Globally speaking, the decades beginning with the Forties were watershed years. Their events permanently altered the political geography of all five continents, the social and economic structures governing the lives of much of the world's population, the psychological climate of humanity's thinking, the very prospect of man's survival on earth.
In different and less drastic ways, the same era was one of major change in the world of work for the blind. The time had come for the generation of dedicated pioneers to relinquish their leadership. They would not be leaving a void, for they themselves had planted the seeds and cultivated the soil that produced a crop of sturdy successors. Decades of determination to turn work for the blind into a soundly based profession were now ready for harvesting.
When the guns of World War II were silenced, the American Foundation for the Blind was on the verge of its 25th anniversary. The ranks of its founders, already diminished by death, were about to be thinned still further by the toll of advancing years. By 1945 the permanently missing among the founding trustees included Henry Randolph Latimer, the insurance executive Herbert H. White, the Baltimore attorney William H. Hamilton, the banker William Fellowes Morgan, the blind Chicago heart specialist Robert H. Babcock, the Pittsburgh industrialist Captain Charles W. Brown, the financier-philanthropist Felix M. Warburg.
Gone, too, were two of the three founding trustees whose donations of $1,000 each salted the Foundation's treasury with its initial cash: the piano manufacturer Sir Charles W. Lindsay of Montreal, and Prudence Sherwin, a member of the Cleveland family whose fortune was made in paint manufacturing. The third member of the trio, Mabel Knowles Gage of Worcester, Mass., was to live another three years but had already retired from the Foundation board.
All but one of the remaining early stalwarts were nearing the end of long life spans. The retired Philadelphia educator Olin H. Burritt was seventy-seven; William Nelson Cromwell, international lawyer and philanthropist, was past ninety; the New York banker Harvey D. Gibson was sixty-three. Gustavus A. Pfeiffer was seventy-three; he was to survive another eight years. Sherman C. Swift, the blind Canadian librarian and literary critic, was sixty-seven; his life had just one more year to run. Mary Vanderpoel Hun maintained a reticence about her age; it was a matter of record, however, that she had held public office since 1914. She, William Ziegler, Jr., and M. C. Migel were the only three of the early trustees who were still in office in 1945. Ziegler was the baby of the group; he was fifty-four.
For M. C. Migel the war's end was also an opportune moment to withdraw from the firing line of work for the blind. He was approaching his eightieth birthday when, in November 1945, he felt free at last to resign the Foundation presidency and turn it over to Ziegler. The Major would probably have taken this step earlier, were it not for the war. He was not the kind of man to feel comfortable about slacking off when younger men were devoting their lives to the nation's defense.
As personalities, Moses Charles Migel and the man who succeeded him as president were a study in contrasts. Where Migel's commanding presence tended to overwhelm his associates, William Ziegler, Jr., was a shy and soft-spoken man, not given to self-assertion, who sought consensus through accommodation. Migel's dashing personal style made him a center of attention in any gathering. Ziegler, a stocky figure of middle height, the roundness of his face emphasized by rimless eyeglasses, had the benevolent look and reserved demeanor of a country doctor. He shrank from the spotlight; public appearances necessitated a genuine effort of will on his part.
Different as they were, Migel and Ziegler also had much in common. Their business interests consisted largely of managing their own investments, which left time and energy to devote to philanthropic and civic causes. They shared a decades-long concern for the welfare of blind people, a concern that had brought them into association as early as 1916, when New York State Governor Charles S. Whitman appointed Migel chairman of the state's commission for the blind and named Ziegler as one of its members. Both men had political interests and connections; Ziegler was at one point treasurer of the New York State Republican Committee. Both were sportsmen. Ziegler bred gun dogs and race horses, had his own racing stables and was prominent in yachting circles.
The name Ziegler was probably better known than any other to America's blind citizens. This was not due to William but to his adoptive mother, Electa Matilda Ziegler, whose generosity had founded and financed the embossed magazine bearing her name. Young Billy Ziegler was only sixteen when the magazine put out its first issue in 1907, but he already knew a good deal about the problems of blindness, having grown up in the same household as Charles Gamble, Matilda Ziegler's son by an earlier marriage, who had been blind since boyhood.
Born William Conrad Brandt in Muscatine, Iowa, in 1891, Billy was not yet five years old when he was adopted by his father's half brother, William Ziegler, and brought to New York to live. The senior Ziegler had made his fortune as founder of the Royal Baking Powder Company; when he died in 1905 his adopted son inherited $16 million. William Jr., on completion of his education at Columbia and Harvard universities, succeeded his adoptive father as president of the baking powder firm and went on to expand his business and civic interests. In World War I he served his nation first as executive secretary of the War Credits Board and then as company commander of an Army motor transport corps overseas.
At the time he became president of the Foundation, Ziegler was a director of Standard Brands, Inc., which had bought out Royal Baking Powder in 1929. He was chairman of the board of American Maize Products Company, held a similar post in a large manufacturing concern, and presided over a personal holding corporation. Ever since his mother's death in 1932 he had administered the trust fund she had set up for the Ziegler Magazine. In the course of his more than twenty years on the Foundation board, he had also assumed officer responsibilities in its affiliated organizations.
Ziegler was not one of the founding trustees named at Vinton in 1921; when, however, the bylaws were amended the following year to enlarge the number of trustees to 25, of whom 15 were to be "persons of influence," he was a natural choice. He was thus a member of the board when the Foundation opened its office early the following year and, in his unassuming manner, took an interest in every phase of the growing organization, particularly the area he knew best, financial management. When Herbert H. White, the first treasurer, died in 1934, Ziegler took over the post. Two years later, when Olin H. Burritt retired as principal of the Pennsylvania Institution for the Instruction of the Blind (Overbrook), he also withdrew as secretary of the Foundation board. To fill the void, Ziegler served in the combined role of secretary-treasurer until, in 1939, the death of Prudence Sherwin left the board without a vice-president. The secretaryship was assigned to another trustee and Ziegler, occupying the dual offices of vice-president and treasurer, became the Foundation's second in command.
When he became president, the post of treasurer went to Richard L. Morris, a member of the Wall Street brokerage firm of Hayden, Stone and Company. Morris, an elderly man who had been a trustee since 1935, agreed wholeheartedly when Ziegler, in his address accepting the presidency, urged that younger people be brought into work for the blind. He proposed two young Wall Street colleagues for trusteeship: twenty-eight-year-old Jansen Noyes, Jr., and thirty-year-old Richard H. Migel, M.C.'s younger son. Both were elected the following June and Noyes promptly followed Morris into the treasurership. Richard Migel became assistant secretary a few years later, and then secretary in 1958.
The process of rejuvenation in the Foundation's governing body was gradual but noticeable in the succeeding decades. The added ingredients were younger laymen and a more dynamic group of professionals in work for the blind, chosen not because they stood for particular segments of work but because they contributed broad spectra of experience to the board's thinking. Changes in the bylaws enacted in 1951, 1958, and again in 1971 first loosened, and finally eliminated, the stipulation that board composition include an arbitrary number of persons to represent specific segments of work for the blind. The updated bylaws reflected the Foundation's position as an independent, nonpartisan body accountable only to the public that supported it.
One of the earliest problems faced by the trustees in these watershed years was the necessity for a change in the Foundation's professional leadership. Robert Irwin reached the age of sixty-five in June 1948. Under the mandatory staff retirement system he himself had set up a dozen years earlier, it was time to make way for a successor. But Irwin, not yet psychologically ready to step down, persuaded the trustees to let him continue on a month-to-month basis while they pondered the problem of what sort of man should take the helm.
It was not a simple question. The Foundation, now a complex enterprise with assets in cash, securities, and real estate in excess of two million dollars, a staff of over a hundred to be directed, a budget close to $350,000, and a far-flung program that stood on the threshold of sizable expansion, would need an experienced and vigorous administrator with an unusual array of talents. The job called for a man accustomed to handling large sums of money who also knew his way around the intricacies of the federal and state laws and regulations that had come to govern major services for blind people. He would have to have sufficient professional prestige to win acceptance in the field of work for the blind, but not be so closely identified with any one ideological faction as to antagonize those with opposing views. Moreover, the Foundation itself stood in need of basic internal reforms. The circumstances of its growth—improvising solutions to unforeseen problems, responding to opportunities as they arose—had not been conducive to orderly planning or the development of an integrated organizational structure.
The issue facing the trustees, and troubling some of them, was whether even the most capable blind man would be able to cope with these diverse challenges, or whether the time had come to seek a sighted executive from the wider world of commerce.
Word that this question was even being contemplated was not slow in filtering down to the Foundation staff. On March 11, 1949, eleven staff members in key professional and administrative posts addressed a joint letter to the agency's president urging that preference be given to a blind man. They said that blindness was "an indispensable link" between the Foundation executive and those he would serve, and that "the inspiration of a dynamic blind leader" not only spurred the staff to higher achievement but also won an extra measure of support and cooperation from legislators and others in high places.
One of the signatories was Alfred Allen, who had joined the staff five years earlier as assistant to Irwin, and who simultaneously functioned as unpaid secretary-general of the American Association of Workers for the Blind. The same day as the staff letter, Allen sent a communication to the AAWB's board of directors, enclosing a draft of a proposed resolution to be endorsed and sent posthaste to Ziegler. The resolution echoed the staffs arguments in favor of naming a blind person to succeed Irwin.
As it happens, most of this concern was needless. Jansen Noyes, Jr., one of the five members of a committee assigned to the executive search, later said that the committee had never seriously considered appointing a sighted person. But the committee did not voice this view publicly, which may be why Dr. Francis J. Cummings, AAWB president, told his membership at their convention in Boston in July that one of the "proudest accomplishments" of the year was the influence the AAWB's board had exerted on the Foundation to choose a blind man as their new executive.
Cummings himself, it was rumored, had been one of the candidates considered by the search committee. A man of exceptional scholarly achievement who had been executive secretary of the Delaware Commission for the Blind since 1942, he held a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, where he had made history by becoming the first blind person to be named to the university faculty. His subject was French, which he had studied at the Sorbonne. He also taught foreign languages at Overbrook, of which he was a graduate. Later elected a trustee-at-large of the Foundation, he served until his death in 1962 at the age of fifty-eight.
By the time Cummings mounted the podium at Boston, the Foundation had already made its decision public. Its new executive director, as of September 1949, would be thirty-two-year-old M. Robert Barnett, executive director of the Florida Council for the Blind.
The announcement took many by surprise. Barnett was very young for a post of such national stature. He had behind him only five years of experience in work for the blind. He hardly qualified as a member of the old-line "establishment," having attended his very first AAWB convention only two years earlier. Nor could he lay claim to an "old school tie" relationship with graduates of one of the Ivy League schools for the blind.
The more perceptive of the leaders in work for the blind realized that these potentially negative factors were, in fact, a plus. Barnett's feet were not entangled in traditional ideologies, attitudes or loyalties. He was attuned to the future, not the past. In selecting him, the Foundation had given realistic recognition to a fundamental shift in the balance of power in work for the blind. The long-established voluntary agencies which had for so many years set the pace were rapidly being overtaken by the state bodies through which were funneled ever larger quantities of federal money for services to blind men, women, and children. The tools of progress were no longer the sole property of private philanthropy.
In the preceding decade virtually every piece of federal legislation—the Social Security Act, the Randolph-Sheppard Act, and particularly the Barden-LaFollette amendments to the Vocational Rehabilitation Act—had vested added degrees of power in the state agencies. As the head of one such agency, Bob Barnett had administered large sums in creating dynamic and imaginative programs. He had opened the nation's second adult rehabilitation center, patterning it in an original mold which emphasized rapid placement results. He had been elected president of the National Council of Executives of State Agencies.
Barnett had other assets as well. He was personable; the official photograph taken for his new job showed a handsome, youthful face topped by a wavy pompadour of dark hair, the broad forehead and cleanly etched features accentuated by heavy black eyebrows. He was quick-thinking and articulate, a good writer, and a fluent public speaker. He combined the pleasant manners and social ease of a Southerner with a ready sense of humor and the confident air of a man who, mainly through his own efforts, had surmounted both a difficult boyhood and the trauma of sudden blindness. In many ways, Bob Barnett was himself a symbol of the achievement workers in the field strove to make possible for all blind people.
M. Robert Barnett (his birth certificate read that way but Barnett assumed the first initial was intended to stand for Marvin, his father's name) was born in Jacksonville, Florida, October 31, 1916. His mother succumbed to a flu epidemic when he was a year old, and he spent his early years in the home of his paternal grandparents, then shared a bachelor apartment with his father until the latter, a commercial printer, died in 1931. After that he lived with various relatives while attending high school.
Shortly before his 16th birthday, Bob and two other teenagers went joy riding; as they drove past an orange grove, a prankish notion struck them. They would climb the fence, pick as many oranges as they could stuff into their shirt fronts, then drive on in search of further amusement. While they were in the grove an unexpected noise sent the boys scrambling for the fence. Two made it; the third was stopped by two bursts of buckshot that tore across his face. The grove's owner, who had been troubled by poachers, had decided to teach the next trespasser a lesson. The victim of this lesson was Bob Barnett, who would never see again.
During the next two years a series of operations gave rise to a faint hope that some sight might be restored, but there came a day when Bob's surgeon advised him to enroll in a school for the blind to finish his high school education. January of 1935 saw him a student at what was then the Florida State School for the Deaf and Blind; June 1936 marked his graduation. It was during his senior year at the school that he met with his first stroke of good fortune. Through an acquaintance, he was introduced to Mrs. Alfred I. DuPont, who maintained a winter home in Florida. She had been informed about Bob's family circumstances and his good academic record. He was definitely college material, but could never make it without help. Florida had yet to create a state agency for the blind or a vocational rehabilitation program that would finance a blind youth's college education. In the tradition of personal philanthropy characteristic of her generation, Mrs. DuPont volunteered to pay his tuition.
Barnett chose to attend a small denominational school, Stetson University, in DeLand, Florida. To earn pocket money he got a work scholarship editing the campus magazine. He managed his studies with the help of student readers paid by the National Youth Administration, one of the New Deal's depression agencies; the paid readers were supplemented by girl volunteers, one of whom he married a year after graduation.
Majoring in history and political science, Bob also took an elective course in journalism, which-led to his joining the staff of the weekly student newspaper. Teaching was the career he had in mind, but during his senior year he discovered, after applying to every high school in Florida, that blindness automatically disqualified him under the physical criteria stipulated by school boards. (One of his later satisfactions, as executive director of the Foundation, was helping to circumvent this particular barrier; the first blind person to secure a teaching appointment in a Florida school got the position when a Foundation field consultant persuaded the local school board to give her a tryout.)
What helped Barnett land his first job was the wartime need for manpower which claimed Stetson University's journalism teacher, who also doubled as its public relations director. When the manager of the local Associated Press county bureau was drafted, there arose an opportunity to become a full-time journalist.
Using a Seeing Eye dog acquired during a college vacation, Barnett covered his journalistic beat to the satisfaction of his employers. A by-product of this job was meeting some of the state's political leaders, among them R. Henry P. Johnson, a Tampa lawyer prominent in Lions Club work, who was spearheading a campaign for a bill to establish a state agency for the blind.
It was a long-sought goal. As early as 1929, the Foundation, asked to help press for such a bill, had sent Helen Keller to Tallahassee. Although her reception by the state legislators left nothing to be desired, they failed to act. A dozen years later Johnson and his fellow Lions took up the cudgels and asked for the Foundation's help once again. Helen Keller made another trip to the Florida state capital and appeared before a joint session of the legislature in April 1941. This time the bill was passed.
Johnson was named by the governor to head the new agency, the Florida Council for the Blind, but he had only a $45,000 appropriation to work with. One service he could not afford was public relations; when he prepared his first annual report, he invoked Barnett's help, as a newsman, to publicize it. When the Barden-LaFollette Act was passed the following year, the Council gained access to new and substantial funds—some $200,000 in federal money plus $125,000 as the supplementary state grant required under the bill's formula. Money meant staff, and one of the first staff members to be employed was M. Robert Barnett.
Bob was ready for the change. His first child was about to be born, and he needed a post with a future. There was no assurance he could keep his Associated Press job once the war was over; the man who had been drafted would have first claim on it. What weighed even more heavily was his conviction that the Barden-LaFollette Act could open tremendous new vistas for blind people. He could not help but think how many of the new services might have made a difference in his own life, had they existed when he lost the use of his eyes.
It was thus an eager and enthusiastic young man who came to work as a placement counselor for the Florida Council for the Blind in September 1944. Like other recruits into this new program, he was sent to Canada for a few weeks to learn from that country's well-established vocational program for the blind, then to Washington to be instructed by Joseph Clunk and his staff in the basics of vending stand operations. Once back in Tampa, he was made supervisor of employment and worked with Johnson in getting the Florida legislature to authorize the Holly Hill Diagnostic and Pre-Vocational Training Center. He was so clearly the Council's second in command that when Johnson died suddenly in the summer of 1945, Barnett was the logical choice as his successor.
When he became executive director of the Foundation in September 1949, Barnett's first challenge involved a thorough internal housecleaning. In the last years of Robert Irwin's administration, the Foundation had succumbed to a certain degree of balkanization. Several little departmental clusters had grown up, each jealous of its autonomy and reluctant to surrender authority for the sake of a more coordinated whole. Staff rivalries as well as cliques were in evidence.
Some awareness of this situation existed among the trustees, particularly the younger men who had been taking a hard and objective look at program planning and budgeting practices and had called in outside consultants for expert advice. They made it clear Barnett would be given a free hand. His initial move was to consolidate allied types of service and carve out clear channels of command. Alfred Allen, who had been one of Irwin's two assistant directors, was assigned responsibility for administrative services. Two other assistant directorships were created, one for professional services, to which Kathern Gruber was appointed, and the other for technical and production services, to which Barnett named C. H. "Dick" Whittington, a man he had brought north with him from Florida. Whittington remained only a few years; in 1954 he was succeeded as technical chief by John W. Breuel, manager of the Talking Book Department.
These moves were the first of a series of internal reorganizations over the next two decades, each part of a continuing effort to shape an administrative structure responsive to expanding needs and evolving program priorities. Major milestones included:
—Building a field staff of six professionally trained community organization specialists to provide year-round consultation on all aspects of work for the blind, with each field consultant assigned responsibility for a specific region. Originally headquartered in the Foundation's New York office, the Community Services Division was geographically decentralized in 1966–67 when regional offices were established in Chicago, Atlanta, Denver, and San Francisco so as to place the field consultants in closer proximity to the areas they served.
While the Foundation had from its inception provided help in program development, administration, staffing, policy formation, and legislative action to state and local organizations requesting guidance in these or related functions, the requests for service had been sporadic, usually initiated by an agency or a community in crisis. The continuous availability of full-time regional consultants made possible ongoing assistance of a more planned and constructive nature. The regional staff also served as conduits through which national programs for strengthened services could move rapidly into the communities where those services were delivered.
—Building a parallel staff of program specialists, located at headquarters, to lead in spurring progress in their respective spheres of competence and be on call for expert advice when agencies or communities needed help in specific program areas. In 1972 the Program Development Division was staffed by seven professionals whose respective specialties were independent living, aging, early childhood development, personnel training, educational aids, child education, and career education.
During the Sixties, the two professional units were combined into a Program Planning Department which, at the end of 1972, was headed by William F. Gallagher. Directing the department's Program Development Division was Marion V. Wurster; the Community Services Division was directed by Doris P. Sausser.
—A gradual transition in the Foundation's research functions from in-house exploration, invention, and engineering to the multifaceted role of catalyst, coordinator, evaluator, information disseminator, and consultation center. These successive shifts in approach to both technological and psycho-social research took place under the guidance of advisory committees of ranking scientists.
—Streamlining the Foundation's manufacturing and sales units to keep pace with changing technology in the manufacture of Talking Books and mounting demands for development and distribution of aids and appliances for use by blind persons.
—Steady expansion of public education activities designed to produce a continuous flow of information aimed at three principal goals: (1) alerting blind people to the availability of goods and services for their use; (2) keeping organizations for the blind aware of professional developments and techniques that could help them upgrade their programs; (3) shaping more constructive public attitudes toward blindness and blind people.
—Heavy investment in expansion and modernization of offices and plant: new buildings, new recording studios, automated manufacturing equipment for Talking Books, computerized recordkeeping, and other facilities designed to promote efficiency of operation.
The administrative restructuring that accompanied such basic alterations in the Foundation's program involved more than reshuffling of existing personnel. A substantial increase in professional staff was called for, along with revised lines of authority. In 1959, ten years after Barnett took over as Foundation executive director, he reported to the board that while in that decade the total staff had increased 27 percent to 179, the number of professional staff members had grown 57 percent, from 28 to 44; when five budgeted vacancies were filled in the ensuing months, the rate of professional increase would mount still further. At the end of 1972 the professional staff comprised 56 persons out of a total complement of 204. Professional personnel were organized into seven departments, three of which (Program Planning, Research, and Information) reported to Barnett's associate director for service, Harold G. Roberts, and the remaining four (Business and Office Management, Manufacturing and Sales, Finance, and Program Support) reported to the associate director for administration, a post which was vacant at the time.
In many ways Harold G. Roberts personified one of the basic changes in program direction that began in the Fifties. When he joined the Foundation staff in 1959, his experience included seven years as chief of social services for a VA regional office, followed by six years as executive director of a community service council in New Jersey. Holder of a master's degree in social service administration from the University of Pittsburgh, he had taken additional graduate studies at the University of Michigan and the Columbia University School of Social Work and had been an adjunct faculty member of the Rutgers University Graduate School of Social Work. His first Foundation assignment was as director of field services; he later became director of the Division of Community Services and in 1967 was named to the newly created post of associate director.
Roberts personified the strong strand of professional social work thinking that had entered the Foundation's concept of its role. If it was to succeed in encouraging the field of work for the blind to move from paternalism to professionalism, it had to set the example. The first significant move in this process had taken place in 1954, when Alexander F. Handel was employed as consultant in community planning. Handel, who held a master's degree from the University of Chicago's School of Social Service Administration, had a solid background of professional practice in public and voluntary agencies and had also been dean and professor of social work at the Adelphi College School of Social Work. In addition to his specialized initial assignment, he carried major responsibility for manning the Foundation's field service staff with qualified social workers.
The first few years of Barnett's administration also saw important strengths added to the staff of program specialists. One of the first appointees was Georgie Lee Abel, consultant in education, whose ten-year stay helped the Foundation exert a powerful influence during a volatile era in the field of special education. Miss Abel, who brought to her job nearly twenty years of experience in teaching at residential schools for blind children, resigned in 1960 to join the faculty of San Francisco State College.
In 1952 another education specialist, Pauline Moor, joined the staff as consultant on services for preschool children. With a background that included teaching in elementary and nursery schools, direction of day care programs, and participation in a research team studying infant blindness, Miss Moor was in a position to offer expert guidance to parents, agencies, and schools struggling to cope with thousands of small children blinded by retrolental fibroplasia.
The following year saw a youthful blind man, J. Albert Asenjo, become the Foundation's specialist in vocational education and adult rehabilitation. For six years he had been chief instructor at the Florida Council's rehabilitation center in Daytona Beach. Asenjo's expertise led to his twice being detached on loan to foreign governments to design rehabilitation programs for their blind populations. In 1972 he was serving as the Foundation's specialist in independent living. A second expert in vocational rehabilitation, Arthur L. Voorhees, joined the staff in 1957. Blind since birth, he had begun his career with the New Jersey State Commission for the Blind in 1939 and had subsequently spent 13 years in the federal Division of Services for the Blind. He retired in 1972.
In a different area of specialization, Dorothy D. Bryan, who had directed the department of service to the deaf-blind for four years, resigned in 1950 and was replaced by Annette B. Dinsmore, who had been the department's assistant director since 1948. Miss Dinsmore's past experience as a teacher of the deaf and as a social welfare worker, together with her personal knowledge of blindness from having lost her own sight in adulthood, made her uniquely equipped to head a national program for the deaf-blind. She retired in 1971.
Shortly after Barnett took charge at the Foundation, Evelyn C. McKay, director of social research, resigned. On staff since 1926, Miss McKay had carried a variety of additional responsibilities during the organization's formative years, including major editorial duties on the Outlook and a number of special field assignments. January 1952 saw Nathaniel Raskin appointed to head a restructured research department. Raskin was a young psychologist who had taught at the University of Chicago, where he earned his Ph.D., and at Hunter College. His basic assignment was to initiate a research fellowship program as part of a plan to interest the nation's institutions of higher education in research bearing on blindness. These efforts also produced some needed spadework in surveying the state of research throughout the country, an overview which convinced the Foundation that its own research required a different and more sophisticated approach than before.
Raskin resigned in 1957 to become chief psychologist at Children's Memorial Hospital, Chicago, and the following year the research function was once again reorganized, with Milton D. Graham named as its head. Graham, whose background included direction of a research project at Yale University and classified work with the United States Defense Department, had received his Ph.D. in social psychology from the London School of Economics, which he attended as a Fulbright fellow after graduation from Antioch College. One of Graham's former associates at Yale, Leslie L. Clark, joined him at the Foundation in 1959 and, in 1964, took on direction of the newly created International Research Information Service (IRIS).
One other change in senior personnel took place in 1951, when Howard Liechty was named editor of the Outlook. For some years previously, the principal editorial responsibility had been in the hands of Philip Clive Potts, whose main interests were in the field of education. Potts, who held a Ph.D. in educational administration from Johns Hopkins University, came to the Foundation in 1937 from the Idaho State School for the Blind and Deaf, where he had been superintendent following a number of years as principal at the Maryland School for the Blind. At the Foundation, where he succeeded Eber L. Palmer as Irwin's assistant executive director, his role as educational specialist included editing a periodical, the Teachers Forum, which was later merged into the Outlook. When editorial responsibility passed into Liechty's hands, Potts was able to devote full time to educational consultation. He retired at the end of 1958.
In June 1950 Robert Irwin severed his last tie with his former colleagues and moved back to Puget Sound, the scene of his boyhood. He had spent the year following his retirement in semi-harness, serving as Barnett's associate director of the Foundation's sister agency, American Foundation for Overseas Blind. In this capacity he presided over the postwar international assembly of workers for the blind convened at Oxford University's Merton College in England in August 1949 under the joint auspices of AFOB and Britain's National (later Royal National) Institute for the Blind.
The Oxford assembly initiated the steps leading to the creation of a permanent body, the World Council for the Welfare of the Blind, which was formally incorporated in June 1951. At the meeting marking this event, Irwin was nominated as the Council's first honorary life member. Before this distinction could be formally conferred upon him, however, a heart attack ended his life on December 12, 1951. He was sixty-eight.
At the time of his death Irwin was working on a history of work for the blind for which he had received a Guggenheim Fellowship grant; his partial manuscript was subsequently published by the Foundation under the title As I Saw It. The first copies of the slim volume were distributed in May 1955 at a ceremony marking the dedication of the Robert B. Irwin Memorial Room at Foundation headquarters. The room, located just inside the main entrance and originally used as a repository for Irwin's personal library as well as a small museum of early artifacts associated with work for the blind, was later converted to more practical use as a display and sales room for aids and appliances.
Among other posthumous honors was the naming in Irwin's memory of a newly constructed academic building at the Washington State School for the Blind. In 1952 his role in the conception and passage of the Wagner-O'Day Act was memorialized by National Industries for the Blind through the Robert B. Irwin Award "for outstanding achievement in the field of workshops for blind persons."
Irwin did not lack for recognition during his lifetime. In 1943 he received an honorary degree from Western Reserve University; two years later, the University of Washington bestowed upon him the title of Alumnus Summa Laude Dignitatus, and in 1947 he was made a Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor, the first blind American to be so honored, for his leadership in restoring services for blind people in France following World War II.
The man who had been Robert Irwin's commander-in-chief outlived him by seven years. October 24, 1958, saw the passing of Moses Charles Migel, 11 days short of his ninety-second birthday. With him died the brand of paternalistic philanthropy that had been the hallmark of his generation of leadership. Because Migel had a passion for privacy where his personal benefactions were concerned, there exists no accurate record of how much of his wealth was poured into work for the blind. Some of the larger gifts, however, were too conspicuous to be kept under wraps. Outstanding among these was the $130,000 he gave in the early Thirties to provide the Foundation with its first headquarters building. His original pledge had been $100,000, but when quicksand and water in the subsoil made for additional expense, he insisted upon meeting the additional $30,000 cost himself.
All told, Migel's philanthropies may well have exceeded a million dollars during an era when that was a genuinely commanding sum. Almost all of this generosity took place during his lifetime; he was enough of a hedonist to want to enjoy the pleasures of giving. The sum he left the Foundation in his will was relatively modest—just enough to perpetuate the annual custom of bestowing what was originally called the Foundation Medal but later became known as the Migel Medal.
Initiated in 1937, the medal was designed by its sponsor's daughter, Parmenia Migel Ekstrom. One side was inscribed "For outstanding service to the blind" and the other showed a smiling angel shielding the lighted torch held in her left hand.
The first awardee was the lawyer-philanthropist William Nelson Cromwell, for his leadership in both international and American work for the blind. From 1937 through 1972 the number of recipients totaled 57 and embraced both laymen and professional practitioners. They included Henry Ford II of the Ford Motor Company and Thomas J. Watson of International Business Machines for the exceptional record of their companies in employment of blind workers; Major General Melvin J. Maas for crusading leadership on behalf of the disabled through the President's Committee on Employment of the Physically Handicapped; Mrs. Aida da Costa Breckinridge, founder of the Eye Bank for Sight Restoration; Dr. Jules Stein, chairman of the Music Corporation of America, for his role in founding Research to Prevent Blindness; Mary E. Switzer for her accomplishments in federal vocational rehabilitation programs; the actress Katharine Cornell for her years of personal participation, through various media, in creating greater public understanding of blindness; the playwright William Gibson for The Miracle Worker; Dr. Jerome B. Wiesner, professor (and later president) of Massachusetts Institute of Technology for his encouragement of sensory aids research in the field of blindness; Dr. Richard E. Hoover, both for his pioneering work in mobility and his later leadership in ophthalmology; Senator Jennings Randolph for decades of legislative leadership to augment the welfare of blind Americans.
During his lifetime, the Major was a recipient as well as a giver of honors. A man who never went beyond high school, he was awarded an honorary Master of Arts degree from Wesleyan University in 1935. Both the French and Italian governments recognized his services to their people by making him a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor in the one instance, and awarding him the Order of the Crown of Italy in the other.
A posthumous tribute came five years after the Major's death when the Foundation's professional library was housed in spacious new quarters and rededicated as the M. C. Migel Memorial Library. At one end of its handsomely paneled reading room was placed Mario Korbel's bronze portrait bust of Migel, which William Ziegler, Jr., had commissioned and presented to the Foundation. An idealized likeness which smoothed over the crags and fissures of advanced age, the sculpture nevertheless captured the serene and courageous spirit of the man who, in his 90th year, used as the theme of his annual New Year's message to friends the words from an old hymn: "Safely led by His hand thus far, why should we now give way to fear?"
Migel's bronze likeness sits just east of the plot at 13-15 West 16 Street on which the Foundation's first building was erected with his $130,000 gift. The three-story red brick Federal-style building was designed to give the Foundation a permanent home which, the Major said, "would add greatly to its stability, permanence and the confidence of the public generally." Confidence was so scarce a commodity in the depression-ridden early Thirties that considerable public attention was paid when the cornerstone-laying ceremony for the new building took place on December 5, 1934. Helen Keller wielded the symbolic trowel; Dr. John H. Finley, associate editor of The New York Times, presided; a congratulatory telegram from President Franklin D. Roosevelt was read; a brief speech was made by H. Randolph Latimer; Migel gave a response; and the entire event was broadcast over the NBC radio network. The broadcast was recorded by the Talking Book studio and the recording placed in the time capsule sealed into the cornerstone. Among the capsule's other contents were photographs of Helen Keller, M. C. Migel, and Robert Irwin; a set of copies of the Foundation's annual reports, some issues of the Outlook, that day's edition of all the New York City newspapers, and a second Talking Book record, Street Noises of New York in 1934.
Although the Foundation staff moved into the building in late April of the following year, the formal dedication was deferred until December, when the board held its annual meeting. Among the speeches at the ceremony was one in which Migel paid tribute to his fellow trustees ("not visionaries, not maudlin sentimentalists, but sound and yet sympathetic thinkers and doers") and noted that one of them, Gustavus A. Pfeiffer, had contributed the funds for the new building's furnishings. Irwin, who accepted a key to the building from the Major, called attention to the generosity of another Foundation friend, Mrs. William A. Moore, whose gift had equipped the new building's Talking Book studios.
The conference room had been named, somewhat misleadingly, the Helen Keller Memorial Room. A symbolic key to it was presented to the living Helen by Harvey D. Gibson, treasurer of the Foundation's endowment fund, which had at that point just topped the million dollar mark. This room, furnished and decorated under the personal supervision of Mrs. Migel, was designed to hold some of Helen's memorabilia. Among its features was a panel inscribed with a motto from Helen's pen:
"While they were saying among themselves, 'It cannot be done,' it was done."
Not one of Helen's more distinguished literary efforts, this sentence was one of nine she had drafted, at Migel's request, as possible motifs for the room. The Major had conducted an informal poll by asking several people for their preferences and then, typically enough, proceeded to ignore the opinions of the others and select the one whose idea appealed to him most strongly. But Helen had an opportunity to be as flowery as she liked when she was presented the key. After lauding Migel's "royal generosity" and terming him "the one friend of the blind who dared back their dream," she said that the new building would be one "on whose hearth the flashing wings of Hope shall fan a new flame of life for those who travel the dark way."
The original Helen Keller Room later became the office of the Foundation's executive director, but was connected by fold-back doors with an adjoining room whose walls were lined with photographs of Helen and some of the many notables she met during her long life and extensive travels, among them Alexander Graham Bell, Rabindranath Tagore, Luther Burbank, King Alexander of Yugoslavia, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. A fraction of the Foundation's collection of Keller memorabilia, the photographs on display constituted almost a pictorial biography, beginning with Helen's early childhood in Tuscumbia. Along three walls were glass-windowed cabinets displaying some of the artifacts, medals, diplomas, citations, and other mementos presented to her. One item was an autographed photograph of Mark Twain, inscribed in 1909 to Anne Sullivan Macy, "with warm regard and with limitless admiration of the wonders she has performed as a miracle worker."
From an architectural rendering of the Foundation's first building, it appears that the original design called for a four-story structure. Economy probably limited the building to three, but the change also reflected Migel's conviction that three stories provided ample space for anything the Foundation might ever need. It may have been the architects who persuaded him to top the building with a reinforced roof and a balustrade that could eventually make possible the addition of a fourth story. It was never built; when, only five years after the building opened, it was already so overcrowded that some departments were being housed in rented quarters, the need for additional space was more than could be provided by a single extra story.
A neighboring building, 11 West 16 Street, was available for purchase from the estate of its former owner and early in 1942 the Foundation bought it, together with an abutting rear structure at 18 West 17 Street, for $29,000. Both buildings were nearly a century old. The one on 17th Street was ultimately torn down and the cleared ground became a loading area for the shipping department. The one on 16th Street was a stately mansion, the former home of a New York society woman, Emily Meredith Read Spencer. It was usable with some renovation, and its architectural features, including the sweeping oval staircase that rose from the parlor floor and the panelled walls, decorated with imported wood carvings, of what had formerly been the dining room, remained for a dozen years one of the sights relished by visitors to this first annex.
As had been true in relation to the Foundation's first building and was to be the case with all subsequent property purchases, no building fund campaign was conducted. A few large gifts from trustees and, in later years, the arrival of substantial bequests, made it unnecessary. All the money received from annual contributors continued to be used exclusively for program activities.
By 1945 the immediate needs and anticipated postwar requirements of National Industries for the Blind (NIB), which had been housed by the Foundation from its inception, demanded greatly enlarged quarters. Two lots were available on West 17th Street, adjoining the rear of the Foundation's building; these were bought for $19,000 in 1945 and the existing structures torn down. A $200,000 four-story building was completed in the fall of 1947. NIB contributed $75,000 toward the cost, a sum it recovered when it moved to a new location in 1962.
By 1953 the century-old Spencer mansion was beset by so many structural defects it was no longer safe to use. It succumbed to the wrecker's ball and a new three-story structure was erected in its place. Construction of the new building, faced with red brick to match the adjoining 15 West 16 Street, and alterations to the latter to connect the two, cost close to $300,000.
At this point, the Foundation's buildings occupied three and one-half sides of a rectangle stretching through the block from 16th to 17th Street. A 12-story loft at 20 West 17 Street interrupted the fourth side. By 1960 a need for additional space prompted purchase of the loft and the creation of a corridor to connect it with the other three buildings. Initially, only 6 of the 12 floors were needed by the Foundation and the remaining floors were rented out to other nonprofit organizations, but as of 1972, only 2½ floors were occupied by others.
The loft purchase ended the acquisition of land, but not the rearrangement of space to meet changing conditions. One such rearrangement created a good-sized ground floor conference area which was named the Polly Thomson Room. Helen Keller's devoted companion had died in 1960, and the suggestion to honor her came from Nella Braddy Henney, the biographer of Anne Sullivan Macy, who had been an intimate of the Keller household since the mid-Twenties. To furnish the Polly Thomson Room, Mrs. Henney turned over the $10,000 fee she had received as a consultant in the production of the motion picture of William Gibson's The Miracle Worker. The balance of the funds to equip the panelled and carpeted auditorium, which was opened in 1964, came from Foundation resources.
As of 1972 the Foundation and its sister agency, American Foundation for Overseas Blind, occupied 67,300 square feet of space in four buildings whose value was carried on its balance sheet at cost, $2,043,472. That same year, however, found members of the board's Business Advisory Committee recommending that 5,000 square feet of additional space be rented to permit expansion and further automation of the Talking Book manufacturing plant.
If all of this was a far cry from the original two-room office of 1923, so was the financial picture shown in the 1971–72 annual report, which revealed total assets of $19,311,211, of which endowed funds constituted over $17 million. The Migel-Irwin-Keller trio who had striven so mightily to achieve what at times seemed an unreachable endowment goal of $2 million all lived to see it attained in 1948, but only Helen Keller survived long enough to see capital reserves go into eight figures and the yearly income from contributors hover around the million dollar mark.
Just as 1945, the year M. C. Migel gave up the presidency of the Foundation, signalled important changes in its leadership, so 1958, the year he died, also brought a new command to the fore. William Ziegler, Jr., who died March 3, 1958, at the age of sixty-seven, was replaced as president by Jansen Noyes, Jr. Elected to succeed the late Major as chairman of the board was Eustace Seligman, who had been board secretary since 1950. The new secretary was Richard H. Migel. The treasurer's post vacated by Noyes was filled by John P. Morgan II. The only title without a new name opposite it was vice-president. George F. Meyer continued in that post, which he had held since 1952.
More was involved than a change of chairs. The group now heading the Foundation were not retired philanthropists but persons active in their respective professions and, in four out of five cases, men with heavy experience in fiscal management. Noyes was a partner in the investment banking firm of Hemphill, Noyes and Company. (In 1965, as the result of a merger, the firm became Hornblower and Weeks—Hemphill, Noyes. In 1972, Jansen Noyes, Jr., was its president and chief executive officer.) Seligman was a partner in the law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell, Morgan an officer of the Morgan Guaranty Trust Company, and Migel an officer of a firm of securities dealers (he later joined a large printing firm as its financial vice-president). The sole exception to this Wall Street-oriented alignment was Meyer, who was executive director of the New Jersey Commission for the Blind.
Jansen Noyes, Jr., tall, rangy, blond-haired, with strong Nordic facial features, was forty years old when he became the Foundation's third president. Born in Montclair, New Jersey, he attended the Lawrenceville School, then went on to Cornell University where he took a degree in mechanical engineering. He was pursuing advanced study at the Harvard Graduate School of Business when the United States entered World War II. A member of the Naval Reserve, he entered his country's service, spent the war years on active duty in the Atlantic, and was discharged in 1945 with the rank of lieutenant commander.
It was not long after his return to civilian life as a general partner in the Wall Street firm of which his father was co-founder that the youthful veteran received a telephone call from M. C. Migel. Noyes would surely be devoting some of his time to civic affairs, the Major said; how would he like to use that time for the benefit of blind people?
Noyes was interested. He knew something about M. C. Migel from the latter's son, Richard, who was with Hemphill, Noyes at the time. And while he knew nothing about blindness—up to that point he had never even met a blind person—he considered serving as a trustee of the Foundation a more stimulating activity than ringing doorbells to raise funds for local charities. Election to the Foundation board took place in June 1946; and a few months later Noyes took over the treasurer's post. He soon found himself also overseeing the financial affairs of two related organizations, National Industries for the Blind and the newly incorporated American Foundation for Overseas Blind. In similar fashion, when he became Foundation president in 1958, he simultaneously acquired the presidencies of NFB and AFOB.
Noyes' real education in the affairs of the Foundation came about when he conducted a penetrating study of its budgeting and accounting processes in 1949. He found that the long-established system of maintaining separate revolving funds for different activities failed to yield a true budgetary picture of the scope and depth of operations and financial commitments, because only net results, with income offset against expenditures, were shown. In the revised procedures adopted under Noyes' direction, gross figures were given for both expenditures and income, and the trustees evaluating budgets were able to gain a more detailed grasp of just what was happening, Analyzing the workings of these separately administered funds also brought to light the existence of overlapping responsibilities in various departments, and precipitated the administrative changes instituted by Barnett during his early years as executive director.
It was fortunate that the new president needed little or no briefing when he took over in 1958. At that point the Foundation was undergoing some crucial changes of direction. These had a number of aspects, but all centered in one way or another on the question of professionalization.
The movement toward professionalizing work for the blind began in the educational area during the late Thirties. In 1940 AAIB introduced a national certification service for teachers of blind children, and the following year AAWB launched a similar program for home teachers of blind adults. Progress, halted during the war years, resumed momentum in the early Fifties. In 1952 AAWB appointed a committee to delineate "the ideal agency for the blind," but the committee sensibly decided that "ideal" meant "such perfection as to be practically unobtainable" and devoted itself instead to considering the question of criteria and standards. Reporting the committee's position to the next year's convention, M. Roberta Townsend, its chairman, spoke candidly. Work for the blind, she said, had "been guilty in some instances of coasting comfortably on past achievements, complacent in the assurance that privileges and preferences guaranteed sound service to its clientele." However:
A lack of standardization of services as well as an equal lack of unanimity of thinking has fostered many sporadic programs. Some continue to duplicate those already in existence, some hide behind a long list of high sounding services, no one of which is actually available to the client.
She then went on to identify a number of specific weaknesses in existing services, to suggest as a "test or model" the "best in the total programming of health and welfare in society as a whole," and to make clear the obstacles in the way of such an effort.
What the AAWB did, after hearing this forthright analysis, was to adopt a resolution asking that "a manual of useful criteria and standards for the guidance of agencies" be devised and that it be done by the American Foundation for the Blind.
At the same 1953 convention, the AAWB received and acted on a report from a committee dealing with another problem: fund-raising and public relations practices. This second group, chaired by M. Robert Barnett, was as blunt as the Townsend committee. Without naming names, its report asserted that there were
so-called agencies for the blind which have absolutely no basis for existence in terms of necessary services to blind people, whose administrative bases are just as weak as their service, and yet who overtly seek public support for the agency and its empty program in a manner which implies to their supporters that they do have essential and substantial worth.
The report also noted that some six hundred agencies in the field of work for the blind were making that number of separate approaches to the public, with resulting public confusion and, often, sufficient irritation to cause rejection of the entire field. It criticized some prevailing practices, such as publicizing client names and photographs without prior consent and using exaggerated emotionalism and appeals to pity in fund-raising literature. Its heaviest fire was directed at "coercive types of fund-raising techniques," specifically the mailing of unordered merchandise to prospective contributors, and the use of "gimmicks" which "tend to perpetuate public notions of the stereotype of blindness, such as white canes, dark glasses, miniature mops and brooms, canisters which are strongly reminiscent of the tin cup."
What action could AAWB take to correct these abuses? The committee's recommendation was that it adopt a code of ethics and that it award an official "Seal of Good Practice" to agencies demonstrating their adherence to such a code.
Aware that in several states legislative investigations of charity rackets had uncovered deception and fraud in many organizations, including some ostensibly engaged in work for the blind, the delegates saw the value of the committee's idea. The code of ethics was adopted July 14, 1953, and covered desirable elements of agency structure and program as well as specific prohibitions against such practices as claiming falsely that products were blind-made, paying commissions to fund-raisers, and mailing of unordered merchandise.
A standing committee was empowered to issue the "Seal of Good Practice" to agencies voluntarily submitting evidence that they adhered to the code. But no great rush to acquire the seal developed; two years later, AAWB's secretary-general voiced a public reproach over the slow rate of acceptance. Only 68 agencies had applied for the seal. In succeeding years the code did pick up some speed, but it was eventually abandoned when a far more comprehensive set of standards, and a permanent structure for their implementation, made their appearance.
As it began to explore the dimensions of the arduous AAWB assignment, the Foundation discovered that before standards could be formulated for services to blind persons, some basic factual data would have to be assembled about the personnel who delivered those services. Who were they? What were their responsibilities? What qualifications of education and experience did they have? Did they earn commensurate salaries?
The aid of the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics was enlisted and a survey conducted of all agencies serving blind persons and their several thousand professional, technical, and administrative staff members. Financed in part by an OVR research grant, this produced a number of useful findings, among them the not unexpected discovery that jobs in the field of blindness were generally underpaid. There was outright discrimination in state agencies, where employees in the division for the blind often earned less than persons with the identical titles in other divisions. Equally serious was a chaotic lack of uniformity in job descriptions and in the qualifications of persons holding jobs with the same or similar titles. The day-to-day field experience of the regional consultants confirmed this, and also highlighted the difficulty of local and state agencies in recruiting qualified personnel to meet the demands of rapidly expanding programs.
Toward the end of 1959 the Foundation established a national personnel referral service to help overcome the last-named problem. It listed both job openings and available candidates all over the country and became a resource for agencies seeking executives, administrators, and practitioners, and for personnel ready for career advancement. Among the agencies, some needed help in developing appropriate job descriptions and sound personnel practices so as to attract the calibre of worker they wanted; among the job-seekers, many were encouraged to acquire the additional education or training that would qualify them for higher categories. An active promotional campaign was conducted to bring new personnel into work for the blind.
All of these efforts had a single goal, M. Robert Barnett told the AAWB in 1959: "to make sure that blind persons benefit from the social revolution that is currently taking place in this country." He was referring to the impact of the 1954 VRA amendments, which had stimulated sizable spurts in all types of rehabilitation services. The next ten years, he predicted, would show even more dramatic advances.
To achieve these advances, it grew increasingly clear, would require a structured process that embodied both standards and a method of implementing standards to serve as instruments of change. In a word, accreditation. In 1961 Noyes told his board of trustees that the time had come to move in that direction. "It is not our intention," he said,
that the American Foundation for the Blind will itself conduct a policing program, but rather that it would arrange to expedite a service program of evaluation and accreditation which would find its authority in a democratic representation of all legitimate interests in this field. … [There is] enough misunderstanding, misrepresentation, and probably ineffectual activity which the public is being asked to support, that we all should join together in a pioneering effort to reduce these confusions to the greatest possible extent.
Had there been any hesitation in the board's thinking, it would have been removed by the appearance in 1961 of the influential and widely read "Hamlin Report," so designated after the name of its study director, Robert H. Hamlin. (The formal title was Voluntary Health and Welfare Agencies in the United States—an Exploratory Study by an Ad Hoc Citizens Committee.) Sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation, it presented the conclusions of a group of 21 distinguished citizens after they had assessed the degree to which all types of voluntary agencies were meeting their duty of public accountability. A major conclusion was that the public "must have more objective information about agency purposes, program content, administration, physical facilities, board structure and function, personnel, financing and budgeting and relations with other agencies and the community."
The implications of the Hamlin Report were one more evidence of a swelling popular demand for some form of assurance that the nation's thousands of voluntary health and welfare agencies, supported by many millions of contributed dollars, were operating responsibly. In the professions, and in higher education, such assurance had long been provided through accreditation systems. Now accreditation had begun to come into force in secondary education, library services, the hospital field, and nursing homes, and was under development for rehabilitation centers and sheltered workshops.
By what method could a comparable system be established in work for the blind? Guidance was sought from persons outside the field as well as from those who understood its unique nature and problems. An Ad Hoc Advisory Committee on Accreditation was appointed by the Foundation in 1962; its recommendation, submitted in April 1963, was for an autonomous commission that would be responsible for both the formulation of standards and the creation of a permanent accrediting body.
Thus was born the independent organism known as COMSTAC: the Commission on Standards and Accreditation of Services for the Blind. In creating the 22-member commission, the Foundation agreed to grant it absolute autonomy of policy and procedure while accepting responsibility for financing its work. Some exploratory approaches to philanthropic foundations had already been made. Originally estimated at $350,000 over a four-year period, the final costs were $438,000, of which the Foundation supplied $300,000 in cash and staff services and the remainder came from the Irene Heinz Given and John LaPorte Given Foundation, the Gustavus and Louise Pfeiffer Research Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the Vocational Rehabilitation Administration.
The commission membership comprised a great many diverse elements. It balanced lay leadership with professional expertise, governmental services with voluntary agencies, blind persons with sighted persons, business interests with labor representation, specialized work for the blind with general community services. It embraced the major professional disciplines and drew on all geographical sections of the United States. Chosen as chairman was a man knowledgeable about accreditation but in a position of absolute neutrality where work for the blind was concerned: Arthur L. Brandon, retired vice-president for university relations at New York University.
To serve as full-time executive director of COMSTAC, Alexander F. Handel was detached from the Foundation staff. Eight other staff members were released part-time for service with the commission, and six professional persons with other affiliations were also engaged to staff the committees charged with developing standards.
COMSTAC got under way in February 1964. It selected 12 areas for development of standards, of which 5 were basic aspects of administration common to all operating agencies, and 7 were specific types of service programs in work for the blind. Technical study committees were appointed for each of these 12 subjects; the committees, whose membership ranged between 7 and 14, were selected with the same attention to balance as the commission itself. They were given a set of guidelines designed to avoid blue-sky thinking at one extreme and unduly lax criteria at the other. The key clauses were these:
Standards should be formulated so as to set a level of acceptable performance below which no agency should fall, while simultaneously constituting a challenge to the better agencies to continue striving for improvement. Standards should be practicable. They should be based primarily on existing knowledge which has been tested in practice, leaving to future revisions whatever modifications might be called for in the light of new knowledge produced by research or experience.
As the committees went about their assignments, correspondence was conducted with specialists all over the country and progress reports were made at appropriate professional meetings. By December 1965 the standards had been drafted in sufficiently final form to warrant intensive review at a three-day national conference that was attended by some four hundred lay and professional persons. Each set of standards was analyzed and debated, line by line and page by page, in workshop sessions. Following a process of revision and clarification, based on the reactions and suggestions of the conferees, the standards were published in 1966 under the title The COMSTAC Report: Standards for Strengthened Services.
The national conference also served as the stage for the first public presentation of the plan for establishing the National Accreditation Council for Agencies Serving the Blind and Visually Handicapped. NAC, as it came to be known, began on January 1, 1967, with Brandon as president and Handel as executive director. Its founders projected a ten-year plan for gradual self-support through membership dues to be paid by agencies admitted to accreditation. To help underwrite the initial years, the Foundation committed $300,000 over a five-year period and persuaded the Vocational Rehabilitation Administration and other groups to underwrite an equal sum.
By the end of 1972 NAC had accredited 47 agencies and schools for the blind; approximately the same number were in one or another phase of the self-study process that precedes accreditation. The pace was slower than had been hoped for, and additional financial help was needed from and granted by the Foundation and other sources. It was clear by then that self-support was not likely to be attained by the original target date of 1977.
Not everyone agreed with the statement by one enthusiast that accreditation would be "the most significant advance in work for the blind since the advent of the Talking Book." In some quarters the prospect of standards stipulating professional qualifications for various positions was regarded as threatening the security of blind personnel holding such jobs in public and voluntary agencies and as limiting future access to such jobs by blind persons. These same groups also regarded as inimical to the interests of blind persons employed in sheltered workshops the absence of standards calling for minimum wages, collective bargaining and other labor protections.
The principal vehicle for opposition on these and similar grounds was the National Federation of the Blind, whose militant and outspoken president, Kenneth Jernigan, conducted a vehement crusade, first against COMSTAC and then against NAC. Under the banner of consumerism, Jernigan used his organization's annual conventions, and its monthly newsletter, the Braille Monitor, to mount a vendetta against NAC, designed, as he put it, "to reform it or destroy it." His tactics were viewed by more conservative elements as an outright struggle for power characterized by extremist accusations of a kind that had not been seen or heard in work for the blind since the Congressional hearings on the Pratt-Smoot bill forty years earlier.
These more conservative elements continued to assert their faith in the accreditation process as an instrument for constructive progress. In 1971 the United States Office of Education awarded NAC the status of a recognized accrediting agency; it was the first such recognition in the field of special education. The Social and Rehabilitation Service continued to make annual budgetary grants. The Council of State Administrators of Vocational Rehabilitation voted in late 1972 to adopt a policy under which, by mid-1974, all rehabilitation facilities under their jurisdiction would be required to apply for accreditation, either to NAC or to a comparable body, the Commission on Accreditation of Rehabilitation Facilities. The Association for Education of the Visually Handicapped (formerly American Association of Instructors of the Blind) reacted to NFB's anti-NAC propaganda by writing the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare: "We decry the efforts of one particular organization to impair or destroy the single organization completely dedicated to improving and maintaining high standards of service to the visually disabled in our country."
The American Foundation for the Blind remained unwaveringly convinced that accreditation was an essential ingredient in the development of quality services for America's blind citizens and reaffirmed its stand in a policy statement issued in October 1968. As further evidence of its conviction, the Foundation awarded its 1969 Migel Medal for lay leadership to Arthur Brandon, citing his leadership of both COMSTAC and NAC. No comment was made during the award ceremonies over the ironic twist which saw the same year's Migel Medal for professional achievement go to John F. Nagle, the blind attorney who was chief of the Washington office of the National Federation of the Blind.
The Foundation's policy statement on accreditation was one of a series of such statements developed by its Service Advisory Committee. The use of committees made up of trustees and others came increasingly into play during the Noyes presidency as part of a base-broadening philosophy which simultaneously brought board members into more intimate contact with program activities while giving practitioners in work for the blind greater participation in shaping Foundation policy. From its inception in 1965 through the end of 1972, the Service Advisory Committee formulated policy statements on a score of issues, among them employment, housing, income maintenance, education, peripatology, and services for the aged.
Not all of these statements accorded with popular thinking. A policy declaration on fragrance gardens, for example, asserted that these were not "in the best interests of visually impaired persons" because they fostered needless segregation and perpetuated a stereotype. A later statement applied the same negative judgment to brailled nature trails and touch museums for the blind.
Another advisory group which exerted policy-shaping influence was the Scientific Advisory Committee. A Business Advisory Committee gave its attention to questions concerning the manufacture of Talking Books and the procurement and sale of other products of importance to blind users. A Public Relations Advisory Committee was appointed in 1970 and a Publications Committee in 1971 to guide the work of the Foundation's information staff.
A dozen years after assuming the Foundation presidency, Jansen Noyes, Jr., moved into the post of board chairman, succeeding Eustace Seligman, who became a trustee emeritus. The 1970 alignment of officers brought John S. Crowley to the presidency and Mitchell Brock, a partner in Sullivan and Cromwell, to the secretaryship. Richard H. Migel, who had served as secretary since 1958, was elected to the just-created office of vice-chairman of the board. J.P. Morgan II remained as treasurer and J.M. Woolly, superintendent of the Arkansas School for the Blind, continued in the post of vice-president to which he had been elected in 1967.
John S. Crowley, forty-seven years old when he became the Foundation's fourth president, brought a fresh orientation to the office. As senior partner and director of McKinsey and Company, an international management consulting firm, he was in a position to contribute professional thinking to internal management practices and extramural relationships. A trustee since 1963, he had served on the executive and finance committees and had headed a committee on personnel to update staff salary guidelines.
Crowley's early training paralleled that of Jansen Noyes, Jr. He, too, held a degree in engineering (in his case, from the University of Rochester) and had taken graduate work at the Harvard Graduate School of Business, where he received a master's degree in business administration. He had also seen Navy service during World War II. Thereafter, however, the careers of the two men diverged, Crowley having spent most of his business life in marketing and management.
Dark-haired, dark-eyed, incisive in speech and manner, Crowley spearheaded a marketing program to bring the sensory aids developed by science and technology into greater usefulness for the nation's blind population. At the fiftieth anniversary observance, held in October 1971, he announced that the Foundation would assume responsibility for "the full entrepreneurial role" in bridging the commercial gap between drawing board and consumer—a gap which had long kept sensory and other devices from reaching their potential markets.
After analyzing the four necessary steps—making an inventory of products in various stages of development all over the world, developing a mechanism to evaluate them, defining the market potential of each, and finding manufacturers who would produce and distribute the finished products—Crowley said that, if need be, the Foundation would commit itself
to the tasks of securing the required funding from whatever combination of sources, negotiating with various contractors for producing and marketing the products, and, finally, managing and monitoring the contractors as necessary.
The first stage of the new venture got under way soon thereafter under the direction of a marketing specialist. After analyzing the various statistical studies of blindness made in the preceding decade, his initial conclusion was that the prevalence of severe visual impairment in the United States had been greatly underestimated. The implication was that there existed a largely undiscovered market for a variety of products, ranging from sophisticated sensory aids to simple appliances, that could be useful in the lives of visually impaired people. How to pinpoint the appropriate segments of this market so as to disseminate knowledge of, and stimulate demand for, what was actually or potentially available was the next challenge to be overcome.
