[nfbmi-talk] important history

[joe harcz Comcast]

Ironic indeed that this showed up on an ACB list serve. Yet, the words are deep, profound and for the ages.

Joe
This 1962 speech by Jacobus tenBroek, delivered almost 50 years ago, is a clear reminder that we are in a class struggle, and it's been raging for a long
time.
Carl Jarvis
Welfare of the Blind: Perils and Prospects

An address delivered by Professor Jacobus tenBroek
President of the American Brotherhood for the Blind
At the Annual Convention Banquet
Detroit, Michigan, July 6, 1962

"Welfare," says the Oxford Universal Dictionary, "is the state or condition of doing or being well."

That short definition may not cover everything; but it goes straight to the heart of the matter. It identifies the two irreducible objectives of welfare
for any individual--those of doing well and being well.

The first points to a social and economic condition. To say of a man that he is "doing well" is to say that he prospers--that he is accomplishing things
socially and economically. The second, "being well," describes a physical and mental condition--that of bodily health and emotional equilibrium. Personal
welfare rests on both of these conditions. So, for that matter, does public welfare.

In its accent on relief and basic security, public welfare attends to the well-being of its clients. In its accent on rehabilitation, on self-support and
self-care, it looks toward what we may call their "well-doing." Both are vital to an adequate and effective system of welfare.

How well, then, are blind Americans doing today and what is the state of their well-being ?

I shall not draw up a balance-sheet of the perils and prospects confronting the blind in welfare. I propose to skip the customary practice of "pointing
with pride" to the great advances and achievements which the blind have won since the poor laws of Elizabeth, or since the poor-houses of Victoria. Without
overlooking these or forgetting them I shall emphasize our remaining weaknesses and recurring failures in welfare and security. I shall focus on ten specific
but interrelated threats to the welfare of the blind which, taken together, place in jeopardy nearly all that has been won over the past generation of
social legislation and reform.

These threats to our welfare come from a variety of sources and strike at different points of the system. Some are new. Some are ancient. All are immediate.
All present a clear and present danger to the preservation of the modern philosophy and practice of welfare.

More than that, all but two of these threats, as we shall see, are part and parcel of a single movement lately risen from the gutters of politics and journalism
which has spread its poison over the land from Newburgh to San Diego. You all know the main features of this movement. It speaks of reform but acts in
revenge. It begins with a "clean-up," and ends in a crackdown. Its voice is the voice of law and equity--but its hands are the hands of Herod.

Let us have no illusions about the meaning of this organized assault upon the welfare system of the nation. It is not meant merely to close up a gap or
a loophole here and there in the law. It is not meant to uncover the rare conniving client, the one recipient in a thousand, who owns a fur coat or keeps
a lover. It is not meant to elevate the morals and improve the character of the millions of Americans, families and individuals, who are through no fault
of their own needy or incapacitated.

It is not meant to clean house but to bring the house of welfare down in ruins. It is not meant to rectify injustice but rather to wreck that concept of
social justice which has found expression in the social security program. It is meant to undermine the confidence of the public in their state and federal
provisions of relief and rehabilitation. It is meant to bully, shame and frighten the recipients of that aid off the rolls and to turn back the clock of
welfare to the days of the workhouse and the asylum.

As we who are blind observe this calculated campaign of fear and smear, we may well ask the question put by Patrick Henry in another crisis: "Sir, what
means all this martial array?" And we may well answer, as he did: "It is meant for us--it can be meant for no others." The attack upon public welfare is
an attack upon the blind, not vaguely and remotely, but immediately and frontally. When the principle of public assistance is compromised in one of its
programs, it is compro- mised in all. When the protections of law and right are stripped from one group of recipients, they are on the way to being stripped
from all. When the dignity and decency of one class of welfare clients is ridiculed, all of them are in jeopardy.

Let us look at these threats to the general welfare, one by one.

1. The most persistent and pervasive threat to our welfare is also the most ancient. It is, simply, the undying spirit of the poor law. That bleak and baleful
shade finds expression today both in our written laws and our unwritten attitudes. It underlies all the righteous requirements of "deserving" character,
of relatives' responsibility, of length of residence, and of the mean-spirited means test, which are still to be found infesting the public assistance
statutes of the states and nation. Yet more insidiously, the spirit of the poor law is manifested in the ancient and demeaning stereotype of the welfare
recipient and most conspicuously, perhaps, of the blind recipient, as somehow deficient in character, inferior in ability and abnormal in personality.

It may seem that we have come a long way in the 125 years since the case of New York v. Miln , in which the United States Supreme Court could speak in one
breath of the moral pestilence of the pauper, the vagabond and the criminal. But as late as 1920 it was possible for a United States Senator to gain a
public hearing with the argument that federal measures of welfare and rehabilitation would "place a premium upon the vagrant, the criminal and the worthless."
"After a man has reached the period when he has hardened down into what he is in this world," thundered the Senator, "do you think you can make over the
broken instrument, the failure of life?... Let such failures go to the poorhouse."

Lest anyone think that this Scrooge-like spirit is the extinct relic of a bygone era, that the medieval stereotype of the worthless needy has long since
been laid to rest, I need only point again to the anti-welfare revival of the past year, in which that ghost from the past has been dramatically disinterred
from its grave and made to walk abroad in the land, striking fear in the hearts of the ill-informed, heaping ridicule upon the heads of millions of Americans
who receive welfare aid, and drying up the wellsprings of public and private charity alike.

Do I exaggerate? Hear the angry outcry of a national mass-circulation magazine in a recent diatribe (no worse than many others) entitled "The Scandal of
Welfare Chiselings": "An almost visible wage of resentment has begun to roll across the land against the rackets and abuses that plague the vast, ever-growing
American welfare programs.... The house of welfare is in disorder. In some places, it is downright disorderly..., The original conception of the great
welfare programs.... has been warped and twisted out of all reason. Instead of giving temporary aid to those in need through no fault of their own, welfare
rolls now harbor hundreds of thousands of the shiftless, cheats and criminals.... When the rules are complex, the evaders, the frauds and the rationalizers
take over."

There, my friends, is the first and greatest threat to our Social Security. That is Public Welfare Enemy No, 1.

2, A second and more specific form of the anti-welfare movement is the intrusion into the modern humanitarian law of welfare of the ancient and punitive
law of crimes. Congress itself has done much to assist this infiltration. In the social insurances Congress has decreed that benefits may be denied to
a person who commits treason, to one who has engaged in sedition, and to those who have been deported from the land on any of 14 lesser grounds. In public
assistance, Congress has fortified the influence of the law of crimes by adding the statutory requirement that law enforcement officers must be notified
in all cases of aid to needy children where either of the parents is absent.

Not to be outdone by Congress, the federal administrators have further opened the door to the spirit of crime and punishment by imposing a regulation requiring
that a state's definition of fraud under public assistance must be the same as the general state law on fraud. There is no longer room for variation from
program to program, for justice tempered by mercy, for recognition of special and extenuating circumstances.

Within our states, the penetration of the criminal law into public assistance is seen in the increasing proliferation of local rules and practices bringing
to bear the methods of the lie detector to determine truth, of the blood test to establish parentage, of the night raid upon the homes of recipients to
flush suspected partners, of the beating of park bushes to deter promiscuity, in sum, of the whole repressive weight of criminal investigation and police
authority.

The challenge to social security involved in this insidious encroachment of the law of crimes is critical and immediate. The human problems with which the
programs of welfare are necessarily concerned--problems of economic distress, of social dislocation, of personal confusion--cannot be solved by criminal
sanctions and threat of punishment. They can be adequately understood and constructively approached only by measures addressed to their human conditions
and inhumane consequences. It is this humanitarian approach that lies at the heart of the modern law of welfare as embodied in the public assistance program,
and goes to the root of its persistent conflict with the much more ancient law of crimes. For the assumptions and objectives of the law of crimes are diametrically
opposed. Its preliminary assumption is that persons who are in need are there either through choice or through weakness of character. Its ultimate objective
is to wipe out the problem by suppression and punishment. Problems of poverty and immorality, of social crisis and economic depression, all are perceived
by the law of crimes in the same narrow focus of personal responsibility, to be solved by arrest and investigation, by penal sanctions and retributions.

*************
Too long have the workers of the world waited for some Moses to lead them out of bondage. I would not lead you out if I could; for if you could be led out,
you could be led back again. I would have you make up your minds there is nothing that you cannot do for yourselves. --Eugene Victor Debs
1855-1926

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