As the R.M.S. Lusitania neared the coast of Ireland en route from New York to Southampton in May 1915, a single torpedo from a German submarine made a perfect hit. In 18 minutes the liner sank; with her went 1,200 human beings, passengers and crew. Another 800 managed to keep afloat in the icy waters until rescue vessels arrived. Among these was George Alexander Kessler, an American businessman, who clung to an oar for seven hours.
During his long vigil, the fifty-one-year-old Kessler made a bargain with fate. Should he survive, he would devote his energies and his wealth to helping the victims of war. He had nothing specific in mind at the time, but during his convalescent stay in London, he heard of the work Arthur Pearson had begun at St. Dunstan's for the British war blind and made up his mind that this was the cause he would adopt for the people of all the countries fighting the Kaiser.
A less likely candidate for the role of philanthropic savior could hardly be imagined. Had the term "international jet set" existed during those years, George Kessler would have been one of its conspicuous members. He was known on both sides of the Atlantic as "the champagne king" and "the prince of the wine agents"—royal sobriquets he had earned during a flamboyant and spectacularly successful career as international distributor for the French winery, Moet & Chandon. "He had the world's greatest flair for publicity," a journalist was to say in reviewing Kessler's colorful career. His instinct for marketing was equally keen. He concentrated his efforts on the logical customers for champagne, entertaining high society at spectacular dinner parties that were designed to set tongues wagging. At one such event a Venetian theme was created by flooding a hotel ballroom to create an artificial lagoon stocked with live swans, ducks and salmon trout. A hundred white doves fluttered overhead as the twenty-four guests were conveyed by gondola to a floating platform where they dined while listening to arias by Enrico Caruso and two other opera singers.
Kessler was also an extraordinarily lucky man. He was in San Francisco at the time of that city's disastrous earthquake in 1906 and escaped death by walking out of a business conference shortly before the building it was in collapsed. In Chicago, on another occasion, he left a hotel minutes before it went up in flames. The Lusitania experience was his third narrow escape.
Kessler's society connections stood him in excellent stead as he went about making good on his vow. The likeliest place to raise money for the Allied war blind was in the United States, which, not yet a combatant, was prospering mightily from the sale of munitions and other goods. Six months after the Lusitania episode, Kessler and his wife, the former Cora Parsons, organized the B.F.B. (British, French, Belgian) Permanent Blind Relief War Fund and braved another Atlantic crossing to open a campaign. They seeded the drive with $50,000 of their own funds; Mrs. Kessler, it was reported, sold Tiffany and Company one of her jewels, a piece cut from the Cullinan diamond, to start the drive.
The names of those Kessler enlisted to form the American committee for the Fund were testimony to his social and business connections. They included Mrs. John Astor, Mrs. Cooper Hewitt, August Belmont, Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler, William H. Crocker of the San Francisco family, Myron T. Herrick, Otto H. Kahn, Frank A. Munsey, Elihu Root, E. S. Stotesbury of the Philadelphia family, and William K. Vanderbilt.
Similarly, eminent committees were established in England, France, and Belgium, both to raise funds and supervise their distribution. Royal patronage was accorded the committees in Britain and Belgium; in France the President of the Republic granted his seal of approval. After the United States entered the war in 1917, President Woodrow Wilson accepted the honorary presidency of the Fund's American section.
A variety of campaign techniques—mail appeals, benefit performances, collection boxes, subscription books—were employed to capture American dollars for the cause. Leading artists were persuaded to contribute dramatic illustrations for brochures and posters. To step up the pace Kessler arranged for one of St. Dunstan's earliest graduates, Sergeant-Major Robert Middlemiss, to tour the United States and address audiences at the benefit entertainments. A mustachioed veteran of 17 years of service in the British Army who had been blinded in battle at Gallipoli, Middlemiss personified the confident self-reliance rehabilitation could produce in a blinded soldier.
By early 1917, when more than $400,000 had been collected, the United States declared war on Germany and the Fund's already lengthy name became the A.B.F.B. Permanent Blind Relief War Fund, the first initial standing for "American." At this point it also found itself engaged in a distasteful squabble with a competitive drive, the Committee for Men Blinded in Battle. This other group had been organized by Winifred Holt, the dynamic and resourceful woman who, with her sister Edith, had taken up the cause of blind people soon after the turn of the century.
In 1906 the Holt sisters had founded the Lighthouse (the New York Association for the Blind) in New York City and encouraged the formation of similar local service agencies throughout the United States. Soon after the outbreak of the war, Winifred Holt went to France to work for the French soldiers blinded at the front. She established the Phare (Lighthouse) de France in Paris and helped reorganize an existing agency in Bordeaux into a Phare as well. To raise funds for these rehabilitation units, the Committee for Men Blinded in Battle was established in the United States at about the same time as Kessler's group. Its sponsors were no less distinguished than the others; the daughter of publisher Henry Holt was not lacking in influential friends.
Since the two groups operated in different ways, they could have coexisted, without rancor were it not for some imperious assertions made by Winifred during an American campaign tour for her committee in the winter of 1916–1917—assertions that were at once played up, and probably somewhat exaggerated, in press reports. The technical grain of truth in her quoted remarks was that the Phare de France was the only American organization giving direct service to the French war blind. This was so; Kessler's organization did not, at that time, conduct programs under its own name, but worked through locally-operated agencies in France, Belgium, and England.
In rebuttal to the Holt charges, the A.B.F.B. Fund listed the seven French agencies and schools for the blind to which it had already remitted $60,000. Allocation of these grants was under the direction of the French committee appointed by the president of France. The committee was headed by the playwright Eugene Brieux, a member of the French Academy, and its membership was made up of a former foreign minister of France, the president of the Paris Chamber of Commerce, the head of a leading French bank, the owner of the giant Creusot steel works, the grand chancellor of the Legion of Honor, and other impeccable dignitaries. In Britain, the allocation committee under the patronage of Queen Alexandra was chaired by Arthur Pearson, with St. Dunstan's the major beneficiary. (At a later point, the American end of the program shared in the $2 million ultimately collected by the Fund; substantial sums were given to the Red Cross for its work at Evergreen, and grants were also made to the United States Blind Veterans of World War I.)
With the signing of the Armistice in November 1918, many of the American war relief organizations considered their jobs done. But the A.B.F.B. Fund took the word "Permanent" in its title seriously. Need among Europe's war-blinded had not disappeared. Instead of liquidating, the Fund was incorporated in New York under a slightly different name with George A. Kessler as president. On the list of directors of the new corporation appeared a name new in work for the blind: William Nelson Cromwell.
Co-founder of a prestigious law firm, Cromwell had earned an international reputation for financial and legal wizardry in corporate reorganization; one journalist dubbed him "the physician of Wall Street." His most spectacular legal feat involved the prolonged and complex negotiations that resulted in the construction of the Panama Canal. Representing the French owners of the franchise to the selected route, which they sold to the United States for $40 million in 1902, Cromwell devoted almost eight years of his life to what Arthur H. Dean, his biographer, called a "case that was all but lost." The successful outcome brought Cromwell additional French clients and he began to spend more and more time in France. During most of World War I he remained in his Paris home, lending his skills and much of his wealth to war relief efforts and, following the Armistice, to reconstruction measures for hard-hit sections of the French economy.
A born romantic, he was particularly proud of the Lafayette Escadrille, the volunteer corps of American aviators who flew for France before General John J. Pershing arrived with the American Expeditionary Force. He was a prime mover in the erection of the white marble temple in Paris where the 67 members of the Escadrille lost in combat are buried, and he personally endowed a fund for the memorial's maintenance in perpetuity.
William Nelson Cromwell, who left an estate of some $20 million when he died in 1948, was not born to wealth. Orphaned at an early age when his father was killed in the Civil War, he grew up in Brooklyn, New York, where his mother brought up her children "in Spartan living under extreme financial difficulties." On graduation from high school, he found a job as an accountant in a railroad office. Three years later he went to work for a law firm whose senior partner, Algernon Sydney Sullivan, encouraged him to attend Columbia Law School. He was admitted to the New York Bar in 1876. In 1879 the old firm was dissolved and Cromwell, only twenty-five years old, joined the much older Sullivan in a new legal partnership whose gross income, that first year, was $22,500. It was a modest beginning for Sullivan and Cromwell, which grew to be one of the world's largest law firms.
Cromwell never forgot the poverty of his youth. According to his biographer: "To the end of his life he carefully picked up paper clips or rubber bands on the floor, turned out electric lights and was saving and frugal in his habits." On the other hand, his personal life style was opulent. He spent little time in his office, conducting his business for the most part from a Manhattan mansion whose rooms, crowded with tapestries, paintings, and sculpture, were virtually museums of mid-Victoriana, or from an equally luxurious home in Paris. His appearance was also distinctive. John Foster Dulles, one of his law partners, described him as "an impressive figure with his shaggy white locks, his florid complexion and sparkling eyes."
It was this singular personality who succeeded to the presidency of the Permanent Blind Relief War Fund following the death of George Kessler on September 13, 1920, and it was he who directed a fundamental change in the Fund's program soon thereafter. Kessler's idea had been that the Fund would function in France and other parts of the Continent somewhat along the lines of St. Dunstan's in England, providing vocational training and education, supplementing inadequate government pensions, buying homes for those who had been taught hand crafts and establishing central purchasing and marketing facilities for their output.
Cromwell thought along different lines. Such rehabilitation programs, he believed, should be maintained by the governments and philanthropies of the respective countries; American funds should be reserved for those services no single agency could manage. Among the activities begun by the Fund while hostilities were still under way was braille printing. This, Cromwell felt, was the sort of service that could benefit all of Europe's war-blinded. But he encountered considerable initial resistance to the proposal that the Fund's resources be used for the production of braille literature and music. Opponents pointed out that few of the war-blinded could read braille or were interested in mastering it. That, replied Cromwell, might be true at the moment, but it would change. Supply would create demand.
The next year was spent in transforming a 64-room rented mansion near the Arc de Triomphe into what became one of the largest, best-equipped, and most up-to-date braille printing houses of its day. Cromwell personally contributed $30,000 to renovate the premises at 74 rue Lauriston and by early 1923 the plant was ready and its 45 employees, two-thirds of them blind, began production. Two years later some 5 million pages of braille had been printed, five periodicals were being issued in three languages (French, English, and Serbian), and a large quantity of braille music was coming off the presses.
One fact soon emerged: distribution of the plant's output need not and should not be limited to those blinded in the hostilities. Once the printing plates had been prepared, additional impressions could be made. With this recognition, the scope of what had been a war relief organization was enlarged to embrace blind people all over the world. The broadened purposes were reflected in a change of name: American Braille Press for War and Civilian Blind, Inc.
Under its amended certificate of incorporation, the Paris printing house enlarged its publishing program to issue periodicals and books in three more languages (Italian, Roumanian, and Polish) and branched out into collateral fields: manufacturing maps, diagrams and games, working on improved braillewriting machines, researching and testing various other educational and practical devices for blind users. In these respects, it was the European counterpart of the American Foundation for the Blind, and the two organizations cooperated closely.
One of its most substantial contributions was leadership in convening the international conference that established a worldwide braille music code in 1929. Two years later the theme of international cooperation was reinforced when American Braille Press joined the American Foundation for the Blind in cosponsoring the World Conference on Work for the Blind, the first such event ever held on American soil.
Before World War I there had been several triennial international conferences of workers for the blind, the last of these in England in 1914. Once past the initial phase of postwar reconstruction, European leaders began to think of another such conclave. Robert Irwin was made aware of this desire when he went abroad in 1925 and, in his capacity as president of the AAWB at the time, he mentioned the subject at that year's convention. At the next biennial AAWB meeting, he brought up the question again. A committee was appointed to look into it, and conferred with a parallel committee named by the AAIB, which endorsed the idea when it met in 1928. In December of that year a letter went out to leading workers for the blind all over the world, asking whether they would be interested in an international conference to be held in New York in the spring of 1931.
Reporting to the AAWB when it next met in the summer of 1929, Irwin said that many favorable replies had been received although "there was a strong feeling in most quarters that the high cost of traveling would be a serious obstacle." However, he informed the delegates, he had "taken up this matter with certain persons interested not only in the blind, but also in movements to bring about greater international good will," with the result that "sufficient funds were pledged to the American Foundation for the Blind to warrant it in undertaking to meet the expenses of this project." He had gone even further. Foundation president Migel had arranged with Senator George H. Moses of the Foreign Relations Committee to introduce a joint Congressional resolution authorizing President Hoover to call a world conference on work for the blind. The invitation would be extended through diplomatic channels: "It is hoped that in this way many countries will be induced to send official delegates at governmental expense."
A budget of $30,000 had been projected for the United States' share of the conference costs; the "certain persons" promising financial support were John D. Rockefeller, Jr., who pledged $10,000, and M.C. Migel, $5,000. The Foundation had budgeted an additional $10,000 of its own funds. Later, smaller sums came from others, including a personal contribution from Herbert Hoover. As is often the case with budgets, the anticipated cost underestimated the actual need, the final expense totalling $46,000. William Nelson Cromwell, who was also among the early contributors, responded to a last-minute S.O.S. for deficit financing by sending a messenger with a $2,500 check a few days before the conference was scheduled to begin.
The Congressional resolution was finally voted in February 1930 and the following month saw invitations go out from the United States Government to 50 foreign governments. Acceptances were received from 39 nations, although 7 later dropped out. The final number of delegates from outside the United States came to 109; they were accompanied by 36 others: wives, escorts, or guests. It proved to be the most broadly representative gathering of specialists in work for the blind that had yet been held.
The conference program was planned to cover an 18-day period, opening with a reception on the evening of April 13, 1931. There would then be four days of meetings in New York City, following which the overseas delegates would set out on a ten-day tour of various schools, institutions, and agencies for the blind in the eastern part of the United States. At the tour's conclusion the delegates would reassemble in New York for two days of summary and final action.
This elaborate plan had been worked out by a multinational program committee which met in Hamburg in May 1930. One of its decisions was to extend a number of additional invitations to supplement the delegations named by the respective governments, concentrating on people who could contribute the fruits of practical experience in work for the blind. The committee was chaired by an able Frenchman, Georges Raverat, secretary-general of the American Braille Press, who was already a prominent figure in work for the blind and was destined to play a heroic role in the years to come.
Raverat had been George Kessler's secretary before World War I. A soldier in the French Army, he was in a military hospital recovering from a wound when news came of the sinking of the Lusitania and his former employer's survival. Invalided out of military service, Raverat was reemployed by Kessler, this time to supervise the European operation of the Permanent Blind Relief War Fund. In the course of the Fund's development and subsequent emergence as the American Braille Press, Raverat came to acquire an intimate knowledge of all European work for the blind. An urbane and handsome figure, he was a well-organized executive endowed with tact and adroitness in human relations.
The logistics of the conference plan were not simple. Many of the overseas delegates were blind; some had little or no command of English. Their American hosts had to cope with innumerable details in arranging for the visitors to tour Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, Pittsburgh, and Cleveland with a sufficient number of American delegates to act as escorts but not so many as to overshadow the foreigners or tax the hospitality of the organizations and institutions they were to visit.
It all went off brilliantly. There was even room for the added amenity of a White House reception, arranged by Helen Keller through an exchange of correspondence with Mrs. Herbert Hoover. The language barrier at the conference sessions was overcome by means of a newly invented simultaneous translation system, the Filene-Finlay Translator, which made its American debut on this occasion.
The 558-page volume of Proceedings of the World Conference on Work for the Blind, published by the Foundation in 1932, still makes absorbing reading. To review the texts of the formal presentations and the transcripts of the ensuing discussions is to pinpoint both the gratifying progress achieved since 1931 and the problems that remain as grievous in 1972 as they were four decades earlier. There is poignancy, too, in noting how much of what was good and promising in 1931 lay shattered after World War II, some of it never to be restored.
Almost every European country made a substantive contribution to the conference content. The director of Vienna's Israelitisches Blindeninstitut gave a scholarly paper on "Psychological Problems of the Pre-School Blind Child." Questions of sensory perception were dealt with by the chairman of the Norwegian Federation of the Blind. The head of a school in Bordeaux presented his views on the education of young blind children. Vocational training principles to guard against older students' becoming "strangers to life" were set forth by the director of a Westphalian institution in a paper that provoked a heated debate on the ever-touchy subject of institutional education. Another German educator took on the subject of education for the professions. Italy's methods of preparing teachers of the blind were outlined by the director of Rome's teacher training school.
The employment section heard descriptions of Sweden's services for blind home workers, of how workshop programs were managed in Birmingham and in Glasgow, and of Canada's experience in placing blind workers in open industry. The president of the Italian Association of the Blind praised Benito Mussolini's government for requiring that certain government orders be assigned to workshops for the blind. Professor Pierre Villey, the influential secretary-general of the Valentin Haüy Association in Paris, described his country's decades of success in developing jobs for blind people in musical occupations but noted worriedly that "the sudden and extraordinary development of mechanical music and the radio" now constituted a serious threat to live musicians.
The only section in which American speakers predominated was that dealing with technical aids and resources. Papers were given by Edward E. Allen of Perkins on museums for the blind, Frank C. Bryan of Howe Memorial Press on braille printing methods, and Lucille Goldthwaite on library services. The beginnings made in Latin America to produce braille literature in Spanish were described by the executive of a Mexican agency. A Polish psychologist traced the history of the inventions and devices that enabled blind people to gain an education and earn a livelihood.
A separate session was devoted to conditions in the Orient. The unique, centuries-old status of blind people in Japan was depicted by Umaji Akiba, the director of the Tokyo School for the Blind. He detailed the up-to-date programs offered by his school to prepare children for the occupations traditionally followed by the Japanese blind but noted that the ancient custom of training through apprenticeship to private masters continued simultaneously. Delegates listening to Akiba's talk felt as though the pages of history were being rolled back when he said:
Massage, shampooing, acupuncture and moxibustion are also taught by private masters who take apprentices. … The years of apprenticeship range from three to seven, according to age and attainment. The apprentices receive no education but, on the other hand, get plenty of work to do, and their condition is no better than that of a day laborer. In the country, these poor apprentices, even today, are sent out each evening by their masters to herald their presence by shouting or blowing on a small whistle in the streets for patients. It is heartrending, indeed, to hear their melancholy cries in the dead of night, particularly of a cold winter night.
Of equally exotic interest was the report given by George B. Fryer, superintendent of Shanghai's Institution for the Chinese Blind, who outlined the situation not only in China but in other, more primitive countries of the Far East. "The civilization of these countries, coming as it does out of hoary antiquity, is unique in itself and it is almost impossible to understand the customs, manner[s], religions and modes of thought of the people, even after long years of residence," he began. Religion and superstition
play an important part in the lives of these peoples. A person is blind or deformed because the gods will it so—a sort of retribution for the sins of past generations—and any help or assistance that would tend to ease his punishment is quite contrary to practice, beyond a few cents with which to keep the body alive and so prolong his suffering. For this reason, the blind are looked upon with pity, but ostracized from society and forced to become pariahs and parasites upon the community in which they live. Being fatalists to a certain extent, they make the best of it and suffer in solitary silence, dragging out their darkened, weary lives, a burden to themselves and to all around.
No prevention of blindness programs existed in these countries, although much of the visual loss in their populations was readily preventable through simple sanitation and treatment measures. In China, political turmoil added to the complications. In an emotional peroration, Fryer expressed the hope that measures to alleviate these "pitiable and unenviable conditions" would one day come into being despite "the lack of funds, the lack of trained teachers and helpers, the ignorance of the masses and even the nonchalance of the governments themselves."
The theme of prevention was the subject of two other papers. "The first right of a blind person is not to be blind," declared the Spanish physician who headed an agency in Malaga where, he said, 77 percent of those without sight need not be so. Winifred Hathaway, associate director of the National Society for the Prevention of Blindness, described the special provisions that enabled partially sighted children to be educated in American day schools.
The liveliest controversy of the conference arose when Captain Ian Fraser of St. Dunstan's and Paul Guinot, secretary-general of the French National Federation of Civilian Blind, gave back-to-back papers expounding their respective views on the role of the state in relation to its blind citizens.
Fraser took the position that a basically sound system was provided by the British Blind Persons Act of 1920, which combined national pension grants with shared national and local financing of service programs conducted under local administration, often in partnership with voluntary philanthropy. Guinot denounced private philanthropy as a failure which had led to "incoherence, confusion, disorder—fruits of incompetence or ignorance" in work for the blind. Government, he said, had a legal and moral obligation to insure the welfare of its blind citizens. This obligation would be met only if blind people organized as a pressure group to secure their social rights. He proposed the formation of an international federation of associations of the blind who could "unite simultaneously and ask for the recognition of their own sacred rights" in a worldwide activist program.
Examined in detail, the specific measures urged by Guinot were not unreasonable, merely ahead of their time. He asked for compulsory free education of blind children under state-approved standards; vocational training, placement services and employment priorities for blinded adults; a system of disability pensions; tax exemptions; health services and other forms of social protection. Most of the delegates agreed, in principle, with the justice of these proposals, many of which were ultimately implemented in France and elsewhere. What aroused irritation was Guinot's hostile tone and his passionate insistence at every opportunity that blind people, and only blind people, "claim the right to organize the new work which will lead them to ultimate liberty."
When the delegates reassembled in New York following their ten-day tour they debated the proposal that a permanent body be formed to further future international cooperation. A tentative outline for such a body was submitted and adopted with minor modifications. The new organization was to be called the World Council for the Blind and would be headquartered in Paris. Its membership would begin with one representative from each of the 33 nations whose delegates had attended the conference. There would be an 11-member executive committee, headed by the Council's president and vice-president. William Nelson Cromwell and M.C. Migel were nominated for these respective offices; they were the only Americans on the executive committee, whose nine other members consisted of eight Europeans and one Japanese. Paul Guinot was elected a member, not as a representative of France but as spokesman for the several national associations of blind people.
To get the World Council under way, Cromwell and Migel agreed to underwrite its budget for the first three years at a rate of $15,000 to $20,000 a year. Thereafter, it was hoped, the member nations would be able to finance the work through dues.
Early in the discussions one suggestion had been that the World Council should be under the wing of the American Braille Press. Cromwell vetoed the idea, thinking it better for the new body to be wholly independent. The decision was a prudent one, for this first effort to create a permanent international body in work for the blind never actually took hold.
One reason was the worldwide depression of the Thirties, complicated by the political tensions that brought war at the decade's end. Another reason, at least as compelling, was the issue that had been raised by Guinot. In his authorized biography, Canada's Edwin A. Baker, who had been a delegate and a member of Raverat's program committee, had this comment to make:
Half of the gathering in New York in 1931 had insisted that the proposed organization could function successfully only if its membership consisted entirely of blind persons. The others believed even more strongly that success depended on the combined efforts of the blind themselves and sighted workers for the blind. It had been on this divergence of philosophy, as well as on the economic situation, that the [World Council] foundered.
It was not until 1949 that postwar conditions settled down sufficiently to make possible the holding of another international assembly of workers for the blind. The Oxford Conference gave birth to a new body that did succeed in achieving permanence, the World Council for the Welfare of the Blind. Many of the people who came to the 1949 meeting were the same ones who had met in New York in 1931, and some of the basic issues they considered were the same. But almost everything else had changed: the geographic and political structures of Europe, Africa and Asia, the plight of their blind people, and the resources available to ameliorate that plight.
One of the effects of the 1931 conference was a major policy change adopted by the American Braille Press that same December. "It is not enough to talk cooperation," the Press said in announcing that it would gradually give up its role as the principal overseas braille publisher and begin, instead, to provide various countries with the equipment they needed to operate their own braille presses. According to an official history of the organization:
By spring of 1935 the American Braille Press had founded or equipped two printing plants in France, two in Belgium and one each in Poland, Portugal, Yugoslavia, Colombia and Brazil. Periodicals formerly published by the Press were appearing from these printing plants, with financial assistance furnished by the Press. The printing of books had also been taken over by the individual plants, although the publication of music in braille continued at the printing house in Paris as well as the manufacture of stereotyping machines and appliances, games and braille writers.
It was at this time, too, that braille's major competitor, the Talking Book, emerged in the United States. American Braille Press initiated its own research on how recorded literature could fit into the European picture and in 1937 began producing its own Talking Books on flexible aluminum-base discs. But with the Nazi invasion of France in early 1940, these activities were forced underground.
One of the first ordinances passed by the German occupation authorities was that all alien property had to be declared. After the war, Georges Raverat described what he had done:
I had to comply with it; and, in due time, I filed the necessary reports. It took ten months of the most trying negotiations to get it O.K.'d and at times I must say I didn't feel so very good! I purposely omitted to declare the fifty or more long tons of embossed zinc plates and Talking Book pure copper master discs stored in the basement, although I knew already that the Germans were strenuously endeavoring to obtain this very metal. I realized I was taking chances, but it finally turned out all right, except for many sleepless nights.
Raverat also successfully maneuvered, by means of delicate negotiations with high-placed French officials, to keep the Press offices and equipment intact, despite two Nazi efforts to requisition the premises and a separate attempt to have its braille embossing machinery shipped to Germany. The machinery remained in France, where it was used by the French Union of the War Blind.
Nine months after Paris was liberated in August 1944, war in Europe ended. The devastation left behind was almost unimaginable. In many ways, Europe's blind people were far worse off than other segments of the population. Reports reaching American agencies told of how schools for blind children had been knocked down by bombs, their braille books torn up and used for fuel, their writing slates melted down for metal, their workshop equipment looted or smashed. Blind adults were homeless, penniless; their residences and workshops had been wrecked, the raw materials out of which they had once made salable products were gone and there were none to be had, even with money.
William Nelson Cromwell, ninety-one years old at war's end, was no longer in a position to supply the dynamic leadership to get postwar reconstruction under way. At his suggestion, two of his law partners, John Foster Dulles and Eustace Seligman, both of whom were trustees of the American Braille Press, opened negotiations with the American Foundation for the Blind over the possibility of taking over the Press. A member of the Foundation board since 1931, Cromwell felt its experience would be eminently useful in rebuilding the work in Europe.
In September 1945 Migel told the executive committee about the talks that had been held with Dulles and Seligman. The proposed affiliation would not be a drain on the Foundation's funds, he explained, because the Press had sufficient assets to take care of immediate needs.
In short order an affiliation agreement calling for interlocking boards of directors was worked out, and a new name decided upon. American Braille Press was reborn as American Foundation for Overseas Blind, with Cromwell as board chairman, Migel as president, Dulles as first vice-president, Seligman as secretary, Richard L. Morris as treasurer, and Irwin as executive director. Raverat continued as European director until his retirement in 1953; he died in 1969 at the age of eighty-one.
(Subsequent changes in AFOB officership paralleled changes in the Foundation. Migel resigned the two presidencies in 1946 and was succeeded in both posts by William Ziegler, Jr., who was in turn followed by Jansen Noyes, Jr., and then by John F. Crowley. Cromwell remained as chairman of the board until his death in 1948; the post was subsequently filled by Eustace Seligman. In 1972 it was occupied by Noyes, who held the same office at the Foundation. Dulles remained an AFOB vice-president until his appointment as United States Secretary of State in 1953. Robert Irwin was replaced as executive director of both agencies by M. Robert Barnett. AFOB's other officers in 1972 were Richard H. Migel, vice-chairman of the board; Peter J. Salmon, vice-president; Alexander M. Laughlin, treasurer; and Mitchell Brock, secretary.)
Although the directors in office at the time AFOB was incorporated resolved as a matter of policy that its funds would be used for long-range programs, they recognized that initial priority would have to be given to such basic needs as food, clothing and housing for the hardest-hit segments of Europe's blind communities. True, American and international relief bodies were dispensing relief supplies on a vast scale, but limited mobility made it hard for blind people to get to the distribution centers, and when they did get there, they were often last in line and went away empty-handed. Nor did they command the resources to cope with the black markets that quickly arose for hard-to-get commodities.
Raverat, who visited most of the war areas soon after the end of hostilities, reported that warm clothing for the coming winter was the most urgent need. AFOB's first public appeal, therefore, was in the form of a clothing drive, with numerous American agencies for the blind serving as collection points for new and used garments. Before the end of 1946, some 60,000 pounds of clothing and 100,000 cakes of soap had been shipped to agencies for the blind in France, Belgium, Holland, and Norway.
The haste with which these postwar relief supplies were assembled created certain problems for the European agencies which distributed them. Eric T. Boulter, who was then serving in Greece as director of blind welfare for the UNRRA-affiliated Near East Foundation, recalled:
We got massive sacks packed with used and repaired shoes; they were supposed to have been tied together in pairs, but most of the time they weren't. You can imagine what it was like to open one of these sacks and find 2,000 shoes, unmatched, all jumbled together. … That wasn't our only problem: we needed great powers of persuasion when a Greek peasant woman with feet eight inches wide from years of barefoot work in the fields insisted she could squeeze her feet into four-inch wide shoes because they had gilt ornaments.
Boulter was an Englishman blinded early in the war who had joined the London staff of the Royal National Institute for the Blind following his discharge from St. Dunstan's. Soon after the liberation of Greece he was sent to survey the situation of blind people there and to develop a master plan for education, rehabilitation and training in a nation where there had formerly been few services for the blind. In the three years he spent implementing that plan, he met Helen Keller during her first postwar overseas trip for AFOB. She was so impressed by the competence, integrity, and charm of the young Englishman that she commended him to the attention of Robert Irwin, who made his own postwar survey of Europe's blind in the company of Georges Raverat in the summer of 1947. These two concurred in Helen's high opinion, with the result that, the following year, Boulter joined the European staff of AFOB as Raverat's assistant. He was named field director in 1950, promoted to associate director in 1961, and retired from AFOB service in 1970. In his 22 years with the agency he had traveled nearly half a million miles and visited 60 countries. Retirement saw him returning to his native land, where he became director general of the Royal National Institute for the Blind.
The postwar survey findings provided essential guidelines for AFOB's initial reconstruction efforts. In many places the institutions and facilities that had formerly served blind people were all but gone. Immense quantities of supplies were needed, along with working capital to reinstate local programs. Of perhaps equal importance was the need to rekindle a spirit of hope among agencies for the blind. Not surprisingly, the common hardships of the war years had effected a degree of brotherhood previously absent. In an extensive report, "The Blind of Europe in 1947," Irwin observed:
The blind are trying to help themselves in France. Among other self-help projects is the National Federation of the Blind. This Federation has 6,000 or more members, has established eight workshops, a convalescent home, a large cooperative, a school of massage, and is now trying to get money for a rehabilitation center. I found the president of the National Federation of the Blind, M. Paul Guinot, one of the most energetic people I have ever worked with. When I first knew him sixteen years ago he was a severe critic of everything being done for the blind in France. Today he has assumed responsibility for helping to make the work for the blind of France more effective and realistic.
Building on this base, AFOB organized a Central Committee for Blind Workers made up of representatives of France's major agencies for the blind, with Guinot at the head. With the help of an initial $10,000 grant, matched by funds raised locally, the committee organized a central purchasing and sales organization for the output of the 3,000 men and women employed in France's workshops for the blind.
The disruption of services in France was more or less duplicated in Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Austria. One of the saddest losses was the destruction by fire-bombing of the world-famous library of "blindiana" at the Vienna Institute for the Blind. Begun early in the nineteenth century, the library collection had been the repository for thousands of rare volumes and manuscripts. The sole stroke of good fortune was that many of these were duplicated in the library of America's Perkins School for the Blind under an exchange arrangement dating back several decades.
A special set of problems existed in Italy, where a closely knit nationwide system of services for the blind had been built under the Fascist regime. As in other countries, supplies and funds were needed to restore schools and workshops; raging inflation had reduced many formerly self-sustaining blind people to street beggary. A painful dilemma confronted the Italian schools for blind children. They had to comply with the orders of the postwar republican government to destroy textbooks regarded as tainted with Fascist ideology, but the government made no provision to supply the schools with the paper or metal with which approved texts could be produced in braille. AFOB undertook to furnish the needed equipment.
Possibly the most tragic situation of all prevailed in Greece. The sole school for the blind, located in Athens, had a capacity of merely 120. Some of the blind children were also missing one hand or both, the consequence of picking up unexploded grenades or land mines with which the retreating Germans had sown the fields and beaches. The only braille books in Greece were hand-transcribed. Irwin reported that when he visited the Athens school during the summer vacation he found a dozen children in residence:
These were from Macedonia where guerrilla activities made it dangerous for the pupils to return to their homes. In one room I found four children gathered around a table where a little girl with only one hand was reading aloud from a hand-transcribed volume while the other three blind children were writing with their braille slates from her dictation, making extra copies of the book for use when school opened.
AFOB undertook to assist Eric Boulter in the Near East Foundation's effort to implement a comprehensive plan for the welfare of blind children and adults. It established a braille printing plant in Athens to supply press-made schoolbooks and helped to equip a new school in Salonika for 125 children.
By 1949 many of Europe's essential services for blind people had gained at least a start toward reconstruction, and AFOB began to look at the needs on other continents. The Oxford Conference underscored both the global problems of blindness and the necessity of enlisting the active support of the newly established intergovernmental bodies: the United Nations and its affiliates, UNESCO and UNICEF, the International Labor Organization (ILO), the World Health Organization (WHO). An official consultative relationship was established between these groups and the newly constituted World Council for the Welfare of the Blind, and Boulter, who became secretary-general of the Council when it was incorporated in 1951, was active in establishing contacts with them and their constituent nations. It was at the invitation of such governments that AFOB began the practice of assigning on-the-spot consultants to countries in all parts of the world to help establish services for their blind populations.
One of the first such enterprises was a Middle East pilot demonstration project set up in Cairo, jointly financed and operated by the UN, the Egyptian government, and several non-governmental agencies. The project embraced a comprehensive range: schooling for the young blind, training centers and workshops for adults, a braille printing facility, library and recreational activities, social services and facilities for training professional workers from other Arab countries. In other parts of the Middle East vocational training centers were established in Jordan and Iran, support was given to schools in Iran, Iraq, Kuwait and Lebanon, a teacher training project was launched in Turkey, home teaching and rehabilitation services were begun in Syria, help was given in opening Israel's first rehabilitation center and in equipping a braille printing plant in Jerusalem. So extensive was the work in this part of the world that, in 1962, AFOB established a regional office in Beirut.
It was the fourth such overseas outpost for the New York-based organization. In addition to the office in Paris, which served Europe and the Near East, a regional headquarters for Latin America was opened in 1957, initially in Chile and later moved to Argentina. The same year saw one established for the Far East, first in Manila and later in Malaysia.
In 1952, work in the Orient was spurred when the Association for the Chinese Blind was merged into AFOB. Founded in 1938 by an American missionary, Edgar H. Rue, the Association had been unable to continue its work on mainland China once the United States refused to recognize the People's Republic after the defeat of the Nationalist Chinese forces. It had transferred its work to Formosa and to South Korea, concentrating on blindness prevention services. When Rue, who had directed its program from the beginning, died in late 1951, the Association's board asked AFOB to take it over.
Toward the end of the Korean war AFOB sent a full-time mission to South Korea, whose blind population was estimated at 70,000. The decision to make available a team of experts to develop a program of education and vocational training in cooperation with the Korean government, the United Nations, and other agencies followed a survey by Boulter, who also proposed that a Far East conference on work for the blind be convened. It was this meeting, held in Tokyo in May 1955, that led to the decision to establish a regional office for the Orient. A second Asian conference was held in Malaya in 1963, this time co-sponsored by the Royal Commonwealth Society for the Blind, a British agency which conducted programs similar to AFOB's in the territories comprising the British Commonwealth.
Latin America presented a different set of problems. For one thing, there was no uniform braille code in the Spanish language. The partnership evolved between the World Council on Work for the Blind and intergovernmental bodies helped bring on an explosive period of progress. The matter of a braille code that could be read in all Spanish-speaking lands was settled at a conference held in Montevideo under UNESCO auspices in December 1951. The way was then open for all blind people in Latin America to share in the educational and vocational advances achieved in other parts of the world. An immediate consequence was the 1953 agreement of AFOB and the Kellogg Foundation to jointly finance establishment of a modern braille printing plant in Mexico City whose output could serve the needs of the Central American republics.
It was only a beginning. In June of the following year AFOB joined in sponsoring the first Pan-American conference on blindness. Held in São Paulo, Brazil, it served as the launching pad for a newly invigorated effort to help the blind people—their number estimated at 400,000—of South and Central America. By the late Fifties constructive activity was under way in a dozen lands, with AFOB acting as technical consultant and, in many instances, supplying financial underpinning for newly emerging programs. The University of Chile inaugurated Latin America's first postgraduate course for teachers of the blind. A new braille printing center was established in Uruguay. A rehabilitation center in Havana expanded its work to provide vocational training and employment in seven trades. AFOB scholarships brought students from Brazil, Guatemala, and Haiti to the United States to study rehabilitation theory and techniques. Equipment for duplicating braille books was supplied to schools for blind children in Bolivia, Chile, Guatemala, Costa Rica. New schools were opened in the Dominican Republic and in Colombia.
The potential support of intergovernmental agencies was never overlooked. At the Pan-American conference, Brazilian leaders of work for the blind were advised on how to secure United Nations help in developing rehabilitation and employment programs. In due course the International Labor Office agreed that this would be appropriate to its function of encouraging utilization of untapped labor supplies. A vocational specialist was needed to advise the Brazilian government on how to go about training this labor supply; at ILO's request, J. Albert Asenjo of the Foundation staff was given a year's leave of absence in 1957 to undertake the assignment. It was one of several instances where needed expertise was transferred from work for the American blind to the international scene.
A new dimension was added to overseas work when, in 1961, the United States Government began the practice of allowing "counterpart funds" to be spent for research and demonstration projects under the direction of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. These funds derived from the sale of American agricultural commodities to developing countries, which were permitted to pay for them in local currencies instead of dollars. Countries where the supply of such American-owned currencies exceeded the United States' requirements for local expenditures were designated "excess currency countries." Under a law passed in 1961, such excess currencies were permitted to be used for purposes that could benefit mankind as a whole.
Between 1961 and 1971 the equivalent of $28 million in seven different countries was spent on 21 projects relating to blindness. The projects covered a wide range: blindness prevention and sight restoration in Pakistan, vocational training in Israel, industrial training methods in India and Pakistan, studies of vocational aptitudes in Yugoslavia, training of the rural blind in agricultural occupations in Egypt, Syria, and India. Many of these efforts were stimulated or expedited by AFOB, which was also called upon to assist in review, development and monitoring of the projects.
At the time AFOB was incorporated to absorb the American Braille Press, the intention had been to phase it out once the remaining assets had been used up in financing initial postwar relief and reconstruction activities. However, such widespread public interest had been generated by the 1946 clothing campaign that the trustees of the American Foundation for the Blind agreed to allow its own contributors' list to be used for a one-time fund-raising effort on behalf of the overseas blind. The response was sufficiently generous to cancel the original plan of winding up the affairs of the overseas agency. From this beginning, AFOB built its own list of supporters, and annual mail appeals became the method through which its funds were raised.
During the Fifties, contributions ranged between $300,000 and $375,000 a year. In 1959, when Helen Keller was nearing her 80th birthday and had made the last of the nine globe-circling tours which had taken her to 34 countries all over the world, AFOB's annual campaign was renamed the Helen Keller World Crusade for the Blind. Contributions from the public increased, topping $500,000 in 1962 when the appeal was given the added prestige of a National Crusade Committee headed by Helen's devoted friend, Katharine Cornell, a trustee of both AFOB and AFB. Toward the end of that decade, however, the state of the American economy and other factors caused a drop in giver income, resulting in annual operating deficits in six figures. Although the yield from $3 million in endowment funds helped, it was not enough to close the gap between income and expenditure.
Part of the endowment fund came from legacies. A not unexpected bequest was the $180,000 left by William Nelson Cromwell. Another large bequest, approximating $200,000, came from the estate of a man whose small annual contributions to the Association for Chinese Blind had given no hint that he would make so generous a provision in his will.
A more sizable proportion of the endowment fund came about through a kind of sweet irony. When World War I ended, Winifred Holt's Phare de France, housed in what had once been the Paris residence of the Vatican delegate to France, became a home and rehabilitation center for war-blinded French servicemen. The 44-room mansion, with its two gardens, coach house, and stables, had originally been leased at a nominal rental; the lease was supposed to terminate six months after the end of the war. It was extended until mid-1922, at which point the Vatican authorities, seeking to dispose of the property, gave the Phare the option of buying or vacating.
By this time, Winifred Holt was living in Rome, where she had organized another Lighthouse, Il Faro d'Italia, and had managed to raise the funds to buy a building for it. The necessity of immediately going after additional funds to buy the Paris Phare was more than the remnants of the Committee for Men Blinded in Battle could undertake. But Winifred Holt never lacked either daring or imagination. In Rome the fifty-two-year-old spinster had met an American art historian, Dr. Rufus Graves Mather, who proposed marriage. She decided to use her wedding to launch a campaign for $500,000 on behalf of both the French and Italian Lighthouses.
"Blind Poilus' Beacon Saved by Bridal Gifts to Miss Holt," read the headline in the *New York Evening Mail *of November 14, 1922. The article explained that the betrothed pair had asked well-wishers to refrain from giving them personal wedding gifts but to contribute cash, instead, to the campaign "needed to save the French veterans from ejection." Stories in other newspapers detailed the arrangements for the wedding ceremony, to be performed at the New York Lighthouse, noting that four of the eight bridesmaids would be blind women "attired in costumes of blue crepe de chine with blue and gold headdresses."
There is no record of how much cash actually was received, but the hoped-for half-million-dollar figure was never even approached. Enough was raised, however, to buy the Paris Phare, and in late 1924 it was dedicated by Marshal Foch at formal ceremonies attended by the Mathers. Not long thereafter, the couple set out on a series of world tours in which they visited schools and organizations for the blind in Europe, the Near East, Asia, and Latin America. Wherever they went they gave lectures and started movements for the welfare of blind people, founding additional Lighthouses in places like India, Peking, and Osaka. Their travels ended in 1937; Winifred Holt Mather died in 1945.
The Paris Phare, following its purchase and dedication, was maintained by a Franco-American committee which raised funds for its upkeep. Soon after World War II, during which the building at 14 rue Daru was used as a shelter for all types of refugees, the committee decided not to reconstitute a home for blinded veterans but to merge its efforts with the work in France of the newly formed AFOB. The Phare 's sole remaining asset at the time consisted of the now dilapidated mansion. A merger was duly effected and in 1950 AFOB spent $100,000 in repairs and renovations so that the property could serve as its own European headquarters.
Fifteen years later, real estate values in the heart of Paris had risen so sharply that AFOB was able to sell the land on which the property stood for $1,837,000 in cash plus other considerations valued at $500,000. The sale proceeds were augmented the following year by a demolition grant of $58,000 from the French Government. In 1972 AFOB's Paris office address was still 14 rue Daru, but it was quartered in the modern office building erected on the site of the old mansion and derived some income from subletting part of the space allotted it under terms of the sale. In the end, Winifred Holt Mather succeeded in endowing the cause of the overseas blind far more generously than even she had dreamed.
The American Foundation for Overseas Blind never pretended it could even begin to cope with all of the problems of a world blind population whose numbers were estimated at anywhere between 14 million and 22 million. Its principal thrusts were keyed to self-help: making trained specialists available to supply guidance and technical knowledge in establishing programs to assist the blind, providing seed money to get programs started, upgrading the level of professional training of those operating the programs.
The year 1968 saw adoption of a fourth objective: active promotion of blindness prevention programs in areas of the world showing the highest blindness rates, such as Africa, Asia and parts of Latin America. One aspect of the plan was cooperating with governments and international bodies in the administration of massive doses of Vitamin A to preschool children in areas of dire poverty. This simple measure, it was demonstrated in scientific tests, was an important element in preventing xerophthalmia, an eye disease caused by vitamin deficiencies in the diet of growing children. An advisory committee made up of specialists in eye care, pediatrics, nutrition, and public health was named in 1972 to guide development of these preventive activities, which were expected to assume steadily greater prominence in AFOB's work.
The early Seventies also saw changes in personnel and administration. Alex H. Townsend, who had succeeded Eric Boulter as associate director in 1970, stepped down from the post because of ill health in 1972. The associate directorship was assigned to Harold G. Roberts, alongside his role as an associate director of the American Foundation for the Blind. R. Roy Rusk, who had been director of the latter agency's program planning department since 1967, moved to the Overseas Foundation in a similar capacity. AFOB's regional offices, originally staffed by American or British personnel, had been placed in the hands of indigenous or other persons intimately familiar with the cultural values and customs of the areas they served. This arrangement also meant less dislocation when, as conditions changed, the need for full-scale operations in particular regional offices diminished.
The element of responsive flexibility also characterized the World Council for the Welfare of the Blind in its role as a bridge between the efforts of local, national and international agencies and the network of human services financed through the United Nations family of intergovernmental bodies.
Following its incorporation in 1951, the Council adopted the practice of meeting in general assembly every five years, with interim actions in the hands of an executive committee. Its purposes remained guided by the nine-point "bill of rights for the blind" adopted at the 1949 Oxford Conference as a statement of every nation's minimal obligation toward its blind citizens:
1) Registration of all who fall within a standard definition of visual disability; 2) assumption by the national government of responsibility for the basic welfare of such citizens; 3) the right of blind people to rehabilitation and training for participation in the nation's economic, social and civic life; 4) provision of employment opportunities, both open and sheltered; 5) a standard of subsistence that makes allowances for the special costs of blindness; 6) visiting and teaching services for blind persons who are homebound; 7) group homes for aged or multihandicapped blind people, operated on acceptable standards; 8) provision at little or no cost of such aids, appliances and services as mitigate the handicap of blindness; 9) education of all blind children "according to their interests and aptitudes [and at a level] at least equal to that which they would have received if they had not been blind."
Membership in both the World Council's general assembly and its executive committee was based on proportional representation according to population. Under this formula, the United States held six seats in the assembly and three in the executive committee. The World Council's first president was Colonel Edwin A. Baker of Canada, who served three consecutive terms. He was succeeded in 1964 by Eric Boulter; when Boulter's five-year term expired in 1969, Charles Hedkvist of Stockholm became president, to serve until the next general assembly scheduled for Brazil in 1974.
In 1960 Colonel Baker's skillful leadership of the Council was honored by AFOB with the first Helen Keller International Award, a bronze statuette by the American sculptor Doris Caesar. The award's second recipient was Georges Raverat in 1968; the third, in 1970, was John F. Wilson, director of the Royal Commonwealth Society for the Blind. The statuette, "The Spirit of Helen Keller," went to another Briton, Lord Fraser of Lonsdale, in 1971. Plans were under way, at the end of 1972, to award it next to an American, James S. Adams. An industrialist and investment banker, Adams was to be honored both for his long years of service as a trustee of AFB and AFOB, and for his more than four decades of support for medical research to prevent blindness. That support had culminated in his role as a founder and, later, president of Research to Prevent Blindness, a voluntary organization established in 1960.
Not only did George Alexander Kessler keep the promise to God that he made during the seven desperate hours he clung to an oar in the Atlantic Ocean, he started a chain of events that bound others to the same selfless purpose. By 1972 the activities of the American Foundation for Overseas Blind had extended to 103 nations. Not even the vaulting imagination of "the champagne king" could have visualized an outcome of such dimensions.
