POLITICAL IDENTITY AND AGENCY IN AMERICAN POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT

Over the last twenty years, a growing body of scholarship has explored the links between political identity, civic membership, and the development of both modern liberalism and the capacities of the national state. It has deepened our understanding of how contests over identity were central to early efforts at nation building, the development of the social and political order, and the formation of national unity.Footnote ¹² By “political identity,” I refer to those aspects of an individual's self-understanding that lead one to see one's fate as linked with other individuals and to unite with them in groups that have political significance. If, as Stuart Hall argues, “Identity is the narrative of the self … the story we tell … in order to know who we are,” then political identity encompasses those aspects of the narrative that lead us to reach beyond the self to engage politically.Footnote ¹³ It aggregates individuals under a larger narrative of the group, weaving together constitutive norms, shared purposes, and a communal history and worldview that, for the purposes of politics, infuse individuals with a sense of who they are.Footnote ¹⁴ By allowing human beings to see themselves as part of a group, by serving as “symbolically charged loyalties,” political identity makes claims on individuals, influencing how they evaluate policies, formulate preferences, and ascertain their interests. Political identity can be so powerful, in fact, that it induces individuals to support policies that benefit the group but either have no personal benefits or entail some measure of sacrifice.Footnote ¹⁵ Among African Americans, for instance, despite social and economic disparities that sometimes cause group and individual interests to diverge, a shared history of oppression and experiences with discrimination have forged a politicized identity around race that organizes individual attitudes and behaviors in highly cohesive ways.Footnote ¹⁶

Political identity is not simply a matter of fixed, ascriptive characteristics or individual self-reflection. Rather, identity is constructed through politics. As David Engel and Frank Munger point out in their study of disability, the narratives that constitute identity remain fluid, continually revised through “a process of interaction over an extended period of time” between the individual and a range of state and nonstate actors.Footnote ¹⁷ Because they are located at the nexus of two feedback loops, citizen advocacy organizations are key among these actors. One feedback loop connects these organizations to governing institutions, political processes, and public policies, where they speak on behalf of their constituents to elected and administrative officials, cultivate coalitional partners, and introduce emerging cultural and social ideas into political debate. In a second feedback loop, citizen advocacy organizations bring politics to their constituents. They educate their constituents about policies and the operations of government, signal to them which issues are relevant to their interests, and provide a conduit through which constituents to articulate their demands to government.Footnote ¹⁸

As the lynchpin between citizens and the state, these organizations are well-situated to mobilize identity in strategic ways in order to translate what individuals would otherwise see as personal problems into broader claims of social and economic injustice.Footnote ¹⁹ Organizational activists can—and often do—appeal to shared histories or invoke group norms and rituals, in order to strengthen group coherence and draw boundaries between members and external actors, allowing members to derive shared purpose from their common opposition to “outsiders.”Footnote ²⁰ They can also challenge prevailing constructions of identity in order to politicize certain affinities or heighten the salience of selected issues among their members. Exercising what Maureen Scully and Douglas Creed call “institutional entrepreneurship,” activists knit together existing repertories or reinterpret cultural frames, then move them across contexts in order to mobilize new constituents or channel their engagement in different ways.Footnote ²¹ By bringing new actors into the political process and heightening the political salience around issues, citizen advocacy organizations construct and clarify group identity for the purposes of destabilizing settled political dynamics and reordering existing power relationships.Footnote ²²

By placing political identity front and center in its analysis, recent scholarship in American political development underscores the ways in which identity animates what some critics see as an overly structural view of political change among scholars of development.Footnote ²³ In these accounts, contests over identity and civic membership serve as a means by which cultural values enter the legal and political realm and reshape policymaking.Footnote ²⁴ Nevertheless, entrepreneurship is not without bounds.Footnote ²⁵ The struggle to redefine categories of identity is done within a political institutional order already thick with identity-based meanings, some of which are salient enough to serve as orders in their own right. Race constitutes one of the most enduring of these orders. Desmond King and Rogers Smith use the concept of racial institutional orders to capture the ways in which race reaches beyond the individual to structure political interactions and outcomes. Racial institutional orders are coalitions of political institutions, organizations, and actors that are held together by shared beliefs about race and common aims with respect to race relations. Political leaders maintain these coalitions by pursuing governing agendas that distribute authority, resources, and prestige along racial lines. They concretize their aims through the enactment of public policies, rules, processes, and other arrangements that maintain political power and manage shifts in the exercise of that power. According to King and Smith, competition between two such orders—one committed to white dominance and the other to racial egalitarianism—have informed the nation's conflicts over other forms of hierarchy, including economic inequality, and profoundly shaped terms of civic membership in the United States across time.Footnote ²⁶

Conceiving of identity as the crux of an institutional order rather than simply group affinity allows us to comprehend the ways in which it organizes politics in consequential ways. According to Evelyn Nagano Glenn, identities are dichotomous, relational oppositions, in which a category of identity is often defined as much by what it is as by what it is not. White–black, male–female, masculine–feminine, heteronormative–queer—These oppositions clarify the meaning of the dominant group and justify its hold on power through the construction of its relational opposite. While the subordinated “other” is named and often described in great detail to make clear its distinctiveness from the majority, the dominant group's attributes—whiteness, maleness, heterosexuality, able-bodiedness—remain unspecified and appear “natural” or “normal,” thus obscuring the ways in which perceived differences between groups are not only systematically related but also expressive of power.Footnote ²⁷ Under a system of white supremacy, whites are “normal,” their normality constructed through notions of black deviance and inferiority. Indeed, whiteness takes on the moniker of “everyone,” an unspecified and purportedly universal position that erases the marginalization of unnamed “others.”Footnote ²⁸

While King and Smith primarily focus on racial orders, other scholars have noted that the existence of similar political coalitions united around aims pertaining to class, gender, sexuality, disability, and other forms of identity. These set the terms by which citizens and noncitizens alike experience civic membership.Footnote ²⁹ As an institutionalized form of political identity, civic membership organizes the privileges, obligations, and civic standing of all individuals within the purview of American government.Footnote ³⁰ But a particular individual's civic status is never unidimensional. Rather, status is constituted by multiple identities that locate the person within a complex system of power relations, fashioned by overlapping coalitions that defend their privileged position.Footnote ³¹ In other words, taken together, simultaneously existing identity-based political orders create an edifice of interlocking institutions, each organized around a distinct axis of inequality, mutually constituting one another into what Patricia Hill Collins calls a “matrix of domination.”Footnote ³²

Viewing citizen advocacy organizations as situated within this larger institutional landscape calls attention to the extent to which their efforts are politically grounded. Public policies, for example, are one aspect of a larger political order that influences organizational and citizen behavior. By dividing Americans into statutory and administrative categories and imbuing those categories with material consequences and subjective meaning, policies facilitate or stymie political involvement, rights claiming, group mobilization, and coalition building between potential organizational allies.Footnote ³³ Yet the effects of policy are inconsistent across members of the group because all groups, even ones that coalesce around subordinated identities, contain members of intersecting identities. Thus, members experience a “shared (though not uniform) location in hierarchical power relations.” Footnote ³⁴ Some enjoy an ascriptive identity or resources, like income, skills, or social connections, that other members lack, and these relatively privileged activists often exercise disproportionate influence in setting the agenda or direction of the group.Footnote ³⁵ As a result, though E. E. Schattschneider observed that “new policies create new politics,” try as activists might to reimagine the self, the strategies and tactics they deploy are informed by the extant identity-based orders.Footnote ³⁶

While activists might understand that oppression operates simultaneously, as they navigate institutional obstacles, their political strategies for rectifying inequalities between groups might actually deepen inequalities within groups. At various historical moments, activists engaged in rights-based campaigns for equality have distanced themselves from stigmatized identities in order to forge alliances with powerful political actors and maintain organizational unity. They have framed their analysis of oppression along a single axis of difference, arguing that they “deserve” equality by virtue of the moral decency or capacity for rational self-governance they share with the dominant group—and ostensibly lacking among other groups.Footnote ³⁷ Cathy Cohen, for example, observes that contemporary white LGBTQ activists have pursued assimilation into dominant institutions rather than a transformative queer politics that questions “the political, legal, economic, sexual, racial and family systems within which we live.”Footnote ³⁸ Similarly, Dean Spade chides disability rights activists for prioritizing access to workplaces, where discrimination of all forms is present, rather than rejecting the denigration of “dependency” and contesting “what is considered ‘normal on every front.’”Footnote ³⁹ While such rights-based campaigns speak to the concerns of individuals who, but for one marginalized status, would qualify as full citizens, they leave unaddressed the injustices experienced by members whose exclusion rests on multiple dimensions and could, in fact, exacerbate those injustices by legitimizing some forms of exclusion.Footnote ⁴⁰ Despite aspirations for intersectional justice, not all group members, Cohen says bluntly, are “equally essential to the survival of the community.”Footnote ⁴¹

THE INTERSECTIONALITY OF THE BLIND

Thinking of activists as operating within a political environment replete with identity-based commitments directs us toward two significant aspects to the formation of disability consciousness in the United States. First, activism moved along already privileged channels of mobilization. Between 1880 and 1930, disability emerged as a formal category of social differentiation, ingrained into medical and administrative practice through social scientific theories, casework practices, and federal, state, and local laws.Footnote ⁴² Philanthropy and activism emerged for and among the “healthy disabled”—individuals who were not burdened by chronic pain or declining health and whose disabilities evoked empathy rather than fear and disgust.Footnote ⁴³ Such was the case with the blind. Organizing the blind was no easy task. A range of conditions caused blindness—everything from venereal diseases to impoverished and unsanitary conditions, from industrial accidents to old age—and individuals had vastly different experiences with blindness depending on the age at which they were blinded.Footnote ⁴⁴ The blind, in short, had little in common other than the lack of eyesight. During the late nineteenth century, however, social and political changes brought young and highly educated white blind men together to form the first organizations of the blind. Moved by the “tragedy” of blindness, philanthropists founded a network of private and state-supported residential schools for blind boys and girls, starting first in New York, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania in the 1830s and spreading through the Midwest between 1850 and 1870. These schools aggregated otherwise spatially dispersed individuals together under one roof to share their common experiences with blindness, leading to the formation of alumni associations and social clubs for the adult blind. By 1920, these organizations were present in almost every major American city.Footnote ⁴⁵ Many were instrumental in lobbying state governments to support a range of charitable and public programs for the blind, including sheltered workshops, day schools for children, home aides to help with errands and chores, readers for the blind attending college, instructors to teach newly blinded adults to read Braille, and research into the prevention and curing of blindness—all of which were to be administered by an emerging profession of social workers trained specifically in work with the blind and coordinated through newly established state commissions for the blind.Footnote ⁴⁶

Activism and philanthropy tracked prevailing cleavages in American society. Among the most impoverished of the blind were African Americans in the South, where educational opportunities for blacks and social services for the poor, never mind the blind, were few and far between. Blind individuals who were deaf or cognitively impaired also faced limited prospects; schools and workshops routinely turned them away because they were, in managers’ estimations, poor rehabilitation candidates. Similarly, because women who were blind were less likely to be married and less likely to be employed and, when employed, earned less than their male counterparts, they experienced deep levels of destitution.Footnote ⁴⁷ Yet rather than organizing the most marginalized in American society, organizations of the blind featured largely male memberships, replicating the sex segregation of workshops and most residential schools. In the South, blind schools and their alumni networks remained racially segregated, as did state and local associations of the blind.Footnote ⁴⁸ At a time when blindness was more prevalent among people of color and foreign-born immigrants and when the vast majority of people became blind after school age, organizations of the blind, including the NFB, were dominated by the white, native-born graduates of the residential schools. Yet even though NFB officers were professionally employed and hardly depended on the pensions that sustained many blind men and women, they shared a commitment with rank-and-file Federationists to defending the dignity of and opportunities for the blind, compelling them to reach beyond the concerns of male alumni groups and clubs to defend generous pensions for the poor.Footnote ⁴⁹

A second aspect of disability consciousness is its development in opposition to the sighted professionals who specialized in the education and rehabilitation of the blind and, by extension, the gendered logic on which they grounded their arguments for public aid. The first alumni organization of the blind, the American Blind People's Higher Education and General Improvement Association (ABPHEGIA) was founded in the 1890s, after graduates of the Missouri School for the Blind who had entered teaching became disenchanted with their professional organization, the American Association for Instructors of the Blind. They resolved to create an organization with membership restricted to blind educators and workers. Although the ABPHEGIA did not last long, it gave a voice to the blind that its members believed was missing from organizations dominated by the sighted.Footnote ⁵⁰ While cooperation between blind groups, sighted philanthropists, charitable workers, and educators was common, throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, conflict between the blind and sighted professionals increased with the advent of blind pensions. Between 1890 and 1930, coalitions of alumni groups, clubs, and the friends and family of the blind were successful in persuading state legislatures to enact cash aid to the blind.Footnote ⁵¹ The first of these pension laws passed in Ohio in 1898, and by 1929, eighteen states in the Union had a blind pension. In at least half those states, the programs had been championed by blind activists over the opposition of social workers and instructors of the blind.Footnote ⁵²

Antagonism with the activist blind grew out of two objectives that sighted progressive reformers pursued. First, reformers sought to erect a welfare state that not only directed men and women into different programs but also established a different basis for their civic incorporation. From Civil War pensions to mothers’ pensions, from maternal health programs to workmen's compensation, progressives premised public aid on gendered notions of national service: motherhood for women and military or industrial service for men.Footnote ⁵³ Blind benefits, however, defied this gendered logic. To offer aid based on the fact of blindness alone, reformers feared, would undo a regime that that not only limited demands for redistribution but also reinforced proper gender relations.Footnote ⁵⁴ Second, social workers worried that pensions undermined their status as experts in the treatment and rehabilitation of blindness, which rested on their ability to deliver aid under “scientific” principles of administration. During the first decades of the twentieth century, social workers sought to professionalize charitable work. New schools of social work churned out young women and, to a lesser extent, young men trained in social scientific principles of case management, the determination of individual and family needs, and the care of infants and children.Footnote ⁵⁵ Those social workers who specialized in serving the blind pursued the same professional transformation of their field and hoped to establish sheltered workshops as a key component of a comprehensive rehabilitation program for the blind.Footnote ⁵⁶ The spread of pensions would make it difficult to find employees to fill the low-paying jobs in their workshops. Blindness social workers, therefore, argued for pension laws that placed them in charge of determining eligibility so as to keep benefits out of the hands of those “with known vicious habits”—habits that included begging, getting married, or failing to abide by the rehabilitative regimens they suggested.Footnote ⁵⁷

The blind did not take kindly to being managed. In some states, social workers reported that blind pensioners were “openly resistant” to their help.Footnote ⁵⁸ Across the Midwest and West, blind activists lobbied legislatures for laws that minimized administrative oversight and discretion, including pensions paid as flat grants and application processes that involved little more than a certification of blindness and low income.Footnote ⁵⁹ By 1935, more than a dozen of the states with a blind pension used simple income thresholds to determine whether an applicant was needy rather than the individualized investigations that blindness workers endorsed. Some states went even further, paying blind pensioners a monthly grant irrespective of their actual level of need.Footnote ⁶⁰

Rather than resolving the simmering conflict between professionals and activists, the New Deal thrust it onto the national stage. Between 1930 and 1950, social workers and their allies in the SSA sought to split employment and public assistance; an individual could not both work in competitive employment and receive public aid. Those social workers specializing in blindness further advocated lodging control of assistance in their state agencies. The NFB, however, rejected supervision of the blind and used its dispute with the SSA to turn what until then had been loosely formed ideas about “help[ing] the blind help themselves”—to borrow an early motto of the Wisconsin-based Badger Association of the Blind—into a biting critique of social workers and government bureaucrats that drew from the New Deal's rich vocabulary of rights belonging to breadwinners.Footnote ⁶¹ By grounding the political identity of the blind on their capacities for productive labor, Federationists rejected both the feminized status of welfare dependency and supervision by the largely female profession of social work. They also wedded themselves to rights reserved largely for men whose race and heterosexuality made them proper breadwinners. Although Federationists sought to reconstruct the political meaning of blindness, by embracing breadwinning, they acceded to a larger political order of identity-based hierarchies, which constrained their ability not only to reimagine blind identity but also to reframe narratives around poverty and unemployment.

THE NEW DEAL: CONSTRUCTING THE BLIND AS “CHRONIC CASES” OF DEPENDENCY

The New Deal channeled state responses to the Great Depression along existing avenues of progressive activism. Many of the liberal reformers who came to Washington, DC, to work in the Roosevelt administration were trained social workers who brought with them their profession's notions of what sound and modern antipoverty policy should look like, including a commitment to individual determinations of need, casework, and the family wage. These included Harry Hopkins, director of federal emergency relief; Frances Perkins, Secretary of Labor; Grace Abbott and Katherine Lenroot of the U.S. Children's Bureau; and Jane Hoey, director of the SSA's Bureau of Public Assistance (BPA) in the 1930s and 1940s. They built upon the gendered tracks set forth during the Progressive Era, rooting social insurance in formal employment subject to uniform rules and national administration but leaving a largely “feminized” realm of public assistance to the states.Footnote ⁶² Disability, however, left the reformers flummoxed. Their plans for both emergency relief and long-term economic security largely excluded people with disabilities, whom they deemed “chronic cases” of poverty.

The summary exclusion of the disabled from New Deal work relief programs illustrates the extent to which gendered notions of aid operated to marginalize people with disabilities. Hopkins headed up the Roosevelt administration's emergency relief efforts and brought with him an abiding interest in the psychology of unemployment. While running relief programs in New York in the 1910s, Hopkins had come to the conclusion that men and women required different forms of aid. Because men's social status was tied to their ability to provide for their families, the lack of a job, not poverty per se, left men demoralized and vulnerable to lapsing into drinking, gambling, and other intemperate behaviors. To remove the stigma associated with the dole and create male-appropriate assistance, he endorsed providing relief to men in the form of wages. While social workers closely monitored the recipients of mothers’ pensions to ensure that only “deserving” women received aid, Hopkins believed that such supervision had no place in a relief program for men, whose poverty resulted from the vagaries of capitalism rather than moral imprudence.Footnote ⁶³ Eventually envisioning a job as the right of every man, he promoted public works programs as relief and put his ideas into effect on a national scale once he assumed control of federal work relief projects run by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC).Footnote ⁶⁴

Nonetheless, because the demand for jobs far outstripped the resources available, Hopkins prohibited the hiring of “unemployables.” Senior citizens, mothers of young children, and people with disabilities—Hopkins believed them to be “chronic cases” of poverty, whose need was not the result of a temporary economic dislocation but was instead rooted in medical and social conditions that he considered beyond the purview of emergency measures. The exclusion of chronic cases, however, reflected more than Hopkins's efforts to reserve jobs for laid-off male workers. It was also based on progressive conceptions of proper masculinity, which grounded citizenship on a man's role as the provider of a family. The WPA and CCC preferred men who were married and encouraged the transient men who participated in work projects to settled down with a wife. These roles, however, were closed to many of the disabled. Women with disabilities were frequent targets of public and private sterilization campaigns, and many states discouraged or outright banned marriages to people with disabilities, including the blind.Footnote ⁶⁵

The politics of the Social Security Act of 1935 further indicates liberal uncertainty concerning the place of the disabled in an incipient national welfare state that organized aid along the gendered lines of breadwinner and dependent. As they labored over the summer of 1934, the economists, academics, and social workers who staffed the Committee for Economic Security (CES) agreed that, in the long-term, the nation's foundation of security should be social insurance to protect industrial workers from the economic risks associated with old age and temporary unemployment. To assist workers who were in immediate need, they proposed a massive work relief program, similar to the WPA. But for the “unemployables,” the CES recommended federal matching funds for two existing state pension programs. State pensions for the elderly became the federal-state matching grant, Old Age Assistance (OAA), while mothers’ pensions were converted to Aid to Dependent Children (ADC). Additionally, the Children's Bureau urged the CES to include federal grants to support state programs for maternal and child care, child welfare, the care of crippled children, and public health.Footnote ⁶⁶

The CES, however, had little to say about adult disability. By 1934, more than half the states in the Union had a blind pension, many less than a decade old, but unlike OAA and ADC, they lacked a bureaucratic advocate within the CES. Though committee members understood that disability was a major contributor to poverty, they considered invalidity the most difficult risk against which to insure. They also believed that, relative to other groups of the poor, the blind were already well taken care of through state pensions, and they hoped that vocational rehabilitation, extended to civilians in 1926, would suffice to meet the needs of the disabled for the moment.Footnote ⁶⁷ When it came time to forward its proposals to Congress, the CES set aside plans for health and invalidity insurance and decided against proposing federal matching grants for blind pensions.

Public assistance for the blind, however, became part of the Social Security Act through an act of serendipity that captures the period's conflicting ideas about blindness. As the bill moved through the House of Representatives in the summer of 1935, Robert Irwin, the executive director of the American Foundation for the Blind (AFB), realized that blindness professionals were about to get left out of the federal largesse the new law promised. When the bill reached the Senate, Irwin suggested a program of aid that mirrored the age-based distinctions in the Social Security Act. His proposal allowed older blind applicants, who had poor job prospects, to receive OAA at age 50 rather than 65 and extended services under the crippled children's program to children with visual impairments, thus permitting states to spend federal money on services that restored children's sight or helped them adapt to blindness. With the aged and children taken care of, blindness professionals would then be free to concentrate on the rehabilitation of working-age adults. To that end, Irwin recommended federal funding for sheltered workshops and other services to the blind, essentially a federal rehabilitation plan for the blind. At the time, state vocational rehabilitation agencies routinely turned away blind applicants because they believed their impairments were too severe to make them viable job candidates.Footnote ⁶⁸

Although the AFB, the American Association of Workers for the Blind (AAWB), and other organizations of blindness professionals lobbied for Irwin's proposal, the Senate Committee on Finance instead turned to cash support. A champion of the blind from a state that was among the most generous toward the blind, Representative Thomas Jenkins (R-OH) had tried to amend the Social Security Act from the House floor to provide matching grants for blind pensions so that, in his words, the blind “are recognized as a part of our citizenship.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Though Jenkins had been unsuccessful, the Senate was receptive to establishing federal aid to the blind, whom lawmakers likened to the aged. During floor debate, Finance Committee chair Pat Harrison (D-MS) noted that very few of the blind found jobs and, even among those who worked, only a small fraction earned enough to support themselves.Footnote ⁷⁰ Desperate to bundle services with pensions, Irwin persuaded Senator Robert Wagner to offer an amendment that would authorize federal grants for blindness services. But the House and Senate struck the Wagner amendment in conference, leaving only cash benefits for the blind. Aid to the Blind (AB) became Title X of the Social Security Act. Modeled on OAA, AB set a ceiling on federal spending of $15 per month per person and matched dollar for dollar state spending on blind pensions.Footnote ⁷¹ Because the Social Security Act barred individuals from receiving both an OAA and an AB grant, shortly after the law's enactment, most states transferred their aged blind—by far the vast majority of pensioners—into OAA, suddenly transforming Title X into a program for the young. Blind men and women remained the only working-age adults eligible for cash grants under the Social Security Act until 1950.Footnote ⁷²

Though the blind were never more than a small share of the public assistance caseload, Title X soon became caught up in a larger struggle over aid to the aged.Footnote ⁷³ The Social Security Act charged the newly created Social Security Board with ensuring that state plans for OAA, AB, and ADC complied with federal law. Seeking to protect the embryonic Old Age Insurance (OAI) program from competition from public assistance, the agency used its power to harden the New Deal distinction between those who could work and those who could not. In particular, political executives at the board and the Federal Security Administration (FSA) were concerned about the popularity of flat grants.Footnote ⁷⁴ OAA immediately met the needs of millions of Americans, but OAI would not begin paying benefits until 1940. Even after 1940, OAI benefits would be a pittance because workers would have a rather short history of contributions; the neediest among them would need to supplement their benefits with OAA. Meanwhile, Congress and state legislatures faced pressure to liberalize assistance programs. The Townsend Plan, which would pay a monthly pension of $200 to every citizen over the age of 60, was the most popular of the flat grant proposals, but other movements, including Huey Long's Share Our Wealth crusade, Father Charles Coughlin's populist National Union for Social Justice, and Upton Sinclair's End Poverty in California campaign, enjoyed wide regional and national followings.Footnote ⁷⁵ The pressure was especially intense in the Midwest and the mountain and coastal West, where several states paid old-age and blind pensions in the form of flat grants, and pensioners had come to view their benefits as based on rights rather than need. SSA officials speculated that these states lacked familiarity with the social work profession and, with small elderly and disabled populations, failed to develop the robust administrative techniques commonly used in the Northeast to manage welfare rolls.Footnote ⁷⁶ They feared that allowing flat grant plans to continue under the Social Security Act would diminish political support for social insurance before it ever got off the ground and pave the way for the enactment of a national Townsend Plan, which remained popular among Americans and in some quarters of the House of Representatives until the mid-1940s.Footnote ⁷⁷

Between 1935 and 1939, using its administrative authority over public assistance, the SSA sought to shape the contours of the emerging welfare state. During this time, the agency was tasked with converting the nation's highly decentralized system of public aid into state-run programs that complied with a few basic federal conditions: residency requirements of not more than one year, program benefits available statewide, and opportunities for recipients whose applications were denied to request an administrative hearing. In approaching this task, SSA officials wanted to protect social insurance from an aggressive expansion of public assistance that would blur the distinction between OAI and OAA and doom OAI, but they also wanted to increase the resources available to poor children and their mothers, who remained the poorest of the public assistance recipients. Additionally, some mid-level agency staff sought to root out invidious forms of discrimination, in particular racial discrimination, that operated to keep welfare rolls small and impoverished mothers in the local low-wage labor force.Footnote ⁷⁸

To distinguish public assistance from social insurance, and also to professionalize the administration of aid to the poor, the SSA interpreted the Social Security Act as requiring states to follow a rule of “individual need, individually determined.” Promoted in model legislation drawn up by the American Public Welfare Association (APWA) in 1935, the rule required local welfare caseworkers to create a budget for each recipient based on the recipient's needs for housing, food, clothing, and fuel, and then count all of his or her income, assets, and other resources, including gifts and contributions from relatives, when determining the individual's means. Caseworkers then subtracted the individual's needs from means to arrive at the amount of monthly benefit.Footnote ⁷⁹ Standardizing eligibility determinations and casework practices across the states comported with the aspirations of social workers who had long hoped to develop a “new scientific philanthropy” that would replace local prejudice and pity as the basis of judgments about eligibility for assistance. Meanwhile, agency officials wrapped casework practices in the language of rights to emphasize that public assistance was not charity. Claimants had the right to apply for aid, the right to timely consideration of their cases, the right to appeal denials, and the right to keep personal information confidential.Footnote ⁸⁰ Echoing these ambitions, Altmeyer noted that the SSA's objective was, in his words, to “assure that the rights and needs of each public assistance applicant were properly determined by trained social workers.”Footnote ⁸¹

While SSA officials viewed recipients of public assistance as enjoying a limited set of rights to administrative fairness, these were not the same as the rights to adequate income and individual autonomy that Federationists would come to demand. In fact, even as the SSA sought to curb the ability of local officials to discriminate or harass low-income recipients of aid, it also moved to reduce the ability of states to expand public assistance. The agency's position not only placed public assistance squarely under the purview of social workers but also barred states from paying flat grants or using rudimentary means tests. Nor could states ignore recipients who were employed or who managed to accumulate savings. All income would now have to count against the means test, no matter how irregular or low paying, reducing monthly payments dollar for dollar.Footnote ⁸² Although SSA officials were most apprehensive about OAA because it directly competed with OAI, they extended their interpretation of need to AB and ADC as well.

The SSA had to tread carefully when questioning state plans both because it was not sure it had the authority to proscribe needs rules and because it did not wish to arouse organized opposition. The agency's legal counsel argued that Congress intended to allow the states wide discretion when determining need, and though it had implied that public assistance recipients had to be needy, it had never explicitly stated that. Nor was it clear that the SSA could tell the states how to determine need. Program executives worried that Congress might overturn its position if states or Townsend groups protested too loudly the agency's heavy hand.Footnote ⁸³ Officials waited until 1939, when Congress again took up the Social Security Act, to suggest inscribing into the statute the agency's preferred definition of need. The 1939 amendments are best remembered for enshrining the breadwinning status of workers. Much of the congressional debate focused on turning OAI from an individual to a family benefit by allowing dependent children and wives to receive the Social Security benefits of a covered worker in the event of the worker's death. Less noted, however, were the important changes the amendments made to public assistance and federal-state relations. Not wanting to alert supporters of the Townsend Plan that the public assistance titles of the Social Security Act were ambiguous, Altmeyer waited until the Ways and Means Committee was in closed session before recommending to lawmakers that they define need, which they did.Footnote ⁸⁴ Although they did not explicitly rule out flat grants, the 1939 amendments instructed states to count all of the income and resources of a recipient when determining eligibility for public assistance. The incongruity between sighted and blind men was striking. Even as the amendments extended benefits to the dependents of heterosexual male workers, by adopting the SSA's preferred definition of need, they denied them to the families of blind workers, who could not pass onto their dependents the fruits of their labor, either in life as earnings or in death as savings. Emboldened by this “clarification,” as the agency called it, the SSA directed wayward states to revise their public assistance programs to include individualized assessments of need.Footnote ⁸⁵

BUILDING THE COLLECTIVE IDENTITY OF THE BLIND

In 1935, blind activists greeted the Social Security Act with optimism that soon turned to outrage. On the one hand, for the poorest citizens, Title X was a godsend. Although Congress struck provisions in the law that would have required states to set benefit levels compatible with “health and decency,” the Social Security Act made many individuals eligible for blind benefits for the first time. States that had not yet set up pensions were now eligible for federal matching funds if they did, and the act directed states that took federal money to make benefits available in every locality. Prior to the Social Security Act, most states that had blind pensions authorized but did not require local governments to provide grants to their residents, creating vast inequalities among the blind across different counties within states. The law expanded eligibility by reducing residency requirements, which had been as long as ten years in many states, and it barred rules that had limited pensions to individuals who could prove they had been blinded in the state.Footnote ⁸⁶

On the other hand, the coming of the Social Security Act brought hardship to others. In states that either paid individuals both an old-age and a blind pension or paid a stipend to the elderly blind to cover the added costs of hired help, the Social Security Act lowered incomes, as the aged blind were moved into OAA and their pensions reduced to the same monthly grant as sighted senior citizens.Footnote ⁸⁷ Similarly, roughly one-fifth to one-quarter of the blind had some earnings, though rarely enough to raise them far above subsistence levels. These individuals found themselves facing the prospects of lower assistance checks, as the SSA moved to rule out flat grants and exemptions for earned income. Following the transition from pensions to AB, letters poured into the AFB from recipients complaining about caseworker investigations and reduced payments.Footnote ⁸⁸ Organized opposition, however, was initially muted. Because, prior to 1939, the SSA did not publicly announce its opposition to flat grants and earnings disregards, blind organizations struggled to understand why the agency overturned some state provisions but not others. The enactment of the 1939 amendments, however, made evident the SSA's position on individual need. Following the amendments’ “clarification,” the agency warned California, Illinois, Missouri, and Pennsylvania that they would lose federal funds unless they promptly aligned their blind pensions—the most generous in the nation—with the agency's rules on need.Footnote ⁸⁹

Blind activists were furious and galvanized to defend their benefits. Shortly after the passage of the 1939 amendments, Gayle Burlingame, head of the Pennsylvania Federation of the Blind, ran a series of ads in Braille magazines, inviting concerned men and women from around the nation to attend his organization's annual convention. Sixteen activists answered Burlingame's call, convening in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, in November 1940. They hailed from seven states, all with liberal pension laws, including the four that had been threatened with withdrawal of federal funds.Footnote ⁹⁰ Among the attendees was Jacobus tenBroek, who had just completed a fellowship at Harvard Law School and was beginning a teaching position at the University of Chicago Law School. TenBroek was a protégé of Newel Perry, a mathematician teaching at the California School of the Blind in Berkeley and an activist who had united local groups into the California Council of the Blind (CCB).Footnote ⁹¹ Although blind associations were influential in several states, the attendees decided to organize the blind nationally in order to confront the SSA. TenBroek wrote the constitution for the new National Federation of the Blind, the name the delegates chose for their incipient organization, and, following the adoption of the constitution, was promptly chosen president in an uncontested election. TenBroek would remain at the helm of the NFB for the next twenty-five years, infusing the organization with his fiery rhetoric and radical insistence that the “administrative despots” who ran the SSA represented “the single greatest menace to the welfare of the blind.”Footnote ⁹²

According to its constitution, the purpose of the NFB was “to promote the economic and social welfare of the blind,” a mission that could have included any number of the reforms that state blind associations pursued.Footnote ⁹³ Nowhere had a more wide-ranging agenda for blind equality been articulated than in California. Under the leadership of Perry, activists had developed a legislative program for aiding the “self-sufficient” blind, including state support for stipends and readers to blind students attending college, flat pensions and earnings disregards for the working blind, rehabilitative services that would place blind men and women in jobs outside of sheltered workshops, and reduced fares on streetcars and buses so that blind persons could travel economically with a sighted guide.Footnote ⁹⁴ Much of this agenda was endangered, however, if blind persons could not keep their earnings, accrue savings, or disagree with the recommendations of sighted caseworkers. Thus, for the activists gathered in Wilkes-Barre, opposition to the SSA's position on needs was their reason for being. Edward Collins, the delegate from Illinois, made clear the work of the NFB when he declared to the convention, “The primary purpose of this organization is to go to Washington.”Footnote ⁹⁵

As president, tenBroek expressed the state activists’ yearnings for equality and amplified them onto a national stage. In a speech entitled “Have Our Blind Social Security?” tenBroek gave his presidential address to the handful of delegates composing the inaugural NFB convention, articulating two pillars of blind identity that would guide Federationists for the next decade. First, tenBroek asserted that blindness constituted a coherent political identity—that is, that the blind had shared experiences and a worldview that distinguished them from the sighted. No matter how well-meaning, learned, or experienced sighted family members, friends, and social workers or other professionals were, they could not understand blindness the way the blind could and therefore could not adequately speak on their behalf. TenBroek committed the NFB to representing the voice of the blind, displacing the charitable and professional organizations that had long dominated policymaking. Without consulting the blind, he argued, agencies such as the SSA operated in “profound ignorance” and with “authoritarian arrogance.” “[We will] diminish the Board's arrogance if we cannot reduce its ignorance,” tenBroek promised. Second, tenBroek argued that the blind were “normal” adults—albeit without sight—and that they, therefore, were entitled to the same rights and opportunities as the sighted. The SSA's policy of individual need stood as the primary obstacle to civic equality because it barred the blind from earning a paycheck and building a nest egg in the same way that sighted workers did. TenBroek denounced the SSA for conspiring to reduce the blind to “paupers,” condemned to subsist at “a bare animal minimum.”Footnote ⁹⁶

Despite the fact that substantial numbers of the blind did not live in states with generous pensions, flat grants, or earnings disregards, the historically tight labor markets during World War II heightened the salience of the NFB's campaign against the SSA. Marginal workers of all kinds streamed into the nation's factories, and sheltered workshops operated around the clock. But because of the SSA's needs policy, each dollar that blind men and women earned led to corresponding reductions in public assistance, thus leaving workers no better off financially than when they had no work. In an open letter to members of Congress, Federationist Raymond Henderson criticized the SSA for expecting the blind, unlike other workers, to labor without remuneration.Footnote ⁹⁷ To hammer home their feelings of betrayal, several local and state blind clubs adopted the slogan “Save Our Social Security from the Social Security Board.”Footnote ⁹⁸

As the war came to a close, the SSA drew up plans to sharpen the distinction between need-based aid and contributory social insurance. In 1943, a temporary government commission, the National Resources Planning Board (NRPB), began laying the groundwork for America's transition to a peacetime economy, guided by President Franklin Roosevelt's call in his State of the Union Address for a system of social insurance that offered “assurance against the evils of all major economic hazards” and “extend[ed] from the cradle to the grave.”Footnote ⁹⁹ The SSA exercised great influence on the NRPB and the subsequent Wagner-Murray-Dingell bill, which embodied many of the board's recommendations, including national health insurance, coverage of permanent and temporary disability, maternity and death benefits, a national system of unemployment insurance, and the expansion of OAI. Agency officials anticipated that, as contributory social insurance grew, spending for public assistance would drop to negligible levels, allowing states to resume responsibility for the poor. With the defeat of the Wagner-Murray-Dingell bill in 1943 and again in 1945, however, SSA officials were forced to reassess.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Although they still pursued the incremental expansion of social insurance, they no longer talked of public assistance withering away. The claim was dubious, as the increased cost of living and the end of wartime assistance to civilians drove public assistance rolls higher.Footnote ¹⁰¹

Instead, SSA officials pressed for the standardization of public assistance and its subordination to OAI. They envisioned a residual safety net that would catch individuals whose income fell below a state's established standard of need, irrespective of their age, family status, or disability, thus constraining the capacity of local officials to discriminate against the “undeserving” poor. To standardized public assistance, agency leaders advocated the end of categorical assistance and the merging of aid to the poor into one universal relief program. The SSA further recommended adopting a “variable” grant formula that paid a higher share of the public assistance costs for impoverished states, expanding federal spending on social services to prevent “dependency,” and consolidating the administration of antipoverty programs under state welfare departments.Footnote ¹⁰² The safety net would be comprehensive, but it would not challenge OAI's primacy. To ensure that public assistance remained ancillary to social insurance, SSA officials insisted on basing eligibility on individualized determinations of need.Footnote ¹⁰³ They also reinforced the conceptual distinction between social insurance and public assistance. As Altmeyer liked to remind audiences in his many speeches, OAI benefits were a right earned through years of payroll contributions. Therefore, upon retirement, social workers did not visit the beneficiaries to ensure that they budgeted their needs and lived within their means. Public assistance, by contrast, was residual; even if applicants enjoyed certain administrative rights, they still had to show welfare officials that they lacked the resources to meet the basic needs in their family budget and that they used their aid judiciously.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Even if the public assistance programs paid larger benefits than OAI or aided a larger number of individuals, as they did in the 1940s, even if they were comprehensive rather than categorical, this fundamental distinction between the two forms of public aid remained.

Plans for comprehensive welfare placed the SSA on a collision course with the NFB. Federationists did not want their lives managed by social workers, and they viewed rights as protecting recipients from the whims of sighted administrators, whether local or federal. According to the NFB, flat grants and earnings exemptions would allow the blind to seek employment without worrying that the state would reduce benefits, thus speeding the rehabilitation of the newly blind. But these demands threatened the SSA's plans. Money that states spent on flat grants or earnings exemptions was money not available to extend aid to new categories of the poor or to increase the benefits of needy children and their families, which were already appallingly low in the most impoverished states. The NFB's purpose, however, was not to advocate for the poor but for the blind. To the extent the NFB spoke of poverty, it was to plead the cause of the blind who were poor.

Throughout the 1940s, the NFB connected the struggles of the blind to the larger political discourse of rights and freedoms that animated postwar American liberalism—and to the expanding regime of benefits enjoyed by breadwinners. The blind, tenBroek argued, had as much right to “the helping hand of government” as other citizens. While the Social Security Act extended the promise of economic security to industrial workers, the SSA “continually impresses upon [the blind] a sense of their own helplessness and dependence.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ In 1944, President Franklin Roosevelt dedicated American liberalism to an Economic Bill of Rights, which articulated the federal government's commitment to the rights and security of American workers and their families. That same year, Congress enacted the Servicemen's Readjustment Act, popularly known as the G.I. Bill of Rights, the most sweeping social welfare law since the Social Security Act. To Federationists, the exclusion was palpable. In a pamphlet circulated among the blind, Ross M. Koen denounced offers of a “pauper's mite.” “The blind do not want pity or sympathy,” Koen declared. “They only want the same treatment” as “the manufacturer, the farmer, or the laborer,” which meant “a fair compensation and a chance to take their place among other men.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ To that end, in 1948, at the NFB annual convention, tenBroek called upon the nation's leaders to enact a Bill of Rights that would recognize the rights of the blind to economic security, equal opportunity, and equality. Shortly after President Harry Truman vetoed a bill that would have allowed blind workers to keep a portion of their earnings, tenBroek declared “Social security, training and employment … inseparable.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷

ORGANIZING THE BLIND TO SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES

Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, advocacy for the blind was spearheaded by the sighted family members and friends of blind men and women and the professionals who treated, educated, and counseled the blind.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Indeed, in the 1930s, the two most prominent national organizations to lobby on matters related to the blind were the AAWB and the AFB. Both organizations were dominated by sighted members, though they sometimes employed blind individuals as spokespersons, notably the AFB's executive director Robert Irwin and its patron Helen Keller. Federationists, however, reconceptualized identity and representation. They dismissed individuals like Irwin and Keller as “occasional blind showpieces” for the sighted and were determined to displace the authority enjoyed by professionals.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ The NFB drew a sharp distinction between organizations of the sighted that spoke for the blind and organizations of the blind themselves, resting its political legitimacy on the fact that it was the latter. It urged its state affiliates to ensure that their leadership consisted of persons who were blind, and it frequently called attention to its federated grassroots membership of blind associations and individuals. As executive secretary A. L. Archibald liked to say during congressional testimony, “We do not speak for the blind; we are the blind speaking for ourselves.”Footnote ¹¹⁰

The distinction the NFB made between organizations of the blind and organizations for the blind emerged from early-century activists seeking to carve a distinctive blind identity from a landscape of poverty and charity work sculpted by white maternalist reformers. One of the most vocal and influential of these activists was Newel Perry of California. While charity and social workers asked philanthropists and elected officials for additional funds for sheltered workshops, Perry lobbied the state legislatures of New York and California to provide stipends so that blind college students could hire readers, complete their degrees, and enter white-collar professions instead of sheltered employment.Footnote ¹¹¹ Perry had little patience for becoming the object of social feminists’ “municipal housekeeping.”Footnote ¹¹² He had once derided Winifred Holt, the wealthy New York heiress who established the Lighthouse workshops, as being driven by nothing more than the desire “to get a little glory.” Rather, Perry aspired to build organizations of the blind that would contest the influence that social workers enjoyed in policymaking. In the 1920s, he founded the Association of the Self-Sufficient Blind in Berkeley to lobby for pensions that preserved the dignity of their recipients and expanded opportunities for the blind in higher education. In 1934, after traveling throughout the state speaking to activists, Perry aggregated local blind groups into the California Council of the Blind. The CCB featured bylaws that banned sighted persons from holding leadership positions so that, as Perry explained, it would remain “a real blind man's club and not a tool of the social welfare ladies.”Footnote ¹¹³

To advance a distinctive voice of the blind, Perry cultivated many of his most promising male students to become leaders in their profession and among the blind. Counted among Perry's Boys, as blind activists affectionately called this fraternity, were NFB President Jacobus tenBroek; its executive secretary, A. L. Archibald; its first executive director, Raymond W. Henderson; its first legal counsel, Leslie Schlingheyde; several members of the NFB's executive committee; and many prominent officials in the CCB and California state government.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Like Perry, they had little regard for social workers, blindness professionals, or state commissions for the blind. Citing the “many petticoated investigators, who constantly shove their long, cold facial extremities into every blind person's affairs,” Earl Wilcox professed his “intense hatred for the professional social worker” and “their violation of all psychological and sociological laws of rehabilitation.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ His fellow Federationist, Allen Jenkins, was only slightly less dismissive. The typical blindness worker, he noted, was “very well motivated” but not “the brightest guy out of college.” These blindness workers might know the social work curriculum, but, Jenkins claimed, they had no idea what it was like to be blind and so knew little about the needs of the blind.Footnote ¹¹⁶

Perry's Boys brought to the NFB their mentor's commitment to giving voice to the blind. Upon being elected president of the NFB in 1940, tenBroek promised delegates at that first convention that they would build “a militant, aggressive, group-conscious organization of the blind,” capable of resisting “the oppression of the social worker and the arrogance of the governmental administrator.” He warned, “Individually, we are scattered, ineffective, and inarticulate.” Only by creating the “machinery … to unify the action and concentrate the energies of the blind” could blind persons become “masters of [their] future.” Anticipating themes of participatory governance that would blossom in the 1960s, tenBroek asserted that mastery entailed demanding that programs be designed to serve their interests as they, not some caseworker or bureaucrat, defined them.Footnote ¹¹⁷

Following the convention, tenBroek contacted several activists about forming NFB chapters in their home states. He found eager affiliates in states across the Midwest, the mountain West, and the West coast, where flat grants and disregards for earned income had been commonplace.Footnote ¹¹⁸ In 1941, when the NFB held its second convention, 104 delegates from eleven states were in attendance. The following year, Perry addressed the convention, challenging attendees to “make a definite, personal, active effort … to enlarge the organization as rapidly as possible.”Footnote ¹¹⁹ Throughout the war, the NFB took advantage of the working blind's resentment of the SSA's policy for determining individual need, which restricted earnings despite high demand for labor. Existing chapters held statewide recruitment drives, social clubs for the blind converted into political organizations, and local affiliates banded together into state chapters. Despite wartime restrictions on travel, the NFB managed to hold all but two of its annual conventions, and in between these yearly meetings, tenBroek and other officers fanned out across the United States, traveling to state and local gatherings to persuade attendees to become affiliates. When the NFB convened its 1944 convention in Cleveland, Ohio, nearly 200 delegates representing eighteen states attended, sufficient grassroots support for tenBroek to proclaim the NFB the preeminent organization of the blind.Footnote ¹²⁰

FRAMING THE BLIND AS WORKERS

Throughout the 1940s, the NFB pursued a political agenda that tied the identity of the blind to their roles in the labor market. Its emphasis on productive employment as not only the crux of blind identity but also the vehicle through which to secure equality placed Federationists squarely in line with the New Deal's redefinition of national citizenship in economic terms.Footnote ¹²¹ In 1940, delegates to the NFB's inaugural convention passed two resolutions that captured the extent to which activists saw the SSA as standing in the way of equality. The first resolution endorsed a national pension for the blind, protection against the economic risks of blindness as a matter of right. Recognizing, however, that a national pension would take years to secure, in a second resolution, delegates spoke to the immediate needs of the blind. They endorsed flat grants and exemptions for earned income and committed themselves to blocking the SSA's efforts to keep AB residual.Footnote ¹²²

The Federationists’ demands challenged assumptions that had long guided disability policy. Sighted policymakers viewed rehabilitation and welfare as serving two distinct purposes. Rehabilitation taught impaired individuals how to resume their place in the labor market by adapting to or overcoming their conditions; welfare, by contrast, provided financial compensation to individuals beyond rehabilitation's help. Blind activists contested this distinction and argued instead for a rehabilitative public assistance program “so arranged as to leave the recipients’ independence unimpaired.” In so doing, they gave voice to an expansive definition of need, one that spoke to the subjective as well as material well-being of the poor.Footnote ¹²³

According to tenBroek, the rehabilitation of a newly blinded person entailed “individual personal reconstruction” rather than mere return to work.Footnote ¹²⁴ This individual not only had to learn to do many once-familiar tasks without the aid of sight but also had to come to a new self-understanding. He had to reject prevailing social stereotypes about the blind and overcome the inferiority and defeatism that he felt. To adjust to blindness, the individual had to accept both the permanence of the condition and the conviction that a life without sight was still worth living.Footnote ¹²⁵ If the individual could do so, tenBroek asserted, blindness might still be “a physical nuisance,” but it did not “determine his career” or “affect his usefulness or happiness.”Footnote ¹²⁶ Productive employment was imperative because it not only provided a paycheck but also fostered dignity, as blind men came to see that, despite their impairment, they could still contribute to their families and communities.Footnote ¹²⁷ The great scourge of blindness, Federationists often claimed, was not blindness itself, but the enforced “idleness” that came with it.Footnote ¹²⁸ Without the opportunity to contribute to society, to be tested on their merits, tenBroek argued, the blind experienced “the disintegration of the personality,” “social isolation, and the atrophy of their productive powers.” Confined to “the sidelines of life,” the blind became nothing more than “players warming the bench in the game that all should play.”Footnote ¹²⁹ To be sure, Federationists did not suggest that women's roles as caregivers were any less valuable than men's roles as workers and breadwinners. Yet by highlighting the centrality of productive employment to personal reconstruction, by falling back on metaphors of sports and competition, they gave voice to a masculine interpretation of blindness that resisted incorporation into the feminized world of welfare.

The NFB's vision of “constructive” public assistance set activists at odds with the SSA's pursuit of universal but residual public assistance.Footnote ¹³⁰ Following the 1940 convention, Burlingame and tenBroek traveled to Washington, DC, to meet with FSA and SSA officials to plead their case. The encounter did not go well, reinforcing the activists’ disdain for sighted professionals. TenBroek dismissed Jane Hoey as “simply another social worker … with a higher salary than most.” TenBroek was equally scornful of male administrators. He described Paul McNutt, head of the FSA, as “a lesser Hitler” who made California social workers “look like angels by comparison.”Footnote ¹³¹ Though Federationists had hoped for better relations with the SSA once Arthur Altmeyer became commissioner in 1946, it was not to be. The following year, frustrated with the SSA's continued opposition to its agenda, delegates at the NFB annual convention passed a resolution calling on President Truman to fire Altmeyer; he did not.Footnote ¹³²

As the SSA pressed states to bring their assistance programs in line with the 1939 amendments, blind activists resisted. In 1941, the CCB and the NFB convinced the California state legislature to create a program of flat grants and earnings exemptions that would supplement AB. called California's Aid to the Partially Self-Supporting Blind (APSB) paid a flat grant of $60 per month to recipients and allowed earnings or other income of up to $800 per year before state welfare officials began reducing assistance payments. Because this plan violated the SSA's rules requiring the counting of all income and resources when determining need, APSB was entirely state-funded and sat alongside the state's SSA-approved and federally matched AB program. SSA officials grudgingly allowed California's program, reasoning that it was a rehabilitation rather than assistance plan because it required recipients to devise an individual plan for self-support.Footnote ¹³³ Shortly thereafter, Missouri and Pennsylvania created similar programs, but the SSA would not accept them. Even though the states offered to pay the full costs of the program for the working blind, the SSA refused all federal matching funds, even for AB programs that complied with SSA rules. The agency argued that the plans did not have the trappings of rehabilitation, such as a plan of self-support, and therefore the states were running two assistance programs that treated persons in similar need differently. Those who could not work received AB; those who could were directed to the state's program of partial support, which had the potential to provide a higher standard of living than AB. Because Missouri and Pennsylvania refused to budge, for a decade, these states operated dual public assistance programs for the blind without any federal grants at all. Meanwhile, the NFB used these three state-funded plans not only as models for what a federal work-based public assistance program might look like but also, in the case of Missouri and Pennsylvania, as an example of bureaucratic meddling that stood in the way of state autonomy and blind people's efforts to better their lives.Footnote ¹³⁴

THE DECISIVE WELFARE BATTLES OF THE 1940S

The discord between the SSA and the NFB came to a head at a time when liberals were on the defensive. By 1946, after waiting patiently during the war years, liberals were ready to expand the scope of protections for American workers and their families. Following the demise of the Wagner-Murray-Dingall bill in 1945, President Truman proposed a twenty-one-point plan designed to boost the American economy. This plan pledged, among other things, to guarantee full employment; raise the minimum wage; expand the availability of unemployment benefits, Social Security, and housing assistance; and grant the federal government greater powers to initiate tax cuts and spending programs should the economy slide into recession. The 1946 midterm elections, however, proved disastrous for Democrats. Riding voter displeasure over price controls and labor unrest, Republicans gained seats for the first time since 1930 and took control of both houses of Congress. Joining with Southern Democrats to form the Conservative Coalition, Republicans truncated Truman's grand ambitions for the Fair Deal and sided with business groups that hoped to hold onto wartime profits by blocking capacious social welfare measures and labor legislation.Footnote ¹³⁵ Despite the inauspicious political climate, liberals believed that reconsideration of Social Security was long overdue. Demobilization had brought both cost-of-living increases and unemployment. Meanwhile, emergency civilian war relief and work projects had ended in 1943, and with no other federal aid available, public assistance and general aid rolls were growing rapidly across the United States.Footnote ¹³⁶ In his State of the Union Address, Truman noted that the time had finally come for “a thorough reconsideration of our social security laws,” which Congress had not done since the 1939 amendments.Footnote ¹³⁷

Preparing for a major reform of Social Security, the administration split social insurance and public assistance into two separate bills. Introduced by Aime Forand (D-RI), the Public Welfare Amendments of 1946 had been written in consultation with the APWA and embodied many of the SSA's objectives in public assistance.Footnote ¹³⁸ Its overriding purpose was not so much generosity—Altmeyer demurred when members of the House Ways and Means Committee asked him to name a minimally adequate income—as was it was remedying inequities among the poor.Footnote ¹³⁹ The bill broadened eligibility for public assistance by allowing states to place all poor persons, including those currently receiving OAA, AB, and ADC, into one catch-all public assistance program under Title XIII of the Social Security Act. Additionally, Title XIII erased inequities between categories of the poor by placing all programs under the same federal matching rate; at the time, ADC was matched at a lower rate than the adult public assistance programs. The Forand bill also added federal reimbursement for state spending on social services designed to keep families intact and prevent “dependency,” and it encouraged states to consolidate administrative responsibility for public assistance under the state welfare office.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ These changes, former APWA president Elizabeth Wickenden argued, would reduce disparities in how the poor were treated from one state or one category to the next, “placing a floor under need” (albeit state-defined) “whatever its cause” and allowing welfare administrators to meet the needs of families “as a whole, not piecemeal.”Footnote ¹⁴¹ Additionally, Altmeyer told Congress, administrative unification would enhance “the effectiveness and the economy of assistance programs” and simplify the application process for the needy.Footnote ¹⁴²

The Forand bill provoked outrage from both organizations of the blind and organizations for the blind. Blindness professionals feared that the bill would render them obsolete by giving blindness services to the family-oriented social workers who dominated state and local welfare offices.Footnote ¹⁴³ During congressional hearings in 1946 and again in 1949, when the SSA made another push for comprehensive welfare, they pleaded with lawmakers not to eliminate Title X in pursuit of a “model bureaucratic set-up.”Footnote ¹⁴⁴ North Carolina worker for the blind Helen Reinhardt explained to Congress that, like “medicine, dentistry, law, and other established professions,” caring for the “specialized problems” of the blind required the “special skills” that social workers lacked if trained only in the needs of “large over-all groups of the population.”Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Rather than roll the blind into a comprehensive program under the supervision of generalist social workers, she endorsed an AFB proposal to lodge administrative control over all blindness programs in state commissions for the blind.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Consolidating responsibility for pensions and social services had been a long-standing goal of professional groups, allowing them to deploy (or withhold) aid as part of a professionally supervised rehabilitation plan. “Relief is of little assistance to blind recipients,” Reinhardt argued, “unless it is administered by case workers especially trained in the field of work with the blind and in connection with programs of rehabilitation and prevention.”Footnote ¹⁴⁷

Caught between two sparring factions of the social work profession, the NFB articulated its constructive vision of rehabilitation, which not only distinguished the blind from other groups of the poor but also prioritized the dignity of disabled men. Though NFB leaders shared the AFB's opposition to comprehensive public assistance, they thought little of the specialized guidance that blindness professionals claimed was central to their rehabilitation of the blind. TenBroek argued that the blind were capable of rehabilitating themselves if “given the complete freedom of choice as to the direction of the rehabilitative effort.”Footnote ¹⁴⁸ To be sure, the loss of sight required adjustment, but, he insisted, “there are no general formulae, no regularly established procedures” to direct acclimating to blindness. In fact, insisting upon the standardized processes promoted by social workers “destroys that individual personal process of reconstruction.”Footnote ¹⁴⁹ “When a person must be placed at the mercy of other individuals,” Archibald argued to Congress, “when he must be told what he can have and what he can do with what he has … he no longer is capable of being a man.”Footnote ¹⁵⁰ Rather than facilitating recovery, the ongoing involvement of social workers “damages the mentality of the recipient of aid.”Footnote ¹⁵¹ By contrast, a flat grant of assistance and a graduated schedule of exemptions for earnings would constitute a truly rehabilitative program by freeing the blind from the intrusive management of the social workers and creating financial incentives that fostered “among the blind a sense of the usefulness, growing independence, and self-reliance.”Footnote ¹⁵²

The SSA and the APWA opposed the NFB's agenda on three grounds. First, though support for the Townsend Plan was much weaker by the late 1940s than it had been a decade earlier, SSA and APWA officials underscored their belief that flat grants and earning exemptions undermined the clear divide between contributory social insurance and public assistance by granting benefits tied to neither payroll contributions nor financial need. During congressional hearings in 1946 and 1949, they maintained that expansion of the increasingly popular social insurance program was possible only if public assistance was a program of “last resort,” which meant retaining “an individualized approach to need.”Footnote ¹⁵³ If public assistance became the “primary reliance” for any one group, BPA director Jane Hoey warned, then it could grow to eclipse OAI as the foundation of economic security.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Second, hoping to rid the administration of public assistance from local prejudices against the “undeserving” poor, SSA and welfare officials believed strongly that the government should pay grants of public assistance based on an individual's need alone rather than one's categorical classification. A person aged 60 who was as needy as a person aged 65 should be entitled to assistance. The needy child should be eligible for aid irrespective of whether the reason for need was parental abandonment or parental unemployment. Whether a person with a disability could find work should be irrelevant when determining how much of the person's need to alleviate.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Otherwise, the APWA asserted, policymakers created “a virtual caste system in assistance” by dividing the poor according to judgments other than need. In short, earnings disregards for one category of the poor exacerbated inequity among the poor by channeling more resources to one group (those who had the wherewithal to work) than another group (those who could not work) that was equally, if not more, needy.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ Third, however worthy the cause of employment, the SSA's plan to make public assistance more widely accessible to the poor necessitated holding the line on generosity to the blind. Money that states spent on disregarded earnings or flat grants was money not available to cover additional groups of the poor or raise benefits for families with needy children, which were lower across the states than those for the aged or blind.Footnote ¹⁵⁷

Herein was the fundamental conflict between the NFB and SSA. While the SSA tried to establish need as the sole factor in eligibility for public assistance, the NFB was adamant that the poor were not all the same even if they were similarly needy.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ Testifying to the Ways and Means Committee against comprehensive public assistance program, Archibald objected that the blind “have their own peculiar problems; they have their own particular needs.” Society had decided that “dependent children should not be permitted to work, in order that they may reach maturity in health and in knowledge,” while the aged were long past their working years. Thus, the needs of children were temporary, and the failure of the aged to work did not implicate their social identity. The blind, on the contrary, were “in the productive years of life” and demanded “measures … appropriate to their condition.”Footnote ¹⁵⁹ The unique needs of the blind was a message that organizational leaders also conveyed to rank-and-file activists. In his address to the first NFB convention in 1940, tenBroek told the intimate gathering of activists that the need of the blind person “can only be obtained by restoring him to economic competence in a competitive world.”Footnote ¹⁶⁰ Durward McDaniel, a member of the NFB's board of directors, put the matter just as bluntly to a much larger audience at the 1949 convention. In contrast to the aged, “the blind,” he declared, “are young and vigorous and need opportunity above all else.”Footnote ¹⁶¹

In 1946, as an alternative to the Forand bill, Representative Jerry Voorhis (D-CA) introduced legislation, drafted by the NFB, that ran counter to the SSA's efforts to exert greater control over state administration. The Voorhis bill overturned the 1939 amendments by explicitly allowing states to enact flat grants and leaving the method of determining need entirely at the discretion of the states so they could create income exemptions, if they chose.Footnote ¹⁶² Congressional hearings in 1946 and 1949 over the Forand and Voorhis bills made clear the incompatibility between residual but comprehensive welfare, on the one hand, and constructive but categorical welfare, on the other. Even though the Forand bill would have raised benefit payments for the blind, Federationists argued that the blind were entitled to more than mere “animal survival.” The spiritual or psychological dimensions of poverty mattered as well. Archibald insisted on the “inherent right of every good American to retain his self-respect and dignity, no matter how physically handicapped.” Such could only be accomplished through policies that not only set an income floor but also offered ladders out of poverty. The blind, like sighted Americans, he argued, had a “right to own a little and enjoy a little.”Footnote ¹⁶³ By contrast, Archibald explained, under the SSA's rules for determining need, the blind were “denied the normal right to retain the benefit of meager, hard-won earnings, penalized for effort and ambition …, [and] robbed of incentive for self-improvement.”Footnote ¹⁶⁴ Without this opportunity, the blind were condemned “to a life which is not enriched by the thrill of achievement, by success, or by the feeling that life has been made complete.”Footnote ¹⁶⁵ SSA officials were largely unmoved. During House hearings in 1946, Representative Daniel Reed (D-NY) protested that the SSA's approach to need would weaken the rehabilitation of the blind. Altmeyer simply responded, “You might say the same thing about any payments based on need.”Footnote ¹⁶⁶

Neither the Forand nor the Voorhis bill made it out of committee. But Reed, a champion of expansive aid to the poor, especially to the blind, proclaimed the blind “the most courageous group in this country” and resolved to find some way of assisting them.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ In 1948, with Congress at an impasse, Reed and Senator Irving Ives (R-NY) introduced legislation drafted by the NFB that allowed recipients of AB to exempt up to $40 of income per month. The bill's stated purpose was to “provide a much-needed encouragement to blind individuals to become useful members of their community” and to retain “every possible incentive to pursue useful occupations.”Footnote ¹⁶⁸ Despite the SSA's opposition, the Reed-Ives bill passed the House and Senate by voice vote late in the session. President Truman vetoed the bill within weeks, explaining that the bill was unfair to “those needy blind who are unable to work” because paying for income disregards would lead states to reduce aid overall. The president added that disregards would lead to “converting public assistance payments into flat, noncontributory pensions” that would undermine “the development of a sound and comprehensive social security.”Footnote ¹⁶⁹

Though vetoed, the Reed-Ives bill signaled strong congressional support for earnings exemptions, reflecting a growing consensus behind returning disabled men, in particular war veterans, to competitive employment. Between 1945 and 1949, Congress established National Employ the Physically Handicapped Week and authorized appropriations for a presidential commission to promote the hiring of people with disabilities. Ives couched earnings exemptions in terms of this larger effort and, on the Senate floor, lauded his bill as “a short step” toward making sure that “blind persons may have every encouragement to be self-supporting.”Footnote ¹⁷⁰ Sensing political opportunity, in 1949, the NFB teamed up with the two leading professional organizations, the AFB and the AAWB, to secure exemptions for the working blind, one of the few issues on which they could agree. The AFB and AAWB muted their calls for bringing AB and blind services under the aegis of state blind commissions, a move the NFB adamantly opposed. The NFB, meanwhile, dropped demands for flat grants and set aside its attacks on workers for the blind.Footnote ¹⁷¹ The SSA was also ready for compromise. Elevated to the position of commissioner, Altmeyer indicated to the AFB's Robert Irwin his willingness to allow a small exemption for earnings and other income.Footnote ¹⁷² Altmeyer had become dismayed by the lack of progress on major reforms during the “terrible 80th Congress” and anticipated that 1949 would be a “decisive year” for Social Security.Footnote ¹⁷³ In addition, the APWA had endorsed part-time work for older but healthy workers and people with impairments that were not entirely disabling. During congressional hearings on the Forand bill, SSA officials had urged lawmakers to reimburse states for funds spent on welfare and medical services used to “prevent or remedy … dependency” among the able-bodied poor.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ The SSA's evolving position toward rehabilitation of the poor made denying the working blind the ability to keep some of their earnings untenable. Confluence among the two flanks of blind organizations and the SSA paved the way for the far-reaching provisions in the 1950 amendments to the Social Security Act.

The 1950 amendments marked the demise of the SSA's aspirations for comprehensive but residual public assistance. The amendments created an exemption for earned income of up to $50 per month for working recipients of AB. States had the option of instituting the income exemption for two years, after which time it became mandatory.Footnote ¹⁷⁵ Though it would be another twelve years before Congress would add an earnings exemption to ADC, the amendments authorized federal spending on social services to facilitate employment and prevent dependency among mothers whose children received ADC.Footnote ¹⁷⁶ Throughout the 1950s, lawmakers repeatedly bolstered the rehabilitative aspects of public assistance. In 1952, they extended the earnings exemption to blind individuals who were enrolled in ADC or OAA and added “self-support” and “self-care” as stated purposes of public assistance. Later they expanded the generosity of the exemption in AB, broadened it to include working recipients of Aid to the Permanently and Totally Disabled, and greatly increased the federal resources available for social services designed to avert dependency.

By introducing exemptions for earnings into public assistance, the 1950 amendments breeched residual welfare and, in its place, laid the foundation for public assistance programs that rehabilitated the poor through financial incentives and social services. The development was a setback for the maternalist vision of professionally managed programs for the poor. This vision had guided social workers through the New Deal, but by the 1950s, they were internally split between those who served families and those who served the adult blind. Additionally, they faced withering criticism both from local and state officials, who by the 1950s had tired of federal limits on local discretion, and from low-income blind activists, who, organized by the NFB, rejected casework management as antithetical to equal dignity.Footnote ¹⁷⁷

TenBroek sensed the shifting of the political landscape. In 1950, at the NFB's annual convention in July, tenBroek issued “A Declaration of Independence by the Blind,” a speech that, by weaving together themes of inclusion and autonomy, portended many of his later ideas about welfare rights, ideas that exploded onto national politics in the 1960s. The blind, he proclaimed, sought “full integration into the life of the community,” which included “the same realm of personal choice and individual judgment as is the right of all other citizens.” Independence in this sense required “the highest premium be placed on the efforts of recipients to get themselves off the relief rolls” but also adequacy for the blind who were aged and infirm. It also meant ridding public assistance of “all of the devices of control and inhibition,” including needs determination and casework, which presume “the blind are paupers and incapable of deciding” for themselves what was in their interests. All of these initiatives served as the forerunner of later claims for the rights of welfare recipients.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ A few years later, looking back over the NFB's decade of accomplishments, tenBroek declared that public assistance was no longer “supplementary” to social insurance, as it had been in 1940; instead, it had taken on “an independent reason for existence”—the rehabilitation of the self.Footnote ¹⁷⁹

THE LIMITS OF COLLECTIVE IDENTITY

The NFB advanced blindness as an individual's primary political identity over competing affinities predicated on class, gender, and race, a stance that led it to adopt surprisingly progressive positions for its time. The NFB refused to admit chapters that barred female members, and it permitted women to head state chapters and occupy the lower ranks of organizational leadership. The NFB also accepted African Americans who applied for individual membership in the national organization. Though black Federationists remained few and far between, the NFB rebuffed segregated chapters that petitioned to join.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ The NFB, however, did not escape the racial and gendered stratification of opportunity present in American society; nor did it challenge that stratification. The top leadership of the NFB was overwhelmingly male and exclusively white. Though state and local organizations of blind African Americans existed, there is no evidence that the NFB sought to bring these groups into its federation, or that it invited members of such groups to speak at its annual conventions, as it did the leaders of labor unions and blind veterans’ groups.

Furthermore, the NFB had a difficult time accommodating intersectional differences among the blind given its framing of inclusion and its masculine conception of blind identity. In his “Declaration of Independence of the Blind,” tenBroek spoke of the blind seeking “full integration into the life of the community,” but he was speaking of integration as enjoyed by white Americans. The NFB did not object to the segregation from white spaces experienced by African Americans who were blind. Though the NFB protested employment discrimination against the blind, it did not contest racial or gender discrimination in workplaces or state laws that forbade interracial marriages or marriages among the blind. Instead, it voiced a distinctively gendered understanding of independence and a sexist disdain for social workers and female philanthropists.

Federation leaders, moreover, struggled to articulate exclusion predicated on the intersection of blindness and gender. “A girl could become a lawyer, I guess,” Perry once said when asked to compare the accomplishments of his male students with those of his female ones. “Girls, I don't think have as many opportunities,” he admitted, but he nevertheless underscored the imperative “to keep opening up opportunities” for all of the blind.Footnote ¹⁸¹ Yet within the very organization tasked with opening up these opportunities, labor itself was deeply gendered. Many NFB officers relied on the assistance of their sighted wives, who dutifully typed correspondences, took minutes, and traveled with their husbands to meetings and conventions.Footnote ¹⁸² The significance of unpaid feminine labor cannot be overstated. During the 1940s, Braille materials and guide dogs were not widely available, and some bus and rail systems refused to seat blind passengers unless they were accompanied by a sighted companion.Footnote ¹⁸³ Because they were much less likely to be married than either sighted women or blind men, blind women were frequently bereft of the help of a sighted spouse.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ Not surprisingly, there was no feminine or African American equivalent of Perry's Boys.

Grappling with intersecting claims of identity was further complicated by the fact that, in its efforts to make blind identity salient to its members, the NFB pursued what it called “separatism” at a time when black civil rights organizations pursued alliances with labor unions, civic and women's groups, and religious organizations. TenBroek explained that the NFB would cooperate with allies in “any group … if they believe in our program and the principles for which we are fighting,” but the NFB eschewed coalitional politics unmoored from the discrete legislative issues it wished to advance.Footnote ¹⁸⁵ The NFB's brief partnership with the AFB and AAWB during the 1948–1950 campaign for earnings exemptions represented one of these fleeting moments. Long term, however, tenBroek steered the NFB clear of alliances that risked subordinating blind identity to other forms of affinity. For instance, during the 1940s, labor organizer Randall Strachan of the American Federation of the Physically Handicapped tried to build a cross-impairment organization of the physically disabled, one of the goals of which would be to consolidate government programs for the civilian disabled under one agency. Strachan hoped a single agency would be much more responsive to the disabled than the many agencies across which disability programs were scattered. The NFB resisted Strachan's invitation to join forces, pursuing instead blind-specific programs and blind-specific agencies.Footnote ¹⁸⁶

The NFB embraced separatism for two reasons. First, thick organizational alliances opened the door to the sighted speaking for the blind despite the federation's founding tenet that only the blind could speak for the blind. In his 1950 “Declaration of Independence by the Blind,” tenBroek told Federationists, “In founding the National Federation of the Blind, the blind found themselves.” Alliances with the sighted could make them again “the easy prey of private charities” and “the unresisting objects of domination and manipulation by agencies.”Footnote ¹⁸⁷ In this regard, the NFB's approach to labor is telling. Throughout the 1940s, labor unions provided most of the financial support for the NFB, and in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the NFB fought for the rights of sheltered workshop employees to collectively organize and strike.Footnote ¹⁸⁸ While it seemed obvious for blind activism to join forces with labor, the NFB alienated labor feminists. Both the labor feminists and the NFB championed the rights of women and the blind, respectively, to achieve full citizenship through participation in the competitive labor market, and they also fought for the social rights that provided security outside the world of wage work. Yet the federation's masculine ways of conceptualizing labor foreclosed alliances with the labor feminists. For the latter, labor in the home was still labor, but for Federationists, the home was a place of “idleness.”Footnote ¹⁸⁹ More significantly, in the same way that tenBroek did not think of the needs of blind women as distinct from that of blind men, he did not conceive of labor as representing the blind. Rather, he praised organized labor for “trying to do for its people” what the NFB was “trying to do for our people.”Footnote ¹⁹⁰ Unions were for sighted workers; the NFB spoke for the blind—“all” of them.

Second, the NFB recognized the privileged status of the blind and was wary of diluting it, even when most of the blind stood to benefit materially. The SSA's plan for comprehensive welfare, for example, would have raised blind benefits in several states because it included provisions that increased the federal matching rate for state grants. Yet in a 1949 bulletin to the membership explaining the organization's opposition, tenBroek warned against allowing the blind to get “lumped, scrambled and confused” in a program that gave “aid to the aged, to juvenile delinquents, to the unemployed, as well as to the city prostitute, the town derelict, and the village idiot.”Footnote ¹⁹¹ In seeking to distinguish the blind from other groups of the poor, Federationists were following a path trod by social feminists, who, between 1890 and 1930, tried to reserve, first, mothers’ pensions and, later, ADC for “deserving” (white) mothers. Yet because the NFB rejected casework and professional supervision, the hallmark of how these reformers approached antipoverty work, Federationists alienated women's organizations and their allies in the Children's Bureau. Although provisions in Forand's bill creating a universal category of public assistance would have gone a long way toward aiding “undeserving” mothers as well as other poor and marginally employed groups, the NFB focused exclusively on the needs of the working-age blind. Moreover, by positing femininity as the antithesis of the vigor and aspirations of the blind, it fostered relational oppositions to clarify its claims of political identity and shared interests. In this manner, Federationists subscribed to a pattern scholars have observed among other movements making rights-based claims for equal citizenship. By challenging only some practices of subordination while leaving much of the existing social hierarchy intact, they risked deepening the subordination of people of intersecting identities, whose exclusion, because it became indiscernible, escaped unchallenged.Footnote ¹⁹²

Unity around blind identity, however, did not last. With the enactment of the 1950 amendments, the NFB secured the legislative victory that had bound Federationists in common cause for the better part of a decade. Thereafter the contours of blind identity became elusive. The mass protests of the African American civil rights movement and the cross-disability organizing efforts of the American Federation of the Physically Handicapped aroused interest in coalitional politics among some Federationists. At the 1953 convention, Earl Scharry, president of the Iowa Association of the Blind, chastised delegates for rebuffing that organization. Accusing his fellow Federationists of seeking to become the “Brahmins in the caste system of misfortune,” Scharry argued, “Our slogan [is] ‘Help the blind to help themselves’ [but] a healthy interest in the welfare of others is the first attribute of a good citizen.” A few years later, George Howeiler, the president of the Oregon Council of the Blind, expressed similar dismay: “We advocate integration on the one hand and isolate ourselves on the other. We contend that we're relegated to a second-class citizenship, while at the same time we enjoy special services and privileges.”Footnote ¹⁹³

Unity was further eroded by the very success that Federationists achieved in asserting that only the blind could know the problems of the blind. The NFB had come into being under the belief that the blind shared a common identity and interests that put them at odds with the sighted professionals who staffed public agencies for the blind. But in the 1950s, several high-ranking Federationists, including tenBroek, were appointed to these same agencies. TenBroek believed that rehabilitation of the blind could not been done by the sighted or by individuals who were merely blind. It required instead “persons who are themselves blind and who are in addition well adjusted and independently successful.” In other words, public agencies for the blind needed Federationists running them.Footnote ¹⁹⁴ For other Federationists, though, it was unclear what blind activism meant when the blind became the very social workers and public decision makers they had condemned.Footnote ¹⁹⁵

By the late 1950s, the NFB was deeply divided over several issues, including the strategy of separatism, the organization's militancy against agencies, and the power of dissenting members to challenge leadership decisions. Unable to resolve differences between members, in 1962, the federation split into two competing organizations, the NFB and the American Council for the Blind. The fracture dismayed activists who had devoted much of their adult lives to mobilizing the blind around a shared political agenda and establishing the right of the blind to speak for themselves in policy debates. Writing to the executive committee and presidents of state chapters on the eve of the NFB's collapse, tenBroek lamented, “What all of our external enemies together have been unable to do to us … we have now done to ourselves: we have brought our organization to the brink of ruin.”Footnote ¹⁹⁶ Speak they might, but the blind would no longer speak with one voice.