Esperanto for the Blind

Edward K. Harvey
Taught Esperanto to
blind students

The February 26, 1906 item in the New-York Tribune seems wholly misguided, and then there’s the other problem that one statement made in the article is wholly out of date. The topic at hand was a group of students at the Perkins Institution for the Blind who had taken up Esperanto. The Tribune described the whole thing as “unnecessarily cruel,”[1] and compares it to an attempt to defraud a blind beggar. (Oddly, the Tribune doesn’t seem to view it as a problem that blind men were reduced to begging in the street.) Indeed, the word used by the Tribune was “inveigle,” as if the Perkins students were deceived.

This is one of those situations when, from the lofty perch of History, we can know more than what the newspaper reported. Other reports indicate that no one was defrauded. The students had a reason for what they were doing, and I suspect that if the Tribune had reported on it, donations would have flowed from the generous people of New York to those blind students in Boston. We know who convinced the students to learn Esperanto and why they organized a public demonstration in Esperanto.

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