of Mathematics. In 1900, following a

general custom of that day, he went to Europe to continue his

studies. He did this for a time at the University of Zurich in

Switzerland and then at the University of Munich in Germany.

From the latter he secured the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

in Mathematics, with Highest Honors, in 1901. He lingered in

Europe for a time traveling and writing an article on a

mathematical topic which was published in a learned journal. He then

returned to the United States in 1902, landing in New York where he was

to remain until 1912. He had about $80 in capital, a first-class

and highiy specialized education, and all the physical, mental and

personal prerequisites for a productive career, save one, visual

acuity.

During this period, he supported himself

precariously as a private

coach of university mathematics students. He applied himself,

also, to the search for a university position. He had begun the

process by mail from Europe even before he secured his Ph. D. He

now continued the process on the ground in New York. He displayed

the most relentless energy. He employed every imaginable technique.

He wrote letters in profusion. In 1905, he wrote to 500 institutions

of every size and character. He distributed his dissertation

and published article. He haunted meetings of mathematicians.

He visited his friends in the profession. He enlisted the

aid of his teachers. He called on everybody and anybody

having the remotest connection with his goal.

Everywhere, the outcome was the same. Only the form varied. Some expressed

astonishment at what he had accomplished. Some expressed interest. One of these

seemed genuine he had a blind brother-in-law who, he said, was a whiz at math.

Some showed in- difference, now and then masked behind polite phrases. Some

said there were no vacancies. Some said his application would be filed for future

reference. One said ironically, as an encouragement to men who labor under disadvantages

and who may learn from it how much may be accomplished through resolution and

industry.<170> Some averred that he probably could succeed in teaching

at somebody else's college. Many said outright that they believed a blind man

could not teach mathematics.

Many of these rejectlons were, of course,

perfectly proper. Many were

not. Their authors candidly gave the reason as blindness. We know

about this period of Newel Perry's life from reports of contemporaries

or near contemporaries such as Hugh Buckingham, a student at

the School from 1896 to 1900 during Doctor's absence, who has

prepared a manuscript about Doctor's boyhood and youth. We know about

it from what Doctor told many of us in later years. But we know

about it in all its poignancy, desolation and bleakness, from Newel

Perry's own intimate accounts written at the time to his old mentor

and true friend, Warring Wilkinson. These accounts, with copies of

many of the letters of rejection, have been preserved by the

Wilkinson family through the intervening years. In the last two weeks, they

have been opened to my inspection by Wilkinson's granddaughter,

Florence Richardson Wyckoff, who is here with us today.

I have dwelt on this period and these

experiences for several reasons.

They reflect, they accurately portray, a phase of all of our lives as

blind people. In fact, thirty-five years later, I personally

received identical letters from many of these same institutions.

It was almost as if a secretary had been set to copying

Doctor's file, only changing the signatures and the name of the

addressee. Yet great progress has been made. Many of us are now teaching at

colleges and universities around the country and filling many

other jobs hitherto closed to us.

Doctor Perry's reaction to this decade of

defeat and privation was

remarkable. He did not break. He did not resign. He did not even become

embittered. Discouragement, frustration, a sense of wrong and

Injustice, certainly these; but never collapse. He was not licked.

We see in these bitter years of hunger and rejection the source

of true knowledge about the real problems of the blind and an

ineradicable determination to do something about them. Here was a

mainspring of social reform, an ever-flowing motivation to redirect

public attitudes and actions toward the blind. To this was added the

thrust of an active and restless disposition and the wit to perceive

remedies and adapt them to the need.

Out of these elements of mind, personality

and experience were compounded

the public career of Newel Perry; and out of these elements

also were constructed the programs the initiation of which made that

career publicly significant.

First of all, the distress of poverty

must be relieved. The necessities

of life must be available. The minimum essentials must be assured.

So much in some way had been provided in the Anglo-American

system for three centuries before Newel Perry faced near

starvation and economic exclusion in New York City. The Elizabethan

Poor Laws did it in one way. County direct relief, instituted

in California in 1901, did it in another. The almshouse and the

county hospital and poor farm did it in still other ways. At the very

minimum, it had to be done better. It should be done by a system of

cash grants, adequate in amount to maintain standards of decency

and health, receivable upon fixed and uniform standards of

eligibility, made generally applicable by state participation and control,

and expendable by the recipient through a free exercise of

self-management and consumption choice. To bring this about,

however, prohibitions in the state constitution would have to be

removed by the arduous process of a people's amendment, an organic

statute would have to be lobbied through the state legislature,

faithful administration would somehow have to be secured.

Year-by-year and session-by session into the indefinite future, the

myriad minor corrections and major improvements made necessary by

time and disclosed by experience would have to be worked

through the legislature and the administration. And so indeed it

came to pass in California.

Secondly, much more had to be done than

merely relieve the distress of

poverty. Security is a necessity. As an unmixed blessing,

however, it is a stultifying concept. An indispensable ingredient

of any welfare system is opportunity. One of the objects of public

aid must be to stimulate and enable people to become independent

of it. Accordingly, their initiative must not be hemmed in. The

means of productive activity must not be withdrawn or denied.

Independence of action and self-reliance must be encouraged.

Legal liability of relatives must be relaxed so as not to spread

poverty, increase dependence, and disrupt family life. Economic

resources, reasonable amounts of real and personal property,

must be devotable to plans for self-support instead of being

required to be consumed in meeting daily needs. Incentive to earn must be

constructed out of retention of the benefits of earning. And

this too presently came to pass in California. The new system took

cognizance of the need of the blind for adjustments on the social

and psychological as well as the physical level. It permitted

and encouraged them to strive to render themselves self-supporting.

It applied the democratic principle of individual dignity to

an underprivileged class of American citizens. It guaranteed

them a fair measure of independence and self-respect in the conduct

of their lives. The California system, the Newel Perry system, was

thus far in advance of its time. It is still envied and emulated

throughout the nation.

Thirdly, the reintegration of the blind

into society on a basis of

full and equal membership could only be achieved if they had a chance

to earn their daily bread as others do in the community.

Accordingly, action must be taken to eliminate restrictive

barriers and legal discriminations. The main channels of

opportunity must be swept clear of artificial and irrational obstructions.

The public service, private employment, the common callings,

the ordinary trades and occupations, the professions must be rescued

from arbitrary exclusions based on blindness when blindness is

not a factor bearing on competence and performance. Doctor was a

prime mover in securing legal, constitutional and other

provisions which: protect the right of the blind to enter a number of

professions; forbid arbitrary discriminatIons against us in the state

civil service and in secondary teaching; enable blind college

students to pursue their studies with the aid of sighted readers

hired by the state; bring the blind in an ever- increasing stream into

the colleges and universities of the state and thence into the

higher callings.

These achievements legal, social,

economic and political have been the

fruits at once of Doctor Perry's leadership and of the collective

self-organization of the blind which that leadership engendered.

More than any other person, it was Doctor who implanted and nurtured

among the blind of California the sense of common cause, the

spirit of collaborative effort in seeking solutions to our

problems. More than any other person, it was he who taught us that the

blind can and must lead the blind and the sighted, too, when dealing

with the problems of the blind. More than any other person, it

was he who made us aware that to go on unorganized was to remain

disorganized, that only through concerted action can the blind hope

to convert and enlist the power of government and to defeat the

thoughtless tyranny of public prejudice and opportune ignorance.

Newel Perry was a teacher: a teacher of

subject matter and a teacher of

men. He taught his specialty of mathematics and taught it very well

indeed; but he taught his pupils even better. To be sure, not

all the students who came his way during his 35 years on this campus

were wholly inspired by him. His personality was vigorous and

his standards rigorous. But for many of us who attended the

School during those three and a half decades it was Doctor Perry

who furnished the impetus and incentive, the goad and the goal,

that would light our later lives and nourish our careers. Our bond

with him was not broken when our schooldays ended. We went on to become

his comrades and colleagues in the cause which was always his

true vocation.

Newel Perry was, in short, both a teacher

of youth and a leader of

men. These two roles were not, however, quite separate. For the

secret of his success in both of them lay in this: that his teaching was

a kind of leadership, and his leadership a kind of teaching. In

his pedagogical method as well as his social purpose Doctor was

thoroughly Socratic. His classroom manner was essentially

that of the Platonic dialogue: dialectical, inquiring, insistently

logical and incessantly prodding.

In this Socratic combination also lies, I

think, the secret of Doctor's

success as the leader of a social movement. Juet as in the classroom he

taught his students by leading them, so as the pioneer of the

organized blind movement he led his followers by teaching them. His

power, like that of all leaders, rested in the last analysis

upon persuasion. His triumphs, however, were not the product of

oratorical or literary skill, although he had a notable gift for

trenchant and incisive phrasing, the epigrammatic thrust which

distills the essence of a complex issue. His persuasive power was not that

of the demagogue but of the pedagogue. And It was not only his

followers who learned from him. He educated the blind people of

the state to an awareness of their capabilities as individuals

and of their powers as a group. He educated the legislators

in the State Capitol by dint of dogged, relentless, well-nigh

incorrigible campaigns of persuasion carried on year after year

and decade after decade. He educated the general public by his

preachment and his example to regard the blind not in the traditional

terms of charity and custody but in the realistic terms of normality

and equality.

And most of all, in his role as leader,

Newel Perry educated, indoctrinated

and persuaded a distinguished group of cohorts to join him in

carrying on the struggle and carrying out its goals. Those whom

Doctor gathered around him were other blind men and women,

mostly former students, whose special talents and professional

positions uniquely supplemented his.

Raymond Henderson: by profession an

attorney, self-taught, by preoccupation

a reformer, with poetry in his soul and literature in his stylus.

Born in 1881, he attended this School from 1889 through high school

and continued to live here until his graduation from the

University of California in 1904. He practiced his profession in Bakersfield,

California, from his admission to the Bar until his death in

1945. Raymond came to the organized blind movement in his maturity

from a long background of experience in other causes. He brought to

it a notable array of personal abilities, a high degree of

professional skill, a fine spirit of humanity and the enrichment of wide and

intensive activity.

Leslie Schlingheyde: also by profession

an attorney, gentle and

religious by disposition, practical rather than reflective in frame of

mind, with a brilliant academic record and a liberal outlook. He

was born in 1893, attended this School from 1906 to 1913, and

thus came under Doctor's influence in the year of his graduation.

He received a J. D. from the Law School of the University

of California in 1920 and from that time until his death in 1957

practiced his profession In Modesto, California, and served the blind

movement all over the state.

It was Raymond Henderson and Leslie

Schlingheyde who were primarily

responsible for handling cases in court, for preparing innumerable

legal briefs and arguments, for drafting projected bills and

constitutional amendments, for continuous legal counsel during the

insurgent and formative years. They were in a real sense the legal

arm of the organized blind movement

Ernest Crowley: again by profession an

attorney but distinguished

for his service in another arena. He kept a law office open

In Fairfield-Suisun from the time of his graduation from the

University of California Law School in 1923 until his death in

1952. To him, however, the law was only a necessary and not a

particularly attractive means of earning a living. His law office was a

cover for his real love and active life the practice of politics.

He was born in 1896 and attended this School from 1910 to 1916. He

was thus under Doctor's tutelage as a student for four years. His

significant contribution was made as a member of the State

Legislature from 1928 to 1952. It was he who introduced and skillfully

maneuvered through to passage the memorable bills which are now the

statutory landmarks of our movement. In a very real sense, he

was the legislative spokesman and arm of the movement.

Perry Sundquist: social worker and public

administrator by profession,

bringing to his work a sympathetic personality, an unshakable

faith in blind people and skillful management of administrative

techniques and devices. He was born in 1904 and attended

this School from 1918 to 1922. For exactly twenty years now he has

been Chief of the Division for the Blind in the State Department

of Social Welfare. During those two decades he has translated

the principles of the organized blind movement into concrete

administrative action, from legislative parchment into practical

reality. Under his direction programs for the blind have multiplied

and prospered, services have been expanded and their benefits

spread. Most important of all, the working philosophy of the movement

has been transformed into a working practice. In a very real

sense, he has been the effective administrative arm of the

movement.

Through the years this little band grew

in numbers and evolved in formal

structure. It formed the nucleus of the California Council for

the Blind, which came into being in 1934 with Doctor Perry as its

first president. For 19 productive years, until his retirement

in 1953 at the age of 80, Doctor forged and shaped the Council on

the anvil of his own will into an instrument larger and more

formidable but essentially similar to the informal group from which it

originated. Doctor's social vision in the field of

blind welfare outdistanced

his time and placed him in the advance guard of thought and

planning. His liberality on these matters gains, rather than loses,

in significance when it is placed alongside his broader attitudes

toward politics and human affairs; for in matters unrelated to

the blind, Doctor was fully an heir of the 19th century,

conservative, even reactionary, by nature, often inflexible

and not without a touch of old-fashioned nationalist imperialism.

When it came to the cause to which he was most com mitted, he

was far less a Victorian than a Utopian less a standpatter

than a restless progressive in search of new horizons.

How shall we sum up a man's life? How capture the essential quality of a

human career? How convey the inward meaning, the im ponderable

and intangible qualities of will and heart and spirit? There are

the vital statistics. But they are more

statistical than vital. All

that they can tell us of a man is that he was born, he lived, he

loved, he died. For Newel Perry we must amend the litany at least

this much: he lived, and he brought new life to many; he loved, and

he was beloved; he died, and he will not be forgotten. On the day following the death of

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Walter

Lippmann wrote some words about him which might also stand as an

epitaph to the leader and comrade whom we honor today: The man must die

in his appointed time. He must carry away with him the magic of his

presence and that personal mastery of affairs which no man, however

gifted by nature, can acquire except in the relentless struggle

with evil and blind chance. Then comes the proof of whether his

work will endure, and the test of how well he led his people. The

final test of a leader is that he leaves behind him in other men

the conviction and the will to carry on.
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