Work for the Blind

A Nobel Prize winner is blind--Dr. N. Gustaf Dalen of Sweden, inventor of automatic, flashing lighthouse lamps.

A famed advertising manager is blind --George S. Hurst of J. B. Williams Co. (shaving accessories).

A newspaper editor is blind--B. Frank Irvine of the Portland, Ore. Journal. (So was the late Publisher Joseph Pulitzer.)

Two U. S. Senators are blind--Thomas David Schall of Minnesota and Thomas Pryor Gore of Oklahoma.

An institutional director is blind-- Robert Benjamin Irwin of the American Foundation for the Blind.

Such men were prime examples by which a World Conference on Work for the Blind, which met in Manhattan last week, could prove that the blind and the purblind*can succeed in man-to-man competition, if given opportunity. The limits of their ability are far wider than commonly supposed. The necessity of providing work for the blind is great. The U. S. has 100,000 blind, the world six to ten million. Vast numbers could support themselves.

Four men made the Conference possible: John Davison Rockefeller Jr., Robert Benjamin Irwin, William Nelson Cromwell and M. Charles Migel.

Mr. Rockefeller paid traveling and living expenses of all delegates, invited from 36 countries, who needed help. Expenses of blind delegates included their seeing companions.

Mr. Irwin, the most important U. S. blind man where the blind are concerned, organized the Conference. Blind typists handled his correspondence.

Mr. Migel is president of the American Foundation for the Blind. Mr. Cromwell is founder-president of the American Braille Press. The two organizations sponsored the Conference (in association with Instructors of the Blind and Workers for the Blind). Both gentlemen see well. Their interest in the blind arose, like Mr. Rockefeller's interest in health and education, from a rich man's desire to identify himself with a specific philanthropy.*

About Mr. Cromwell, international corporation lawyer, everyone knows. He negotiated the transfer of rights for a Panama Canal from French investors to the U. S. Government. He was one of the organizers of U. S. Steel Corp. He reorganized many a great U. S. corporation and put them, he likes to repeat, ''all on a paying basis."

Mr. Migel, aristocratic, Texas-born, is less famed, except in the silk industry, one of whose few tycoons and Lotos Club members he is.

The Conferees emitted no vaporings about jobs the blind can fill efficiently. The U. S. delegates listed 206 separate kinds of jobs. The Europeans added a few more. Occupations range from the mental (lawyers, writers, singers, salesmen), through the semi-manual (osteopaths, masseurs, typists), to the manual (farmers, carpenters, mechanics). The blind are peculiarly deft at assembling parts. A profession whose unexpected obviousness makes it surprising is Miss Emma Most's of San Francisco. She is a coffee-taster.

*Viz. The King of Siam; James Joyce, who last week was preparing for an operation to prevent total blindness; Booth Tarkington, whose sight has largely been restored by surgery; Earl Musselman (TIME, April 13).

*Other examples: Edward Stephen Harkness (education, medicine), George Crocker (cancer), Lucius Nathan Littauer (pneumonia), George Barton French (deafness), George Fisher Baker (business education), Cleveland E. Dodge (Presbyterianism), George McDonald (Roman Catholicism), Francis Patrick Garvan (cancer, chemistry).

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