The practice of philanthropy in America has brought to the fore some extraordinary personalities, but few so singular as the man who turned his unpaid labors for the blind into the second career of a long and colorful lifetime.
If one were compelled to assign a single explanation to Moses Charles Migel's unique role as champion and benefactor of the blind, it would have to be that his exacting sense of order was offended by needless chaos affecting an entire stratum of society. It was his steadfast belief that commonsense principles of organization, of the kind that are second nature to any businessman, should be able to straighten out an untidy state of affairs.
Leaders in work for the blind had never even heard the name Migel when he appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, and proceeded to assume a strategic role in a hopelessly stalemated situation that reflected precisely the kind of disorder he could not abide. This was the tactile type question, "the war of the dots."
Ever since the first schools for blind children were founded in the 1830s, there had coexisted in the United States a number of separate systems of raised writing designed to be read by the fingertips. As Charles W. Holmes summed it up soon after the turn of the century:
The lamentable fact is that we have at present five distinct codes of embossed print. … In order to avail himself of the full range of literature (which at best is woefully limited) the blind reader must learn, and keep well up in, all these codes. How long would our seeing friends stand for such a state of affairs in ink type? Imagine for a moment the ridiculous situation that would arise, if the daily papers published in Boston had an entirely different system of characters from those used by New York publishers.
The implications of this "ridiculous situation" were anything but ridiculous. The small sums available for books were being dissipated because the same titles had to be produced in different types. Communication among blind people was rendered nearly impossible because they could not read one another's letters. Professional energies that could have been devoted to constructive efforts were being burned up in passionate internecine struggles.
By 1911 more than a decade of concentrated effort on the part of leaders in work for the blind had produced some improvement. Through a complex process of trial and error, negotiation and compromise, the field of battle had been reduced to New York Point and American braille.
At its biennial convention that year, the American Association of Workers for the Blind concluded that the only way to decide the question of which of these systems should be universally adopted was through an impartial research study that would test the reading performance of an equal number of users of each system. AAWB members raised a small sum with which its Uniform Type Committee could begin conducting such a study. In the months that followed, twelve hundred American readers were tested, without either system demonstrating a commanding lead. What proved really unsettling to the research team was the discovery that a third system—British braille—apparently gave better results than either the American version of braille or New York Point. It looked as though the entire process would have to start over again.
At this juncture M.C. Migel entered the picture. Up to that time, his interest in blindness had been confined to spending each Monday evening reading aloud to the residents of a New York home for blind men and women, the Society for the Relief of the Destitute Blind. But he had become personally aware of the type problem when, having brought a braille book from England as a gift for one of the home's residents, he found to his astonishment that her fingers, trained to read New York Point, could not read it. Now, he heard, there was a movement afoot that might correct this senseless situation.
The brother of one of the home's residents was Walter G. Holmes, editor of the Matilda Ziegler Magazine for the Blind, a periodical which, like most other embossed literature, was being produced in separate editions of American braille and New York Point. Migel called on Holmes to find out more about the group that was attempting to work out a single finger-reading system. "Would it be worth while," he asked, "for me to give this Uniform Type Committee a thousand dollars?" Holmes, to whom such a sum represented the larger part of a year's salary, gave a guarded reply. "It depends," he said, "on how much a thousand dollars means to you." "That's a minor point," said Migel. "Something really ought to be done to straighten things out."
It was the beginning. By 1914, when the AAWB's Uniform Type Committee had joined forces with a parallel committee of the American Association of Instructors of the Blind, the name of M.C. Migel appeared as treasurer of the combined task force, renamed the Uniform Type Commission. From that point onward, he became the commission's sole source of funds, supplying whatever it needed for staff work, travel expenses, publication and distribution of its reports.
As will be seen in a later chapter, the question of a single dot code for the United States was settled by 1917, but it was to take some 15 years of calendar time and uncounted man-years of patience before the ultimate goal was reached of a uniform system of raised type that could be read throughout the English-speaking world. Although patience was not his long suit, Migel stuck with the problem throughout. Had this been his sole accomplishment for blind people, it would have earned him an honored place in their gallery of greats. But a host of mightier feats were in the offing.
What manner of man was Moses Charles Migel? What prompted him to devote more than half his lifetime to the cause of blind men and women? It was many years before even those who worked most closely with him learned much about the man, his background, or his motivation. In 1941, when the AAWB was preparing to present Migel with its Shotwell Medal, the chairman of the award committee wrote Robert Irwin asking for background material about the man Irwin had been intimately associated with for 20 years. "Strangely enough," Irwin wrote in reply, "I can tell you very little about Mr. Migel's biography except that he was formerly a silk manufacturer but retired many years ago. … Mr. Migel is very shy about publicity."
Throughout his long lifetime—he died a few days before his ninety-second birthday—Migel knew far more about the blind than the blind knew about him. As a man who always lived in the present, he was so little given to reminiscence that even his children were unable to supply authenticated details of either his ancestry or his early years. Much of what they recalled was told them by Migel's mother, Hannah, who died in 1926.
Migel's parents began their married life in New York City during the Civil War, living in a house on Canal Street where their first child, Clara, was born in 1864. Soon thereafter, the young husband developed an asthmatic condition which necessitated a change of climate. The family traveled to Houston, Texas, where their second child, Moses Charles, was born November 3, 1866. The Texas climate having failed to bring about the desired remedy for Migel senior, the family moved south, by way of Panama, to Peru and then to Chile. Three other children, two sons and a daughter, were born during these wanderings. However, the father's health continued to deteriorate; he died soon after the family came back to New York and just before the birth of a sixth child, a daughter.
Left in modest circumstances, the widow moved across the East River. The census of 1880 showed Hannah Migel, widow, aged thirty, living at 278 McDonough Street in a middle-class district of what was then the independent city of Brooklyn. The census entry listed six children: Clara, fifteen; Moses, thirteen; Saul, eleven; Linda, five; Julius, two; Bella, one.
Moses Charles Migel, then, was orphaned in his early teens; as the eldest son he became the man of the family and apparently assumed the role of breadwinner as soon as he was out of school. After a series of jobs as office boy, clerk, and salesman for various firms, he somehow got into the silk business. The Brooklyn city directory for 1893, at which time he was twenty-seven years old and his brother twenty-five, listed Moses Migel, silks, and Saul H. Migel, silks, at 370 Grand Avenue, which was also given as the residence of Hannah Migel, widow. The directory for the following year showed the silk business to have been moved to 58 Greene Street, Manhattan; the Brooklyn residence remained unchanged until 1897.
By 1898 Migel and his mother (and probably the younger children) had moved their residence to West 88 Street in Manhattan. Two years later the business listing for Moses C. Migel, silk, showed not only a Greene Street address in downtown Manhattan but also one in an industrial section of Long Island City, the latter probably a factory or warehouse. In the course of time, there were also silk mills in Providence, Rhode Island, and elsewhere, employing three thousand people. The Migel mills specialized in spun silk, made out of short fibres. One of the outlets for this product was telephone wire insulation, for which the mills held a profitable contract. This and other lucrative products made of silk during the days before synthetics came on the market enabled the self-made young industrialist to gain so strong a start and so substantial a capital that when, at the age of forty, he became a married man, he was in a position to retire from managerial activities. He retained his financial interests, however, for he was still sufficiently involved in the silk industry a dozen years later to be able to render his country a signal service when the United States entered World War I.
The War Department was in need of silk—more than 25 million yards of it—for cartridge bags to contain the smokeless powder used in firing cannon. Silk had the advantage over cotton of leaving no residue after firing, so that ramrod cleaning of the barrel was eliminated and reloading could be done at once. Since the breeding of silkworms was centered in the Orient, Migel volunteered to form an import firm, the Allied Silk Trading Corporation, to bring in the needed fibres from China and Japan and to supervise the manufacture of the cartridge cloth by a combine of American mills. Without waiting for a formal contract, he tied up $500,000 in working capital to import 6,900,000 yards of silk. The price quoted the government was cost plus 7½ percent, a reasonable markup in view of the delays and uncertainties of payment. At war's end, these difficulties having proven less than anticipated, the Allied Silk Trading Corporation voluntarily reduced its profit margin to 3 percent and rebated $2 million to the federal treasury. A distinguished service certificate from the War Department was its principal reward.
Immediately after the Armistice, the American Red Cross asked Migel to take charge of preliminary adjustment services for American servicemen blinded in battle who were in various French hospitals awaiting return to the United States. By then he was not only nationally known for his association with the Uniform Type Commission but had acquired official status through appointment by New York Governor Charles S. Whitman as chairman of the New York State Commission for the Blind. He not only accepted the overseas assignment but assembled a group of eight trained nurses to accompany him abroad at his own expense. In Paris the group set up headquarters for the Red Cross Bureau of Reconstruction and Reeducation which, in addition to attending to the needs of blinded American soldiers and sailors, established an experimental farm school near Chenonceaux for a group of French mutilés de la guerre, supplied it with tractors and other agricultural machinery and staffed it with expert instructors who would train for a future livelihood in agriculture those disabled men who could no longer pursue their pre-war occupations.
The bureau also established a factory for the manufacture of artificial limbs for legless French veterans and, once it was in full operation, made a gift of it to the French government. As disbursing agent for the American Red Cross, it distributed several million francs to various French relief organizations. For these services to France, Migel was subsequently made a Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor.
Migel's work for the war-blinded continued when he returned to the United States after nine months in France. He served on the five-member Committee of Direction of the Red Cross Institute for the Blind at Evergreen, an experience which added one more dimension to his understanding of the problems of the visually handicapped.
Where his colleagues in work for the blind were concerned, Migel's wartime activities yielded a handy by-product. Then, as now, Red Cross officials working with the armed forces were given assimilated military ranks. Migel's assignment in France carried the rank of major, and "Major" became the familiar form of address used by people who knew his aversion to the use of his given name. He had long since adopted the practice of using only his initials in business. Old friends gave him the nickname of "Migs"; his Chilean-born wife invariably addressed him as Hijo (son) or its fond diminutive Hijito (sonny). It became a favorite family anecdote that when Migel was overseas for the Red Cross and sent affectionate cables to his wife at their summer home in Monroe, New York, a rumor swept the small town that Mrs. Migel was carrying on an affair with someone named Hijito.
There could hardly have been a less likely candidate for naughty behavior. Elisa Parada, whom Migel married in 1906, grew up in the Victorian age and never really left it. Born in Santiago, Chile, in 1877, she was orphaned while young and spent her growing-up years at Santiago College, a Methodist boarding school for girls. For all her ninety years, she remained an old-fashioned, straitlaced lady who never cut her hair, never shortened her ankle-length skirts, never wore a sleeve that ended above the elbow, and objected on moral grounds to alcohol, tobacco, gambling, and swearing. Her husband, on the other hand, was a bon vivant. He was a master mixer of giant-sized old fashioneds, a confirmed cigar and cigarette smoker until he gave up tobacco for health reasons late in life; a man who played cards for high stakes, bet heavily on horses and even owned a few.
The glue that held the marriage together was Mrs. Migel's Spanish background. She was a submissive wife who took it for granted that her husband should be undisputed master of the house and that his outside life was no concern of hers. For a man who had been catered to by an indulgent mother until the age of forty, it was an ideal arrangement. The Major worshipped the petite, dark-haired beauty he called "my little Carmen" and told people "she's the one who'll get me into Heaven." Having thus taken care of the future, he felt free to do as he pleased in the here-and-now. He did, however, pay his wife the compliment of not flaunting his freedom in her presence. At the country home where they entertained extensively, the famous old-fashioneds were mixed and consumed in the pantry, out of sight of the lady of the house. The Major refrained from telling his wife about the nickel-a-point bridge games he played at the Lotos Club, and she refrained from asking.
One subject on which the Migels saw eye to eye was strict discipline for their three children. Even when they were quite small, daughter Parmenia and sons John and Richard were expected to report to the breakfast table at eight o'clock sharp, washed, dressed, and combed. Lunch was promptly at one o'clock. The child who came a few minutes late to the table had to begin with whatever course was being served at the time; greater tardiness usually meant banishment from the dining room until the next meal.
Another thing the Migels had in common was a love of nature and a firm belief in the healthful effects of outdoor living. The spacious country estate called Greenbraes, located in the Ramapo Hills some forty miles from New York City, was their real home; their city apartment was little more than a pied à terre, for the restless Major was constantly on the go, spending most winters in Palm Beach, spring months in Arizona or New Mexico, and autumn months in Europe.
It was the Migels' belief in the benefits of country air that led them to undertake a personal charity which gave them much satisfaction. When a five-acre piece of property adjoining theirs became available in 1923, they bought it and turned it into a free vacation home for blind women. Called Rest Haven, the property could accommodate 35 guests at a time. Each year, between May and October, six successive groups of women who could not otherwise afford a country vacation were accommodated at Rest Haven for 18-day stays. The question of guides was ingeniously solved by including a few sighted women in each group. There was no charge for anyone, blind or sighted; even the round-trip transportation from New York City was supplied.
The Migels personally supervised the conversion and decoration of the house and grounds at Rest Haven into a comfortable resort adapted to the needs of blind persons. They and their children visited frequently, enjoying the pleasure of their guests, many of whom were women the Major had known during his weekly visits to the Society for the Relief of the Destitute Blind.
Until just before World War II, when it was closed down for a period, all of Rest Haven's expenses were defrayed by the Migels. In 1944 the Major deeded the entire property to the American Foundation for the Blind. Although the Foundation's executives and trustees knew that there were now other vacation facilities available to blind women, and were aware that this type of direct service activity for individuals was not really appropriate for a national organization, Rest Haven was kept going out of respect for the Migels and was not closed down until after the death of Mrs. Migel in 1967. The purchase, maintenance, and operation of Rest Haven over a 15-year period probably cost the Migels some $200,000. They never for a moment doubted it was worth it, even when it meant a little financial strain.
It was characteristic of the Major that when Rest Haven first opened, it was credited to "an anonymous friend of the blind." Migel had yet to learn that money could be more easily raised for a cause if donors were publicly identified, and that it was up to him to set the example.
Although the American Foundation for the Blind was the recipient of most of the gifts Migel made in his lifetime, he maintained other private charities in addition to Rest Haven, such as financing the college education of several deserving young men. His interest in the Society for the Relief of the Destitute Blind continued long after he stopped being a weekly reader for the residents. Periodically he would organize parties at the institution, bringing in groups of musicians or actors to provide entertainment. He was also a lifelong contributor to the National Society for the Prevention of Blindness, of which he had been one of the founders.
Mrs. Migel's main interest was in her alma mater. When she visited Chile in 1924 and found Santiago College in need of new buildings, the Migels made a gift of $150,000 to the school and Mrs. Migel became president of its board of trustees.
M.C. Migel was not the type of man to pass unnoticed in a crowd. He was a handsome figure whose erect posture and jaunty tread were outward symbols of a healthy self-regard. A bit of a Beau Brummell, he usually sported a flower in the lapel of his custom-tailored suit; he wore his hat tipped to a rakish angle. A full head of white hair was combed smoothly back to frame a clean-shaven, craggy face whose outstanding features were a pair of keen, somewhat hooded, brown eyes, a Roman nose and a full-lipped, sensuous mouth. Until he required an operation for cataract when he was nearly ninety, his sole physical impairment was a mild hearing loss, the result of a childhood bout with scarlet fever.
Toward women, the Major's manner was courtly but tinged with indulgent condescension. Intellectual brilliance or business competence on a woman's part never failed to amaze him. Grace S. Harper, who worked with him during his Red Cross stint in Paris, so impressed him by her ability to prepare a complicated budget that, on her return to the United States, he used his influence to have her appointed executive secretary of the New York State Commission for the Blind, of which he remained chairman until 1924. It was a post Miss Harper filled with distinction for 32 years until her retirement in 1951.
Ability to handle figures was an essential qualification for anyone who worked for Migel. There came a time when, after hiring a private secretary who was perfect in all other respects, he discovered she simply couldn't add. He discharged her and, determined not to make the same mistake twice, prepared a long column of figures with which to test the arithmetical ability of candidates for the job. Having added up the column himself and jotted down the sum, he interviewed each applicant, then handed her the sheet of figures and told her to go into the next room and add them up. To his dismay, one young woman after another failed the test.
When Amelia Landor's turn came, she listened to his instructions and said, "It's quite unnecessary for me to go into another room. I'll add up the figures right here and now." Which she proceeded to do. When she announced her sum, he compared it with his. "Sorry, my dear, it's the wrong answer."
"It's no such thing," came the tart reply. "If you got a different answer, sir, it's you who made a mistake." He took the figures, recalculated, and burst into laughter. Miss Landor was right, and so had been most of the other applicants he had rejected. But he hired Amelia Landor on the spot, not merely because she knew how to add but because she had the spunk to defend her work. She remained in charge of his private business office until the day he died.
Major Migel admired brains and mettle and he liked people who argued with him. What he didn't like was losing the argument, as those who worked with him at the Foundation were to find out. Because he was quick to anger, people who knew him well learned to recognize the warning signal: a sharp sucking-in of cheeks and tightly pursed lips preceded an outburst of temper. Had Robert Irwin been able to see, he might have evaded a few of the stormy encounters which were to punctuate the otherwise harmonious team effort that began when M.C. Migel took over active direction of the national strategy to serve the interests of blind people.
