Mobilization and Momentum: The Founding of the Blind of the

Mobilization and Momentum: The Founding of the Blind of the

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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
wage as low as five cents an hour laboring 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 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 creation the founding
fathers and mothers of the National Federation of the Blind were 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 thunder and 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. Nor perhaps even more astonishing was
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 speech that of independence, aggressiveness,
and determination set 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:

HAVE OUR BLIND SOCIAL SECURITY?

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 forth but 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 states
which 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 Washington only 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 programs such as aid to the aged and aid to the disabled to 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 other a 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 specialists in 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 change most
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 the irrespective 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 least
that of exclusion from the civil service the 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 nonmember 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 toendure 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 the1944
convention banquet serves to demonstrate, the attention of the organized blind
in that early period was still mainly focused on subsistence centering upon
public assistance in 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 security one 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:

THE WORK OF THE NATIONAL FEDERATION OF THE BLIND

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 before1941. It therefore behooves us as
an organization to review ourwork, 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 Administrator, 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 peopleand 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 policiesand in all major decisions, and
the officers of the organizations must be subject periodically to removal if
they do not performtheir 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 withwhich we must deal. There was a time when local
organizations weresufficient 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 affiliate a 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 luminaries graphic 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 occupations
from 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 generation is 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 dignity let 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:

A BILL OF RIGHTS FOR THE BLIND

by Jacobus tenBroek

I have a serious question to ask the sighted persons present would 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 spent 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' restroom. But with proper orientation you would develop techniques
for overcoming this physical limitation in blindness. The Braille system 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 adaptations psychological, 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 necessity
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 independence 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 there
by a lack of opportunity for self-support these 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 legislation not so, incidentally,
in the federal government but 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 idleness--idleness 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 dependability, and the aptitude, he be given
an equal chance with the sighted that 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 front that of productive
employment in the full range of normal occupations and professions. The drive
for jobsfor more and better jobs had 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 as certain 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 workshops those 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 Sighted Twin 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:

THE NEUROTIC BLIND AND THE NEUROTIC SIGHTED TWIN PSYCHOLOGICAL FALLACIES

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 accentuated
not 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 integration social, 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 ways
and two ways only the way of compulsive compensation, or the way of hysterical
withdrawal. Both responses, according to Cutsforth, are fundamentally neurotic
which 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 hysterically and
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 attitudes a neat bit of circular
reasoning which avoids coming out anywhere. The second reason advanced against
this spitting into the wind that is, trying to change social attitudes should
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 answer a scientific answer to 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 death a 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 checked16
then 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 thesis of the neurotic public affords 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 blind the 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 phenomenon has
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 minority 29; 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 general through 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 understanding first among our seven organizational
goals emerges 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 premature to 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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