Do blind people constitute a special class entitled to special social protection?
For centuries past, the answer to this question seemed self-evident. Of course! The fact that in recent decades a good many responsible voices have challenged this assumption, or at least the extent to which it has been allowed to govern public programs, has created one of the unresolved contradictions in work for the blind.
At the one extreme have been those who, holding blindness to be a mere inconvenience, were sincerely convinced that if blind people were ever to become full-fledged members of society, they would have to desist from asking or accepting special favors. At the other extreme have been those who, with equal sincerity, adhered to the traditional view that blindness was so disabling a handicap that only if it were equalized through compensatory laws and regulations could blind people hope to approach parity with the sighted.
The traditionalist viewpoint was all but unanimous during the depression years, when the United States Government, struggling to cope with disastrous economic collapse, abandoned the tenet that America's system of free enterprise and local self-government could build a sufficient base of economic security under all its people.
The instrument chosen to deal with this changed view was the Social Security Act, a landmark in American history. The United States Constitution had laid upon the national government the responsibility to promote the general welfare. In 1935 the national government went a crucial step further; it moved into partnership with the states to provide the general welfare.
Conceived in crisis, patched together in haste, the Social Security Act was an imperfect instrument. How imperfect may be judged from the fact that nearly every Congress has amended it.
Matters might have been greatly simplified if the Act had been less of an omnibus measure, or if at least its major facets had been separated. One facet—what is now commonly referred to as Social Security—was a social insurance system which provided that working adults and their employers would contribute matched sums to a federally operated trust fund out of which monthly cash benefits would be paid to workers when they reached retirement age. (A subsequent amendment extended this protection to the families of insured workers.) A related form of insurance protection was unemployment compensation, fortified by a public employment system.
The other facet was public assistance, totally different in nature and purpose from social insurance. The Act's welfare provisions were designed to assist the states in meeting the subsistence needs of people who were uninsurable because they were incapable of working to support themselves: too old, too young, too incapacitated. These categories of uninsurables were specified in separate titles of the Social Security Act, and the provisions for federal-state cooperation in aiding them came to be known as categorical assistance.
As originally drafted and introduced into Congress in January 1935, the Wagner-Lewis bill, then called the Economic Security Act, contained not a single reference to blindness.
"A few days ago we were studying the Wagner-Lewis Economic Security Bill," Robert Irwin wrote to M.C. Migel on February 13, 1935, "and quite to my surprise I found it contains one section which provides that the Federal Government will match dollar for dollar money appropriated in the various States for carrying on work with crippled children." Why, Irwin went on, should not similar help be extended to the blind? The state agencies for the blind were in deep trouble; appropriations, never sufficient in the first place, had been cut or eliminated altogether. "If we could show [the states] that the Government would match any appropriation they made, I think we would be able to get things going."
With this in mind, Irwin had drafted an amendment to add a new clause to the bill, patterning it after the crippled children's section. It proposed that $1,500,000 in federal money be set aside annually to match state money expended for work with the adult blind. Such funds were not to be used for direct relief grants, but to support the constructive activities of the state agencies for the blind in casefinding, vocational training and placement, home care, and other rehabilitative services.
The proposed amendment contained two other features. The crippled children's section provided "facilities for diagnosis and care, hospitalization and after-care." Irwin wanted the definition of crippled children to be broadened so as to specify that it included children with seriously impaired vision. Another section of the bill, Title I, the old age insurance plan, called for benefits to be paid to workers at age sixty-five. Irwin wanted such benefits to be paid to blind workers at age fifty.
Hearings on the Senate version of the bill were already being held by the Senate Finance Committee when these ideas came to Irwin. In order to get them on record before the hearings ended, he ventured to testify even before notifying the Foundation president. He had been accompanied, he informed Migel in this same letter, by L.L. Watts of Virginia, president of the American Association of Workers for the Blind; S. Mervyn Sinclair of Pennsylvania, president of the Association of State Executives; and Lewis H. Carris of New York, executive director of the National Society for the Prevention of Blindness.
"We had a brief hearing yesterday," he reported, "but I do not think we will get anywhere unless we can get Wagner or some other member of the Finance Committee sufficiently interested to sponsor the matter vigorously when the Committee goes into executive session." Would Migel be willing to write his good friend, Robert F. Wagner, about it?
Migel, who was in Palm Beach, dashed off a characteristic response: "It is useless to write to any Senator—one has to see them." He would be back north in a week or so and would willingly go to Washington for that purpose.
Migel's trip to Washington bore fruit when the bill was reported out by the Senate Finance Committee. It now contained a brand-new section, Title X, that established aid to the blind as a separate assistance category. But the title's provisions were quite different from what Irwin had asked for. It merely appropriated $3 million for 1936 to match state expenditures "for aid to the needy blind," with a ceiling of $15 monthly per person on the federal share of such grants. Instead of paralleling the preventive and rehabilitative features of the crippled children's program, Title X was patterned after the straight relief features of old age assistance grants.
Workers for the blind were unhappy that the constructive elements of their proposal had fallen by the wayside. An eleventh-hour effort was made to change the nature of Title X so as to incorporate rehabilitative services. In June, Migel and Helen Keller went to Washington to call on three Senators: Wagner, chairman Pat Harrison of the Finance Committee, and Hugo Black of Helen's home state of Alabama. Their purpose was to persuade Wagner, as author of the bill, to amend it from the floor of the Senate; to dissuade Harrison from objecting to changes in his committee's recommendations, and to gain Black's support for the broadened title.
The outcome of their mission to Washington was that Senator Wagner offered, and the Senate passed, an amendment to the committee bill expanding Title X to include not only "money payments to permanently blind individuals" but also "money expended for locating blind persons, for providing diagnoses of their eye condition, and for training and employment of the adult blind."
In an excited bulletin sent to leaders of work for the blind the day after passage of the amended Senate bill, the Foundation noted with satisfaction that the amendments would mean federal money to match state expenditures for most of the activities carried on by commissions and agencies for the blind. However, the rejoicing was premature. Having passed the House and Senate in different forms, the bill had to be reconciled by a conference committee, and in the course of this process most of the features of the Senate version were knocked out. Title X survived, but only as a separate relief category for blind persons.
Robert Irwin's disappointment was tinged with suspicion. "I was unable to find out who was responsible for this change," he wrote Mervyn Sinclair, "but I have a hunch. I believe it was an inside job." He was alluding to the fact that the group of state public welfare officials who had drafted the overall provisions of the Social Security Act saw no justification for separate treatment of blind people. They were particularly resistant to any possibility that administration of federal funds might be diverted from state welfare departments. Only a few of the state commissions for the blind were tied to welfare departments; others were units of state education departments, and still others were independent bodies. Whether or not Irwin's hunch was justified in this particular instance, the years ahead were to bear out his belief that there would be a continuing tug of war between public welfare officials and the organizations promoting the interests of blind persons.
Sinclair, while sharing Irwin's disappointment, took a more optimistic view. The mere fact that a separate title for aid to the blind had been achieved was a crucial gain, he felt. The next step, he wrote Irwin, was to establish good working relations with the Social Security Board, which the Act established to administer its provisions.
There was also a lot of other work to be done, both nationally and locally, before the first dollar of federal money could find its way into the hands of blind people.
While the Social Security Act was signed into law on August 14, 1935, it failed to receive funding and its first appropriation was not enacted until Congress reassembled the following January. Even if the money had been available earlier, however, the Act's administrative regulations were such that not a single one of the 26 states which already had relief programs in effect for blind residents would have been eligible for the federal grant. Some states had residence requirements more stringent than those allowed by the statute. Others did not meet the stipulation that relief had to be a statewide program rather than on a county-by-county basis. And, of course, there remained 22 states and several territories that had yet to begin any sort of assistance program for the needy blind.
In virtually every state, therefore, legislative action was needed before the flow of federal money could begin. By mid-1936 the necessary measures had been taken by 20 states and the District of Columbia, and in August the Social Security Board reported that some 22,000 blind residents of these states had received an aggregate of $584,610 the preceding month. This came to an average of $26.27 per recipient, although the figures making up the average ranged from a low of $5.74 in Arkansas to a high of $34.05 in California.
There was a good deal of confusion over regulations. For the Social Security Act to get through Congress at all, the states had to be allowed wide discretionary latitude in the administration of their individual programs. Different states did things differently, and the impact of their actions affected their residents in different ways.
A random survey made by the Foundation in the summer of 1936 and published in the October issue of the Outlook, highlighted some of the problems. In Massachusetts the commission for the blind, which was a unit of the state welfare department, was required to turn over to the department's old age assistance division all cases of blind persons aged sixty-five and over. In Wisconsin, on the other hand, elderly blind people were given the choice of whether to register under Old Age Assistance or under Aid to the Blind, and many opted for the former category. Indiana reported that red tape and the complications of setting up an operating structure were delaying implementation of the law. Relaying this information, C.D. Chadwick made an observation that was echoed from Vermont and Pennsylvania:
This assistance has improved the living conditions of some of our more needy or destitute blind; but the blind who are self-supporting or who are barely able to earn their support complain that [it is] more difficult for them because the general public is cognizant of assistance being granted and naturally assumes that all blind are being assisted. …
In New York City, the Greater New York Council of Agencies for the Blind made a valiant but futile effort to have Title X funds administered through the state's commission for the blind rather than its department of welfare. In a detailed account of this ultimately unavailing campaign, Peter J. Salmon, executive secretary of the Industrial Home for the Blind in Brooklyn, and one of the nation's staunchest spokesmen for the traditionalist view, concluded with this somber warning:
If those of us who have lived with work for the blind have learned one thing, it has been this: that such progress as has been made has come only through specialized work for the blind, whether in the field of private philanthropy or in that of legislation. Granting the necessity of relief-giving, there is still nothing more dangerous than the administration of relief or assistance to the blind by those unfamiliar with the whole problem involved. …
Vivid illustrations of the initial effects of the Social Security Act came from individual blind people, whose views were also incorporated in the Outlook survey. Some had benefited, but many more had not, and almost all were bewildered.
One of the chief complaints was that in many states relief applicants were required to divest themselves of whatever property they owned before they could be eligible for assistance. Limitations on the amount of life insurance relief applicants were permitted to retain also caused a great deal of resentment.
In states like Massachusetts, that had long provided pension allowances for blind residents, the operation of the new law was a blessing to some, a blow to others. An elderly Massachusetts man, who had been receiving a small, state old age pension as well as a blindness stipend, was a victim of the new regulations. His letter capsulized the pathetic suffering that so many endured during the depression years:
I am so worried I am near to a nervous breakdown as I cannot get by on what I am told I will now have for the future. I will only receive thirty dollars per month, old age pension and all, whereas I have been getting twenty-four dollars from the [state] old age pension and twenty dollars from the [commission for the] blind, so it is not satisfactory to me at all, this new system. I do not know what I am going to do. I am a man eighty-three years old, and all I ask is food to eat and fuel to keep me warm. The woman who looks after me and keeps my house has given me her wages to buy the coal for this winter. All I pay her is three dollars per week.
The bitterest pill of all was the requirement that all earnings, no matter how small, and even gifts from relatives or friends, were to be deducted from the relief allowance. While the same rule applied in the Aged and Dependent Children relief categories, the situation of blind people was not really comparable. The aged were too old to compete for jobs, the children too young, but many of the needy blind people were of an age where they were capable of doing something, however little, toward self-support. The guiding philosophy of all organized work for the blind was to encourage such activity. If every dollar earned meant a dollar lost in relief payments, the incentive to earn would be quenched.
One way out of the dilemma was suggested before the Social Security Act was a year old. It was outlined, with due regard for delicate political overtones, in the February 1937 issue of the Outlook. Under this plan only 50 percent of the blind person's earnings up to a given limit would be taken into account in computing his relief budget. The same plan could be applied in the Old Age Assistance category—and thus be less criticized as special favoritism for the blind.
However, no effort was made that year to incorporate such a solution into law. Nineteen thirty-seven was a year in which federal spending reached such unprecedented proportions that Congress and the White House embarked on an economy drive. The following year, legislative efforts of workers for the blind were centered on the Wagner-O'Day Act, which gave a new lease on life to the sheltered workshops. It was not until 1939 that attention was once again turned to the Social Security Act. At the Foundation's persuasion, Senator Wagner, who by this time wore the mantle of national legislative champion for blind persons, addressed letters to the state commissioners of public welfare, urging them to use their discretionary powers and follow the 50 percent plan. Such an arrangement, Wagner noted, was already in effect in Michigan, North Carolina, and part of New York State, and had proven its worth.
The response he received was lukewarm; several welfare commissioners agreed to go along, but most were noncommittal. It seemed clear that the fastest route would be to write such exemptions into the Social Security Act. An opportunity to do so was at hand, for the Social Security Board, having completed its shakedown cruise, was preparing to correct the weaknesses that had shown up during the Act's four years of operation.
In the course of the Senate debate over these changes, Wagner introduced an amendment regarding earnings exemption, but it failed to pass. Worse yet, one of the changes proposed by the Social Security Board that did get through made it mandatory rather than optional for all income and resources to be taken into account in all categories of assistance. The few states that did exempt some earnings in administering Title X would no longer be able to do so.
Wagner was not the only senator responsive to the pleas of blind constituents. Various other legislators proposed amendments in an effort to revive two of the provisions voted by the Senate in 1935 but killed in House–Senate conference. These were 1) assistance to state agencies for the blind in carrying out programs of rehabilitation and employment, and 2) federal participation in financing the costs of eye care to ameliorate or prevent visual impairment. Such efforts were also doomed to failure. The only concrete benefit the 1939 amendments conferred upon blind people was to raise the ceiling on federal participation in individual relief grants to $20 a month as against the former $15. A number of the overall changes, however, were indirectly beneficial. The federal government would henceforward reimburse the states for a greater share of their costs for administration of categorical relief. This could mean reduced caseloads and more efficient performance. All states were required to set up merit systems for hiring welfare workers. This would divorce such jobs from political patronage.
Despite its numerous imperfections, workers for the blind felt, on the whole, that the Social Security Act had produced sizable gains for blind people during those first five years. One of the most worthwhile was the requirement that applicants for Aid to the Blind undergo eye examinations. These examinations revealed that many applicants were needlessly handicapped; with proper medical or surgical treatment their vision could be improved and even restored. In Kansas alone, it was reported, 125 blind persons were restored to sight in a single year.
Discussing this fact in an address to a convention of blind people in late 1939, Robert Irwin posed a logical question: "If eye examinations and medical service for restoration of sight are beneficial to needy blind people, why wouldn't they be equally beneficial to blind persons who are not eligible for Aid to the Blind?" There were many, he said, whose families barely managed to support them but could not summon up the additional resources for medical care. For blind adults of working age, this problem was met through passage in 1943 of the Vocational Rehabilitation Act. Where the elderly blind were concerned, it took longer, even for some of those on welfare. The last group consisted of people who were not getting assistance under Aid to the Blind but had been assigned to the Old Age Assistance category, where no eye examinations were required. Repeated efforts were made to correct this situation through legislation, but it was not until the enactment of the Medicaid and Medicare systems in 1965 that the idea was implemented.
Improving the Social Security Act was not a major item on anyone's agenda during the war years. Not only was the nation preoccupied with matters of more desperate import but the war economy erased the last traces of depression unemployment, with the result that all welfare rolls decreased. Thanks to full employment, many more families could assume the support of their blind members, and able-bodied blind adults were themselves in demand for defense work. Moreover, due to the Wagner-O'Day Act, the sheltered workshops which had formerly been unable to yield more than the meagerest of earnings for their blind workers were now on double and triple shift, producing millions of dollars' worth of goods for the war effort.
The gratification felt by organizations for the blind at this turnaround was tempered, however, by concern over the future. World War I had also seen a boom in employment of blind workers, but the gains had not been retained in the postwar years. The knowledge that war's end would bring a drastic drop in the economy, that veterans would be given preference in employment, and that the large numbers of men being blinded in battle might also be competing for the limited kinds of work available to the blind—these were reality factors that could not be ignored.
It was primarily with disabled servicemen in view that steps were initiated in 1942 to enlarge the scope and depth of the Vocational Rehabilitation Act of 1920. Both the Barden-LaFollette Act for civilians, which became Public Law 113 of the 78th Congress, and the Clark-Walsh Act for veterans, which became Public Law 16 of that same Congress, opened a broad range of services for newly blinded adults. But neither measure could do anything for the many blind persons who were not suitable candidates for vocational rehabilitation either because they had already made a satisfactory vocational adjustment or because they were too old or too handicapped in other ways to qualify.
Since so few blind people commanded even moderate means, federal income tax was of no great concern to the field until, in 1943, the tax structure was revised to reach down into the lower income brackets. When this happened, many who were employed held that the extra expenses of blindness should be recognized in their tax obligations. A given income, they argued, did not represent as much purchasing power to a man who had to hire eyesight in the form of readers or escorts as it did to his sighted colleague at the next desk or factory bench. The argument carried sufficient weight with Congress for an amendment to be passed in 1944 permitting a legally blind taxpayer to take an additional personal exemption on his tax return. In 1948 a further amendment extended the exemption to a blind spouse.
Once the special expenses of blindness were acknowledged for those who earned enough to pay taxes, blind people were encouraged to hope that comparable recognition might be extended to all. The cost of living of even the relief recipients who were blind was higher than that of others: they could not shop as economically, they had to pay people to do chores and errands that sighted persons could do themselves, they could not always make use of inexpensive public transportation.
There was no general agreement, however, as to just how this end might be achieved. Some spoke of a handicap allowance in the form of a federal pension for the blind. Others thought in terms of an insurance system to protect against dependency due to blindness, along the same lines as the old age insurance feature of the Social Security Act. Still others maintained that the best chance for equalizing the status of blind people lay in federal support of the state agencies for the blind so that they could strengthen and extend their rehabilitative and medical and social services. Since the federal government was now sharing the costs of vocational rehabilitation services which would primarily benefit those of working age, why should it not give similar help, through the state commissions, to others whose needs were equally urgent?
Blind people were not alone, of course, in clamoring for more help from their government. Groups representing people with other physical disabilities were also insistent on the need for greater federal support. In the summer of 1944 the House Committee on Labor appointed a Subcommittee on Aid to the Physically Handicapped to study the aid given by public and private agencies to the physically disabled and to frame legislative recommendations based on their findings. The seven-member subcommittee, chaired by Congressman Augustine B. Kelley of Pennsylvania, took testimony from more than five hundred witnesses over a two-year period. Its recommendations, published at the end of 1946, were numerous and broad-ranging; many ultimately found their way into law.
Testimony before the Kelley Committee by spokesmen for the blind focused largely on the changes needed in the Social Security Act. Robert Irwin reopened the question of exempting part of blind people's marginal earnings from computation of their budgetary needs. He urged that exemptions also be made for occasional gifts, up to a maximum of $20 a month, from relatives and friends. He reiterated the importance of federal help to the states in defraying medical expenditures for the improvement or restoration of sight. He called attention to "the shockingly low relief grants" made by the poorer states, proposing that the federal reimbursement formula be made variable so that it could meet a greater share of the relief expenditures in states with low capital wealth. He pleaded that the $20 limitation on the federal share of a blind person's relief grant be raised; most states, he pointed out, were unwilling to go beyond an exact matching of the federal contribution, even in cases where the person's needs were admittedly higher than $40 per month.
Speaking for all organized groups interested in the welfare of the nation's blind citizens, Irwin took the opportunity to introduce the idea of a system for insurance against blindness. Under such a plan the cost of benefits for people who might become blind in the future would be met through a trust fund to which all insured workers could contribute. As for financing the cost of benefits to those who were already blind, a one-time federal appropriation to establish the trust fund would take care of things.
A few weeks later Helen Keller also addressed a hearing of the Kelley Committee, and used the occasion to enter a special plea for a handicap allowance for two subgroups, "the hardest pressed and the least cared-for among my blind fellows." These were the Negro blind and the deaf-blind. Of the former, she said:
In my travels up and down the continent I have visited their shabby school buildings and witnessed their pathetic struggle against want. I have been shocked by the meagreness of their education, lack of proper medical care, and the discrimination which limits their employment chances. I feel it a disgrace that in this great wealthy land such injustice should exist to men and women of a different race—and blind at that!
Even before the Kelley Committee published its findings, the House Committee on Ways and Means began extensive hearings on new amendments to the Social Security Act. The principal measure before it was a bill introduced by Representative Aime J. Forand of Rhode Island which proposed a number of fundamental changes in the nation's public welfare system. The broadest of these was that the federal government participate financially in the total welfare package—not merely the special categories of aged, dependent children and blind covered by separate titles in the Social Security Act but also in what was called general assistance: financial aid to individuals and families in need due to the breadwinner's temporary unemployment, sickness or physical disability other than blindness. Under the existing Act, the full cost of general assistance was borne by the states.
A logical consequence of this proposal was the proviso that the states should have the option of establishing unified administration for all welfare grants, categorical and non-categorical.
Other proposed changes were that the federal government should share in the costs of social services designed to prevent or overcome dependency, and that a variable grant formula be established to help the poorer states raise their level of assistance.
Many facets of the Forand bill were welcomed by the organizations of and for the blind, but much concern was expressed over the idea of a comprehensive welfare system which would allow the states to do away with separate categorical titles. With Title X seemingly in danger of disappearing, much of the testimony presented at the hearings by the blind interest groups centered on the necessity for its preservation.
Representative Forand responded to these anxieties by voicing assurances that adequate safeguards had been introduced into his bill for the protection of blind assistance recipients. "As one of a large family [he had 15 brothers and sisters] of a father who went blind, I have more than an academic interest in the welfare of this group," he declared.
At the conclusion of Robert Irwin's testimony, Forand engaged him in a colloquy. Irwin had maintained that if the states were given the option of consolidating all welfare administration, "what we are afraid of is that there will be more advantage financially for the states to throw the blind into general relief than … to keep them under Title X." Any generalized relief program would penalize the blind because it would be administered by staff members not familiar with the special needs and problems of blind people.
When Forand demurred that his bill was intended "to help rather than hinder the cause of the blind," Irwin credited him with the best of intentions. "I think you are as good a friend as we have on the committee," he said, "only I am just afraid that some of these lawyers in Washington are going to misinterpret your intention in the bill." Experience had shown, he went on, that federal bureaucrats often interpreted laws differently from what Congress had in mind. "Let us write [the new bill]," he urged, "so that even a lawyer will get only one meaning out of it."
Neither the American Public Welfare Association nor the organizations for the blind got very much of what they wanted when the 1946 amendments to the Social Security Act were passed that summer. The public welfare directors failed to get their consolidated system; it was to be 16 years before they could achieve even part of this goal through an amendment giving the states the option of grouping all adult assistance programs in a single plan. Even here, however, advocates of Title X salvaged something; under these same 1962 amendments, states which had a separate agency for the blind could still designate that agency to administer Title X.
While Title X survived in the Public Welfare Act of 1946, none of the other gains organizations for the blind campaigned for got through: neither the handicap allowance, nor the exemption of earnings, nor federal support for state commissions, nor the blindness insurance system. However, a few grains of comfort were provided. The maximum individual monthly assistance payment for a blind person went up from $40 to $45 with the federal share slightly raised. Two years later the maximum was upped to $50 and the federal share was again raised. By this time—1948—there were 45 states rendering aid to the blind under the Social Security Act, but it was not until 1953, when Nevada came into the system, that all states and territories were covered.
In 1952, both the maximum and the federal share were again raised by $5. Additional increases were authorized in 1956, 1958, 1961, 1962, and 1966. By the end of the 1970 federal fiscal year, the national average monthly grant to recipients of Aid to the Blind was $102.
Groups pressing for legislation cannot afford to be discouraged by defeat. They merely wait until the next session of Congress and try again, modifying their demands in terms of what they may have learned the last time around. In 1948 two New York legislators, Congressman Daniel A. Reed and Senator Irving M. Ives, introduced amendments to effectuate the income exemption provisions that had failed to get through two years earlier. Their bill permitted states that wished to do so to allow a blind recipient of public assistance to earn up to $40 per month without having a corresponding reduction made in his benefits.
The Reed-Ives bill was unanimously passed by both houses of Congress, but to the astonished chagrin of the bill's advocates, President Harry S. Truman vetoed it. The detailed "Memorandum of Disapproval" gave as its main reasons that the bill contravened the principle of assistance rendered on the basis of need, that it discriminated unfairly against other assistance categories, that it would render large numbers of new blind people eligible for public assistance, causing the available funds under Title X to be spread thinner. What was needed in the Social Security Act, the memorandum asserted, was not special treatment for one assistance category but a substantial increase in all payment categories.
There was little question in anyone's mind as to how this veto had come about. Jane M. Hoey, director of the Bureau of Public Assistance in the Social Security Administration, had repeatedly voiced the position spelled out in the document signed by Truman, Irwin told Migel. In a letter to Ives on July 15, 1948, Migel declared that, where blind people were concerned, the veto was "one of the most disappointing legislative steps ever taken by a President." He reasserted the belief that people on public assistance must be encouraged to help themselves, otherwise: "This results in bitterness and subterfuge on the part of the industriously inclined and makes loafers out of the less courageous."
Two years later workers for the blind rallied to press once again for the changes they wanted in the Social Security Act. They had used the interval to seek an accommodation with the federal welfare officials and had found Arthur J. Altmeyer, Commissioner of Social Security in the newly established Federal Security Agency, somewhat more amenable than his predecessors to the income exemption plan. Early in 1950 H.R. 6000 was introduced in Congress. Among other things it contained a section giving each state the option of disregarding earned income of up to $50 a month in determining the relief budget of a blind assistance recipient in order "to encourage or assist the blind to prepare for, engage in, or continue to engage in remunerative employment to the maximum extent possible." It also contained a new provision: any worker registered with Social Security who lost his sight would have an immediate right to retirement benefits even though he was younger than sixty-five. This proviso was subsequently stricken, but the income exemption clause finally went through. When H.R. 6000 became Public Law 81-734, approved August 28, 1950, it provided that exclusion of earned income of up to $50 a month would be optional with the states for a two-year period; thereafter, it would be mandatory.
To achieve this long-sought breakthrough, organizations representing the blind joined forces as never before. One group, the National Federation of the Blind (NFB), a membership body of blind people organized a few years earlier, pressed hard for even greater liberalization; it asked that half of all earnings above the $50 exemption also be disregarded in calculating income. This demand threatened to upset the applecart. When, during the final hearings preceding passage of H.R. 6000, the NFB representatives insisted they would not compromise their stand, Commissioner Altmeyer had a private word with Peter Salmon, who had taken an active role in the negotiations with the Federal Security Agency. "Peter," he said, "you people can walk out of here with the $50 a month, but if you press for everything, you'll wind up with nothing."
Robert Irwin lived long enough to enjoy the triumph of the idea he had campaigned for since 1937, although by the time the law was signed he had already retired and his leadership role in the 1950 legislative drive had been taken over by M. Robert Barnett. Barnett was assisted by Hulen C. Walker, a member of the Foundation's field staff who, shortly thereafter, was appointed its first Washington-based legislative analyst. One of Walker's initial accomplishments was to secure a clarifying clause in the next set of Social Security Act amendments (1952) to insure that the earnings exemption applied to all blind people receiving public assistance, even if their aid came under a classification other than Title X. Since many were receiving help under Old Age Assistance, and others, who were family heads, were drawing benefits under the Aid to Dependent Children category, this move expanded the number of beneficiaries of the exemption allowance.
Walker, a blind attorney, resigned in 1958 to become the first full-time executive director of the American Association of Workers for the Blind. He was succeeded as the Foundation's legislative analyst by Irvin P. Schloss, who had been blinded in action in World War II. Schloss had been an active leader in the Blinded Veterans Association, serving as editor of its bulletin from 1948 to 1953 and then as its executive director until he joined the Foundation staff.
Walker began, and Schloss continued, the practice of issuing periodic newsletters on legislative developments to a large list of persons and organizations interested in the welfare of blind persons. Since the Washington office made it unnecessary for the Foundation's executive director to spend as much time in the nation's capital as his predecessor, the legislative analyst also took over the task of testifying for the Foundation before Congressional committees on routine matters. Appearances by Barnett were reserved for major episodes.
One such episode took place in 1956 when several issues were at stake. Title X was once more in jeopardy; a bill had again been introduced to lump together all categories of adult assistance under a single new title. On the affirmative side, an effort was under way to increase the income exemption allowance for the blind. Stalled in committee was a separate proposal for the appointment of a temporary national advisory body that would study all work for the blind. Most urgent of all was the issue of disability insurance.
In 1954 amendments to the Social Security Act had set the stage for a disability insurance program by instituting a "disability freeze." This provided that a worker insured under Social Security who became totally and permanently disabled could have his wage record "frozen" at that point, so that subsequent periods of lower or non-existent earnings due to his disablement would not diminish the amount of his ultimate retirement benefit. The amendment proposed in 1956 inaugurated a cash disability program under which a disabled worker who met stringent standards relating to both the nature of his disability and his potential for gainful employment could begin, at the age of fifty, to collect retirement benefits equivalent to what he would have been entitled to receive on the basis of the same wage record upon retirement at age sixty-five.
While blindness per se constituted presumed disability under the "freeze" provisions, the 1956 amendment stipulated that, to be eligible for benefit payments, a blind person would have to prove that he or she was unable to engage in any "substantial gainful activity." This meant, for example, that an architect who lost his vision would have to prove not only that he could no longer pursue a career in architecture but that he was unable to earn anything "substantial" by opening a small business or taking employment in a sheltered workshop. What constituted "substantial gainful activity" was not defined and could easily constitute a booby trap. Moreover, the definition of blindness stipulated in both the "freeze" and the cash benefit regulations was not the accepted 20/200 standard for legal blindness but a much more restrictive 5/200.
In the Congressional debates over the 1956 amendments, the Foundation and others made strong efforts to preserve some incentive for persons who became blind to engage in as much productive activity as they were capable of. To assist toward this goal, Representative Jere Cooper of Tennessee introduced a bill that 1) established 20/200 as the definition of blindness for disability benefit purposes; 2) postulated that persons certified as blind should not be required to meet the "substantial gainful activity" test; 3) made blinded workers eligible for cash benefits from the onset of blindness instead of requiring them to wait until age fifty.
A further provision in the Cooper bill was that blind workers who did qualify for disability benefits should be permitted to earn up to $1,200 a year before their disability payments were reduced. The rationale behind this demand was that such an arrangement was already in effect for over-sixty-five workers receiving retirement benefits under Old Age and Survivors Insurance.
While the Cooper bill was not enacted in 1956, most of its proposals eventually became law. The blindness definition for disability purposes was broadened to 20/200 in 1967. Disability benefits prior to age fifty were instituted in the 1960 amendments. The requirement for the amount of covered employment needed to qualify (originally 20 out of the preceding 40 quarters), was modified in 1965 to as few as six quarters if a person lost his or her sight before age thirty-one. In that same year the "substantial gainful employment" stipulation was loosened for blind persons between the ages of fifty-five and sixty-five; they could now qualify for disability benefits by proving inability to work at the same occupation or one requiring similar skills. Two years later, the same concession was extended to sighted persons disabled by any type of handicapping condition.
Eventually, too, the more liberal earnings income exemption, for which the National Federation of the Blind had pressed so hard in 1950, was achieved. In 1962 the monthly exemption figure of $50 was raised to $85 and half the earnings over that amount were also excluded in calculating a blind person's public assistance grant. A further concession was wrung in 1964 when it was ruled that, for a Title X recipient enrolled in an approved plan leading to self-support, all income for a period of 12 months was to be disregarded; states were given the further option of extending this period to 36 months.
Along with all others receiving welfare assistance, blind persons benefited from across-the-board improvements introduced into the Social Security Act over the years. Among these were the gradual easing of state residence laws, culminating in the 1969 Supreme Court decision forbidding residence requirements as a condition of eligibility for public welfare aid; the enactment of the Medicare and Medicaid programs which helped cover the cost of eye care as well as general health maintenance; the widened scope of the child health program, which assisted with vision screening and remedial ophthalmic services for children; the broadening of survivor benefit regulations to make disabled widows, widowers and divorced wives eligible for cash benefits at an earlier age.
In retrospect it can be seen that virtually all of the goals sought by champions of the blind in relation to the Social Security Act were sooner or later attained. The demand for a flat pension or handicap allowance for needy blind people was one of the major exceptions, but hopes were aroused that it might yet be achieved in the guise of a guaranteed annual income for the poor—the "family assistance plan"—which the Nixon administration proposed as part of a set of welfare reform measures in 1971.
The compromise measure which finally passed Congress and was signed into law in late 1972 (Public Law 92-603), omitted the family assistance plan, but it did improve benefits in many categories, including the extension of Medicare to disability insurance beneficiaries. It also federalized the three adult public assistance categories (Old Age Assistance, Aid to the Blind, and Aid to the Permanently and Totally Disabled), effective January 1, 1974. One effect of this scheduled change would be to raise the monthly income of Aid to the Blind recipients in the many states which, under the previous federal-state funding formula, had made inadequately low grants. Another effect would be to finally put an end to Title X as a separate category.
Advocates of the family assistance plan were still hoping, at the end of 1972, that some form of guaranteed annual income might come into existence at a later date. Blindness would not be a factor in such a plan; blind persons would receive the same treatment as all others, handicapped or non-handicapped, whose incomes were below the poverty level. The days of preferential treatment for the blind were clearly coming to an end. Most of the new legislation introduced was framed on the theory that blindness should no longer be singled out from all other disabilities for special preference.
While professional workers and organizations for the blind came to accept and promulgate this concept, some membership organizations of blind persons continued for the most part to adhere to the opposite view. The point most frequently made in favor of special treatment was that, historically, once special legislation for the blind was in force, it tended to serve as an opening wedge for all handicapped groups as, for example, in the 1965 liberalized disability benefit provisions for the blind which were extended two years later to all disabled persons.
While granting the weight of this argument, many leaders in work for the blind held to the belief that since the ultimate desideratum for blind people was to become part of the mainstream of society, the seeking of preferential treatment in law defeated this end.
At the same time that thoughtful persons in work for the blind were executing this 180-degree turn, public welfare authorities were also reversing their stands on a good many formerly cherished principles. Their experience with welfare programs for the blind undeniably contributed to these changed viewpoints.
One example was the earnings exemption concept, which was resisted for so many years by welfare officials on the grounds that it contravened a basic tenet of welfare administration. In 1964 the Economic Opportunity Act, which launched Lyndon B. Johnson's "war against poverty," recognized the validity of a work incentive for all welfare recipients by including an earnings exemption clause.
Another basic change in thinking related to methods of administering welfare. From the inception of the Social Security Act, federal and state authorities were insistent that the heart of the relief system lay in the public welfare worker's determination of individual budgetary needs, case by case. On the opposite side, the spokesmen for blind people who sought to have Title X administered by state commissions for the blind maintained that this budgetary function was a more or less mechanical operation, devoid of rehabilitative assistance to the recipient. In the Seventies several state and municipal welfare departments assigned clerical workers to make the eligibility and budgetary determinations and reserved their professionally trained social workers to render constructive services designed to lead people out of poverty.
In these and comparable directions, workers for the blind were ahead of their time in identifying weaknesses and suggesting remedies for welfare programs. To the extent that they persisted until experience proved them right, their foresight benefited all the nation's people.
