Vinton, Iowa (population 3,000), Thursday morning, June 23, 1921. The weather was the first thing on May Palmer's mind when she awoke just before the clock struck six. There was still a trace of morning haze over the broad meadow that lay beyond the tree-bordered lawn, but all of the omens were favorable.
Mrs. Palmer and her husband faced a busy day, with a hundred and fifty guests due to arrive for a five-day visit to the thirty-acre campus of what was then known as the Iowa College for the Blind. The occasion was the ninth biennial convention of the American Association of Workers for the Blind (AAWB), and Francis E. Palmer, just completing his third year as superintendent of the school, was eager to meet his obligations as host.
A man in his mid-fifties, Palmer was a relative newcomer to work for the blind. Before his appointment at Vinton, he had put in thirty years as teacher and principal in the Iowa public school system. Applied to his present post, his experience as an educator had brought about important changes in the curriculum and in teaching methods for the 100 blind boys and girls who lived at the school nine months of the year. Before his retirement in 1939, Superintendent Palmer was to see the school's enrollment nearly doubled and its program acknowledged to be one of the most progressive in the nation. He was also to see the inaccurate designation "college" dropped, and the name changed to Iowa School for the Blind. (Subsequent years saw yet another name change to Iowa Braille and Sight Saving School—a far remove from what the school was called when it was founded in 1853: the Asylum for the Instruction of the Blind.)
Palmer had called on all his powers of generalship to get the school's premises ready for the incoming delegates. The school's teachers, as well as its matrons, its farm hands, and its maintenance staff, had all been dragooned into service. Dormitories had been scrubbed and refurbished. Teachers had arranged to double up, or to board with families in town, so the conventioneers could use their private rooms. Classrooms had been readied for committee meetings and group sessions. The school's piano and pipe organ were freshly tuned. All the outbuildings—the gymnasium with its small swimming pool, the greenhouse, the industrial arts building, the hospital, the carpentry shop—had been put in apple-pie order. Ditto the barns which housed the herd of Holsteins, the horses which worked in the grain fields, and the brood nests of the chicken flock.
Palmer and his staff were not expected to cope unassisted with the reception and registration of the delegates. Key officers of the AAWB had arrived a day earlier. The most important of these—and the man on whose shoulders rested the responsibility for leading this 1921 convention to the accomplishment of a single, overriding purpose—was a courtly southerner, Henry Randolph Latimer, then completing his first two-year term as president of the Association. The organization's first vice-president, Sherman C. Swift of Toronto, had not been able to make it to Vinton, but its second vice-president, Kate M. Foley, had come east from San Francisco, and the secretary, Charles B. Hayes, had arrived from Boston. Of the four, Hayes was the only sighted person.
At the opening session that Thursday evening Palmer made a short speech to greet the delegates; the pastor of the Vinton Presbyterian Church intoned a prayer; "America" was sung to piano accompaniment; there were welcoming addresses by the mayor of Vinton, the president of the Iowa State Board of Education and the speaker of the Iowa House of Representatives. At the reception which followed, the delegates sipped lemonade and fruit punch as they milled around, renewing old friendships and meeting some of their newer colleagues.
Attracting a major share of attention were the "Great Triumvirate" in education, the superintendents of the largest and oldest residential schools for the blind: sixty-year-old Edward Ellis Allen of the Perkins Institution for the Blind in Watertown, Massachusetts; Olin H. Burritt, fifty-four, of the Pennsylvania Institution for the Instruction of the Blind; and Edward M. Van Cleve, fifty-four, of the New York (City) Institute for the Education of the Blind.
The AAWB was not the principal power base of Allen, Burritt, Van Cleve, and their colleagues in education. They had a separate national body, the American Association of Instructors of the Blind (AAIB), which in those days met in the even-numbered years, leaving the odd-numbered years for the biennial conventions of the AAWB.
In 1921—as in the preceding decades—the AAIB (currently known as AEVH, Association for the Education of the Visually Handicapped) was the senior group in every sense. Founded in 1871, it antedated the AAWB; more important, because it had a single focus, it had been a cohesive group from the start. In an era when virtually all public expenditures for the blind were devoted to education and thus funneled through the schools for blind children, the school superintendents served as the undisputed experts on all aspects of blindness. Legislatures called upon them for counsel, the public looked to them for leadership, and the generations of blind children educated in their schools seldom wished, or dared, to challenge their authority.
The AAWB, on the other hand, had suffered several false starts before defining a workable role for itself. It had begun, in point of fact, with a purely educational goal. As described in an official history of the association:
In 1895, at St. Louis, Missouri, the forerunner of the AAWB came into being. At that time, a group of individuals who were concerned about educational opportunities for the blind formed the American Blind People's Higher Education and General Improvement Association, and for several years thereafter this group met to consider methods by which blind and visually impaired persons might have an opportunity to advance themselves in the society of those days. …
These early pioneers advocated: (1) a specialized college to serve the blind; (2) Governmental scholarships for the blind; (3) non-segregated admission to existing institutions of higher learning; and (4) the annex theory, which was a combination of the first two suggestions, namely, that scholarships be provided and a segregated unit be established in an existing college or university specifically designed to meet the needs of the blind.
By 1905, the group was ready to admit the failure of its efforts to interest federal or state officials in financing any such program. Simultaneously, however, it recognized that there were many other problems it might usefully tackle in the realm of "general improvement." At the 1905 convention the group changed its name to American Association of Workers for the Blind and formulated a new philosophy: "We ask that blind persons be given an opportunity to earn their own living. We do not approve any system to pauperize them. We are not asking for them a degrading pension, or the abstract glories of higher education."
With this broadened focus, the conferees then included on their agenda such items as industrial education, employment, standardization of a tactual reading system, the welfare of elderly blind persons, boarding homes and other housing arrangements for blind adults, nurseries for blind babies, and home teaching services for adults. At the next biennial convention, four major committees were designated to deal with the ongoing problems of higher education, federal pensions, a uniform system of embossed type, and the prevention of blindness.
Unlike the AAIB, which restricted its membership to educators, the AAWB maintained open membership rolls and encouraged the participation of interested lay persons as well as all categories of personnel engaged in all types of work for blind persons of all ages. This wide-open membership policy naturally encompassed the educators who were AAIB members; most school administrators belonged to both associations.
In a sense, the two associations constituted a kind of bicameral parliament, with the AAIB in the role of the smaller, more exclusive upper house and the AAWB in the role of the more popularly representative lower house. It became the custom for most major issues to be debated twice: one year at the AAIB convention and the next year at the AAWB meeting, or vice versa. As the mutuality of some of these issues came to be recognized, the two associations established joint committees. Notable among these was the Commission on Uniform Type, which had been in existence since 1915 to seek a solution to the troublesome question of a standardized tactual system for finger-readers.
At Vinton, that summer of 1921, the major agenda item before the AAWB had been considered by the AAIB the previous year. This was the question of forming a new kind of national organization that might be able to accomplish, in a systematic and coordinated way, those objectives that were clearly beyond the reach of loose-knit membership groups that got together for a few days every two years.
There was not a single delegate at the Vinton meeting who did not have a direct stake in the outcome of this question. Every organization engaged in work for the blind, from the long-established residential schools to the smallest and newest local voluntary agencies, stood in need of the kind of coordination and centralized research and leadership that could only be provided by a strong national body. Not too strong, some of the delegates demurred privately: there must be no interference with local dominion. But even the doubters were persuaded that, with suitable safeguards, such a national body could be servant rather than master, and that it could prove to be a convenience in many ways.
By and large, the important divisions in work for the blind were well represented at Vinton. Key school people other than the "Great Triumvirate" were on hand, among them superintendents of the schools for the blind in Jacksonville, Illinois, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Macon, Georgia, as well as the superintendent of one of the dual schools which still existed in various parts of the country: the Virginia School for the Deaf and Blind. And, of course, there was Francis Palmer. Latimer himself was a school man: at the time of the convention, he held the position of head teacher of the Maryland School for the Blind. His boss, Superintendent John F. Bledsoe of the Maryland School, was also there, as was Ambrose M. Shotwell, librarian of the Michigan School for the Blind, who had been a leading spirit in guiding AAWB out of its early parochialism.
Present, too, were leaders of the new and ultimately to become the dominant direction of education for blind children, the advocates of day school programs. Notable among them were fifty-year-old John B. Curtis of Chicago, who had pioneered by establishing the nation's first classes for blind children in public schools, and Robert B. Irwin, a dozen years his junior, who had introduced Curtis' methods in Cleveland and other cities in Ohio. In 1921 Irwin bore the title of supervisor, Department of the Blind, Cleveland Board of Education.
The steadily expanding diversity of work for blind adults was implicit in the range of interests represented by other delegates. There was Eben Morford, superintendent of the Industrial Home for the Blind in Brooklyn, New York, a voluntary agency specializing in vocational services through sheltered workshops and industrial placement programs. There was Charles W. Holmes, a Canadian educated at the Perkins Institution, who had left his post with the Massachusetts Commission for the Blind to organize the industrial and other service programs of the newly formed Canadian National Institute for the Blind. There was young Joseph F. Clunk, then executive secretary for the Youngstown, Ohio, Association for the Blind, who had already given a convincing preview of the extraordinary career he would pursue in placement of blind industrial workers side by side with the sighted.
The field of social work, rapidly coalescing into a profession, also drew its share of practitioners to Vinton. Prominent among the trailblazers in this area of work was Calvin S. Glover, secretary of the Cincinnati Association for the Welfare of the Blind, who was slated to report to the convention on behalf of its Legislative Committee. Present, too, were "Colonel" L. L. Watts, executive secretary of the Virginia Legislative Commission for the Blind, an acknowledged leader in demonstrating the ability of a state agency to deliver a wide range of services to blind adults and children, and Murray B. Allen, executive secretary of the newly organized Utah Commission for the Blind. Four additional state agencies were represented at Vinton: Massachusetts, California, Michigan, and Missouri. As of 1921, there existed only a handful of such state commissions; it was to take three full decades before virtually every state in the union had a comparable body.
Home teaching, which was then the major service given by most state agencies, was personified by Kate M. Foley of California, probably the nation's best-known exponent of this type of work. Miss Foley, a middle-aged woman who had been born lame as well as blind, was an eloquent writer and speaker on the subject of how significantly the visiting teacher could enrich the lives of homebound blind adults.
A number of voluntary agencies had also sent delegates to Vinton. In addition to Glover of Cincinnati and Morford of Brooklyn, program participants included both the president and executive director of the Chicago Lighthouse, the director of the Duluth Lighthouse, the executives of the Cleveland and Minneapolis Societies for the Blind, and the head of the Illinois Society for the Prevention of Blindness.
On the program to lead a round table on Embossed Literature for the Blind were two women who had already made their mark in library service and were to go on to even more notable accomplishments in the years ahead. One was Gertrude T. Rider, head of the Service for the Blind of the Library of Congress; she had initiated braille transcribing by volunteers. The other was Lucille A. Goldthwaite, in charge of the Department for the Blind of the New York (City) Public Library. It was to be ten years before the federal government would take the responsibility for supplying blind adults with reading matter; in 1921, when finger-readers were dependent on the private collections of the larger local libraries, the operation headed by Miss Goldthwaite represented a major source of embossed literature in more than a dozen states.
Three men and two women on the program at Vinton wore name badges that identified them with a new adjunct in work for the blind: the Federal Board for Vocational Education.
A year earlier, President Woodrow Wilson had signed the Smith-Fess Act which authorized the expenditure of $750,000 in the 1921 fiscal year for a joint federal-state program of vocational rehabilitation for the physically handicapped. This civilian program was put under the direction of the Federal Board for Vocational Education, which two years earlier had been given charge of similar measures on behalf of disabled veterans. The delegates were curious to hear what the board's vice-chairman, James P. Munroe, would have to say in his scheduled address: "What the United States Government Is Prepared to Do for the Civilian Blind." They would also listen with interest to the reports given at succeeding round tables by two of the federal board's vocational agents who were operating at the state level—Florence Birchard in Massachusetts and Ada Turner in Wisconsin—as well as to talks by Lewis H. Carris, the federal board's assistant director of industrial rehabilitation, and Arthur E. Holmes, supervisor for the blind in the board's Washington office.
The delegates were not overly sanguine. The Federal Board for Vocational Education's work with war-blinded soldiers had thus far been disappointing. There was little reason to think civilians would fare much better. Few states had passed the necessary legislation that would enable them to take advantage of the federal funds made available under the Smith-Fess Act. Most discouraging of all was the fact that in those states that did have enabling laws, most blinded veterans were being more or less arbitrarily classified as "nonfeasible" for vocational rehabilitation.
These doubts proved to be well founded. As it turned out, blind people profited little under Smith-Fess; it was to take 23 years and another world war before the Barden-LaFollette amendments would give the Vocational Rehabilitation Act the necessary sinews to make a real difference in their lives.
A similar time lag was to characterize the once bright hopes for the first large-scale experiment in rehabilitation of blinded soldiers at Evergreen, a handsome estate on the outskirts of Baltimore that had been loaned to the Army early in 1918 for use as a training center for war-blinded servicemen.
Although Evergreen was not phased out of existence until 1925, its fundamental weaknesses were already apparent in 1921. Nevertheless, the delegates at Vinton looked forward to the scheduled talk: "What We Have Learned from Our War-Blinded Which Can Be of Use in Our Work with Civilian Blind." It was not so much the subject that intrigued them as the speaker, Charles F.F. Campbell, easily the most colorful figure in work for the blind and one of the most popular. Anything that Charlie Campbell had to say was sure to be entertaining, challenging, perhaps even outrageous, but nonetheless worth hearing.
These, then, were among the 145 assorted personalities who, following the reception that Thursday evening in June of 1921, strolled along the well-raked gravel paths of the Iowa College for the Blind to enjoy the fresh country air before retiring for the night. We will meet most of them again as the panorama of the next fifty years unrolls.
Born in rural Prince Georges County, Maryland, in 1871, Henry Randolph Latimer came from a family whose English forebears had arrived on American shores in 1667 and had been prominent in the Maryland gentry. Henry was one of six children brought up on the family acres in an atmosphere of genteel poverty. The Latimers had lost much of their substance during the Civil War, and while they retained their land, they had little cash available. Both Henry and his sister, Lillian Emmeline, were born with poor vision. Until Henry was ten years old, however, he lived at home.
"Though I was as blind as a chicken by night," he wrote in an autobiographical sketch published in 1914,
and had very little sight by day, I took my chances with my four brothers on the farm, doing my share of everything that came to hand, chopping wood, feeding cattle, and even rounding up stock in the pasture and milking as many as five cows at one sitting. … At six years of age, I entered the local public school, where, for four years, I kept abreast of my classes, leading them in mathematics. I did my work with crayon, soapstone and lead pencils, pen and ink, like other boys, with the exception that the lines on foolscap paper were made much heavier for me to see. Books in very bold print, of the pictorial type, were used to teach me to read. My lessons were regularly taught me at home by my mother or aunt, the latter being the local school teacher. Upon her removal to a school too remote for me to attend daily, my parents, with much reluctance, entered me at the Maryland School for the Blind, in Baltimore, in 1881.
At this school, which his sister soon entered as well, Latimer remained for 9 years as a student and, after graduation, for 30 years as a staff member. From his first assignment, that of foreman of the school's mattress and caning shop, he moved into teaching in the separate Department for Colored Blind and Deaf, where he served for 12 years before being transferred back to the main school. There he rose, by gradual stages, to the position of head teacher.
Simultaneously, Latimer pursued his own education. In 1892 he matriculated at Illinois Wesleyan University as a non-resident student in a correspondence course leading to a Ph.B. degree. Because he had little time to study (and also because, in 1894, he suffered an attack of typhoid fever which not only turned his hair white but destroyed his remaining vision), it took him seven years to complete the work. A year after receiving his bachelor's degree, he took a summer course at Harvard which earned him a certificate in Theory and History of Education.
The introduction to a wider world which Latimer gained through his studies led him to perceive the weaknesses that resulted from educating children in the cloistered atmosphere of the traditional school for the blind. The pattern of academic paternalism tended to stifle the impulse toward independent thought and action. Habits of dependency were hard to overcome in later life, Latimer found, when, from his base at the school, he reached out into adult work and instigated formation of the Maryland Association of Workers for the Blind to promote rehabilitation and employment of the state's blind men and women. It was his success here, added to the reputation developed out of his effective participation in several national projects, that had brought him to a major crossroads in his career. On his return home from Vinton, Latimer would pack his belongings and leave both Maryland and the field of education for Pittsburgh and full-time work for the adult blind. He would be the new executive secretary of the Pennsylvania Association for the Blind.
In his presidential address to the AAWB, Latimer presented not only a proposal but a detailed plan—complete with drafts of a certificate of incorporation, a constitution, and set of bylaws—for the creation of a new national body to be known as the American Foundation for the Blind. He asked the delegates to endorse the proposal, to enact the enabling resolution, to adopt the constitution and bylaws, and to appoint the incorporators who would bring this new body into legal existence.
Latimer had few misgivings as to the outcome. His preparatory work had been thorough. He was springing no surprises. The delegates had known for many months that this 1921 convention would center on a single theme.
"The Executive Committee of the American Association of Workers for the Blind," read the carefully phrased notice sent out with the preliminary program for the Vinton meeting,
is responding to what it senses as the general wish of the most thoughtful workers for the blind of the United States and Canada. … that there should be in work for the blind some sort of General Foundation representative of and responsive to every important phase or branch of the profession. … It is very essential therefore that opportunity should be given for the fullest possible discussion of the question and it is to this end that the committee ventures to depart from the usual mixed program and submit one bearing almost entirely upon the topic uppermost in the public mind.
In his presidential address Latimer detailed the steps he had taken to translate these tentative ideas into concrete form, and the precautions he had observed in insuring the soundness of his proposals for such a foundation:
We were neither reckless nor hasty in our manner of approach. In the first place, your president made it his personal business to ascertain, as far as the time and means at his disposal admitted, whether the profession generally, and certain persons in particular, would lend their support to such a program. In this connection it is gratifying to report that, while some skepticism as to the outcome was expressed, virtually everyone approved the undertaking and bade us Godspeed in the effort.
In the second place, it seemed advisable that every possible precaution should be taken to avoid wrangling, destructive criticism, and other unprofitable discussion here at the convention. To this end, in assigning the topics for discussion, each speaker was asked … to point out in what respect his particular branch of the work could be advanced by the cooperation of a properly organized general agency in work for the blind.
Moreover, his text continued, "it seemed that something more concrete still must be done if any real organization was to result." A constitution and bylaws had therefore been drafted and circulated, first to the executive committee and then to:
as many other persons as the time and means at hand permitted, including Messrs. E.E. Allen, Charles F.F. Campbell, W.G. Holmes, R.B. Irwin, M.C. Migel, E.P. Morford, J.F. Bledsoe, C.D. Chadwick, W.I. Scandlin, O.H. Burritt, E.H. Fowler, C.W. Holmes, E.M. Van Cleve, T.S. McAloney, G.S. Wilson, Dr. James Bordley, Miss Susan B. Merwin, and Lady Francis J. Campbell. The criticisms and suggestions received from these various sources were unusually helpful … and [in their light] the articles were redrafted and submitted for proper legal advice to my lawyer, Mr. W. Howard Hamilton of Baltimore.
It was Hamilton, a prominent attorney with influential business and social connections in Maryland, who had drafted the necessary papers in proper legal form, "giving free of charge both his own services and those of his office force."
In addition to all of these precautions, Latimer went on to tell the assemblage, "in order that no false step … should be taken, and in order that the sanest available counsels might prevail," a conference on the whole question had been held in May in New York City. He listed those in attendance, swelling the impressive roster he had already recited with additional prestigious names: Lewis H. Carris, Mrs. Rider, Miss Goldthwaite and Grace S. Harper, executive secretary of the New York State Commission for the Blind.
Latimer's peroration was characteristic of the peacemaking propensity that had won him the confidence and support of so many warring factions. It was also a fair sample of his somewhat overblown literary style:
And now, my dear friends, why have we come to Vinton? To suspect and to discount, to wrangle and to backbite, to circumvent and to destroy? Not so, I pray you, most emphatically not so! Unless I am entirely wrong in my diagnosis of the human heart, we have come here prepared to fraternize and to counsel, to confide and to commend, to cooperate and to construct; and, by the grace of God, we shall go forward to the consummation of one of the greatest achievements yet known to work for the blind.
The low-keyed tone of Latimer's presidential address proved to be precisely right. There had been enough rousing oratory in the past. A year earlier, at the 25th biennial convention of the AAIB, L.W. Wallace, director of the Red Cross Institute for the Blind at Evergreen, had delivered a blunt, hard-hitting address calling for the creation of a national vocational institute for the blind:
The work being done for the blind in the United States today is sadly deficient, because of the lack of an authoritative central organization to coordinate and to crystallize and to stimulate the work. This is evidenced by the great lack of uniformity in character of and functions of the agencies dealing with the problem, and by the total absence of properly delegated agencies in some localities. … The majority of the agencies dealing with the question of the blind have been so limited in authority, in means and in trained personnel that they have not realized the full possibilities.
This situation, he said, could be overcome if there were a national body composed of three major arms. One would be a Bureau of Information "to collect, codify and to disseminate the most authoritative information to be had in the world on all questions pertaining to the blind." The second would be a Bureau of Research "liberally financed and … unhampered in scope of activity, in authority and in freedom of action," that would investigate the education of blind youth, survey the occupations already open to the blind, and identify others with practical possibilities in industry, commerce and agriculture; it would "determine, standardize, codify and disseminate" the most efficient ways for the blind to perform given operations and would, in general, serve as a living laboratory "in accord with the best practice … in practically every important and progressive phase of human activity." The third—and most important—arm would be a Bureau of Education responsible for educating and training workers for the blind, and blind themselves, the employer, and the public.
Special attention, he emphasized, "should be given to the training of the placement personnel. … Very often the placement or the employment agent has been a glaring example of misplacement himself. In many, many instances he has been a gross misfit because of the lack of proper training, unsuited personality, inexperience and limited knowledge of the factors involved."
If Wallace was hard on those who worked with and for the blind, his judgment of their clients was even harsher:
The possibilities of vocational activity for the blind will never be realized until there is a change of attitude on the part of many of the blind themselves. … The attitude that many of the blind assume or acquire, or it may be a part of their natural psychology, is one of the greatest drawbacks to their development and opportunity. What do I mean? It is this, they are supersensitive, critical and unappreciative. They lack ambition and determination. They lack the spirit to will, to do. They are too prone to accept and not to earn.
But there was not much use in attempting the education of the employer or the public at large, he concluded, until "our own house is in order." This would happen when the national body acquired extensive financial backing, a sound, aggressive administration, and widespread professional support "free of unjust and destructive criticism and petty jealousy."
Perhaps it was because Wallace had stepped on so many toes. Perhaps it was because his listeners interpreted his remarks as an irked response to the criticism that had been so freely leveled at Evergreen. Perhaps it was because Wallace was an outsider (when his appointment as general manager of Evergreen was announced by the Red Cross, the Outlook for the Blind had blandly identified him as "late of Purdue University, and one of the best railway experts in the United States"). Whatever the reason, Wallace's speech to the AAIB's convention in 1920 had brought about passage of a resolution whose guarded wording hardly constituted a clarion call to action:
Resolved, that this Association would welcome the cooperation of some wisely organized agency for assisting and improving the vocational education and the employment of the blind of this country, such as has been outlined at this convention by Director Wallace of the Red Cross Institute for the Blind.
What Latimer had done was to incorporate the affirmative substance of Wallace's talk while omitting the finger-pointing. The drafts circulated to the delegates of the proposed constitution and bylaws set forth an operating structure for the American Foundation for the Blind consisting of the very same three bureaus Wallace had recommended. Their scope, however, had been broadened to cover wider ground than vocational education and employment. The articles spelling out the respective functions of the three bureaus remained unchanged for thirty years. And even then, when a 1951 revision of the bylaws eliminated the provisions for specific bureaus, the substance of the foundation's purposes, although modernized and rephrased in more general terms, did not differ in essence from what was set forth in 1921.
The Bureau of Information and Publicity was charged with gathering and disseminating data on all organizations and schools in work for the blind, on existing and potential vocational pursuits, on teaching methods, on legislation, on methods of producing reading matter, and on all other subjects touching on the welfare of blind persons. The Bureau of Research was to "ascertain, develop and standardize, by comparison, experimentation and otherwise, the best methods" in these same areas, while the Bureau of Education was to "improve every facility for preparing the blind and the partially blind for the greatest possible participation in the activities and enjoyments of life" through teacher training, curriculum reform, scholarships for higher education, development of vocational instruction facilities, stimulation of better quality and greater quantity of embossed literature, and cooperation in efforts to prevent blindness.
There must have been some at Vinton who gulped a little at the vast canvas laid out for an organization that had yet to accumulate a dime's worth of assets. But of much greater interest to the delegates than what the new organization would do was the question of who would control it. This thorny issue had been carefully spelled out in Article V of the bylaws. There would be a corporate membership body which would meet annually to elect a governing body of 15 trustees, 10 of whom would be nominated by, and represent, special interest groups: residential schools, public school classes for blind and partially sighted children, librarians, embossing plants, prevention-of-blindness groups, statewide associations and commissions, workshops and industrial homes, citywide associations and clubs, direct service agencies and institutions and agencies engaged in charitable works.
As to the remaining five trustees, two were to be nominated by the membership at each convention of the AAIB and three by the membership of the AAWB.
How to structure the governing board in such a way as to satisfy all and overlook none of the major departments of work for the blind had been Latimer's most difficult problem. The two dozen people he consulted in advance had offered differing views. One of the most trenchant was voiced by Dr. James Bordley, Jr., a Baltimore ophthalmologist, who had acted as the first director of the Red Cross Institute at Evergreen while simultaneously wearing the uniform of an Army lieutenant colonel in his capacity as the U.S. Surgeon General's representative at the training center for blinded soldiers. He wrote Latimer on March 7:
I am convinced that to succeed, a national institute must have a firm financial foundation, that that foundation must not be built up by small donations from strictly interested workers. … There is but one way to get the necessary money—a harmonious, generalized movement. On this point I have had experience. Believing that through certain influences we could reach a large sum of money, the Red Cross Institute undertook to gather it in for the work for the Nation's blind, only to have our efforts thwarted by certain workers for the blind. … You should have on your Board not only professional workers for the blind but men entirely outside of the work, men of large business experience, men who wield national influence, men who can find the money necessary to capitalize the work. …
The great trouble with work for the blind is its restriction to its own workers. I am convinced that any movement to succeed must be a broader movement. You must encourage outside assistance, outside criticism and outside interest in your every undertaking.
As things turned out, it took very little time for the soundness of Dr. Bordley's suggestions to become evident to all. No sooner had the Foundation been incorporated, and before it even opened its offices, the bylaws were amended to enlarge the number of trustees from 15 to 25. The 10 special interest classes remained, but the remaining 15 trustees were to be "chosen from among persons of influence" by the executive committee. Thus control of the Foundation's destinies would pass out of the parochial circle of workers for the blind and into the hands of the "men of large business experience, men who wield national influence, men who can find the money necessary to capitalize the work."
On June 28, 1921, at the concluding business meeting of the ninth biennial convention of the AAWB, the delegates voted, without a dissenting voice, to adopt the enabling resolution authorizing "a properly constituted organization to cooperate with all existing agencies in work for the blind and the partially blind, and to do such other things as are not, or cannot be, done by the existing agencies."
Latimer, Campbell and Waldo Newcomer, president of the Maryland School for the Blind, were named to act as incorporators; the last-named proved unable to serve and was replaced by James H. Preston, a former mayor of Baltimore, when the corporate papers were filed in Delaware the next month.
Following adoption of the enabling resolution, the delegates proceeded to nominate and elect the first board of trustees of the American Foundation for the Blind:
J. Robert Atkinson, Los Angeles; Mrs. Emmons Blaine, Chicago; Arthur E. Bostwick, St. Louis; George W. Brown, Boston; Olin H. Burritt, Philadelphia; Randall J. Condon, Cincinnati; (Mrs. Homer) Mabel Knowles Gage, Worcester, Mass.; W. Howard Hamilton, Baltimore; James C. Jones, St. Louis; Charles W. Lindsay, Montreal; M.C. Migel, New York; William Fellowes Morgan, New York; Prudence Sherwin, Cleveland; Felix M. Warburg, New York; Herbert H. White, Hartford, Conn.
Then, among other business, came the election of AAWB officers. Latimer won a second term as president. Joseph J. Murphy was elected treasurer, but poor health soon forced him to resign. Named to fill his unexpired term was a fast-rising star: Robert B. Irwin.
