Helen Keller - United States
Helen Keller - Childhood
Keller was born at an estate called Ivy Green, on June 27, 1880,
to parents Captain Arthur H. Keller and Kate Adams Keller. She
was not born blind and deaf, but was actually a typical, healthy
infant. It was not until nineteen months later that she came down
with an illness that the doctors described as "an acute congestion
of the stomach and the brain" - possibly scarlet fever or
meningitis. The illness did not last for a particularly long time,
but it left her blind, deaf, and unable to speak. By age seven
she had invented over sixty different signs that she could use
to communicate with her family.
In 1886, her mother Kate Keller was inspired by an account in
Charles Dickens' American Notes of the successful education of
another deaf/blind child, Laura Bridgman, and travelled to a specialist
doctor in Baltimore for advice. He put her in touch with local
expert Alexander Graham Bell, who was working with deaf children
at the time. Bell advised the couple to contact the Perkins Institute
for the Blind, the school where Bridgman had been educated, which
was then located in South Boston, Boston, Massachusetts. The school
delegated teacher and former student, Anne Sullivan, herself visually
impaired and then only 20 years old, to try to open up Helen's
mind. It was the beginning of a 49 year long period of working
together.
Sullivan demanded and got permission from Helen's father to isolate
the girl from the rest of the family in a little house in their
garden. Her first task was to instill discipline in the spoiled
girl. Helen's big breakthrough in communication came one day when
she realized that the motions her teacher was making on her palm,
while running cool water over her palm from a pump, symbolized
the idea of "water" and nearly exhausted Sullivan demanding
the names of all the other familiar objects in her world (including
her prized doll).
Anne was able to teach Helen to think intelligibly and to speak,
using the Tadoma method: touching the lips of others as they spoke,
feeling the vibrations, and spelling of alphabetical characters
in the palm of Helen's hand. She also learned to read English,
French, German, Greek, and Latin in Braille.
Helen Keller - Education
In 1888, Helen attended Perkins Institute for the Blind. In 1894,
Helen and Anne moved to New York City to attend the Wright-Humason
School for the Deaf. In 1898 they returned to Massachusetts and
Helen entered The Cambridge School for Young Ladies before gaining
admittance, in 1900, to Radcliffe College. In 1904 at the age
of 24, Helen graduated from Radcliffe cum laude, becoming the
first deaf and blind person to graduate from a college.
Helen Keller - Political activities
Helen went on to become a world-famous speaker and author. She
is remembered as an advocate for the sensorially handicapped,
but also supported progressive causes. She was a suffragist, a
pacifist and a birth control supporter. In 1915 she founded Helen
Keller International, a non-profit organization for preventing
blindness. Helen and Anne Sullivan traveled all over the world
to over 39 countries, and made several trips to Japan, becoming
a favorite of the Japanese people. Helen Keller met every U.S.
President from Grover Cleveland to Lyndon B. Johnson and was friends
with many famous figures including Alexander Graham Bell, Charlie
Chaplin and Mark Twain.
Helen Keller was a member of the Socialist Party and actively
campaigned and wrote in support of the working classes from 1909
to 1921. She supported Socialist Party candidate Eugene V. Debs
in each of his campaigns for the presidency. Her political views
were reinforced by visiting workers. In her words, "I have
visited sweatshops, factories, crowded slums. If I could not see
it, I could smell it."
Newspaper columnists who had praised her courage and intelligence
before she came out as a socialist now called attention to her
disabilities. The editor of the Brooklyn Eagle wrote that her
"mistakes sprung out of the manifest limitations of her development."
Keller responded to that editor, referring to having met him before
he knew of her political views:
"At that time the compliments he paid me were so generous
that I blush to remember them. But now that I have come out for
socialism he reminds me and the public that I am blind and deaf
and especially liable to error. I must have shrunk in intelligence
during the years since I met him...Oh, ridiculous Brooklyn Eagle!
Socially blind and deaf, it defends an intolerable system, a system
that is the cause of much of the physical blindness and deafness
which we are trying to prevent."
How I Became A Socialist, by Helen Keller, 1912-11-03
Helen Keller also joined the industrial union, the Industrial
Workers of the World (IWW), in 1912 after she felt that parliamentary
socialism was "sinking in the political bog." Helen
Keller wrote for the IWW between 1916 and 1918. In "Why I
Became an IWW," Helen wrote that her motivation for activism
came in part due to her concern about blindness and other disabilities:
"I was appointed on a commission to investigate the conditions
of the blind. For the first time I, who had thought blindness
a misfortune beyond human control, found that too much of it was
traceable to wrong industrial conditions, often caused by the
selfishness and greed of employers.
And the social evil contributed its share.
I found that poverty drove women to a life of shame that ended
in blindness."
Helen Keller wrote glowingly of the emergence of communism during
the Russian Revolution of 1917 (See ISBN 0684818868). Her contacts
with suspected communists were frequently investigated by the
FBI. In 1920 she was one of the founders of the American Civil
Liberties Union. In the 1920s, she sent a hundred dollars to the
NAACP with a letter of support that appeared in its magazine The
Crisis. In 1925 she addressed a convention of Lions Clubs International
giving that organisation a major focus for its service work which
still continues today.
Helen Keller - Death
Helen Keller died on June 1, 1968, at the age of 87 from natural
causes at Arcan Ridge, Easton, Connecticut, more than 30 years
after the death of Anne Sullivan, and was cremated in Bridgeport,
Connecticut. Some sources, including an obituary in The New York
Times, mistakenly said she died in Westport, Connecticut. The
confusion arose from her use of a Westport postal box for her
Arcan Ridge estate. Easton, which did not have a post office at
the time, has named a middle school after one of its most famous
residents. Her memorial service was at Washington National Cathedral.
*****
Helen Keller: Not Blind to War Crimes
by Mickey Z
www.dissidentvoice.org, August 15, 2005
In a textbook example of whitewashing,
if today's America knows Helen Keller (1880-1968) at all, it's
the easy-to-digest image portrayed in the 1962 film, The Miracle
Worker. Brave deaf and blind girl "overcomes" all obstacles
to inspire everyone she meets. "The Helen Keller with whom
most people are familiar is a stereotypical sexless paragon who
was able to overcome deaf-blindness and work tirelessly to promote
charities and organizations associated with other blind and deaf-blind
individuals," writes Sally Rosenthal in Ragged Edge.
But, in 1909, Helen Keller became a socialist.
Soon after, she emerged as a vocal supporter of the working class
and traveled the nation to voice her opposition to war. "How
can our rulers claim they are fighting to make the world safe
for democracy," she asked, "while here in the U.S. Negroes
may be massacred and their property burned?" Of course, as
a woman with disabilities, she was patronized by the same mainstream
media that previously championed her as a heroine. The editors
of the Brooklyn Eagle wrote: "Her mistakes spring out of
the manifest limitations of her development."
Keller minced no words in her responses...one
of which appeared in newspapers across America: "So long
as I confine my activities to social services and the blind, the
newspapers compliment me extravagantly, calling me an 'arch-priest
of the sightless' and 'wonder woman'. But when I discuss poverty
and the industrial system under which we live that is a different
matter."
As the militaristic frenzy spread across
America, Keller appeared at New York City's Carnegie Hall on January
5, 1916. "I have a word to say to my good friends, the editors,
and others who are moved to pity me," she said. "Some
people are grieved because they imagine I am in the hands of unscrupulous
persons who lead me astray and persuade me to espouse unpopular
causes and make me the mouthpiece of their propaganda. Now, let
it be understood once and for all that I do not want their pity;
I would not change places with one of them. I know what I am talking
about. My sources of information are as good and reliable as anybody
else's. I have papers and magazines from England, France, Germany
and Austria that I can read myself. Not all the editors I have
met can do that. Quite a number of them have to take their French
and German second hand. No, I will not disparage the editors.
They are an overworked, misunderstood class. Let them remember,
though, that if I cannot see the fire at the end of their cigarettes,
neither can they thread a needle in the dark. All I ask, gentlemen,
is a fair field and no favor. I have entered the fight against
preparedness and against the economic system under which we live.
It is to be a fight to the finish, and I ask no quarter."
Keller's critique of the government propaganda
campaign to stir up Americans to support U.S. intervention in
the war remains more germane than ever. "Every modern war
has had its root in exploitation" Keller said. "The
Civil War was fought to decide whether the slaveholders of the
South or the capitalists of the North should exploit the West.
The Spanish-American War decided that the United States should
exploit Cuba and the Philippines. The South African War decided
that the British should exploit the diamond mines. The Russo-Japanese
War decided that Japan should exploit Korea. The present war is
to decide who shall exploit the Balkans, Turkey, Persia, Egypt,
India, China, Africa. And we are whetting our sword to scare the
victors into sharing the spoils with us. Now, the workers are
not interested in the spoils; they will not get any of them anyway."
She urged workers-the ones who do the
fighting and dying-to strike at the heart of America's drive toward
war. "Strike against war, for without you no battles can
be fought," she declared. "Strike against preparedness
that means death and misery to millions of human beings. Be not
dumb, obedient slaves in an army of destruction. Be heroes in
an army of construction."
Mickey Z. is the author of several books
including the soon-to-be-released 50 American Revolutions You're
Not Supposed to Know: Reclaiming American Patriotism, from which
this essay is excerpted. Mickey Z. can be found on the Web at:
www.mickeyz.net.
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