The Radical Dissent of Helen Keller 

by Peter Dreier
YES! Magazine
Jul 12, 2012
www.yesmagazine.org/people-power/the-radical-dissent-of-helen-keller?utm_source=feedburner&ut. 1/7

The Radical Dissent of Helen Keller

     Here's what they don't teach: When the blind-deaf
     visionary learned that poor people were more likely
     to be blind than others, she set off down a
     pacifist, socialist path that broke the boundaries
     of her time-and continues to challenge ours today.

"So long as I confine my activities to social service
and the blind, they compliment me extravagantly, calling
me 'arch priestess of the sightless,' 'wonder woman,'
and a 'modern miracle.'

"But when it comes to a discussion of poverty, and I
maintain that it is the result of wrong economics -that
the industrial system under which we live is at the root
of much of the physical deafness and blindness in the
world-that is a di erent matter! It is laudable to give
aid to the handicapped.

"Superficial charities make smooth the way of the
prosperous; but to advocate that all human beings should
have leisure and comfort, the decencies and refinements
of life, is a Utopian dream, and one who seriously
contemplates its realization indeed must be deaf, dumb,
and blind."

           -Helen Keller (letter to Senator Robert La
           Follette, 1924)

The bronze statue of Helen Keller that sits in the U.S.
Capitol shows the blind girl standing at a water pump.
It depicts the moment in 1887 when her teacher, Anne
Sullivan, spelled "W-A-T-E-R" into one of her 7-year-old
pupil's hands while water streamed into the other. This
was Keller's awakening, when she made the connection
between the word Sullivan spelled and the tangible
substance splashing from the pump, whispering "wah-
wah,"-her way of saying "water." This scene, made famous
in the play and film "The Miracle Worker," has long
defined Keller in the public mind as a symbol of courage
in the face of overwhelming odds.

Less well known (but no less inspiring) is the fact that
Keller, who was born in 1880 and died in 1968, was a
lifelong radical who participated in the great movements
for social justice of her time. In her investigations
into the causes of blindness, she discovered that poor
people were more likely than the rich to be blind, and
soon connected the mistreatment of the blind to the
oppression of workers, women, and other groups, leading
her to embrace socialism, feminism, and pacifism.

Early Life

Keller was born on a plantation in Tuscumbia, Alabama,
to Arthur Keller, a former Confederate officer and a
conservative newspaper publisher, and Kate Keller, a
descendant of John Adams. At nineteen months old, she
lost her sight and hearing as a result of a fever. She
became uncontrollable, prone to tantrums-kicking,
biting, and smashing anything within reach. In that era,
many blind and deaf people were consigned to an asylum.
Some family members suggested that this was where Helen
belonged.

Instead, her mother contacted the Perkins School for the
Blind in Boston, which recommended that a former
student, the 20-year-old Sullivan, become Helen's
private tutor. In 1887 Sullivan-the daughter of poor
Irish immigrants and nearly blind herself-moved to the
Kellers' home. She helped calm Helen's rages and channel
her insatiable curiosity and exceptional intelligence.
She patiently spelled out letters and words in Keller's
hand. With Sullivan's support, her student soon learned
to read and write Braille, and by the age of ten she had
begun to speak.

Her story became well known and she, a celebrity.
Newspapers and magazines in Europe and America wrote
glowing stories about the young Keller. Her family
connections and fame opened up many opportunities,
including private schools and an elite college
education. Mark Twain, who admired Keller's courage and
youthful writings, introduced her to Standard Oil tycoon
Henry Huttleston Rogers, who paid for her education. She
later acknowledged, "I owed my success partly to the
advantages of my birth and environment. I have learned
that the power to rise is not within the reach of
everyone."

"I owed my success partly to the advantages of my birth
and environment. I have learned that the power to rise
is not within the reach of everyone."

In 1894, at 14, Keller began formal schooling-initially
at the Wright-Humason School for the Deaf in New York
and then at the Cambridge School for Young Ladies.
Sullivan accompanied her, spelling into her hand letter-
by-letter so she could read the books assigned in her
classes. In 1900, at age 20, Keller entered Radcliffe
College with Sullivan still at her side. At Radcliffe
(from which she graduated magna cum laude in 1904),
Keller was first exposed to the radical ideas that
helped her drawconnections among different forms of
injustice. She began to write about herself and her
growing understanding of the world.

"I Must Speak"

In a 1901 article entitled "I Must Speak" in the Ladies
Home Journal, Keller wrote, "Once I believed

that blindness, deafness, tuberculosis, and other causes
of suffering were necessary, unpreventable.

But gradually my reading extended, and I found that
those evils are to be laid not at the door of
Providence, but at the door of mankind; that they are,
in large measure, due to ignorance, stupidity and sin."

She visited slums and learned about the struggles of
workers and immigrants to improve their working and
living conditions. "I have visited sweatshops,
factories, crowded slums," she wrote, "If I could not
see it, I could smell it."

In 1908 Sullivan's socialist husband, John Macy,
encouraged Keller to read H. G. Wells's New Worlds for
Old, which influenced her views about radical change.
She soon began to devour Macy's extensive collection of
political books, reading socialist publications (often
in German Braille) and Marxist economists. In addition
to giving inspirational lectures about blindness, Keller
also talked, wrote, and agitated about radical social
and political causes, making her class analysis explicit
in such books as Social Causes of Blindness (1911), The
Unemployed (1911), and The Underprivileged (1931). In
1915, after learning about the Ludlow Massacre-in which
John D. Rockefeller's private army killed coal miners
and their wives and children in a labor confrontation in
Colorado-Keller denounced him as a "monster of
capitalism."

Although she was universally praised for her courage in
the face of her physical disabilities, she now found
herself criticized for her political views.

In 1909 Keller joined the Socialist Party, wrote
articles in support of its ideas, campaigned for its
candidates, and lent her name to help striking workers.
Although she was universally praised for her courage in
the face of her physical disabilities, she now found
herself criticized for her political views.

The editor of the Brooklyn Eagle attacked her radical
ideas, attributing them to "mistakes sprung out of the
manifest limitations of her development." In her 1912
essay "How I Became a Socialist," published in the Call,
a socialist newspaper, Keller wrote, "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."

Women's Suffrage, Civil Rights, and War

Keller was part of wide circle of reformers and radicals
who participated in a variety of overlapping causes. She
was a strong advocate for women's rights and women's
suffrage, writing in 1916:

"Women have discovered that they cannot rely on men's
chivalry to give them justice." She supported birth
control and praised its leading advocate, Margaret
Sanger, with whom she had many mutual friends. Keller
argued that capitalists wanted workers to have large
families to supply cheap labor to factories but forced
poor children to live in miserable conditions. "Only by
taking the responsibility of birth control into their
own hands," Keller said, "can [women] roll back the
awful tide of misery that is sweeping over them and
their children."

"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!"

She donated money to the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)- then a young and
controversial civil rights organization that focused on
opposition to lynching and job and housing
discrimination against African Americans-and wrote for
its magazine. At an antiwar rally in January 1916,
sponsored by the Women's Peace Party at New York's
Carnegie Hall, Keller said, "Congress is not preparing
to defend the people of the United States. It is
planning to protect the capital of American speculators
and investors. Incidentally this preparation will
benefit the manufacturers of munitions and war machines.
Strike against war, for without you no battles can be
fought! Strike against manufacturing shrapnel and gas
bombs and all other tools of murder!

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!"

In 1918 she helped found the American Civil Liberties
Union, which was initially organized to challenge the
U.S. government's attempts to suppress the ideas of and
jail or deport radicals who opposed World War I,
including Socialists and members of the Industrial
Workers of the World.

The following year she wrote a letter, addressed to
"Dear Comrade" Eugene Debs, the Socialist labor leader
and presidential candidate, in jail for advocating draft
resistance during World War I. She wrote, "I want you to
know that I should be proud if the Supreme Court
convicted me of abhorring war, and doing all in my power
to oppose it."

In 1924, while campaigning for Senator Robert La
Follette, the Wisconsin radical and anti-war Photo
courtesy of U.S. Library of Congress.stalwart who was
running for president on the Progressive Party ticket,
Keller wrote him a note: "I am for you because you stand
for liberal and progressive government. I am for you
because you believe the people should rule. I am for you
because you believe that labor should participate in
public life."

After 1924, Keller devoted most of her time and energy
to speaking and fundraising for the American Foundation
for the Blind, but still supported radical causes. Even
as feminism began to ebb, she continued to agitate for
women's rights. In 1932, she wrote an article for Home
magazine, "Great American Women," praising the early
suffragists Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone, and Elizabeth
Cady Stanton. She also penned a humorous article for the
Atlantic Monthly, "Put Your Husband in the Kitchen."

Keller, who died in 1968, never saw a contradiction
between her crusade to address the causes of blindness
and her efforts to promote economic and social justice.

Between 1946 and 1957 she visited 35 countries on five
continents. In 1948, Keller visited Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, cities destroyed by American atomic bombs at
the end of World War II, and spoke out against nuclear
war.

In 1955, at the height of the Cold War, she wrote a
public birthday greeting and letter of support to
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, a leading Communist activist,
then in jail on charges of violating the Smith Act. In
response, some supporters of the American Foundation for
the Blind (AFB), for which Keller was the national face,
threatened to withdraw their support. The AFB's
executive director wrote to one of his trustees, "Helen
Keller's habit of playing around with communists and
near communists has long been a source of embarrassment
to her conservative friends."

The FBI kept Keller under surveillance for most of her
adult life for her radical views. But Keller, who died
in 1968, never saw a contradiction between her crusade
to address the causes of blindness and her efforts to
promote economic and social justice.

Keller is well known for being blind, but she also
deserves to be heralded for her progressive social
vision.

Peter Dreier adapted this article for YES! Magazine, a
national, nonprofit media organization that fuses
powerful ideas and practical actions. Professor Dreier
is the E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics
and chair of the Urban & Environmental Policy Department
at Occidental College.

He writes frequently for The Nation, American Prospect,
the Los Angeles Times, and Huffington Post.

His new book, The 100 Greatest Americans: A Social
Justice Hall of Fame, from which this article was
adapted, was just published by Nation Books. You can
learn more about the book at 100greatestamericans.org.

References

Dorothy Herrmann. Helen Keller: A Life. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1999.

John Davis. Helen Keller. New York: Ocean Press, 2003.

Kim Nielsen, The Radical Lives of Helen Keller. New
York: New York University Press, 2004.

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