War-blinded. Few phrases evoke a stronger response, a response in which shock, pity, and guilt seek release through a passionate desire to make amends.
Even during the centuries when wars were fought by professional soldiers and the crippling consequences of conflict were regarded as occupational risks, men blinded in battle were special objects of concern. When, however, the men in the field were not mercenaries but conscripted citizens, public reaction reached new heights. It took a brilliant Briton, Arthur Pearson, to devise a way of channeling this reaction into a boldly original experiment.
A self-made publishing tycoon, Pearson suffered from progressive glaucoma. Surgery proved unavailing, and in 1913, when he was forty-seven years old, his sight failed altogether. With characteristic brio he told his wife, "I will never be a blind man. I am going to be the blind man."
What is now England's Royal National Institute for the Blind was then an old-established but fiscally faltering institution whose chief activity was braille publishing. Pearson used his press connections and his promotional flair to put the Institute on its financial feet. His reward was the presidency of a strengthened body, and it was in this capacity that, when World War I broke out a few months later, he began to give thought to what the war's consequences might be. That there would be men blinded in battle was a certainty; as to numbers, no one could guess. How could such men be helped to avoid feelings of hopelessness and uselessness? Pearson came up with an answer: a temporary hostel where men could "learn to be blind." Thus was born St. Dunstan's, an organization unique in its time. Some of its features were to serve as prototypes for rehabilitation centers the world over.
The Blinded Soldiers' and Sailors' Hostel, as it was called when its first two charges arrived, was established in a private residence in London in February 1915. Six weeks later, when the number had risen to 16, it moved to St. Dunstan's Lodge, a palatial estate in Regent's Park belonging to the American financier Otto H. Kahn. In one of the hands-across-the-sea gestures that preceded America's formal entry into World War I, Kahn had placed at Pearson's disposal—free of charge—the house, gardens, grounds, and outbuildings whose 15-acre spread was said to make it the largest single piece of property in London next to Buckingham Palace.
Kahn's villa was called St. Dunstan's Lodge because, when the mansion was built by the third Marquess of Hertford in 1830, its most distinctive feature was a mammoth clock adorned by lifesized carved figures which raised and lowered wooden clubs to strike each quarter-hour. This mechanical marvel had once been part of the ancient Church of St. Dunstan in the West, situated on Fleet Street in the City of London. Just as the Marquess' new home in Regent's Park neared completion, the church had been destroyed. The nobleman bought the clock, had it installed on the premises of his new home and christened the estate after it.*
St. Dunstan's physical quarters may have been rooted in an elegant past, but its mental outlook was fixed on the homely future. It was not enough, Pearson reasoned, to train men in self-care, in the techniques of daily living, and in vocational skills, and then leave them to their own devices. He set up a settlement department whose tasks included finding jobs for men who had been prepared for open employment as masseurs, typists, or telephone operators; furnishing initial capital and equipment to those who wanted to start small shops or farms; providing tools and raw materials to others who proposed to engage in home handicrafts like basketry, shoe-repairing or woodworking; and setting up a central marketing system for products they did not sell locally.
Even this extended service did not represent the end of the line. In launching a worldwide campaign to raise funds for St. Dunstan's, Sir Arthur Pearson (he was knighted in 1916) pledged that the organization would look after the welfare of every war-blinded man to the day he died. This meant that aftercare would be carried on for the next forty or fifty years and that the St. Dunstan's financial structure would have to be geared accordingly. Thirteen hundred blind men had already passed through St. Dunstan's by the time of the armistice in 1918, while two hundred more—still in military hospitals—had yet to be admitted for rehabilitation. What could not be predicted was the number whose sight had been injured during the war and who would eventually go blind. When the first actuarial survey was made in 1922, that figure was seriously underestimated at about three hundred; on this assumption, the survey calculated that there would still be fifteen hundred St. Dunstaners alive in 1935, nearly thirteen hundred in 1945, and just under eight hundred by 1955. The one factor that no one foresaw was that a second world war would necessitate opening the doors of St. Dunstan's to more than a thousand newly blinded men, and that the delayed blindness growing out of the eye injuries of both wars would bring the overall count of beneficiaries to some sixty-five hundred by 1972.
The man chosen by Sir Arthur to head the aftercare department was a tall, handsome young South African, Captain Ian Fraser. A sniper's bullet had gone through the eyes of the nineteen-year-old officer (later knighted as Lord Fraser of Lonsdale) during the battle of the Somme in 1916. Like other blinded British soldiers, his first contact with St. Dunstan's came soon after he was brought to the special eye ward of a military hospital in London. It was Pearson's practice to visit and talk with each new admission to this ward. At the time Fraser was admitted, however, Pearson was out of the city. Instead his personal assistant came, bearing a braille watch and a letter of cheer and encouragement from her chief. Both the message and the gift did a great deal to lift the spirits of the youthful officer; even more inspiring was the messenger, a young woman named Irene Mace who later became Mrs. Fraser. Miss Mace, like many others who staffed St. Dunstan's, was part of the Voluntary Aid Detachment corps whose members were popularly known as V.A.D.'s.
By the time Ian Fraser was medically fit and ready for admission to St. Dunstan's, its quarters had been greatly expanded to include additional buildings in Regent's Park and annexes in Brighton and Torquay. Blinded officers lived on Portland Place, not far from Regent's Park, in a house where Sir Arthur Pearson and his wife had also taken up residence. It was this proximity that gave Pearson the opportunity to spot the lively minded young South African as a promising assistant. When Pearson met an accidental death in 1921, Fraser was chosen to be his successor. A half-century later he was still chairman of St. Dunstan's, having maintained active interest and leadership in its work throughout a productive career in industry, in politics (he spent 34 years in the House of Commons before being made a Life Peer in 1958) and in distinguished public service.
Not only did St. Dunstan's succeed in achieving its basic purpose of preparing war-blinded men for productive lives, it proved to be a fertile spawning ground for leadership in work for the blind throughout the British Empire. After rehabilitation at St. Dunstan's, Captain Edwin A. Baker, the first Canadian officer to be blinded in World War I, played a key role in founding the Canadian National Institute for the Blind in Toronto. Clutha MacKenzie, blinded at Gallipoli, was the son of a former Prime Minister of New Zealand. When he returned home, he launched a campaign to raise the funds which transformed a small local school for blind children into a comprehensive service organization—the New Zealand National Institute for the Blind. During World War II, Sir Clutha (he had been knighted in 1935) established a St. Dunstan's outpost in India for men blinded in action in that war zone and then, at the urging of the Indian government, drew up plans for a postwar organizational structure to serve the country's numerous blind men, women and children.
In greater or lesser degree, all these men shared the outlook of St. Dunstan's founder, who referred to his institution as "the Aladdin of the modern world—going through the streets of Baghdad offering new lamps for old." The basic idea, Arthur Pearson said repeatedly, was "just this—a refusal to accept blindness as anything but a handicap."
So firm an organizational and financial structure was built by St. Dunstan's during and after World War I that England was ready to serve its men blinded in World War II. There were, of course, problems to be overcome. Temporary new quarters had to be found away from the Brighton seacoast where St. Dunstan's had established its principal residential training facilities after the Regent's Park property had been reclaimed by its owners. Provisions had to be made for a new, large-scale admissions program. Outposts were needed in war zones far from Britain—the Middle East, Australia, South Africa, India—so that preliminary rehabilitation treatment of newly blinded men could begin at once. New funds were needed to finance all of these efforts. It was Britain's good fortune to have a strongly established, ongoing body able to meet and surmount these challenges.
Not so the United States. Its World War I equivalent of St. Dunstan's was not perpetuated once the last war-blinded American serviceman had completed his rehabilitation training. With Pearl Harbor, the United States had to start all over again.
Compared with its European allies—and, for that matter, with the enemy countries—the United States had a small number of blinded casualties in the first war. Varying reports cite figures ranging from under 300 to nearly twice that many. The commonly accepted estimate was 450.
In 1924 the United States Veterans Bureau reported that it had given some form of rehabilitation service to 800 men with visual defects, of whom 480 came within its own rather narrow specifications for blindness. Among the latter group, 185 had been blinded in action and 162 by diseases contracted while in service. Pre-existing diseases and congenital defects aggravated by service accounted for the blindness of the others. The remainder of the 800 men on the Bureau's rolls still had too much sight to be classified as blind, but more than 200 of these subsequently suffered ocular deterioration, so that in September 1941 the Veterans Administration (successor to the Veterans Bureau) had on its register 726 World War I veterans receiving disability compensation for service-connected blindness.
The United States declared war on Germany on February 28, 1917. Shortly thereafter, the Council of National Defense appointed a Committee on Ophthalmology to advise the Surgeon General on problems resulting from eye wounds. An officer of the Surgeon General's staff, Major James Bordley, a Baltimore ophthalmologist, was assigned to survey the work being done for war-blinded in England and France and to seek the opinions of leading American workers for the blind on potential plans for America's war-blinded. The assembled information was presented to a ten-member Advisory Committee summoned by the Surgeon General's office to a conference in Washington in October 1917.
The members constituted a fairly representative Who's Who of contemporary and future leadership in work for the blind. There were the heads of the three pioneer schools for blind children: Edward E. Allen of Perkins, Olin H. Burritt of Overbrook, and Edward M. Van Cleve of New York. Another residential institution, the Ohio State School for the Blind, was represented in the person of Charles F.F. Campbell, then its superintendent, although Campbell was less important as an educator than as an idea man, placement specialist, and editor. The "progressives" in education—those who favored keeping blind children at home and having them taught in local public schools—were represented by Robert B. Irwin, then supervisor of classes for blind children in Cleveland and other Ohio cities.
Also on the committee were two experts in work for the adult blind: Liborio Delfino, field officer of the Overbrook school, who specialized in job placement of its graduates and alumni, and Frederick H. Mills, superintendent of a sheltered workshop, the Pennsylvania Working Home for Blind Men. Non-vocational interests were reflected in the membership of Gertrude T. Rider, then in charge of the Library of Congress' Reading Room for the Blind in Washington, and Walter G. Holmes, who probably had more direct contact with blind people all over the country than any of the others, through his editorship of the Matilda Ziegler Magazine for the Blind. The tenth member of the Advisory Committee, and its only layman, was M.C. Migel, designated in his capacity as treasurer of the Commission on Uniform Type for the Blind.
In two days of strenuous work the Advisory Committee drew up a detailed set of "Plans of the United States Government for Soldiers Blinded in Battle." These called for a two-step operation, beginning with the establishment of a special hospital center in France where preliminary rehabilitation training could be started as soon as the eye-wounded were brought in from the battlefields. The function of the center's staff—which was to include "at least one capable blind man for the inspirational value of his example"—would be to provide the newly blinded soldiers with "games, amusements of suitable kinds and physical and mental occupation" in various forms, including introductory "training in self-helpfulness": eating, dressing, shaving, etc. without benefit of sight. These activities were to be sustained during the transfer to ports of embarkation, on the homeward voyage, and at the American ports of entry until the men could be dispatched to a "Station for Re-Education of Blind Soldiers" to be established, equipped, and operated by the government on the eastern seaboard.
Here phase two would begin. From three months to a year would be required, the committee estimated, for completion of instruction and training
in such subjects as reading and writing the approved uniform embossed system, writing with the pencil and the typewriter, transcribing from the dictaphone and telephone switchboard operating; in such trades and occupations as are suitable for the blind. … in physical training through gymnastics, athletics, swimming, bowling, tramping, boating, etc.
The committee's document was nothing if not thorough. It contained a table of organization for the "re-education station" and a comprehensive syllabus detailing the personal adjustment and manual training skills to be taught, a list of the occupations open to blind persons, the range of recreational pursuits to be offered, even a percentage breakdown of the types of literature to be embossed for the instruction and diversion of the men as they acquired competence in finger-reading.
Looking beyond the training period, the plan called for the appointment of a placement agent to find employment for those completing their reeducation, and for establishment of a follow-up system to work with the blinded veterans and their families in the years to come.
Much of the plan was based on the two years of experience the British had already gained at St. Dunstan's. There were, however, two important differences. One was operational. The British, whose war-blinded could be transported to London overnight, had no need for a preliminary hospital center in France. The other was more fundamental. St. Dunstan's was a voluntary organization supported by private funds. In the United States, the program was to be conducted and financed by the government.
The Advisory Committee had no say on this last point, which was a government decision. At Dr. Bordley's instigation, the American Red Cross had volunteered to act as "the American St. Dunstan's" and had placed a formal proposal to that effect before the United States Surgeon General. The offer had been promptly refused on the principle, according to a diary kept by Dr. Bordley, "that the Secretary of War was not inclined to accept financial aid from civilian agencies."
Even before the Advisory Committee met, Dr. Bordley had located eminently suitable quarters for the proposed training school. He had suggested to a wealthy Baltimore woman, Mrs. T. Harrison Garrett, that she offer Evergreen, her 99-acre suburban estate, for this patriotic purpose, and she did so at a rental of one dollar a year. The Surgeon General accepted the offer in November 1917, but delays in appropriation of the funds needed to convert the estate's facilities to government use and to build additional needed structures put off the actual opening for six months.
In April 1918 the first trainees were admitted to Evergreen, whose official title was U.S. Army General Hospital No. 7. The term "hospital," used because the facility was under the direction of the Surgeon General, was a misnomer. Men still in need of medical treatment were cared for at a military hospital in Cape May, N.J., until they were physically fit for training. But their discharge from medical care did not mean discharge from military service.
Therein lay another essential difference between the American and British systems. For war-blinded Tommies, entrance to St. Dunstan's was voluntary; as soon as they were medically fit, they were discharged from the British Army and could begin to collect their disability allowances. So long as Evergreen remained under War Department control, however, the blinded American doughboy was obliged to remain in military status until a medical survey board decided that he had reached "the highest point of medical and physical restoration." This meant, among other things, that the enlisted man would sleep in a 20-bed dormitory at Evergreen, that he would eat Army-style in a mess hall where metal plates clanged on bare wooden tables, that officers would be separately housed and differently treated, and that—of paramount importance to a man who had a dependent family—he would continue to receive $30 a month in military pay instead of the far larger disability compensation he would be entitled to on discharge.
A complex set of circumstances governed the compensation question. In 1914 Congress passed the War Risk Insurance Act (subsequently amended in 1917), which introduced two novel ideas. One was indemnity through insurance, rather than pensions from public funds, for men disabled in line of duty in the armed forces. Total blindness, under this Act, called for a lifelong compensation payment of $100 a month; lesser degrees of disability were compensated according to the extent to which they reduced earning power. The other new feature was government-financed vocational training and rehabilitation for men invalided by military service, with the object of enabling them to function as productive members of the community.
What was unique about the War Risk Insurance Act was that compensation payment was keyed to the severity of the disability rather than to the military rank of the disabled person. This concept differed radically from systems then in existence in other western countries, where rank was the determining factor. In France, for example, the annual disability pension paid at the time of the Armistice for service-connected total blindness ranged from 975 francs ($195) for privates, to twice that amount for top-ranking noncommissioned officers, to a scale that went as high as 12,600 francs ($2,520) for commissioned officers. The British system also differentiated between ranks, although less sharply (40 shillings, equal to $10 weekly, for privates; 60 shillings for warrant officers). In addition Britain took into account a man's family obligations, making small extra payments for wives and children.
America's initial effort to establish a single disability standard for the war-injured was short-lived. The War Risk Insurance Act was superseded in mid-1918 by the Smith-Hughes Vocational Education Act. It created a Federal Board for Vocational Education to administer the task of providing vocational training for all war-disabled men, finding them jobs on completion of training, and maintaining follow-up services until they achieved financial independence.
Under this legislation, men in training status were to receive the same pay and family allowances as they had while in the service, which meant differential payments for varying ranks. But veterans were protected against arbitrary reduction in benefits. A man could elect to receive either the Federal Board's training allowance or the War Risk Insurance Act's disability benefit, whichever was greater. For a fully insured enlisted man, the latter could be as high as $157 a month. No wonder, then, that the men at Evergreen chafed at being kept in the service at one-fifth that amount. And no wonder, either, that the confusion of dealing with separate branches of the government added to their demoralization. A disabled veteran had to cope with the medical department of the Army for certification of his disability, with the United States Public Health Service for continuing medical care and treatment, with the Treasury Department's Bureau of War Risk Insurance for his disability compensation, and with the Federal Board of Vocational Education for his training and employment needs. It was not until 1921 that some of this bureaucratic red tape was simplified when the last two functions, plus all of the veterans' hospitals formerly supervised by the Surgeon General, were consolidated in the newly created United States Veterans Bureau.
These were some of the factors that, even allowing for all the plusses, made the first year at Evergreen disappointing to its trainees and to the leaders in work for the blind who had pinned such great hopes on an American version of St. Dunstan's. Disappointing, even though the plusses were many. Evergreen's surroundings were idyllic, dotted with magnificent gardens, groves, meadows and walks. The enlisted men occupied the stately main house, whose paneled entrance hall, with its beamed ceiling and carpeted floor, served as their lounge. Another fine old building housed the blinded officers, the military staff in charge of the installation and the civilian instructors. There were six new buildings, erected by the government at a cost of some $250,000. They included a schoolhouse, manual training shops and a recreation building with a fully equipped gymnasium, two bowling alleys, and a 60-foot swimming pool.
The teaching staff was also of high quality. More than half the faculty were experienced teachers on leave of absence from various schools for the blind. But they were civilians, half of them women, and they lacked status in a military establishment. The trainees were said to resent their presence; they came to classes late or not at all, and were generally uncooperative. Adding to the low morale was the fact that military bureaucracy took little account of individual educational needs. According to a man who taught at Evergreen during those early days: "A high school student sat next to a man who had finished only the fourth grade of grammar school some ten years ago. A boy who was hard of hearing was there with a man who was so nervous that he jumped whenever you spoke above a whisper."
Although the American Red Cross had been turned down on its original offer to operate Evergreen, it took the position that as handmaiden to the armed forces in time of war, it had an obligation to serve blinded soldiers and sailors in whatever way it could. While the school was being fitted out by the government, the Red Cross acquired a building on adjacent property and installed a special unit called the Red Cross Institute for the Blind.
At that point in time, in March of 1918, the Federal Board for Vocational Education had not yet been legislated into existence and no provision existed for post-training aftercare of blinded veterans. The Red Cross saw its overall function as providing that essential bridge: "to supply the necessary economic and social supervision of blinded marines, sailors, and soldiers, after their discharge from military service." This would be done through individualized social service so that when the blinded man went back into civil life, he would "be helped to establish himself, with the greatest possible expedition, in his new field of endeavor."
In addition to casework, there would be practical research. The Institute would make "a scientific study … of occupational possibilities for the blind in industry, commerce and agriculture." It would explore new occupational fields. It would find, test and install such special devices as would enable blind men to work efficiently and safely in factories and would then undertake the industrial placement of men trained in the use of these devices with the help of a commission of manufacturers. It would get around the reluctance of industry to hire blind men by standing behind each placement; should a man fail to make good on a particular job, the Institute itself would remove him, "thereby relieving the employer of all embarrassment."
There was more, much more. The Institute would establish sheltered workshops and would act as purchasing and sales agent, respectively, for the raw materials and finished products of such workshops, as well as for the handcrafted articles made by blind workers in their homes. It would train men for work in commerce and agriculture and supply them, if necessary, with the tools and materials of their trades. Men capable of professional or technical education would be helped in these directions. Sighted readers would be supplied to facilitate their studies, and placement service would follow.
A cottage would be opened near Evergreen where, prior to a man's discharge from training, his wife or parent or other close family member would be instructed in how to help him in his occupation as well as in his home life. If a man proved too incapacitated to work, his wife would be "taught some vocation from which she can add to the family income."
Had this staggeringly ambitious program ever come to fruition, it could have become the nucleus of an integrated, nationwide welfare service for blind people—something that does not yet exist in the United States and probably never will. There would have been no need, after the war, to organize the much more modestly conceived American Foundation for the Blind, which ultimately undertook many of the broad research, planning, and coordinating functions embodied in the Institute's prospectus.
That the Red Cross Institute's grand design never materialized was due to several major factors:
First, World War I ended a few months later. Not only did the number of blinded American servicemen prove to be thankfully small, but a good many of them had been discharged from service and were back home before either Evergreen or the Red Cross Institute got under way.
Second, most of the Institute's proposed vocational training, placement, and aftercare activities were ostensibly preempted by the United States Government once the Federal Board for Vocational Education was legislated into being.
Finally, existing state and local organizations for the blind were by no means willing to see their work overshadowed and perhaps eventually swallowed up by a national program with the prestige and money-raising power of the American Red Cross. While there was no way of knowing how many men from a given state or community might return blind from the war, the local agencies felt that any such men should be cared for in their own homes and by their own communities rather than by a national group. Power, authority, and fund-raising potential were all at stake from the viewpoint of the local agencies, and their leaders worked intensively behind the scenes to avert any possible threat to their dominion. This was why, when the American Foundation for the Blind was launched three years after the war's end, Dr. Bordley warned against overloading its policy structure with the professional workers for the blind whose self-interest, he charged, had thwarted the development of the Red Cross Institute as a national body.
In preparation for the role it hoped to assume, the Institute equipped and staffed its building next door to Evergreen with the help of a public fund drive. By the time Evergreen was ready to begin operations, however, the Institute was left with a far more limited function: "to do anything that would help make the life of the soldiers and sailors better and more effective while at Evergreen and also after their discharge."
The Institute found a number of useful ways "to do anything." It installed a library and club room that could serve as an off-post center. A braille transcribing service was started to provide light literature for the beginning finger-readers. Large numbers of volunteers were recruited and trained to serve as educational aides to the Evergreen teaching staff. Housing facilities were provided for visiting families. The Red Cross also sent a nine-person unit overseas to assist in the preliminary adjustment of war-blinded men, and to carry out some additional reconstruction assignments in France. This was the unit headed by M.C. Migel.
The Institute's first director was Dr. Bordley (by then promoted to Lt. Colonel), who simultaneously held the official post of Officer in Charge of the Reeducation of Blinded Soldiers, Sailors and Marines in the Surgeon General's Physical Reconstruction Division. The assistant director was Charles F.F. Campbell, who had taken a leave of absence from the Ohio State School for the Blind.
It was fortunate for all concerned that the Red Cross did not quit in frustration when its master plan was blocked. By early 1919, less than a year after Evergreen admitted its first trainees, the Army recognized that it was not fulfilling its purpose. It was operating under capacity—no more than fifty or sixty men were in residence at any time and, with the cessation of hostilities the preceding November, no great future influx was to be expected. The men in training were restless, largely unmotivated, and eager to leave. The blend of military administration and civilian instruction was not working well. So when the Red Cross renewed its offer to take charge of the school's operations, the War Department was more than willing to reverse its previous attitude. An agreement was reached, and on May 25, 1919, the installation formerly known as General Hospital No. 7 changed hands and was renamed the Red Cross Institute for the Blind. Simultaneously, the military status of the men at Evergreen was terminated; they were now veterans, entitled to receive their disability benefits and eligible to receive their Evergreen training at the expense of the Federal Board of Vocational Education.
The Federal Board's view was that Evergreen should be used primarily to provide prevocational services, equipping men with the basic skills that would help them achieve a degree of adjustment to a life without sight. To furnish specific vocational training, as well as education for the professions, the Board used a variety of other schools, workshops, and local agencies for the blind. It did, however, approve Evergreen as a vocational training center for a few trades and occupations.
Once the military regime was out of the picture, the program at Evergreen took on new life. Flexibility and experimentation became the keynotes. Each student was individually appraised and provided with a course of instruction tailored to his ability and his needs. More than half the men had had little formal education; classes were given in spelling, business arithmetic, American history, civics, and literature. Men who had had a high school education took advanced courses in cultural subjects. Manual training was seen as important for all, since all had to learn to make greater use of the tactile sense, but the men who had been mechanics or factory workers were given more advanced training in woodworking or machine shop operations.
Men who had come off the farm and wanted to go on living in rural surroundings were given a full year's training in commercial poultry raising, followed by three months on a model farm. Another vocational sequence was in massage; those with the necessary academic backgrounds were taught anatomy and all of the technical skills that would qualify them for hospital jobs in what was later called physical therapy. Vending stand operation was taught at the school's canteen, which was operated as a model store. Cigar-making was also taught, but proved a commercial failure.
All Evergreen students, whatever their vocational goals, were given access to a variety of avocational skills to prepare them for rounded social and personal lives. Discussion groups and activities involving music, athletics, dancing, and games were shaped toward that end. Evergreen's "Braille Orchestra" played at the weekly dances; some of the more able musicians performed in community concerts, and several developed enough expertise to lead small commercial ensembles.
With the Federal Board for Vocational Education furnishing referrals, Evergreen flourished under the management of the Red Cross Institute. There had been about sixty men in residence when the Army bowed out; half of these stayed on, and new men sent by the Federal Board brought the population to 104 a year later. But it was not always easy for the Board's field staff to persuade men who had been discharged before Evergreen came into being, or those whose sight had deteriorated into blindness since their discharge, to invest the time and effort involved in undergoing vocational rehabilitation. The Board's 1920 report to Congress contained passages such as this: "In one instance, an agent of the Board was told by the mother of one of the men that her son would never be given vocational training except over her dead body. … The father of one of the men refuses to be convinced that his son should receive training. 'My boy will always have enough money, and all he needs now is a good wife.' "
The Federal Board paid Evergreen $106.50 per month for tuition and board of each registrant. The remainder of the necessary funds was raised by public subscription. Approximately $4,500,000 was said to have been spent by the Institute, much of it for structural changes to erase the traces of military rule. The 20-bed dormitories were partitioned off into separate rooms for two. The bare wooden dining trestles were replaced by cloth-covered oval tables seating companionable groups of six or eight. Out went the metal dishes and in came chinaware and attractive cutlery. Now that everyone was a civilian, teachers and students could and did dine together. These gracious touches helped to lift morale, but the most potent factor in the new spirit at Evergreen was, of course, that no man was there against his will.
At the conclusion of its first year of operating the school, the Red Cross Institute had accomplished such affirmative results that it once more had visions of an expanded future. And at this point Evergreen did indeed have a potential. It was groping toward a formula for the rehabilitation of blinded adults that might have served as a model for such facilities all over the nation, and had in fact taken a tentative step toward testing out the practicability of such a program by admitting nine non-veterans. But Evergreen was due for another change in administration.
When the Veterans Bureau was created in the summer of 1921, that part of the work of the Federal Board for Vocational Education which dealt with ex-service men was transferred to the newly created umbrella organization while the Federal Board, its scope enlarged by the Smith-Fess Act of 1920, remained in charge for civilians. The jurisdictional split meant that the Red Cross Institute had a new partner at Evergreen. It was a partnership that lasted only a few months; on January 1, 1922, the Veterans Bureau assumed full control, the Red Cross Institute for the Blind went out of existence, and the establishment on Mrs. Garrett's spacious acres acquired its third and final name, the Evergreen School for the Blind.
With the change of jurisdiction came changes in personnel. Dr. Bordley had returned to private practice in Baltimore in mid-1919, but had remained in a volunteer capacity on the Institute's Committee of Direction. Originally just on leave of absence from the Ohio State School for the Blind, Charles Campbell had burned his bridges by resigning from the school once the Red Cross Institute took over from the Army. When Bordley left the directorship of the Institute, Campbell had hoped to be appointed in his place. But the Red Cross passed him over and gave the job to L.W. Wallace, keeping Campbell as assistant director. Wallace later resigned and Campbell succeeded to his post, but his tenure was brief; at this point Evergreen was about to be handed over to the Veterans Bureau. When the transfer took place, Joseph E. Vance became Evergreen's new director. He resigned a year later and was succeeded by Robert B. Reed, former head of the school's academic department. Maurice I. Tynan was next in line, and he presided over Evergreen's disbandment in June 1925. By then the school had pretty well exhausted the supply of potential students among blinded veterans and Veterans Bureau regulations ruled out continuation of the experiment of admitting civilians. Hopes for a national body to give leadership in work for the blind were now centered in the new American Foundation for the Blind.
Those who had known Evergreen intimately and were reluctant to see its pioneering efforts eradicated without a trace made a few efforts at salvage. Vance, when he resigned at the end of 1922, wrote Migel, suggesting that Congress might be willing to enact a law transferring Evergreen's equipment to a more permanent institution that could move ahead with development of rehabilitation methods. The Foundation, which had yet to open an office, was not in a position to follow through on the suggestion.
Not long thereafter some of the Evergreen graduates, who had formed an organization called the United States Blind Veterans of the World War, proposed that the Foundation join forces with them in a fund-raising campaign to establish a permanent national training school for blind adults. This, too, was premature where the Foundation was concerned; it had not yet started raising funds for its own basic program. The veterans group then proceeded to establish a separate corporation, the U.S. Blind Veterans' Memorial Fund, which lobbied successfully for a bill appropriating $350,000 in federal funds to the Veterans Bureau for a national training school. But the money was never spent; the blind veterans group was torn by dissension, some members insisting the money should be used only to benefit ex-servicemen while others were willing to share with blind civilians.
The Veterans Bureau was indifferent, to say the least; it had far more serious troubles of its own at the time and was pursuing a policy of strict economy under a new director, General Frank T. Hines. Hines was replacing Charles B. Forbes, the first director, who had been thrown out of office (and was eventually imprisoned) for complicity in corrupt and wasteful practices that were alleged to have cost the taxpayers more than $200 million.
To the bitter disappointment of Philip N. Harrison, a blinded veteran from Pittsburgh who, as president of the Memorial Fund, had been largely responsible for inspiring passage of the bill, the $350,000 appropriation lapsed a year after it had been voted and one more opportunity to begin an adequate rehabilitation program for the adult blind was lost. Harrison himself, like several others who went through the Evergreen program, took up work for the blind as a profession. Eventually he became executive secretary of the Pennsylvania Association for the Blind, whose work was greatly expanded under his leadership. When he retired in 1960 he received the AAWB's Shotwell Award.
If Evergreen itself could not be salvaged, could not at least the fruits of its experience be preserved? In May 1925, just before the school closed its doors forever, Robert Irwin wrote to James L. Fieser, vice-chairman of the American Red Cross, asking whether that organization could appropriate $10,000 to finance a study and evaluation of what had been attempted at Evergreen. "If we were to go into a war ten years from now," he said, "we would be about as much in the dark as to how to proceed as we were eight years ago."
Unfortunately, the Red Cross had no spare research money either, and Irwin's prophecy proved all too accurate when the United States once again went to war.
*The person for whom both church and villa were named had no connection with blindness. St. Dunstan was an Archbishop of Canterbury in the tenth century. The church and its clock are today both back on Fleet Street, the former having been rebuilt and the latter restored to it when the Regent's Park house was torn down.
