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The Unemployed Blind (A Later View)

From: Out Of The Dark
Creator: Helen Keller (author)
Date: 1920
Publisher: Doubleday, Page & Company, New York
Source: Available at selected libraries


Introduction

Helen Keller knew how hard it was for people with disabilities to find self-supporting work. She struggled throughout much of her life to earn enough as a speaker and consultant to sustain herself and her interpreters.

Like many people of her era, Keller thought that being a worker—being useful and financially independent—made a person a better citizen. And as a socialist, Keller believed that capitalism created many social problems, including unemployment. In this piece from the Ziegler Magazine for the Blind in 1911, Keller fused her socialism with her concern about disabled workers. She argued that disabled people’s inability to find work was intimately connected with the fact that there were not enough jobs for workers in general.



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* Editorial from the Ziegler Magazine for the Blind, April, 1911.

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Some time ago I received a pathetic letter from a workman in a woollen mill. I quote a part of it:

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"I was employed in the worsted trade in England before coming to this country. I had worked for ten years and had learnt a good deal about wool, tops, and noils. I came to this country in the hope of climbing the industrial ladder. I could hear pretty well, or I should not have passed the immigration officers. I got work quickly at the very bottom of the ladder. I kept my eyes open and learnt everything that came my way, and in time I was transferred to the combing room to learn to be section hand. By this time my hearing had become slightly worse. All the help in this department were either Italians or Poles, so that between their broken English and my defective hearing I was much handicapped. I have been on short time for over a year, and since the New Year I have earned $6.71 per week. There are six of us to feed, clothe, shelter, and coal to buy. How to find a bare existence is the problem that confronts me to-day. I would take anything where I could earn steady pay. I have the idea that I shall yet rise out of the mire. But in the meantime I must live and support my family, and this I cannot do under present circumstances."

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This workman is deaf, but his position is similar to that of many of the sightless. We have been accustomed to regard the unemployed deaf and blind as victims of their infirmities. That is to say, we have supposed that if their sight and hearing were miraculously restored, they would find work. The problem of the underpaid and underemployed workman is too large to discuss here. But I wish to suggest to the readers of this article that the unemployment of the blind is only part of a greater problem.

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There are, it is estimated, a million labourers out of work in the United States. Their inaction is not due to physical defects or lack of ability or of intelligence, or to ill health or vice. It is due to the fact that our present system of production necessitates a large margin of idle men. The business world in which we live cannot give every man opportunity to fulfil his capabilities or even assure him continuous occupation as an unskilled labourer. The means of employment -- the land and the factories, that is, the tools of labour -- are in the hands of a minority of the people, and are used rather with a view to increasing the owner's profits than with a view to keeping all men busy and productive. Hence there are more men than "jobs." This is the first and the chief evil of the so-called capitalistic system of production. The workman has nothing to sell but his labour. He is in strife, in rivalry with his fellows for a chance to sell his power. Naturally the weaker workman is thrust aside. That does not mean that he is utterly incapacitated for industrial activity, but only that he is less capable than his successful competitor.

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In the majority of cases there is no relation between unemployment and ability. A factory shuts down, and all the operatives, the more competent as well as the less competent, are thrown out of work. In February the cotton mill owners of Massachusetts agreed to run the mills on a schedule of four days a week. The employees were not to blame for the reduction of work, nor were the employers to blame. The conditions of the market compelled it.

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Thus, it has come to pass that in this land of plenty there is an increasing number of "superfluous men." The doors of industry are closed to them the whole year or part of the year. No less than six million American men, women, and children are in a permanent state of want because of total or partial idleness. In a small corner of this vast social distress we find our unemployed blind. Their lack of sight is not the primary cause of their idleness; it is a contributing cause; it relegates them to the enormous army of the unwillingly idle.

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We can subsidize the work of the sightless; we can build special institutions and factories for them, and solicit the help of wealthy patrons. But the blind man cannot become an independent, self-supporting member of society, he can never do all that he is capable of, until all his seeing brothers have opportunity to work to the full extent of their ability. We know now that the welfare of the whole people is essential to the welfare of each. We know that the blind are not debarred from usefulness solely by their infirmity. Their idleness is fundamentally caused by conditions which press heavily upon all working people, and deprive hundreds of thousands of good men of a livelihood.

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I recommend that all who are interested in the economic problem of the sightless study the economic problem of the seeing. Let us begin with such books as Mr. Robert Hunter's "Poverty," and Edmond Kelly's "Twentieth Century Socialism." Let us read these books, not for "theory," as it is sometimes scornfully called, but for facts about the labour conditions of America. Mr. Kelly was a teacher of political economy, a lecturer on municipal government at Columbia University. Mr. Hunter has spent many years studying the American workman in his home and in the shop. The facts which they spread before us show that it is not physical blindness, but social blindness which cheats our hands of their right to toil.

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