The Randolph-Sheppard Act of 1936 and the Wagner-O'Day Act of 1938 lit helpful hearthfires of economic security for particular groups of blind men and women, but it took the Vocational Rehabilitation Act amendments of 1943 (the Barden-LaFollette Act) to kindle the steady flame at which tools of wider opportunity could be forged.
Few blind persons benefited from the original Vocational Rehabilitation Act, which became law in 1920. This was due partly to lack of imagination on the part of the state vocational education boards, which considered blindness so severe a disability as to constitute a hopeless impediment to employment. It was also due to the limitations of the Act itself, which made no provision for medical intervention that might remove or ameliorate the disabling condition.
The Barden-LaFollette Act changed all that, and a good deal more besides. People in the field illustrated its effect this way: before 1943, if a man lost a leg, a rehabilitation agency had to train him for a job that could be done by a one-legged man; after 1943, the agency had the funds to buy an artificial limb and turn the man into a two-legged worker.
The same analogy applied to clients blinded by cataracts or other medically correctable eye defects. Thousands of operations were successfully performed with funds made available under the Barden-LaFollette Act; thousands of other people who did not need surgery were fitted with low-vision aids to overcome much of their visual limitation.
Funds were not the only factor accounting for the momentous turnaround that took place after 1943. In the effort to cope with the casualties of World War II, American military hospitals became laboratories for bold medical techniques which pioneered new ways of dealing with visual restoration. Significant strides were made in mobility training and other rehabilitation techniques. Of at least equal importance was the ever-mounting body of evidence that blindness was by no means an insuperable obstacle to attainment of many kinds of vocational goals.
Because little of this progress would have taken place without the specialized skills of the organizations working with and for blind people, one of the most important contributions of the Barden-LaFollette Act was the way it legislated these organizations into partnership with the federal government. The Act specifically provided that any state with a legally constituted commission or agency for the blind could assign to it the administration of the federal-state vocational rehabilitation program for visually disabled persons. For the first time, state agencies for the blind, some of which had been in existence for more than thirty years, were no longer solely dependent on the capricious ups and downs of annual legislative appropriations. For the first time, they had sufficiently firm financial backing to plan, staff, and organize their work on a systematic, comprehensive basis. It was no wonder that some called the Barden-LaFollette Act "the Magna Charta of the blind."
Why would a nation, in the midst of the most devastating war in its history, pause to concern itself with a social problem unrelated to the war effort? One answer is that the Barden-LaFollette Act, as originally conceived, did have a direct bearing on the war. When, in 1942, legislation was proposed to amend the 1920 Vocational Rehabilitation Act, it sparked little interest in Congress and none whatsoever in the House Committee on Education, which had jurisdiction over such legislation, until the committee's chairman was informed that it was designed to take care of disabled veterans as well as civilians. Although the civilian and veteran components were later divorced, by the time the separate law for veterans' rehabilitation was signed on March 24, 1943, the bill for vocational rehabilitation of civilians had gathered enough momentum to roll forward on its own.
In the history of work for the blind, the events surrounding the evolution of the Barden-LaFollette Act might correctly be considered a daring gamble. As originally drafted, the bill proposed federal-state sharing of the costs of vocational rehabilitation service for all disabled persons except the blind. Where the blind were concerned, a separate title stipulated that the federal government would pay the entire cost. This was surely a boon—or was it? Not a boon but a boomerang, concluded the leaders in work for the blind, who rejected it out of hand. The same spokesmen who had successfully pleaded for special treatment for blind persons under the Social Security Act, the Randolph-Sheppard Act, and the Wagner-O'Day Act took the position that this time there should be no whit of difference between the financing of rehabilitation services for the blind and the financing of similar services for persons disabled by other conditions.
The reasoning behind this about-face was explained in special bulletins issued by the American Foundation for the Blind in late 1942. State agencies for the blind, these said, "feel that a system by which a large proportion of their work will be financed by the Federal government … will jeopardize if not destroy all local initiative and independence." Also, should the impression be created that the federal government was taking total responsibility for the blind, private philanthropy might no longer support voluntary agencies.
The almost panicky tone of these communications reflected an understandable flurry of alarm. Workers for the blind had been taken by surprise by the move to amend the Vocational Rehabilitation Act. Apparently the attitude of the government authorities who initiated the measure was that blind persons constituted so small a proportion of the disabled, there was no need to consult them or their spokesmen. Indignantly, the leadership set about correcting any such notion.
Companion bills to amend the Vocational Rehabilitation Act of 1920 were introduced on August 13, 1942. The House bill was sponsored by Graham Barden of North Carolina, the Senate's by Robert M. LaFollette, Jr., of Wisconsin. Barden, a member of the House Committee on Education, chaired a subcommittee which held a series of hearings on his bill a few weeks after its introduction. The session on the separate title dealing with the blind was scheduled for October 15.
On October 14, the Foundation convened a strategy meeting in Washington at which officers of the AAWB, the AAIB, and a goodly number of executives of state and voluntary agencies sought to reach agreement on the changes they would press for. The group agreed there were only two basic issues to be pursued: first, the bill should specify the use of state agencies for the blind in the delivery of vocational rehabilitation services to blind persons and second, the formula for federal-state support of these services should be identical with the formula applicable to the rehabilitation of other disabled persons.
Because of a backstage power struggle between the Veterans Administration and the Federal Security Agency, the 77th Congress wound up without action on the Barden and LaFollette bills. The replacement measures introduced at the opening of the 78th Congress incorporated the two changes sought by workers for the blind, whose only remaining concern was how the legislation, when passed, would be administered. At the instigation of M.C. Migel, Senator Robert F. Wagner put a direct question to Paul V. McNutt, administrator of the Federal Security Agency. "If this bill passes," Wagner wrote McNutt on February 1, 1943, "is it your intention to delegate to the state commissions for the blind responsibility for carrying out all rehabilitation work for the blind?"
The reply he received was most reassuring:
It is my intention … to work to the greatest possible extent through blind commissions or comparable organizations set up under State administrative or legal structures. It is not my intention to establish Federal facilities for any of the services [for] the blind, unless it becomes absolutely necessary through failure of the State bodies or organizations to do the job effectively.
McNutt's statement provided the final evidence that the workers for the blind had won their gamble. They had been fully aware that insistence on parallel treatment for those disabled by blindness and those disabled by other conditions entailed a real risk. If the two programs were to be dealt with identically, why should they not become one? It was no secret that control of the entire rehabilitation package was sought by the state vocational boards. To avert this, Irwin had visited, and Helen Keller had written to, a number of key legislators during the Congressional recess. Local and State agencies had also made it their business to contact their own representatives in Congress, and so had numbers of blind individuals stimulated by the Foundation's frequent bulletins.
The amended bills, as finally reported out, "gave us all we have ever asked for," Irwin wrote Migel jubilantly on March 9, 1943. Three months later, the Barden-LaFollette Act became Public Law 78-113. These were its basic features:
The federal government would make grants to the states covering the total costs of vocational guidance and placement of physically disabled civilians.
There would be fifty-fifty federal-state sharing of the costs of providing medical and psychiatric examinations, hospitalization and medical treatment, prosthetic appliances, vocational training, transportation, occupational tools and equipment, and maintenance payments to clients while they were undergoing rehabilitation.
Certain of these services would be provided to all clients without charge: counseling and guidance, physical examination, vocational training and placement. If financially able to do so, clients would meet all or part of the cost of all other services. Whatever costs they were unable to meet would be defrayed by the vocational rehabilitation agency.
State agencies were permitted to contract with qualified public or voluntary bodies for the provision of part or all of the rehabilitation services. This brought into the picture almost the entire spectrum of community agencies engaged in work with the handicapped.
To qualify for participation in the program, each state had to submit a detailed plan outlining how its vocational rehabilitation services would be set up and administered. Such plans had two parallel sections, one dealing with disabled persons other than the blind, the other with blind persons. The Foundation lost no time getting busy on the latter. A bulletin went out to the state agencies spelling out the necessary procedures and offering help in developing sound plans; in the course of the next few months, 14 states took advantage of the offer.
There was also a public relations problem to be met. Ever since passage of the Social Security Act, workers for the blind had had to cope with resentment on the part of welfare officials over separate treatment for blind persons. They were aware that this spilled over to state legislatures and to the public at large. As a precautionary countermeasure, the Foundation sent out a statement detailing the reasons why blind persons needed separate handling. Its principal emphasis was that only agencies for the blind had the specialized knowledge and experience to deal with the social and psychological factors which constituted essential elements in vocational rehabilitation of blind persons.
The precaution proved largely unnecessary. Public Law 78-113 provided more than enough work for all in terms of scope, responsibility, and steadily increasing caseload. Five years after its enactment, the federal head of vocational rehabilitation reported that in the previous year (1947) some 44,000 disabled persons had been rehabilitated, 115,000 persons were currently being prepared for employment, more than 1.5 million disabled Americans were in need of rehabilitation services, and newly disabled persons were accruing at the rate of 250,000 a year.
While the figures for blind rehabilitation clients kept pace proportionately, they were minuscule by comparison. Of the 44,000 persons rehabilitated for employment in 1947, for example, 2,155 were blind and an additional 3,000 were visually impaired. Modest as these numbers were, they nonetheless signalled the birth of a vigorous forward thrust in work for the blind.
What may well have been the most far-reaching effect of the Barden-LaFollette Act was the impetus it gave to the establishment of rehabilitation centers, which brought together under a single roof the interdisciplinary battery of personal adjustment and vocational preparation services that could enable a blind man or woman to function with minimal limitation. It was not only new muscle that the Act afforded, but new blood as well. In a 1970 review of the Act's long-term effects, Burt L. Risley and Charles W. Hoehne, executive director and assistant director respectively of the Texas Commission for the Blind, made the point that "many people who have spent the greater part of their careers in work for the blind entered into the profession as a result of the staff recruitment spurred by this legislation."
With vocational rehabilitation funds serving as financial anchor, most state programs were able to develop and maintain a wide range of other services for blind people not involved in vocational rehabilitation. Risley and Hoehne described the state agency programs of the Seventies as delivering
a configuration of various services. In addition to vocational rehabilitation, a state agency for the blind normally will be the licensing agency for the Randolph-Sheppard Vending Stand Program within the state; the agency will offer home teacher services for the elderly or other homebound cases; some sort of prevention of blindness program, usually directed toward children, will be found; and the agency will in one way or another be involved with the talking book machine program of the Library of Congress.
A number of state agencies … have responsibility in the administration of the public assistance program for the blind. In some states, the agency is responsible for the operation of sheltered workshops, and increasing numbers of state agencies are establishing and operating comprehensive rehabilitation centers.
On the federal level, too, work for the blind gathered new momentum with the Barden-LaFollette Act. Recognizing that vocational rehabilitation now embraced a much wider sweep of activities than in the past, a new federal unit, the Office of Vocational Rehabilitation (OVR), was created within the Federal Security Agency. Its nucleus was the staff which had formerly administered these services in the Office of Education. Named to head the new unit was Michael J. Shortley, who had served with the federal Board for Vocational Education, with the Veterans Administration, and with the Social Security Board in various administrative capacities. John A. Kratz, who had headed the vocational rehabilitation program in the Office of Education, became OVR's assistant director under Shortley.
The transfer from the Office of Education also involved the Services for the Blind unit under Joseph Clunk. With the administration of the vending stand program now part of the new OVR, Clunk had the opportunity to use funds provided by the Barden-LaFollette Act for rapid expansion of the industrial placement program that had begun under the Randolph-Sheppard Act.
The frequent reorganizations of the federal government's executive branch in recent decades, accompanied by name changes and interdepartmental transfers, make it difficult to trace the development of particular functions. The problem is further complicated by the custom of using initials as short-cut identifications. The following capsule summary is provided to guide the reader through the balance of this book:
Under the Smith-Fess Act of 1920, vocational rehabilitation was placed under the federal Board for Vocational Education, which was subsequently placed in the Office of Education. The latter was one of the units which became a component of the Federal Security Agency (FSA), an umbrella superagency created in 1939 to bring together a number of domestic social programs formerly located in separate federal departments.
With the passage of the Barden-LaFollette Act, vocational rehabilitation was taken out of the Office of Education and given separate status within the FSA. The change was reflected in its new name, Office of Vocational Rehabilitation (OVR). Ten years later the Eisenhower administration added new spokes to the FSA umbrella; along with broadened responsibilities, it acquired a new name, the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW). In 1963, as part of an internal HEW reorganization, OVR was reconstituted as the Vocational Rehabilitation Administration (VRA). Yet another HEW reorganization took place in 1967, under which all of its service-giving units were brought together in a single agency, the Social and Rehabilitation Service (SRS). This involved more name-changing. What had been VRA now became known as the Rehabilitation Services Administration (RSA).
Thus the initials OVR, VRA, and RSA all refer to the same federal unit at different periods in time. Under OVR and VRA, that segment of the unit concerned with blind persons was called the Division of Services for the Blind; in 1969 the title was expanded to Division of Services for the Blind and Visually Handicapped. In 1970 a further administrative reshuffling within HEW established a new overarching structure in SRS, the Division of Special Populations, and the blindness unit, now renamed Office of the Blind and Visually Handicapped, was placed under it. This demotion to less than full divisional status evoked so strong a protest from the leading organizations in the field of blindness that the order was subsequently rescinded and the Office of the Blind and Visually Handicapped was restored to its former divisional status in the Social and Rehabilitation Service.
The foregoing digression from a chronological account of vocational rehabilitation history might also serve to introduce the major federal personalities who shaped it. Michael J. Shortley, the first chief of OVR, was succeeded in 1950 by Mary E. Switzer, under whose tenure vocational rehabilitation grew from a lusty infant to giant stature. The year she took over, the overall rehabilitation budget was $20.5 million; when she retired 20 years later, the budget had multiplied 25-fold to over $500 million.
Mary Elizabeth Switzer was a career civil servant who entered federal employment in 1922, a year after graduation from Radcliffe College. She began as a junior economist in the statistics section of the Treasury Department and was steadily promoted until, by 1934, she was in an upper administrative echelon of the Public Health Service, then located in the Treasury Department. When the Federal Security Agency was created in 1939, the Public Health Service was one of the programs moved into it, and Miss Switzer was promoted to the job of assistant to the FSA administrator. Her superior performance in this post led to her appointment as director of OVR when Shortley resigned.
The 1963 reorganization that changed OVR's name to VRA also changed Mary Switzer's title from director to commissioner. The crowning success of her career was her selection in 1967 as administrator of the comprehensive Social and Rehabilitation Service, which broadened her jurisdiction to include the public welfare programs as well as rehabilitation. She retired in 1970 and died a year later at the age of seventy-one.
To the achievement of her outstanding record Mary Switzer brought a unique blend of personal qualities. She was a surefooted and knowledgeable administrator with a deserved reputation for always doing her homework. This fact, plus the ability to articulate her deeply-felt convictions about the value of rehabilitation, inspired bipartisan confidence in her in key Congressional committees and in top bureaucratic circles. A lifetime of government service gave her a shrewd and sophisticated insight into political currents. She also made it her business to know the strengths and weaknesses of her colleagues on the national, state, and local levels. Thus armed, she could be a powerful friend or a formidable foe.
Mary Switzer's acknowledged bias was in favor of innovative research. During her tenure, 184 research and demonstration grants in blindness alone were made by her agency. When she received the Shotwell Award from the American Association of Workers for the Blind in 1962, the citation acclaimed her "action to liberate humanity from … the tyranny of physical disabilities." The Foundation's Migel Medal, which went to her in 1965, paid tribute to "the breadth of her vision and the warmth of her heart." At the end of 1972 preparations were being made to name one of HEW's headquarters structures in Washington the Mary E. Switzer Memorial Building.
Within the federal vocational rehabilitation unit, Joseph Clunk initiated services for the blind in 1937. In 1950 he was succeeded by Maurice I. Tynan. A graduate of Perkins, Tynan spent his entire career in work for the blind, beginning as an instructor at the Maryland School for the Blind. When the Canadian National Institute for the Blind was founded in 1919, he moved to Toronto to initiate their vocational adjustment program. He returned to the United States two years later to work with the Veterans Bureau, then became superintendent of Evergreen, where he remained until its closing in 1925. Then he went to Minnesota to head that state's services for blind residents. He joined the federal vocational rehabilitation service in 1938 and had become assistant chief of its services for the blind when Clunk's resignation brought him the top post in 1950.
On Tynan's retirement six years later, he was succeeded by Harmon Burton Aycock, who had spent the 13 previous years as head of the Louisiana state agency for the blind. Aycock, the only sighted person ever to head the federal services for the blind, resigned in 1958 and was succeeded by his assistant, Louis H. Rives, Jr.
Totally blind since the age of two, Rives held a degree in law from the College of William and Mary in his native state of Virginia. He spent his first four years after graduation on the legal staff of the Federal Security Agency; in 1947 he transferred to the rehabilitation service, where he served in various administrative capacities. Rives resigned as director of the Division of Services for the Blind in 1964 to become program planning consultant for the overall VRA. He was followed in the blindness post by Douglas C. MacFarland, who was still the incumbent in 1972.
MacFarland came to the federal agency from the Virginia Commission for the Visually Handicapped, where he had spent two years as assistant director and eight years as director. Born in 1918 and blind since the age of nine, he attended the public schools of his native New Jersey and earned a bachelor's, a master's, and a doctoral degree in vocational rehabilitation from New York University. He pursued his professional specialty in work with three state agencies for the blind—New Jersey, Delaware, and Virginia, successively—amassing a total of 22 years of experience in these posts before being named to the federal office. Unassuming, articulate, and gregarious, MacFarland enjoyed great popularity with his colleagues. He was elected to the presidency of AAWB in 1963 and again in 1969.
Compared with World War II, the war in Korea was a minor social earthquake, but it, too, had the effect of refocussing the nation's attention on manpower utilization. A report issued by a high-level task force on the handicapped on how to make more effective use of disabled persons in the nation's labor pool became a springboard for the enactment, in 1954, of Public Law 83-565. This law introduced basic changes in the Vocational Rehabilitation Act. The most significant was replacement of the system of all-purpose grants to the states with separate grant programs for research, personnel training, demonstration projects, and facilities expansion. Separate budgeting for each of these gave the OVR the flexibility to put its money where the needs were.
Rehabilitation is a skilled person-to-person service requiring special knowledge and training. P.L. 83-565 made it possible to give tangible recognition to the need for properly equipped personnel. It was a coincidence, but a revealing one, that the very first research and development project supported by the OVR under the new grant program was to the American Foundation for the Blind for a 1955 survey of the functions, qualifications, and compensation levels of professional and administrative personnel in work for the blind. The findings, published in 1958, had an immediate impact in stimulating improved salaries and personnel practices. It had a longer-range effect as well, serving as one of the basic documents in the later work of the Commission on Standards and Accreditation of Agencies Serving the Blind. Two follow-up personnel studies were made in 1961 and 1966.
While much of the research in work for the blind sponsored under the 1954 Vocational Rehabilitation Act amendments dealt with specific aspects of placement and vocational training, it was not confined to these subjects. It was Mary Switzer's view that "the real challenge in the field of work for the blind is … how one can compensate for loss of sight in a seeing world," and the federal agency financed a staggeringly wide spectrum of projects. It sponsored early sensory research to explore development of ultrasonic mobility devices, electronic reading machines, and other technological substitutes for sight. It established 30 optical aids clinics that pioneered new ways of overcoming the handicaps caused by partial blindness. It supported demonstrations in orientation and mobility training services. It moved into the field of medical education through grants to develop teaching programs for residents in ophthalmology in university hospitals. It supported research in computerized translation of inkprint into braille. It funded psychological investigations into attitudes toward blindness on the part of sighted people and among blind people themselves. It paid for publications and educational films to interpret and promote public interest in rehabilitation. It assisted in sponsorship of international conferences on worldwide problems of blindness.
The projects on aspects of vocational preparation, training, and placement were equally far-ranging. They included pilot programs to examine employment opportunities in agricultural pursuits, in industrial homework, in professional occupations, in computer programming, in hospital service jobs, in hotel and motel work, in recreational services. They enabled Arkansas Enterprises for the Blind to establish a training program that taught blind persons to work as taxpayer service representatives; by the end of 1971 there were 60 such persons working in Internal Revenue Service offices in 35 states. They developed guidelines for manual arts instruction and the use of trade schools for vocational training of blind students. There were numerous projects related to prevocational services of all types, ranging from braille instruction to psychiatric testing.
To attract qualified personnel, training grants went to universities and other teaching institutions for courses in the several rehabilitation disciplines; support was also given for student traineeships and research fellowships.
Predictably, not all of these projects landed on target, but even those that failed were useful in identifying unproductive lines of inquiry, while those that attained their objectives sometimes exceeded their initial promise. One such was the set of three successive projects conducted by the Industrial Home for the Blind in rehabilitation and training of deaf-blind adults. The results achieved over a ten-year period at an aggregate cost of some $700,000 in grants led directly to the creation in 1967 of the National Center for Deaf-Blind Youths and Adults.
Launched by P.L. 83-565, vocational rehabilitation grants in blindness research and demonstration accelerated at a steady pace. Beginning with five projects aggregating $32,000 in 1955, the year after the law was passed, by 1964 the cumulative total was just over $4 million. Five years later, the $10 million mark had been exceeded.
The 1960s saw the United States grow increasingly aware of flaws in its social fabric. Poverty in the midst of affluence. Racial discrimination and oppression of minorities in the midst of democracy. In a nation proud of its medical skill, unmet health needs in millions of people. Youth in ferment. Most bewildering and divisive of all, the United States had somehow stumbled into a war nobody wanted and nobody seemed to know how to stop.
Before long terms like consumerism, community control, welfare rights, black power, student revolt, began to vie in newspaper headlines with other catch phrases signifying the nation's efforts to attack some of these problems: War on Poverty, Economic Opportunity, Medicare, Medicaid, Welfare Reform, Great Society. Many of these measures took as their prototype the successful experience of the Vocational Rehabilitation Act.
It was generally acknowledged that the nation's investment in vocational rehabilitation had paid handsome dividends not only in human restoration but in the cost-benefit ratio, i.e., the financial cost of rehabilitating a handicapped person to the point of self-support as against the taxes then paid by him as a wage-earner. It was this recognition that paved the way for the ever larger scope of the vocational rehabilitation program. The 1965 amendments lifted appropriation ceilings for the three succeeding years from $385 million in 1966 to $526 million in 1968. Subsequent amendments brought the ceiling up to $800 million for 1972.
The 1965 amendments did more than authorize higher spending. For the first time, federal funds could be granted toward construction of new rehabilitation centers and workshops, toward expansion, remodeling and renovation of existing facilities, and toward defraying much of the cost of staffing. Washington's share of the basic federal-state partnership was raised from 50 percent to 75 percent, and its share of project grants to 90 percent. Vocational rehabilitation agencies were authorized to furnish reader service for blind students and professional persons without charge. A new clause permitted a severely handicapped individual to receive up to six months of diagnostic rehabilitation services before a decision was reached on his potential for ultimate employment.
When the Act was amended once again in 1968, a disturbing new element was introduced through a clause extending its provisions to people who were not physically or mentally handicapped but were socially disadvantaged. The 1968 law authorized the setting aside of $50 million in 1969, $75 million in 1970, and $100 million in 1971 to finance a new program for "comprehensive evaluation of the rehabilitation potential of the disadvantaged."
In the hearings that preceded passage, John F. Nagle, representing the National Federation of the Blind (NFB), spoke for the entire field when he urged that, given the greater difficulty of working with the disabled, any service for non-disabled persons should be separately financed, staffed, and administered. He asserted that, should the same vocational counselor be assigned to work with both disabled and disadvantaged clients, the counselor,
pressured by the need to show the results of his work by the numbers of persons served, would find it much too advantageous to concentrate his attentions and labors upon the relatively simple and soluble problems of the socially and culturally and educationally disadvantaged, rather than [on] the difficult and seemingly insoluble problems of the physically and mentally disabled.
While these fears turned out to be premature—this particular clause in the 1968 amendments was never funded—the possibility that rehabilitation services for the disabled and the non-disabled might be combined continued to be a source of concern. In May 1971 H.R. 8395, a bill calling for radical revision of the Vocational Rehabilitation Act, was introduced by Congressman Carl Perkins of Kentucky at the request of the National Rehabilitation Association. One of the changes proposed by this measure was its definition of handicapped workers as including people with a variety of social and behavioral disorders "who have unusual and difficult problems in connection with their rehabilitation. … Such classes include but are not limited to alcoholics, drug addicts, migratory farm workers and public offenders."
At about the same time Senator Jennings Randolph put before the Senate a bill, co-sponsored by 49 Senators, which had been initiated by the six national organizations representing the blind. An identical measure was subsequently sponsored in the House by Congressman Perkins. In introducing the Senate measure, Randolph pointed out that although much legislation existed for the benefit of elderly people, no federal program—neither Medicare, Medicaid, public assistance, Old Age Survivors and Disability Insurance, the Older Americans Act nor the Public Health Service Act—brought to elderly blind persons the non-medical adjustment services available to younger blind adults as part of vocational rehabilitation. These adjustment services, designed to reduce dependency, included training in orientation and mobility, in activities of daily living and in communication skills.
The effect such training could have on the welfare of the older blind person was spelled out by Irvin P. Schloss when, as spokesman for the Foundation, the AAWB, and the Blinded Veterans Association, he testified before the House committee on the Randolph-Perkins bill. It could mean, he said,
that an elderly blind diabetic won't have to become a leg amputee as well, because he will be trained in orientation and mobility skills to avoid repeated bruising and the possibility of gangrene. It could mean that an elderly blind person will be taught to avoid falls and the fractured hip which results in long-term invalidism and shortens life … [that he] will be taught mobility and personal management skills so he can go to the bathroom by himself, bathe and dress himself, fix himself a cup of coffee and a snack, go for a walk when he wants to, be a substantially independent member of his family group, not a burdensome dependent who has to be waited on for his every little need.
The basic purport of the bill, where blind persons were concerned, was that the factor of employability should no longer be the sole criterion for delivery of rehabilitation services. Men and women over forty constituted by far the largest percentage of the blind population. Of those newly blinded each year, three out of four were middle-aged or older. It was the newly blinded who most urgently needed training in how to live without sight, yet in a youth-oriented society people over forty were seldom regarded as "feasible" for employment and were thus denied access to vocational rehabilitation services.
A good many other bills were introduced in 1971 and 1972 to make substantive changes in the Vocational Rehabilitation Act scheduled to expire on June 30, 1972. One, sponsored by Representative John Brademas of Indiana, was aimed at keeping the Act focused on the needs of the group it was originally designed to serve—the physically and mentally disabled. The bill was, in effect, a counter-measure to the movement that would dilute the Act through coverage of non-disabled, socially disadvantaged people.
H.R. 8395 was the bill finally passed by Congress in October 1972 after extensive hearings and many modifications, but it was pocket-vetoed by President Nixon after Congress adjourned. Its sponsors planned to reintroduce it as soon as Congress reconvened in January 1973. In the meantime, the existing Act was authorized to continue without change for an additional year.
In 1902, a man named Robinson Pierce began a professional career as a teacher of mathematics at Stevens Institute of Technology. A dozen years later, having gradually gone blind, he moved to the country and started over again as a chicken farmer. Toward the end of his life, he had this to say:
When my sight went all I knew, literally, about blind people was that they read with their fingers and felt their way about with a cane. I had never known a blind person and I knew of no one who was familiar with their ways of life. … Someone suggested that I go to the Commission for the Blind and see what they would say. I went and told them my idea of living in the country. They agreed heartily that it was a grand scheme, and encouraged me in it. Not one word was said to the effect that many people, blinded in adult life and having been established in a profession, kept on with their work and led much the same life as before. I had been teaching in a technical school when my sight began to go. If I had had a little good advice at that time, I imagine the last thirty years would have been different.
Latter-day Robinson Pierces have had access to far more than "a little good advice." With the services available under the Vocational Rehabilitation Act, they can be taught enough of the skills that mitigate the limitations of blindness to be able to resume their professional careers with hardly a missed beat. But there remain extraneous factors to cope with.
Although substantial progress was made in the teaching field in the Fifties and Sixties (a 1969 survey showed more than 300 blind teachers employed in elementary and secondary schools; in 1972 there were more than 150 on the college and university level), only a fraction of the potential was being realized. Studies of teaching opportunities for blind persons universally emphasized the continuing existence of impediments, some solidly realistic but others rooted in stereotypical attitudes held by school administrators.
The main realistic factor was that unless would-be teachers possessed superior personal adjustment and mobility skills, as well as competency in their subject areas and instructional techniques, their job chances were slim. Surveys of blind teachers emphasized another reality: they had to purchase certain amounts of sighted assistance to fulfill their faculty responsibilities. Overcoming uninformed and prejudicial attitudes in school boards and administrators was a problem that yielded more readily to example than to persuasion; the successful blind person was always the best salesman for his fellows.
Different sets of obstacles existed in other professions. One of the most discouraging was the closing of the doors in osteopathy and physical therapy. In each instance the ban came about in the course of professionalization of the discipline.
Where physical therapy was concerned, the United States in 1972 continued to be far more restrictive than many other countries. In Japan, massage, the forerunner of physical therapy, was an acknowledged and popular occupation for blind persons and had been so for centuries. In Great Britain blind physical therapists had been functioning successfully since World War I; as of 1970, about a hundred trained and accredited therapists were active in hospital and private practice there. In the hope that the British example might influence the American Physical Therapy Association to modify its position against opening schools of physical therapy to blind persons, the Foundation went so far as to finance the attendance of two blind British physical therapists and their instructor at the Second Congress of the World Confederation for Physical Therapy when that body met in New York City in 1956. Although the visitors gave impressive demonstrations of their competence in all areas of practice, the attempt was in vain. A further effort was made in 1961, when OVR gave a demonstration grant to a rehabilitation center in Hartford, Connecticut, to finance a year's employment of a blind British physical therapist whose work could be observed by officials of the American schools. This also failed to achieve the desired change of policy.
During the Sixties an occupational field whose potential for blind persons aroused great enthusiasm was computer programming. The explosive initial growth of the data processing industry called for huge quantities of personnel. The educational requirements were modest; not even a college degree was a prerequisite for the technical training that could produce programmers in a few months of intensive study. Moreover, the personal qualities needed to master computer science were those that well-adjusted blind persons had had to cultivate in order to function in daily life: the ability to concentrate and to think in logical, sequential steps. The discovery, in 1963, that computers could be adapted to produce their printouts in braille apparently removed the final barrier. Financed with the help of federal grants, studies at the University of Cincinnati and elsewhere proceeded to develop a body of knowledge concerning the needed techniques and aids that would enable blind computer programmers to do their jobs without the need for sighted assistance.
Pioneering efforts to place blind persons in the data processing field were then undertaken by a handful of state agencies for the blind. With tuition and training grants paid under the Vocational Rehabilitation Act, students were enrolled in a number of the computer schools that sprang up all over the country to feed the new, manpower-hungry industry. A joint committee of the AAWB and the Association for Computing Machinery was established in the mid-Sixties to evaluate these schools for their ability to provide blind students with a solid grounding; seven such schools had been screened and approved by the end of 1969, at which time there were 350 visually handicapped people employed in data processing, with approximately 150 additional persons being trained each year.
As had been the case with every new endeavor for blind persons, there was much initial skepticism on the part of employers. It began to be overcome, but as data processing technology evolved, job classifications for blind people were narrowed down to coders (which involved low-paid clerical operations), and systems analysts (which involved sophisticated skills and knowledge of advanced computer language). The intermediate job levels more or less disappeared. The basic problem, some authorities asserted, was the tendency of many placement counselors to pursue "vocational fads" long after the demand for certain types of jobs had peaked. While this affected the non-handicapped equally, it worked special hardships on blind students.
One of the most satisfactory advances in employment of blind persons following World War II occurred in government work. In the federal civil service, the breakthrough came in 1937 with the appointment of Joseph Clunk and his staff under the Randolph-Sheppard Act. Later, federal civil service jobs gradually opened up at many levels. A law passed in 1948 forbade discrimination against physically handicapped persons in civil service examinations, employment, or promotion. While this facilitated jobs for such blind clerical workers as typists and stenographers, and also removed barriers to employment of blind persons in top professional positions which entitled them to secretaries, it left a gap in the intermediate grades, where positions were not normally accorded secretarial services and blind persons were consequently ruled ineligible. Applicants who sought to overcome this limitation by offering to pay for their own reading assistants were prohibited from doing so because of a regulation forbidding any person to work in a government agency while receiving compensation from an outside source. The problem was solved in 1962 when a law was enacted to exempt reading assistants from this regulation.
Other special provisions put into effect by the United States Civil Service Commission included the designation of coordinators for the employment of the handicapped and a special appointing authority which allowed a severely handicapped person to have a 700-hour trial period on the job before permanent appointment. For blind applicants there were also arrangements for administration of oral tests in place of written examinations.
As of 1972, an estimated six hundred blind men and women were working in federal civil service positions; no figures were available as to the number in state, county, or municipal posts.
Texas workers for the blind enjoy pointing out that their state once had a blind chief executive. This was technically true: as president pro tempore of the Texas State Senate, Criss Cole of Houston was for a single day—January 10, 1970—that state's acting governor. No technicality was involved, however, in the elections and re-elections that put Thomas D. Schall and Thomas Gore in the United States Senate from Minnesota and Oklahoma respectively, or Matthew W. Dunn in the House of Representatives from Pennsylvania. And, thanks to the horizons expanded by the Magna Charta of the Blind, there is no barrier, technical or otherwise, to a blind man's occupying a governor's mansion or, for that matter, the White House.
