They were feared, shunned, pitied, ignored. Some were thought to be blessed with magical powers, others to be accursed for their sins. They were princes and beggars, bards and soothsayers, storytellers and buffoons. Some were killed as infants, others were tolerated in youth but abandoned to die by the roadside or even buried alive when they grew old and infirm. There were those who roamed the countryside in gypsy bands, living by their wits, communicating in a secret jargon. There were others who never in their lives ventured from home and hearthside. Some came under the special protection of the church or the crown, and some were thrown into madhouses, pesthouses, almshouses, where they could be kept out of public view.
They were white, black, brown, yellow, red. They were of every race and every faith, of every class and every station, in every land under every sky.
Some were born to their fate; others came to it through caprice of accident, or in the heat of battle, or by dint of a ruler's cruel decree.
They were the blind—uncounted generations of them over the centuries, 15 million or more alive in the world today. Many, probably most, of these millions live in underdeveloped areas where they are still the victims of ignorance and superstition, still suffer the indifference, the loathing, or the casual pity of their fellow human beings. In the more civilized areas of the world, however, the past two centuries, and particularly the last fifty years, have seen the gradual emancipation of blind men, women, and children and their steady entry into the body of society.
Of all the ills and imperfections of humankind, blindness is the most universally dreaded. The deep and tangled roots of this fear have been fed through countless centuries, beginning in primeval days when early man, whose defense against his natural enemies depended largely on his ability to see and thus avoid them, felt most vulnerable in the absence of light.
Invented to explain the inexplicable, primitive mythologies often interpreted blindness as a sign of divine disfavor. Among the ancient Greeks it was thought to be a punishment imposed by the gods on mortals who had displeased them. Homer's Odyssey tells of Phineus, whom Jupiter deprived of sight in punishment for his cruelties; as a further torment the gods sent the harpies—hideous birds with the heads of women—to snatch whatever food was placed before the sightless victim. The soothsayer Tiresias was said to have been blinded by Minerva because he had accidentally seen the goddess at her bath. In the bloodiest legend of all, the sinning Oedipus anticipated the gods' vengeance by imposing it on himself, tearing out his eyes to assuage his incestuous and patricidal guilt.
Such sin-associated myths helped rationalize the social practices among the early Greeks that sanctioned destruction of blind infants. In Sparta newborn children were examined by a committee of elders; those deemed physically imperfect and thus unfit for future citizenship were taken to a mountain gorge and left to die. In Athens there was a period when special clay vessels were fashioned into which such luckless infants were placed before being abandoned by the wayside. The Romans maintained a similar practice; in the marketplaces, parents could buy small baskets for use in consigning their defective children to the waves of the Tiber.
In other early societies that regarded blind children as economic liabilities, parents were permitted to sell them into slavery or prostitution. Nor did those who became blind or disabled in adult life escape the harsh dictates of survival which prevailed among primitive peoples. According to Dr. Richard S. French, who made a scholarly study of the subject:
In Wagria [Serbia] and other Wendish lands it was considered honorable for children to kill, cook and eat, or else bury alive, their aged parents and other relatives, especially all who were no longer useful for either work or war. Praetorius relates of the heathen Prussians: "Old and weak parents were killed by the son; blind, squinting and deformed children were disposed of by the father either by the sword, drowning or burning; lame and blind servants were hanged to trees. … "
Many centuries before barbarism receded from central and northern Europe, more humane practices were to be found in scattered centers of civilization. It may have been the fact that blindness was endemic in the tropical climate of Egypt (a fact still largely true today) that led to efforts to help rather than destroy blind people. The early Egyptian interest in medicine may also have been a factor. Egyptian documents dating back four thousand years detail the exotic medications—reinforced by spells and incantations—used in the treatment of ailing eyes. The writer Ishbel Ross described these remedies:
Ox liver, roasted and pounded, was used for night blindness. Incantations to Isis, Osiris, Horus and Atum were helped along with honey, gum ammoniac, wax, goose fat and oil. Celery and frankincense were supposed "to expel blood in the eyes." Dry myrrh, ink powder and calamine were used for "catarrh in the eyes." Real lapis lazuli, malachite and milk were applied for cataract. Bleary eyes were treated with malachite made into a stew and applied with a vulture's feather. The treatment for trachoma was a mixture of stibium, red and yellow ocher, and gall of tortoise.
Wherever civilization began to replace primitivism, there arose a different ethos toward human life that changed social attitudes toward the disabled. In ancient China, India, and Japan the blind were not only spared automatic extinction but were helped to find constructive roles in society. In this respect the Oriental cultures were far ahead of their western counterparts, which had then advanced only to the point of tolerating blind people as charitable wards of the feudal rulers or their priesthoods.
The belief that blindness equals uselessness has prevailed so long and so firmly in western culture that its traces have yet to be fully erased. One of the factors in its perpetuation was classic literature. Factual assertions are no match for the emotional impact of poetry such as John Milton's lines from Samson Agonistes:
Now blind, disheartn'd, sham'd, dishonour'd, quell'd,
To what can I be useful, wherein serve
My Nation, and the work from Heav'n impos'd,
But to sit idle on the household hearth,
A burdenous drone; to visitants a gaze,
Or pitied object …
Blindness as social liability, blindness as punishment for sin, blindness as uselessness to self and others—these were but three of the strands woven into the cocoon of myths and superstitions which continue to influence modern attitudes. There were others, many of them reinforced by the Bible. The association of blindness with darkness, a common cliché which no amount of contradiction by blind people has been able to dispel, carried with it unmistakable implications of evil. "And God saw the light, that it was good," says the Book of Genesis. Was not the darkness, which was also God's creation, equally good? The Bible not only refrains from saying so but warns against the "powers of darkness." Lucifer, whose very name means light-bringer, was transformed into the Angel of Darkness when he fell from Heaven to become the embodiment of evil known as Satan.
Darkness also connoted death. The Talmud and other Hebrew commentaries referred to the blind as the living dead; there was a Talmudic command that, on encountering a blind person, one must pronounce the same benediction as was customary on the death of a near relative. Darkness as death also became part of modern psychiatric theory. One psychiatrist wrote that for a doctor "to have to tell a person that he is blind … is almost like condemning him to a sort of living death. At any rate, that is how we sighted people are apt to regard blindness—as a return into the black limbo out of which we came." Other psychiatrists have equated fear of blindness with fear of castration, ascribing the unconscious origin of such fears to primitive fantasies in which seeing is equated with eating or devouring. Remnants of such fantasies remain in common parlance: "He ate her up with his eyes" is a metaphor for consuming love.
Not all the fallacies and fables about blindness are negative. There are also positive images interwoven in its mystique. Chief among these is the belief that bounteous nature compensates blind people in a variety of ways: through desirable traits of character (spirituality, patience, cheerfulness); through virtuosity of accomplishment (musical talent, prophetic gifts, razor-sharp memory); or through superhuman command of the non-visual senses.
Helen Keller wrote of her surprise in finding, among otherwise well-informed persons,
a mediaeval ignorance concerning the sightless. They assured me that the blind can tell colours by touch and that the senses they have are more delicate and acute than those of other people. Nature herself, they told me, seeks to atone to the blind by giving them a singular sensitiveness and a sweet patience of spirit. It seemed not to occur to them that if this were true it would be an advantage to lose one's sight.
Much the same idea had been expressed in 1848 by Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, the first American educator of blind children: "To suppose there can be a full and harmonious development of character without sight is to suppose that God gave us that noble sense quite superfluously."
Despite many proofs to the contrary, the popular belief persists that blind people command a "sixth sense." This comforting thought, which helps to mitigate disquieting emotions of fear and pity, stems from the theory of a "vicariate of the senses," an arrangement whereby the four remaining senses of hearing, touch, smell, and taste automatically become vicars, or substitutes, for the absent sense of vision. Shakespeare expressed the idea very plainly in A Midsummer Night's Dream, although he was referring to temporary rather than permanent inability to see. When Hermia, lost in the black forest night, nevertheless locates Lysander, she explains it thus:
Dark night, that from the eye his function takes,
The ear more quick of apprehension makes;
Wherein it doth impair the seeing sense,
It pays the hearing double recompense.
What the Bard seemed not to know, and what most people continue to misunderstand, is that both acuteness of hearing and sensitivity to touch in blind people are not compensatory gifts of nature but the products of long, hard concentration and training. Scientific experiments have demonstrated that blind people do not hear better than others, they merely learn to pay more attention to the auditory cues that sighted people can afford to ignore. Similar tests dealing with the sense of touch have yielded comparable results.
For many years there prevailed, among both the sighted and the blind, a belief that it was "facial vision"—the existence of sensors in the skin—that enabled blind people to orient themselves in space, to avoid walking into trees or falling over furniture. This theory was partially demolished in 1944 when a research team reported the results of experiments conducted at Cornell University. Working with paired blind and sighted subjects, the team concluded that obstacle detection was primarily a function of the ears and not of air pressures or other sensations registered by the skin. A dozen years later the zoologist Donald R. Griffin demonstrated through his work with bats that it was "echolocation"—a kind of natural sonar that bounces sound waves off objects in the environment—that guides sightless navigation on the part of both animals and men. The same conclusion had been reached during the late eighteenth century by the Italian scientist Lazzaro Spallanzani, when he found that if bats were blinded, they could continue to function, but if their ears were plugged, these otherwise sure-flying creatures would blunder helplessly into objects in their path.
If facial vision is a myth, can fingertip vision exist? Can colors be detected, currency bills be identified, newspaper headlines be read by sensitive fingers? Most authorities tend to be skeptical about such claims, but no definitive proof has yet been evolved one way or the other. The question arises every few years when improbable feats of non-visual detection are publicly performed by blind or tightly blindfolded persons. (Curiously, but perhaps irrelevantly, virtually all such persons have been women.)
In 1922 the members of the Chicago Medical Society sat open-mouthed while Dr. Thomas J. Williams, a specialist in ophthalmology, presented the case of seventeen-year-old Willetta Huggins, a blind and deaf girl whom he had been called in to examine and treat at the Wisconsin School for the Blind. Dr. Williams climaxed his clinical report by introducing Willetta herself in a demonstration. As reported in the Official Bulletin of the Chicago Medical Society for June 3, 1922, and reprinted two weeks later in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA):
Miss Huggins gave some remarkable demonstrations in naming colors by the sense of smell. For instance, a skein of wool composed of different colors was handed to her and she named the colors correctly by passing the skein of wool before her nose as dark blue, yellow, pink, green, blue, fiery red, brown and white.
A bunch of paper flowers (colored) was handed to her and she named the colors correctly as white, yellow, pink, lavender, purple, red, tomato red, and yellow. … One end of a wooden pole, about 12 feet long, was placed on top of Dr. Robert H. Babcock's head, while Miss Huggins took hold of the other end, and repeated every word Dr. Babcock said to her correctly. By the sense of touch she told the denominations on a one dollar bill, a ten dollar bill, a twenty dollar bill, and a one hundred dollar bill correctly.
Although Willetta had already been certified as totally blind and totally deaf by reputable specialists, she was carefully blindfolded for her appearance before the medical society. A variety of other precautions were also taken to exclude the possibility of hoax or collusion. Several of the objects she identified with her fingers were submitted by people who had never seen or heard of her before. The paper money of various denominations, for example, came from the pockets of physicians in the audience. So did a number of newspapers, whose bolder headlines her fingers traced without difficulty.
In the same issue of the JAMA which reprinted the Chicago story, there appeared a challenge to the validity of the medical society demonstration by a professor of psychology who had briefly examined Willetta at her school some months earlier. Dr. Joseph Jastrow of the University of Wisconsin asserted that the physicians were victims of "the will to believe." He mentioned the possibility that the girl had some remaining sight and that it was "a slit of vision" beneath the blindfold that enabled her to see the colors of the objects she brought up to her nose. Moreover, he was of the opinion that Willetta's deafness was of a hysterical nature: "The girl deceives herself in the belief that the vibrations conveyed through her finger tips make her hear the sounds which really reach her through auditory channels."
Professor Jastrow's refutation was in turn rebutted by Dr. Williams, who charged him with "the will to believe otherwise" and urged that further scientific inquiry be made. A follow-up study was shortly undertaken by Robert H. Gault, professor of psychology at Northwestern University, whose examination of Willetta bore out at least two of the original findings. On the hypothesis that the girl's ability to distinguish colors was due to an exceptionally keen sense of smell that could differentiate among the aniline dyes used to produce colors in yarn or paper flowers, Dr. Gault made laboratory tests with 32 other persons, 10 blind and 22 sighted, and all of them blindfolded. He found that while many could smell with some accuracy whether a pair of yarns consisted of two alike or two of different colors, none could name the colors in such a test.
The claim that Willetta interpreted speech through vibrations conducted to her hand, Dr. Gault found to be indisputably so. He confirmed it by making tests with his assistant, a person of normal hearing, whose ears were stopped with soft putty and whose hand was enclosed in a soundproof box. The assistant was able, after some practice, to distinguish 35 words through vibrations against his palm sent through a speaking tube, 13 feet long and projecting through two walls and an intervening room.
As for Willetta Huggins, two years later she spontaneously recovered much of both her hearing and her sight, a change she ascribed to Christian Science, of which she subsequently became an accredited practitioner. A statement by her, attesting that through Christian Science she had been "completely and permanently healed" of blindness and deafness, was published in the "Testimonies of Healing" column of the Christian Science Sentinel in early 1929. Willetta later changed her name and her place of residence; in late 1970 she was living in a midwestern city, still working as a Christian Science healer and reluctant to discuss or even recall the days when she was the object of fascinated world attention.
Willetta's was not the first case of its kind, nor was it the last. Comparable wonders have been reported from time to time in medical literature over a period of several hundred years. Some were bizarre. Toward the end of the 19th century the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso described a case of hysterical blindness in a fourteen-year-old girl, in the course of which the child exhibited such feats of sensory transposition as smelling with her chin and, later, with her foot.
In contemporary times, a good deal of perplexed speculation was aroused in 1957 when a fifteen-year-old sighted girl, Margaret Foos, gave a demonstration of "eyeless sight" at Veterans Administration headquarters in Washington in which she read the Bible and identified various objects through a blindfold. Authorities on blindness who attended this and subsequent demonstrations dismissed them as hoaxes. Their opinion was shared by Dr. J. B. Rhine of Duke University, the recognized expert on extrasensory perception.
More serious attention was paid in 1962 to reports from the Soviet Academy of Sciences about an epileptic Russian girl, Rosa Kuleshova, whose fingertips could discriminate and identify colors and read ordinary letterpress printing. Soviet scientists who examined Rosa regarded her ability as evidence of the existence of a "dermal light sense"—a network of fine nerve endings sensitive to light. Although Rosa herself was later said to have joined a circus, subsequent reports indicated continuing investigations in Soviet scientific circles into dermal-optical sensitivity.
American interest in the subject was further stimulated in the mid-Sixties by the work of Dr. Richard P. Youtz, chairman of the psychology department of Barnard College, Columbia University. Several years of investigation led him to conclude that some people do have skin which is sensitive to electromagnetic wavelengths (similar to heat waves), among which may be the different wavelengths emitted by different colors.
Clearly, the last word has yet to be spoken on the subject of seeing fingers, and perhaps on facial vision as well.
In the popular mind, the concept of blindness simultaneously juxtaposes two contradictory notions: that loss of sight dooms most of its victims to lifelong dependence, but that it also rewards a few of them with superhuman powers. Out of these twin beliefs have grown the stereotypes of the blind beggar and the blind genius. Blind people find both labels equally irritating, for they know—as does anyone who stops to think—that they differ from others only in the single respect of visual ability.
Blindness today slices across every stratum of society. It encompasses the same proportions of the wise and the foolish, the gifted and the stupid, the efficient and the fumbling, the aggressive and the diffident, as any other random sample of the population. If there are indeed more beggars among the blind than among the sighted (not necessarily the case: the blind person is more conspicuous, and thus more easily remembered, than others who make their living in the streets), it is society and not blindness that has cast them in this role. If the accomplishments of blind men and women elicit greater praise than similar achievements by the sighted, it is once again society which has established such low standards of expectation that, as a blinded veteran of World War II once remarked, "to be able to blow your own nose without assistance" is enough to give a blind man the reputation of being exceptional.
There is sad irony in the fact that war, which has robbed so many of their sight, has often brought boons to blind people in its wake. As will be seen in later chapters, the shock of war tends to arouse the conscience of the public to needs they comfortably ignore in peacetime.
During the Middle Ages the first state-supported asylum for the blind came into being as a result of the Crusades. In 1254 l'Hôpital des Quinze-Vingts (Almshouse of the Three Hundred) was established in Paris by Louis IX (who came to be known as Saint Louis). Legend has it that the Quinze-Vingts was intended as an asylum for three hundred Crusaders who were blinded by order of the Turkish sultan when the French king, having fallen captive to the Saracens during the Seventh Crusade, was awaiting rescue by ransom. The sultan is said to have hastened the arrival of the gold by blinding 20 of Louis' men on each of the 15 days the ransom was delayed. There seems to be no historical documentation for this gory account; one scholar offers the theory "that Louis, moved probably by the misery caused by the fearful loss of sight among his crusaders in Egypt, directed his attention to the blind at home and founded the institution for the amelioration of the condition of the sightless, irrespective of the origin of their affliction."
In more modern times, war-quickened awareness of blindness and the impulse to do something for its victims reached extraordinary heights during World War I. "Unquestionably the most worthy of all the war charities" is what its sponsors called the drive for help to blinded soldiers which was organized in England in 1915 and quickly became international in scope under the name of the American, British, French and Belgian Permanent Blind War Relief Fund.
It was more than American dollars that crossed the Atlantic for the relief of the war-blinded. Numbers of influential men and women, some operating as independent volunteers and others under the aegis of the American Red Cross, moved into the cleared battle zones of France to establish rehabilitation centers where blinded poilus could be helped to make a new start in life. Spurred by their personal experiences in such centers, these volunteers brought home to the States a fresh fund of zeal and determination to alleviate the miserable status which seemed to be the fate of blind people everywhere.
Some four hundred and fifty American soldiers, sailors, and marines were blinded during the 17 months of United States participation in World War I. This was an insignificant number compared with England's 3,000 or France's 2,800 (and smaller yet when measured against Germany's 7,000) war-blinded. But it was enough to give the final impetus to a movement to establish some sort of nationwide structure that could bring a degree of order and purposeful planning into services for all of America's blind men, women, and children.
In 1918 an estimated $31 million a year was already being spent on public and voluntary services for the blind in the United States, but the services were scattered, diffuse, lacking in common goals or standards. There were numerous urgent problems to be solved as well as an array of vested interests to be dealt with before solutions could even be approached.
As matters stood at the beginning of the Twenties, the major hurdles were these:
- For nearly a century, those blind children who received any sort of education had done so in state-supported residential schools where they spent their formative years physically and socially separated from their sighted peers. Beginning in 1900, a few innovative thinkers had demonstrated that it was possible for blind children to remain at home with their families and attend regular public day schools. Should this, then, be the future direction of education for blind youngsters? What special facilities and services would be needed for such schooling to be effective? How could teachers be trained to work with the blind children in their classrooms? How could parents be helped to prepare such children for educational equality? The residential schools would continue to be needed for many children; what changes should be instituted in their programs and curricula to equip their students for productive life in a sighted world? What were the possibilities for higher education, and how could these be expanded?
- Communication was a fundamental key to functioning at all stages of life. A fifty-year battle—"the war of the dots"—to arrive at a uniform system of finger-reading had finally ended in 1917 and a newly modified braille code was now accepted as the universal American standard for the written word. But no more than two hundred or three hundred books had thus far been produced in this code. Where was the money to be found to provide a decent selection of reading matter? Braille books were expensive; they cost twenty or more times as much to print as their inkprint equivalents. They were bulky; a braille edition of a four-hundred-page novel required at least three volumes, weighing more than fifteen pounds and needing fifteen or more inches of shelf space. Could ways be found to reduce both cost and bulk? How could such books be circulated? Few blind people could afford to buy their own. Their sighted neighbors could take advantage of free public libraries. Could not a similar free library system be set up for blind readers?
- Only a minority of blind persons could read braille. Persons who lost their sight in adult life found braille too taxing to learn; many who had been blind from childhood had been taught one of the other finger-reading codes. To them, mastering braille was equivalent to learning a foreign tongue. Could a way be found to deliver reading matter through a medium other than touch?
- How could blind persons be helped to earn a decent living? Could not many be trained to move out of the narrow confines of the traditional "blind trades"—broom-making, basket weaving, small handicrafts? Could sheltered workshops expand markets and develop new products so that the blind people who worked in them might achieve more than a marginal wage? And if better training and more versatile production were indeed to become realities, could the world of industry and commerce be persuaded to make room for blind workers, their services and products?
- Like every other population group, the nation's blind men and women included many who were too old or too burdened with additional physical and mental handicaps to enter the labor force. How could such persons be given a measure of financial security that would make it needless for them to choose between beggary and starvation? Poverty was not, of course, restricted to the blind, but the sighted poor were not hampered by the additional burden of immobility in their efforts to scrape together their minimal needs. Was there a way to equalize the status of blind people in their search for subsistence?
- Many blind people had worked out ingenious devices to simplify such daily routines as personal grooming, cooking, laundering, household maintenance, recreational pursuits. Could a system be established for such aids and appliances to be made known and available to all? Could engineering and scientific talent be harnessed to develop new and better tools to mitigate the handicap of blindness? Could optical aids be constructed that would enable the partially blind to make more efficient use of their residual sight? Americans prided themselves on their inventive genius. Could that genius be used to invent mobility devices that would enable the blind to move about independently?
Overriding all these specific issues was the challenge of effecting basic attitudinal change both in the sighted world and among blind people themselves. True emancipation could come about only if the community at large could be induced to give blind people a chance to demonstrate their ability to function as responsible and participating members, and for this to happen, the nation first had to be made aware of the existence of its blind citizens, of their needs and capabilities. At the same time, blind men and women needed the encouragement and support of strong and confident leadership to emerge from the personal and social isolation that had cast them in the role of an unseen minority.
Any objective observer surveying these hurdles and pitfalls dotting the road to emancipation for blind Americans might well have been dismayed by the odds against successfully negotiating such a journey. But, as has ever been the case with idealists, those who began the pilgrimage chose to forgo objective realism in favor of resolute faith. The crucial first step was the establishment of a pivotal national body that could serve as a storehouse of available knowledge, a coordinator of existing efforts, a generator of new ideas and directions, and a voice that could make itself heard in the corridors of power. Such a body came into being in 1921. It was called the American Foundation for the Blind.
The spirit of the American people was at a low ebb in 1921. The once confident hope that the sacrifice of more than a hundred thousand American lives in the "war to end war" had been worthwhile was being undermined by each day's headlines: revolution in Eastern Europe, civil ferment in Italy, national strikes in England, assassinations in newly partitioned Ireland, France suffocating in the ashes of her devastated soil and decimated population, Germany and Austria hysterical over imminent financial collapse.
Disgusted, disillusioned, the United States refused to join the League of Nations and resolutely turned its back on the endlessly quarrelsome European continent. A mere 18 months after the armistice, the nation's mood was accurately diagnosed by the Ohio senator who would shortly be chosen as the Republican Party's dark-horse candidate for the Presidency. Said Warren G. Harding:
America's present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity; not the dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment, but equipoise; not submergence in internationality, but sustainment in triumphant nationality. …
This piece of fustian oratory, with its straining after alliteration and its unwitting coinage of a new word in place of "normality," nonetheless promised something Americans longed for: a soothing syrup to cure the throbbing headaches left by the events of the preceding half-decade.
The prescription didn't work. The Twenties were to become what one historian called "an age of rose-colored nightmares." Side by side with unprecedented economic progress and technological development were social fissures whose gravity was not detected until they gave way to the nightmare that became the depression.
Weak spots dotted the landscape of American life. The disparity between economic classes was great. A relatively narrow band of middle-class families separated the rich from the poor. With industrialization moving ahead at a gallop, the urban/rural population balance was in a state of dangerous disequilibrium. Droves of farm families left the land in search of a brighter future in the proliferating industrial factories. High tariffs, enacted to protect the swelling output of those factories, forced the American economy to turn in on itself; within less than a decade a saturated domestic market was to grow so glutted that the entire fiscal structure would collapse on a climactic day in October of 1929.
Helping to obscure these cracks in basic structure was a craving for the new and the different. The Nineteenth Amendment gave women access to the voting booth in 1920; soon the "flapper revolution" saw them bobbing their hair, smoking openly, and frequenting speakeasies. Long-established family and social patterns crumbled as women entered the labor market in record numbers and, as wage earners, demanded, and got, an unprecedented degree of freedom. Restraints were abandoned in both dress and behavior. Whalebone corsets went the way of the bustle. The use of cosmetics no longer signified harlotry. The automobile gave boys and girls undreamed-of opportunities to evade supervision.
It was not merely the young who were seeking new horizons of experience. A diet of dreams was nurtured by movies and the newly invented radio. There were fads, like mah-jongg and crossword puzzles. The new science of psychology was taking hold of the popular imagination. Educators debated John B. Watson's theory of behaviorism, while Freudianism was the latest rage in sophisticated circles.
Sophisticates and hoi polloi were as one in their heightened interest in competitive sports of all kinds. The spirit of competition found an additional outlet in land and securities speculation. But no one thought of these things as gambling fever; they were the hallmarks of the land of opportunity, the richest, fastest-growing, highest-standard nation the world had ever seen.
Were none left out in this froth of national euphoria? Decidedly yes—but little attention was paid to those not fleet enough of wit or foot to cash in on the blessings of the new age. The bonanza brought few boons to the overlooked minorities: unskilled laborers, coal miners, small farmers, sharecroppers and field hands tied to the cotton crops, American Indians languishing on their arid reservations, immigrant families held back by illiteracy and ignorance of American ways.
If hardly a thought was given to sizable population segments such as these, what consideration could be expected by an obscure minority like 100,000 blind people? Thinly sprinkled here and there across the map of the United States, blind people were unseen as well as unseeing.
A revealing index of their invisibility is the fact that the sole reference to blindness in Middletown, Robert and Helen Lynd's classic sociological study of American life in Muncie, Indiana, in 1924, was the following passage:
… the oldest form of tax-supported charity in Middletown is the county poor asylum. … This institution was in 1890 the county catch-basin in which all sorts of human sediment collected: "the insane, the feeble-minded, the epileptic, the deaf, the blind, the crippled; the shiftless, the vicious, [the] respectable homeless. …" It was contrary to the tradition of this pioneer community that anybody should be habitually dependent upon the group; if he was, it was certainly "his own fault." Accommodations, accordingly, were not such as to encourage one to live on the county. … As recently as 1915 conditions [in the asylum] were described as "shocking and deplorable." …
The Lynds went on to say that the multiplication of new group care agencies had since "drained off from the poor asylums to special institutions many of those unable to provide for themselves." Discussing contemporaneous public attitudes toward handicapped people, they wrote that Middletown
extends ready sympathy and help to individual unfortunates whose plight is immediately before the community, and yet it is not particularly concerned with preventing the recurrence of similar situations, because there are bound to be some sick, unemployed or otherwise miserable people in the world, and no change in the present social or industrial system could presumably prevent this unfortunate condition. …
It was this very assumption—that nothing could change the basic plight of the "miserable people in the world"—that a handful of stubborn idealists set out to disprove one summer's day in 1921.
