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The Pratt bill was referred to the Committee on the Library, and the Crail bill was referred to the Committee on Education. Hearings were held before both committees, and an unfortunate amount of acrimony was engendered. The backers of the Crail bill felt that the American Foundation for the Blind had tried to thwart their plans to build up a big braille publishing house on the Pacific Coast.

The Committee on Education reported the Crail bill with an extensive printed account of the hearing, but it never reached the floor of Congress. Helen Keller was among the prominent people who appeared before the Committee on the Library in behalf of Ruth Pratt's bill. Consequently, the Pratt bill was reported out favorably by the Committee on the Library and was immediately placed upon the unanimous consent calendar. It passed the House, and Senator Smoot took it up actively in the Senate, where it passed and was signed into law by President Hoover on March 3, 1931.

The act merely authorized the appropriation. It required considerable effort to get the appropriation committees of the House and Senate to make the $100,000 available.

At that time the American Printing House for the Blind was receiving an annual appropriation of $75,000 for school books for the blind. The backers of the Pratt-Smoot bill wanted to make it entirely clear that they had no desire to interfere with the long-standing allowance for school books of the American Printing House. In order to allay any fears of the new law, the word "adult" was inserted in the bill, specifically indicating that books published with Pratt-Smoot law funds were for the adult blind of the country, not the school children. This word "adult" has made trouble since, as it has made it impossible for juvenile readers whose intellectual interests were frequently equal to those of adults, to borrow books printed with Pratt-Smoot law money. Sooner or later this will probably be corrected, as there is no longer any misgiving on the part of the American Printing House for the Blind about the encroachment of this appropriation upon the grant for school books. As a matter of fact, the American Printing House for the Blind manufactures, on a contract basis, many of the braille books printed under the Pratt-Smoot law. This makes available for school purposes many books of value to junior and senior high school readers. (See chapter introductory remarks.)

Those unfamiliar with the field of work for the blind are often surprised at the zealousness with which the interests of the braille printing houses are guarded by their friends. Sometimes one feels that no commercial concern would fight more fiercely for a privileged position. When in 1934 the American Foundation for the Blind requested Congress to include Talking Books as well as embossed books in the list of publications to be manufactured under the Pratt-Smoot law, the American Printing House for the Blind feared that sound-reproduction books might supplant braille and in some way injure its position. At that time the Printing House was not certain that it could successfully manufacture sound-reproduction records. This resulted in an interesting situation which the author, at the risk of expanding this chapter too far, will describe.

The request that the Pratt-Smoot law be amended to include Talking Books passed the House without difficulty. When it reached the Senate there was apparently no opposition. The author, who was carrying the burden of securing the enactment of this amendment, passed through Washington on the morning the bill was coming up for consideration at an executive session of the Senate Committee on Education and Labor. From his hotel he called the clerk of the committee to learn the status of the measure. He was then told that while the committee would probably act favorably upon it, the chairman had received that morning sixteen telegrams of protest.

After hearing the list of persons from whom the telegrams had come, he reported to the clerk that they were all from managers of braille publishing concerns or members of their boards of directors. This brought him an invitation to attend the executive session of the committee, a rather unusual procedure. He demonstrated the Talking Book machine before the senators, and Senator Davis of Pennsylvania, who had a blind brother, asked if there could be any objection to the bill. The chairman remarked that there had been no opposition except from the braille publishers. Perhaps fortunately, the members of the committee did not realize that these were nonprofit organizations. One committee member remarked that opposition from this source seemed quite understandable, and moved that the bill be approved. His motion was carried unanimously.

Most of the authors of these telegrams have now gone to their reward, but the telegrams still repose in the national archives as evidence that, even in the field of work for the blind, institutional interests are sometimes allowed to take precedence over the welfare of the blind.