Blindness and elected office -- the history behind the headlines

By Penny L. Richards

David Paterson was sworn in recently as New York's new governor, replacing Eliot Spitzer. Much commentary focused on Paterson's status as "legally blind." He has been blind from infancy, we learned in various profiles; he does not use Braille or a cane or a service dog; he does use voice mail and memorization techniques.

The fascination for "How does he do it?" comes a bit late: Paterson has been serving in the New York State Senate since 1985, after all, and has surely worked out all the "hows" of holding office in those 23 years.

While Paterson is the first blind governor to actually govern — Arkansas had a blind acting governor for 11 days in 1975 — he is hardly the first blind elected official in American history. A look at this past reveals that he is part of a long legacy indeed.

In the 19th century, the wonderfully-named Nehemiah Hezekiah Earll (1787-1872) represented New York in the House of Representatives (1839-41), while much later Hernando de Soto Money (1839-1912) served in both the House (1875-85, 1893-97) and the Senate (1897-1911). During his last term, Money was elected Senate minority leader.

During the 1910s through the 1930s, there were stretches when more than one member of Congress was blind: Thomas D. Schall of Minnesota (1878-1935) served in the House (1915-25) and then in the Senate (1925-35), while Ira Clifton Copley (1864-1947) was representing Illinois in the House (1911-1923), Thomas Pryor Gore (1870-1949) was representing Oklahoma in the Senate (1907-1921, 1931-37), and Matthew Anthony Dunn (1886-1942) was representing Pennsylvania in the House (1933-41).

Since 1941, however, though there were several members with limited vision, no blind candidates have been elected to Congress. You have to wonder what's changed.

Another feature of this little-known history is that, like women in general, blind women are vastly underrepresented in the lists of elected officials. When the question popped up on H-Disability, a listserv of almost 400 historians of disability, it was surprising to note that, as far as we can tell, only one blind woman was ever elected to office in the United States: Anita Blair (b. 1916), a one-term Texas legislator in the 1950s.

Blair, who held a master's degree from the Texas College of Mines, was the first person in El Paso to have a guide dog. She and her German shepherd, Fawn, traveled together on speaking tours and to Washington to serve on Truman's Presidential Safety Committee. Blair's is an interesting story, and it raises a pertinent point: Shouldn't there be more such stories to tell?

Paterson will now probably be added to a pantheon of disability history biographies that schoolchildren learn. He will be there next to Louis Braille and Helen Keller and FDR. But I hope some will look beyond the "Great Individual Achiever" tale — to see the many more stories still untold.

Richards is a research scholar at the Center for the Study of Women.