While unpacking from our move from California to Colorado I discovered several braille documents interspersed in my personal writings.
The papers were given to me by a friend who passed who was unable to read braille. Unfortunately, they do not contain author attribution. I have transcribed the documents here for posterity.
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History of the Blind in California
In a very real sense Dr. Newel Perry can be called the architect of Aid to the Blind in California. He was a remarkable teacher and a great leader of his fellow blind. He became the first president of The California Council of the Blind in 1934 and served in that capacity until 1953. In 1898 he formed the predecessor of the California Council of the blind, called the California Alumni Association of Self-Supporting Blind. This earlier organization perceived many of the problems which still face the blind as does the council today and, on balance, the same ways in which to seek solutions.
At the California School for the Blind Dr. Perry was director of Advanced Studies. In that capacity and because of his personality as a leader and teacher, he indelibly stamped the character of a remarkable group of blind students who attended the school from 1912 until 1947 when Dr. Perry retired.
One of Dr. Perry’s, “boys” was Jacobus TenBroek, destined to become a great scholar and one of the truly original thinkers in the field of social welfare.
Dr. TenBroek who, as a lad about to enter the University of California, was denied aid to the blind because he sought an education, was much later to be, a distinguished member of the state’s Social welfare Board for thirteen years (1950 to 1963), the last two as its chairman. Of Dr. Perry as a social reformer insofar as Aid to the Blind was concerned professor TenBroek has written:
“With plenty of ambition but with no money, I prepared to enter the university. At that point I was denied state aid to the blind, a program then newly instituted as a result of Doctors (Perry’s) efforts in sponsoring a constitutional amendment and a comprehensive statute. The reason was not that my need was not great. It was that I intended to pursue a higher education while I was being supported by the state. That was too much for the administrative officials. Almost without discussion, Dr. Perry filled the gap. He supplied me with tuition and living expenses out of his own pocket for a semester while we all fought to reverse the decision of the state aid officials.
“Out of these elements of mind, personality and experience were compounded the public career of Newel Perry, and out of these elements also were constructed the programs the initiation of which made that career publicly significant.
“First of all, the distress of poverty must be realized. The necessities of life must be available. The minimum essentials must be assured. So much in some way had been provided in the Anglo-American system for three centuries before Newel Perry faced near starvation and economic exclusion in New York City. The Elizabethan poor laws did it in one way. County Direct Relief, instituted in California in 1901, did it in another. The Almshouse and the county hospital and poor farm did it in still other ways. At the very minimum, it had to be done better. It should be done by a system of cash grants, adequate in amounts to maintain standards of decency and health, receivable on fixed and uniform standards of eligibility, made generally applicable by state participation and control, and expendable by the recipient through a free exercise of self-management and consumption choice. To bring this about, however, prohibitions in the state’s constitution would have to be removed by the arduous process of a people’s amendment, an organic statute would have to be lobbied through the state legislature, faithful administration would somehow have to be secured. Year by year and session by session, into the indefinite future, the myriad minor corrections and major improvements made necessary by time and disclosed by experience would have to be worked through the legislature and the administration. And so indeed it came to pass in California.
“Secondly, much more had to be done than merely relieve the distress of poverty. Security is a necessity. As an unmixed blessing, however, it is a stultifying concept.
In indispensable ingredient of any welfare system is opportunity. One of the objects of public aid must be to stimulate and enable people to become independent of it. Accordingly, their initiative must not be hemmed in. The means of productive activity must not be withdrawn or denied. Independence of action and self-reliance must be encouraged. Legal liability of relatives must be relaxed so as not to spread poverty, increased dependence and disrupt family life. Economic resources, reasonable amounts of real and personal property must be easily devotable to plans for self-support instead of being required to be consumed in meeting daily needs. Incentive to earn must be constructed out of retention of the benefit of earning. And this too presently came to pass in California. The new system took cognizance of the need of the blind for adjustments on the Social and psychological as well as the physical level. It permitted and encourage them to strive to render themselves self-supporting. It applied the democratic principle of individual dignity to an underprivileged class of American citizens. It guaranteed them a fair measure of independence and self-respect in the conduct of their lives. The California system, then Newel Perry’s System, was thus far in advance of its time. It is still envied and emulated throughout the nation.”
Thus, an elegant disciple of Dr. Perry’s philosophy has sketched the early beginnings of Aid to the Blind in the State of California, and its fruition over the years to a model in the field of social welfare legislation. If Dr. Perry was the architect of Aid to the Blind in this state, then certainly Dr. TenBroek was one of its most prodigious builders. It was out of their own experiences, and those of countless other blind persons, that these two men designed and built A structure of public aid for the blind which was destined to profoundly influence not only the development of statutes in other states but the Social Security Act itself.
You can read more about their friendship in this Address by Jacobus tenBroek at a Memorial Convocation for Dr. Newel Perry at the California School for the Blind, Berkeley, March 25, 1961.
Newel Perry: Teacher of Youth and Leader of Men