The American Foundation for the Blind may have been smoothly born, but it barely survived early infancy. A great many things went wrong in the first few years.
Moses Charles Migel, the man everyone had in mind for the presidency of the new organization, was out of the country when the trustees held their first meeting in New York City in November 1921. This meant that a president pro tem would be needed, and Olin H. Burritt accepted the post.
Lewis H. Carris, the trustees' first choice as director general of the Foundation, decided to accept another job instead; he became executive head of the National Society for the Prevention of Blindness. To keep the Foundation afloat, Henry Latimer was persuaded to become the part-time acting director.
Several trustees, nominated and elected in absentia at Vinton, declined to serve.
There was not even enough money for postage until, at the first meeting of the trustees, the blind Canadian piano manufacturer Charles W. Lindsay pledged $1,000, contingent on an additional $9,000 being secured. One of the two women present, Prudence Sherwin, promptly subscribed $1,000; a few days later, a check in the same amount came in the mail from the other woman, Mrs. Homer Gage. This alleviated the initial financial crisis until January 1922 when, Migel having returned to New York, the executive committee offered him the presidency and he accepted, effective on his return from another European trip. In the meantime, according to the executive committee minutes of January 23, "Mr. Migel donated $7,000 towards getting the Foundation under way" and the committee promptly voted "to inform Mr. Lindsay that the $9,000 requirement had been met and we would now appreciate his check for $1,000."
The interim period until Migel assumed the presidency on June 1, 1922, was not an idle one. Latimer lost no time in sending out feelers for staff recruits. He wrote Charles B. Hayes in Boston about his possible availability to head the proposed Bureau of Information and Publicity, and to Robert B. Irwin in Cleveland, the man who seemed the logical candidate to organize the Bureau of Research. Both men responded with guarded interest, although both demurred over the low salaries mentioned.
Simultaneously, Latimer was pursuing every lead suggested by the trustees and others for a man who might be suitable for the permanent director general's post. There were some who urged that Latimer himself should be the appointee, but Latimer knew this would put him in a ticklish position: he would be charged with having brought the Foundation into being so as to create a job for himself. There were, however, countervailing factors to be considered. These were spelled out by Irwin in a letter marked "personal" he wrote Latimer on December 12, 1921:
I feel that it would be a fearful mistake if a man is appointed who would be subservient to the opinions of a certain small group of the present superintendents. … It would be infinitely better for you to remain as Director General than to have a protege of one of the leading superintendents appointed to this place.
Latimer, however, never lost sight of the fact that what the trustees were after was "a competent sighted man generally acceptable to the profession." The stumbling block was, as he put it in a confidential letter to a friend, the question of whether
such a BIG man can be found for the money available to get him. Men really worth while … are usually settled in their life's work, and if they are not, there is likely some defect in them not at first apparent but which may wreck any undertaking upon which they may set out. It might be better after all … to build up a man rather than try to find one already full grown and full blown.
Robert Irwin's fear that the new Foundation might become the captive of the old guard led him to put in an oar where it would count—with M.C. Migel. He wrote the philanthropist a long, shrewd letter on January 17, 1922, in which he urged (perhaps gratuitously) that Migel accept the presidency because, unless the Foundation "is absolutely above all suspicion of petty politics and personal pull it can never become the factor in the work for the blind which I feel confident it can be made."
The problem Latimer had raised off the record, Irwin was bold enough to voice out loud. The Foundation would have to revise its ideas about a $6,000 salary for a director general, he wrote Migel. A figure of $10,000 would be more like it. Moreover—and here Irwin was doing some spade work concerning the job he himself had an eye on—"if you are to draw the highest type of experts in the profession to act as heads of departments you will have to pay $5,000 or $6,000."
The search for a director general proved exasperatingly elusive, even though Migel, once he assumed the presidency, took an active role in the talent hunt. He went up to Columbia University to consult President Nicholas Murray Butler concerning possible candidates. He solicited suggestions from his wide acquaintanceship in business and philanthropy. He was quite clear about his objectives. "This man need not necessarily be familiar with Blind work," he wrote to the official of a large foundation in August,
but should be of the highest type—if possible, known throughout the country—, of good address and tact, and he should be able, in addition to his other duties, to assist in raising funds for the Foundation. A man having had experience in the latter might be of great advantage.
Our present idea of the salary for the Director General might be approximately eight thousand dollars ($8,000) annually. … I might be willing, personally, to guarantee the salary for several years to the proper man, if necessary. …
More than a dozen possible candidates were weighed, discreetly investigated, approached or dropped from consideration in the spring, summer, and fall of 1922. The best prospects turned the offer down. Migel found that his personal guarantee of salary did not offer sufficient assurance to men secure in good jobs. By October Migel saw the problem in broader perspective:
We have come to the conclusion that the proper method for the Foundation to function in a serious way would be to have same underwritten for a period of, say, three years, with a minimum of $25,000 yearly. Amongst ourselves, as Trustees, we have already agreed to underwrite the Foundation for practically $15,000 yearly for three years, I agreeing to subscribe $10,000 yearly. It was also agreed upon to increase our Board of Trustees with the understanding that any future Trustee would have sufficient interest in the Foundation to agree to underwrite same for a sum of not less than $1,000 yearly for a period of three years, …
The Foundation's archives do not reveal the precise channels which brought Dr. Joseph C. Nate into the picture, but before the end of the year he had been hired, to begin work as director general on January 1, 1923, at a salary of $8,000. Hayes and Irwin had also been engaged, at $4,800 each, as directors of the Information and Research bureaus respectively, effective February 1. A two-room office was rented on the seventh floor of the Hartford Building at 41 Union Square West in New York City, a typist and a secretary-bookkeeper were hired, and the Foundation announced that it was now formally in business.
The new director general was a complete stranger to virtually everyone in work for the blind. Joseph C. Nate had been a lawyer early in his career, and had then become a minister, entering the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1899. He had held pastorates in a number of midwestern cities, one of which was Jacksonville, Illinois, where the Illinois School for the Blind was located. His casual contacts with the school were apparently the sum total of his knowledge of work for the blind. However, in Jacksonville he had demonstrated a talent for fund-raising which had brought about the construction of an impressive new church building. This had led to a position in charge of a statewide drive to raise a million dollar fund for six church-connected educational institutions. Success in this and related promotional endeavors had then brought him into church work on a national scale. In 1920 he moved to New York City to become assistant secretary of the Board of Education of the Methodist Episcopal Church. This was the post he left to accept the job of director general of the American Foundation for the Blind.
It proved to be a sad mistake, both for Nate and for the Foundation. In less than a year, his resignation was requested at the insistence of the Foundation's president, with whom he had apparently clashed head-on.
What little is known about the exact circumstances emerges from a letter Latimer wrote on October 11, 1923, to his good friend and fellow trustee, W. Howard Hamilton:
Mr. Nate, the Director-General of the American Foundation for the Blind, and our President, Mr. Migel, have become hopelessly involved in a controversy over the administration of the work. Mr. Nate has not measured up at all to Mr. Migel's expectations, and Mr. Migel requested his resignation. … I am not surprised at the outcome so far as Mr. Nate is concerned, as he has not seemed to have the capacity for bringing matters to a happy conclusion notwithstanding the reputation he seems to have enjoyed when he came to us a year ago. Mr. Migel has offered him even so much as a year's salary in advance if he will resign and leave the coast clear for another man, but Mr. Nate does not seem disposed to follow this suggestion.
The Reverend Doctor Nate had occasion to regret this refusal. Under the settlement that was ultimately arranged, his resignation took effect January 1, 1924, with his salary continued, up to a maximum of six months, until he located other work.
Perhaps it was because the Nate incident had left an unpleasant taste all around. Perhaps it was because Migel concluded that if he wanted something done right, he would have to do it himself. Whatever the reason, no further effort was made for the next four and one-half years to find a new director general. During this period Migel assumed decision-making powers in administrative as well as policy matters. The degree of control that came into his hands was seldom to slacken, even after the Foundation was being run by a fully effective executive director, until he relinquished the presidency in 1945.
One factor that certainly played a part in Migel's decision to run the Foundation himself was his satisfaction with its two bureau chiefs, Hayes and Irwin. These two had more than lived up to expectations. Even better, they made a good team, if only because they were so different from one another in background, temperament, and interests.
Charles Bishop Hayes brought to the Foundation three separate areas of relevant experience developed since graduation from Clark College in his native city of Worcester, Massachusetts.
He had been an educator—a teacher, and later the director of several private and public schools. He understood the principles of social work, having studied at the New York School of Philanthropy, forerunner of the Columbia University Graduate School of Social Work. He had amassed a good deal of organizational and administrative experience in work for the blind. For five years he had been connected with the Brooklyn Exchange and Training School for the Blind, an adjunct of the Brooklyn Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor. Thereafter, in 1917, he had been called back to his native state as general superintendent of the newly reorganized Massachusetts State Commission for the Blind. Here he had put to use not only his organizational talents but also the promotional methods tested and perfected in Brooklyn, where he had successfully organized the first of the educational exhibits known as "Weeks for the Blind."
Forty-one years old when he began work as director of the Bureau of Information and Publicity, Hayes was well known nationally. As secretary of the AAWB, he had worked hand in hand with Henry Latimer in organizing the Vinton meeting. He had as thorough an understanding as any man of the extent of public ignorance and indifference where the welfare of blind people was concerned. But he also knew there were ways to overcome this, and he was eager to demonstrate them.
Known to one and all as Charlie, Hayes was a man of jovial disposition. In his workaday life, he was apt to be seen in gartered shirt sleeves, his tie slightly askew, his glasses dangling precariously from the bridge of his nose, and his hair rumpled by the fingers he absentmindedly ran through it as he juggled the correspondence, manuscripts, and railroad timetables piled up on one of the second-hand roll-top desks with which the Foundation's early quarters were thriftily furnished.
Hayes' assignments called on the full range of his abilities, particularly his organizing skill. One of his earliest projects was to assist local communities to put on "Weeks for the Blind" of the kind that had proven so effective in Brooklyn. Henry Latimer was first in line to request Hayes' help in developing such a program for Pittsburgh. It was an unqualified success. As recounted in the Foundation's first annual report:
Churches, Women's Clubs, Men's Clubs, Radio broadcasting stations, and countless individuals united in one splendid effort to stimulate the interest of the people of Pittsburgh in the work done for and by the Blind in that community. The President of the Board of Managers of the Western Pennsylvania School stated that this Educational Campaign which the Foundation put on, had done more in one week to show the citizens of Pittsburgh what the Blind are capable of doing, and their need of opportunity and assistance, than the Associations had been able to do in twenty years.
There were several layers of significance to this early venture, and that first annual report made a special point of the most telling: "It is one of the important purposes of the Foundation to be of service to states wishing to develop plans for improving the condition of their blind population. … The Foundation is in a position to bring to such states the fruits of the experience of other sections of the country which have developed splendid agencies for the Blind after many years of study and experimentation."
What underlay this statement was the recognition that the Foundation's existence was viewed with trepidation in many places. A speech made to the Indiana Association for the Blind by Latimer, when he was still the acting director general, faced this issue frankly:
There is a more or less ill defined fear in some quarters that any countrywide organization, such as the Foundation, is likely to interfere unduly, by overstandardization of method and practice, with the special interests of particular localities. … There is little, if any, [such] danger. … So far as local and state organizations are concerned, it will be a matter of their own individual choice whether and to what degree they follow the lines which may be laid down by the Foundation as the wisest and the best in any given case.
Hayes bore this factor constantly in mind as he went about his work with local agencies. His instinctive tact and sensitivity to local pride were largely responsible for the success with which, over the years, he staged "Weeks for the Blind" in dozens of communities. One of the earliest, in Newark, New Jersey, attracted more than 25,000 people. An account of this event made careful note that "the receipts of the sale of articles went to the blind workers who had produced them. In addition, all demonstrators were paid for their services, and each child of the blind and low vision classes, out of the incidental funds raised during the Week, was given a dollar with which to start a bank account."
Once shown how, most state and local groups continued this type of program as an annual public relations activity. While the depression, followed by the war years, interrupted the practice, it was later resumed and in some cities remains a permanent feature in the continuing effort to create public awareness of the problems and the potential of blind men, women and children.
But many states lacked any sort of organizational structure to carry on work for their blind citizens. Charles Hayes, whose responsibilities made him in effect the Foundation's first director of field services, traveled across the country to tackle this fundamental problem. From the 1923 annual report:
One of the first undertakings of the Foundation was directly in response to an appeal made by the State of Rhode Island. There are over 800 Blind in the state, and up to that time they had no Association, no Commission, no Workshop—in fact no assistance of any kind or character, with the exception of two Home Teachers. They wrote us that they desired to establish an Association and had no other source to turn to.
After an active campaign, conducted by the Foundation, in which the interest and support of the Governor and the Catholic Bishop of Rhode Island were enlisted, together with that of the Mayor of Providence and two hundred representative citizens, meetings were held in Brown University. An Association to serve the entire state was formed, with a Secretary and a splendid Board of Directors. This Association is now functioning exceedingly well. Honorable William S. Flynn, Governor of the State of Rhode Island, has addressed a personal letter to the Foundation thanking us for the assistance in this matter.
And in the same report:
In October, 1923, the Foundation was requested to send a representative to Des Moines, for a conference with the Governor and other state officials, regarding the needs of the Blind in Iowa. As a result of this conference, a tentative plan was outlined, to be used as a program for the work of the State authorities.
This kind of basic spadework was to preoccupy the Foundation for years to come, and at many different stages of development. The making of a plan, tentative or otherwise, was only the first step. There had to be enabling legislation, followed by appropriation of public funds, followed by effective programming, followed by recruitment and training of personnel. The progression was by no means automatic; frustrated local groups were to call upon the Foundation over and over again to help reactivate programs that had stalled along the way.
Another of Hayes' responsibilities was taking over editorship of the quarterly Outlook for the Blind. One of the most taxing demands on his versatility came a year or so after the Foundation opened its doors, when he was called upon to act as major domo of what was called "the Helen Keller Party" as it toured the United States in the Foundation's first national fund-raising drive. Of this more will be said later, but it is a revealing clue to Hayes' unflappable nature that he could cope with the conflicting, sometimes explosive, pressures that arose in these tours and yet remain in the good graces of all concerned. Even the hard-to-please Anne Sullivan Macy reacted favorably to him. "He has a genius for harmonizing conflicting individualities," she wrote the Foundation's president after the first coast-to-coast campaign tour.
The same could hardly have been said of Hayes' colleague, Robert B. Irwin, a man of an entirely different stripe. It was not merely a question of Hayes' being sighted while Irwin was blind. The more significant contrasts lay in temperament. Where Hayes was easygoing and flexible, Irwin was doggedly persistent. Where Hayes' first interest was people, Irwin was more concerned with concepts. The common touch which was second nature to Charlie required a conscious, not always successful, effort on Irwin's part. Nor was modest self-effacement Robert Irwin's long suit. His undeniable strengths lay in other directions.
Robert Benjamin Irwin, born in Rockford, Iowa, on June 2, 1883, was a three-year-old tot when his parents boarded the newly completed Northern Pacific Railroad to take up a homestead on the shores of Puget Sound's North Bay, in what was then the Washington Territory. The father, a pharmacist, opened a small drugstore which also served as the post office of the tiny settlement. To feed his growing family, which ultimately numbered three sons and nine daughters, the senior Irwin supplemented his income by working in the lumber camps that dotted the area's virgin forests.
One way and another, the family got by, but just barely. Although Robert Irwin was later to lead a comfortable, financially secure life, he never forgot the taste of poverty and never stopped fearing it. Colleagues often joked, both in his presence and behind his back, about his tight-fistedness when it came to tipping waiters or picking up bar checks. They charged it up to his Scottish ancestry, but it is quite likely that carefulness with money was an enduring heritage of his youth.
A robust, venturesome child, young Robert enjoyed exploring the scenic surroundings of his new home. With his father, the little boy went fishing, clam digging, rowing to points around the bay, gathering starfish and other sea specimens, climbing the cliffs to poke a curious finger into sea pigeons' nests. The alluring memories of towering fir trees, foaming surf, and snow-capped mountains drew him back to Puget Sound when he retired from professional life in 1950.
The boy was five years old when a feverish infection, which he later described as inflammatory rheumatism, affected his eyes. According to an account written by his wife in 1945:
Olympia, the nearest city where good doctors could be found, was two days away by rowboat, the only means of transportation. His parents were young and inexperienced, and did not consider the inflammation in their little boy's eyes especially alarming. When at last they took him in the big steamer to San Francisco to see a specialist, the sight in one eye was gone and that in the other eye was so seriously affected that in another year it too had flickered out.
The child's blindness was total; he was never again to distinguish either light or form. Although an agile mind and a fearless spirit helped him quickly find his way again in the familiar surroundings of the homestead, his parents had to face the painful decision that if their eldest son was to get an education, it could not be at home.
The same year that the Irwin family moved west, the State School for Defective Youth (now the Washington State School for the Blind) was established in the city of Vancouver, just across the Columbia River from Portland, Oregon. Like many other institutions of its day, the school housed under a single roof all types of children who needed special help with education: the blind, the deaf, and the feeble-minded. It was this institution Robert Irwin entered at the age of seven, and left in 1901 as the school's first blind graduate. He was never to live at home again, for the following September he entered the University of Washington in Seattle. During his 11 years at the school, he saw his family only during summer vacations.
The effects on a young child of separation from his family was another experience Robert Irwin never forgot. Throughout his life he favored keeping blind children at home by establishing special classes for them in the local public schools.
Irwin was also convinced, based on his own experience, that blind people could manage perfectly well in ordinary business enterprises. To earn the capital that would keep him going through four years at the University of Washington, and the three years he spent in graduate work, he had turned his hand to a variety of money-making schemes. That first summer after graduation from the school for the blind, he took a young brother as a guide and canvassed the surrounding countryside, selling stereoscopic views to farmers and townsfolk. During succeeding vacations, according to the biographical sketch written by his wife and published in the University of Washington's alumni magazine, Robert
ran a cigar stand inside one of the office buildings in downtown Seattle, he leased a house and sublet parts of it to cover the cost of his own lodging, and each summer he continued his canvassing, once on a tandem bicycle with another young man as a guide. With kettles and pans hung on the handlebars, they toured Washington and Oregon, cooking their meals and sleeping in the open. …
Irwin received his A.B. in 1906. Aided by a scholarship from the University Club of Seattle, he then went east to spend a year earning a master's degree in history from the Harvard Graduate School. By then his vocational aim had crystallized: he would work in the field of education of the blind. He continued at Harvard for the next two years, taking education courses and working on a thesis, "The Administration of Schools for the Blind."
The first public announcement of the advent of this newest recruit appeared in Outlook for the Blind in January 1909. Referring to the thesis in preparation, a news item said that the young graduate student was "supplementing the facts derived from the special literature upon the subject and the files of reports of the various schools with a series of questionnaires to superintendents. … He will [also] visit several of the institutions for the blind. With this exhaustive preparation he is fitting himself to take his place in the movement for improving the condition of the sightless."
A few months later the resourceful Charles Campbell, founder and editor of the Outlook, remembered Irwin when organizing a symposium on the recurrent issue of whether there should be a separate college for the blind or whether the blind should try to secure passage of federal legislation to provide scholarships in existing colleges. Irwin's opinion, published in the Summer 1909 issue, recited various practical objections to a college established exclusively for the blind. Such a college would have to be "virtually a university" because its curriculum would have to embrace not only liberal arts but law, osteopathy, theology, music, and other professional specialities; it would never be able to build a sufficiently large and up-to-date reference library in tactile print; and its diploma would not carry weight with the public for a long time. Furthermore, "every educator of the blind knows the deleterious effect of collecting the blind together in isolated groups. … A College for the Blind would deepen the ruts out of which its students must be got before they can hope to succeed in the world with the seeing."
With equal firmness Irwin came out against automatic scholarships for every blind person aspiring to higher education. Seemingly taking it for granted that his own achievements should serve as a universal yardstick, he assumed a rather dogmatic stance:
All that is needed by a blind man who has fight and ability enough to succeed in competition with his sighted brothers is sufficient pecuniary aid to enable him to employ all the reading he needs. He can then attend with very little handicap, any college he chooses. Any handicap which still remains is that which is his lot as a blind man. This he must face throughout his life and the sooner he faces it the better it will be for him.
By the time he left Harvard in June of 1909, Robert Irwin had already lined up a job of the kind he wanted. The Cleveland Board of Education hired him to organize that city's first day school classes for blind children. During his 14-year tenure there, he blazed a number of new trails.
It took him only a few months to reach the conclusion that children with partial sight did not belong in the same classroom as those who were totally blind. He therefore proceeded to organize one of the nation's earliest sight-saving classes for children who could function in a regular public school with proper room arrangement, good lighting, and special equipment, particularly large-type books. He established an independent non-profit company to publish such books, having first methodically experimented with different type sizes and faces to determine the most legible. This firm, the Clear Type Publishing Company, remained in existence throughout his lifetime. There would come a day, he predicted, when commercial publishers would enter the field of large-type book production. Time proved him right.
Irwin had his first taste of legislative victory when he secured passage in the Ohio legislature of a law that liberally subsidized public school classes for blind and partially sighted children. Thanks to passage of this bill, he was able to expand his territory from Cleveland to other cities in Ohio, becoming the first statewide supervisor of education for visually handicapped children.
As his scope widened, so did his acquaintanceship with every element of work for the blind: the leaders, the institutions, the traditions, the public attitudes that blocked blind people from progressing toward parity with the sighted. He took advantage of every opportunity that came his way to flail at these barriers.
Was there a shameful scarcity of brailled books for the adult blind? A year after coming to Cleveland, Irwin interested a local philanthropic group in organizing the Howe Publishing Society to produce such books. In so doing, he incidentally acquired a technical knowledge of braille production processes that was to stand him in excellent stead in succeeding decades.
Were there other, subtler, more complicated factors that were holding back development of adequate reading materials in tactile form? In 1911, Irwin gained an insight into these when he was named to membership on the AAWB's Uniform Type Committee. This was at the point when "the battle of the dots" was raging full force. He did not do well with the committee. Twenty-five years later, in a tactfully worded reference to Irwin's initial experience with this thorny issue, Henry Latimer wrote that the new member's views "were, to say the least, unconventional; and when, a year later, limited funds made it necessary to reduce the size of the Type Committee, his name was found missing from the membership."
Irwin was renamed to the group in 1918, by which time it had been greatly enlarged and had been turned into a commission jointly sponsored by AAWB and AAIB. The ultimate irony, as Latimer put it, was that when the whole problem of uniform type was turned over to the American Foundation for the Blind in 1923, "it became Mr. Irwin's direct responsibility to guide this movement to its … conclusion."
The beginning of Irwin's work in education coincided with the growth of the new science of psychology. There was much interest in educational circles over the intelligence scale devised by the French psychologist Alfred Binet. Binet's work was considered particularly useful in establishing early identification of mental retardation.
In the United States, major experimentation with the Binet scale was under way at the Vineland, New Jersey, Training School for the Feeble Minded under the direction of psychologist Henry H. Goddard. Irwin's awareness of the educational problems presented by mental deficiency among blind children led him to take the initiative of spending the summer of 1914 at Vineland to work out, in collaboration with Dr. Goddard, an adaptation of the Binet tests that would make them suitable for use with blind children. This meant devising oral or tactual substitutes for the large number of test questions involving pictures or diagrams.
Irwin's adaptations were ultimately found to be imperfect in several essential respects, and it remained for other psychologists, notably Dr. Samuel P. Hayes, to refine and develop the work in succeeding years. But that summer at Vineland added one more dimension to Robert Irwin's range of knowledge and interests, and brought him once again into the national limelight as an innovator.
When Irwin came to the Foundation, his mental luggage included yet another piece of conviction that was to influence his thinking for years to come. In 1918 the American Red Cross Institute at Evergreen had commissioned him to make a survey of existing state pension laws for blind persons. The resulting monograph, "Blind Relief Laws and Their Administration," was a cogent, well-written document that described and analyzed such legislation in 13 states, examined the manner in which these laws were administered, and struck out boldly at the concept of pensions granted purely on the grounds of blindness and regardless of need. It offered a model statute designed to overcome the shortcomings of the existing laws.
Irwin was assuredly aware that many of these laws had come into being through pressures generated by organized groups of blind people. He must also have realized that his strong recommendations to do away with across-the-board pensions would not endear him to the beneficiaries of such giveaway programs. Nevertheless, his somewhat righteous sense of fairness to the taxpayer prevailed over his desire for solidarity with his fellow blind. Both he and the Foundation were ultimately to pay a price for this high-principled indifference to popularity. As it happens, Irwin later modified his stand against special privileges for the blind and in the late Thirties campaigned hard, albeit unsuccessfully, for a "handicap allowance" which was essentially a pension under another name. His change of viewpoint was sincere enough, but it came too late to bridge the uncomfortable gulf between the Foundation and the organized blind.
In his execution of the Red Cross monograph, Irwin had a co-author: Mary Blanchard, a social worker in the employ of the Cleveland Society for the Blind, whom he married in 1917. A capable woman of notable intelligence and charm, Irwin's wife, who was sighted, never resumed her own career after her husband came to the Foundation. She devoted the rest of her life to serving as companion, homemaker, aide, and helpmeet to the brilliant but demanding man she had married. She died on April 23, 1949, at the age of sixty-five.
A sturdily built man just above medium stature, Robert Irwin was blessed with rugged health and a copious fund of energy. He had fair skin, often flushed with high color, a longish straight nose, and a wide, well-shaped mouth. While the thick brown hair of his youth eventually turned gray, he retained most of it. People meeting him for the first time were made instantly aware of his blindness by the dull-glazed spectacles he affected in the once-common belief that they were less conspicuous than dark glasses. Usually composed and affable, Irwin was always dignified and sometimes rigidly formal. His sense of humor was not of the back-slapping variety but more apt to be of an ironic cast, especially when the joke was on him.
Endowed with excellent physical coordination, he moved about with relative ease, using an ordinary stout walking cane. For routine travel between home and office, he dispensed with a sighted companion, relying on trains, taxis, and other public conveyances. When dog guides were introduced in the United States in the late Twenties, Irwin dismissed them for his own use as too much bother. Actually, he may then have been a little old to undergo the necessary training; he was also too stubbornly proud of his independence to rely on so conspicuous a travel aid as a dog. When it came to longer journeys, of which he took many, he was usually accompanied. It was his awareness of the expense of carfare for two that led him to initiate one of the Foundation's first tangible accomplishments in the legislative field. This was the federal law, followed by agreements with interstate carriers, that provided blind travelers and their guides with the one-fare privilege they retain to this day.
Some of Robert Irwin's qualities—his driving perfectionism, his controlling and paternalistic attitudes toward subordinates, his competitive spirit, his occasionally ungovernable temper—surfaced only after he had gained secure stature as a nationally respected thinker, leader, and doer. But enough was known about both his abilities and his personality during the Foundation's formative days to evoke confidence in some quarters, uneasiness in others.
The residential school superintendents, in particular, regarded Irwin as a natural enemy, largely because he was so outspoken an advocate of the day school classes in public schools that seemed to threaten the future of the residential schools. A revealing last-ditch attempt to keep Irwin away from the seat of national power was made by two of these superintendents. On November 29, 1922, Olin Burritt of the Pennsylvania school wrote to Foundation president Migel that he and Edward Allen of Perkins had talked over "the best way in which the Foundation can utilize Mr. Irwin's services" and had arrived at the following plan: "Let us associate Mr. Irwin with the Foundation as the director of research work but let him remain in Cleveland."
Migel ignored this transparent maneuver and proceeded to bring Irwin to New York. Two strong men were now poised on the verge of a partnership neither would have occasion to regret.
