"Give a man a fish," says an ancient Hebrew proverb, "he eats for a day. Teach him to fish, he need never be hungry again." A contemporary writer added a psychological dimension to this concept: "Work shapes a day, and so shapes a life."
It is only in recent years that blind men and women have been given the opportunity to do much about shaping their days or their lives. In past centuries blindness meant a life sentence, either to idleness or to the narrow range of occupations known as the "blind trades." For the more competent and the more mobile, these included musicianship, piano tuning, shopkeeping, house-to-house peddling, and a few small entrepreneurial ventures, one of which was street beggary. For most of the others, the "blind trades" were those involving semiskilled manual operations: chair-caning, broom-making, hand weaving, basketry. Some pursued such trades in their homes, while others worked at sheltered workshops established under community auspices and supported by philanthropic or tax funds.
There were, of course, exceptions: mettlesome souls who broke out of these confining molds and made places for themselves in the world at large. One of the earliest aims of the Foundation was to train a spotlight on these exceptional people in the belief that their example would not only encourage others but would persuade society to open new doors of opportunity to blind men and women. There was hardly an issue of the Outlook for the Blind during the Twenties that failed to feature one or more success stories. Two of the Foundation's first published pamphlets also dwelt on this theme: "Blind Women Who Have Conquered" and "Blind Dictaphone Operators and Typists in the United States and Canada." In succeeding years, similar brochures dealt with career opportunities in insurance underwriting, osteopathy, and organ-playing, and toward the same end the "Weeks for the Blind" local agencies were helped to organize centered around articles made by blind craftsmen and the craftsmen themselves at work.
An organized effort to expand vocational opportunities was greatly needed. In 1926 a Foundation report proposed a vocational study that would assess and attack the problem. The study would cover three major facets:
employment of the blind side by side with the sighted in industrial and commercial concerns; employment in which blind people are engaged in more or less independent ventures; and employment in industries fostered by agencies for the blind, such as special shops, subsidized home industries, etc.
To organize the study, the Foundation employed Evelyn C. McKay, who held a degree in economics from the University of British Columbia, had done graduate work in industrial management, and had gained professional experience as a statistical analyst. Miss McKay, who was to remain on the staff for the next 24 years in a variety of responsible capacities, was given the title of research agent.
To develop a factual base, an ambitious questionnaire was sent to 50 leading state and local organizations for the blind with the object of building a "vocational clearing house system" that would provide "as complete a catalog as possible of the jobs engaged in by blind people of this country since January 1, 1926." By the end of 1927, job data had been received from 1,141 individuals: 171 factory workers, 153 professionals, 185 independent businessmen, 170 salesmen, 93 piano and organ tuners, 49 clerical workers, 80 handicraft workers, 49 household workers, and 191 miscellaneous. Not surprisingly, in view of the catchall nature of the inquiry, the information was frustratingly incomplete, particularly on the people in professional work, many of whom had no contact with agencies for the blind. Also missing were all-important details regarding the specific types of industrial operations performed by factory workers. The broad sweep of an overall study was clearly not the answer. If usable knowledge was to be gathered, individual employment sectors would have to be tackled one by one.
A Vocational Advisory Committee appointed in early 1928 selected for initial study the fields of insurance underwriting, clerical occupations, vending stand-keeping, osteopathy, and physical therapy (the last two fields were then open to blind practitioners but subsequently closed by action of their respective professional associations). It also proposed an examination of subsidized home industries and an inquiry into the question of workmen's compensation laws in various states and how these affected employment of blind persons. The need for a study of the sheltered workshops was noted, but deferred until resources were available to undertake what was sure to be a difficult and time-consuming project.
To stimulate interest in employment problems, a periodic bulletin, Vocational News Notes, was circulated among agencies for the blind. One of the early issues listed 84 different factory operations performed by blind workers in a dozen industries, from automobile manufacture to candy production. The list was designed to jolt into action some of the laggard agencies that were doing little or nothing about industrial placement work in their communities. In its 1928 annual report, the Foundation offered to assign a staff member to "conduct demonstration placement work in these communities and to train newly appointed placement agents to perform this difficult service."
By way of national action, an illustrated brochure, "What the Blind Do," was sent, early in 1929, to a large list of persons, organizations, and industrial firms. A special covering letter from Helen Keller accompanied the mailing of this brochure to Lions Clubs, asking that their members spread its message among potential employers.
By mid-1929 the clearing house operation had already registered close to 2,000 blind persons engaged in non-subsidized work, and the Vocational Advisory Committee was continuing to recommend new lines of investigation. Most of these necessarily faded from view a few months later, with the Wall Street crash. Although the register continued to be maintained for several years thereafter, active promotion of overall vocational opportunities for blind people was clearly futile at a time when so many of the nation's able-bodied workers were unable to find jobs.
The key to survival during the early Thirties was catch-as-catch-can, but once the Social Security Act came into force to safeguard the most helpless, the vocational needs of abler blind people could be returned to the spotlight. The Randolph-Sheppard Act of 1936 and the Wagner-O'Day Act of 1938 opened significant channels of economic opportunity to blind persons who were capable of operating small businesses, holding production jobs in open industry, or increasing their earning power in sheltered workshops. It took a third piece of legislation, the Vocational Rehabilitation Act amendments of 1943, to chip away at remaining barriers by providing federal funds to help the states finance an unprecedented array of vocational training, counseling and placement services for blind adults.
In pre-electronic days, when the printed word was the sole channel of public information, there were small numbers of blind people who earned their livings by operating newsstands in busy urban locations. Once the 1914–18 war aroused the public conscience to the needs of disabled servicemen, ordinances were passed in a number of cities and states giving such men preferential opportunities as licensed newspaper vendors. New York City was one of the leaders; a 1920 law gave veterans with service-connected disabilities preference in securing strategic newsstand locations at subway entrances, under elevated railroad stairways, and at high-traffic intersections. Under this law, second preference was given to blind civilians, and third preference to civilians with disabilities other than blindness.
The New York Association for the Blind, popularly known as the Lighthouse, seized the opportunity to initiate a program that would help blind persons gain access to these small businesses. It processed applications for newsstand licenses, supplied applicants with the required blindness certifications, negotiated with municipal authorities over locations. It made interest-free loans to applicants for the necessary initial investments: money to equip new vending stands or modernize old ones, to prepay insurance premiums, to meet suppliers' demands for cash deposits, etc. It initiated training programs to prepare applicants for their responsibilities through on-the-job clerking experience and sought to expand the available number of profitable locations by securing indoor stand concessions in municipal and commercial buildings.
Adoption of comparable laws in a handful of other cities and states prompted hopes that similar concessions could be achieved nationally. In 1921, at the request of the New York State Commission for the Blind (then chaired by M.C. Migel), Senator James Wadsworth of New York introduced a bill designed to open federal buildings to blind newsvendors. The bill failed to attract interest and never came to the floor. From time to time during the next few years efforts were made to approach the problem through administrative channels. Control over most federal buildings was then in the hands of the Treasury Department. All that was needed, it seemed, was to get that department to exempt blind persons from its general ruling against vendors in federal buildings.
When efforts to accomplish this proved unavailing, sights were once again trained on a legislative approach. Meeting in 1927, the American Association of Workers for the Blind adopted a resolution "to strongly recommend that the federal government open its public buildings to business stands to be operated by the blind." Not long thereafter, a blind senator, Thomas D. Schall of Minnesota, introduced a bill proposing the creation within the Department of Labor of "a bureau for the blind" whose functions would be to open government buildings—federal, state, and municipal—to stands to be operated by blind people. Reporting on this measure at the next AAWB convention, the association's Committee on Legislation declared that the Schall bill had provoked so much controversy "of a confusing and baffling character" that the committee had been unable to arrive at a consensus.
Most of the controversy centered on means, not ends. Everyone agreed that vending stand concessions in public buildings would open important new economic channels for blind persons, but there was sharp divergence over whether the creation of a federal bureau for the blind was a viable method of doing so. In November 1930, at a conference convened by the Foundation to consider the matter, a dozen specialists in employment thrashed out the question of strategy. The group concluded that revival of the Schall bill (which had meanwhile died in committee) did not hold the answer, that "the complete control of federal buildings lay with the Secretary of the Treasury" and that, as a first step, the Foundation should approach Treasury Secretary Andrew W. Mellon. Legislative action could be the second resort.
Mellon was not receptive to the proposal. Neither was his Republican successor, Ogden L. Mills, who served in the final year of the Hoover administration, nor William H. Woodin, who was Franklin D. Roosevelt's first appointee to the Treasury post. Migel, who called on all three with the help of introductions from influential friends in Congress, encountered stony indifference to every argument he put forward. In a letter to Secretary Mills following a personal meeting in March 1932, he noted among other things that if the Treasury Department was unwilling to bother with screening and selection of persons to operate vending stands in federal buildings, the Foundation, with the help of state agencies for the blind, "would cheerfully agree to assume the responsibility for determining the merit of applicants, their capacity and reliability."
None of these persuasions having prevailed, at Migel's request Senator Reed Smoot introduced a bill giving the Secretary of the Treasury optional, not mandatory, authority to grant vending stand permits to blind persons. Unwilling to be told what to do by Congress, the Treasury opposed the measure and the bill was never reported out.
In the first year of the Roosevelt administration a House bill introduced by Congressman Joseph W. Martin of Massachusetts revived the Schall plan for establishment of a bureau for the blind in the Labor Department to handle federal vending stand concessions. In the conviction that this measure, like its predecessors, would get nowhere, Migel decided to reach for the top. Accompanied by Foundation trustee Mary V. Hun, the old friend and political associate of Franklin D. Roosevelt, he called on the President, who responded with gratifying promptness by issuing an executive order to the Treasury Department directing that blind people be exempted from the general rule prohibiting vending stands in federal buildings. On May 18, 1933, a general order was sent out to building custodians by the Secretary of the Treasury permitting "blind persons to sell papers, et cetera, in such buildings where there is sufficient space to make this possible without interfering with the public business."
The long impasse was now seemingly broken, but rejoicing was short-lived. Just four weeks later the Treasury issued a supplementary order which imposed such strangling limitations on the newly granted concessions as to all but cancel them. The privilege extended to blind persons, this second order stipulated,
is to be confined to the selling of newspapers and magazines, and is not to include candy, chewing gum, tobacco or any other commodities whatever.
Worse still:
No rack, stand, counter, table or other fixture or furniture is to be permitted within the building for this purpose, but there is no objection to the use of a portable stool or chair, which, if used, must be taken away when the vendor leaves the building each day.
Migel fired off an indignant telegram to Assistant Secretary of the Treasury L.W. Robert, Jr., who had signed the order. He then had a conference with Robert, following which he reiterated his objections in writing. Not only was the amended order totally at variance with the Roosevelt directive, he wrote, but "the use of a chair or stool and a blind man sitting on it brings him down almost to the status of a mendicant (something that we have for years endeavored to get away from), whereas a stand, no matter how tiny, creates a sense of dignity and responsibility." All over the country, he went on, the first order had activated organizations for the blind to begin screening candidates for vending stand permits. "Rescinding of the original permission granted would mean a sad and bitter disappointment to the blind of practically the entire country."
Perhaps because the Treasury Department was in a state of disarray—Secretary Woodin's health had collapsed as a result of the banking crisis of the past spring; his successor, who was to be Henry Morgenthau, Jr., had not yet been appointed; there were basic reorganizational changes in the offing, under which post office buildings were to be transferred from Treasury Department jurisdiction to the United States Post Office—whatever the reason, Assistant Secretary Robert stood pat.
The reorganized postal structure led to the introduction of a new bill in the House of Representatives to set up a bureau in the Post Office Department to license blind persons "for the operation of stands in federal buildings, post offices, Army and Navy structures, and other governmental buildings throughout the United States for the vending of newspapers, periodicals, candies and tobacco" as well as other articles should these commodities fail to yield a sufficient volume of business. This bureau, the bill said, was to be headed by a director, "to be appointed by the President, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate"—a person with "practical business experience and social work [experience] pertaining to the blind." Preference in the appointment was to be given to a qualified blind person.
The bill, H.R. 5694, was introduced by Matthew Dunn of Pennsylvania, then serving his maiden term in Congress. Dunn, a graduate of the Overbrook School for the Blind, was known to Robert Irwin, who did not wholly approve of him. In private correspondence he described Dunn as "quite a champion of street beggars in Pittsburgh and Harrisburg, and during the several years he was a member of the Pennsylvania legislature, he always lined up with the more radical of the labor group." Nevertheless, Irwin recognized that Dunn's blindness would lend him weight in Congress on laws relating to the blind.
Disheartened by the bureaucratic undermining of the Presidential order to the Treasury Department, workers for the blind were sufficiently stirred up over the Dunn bill for the AAWB to ask the Foundation to call a nationwide strategy conference in December 1933.
The bill's most vigorous advocate was a blind Cleveland lawyer, Leonard A. Robinson, who headed a statewide organization of blind people. He was known to have drafted the Dunn bill, and it was generally believed that he hoped to be appointed to the directorship of the projected bureau. But at the strategy conference the consensus—with Robinson's the sole dissenting voice—opted once again in favor of a two-step plan. First, the Foundation was to continue its efforts to get more satisfactory administrative compliance with the President's executive order. If this approach failed, then legislation was to be attempted. Herman M. Immeln, then president of AAWB, appointed a seven-man legislative committee to draft a revised version of the Dunn bill should the legislative tack be called for.
Named to chair the legislative committee was Benjamin Berinstein of New York, a blind attorney who was a charter member of the Alumni Association of the New York State School for the Blind at Batavia. Berinstein, a short-tempered man with an eloquent, frequently acerbic tongue, soon found himself at loggerheads with Robinson who, while accepting membership on the committee, nevertheless chose to go his own way by campaigning in the name of Ohio groups for immediate legislation.
Worked out by the committee, the revised version of the Dunn bill which the Pennsylvania congressman introduced on March 7, 1934, differed in two important respects from his earlier bill. Dunn had originally proposed financing the cost of the bureau for the blind by charging annual license fees for vending stands; the revised version called instead for a modest federal appropriation to launch the bureau. A second change concerned the qualifications of the bureau's director. These now required, in addition to practical business experience, "not less than two years of experience in the work of placing blind persons in stands and dealing with the problems of such persons in the operation of such stands." The last requirement appeared to eliminate Leonard Robinson from the top job slot.
As it happened, neither part of the two-step strategy succeeded that year or the next. A meeting with Franklin D. Roosevelt and James A. Farley in February 1934 brought no results. The second Dunn bill failed to pass. According to Robert Irwin, the inability to make progress with the postal authorities was due at least partially to the disharmony in the ranks of spokesmen for the blind.
Neither side gave up, however. The Post Office having proved intractable, Migel and Irwin used the connections they had previously established in the Treasury Department to see what could be done about the buildings that remained within that department's jurisdiction. This brought about the Foundation's first contact with Mary E. Switzer, then assistant to an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury and destined to become, in the years ahead, the nation's most influential government official in rehabilitation of the handicapped. Migel met Miss Switzer in late 1934 and at her suggestion wrote to Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr., urging that at least an experiment be tried by establishing stands in a few buildings "with the full understanding that your Department would have absolute power to revoke the privilege." Several stands, including a most successful one in the United States Customs House in New York City, were established on this basis.
Robinson, on his part, was indefatigable in pursuit of legislative action. At a Lions' convention in 1934 he met Jennings Randolph, then a newly elected Congressman. Early in 1936 Randolph introduced a vending stand bill in the House. An almost identical measure was introduced in the Senate by Morris Sheppard of Texas. Following hearings, the House Committee on Labor recommended passage of the Randolph bill. The committee's report said in part:
The Federal Government is spending billions of dollars to create employment opportunities for millions of persons, but not one blind person is benefitted thereby. The blind cannot build bridges, buildings, and do other kinds of work now being authorized by the Public Works Administration. … There is no definite or practical national system or plan whereby placement work for the blind can be done. …
The committee believes that the speedy enactment of this measure into law would take care of a group of our people who are in distress and who are not being reached by any of the vast rehabilitation experiments which the government is conducting.
(The committee report, commendable in its zeal, was not quite accurate in its details. There were, in fact, a small number of blind people employed in public works programs—in hand transcribing of braille, making of embossed maps for students in schools for the blind, supplying home teaching and other personal adjustment services to housebound blind persons. And the WPA project for the manufacture of Talking Book machines was just getting started.)
Following passage by the House on March 16, 1936, the Randolph bill and the companion measure of Senator Sheppard came before the Senate Committee on Education and Labor, whose chairman, David I. Walsh, had solicited the written views of the affected government departments. Walsh's committee report reflected the negativism of the bureaucracies:
This legislation would allow the setting up of stands by the blind in federal buildings for the sale of newspapers, magazines, candy, tobacco products, and so forth, and provides that these stands be licensed by the Office of Education. The bill further provides that a survey be made of concession stand opportunities for the blind in this country; second, that a survey be made throughout the United States of industries, with a view to obtaining information that will assist blind persons to obtain employment; third, that this data be made available to the public and especially to persons and organizations interested in helping the blind; and fourth, that licenses be issued to blind persons, to be approved by the custodian of the building and the Commissioner of Education.
The Senate and House bills, as originally introduced, made mandatory rather than permissive the operation of stands by blind persons. … These provisions were objected to by the Department[s] of the Treasury, Interior, and Labor, and upon the suggestion of the Secretary of the Interior, the committee has amended section 1 of the House bill leaving "in the discretion of the head of the department or agency in charge of the maintenance of the building" whether such vending stands shall be operated by blind persons licensed under the act.
The committee has omitted section 3 of the House bill, which section authorized the Commissioner of Education, with the approval of the Secretary of the Interior, to purchase vending-stand equipment for use in federal buildings, and also the purchase by the Federal Government, rather than by the State, of stands and stand equipment for loan by the states to the blind operators of such stands. …
The amended bill was signed into law on June 20, 1936, as Public Law 74-732. It was a pale shadow of what spokesmen for the blind had sought and it contained the seeds of much future discontent, but it was nevertheless recognized as (and subsequent events proved it to be) an important breakthrough in three different directions:
Vending stands operated by blind men in federal buildings served as showcase operations—public demonstrations, day after day, of the competence of blind persons to handle businesses efficiently and profitably. This not only raised the popular estimate of blind people's capabilities but encouraged the establishment of similar vending operations in state and municipal buildings and, even more significantly, in non-governmental office buildings and factories.
The provisions touching upon industrial placement opportunities opened new channels for employment of blind persons in factory and other production jobs.
It was an opening wedge in federal civil service for blind people. The nation's first blind civil servant was the man chosen to administer the Randolph-Sheppard Act with the title of special agent for the blind in the Vocational Education Board of the United States Office of Education, then located in the Department of the Interior. He was Joseph F. Clunk who, in turn, saw to the appointment of a number of other able blind men—including Leonard Robinson—to serve of his staff, the Act having specified that at least 50 percent of those employed by the federal government to work on the vending stand program should be blind.
Clunk was sworn into federal service in June 1937. By every standard he was the right man in the right place at the right time. He had just completed nine years of creating, in Canada, a vending stand and industrial placement program for blind people that was the envy and admiration of United States workers for the blind.
Joseph Clunk had lost his sight in 1918, when he was twenty-three and a student at Western Reserve University in his native state of Ohio. A zealous, stubborn man of mercurial temperament imbued with exceptional courage and self-confidence, he started his new life as a blind person by proving he could fill a sighted man's shoes. Two months after leaving the hospital he began earning his living as a house-to-house salesman of toiletries, traveling alone. On the theory that anything he could do, other blind people could also do, he joined the staff of the Cleveland Society for the Blind to handle placement work and performed so effectively that he was soon offered the post of executive secretary of the Youngstown (Ohio) Society for the Blind.
His approach to industrial placement was simplicity itself. As he later recounted:
It fell to me as a young newly-blinded man to develop the method of analyzing industrial jobs by working on each process for an hour or more in the same manner as though employed by the company. This procedure enabled the employer to understand that various machines did not require sight on the part of an operator, and that persons without sight but possessing adequate basic ability could be employed as easily as sighted machine operators.
Clunk regarded himself as a salesman whose product ("the commodity of blind labor") was worth "selling to industry on its merits and at face value." His viewpoint was bluntly practical:
To appeal to an employer to give a poor blind man a job on basis of sympathy or charity is a waste of time and effort. … The employer must be shown … that our worker is not going to cost him any more in wages, in overhead or in liability insurance, and that his investment in space occupied by a properly placed blind worker will bring him just as much profit as any other employee. Placement workers must be as ready to condemn suggested jobs as to approve them, for it is folly to accept any job offered by an employer unless we are absolutely certain that it can be held by the worker we have to place.
He believed that should a blind worker fail at a particular job, it was the responsibility of the placement agency, rather than the employer, to remove him and substitute another blind person who could do better. By standing behind the placement, the agency could preserve the confidence of the employer.
So convinced was Clunk of his techniques that in 1926 he proposed that the Foundation establish a placement bureau with a capable blind man in charge to lead a nationwide movement. The Foundation was not ready for this, but soon enough an opportunity materialized north of the border. Ever since its founding in 1919, the Canadian National Institute for the Blind (CNIB) had sought to develop an effective industrial placement and vending stand program. In 1928 Clunk was invited to try. Within two years, the CNIB had more blind persons at work on industrial production lines and in vending stands than were employed by all five sheltered workshops in the Dominion. By 1937, when Clunk left to take the Washington job, seven hundred blind men and women had been placed in non-sheltered work in Canada and the CNIB was that country's largest operator of industrial lunch, canteen, and vending services.
The year's delay between passage of the Randolph-Sheppard Act and the appointment of Clunk to carry out its provisions was due to the lack of an initial appropriation. In the interim, the Office of Education used its existing staff to initiate some of the administrative steps needed to launch the program. John A. Kratz, who had been chief of the federal Vocational Education Board since its establishment in 1920, called a conference of interested parties in September 1936 to exchange views on how the Act could best be put into effect. This led, the following month, to issuance of a set of principles and procedures covering such basic points as selection of buildings and building locations, equipment, articles to be vended, selection and training of operators, and supervision of stand operation.
This final item was a touchy one, and was to remain so throughout the years. The opinion of many vending stand operators was that they were independent businessmen whose freedom of action was infringed by outside supervision. But Kratz had already discovered that, left to its own devices, the whole program could easily collapse. His conviction was borne out by evidence close at hand.
A few years earlier the Public Buildings Administration in Washington had given a local agency for the blind permission to install 17 vending stands in federal buildings. Lacking any sort of experienced guidance, 6 of these had already been abandoned and the remaining 11 were on a shaky footing. The Public Buildings Administration had told Kratz:
There is nothing in our experience which leads us to believe that blind persons and retail merchandising are compatible, and we intend to close the 11 stands as rapidly as circumstances will permit. We do not believe in the program envisaged in the Randolph-Sheppard Act and we want nothing to do with it.
Since the Act called for designation in each state of a public agency to license stand operators, and invested the licensing agency with the responsibility for training, placing, and supervising the vendors and for providing them with initial stocks of merchandise as well as adequate equipment, there was an obvious need for such agencies to keep some degree of control. It was not the individual vendor but the licensing agency—usually the state agency for the blind—that had to persuade custodians of federal buildings to allow vending stands to be installed.
By the summer of 1937 a total of 27 state agencies had been approved by the Office of Education to administer vending stand programs; two years later, the number was 43. Describing the progress made as of mid-1941, Kratz told a convention of the AAWB that 316 vending stands had thus far been established in federal buildings and about six hundred others in non-federal locations.
He was particularly gratified to be able to report the complete turnaround in the nation's capital where, under the aegis of the District of Columbia's Vocational Rehabilitation Service—with a newly organized voluntary agency, the Washington Society for the Blind, serving as fiscal agent—there were now 29 stands in operation doing a gross business of $42,000 a month and yielding the operators an average monthly income of more than $200. Since the District of Columbia lacked civic autonomy and was run by the federal government, the District's Vocational Rehabilitation Service was a unit of Kratz's bureau in the Office of Education. Leonard Robinson, who was put in charge of the D.C. operation in 1940, and remained in that capacity until his retirement in 1971, had been largely responsible for the successful performance. (The Washington Society for the Blind was dissolved in 1971 and replaced by a new non-profit agency, District Enterprises for the Blind, which took over the licensing, managerial and fiscal responsibilities for the 75 vending stands then in Washington buildings.)
The District of Columbia operation was modeled after the Canadian system of "controlled management" under which the licensing agency held title to the stands, took responsibility for equipment, merchandise displays, bookkeeping, accounting, and general supervision of the operators. A number of states copied this system, despite the resistance of many operators who saw no need for supervisory and management services and saw no justification for paying the licensing agency a small percentage of their gross sales—known as the set-aside—for them.
At an AAWB meeting in 1951 Maurice I. Tynan, who a year earlier had succeeded Clunk as head of what had by then been renamed Services for the Blind of the Office of Vocational Rehabilitation, placed equal blame on what he called the selfish attitude of such operators who "are usually better off financially than any other group of blind persons," and on the inadequate performance of some of the state licensing agencies which were failing to give the operators the services that justified the set-aside. Exhorting his hearers to make new efforts to keep the vending stand program as "the show window of work for the blind," he continued: "We should build a reputation for having the best operated, best equipped stands to be found anywhere if we are to compete and overcome the inherent prejudices of the general public in dealing with blind persons."
Tynan was speaking in his capacity as a federal official. This may account for the fact that his remarks did not even touch upon a situation which was engendering mounting concern and anger among both the vending stand operators and the state licensing agencies, and which was the subject of a resolution adopted at the very convention he addressed. The resolution called for a law to "prohibit government employee welfare associations from sponsoring or placing vending machines in public buildings in competition with the business enterprise program for the blind."
The newly elected president of AAWB that year was Roy Kumpe, managing director of Arkansas Enterprises for the Blind. His state had shared honors with the District of Columbia in pioneering effective vending stand programs under the Randolph-Sheppard Act. On behalf of his own state, as well as in the name of AAWB, Kumpe brought the encroachment problem to the attention of Congressman Graham A. Barden of North Carolina, chairman of the House Committee on Labor and Education.
Following a fact-finding inquiry by his staff, Barden summoned a meeting on August 1, 1951, of members of the Arkansas Congressional delegation, representatives of the General Services Administration, members of the Office of Vocational Rehabilitation staff, and Hulen C. Walker, the Foundation's legislative analyst. Barden made a strong statement, and the other Congressmen concurred. He said: "The intent of Congress to give preference to blind persons with respect to vending stands in federal buildings is quite clear and places a definite responsibility on the various federal agencies … to see that no policies or procedures circumvent or encroach upon it in any way."
But no action was taken, and the situation grew steadily worse. By early 1954, in one of the strongest editorials ever to appear in its pages, the New Outlook for the Blind called for an end to lethargy. It voiced alarm over "the insidious wedges into the Congress-given right of blind persons" to earn a living as vendors in government buildings. Postal employee groups, the editorial said, were the main aggressors in installing vending machines for the benefit of their own recreation or welfare associations, in spite of the fact that there existed "absolutely no legal authority for postal employee union groups to install vending machines for something called their welfare."
To build a factual case for a legislative campaign, the Foundation conducted a national survey of vending stand operations in government buildings. Simultaneously, a number of bills were introduced in the House of Representatives to amend the Randolph-Sheppard Act. One of these called for removing the power to decide on installation of vending concessions from both the custodians of federal buildings and their parent agencies, and centralizing all such decisions in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.
In his testimony before the House committee which held hearings on the various vending stand and related measures in May 1954, M. Robert Barnett trained his principal fire on the offending bureaucracies. The fact that the vending stand program had "fallen upon evil times" was "the fault of the Government itself," he said bluntly. Worse still, said Barnett, the offending groups were "openly bragging about their victory over the blind and making it crystal clear that they do not intend that they shall be prevented from continued expansion of their illegal practices." The most recent encroachment had occurred
as a result of the action of the Secretary of Agriculture who in his anxiety to dispose of surplus milk supplies has arranged for a commercial vendor to install milk vending machines in the Department of Agriculture building, in competition with a blind-operated vending stand whose hours of business have been limited by some official edict, in order "to divide business." The Secretary is further quoted as having said that if he could have his way, similar vending machines would be installed in all federal buildings.
Barnett asserted that while workers for the blind would prefer enactment of a bill specifically designed to amend the Randolph-Sheppard Act, they would go along with the omnibus administration bill, then before Congress, which dealt with both the Vocational Rehabilitation Act and the Randolph-Sheppard Act and which was subsequently enacted as Public Law 83-565. While the bill's principal importance was in accelerating vocational rehabilitation services, it also effected some potentially significant changes in the vending stand program. By changing the phrase "federal buildings" to "federal properties," it created additional opportunities in national parks and reservations. It stipulated that vending machines were part of the vending stand program, reaffirmed in specific language that blind persons were to be given preference whenever a vending stand was to be installed on federal property, and required federal agency heads to issue regulations to that effect.
Although P.L. 565, which was enacted August 3, 1954, did not go along with the request that all decision-making power over vending installations be vested in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, it did transfer such power from the individual custodians of federal properties to their parent agencies.
The new law also reinforced both the obligations and the privileges of the state licensing agencies, which were now required to furnish the equipment and initial stock of new vending stands. The law permitted the agencies to take title to the stands, though not forbidding personal ownership. In this respect, it disappointed the National Federation of the Blind, which had urged mandatory decontrol of agency ownership. The Federation was also unhappy over the specific permission given in the law for the set-aside arrangement. And everybody was unhappy over what the amendment altogether failed to do: grapple openly with the problem of competition from federal employee groups. Nor did it really enforce a change in what the Outlook called the "ineffective if not dilatory attitude of governmental administrators."
In late 1954, and again in 1955, the Foundation held two national meetings to develop a unified point of view on the basic goals, problems, and opportunities of the vending stand program. It was hoped that clarification of the needs and wishes of both licensing agencies and operators would lead to prompt, helpful, and practicable regulations by the 12 federal agencies controlling property on which stands were located. The hope failed to materialize. It took nearly a year after passage of Public Law 565 for the first of the federal departments to issue regulations, and more than three years before the last of the 12 provided orders to custodians of its buildings. The vending stand program was stymied, not only by these delays but also by some of the regulations themselves, which were unhelpful.
It is perhaps too easy to cast the federal bureaucracy in the role of outright villain in this situation, although advocates of the blind did not hesitate to do so. The fact was that these bureaus were under considerable counterpressure from their own employees to protect the kind of squatter's rights by means of which the latter claimed vending machine income. The employee groups that installed vending machines in the buildings in which they worked vehemently denied, despite clear evidence to the contrary, that these machines invaded the income of the blind vendors in the same buildings. They insisted that the yield from the machines was essential to staff morale because it financed flowers for sick members, scholarships for employees' children, uniforms and prizes for bowling teams, annual picnics and the like.
The reluctance of the federal agencies to disturb relations with their workers evidently overbalanced their knowledge that not only was their action (or lack of it) in direct conflict with the obligations imposed upon them by Congress, it was also in violation of two rulings—in 1949 and again in 1952—by the United States Comptroller General. These had stated flatly that vending machine operation for the benefit of employee groups was without statutory authority and that any such proceeds should accrue to the United States Treasury.
While the potential for expansion of vending opportunities for blind persons in federal buildings was thus substantially throttled, the program made major strides in non-federal installations. In 1952, for example, there were 559 stands in federal buildings and 920 in non-federal buildings. Between the two there were employed some 2,100 persons whose aggregate net earnings were $3,690,000 on gross sales of $18,660,000. That the federal buildings were desirable from a profit viewpoint could be seen from the fact that the operators in these installations averaged $2,279 in income as against $1,761 for those in non-federal buildings. But nine years later, the number of federal stands had grown by only 97, while those in other locations had increased by 598. At the end of fiscal 1971, the overall figures stood at 3,142 vending stands (986 federal, 2,466 non-federal) with gross sales of just over $101 million. Annual earnings of vending stand operators then averaged $6,516.
One of the troublesome issues growing out of the regulations of the various government departments, once they were finally promulgated in the late Fifties, concerned the question of how to settle disputes between state licensing agencies and the bureaus in control of federal property. A state agency which applied for a vending stand location and was turned down had little recourse. In 1962 Jennings Randolph, who was by then in the Senate, introduced a bill calling for a Presidentially appointed appeals board to resolve such disputes. Hearings on the bill brought fervent assurances from the Bureau of the Budget and other federal agencies that no legislation was needed because departmental regulations could be amended to provide for internal appeals procedures. Such regulations were finally issued two years later, but they proved cumbersome and not readily applicable to the central issue of conflicting claims between agencies for the blind and employee welfare groups.
Other efforts were made in 1968, and again in 1969, to introduce corrective legislation. To present a united front against the employee associations, the Foundation convened the leadership of the five other national organizations concerned with the issue: the American Association of Workers for the Blind, the National Council of State Agencies for the Blind, the Blinded Veterans Association, the National Federation of the Blind, and the American Council of the Blind. The six groups reached agreement on what was needed (and also agreed not to disagree—in public at least—on the set-aside question which remained a major point of difference among them). They drafted a bill which was introduced as S. 2461 by Senator Randolph on the 33rd anniversary of the original Randolph-Sheppard Act.
The basic purpose of the bill was to establish more precise and binding definitions that would assure blind licensees preference in vending operations, including exclusive assignment of vending machine income. It also called for all new public buildings to include in their design a satisfactory site for a vending facility.
Hearings on S. 2461 were held in the summer of 1970 by a sub-committee of the Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare. The same hearings took testimony on a bill to amend the Wagner-O'Day Act, then also before the Senate. For reasons of strategy, the federal employee associations abstained from testifying at these hearings; should the Randolph bill die in the Senate, they could avoid the public obloquy of interfering with blind men's rights to earn a living. When, however, the bill achieved unanimous passage in the Senate, the employee associations—principally spokesmen for postal groups—took vigorous action at the subsequent House hearings. Enough of a crossfire was set up for the House committee, chaired by Congressman John Brademas of Indiana, to refrain from reporting out the bill.
Senator Randolph reintroduced substantially the same bill (S. 2506) during the next session of Congress, and hearings were once again held in the Senate in 1971 and in the House in 1972. They were for the most part a reprise of the testimony given at the earlier hearings—except for what one journalist, in a slashing exposé titled "Stealing from the Blind," called "perhaps [the] most remarkable achievement" of Senator Randolph: to produce the president of one federal union, the National Association of Internal Revenue Employees, who testified that its 47,000 members were firmly in favor of the bill.
In the election year of 1972, this union president's statement did not carry enough weight to offset the opposition of the other employee unions and associations whose combined membership added up to many millions—all of them voters, as one witness carefully reminded Congressmen at the House hearings. Although the Senate passed a modified form of the Randolph bill, its principal features disappeared in the compromise version that emerged from a House-Senate conference committee. The conference report noted that the omissions were not "due to any lack of concern for, or disregard of the need for, strong and forward-looking amendments to the Randolph-Sheppard Act" and that both House and Senate would "consider these matters in depth" in the next Congress. It added:
The conferees are deeply concerned that the Congress has not been able to obtain any definitive information concerning legitimate uses of vending machine income on federally-controlled property [and] urge that the General Accounting Office conclude, at the earliest possible date, its audit and study of such funds. …
The few changes that did get through the conference committee were among the several titles incorporated in the omnibus Rehabilitation Act (H.R. 8395) which was vetoed in toto by President Nixon in October 1972. An even more ominous development surfaced the following month when the General Services Administration, in an effort to reduce the annual deficits in certain cafeteria operations in federal buildings, proposed regulations to prevent blind vendors in those buildings from selling hot foods prepared in microwave ovens. Final action on this newest restriction was still pending at the end of 1972.
In work for the blind, the Randolph-Sheppard Act evokes automatic association with the expansion of vending stand opportunities. Often overlooked has been the pivotal role of this piece of legislation in the development of pioneering techniques that enabled large numbers of blind men and women to earn their living as industrial workers.
It was a particularly timely role, one which shared with the Wagner-O'Day Act of 1938 the initial credit for the contribution made by thousands of blind production workers when the nation needed their manpower in World War 11. What the Wagner-O'Day Act did for the blind men and women producing goods in sheltered workshops is recounted in the next chapter. The program under the Randolph-Sheppard Act was aimed at a diametrically opposite purpose: taking blind people out of these workshops and into open industrial employment, side by side with sighted workers. Its contribution to that goal was achieved through the training of a group of blind placement agents in the practical demonstration methods perfected by Joseph Clunk during the preceding two decades.
Clunk himself had had some notable forerunners. The first instance of industrial placement by an American organization for the blind is said to have taken place in Massachusetts in 1904 when Charles F. F. Campbell induced the Dennison Manufacturing Company, producers of paper products, to employ a blind man to cut box corners. At the time, Campbell headed what was called the Experimental Station for the Trade Training of the Blind, a unit of the Massachusetts Association for Promoting the Interests of the Blind.
Campbell, whose missionary zeal was second only to his versatility, took photographs and made lantern slides of the box-cutter at work and showed them throughout the East in a drive to popularize the idea that blind people could function in other than the "blind trades." When he left New England, the industrial placement program he had initiated, by then under the direction of the Massachusetts Commission for the Blind, was carried on by his successors. Florence W. Birchard and Francis Ierardi both gained national prominence for their achievements along this line in the Bay State.
Similarly intrepid souls had made inroads in the industrial Midwest. One of the outstanding employers of blind labor was the Ford Motor Company, which employed 41 blind men between 1914 and 1944, retaining many even during the depression years when most plants let their handicapped workers go. Henry Ford II was awarded the Foundation's Migel Medal in 1944, in recognition of his enlightened labor policy toward the blind.
It was not, however, until Clunk joined the federal government as administrator of the Randolph-Sheppard Act that any organized national program was launched for the specific purpose of training vocational specialists in methods of placing blind persons in open employment. Clunk's authority for this program derived from the clauses in the Act that called for making national surveys of employment possibilities and passing on the information to organizations for the blind. A believer in direct action, Clunk did not bother much with extended formal surveys and reports. He dived at once into a training and demonstration program that would indoctrinate a nationwide corps of placement counselors in result-getting methods. The fastest road to this goal was to send likely blind men to Canada for field training, where they could learn from first-hand experience just what was entailed in locating jobs that blind men could do, persuading employers to give blind workers a trial at such jobs, preparing the job candidates themselves, and following through on such placements to make sure they stuck.
O. E. (Barney) Day, an Indiana mechanical engineer blinded at age thirty-one, was the first person to receive such field training. After six months with the Canadian National Institute for the Blind, he returned to the United States to take on the job of placing graduates of the Overbrook School in Philadelphia and later became chief of the Pennsylvania State Council for the Blind. His characteristic approach was illustrated in a magazine article which related his experience with the Keebler-Weyl Baking Company.
Day had gone to J. Y. Huber, the company's president, and asked that he be allowed to scout around the plant looking for spots suitable for blind workers. Huber wondered how Day could tell, and Day asked him
to speak to the workers as he and Barney walked through the plant. "If anybody looks up or turns around to answer but at the same time keeps working," said Barney, "that's the job I want to try." They had just started when Barney heard Mr. Huber say, "Hello, Marion, how are you?"
"I'm fine," she said, and looked up and smiled. Mr. Huber nudged his companion.
"By the way, Marion," Barney asked, "how long have you been on that job?"
"Oh, two or three years, I guess."
"Bet you could do it with your eyes closed, huh?"
"Sure," she answered. "Want to see me?"
The president laughed. "Come on," he told Barney, "let's get out of here before you fill the plant with blind people."
Similarly ingenious ploys were used by the many other blind men who, following Clunk's training program, achieved notable careers in industrial placement. Among those named by Clunk in a 1966 article recapitulating the pioneering days were Arthur Voorhees and Carl Hvarre in New Jersey, James Hyka in Cleveland, John McGettigan in Pittsburgh, August McCullom in Kansas, Kenneth McCullom in Connecticut, Floyd Lacy in Texas, Carston Ohnstead in Oklahoma, Carlos Gattis in Arkansas, John McAulay in Seattle, Hulen Walker in Tennessee, Walter Moran in Maine, J. Hiram Chappell in Oregon, Anthony Septineflli in California.
John McAulay, who had lost his sight in an accident during his college days, joined the federal staff in 1942 and was assigned to demonstrate that industrial placement of blind persons could be carried out in every part of the United States, whatever its economic complexion. He conducted whirlwind 30-day job-finding campaigns in each of three very different states: Louisiana, Colorado and Delaware. His accomplishments made the point. There were job opportunities everywhere.
McAulay also added a new dimension to the placement process by showing how the facilities of regular vocational and trade schools could be used to train blind people for industrial work. A manual he wrote on the subject was published in 1954 by the Foundation. Addressed to employment counselors, it spelled out the "live demonstration" technique he had perfected to induce shop instructors to take on blind students. It consisted of assembling the instructors around a piece of power machinery and then blindfolding one of them to prove how much could be done without sight, provided a "four-point pattern of safety" was followed to prevent accidents. In one such demonstration a blindfolded hygiene teacher, a woman who had never even seen a power lathe, performed perfectly.
McAulay's principles were given a practical test in the mid-Sixties when a three-year demonstration program enrolled groups of blind students in a full-scale machine shop course at a technical school in North Dakota and found that the graduates could more than hold their own in industrial jobs. The school's faculty, who began the experiment with an attitude of "we'll believe it when we see it," were soon able to see it:
Class instructors have observed that the determination and initiative shown by the blind students often amazes and encourages sighted students in the same shop area to do better. "There's one thing about these [blind] boys," they note. "They don't goof off a bit. We can't find a job they can't do. Once we transmit a mental picture of the job to be done to their minds, your job is practically done."
In 1961 the AAWB established an annual award for excellence in vocational counseling in memory of McAulay, who died in 1957.
The availability of people like Day, McAulay and their compeers became extremely important when, with the passage of the Vocational Rehabilitation Act amendments of 1943, large new amounts of federal funds were appropriated for vocational training of disabled persons. With these men as instructors, intensive six-week group training classes for blind industrial placement officers were conducted in several cities. In 1944 and 1945, eight such courses were given. In each, after two weeks of instruction in theoretical concepts, the trainees spent the remaining time undergoing actual work experience in about a hundred different production processes commonly found in the kinds of plants that almost every community had: machine shops, laundries, dry cleaning plants, bakeries, department stores, textile and furniture factories, etc.
Comparable courses were given for vocational counselors specializing in vending stand programs. There was also a course in agricultural placement, the first organized effort ever made to provide vocational help to blind persons living in rural areas.
Those enrolled in these courses were primarily staff members of state agencies for the blind. In a later appraisal of the long-range impact of this pioneer training program, the point was made that not only did it set the pattern for preparation of vocational counselors, it also developed leadership material for the years to come. Some notable names could be found among the alumni of those early training courses. They included Douglas C. MacFarland, since 1964 chief of services to the blind in the Social and Rehabilitation Service, Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, and M. Robert Barnett, since 1949 executive director of the American Foundation for the Blind.
Joseph Clunk, the "husky fellow with the flashing teeth and a cherubic but leather-plated countenance" who spark-plugged the movement, resigned from federal service in 1950 to become director of the Philadelphia branch of the Pennsylvania Association for the Blind. Following retirement from that post, he was continuing to function as a consultant in 1972.
