The Whole Helen Keller
April 5, 2015 9:40 AM   Subscribe

Helen Keller's lesser known work as a lefty socialist: Helen Keller was famous for flourishing as a deaf and blind woman. She was well known for her work advocating for the physically disabled. As she discovered that those who are poor were more likely to be disabled, she began her journey towards a leftist, socialist ideology. Much of her political and social activism has been erased from history. This article offers a more complete look at her body of work. posted by batbat (30 comments total) 74 users marked this as a favorite
 
I think for a vast majority of people what they know seems largely to be related to information based on their viewing of The Miracle Worker.

Her wikipedia page is a great place to start. Her books are also all available and downloadable for free (and legal) over at Project Gutenberg. Here is the link.
posted by Fizz at 10:10 AM on April 5, 2015 [4 favorites]


Huh. I had a bio of her that I read over and over as a child, but it was mostly about her as a child learning to speak, so I never knew any of this.
posted by jacquilynne at 10:16 AM on April 5, 2015 [1 favorite]


Funny enough they don't teach this part in school.
posted by Pope Guilty at 10:22 AM on April 5, 2015 [13 favorites]


Something else "they" don't tell you: her Radcliffe education was paid for by H. H. Rogers, an original investor in Standard Oil, at the request of his friend, Mark Twain-- Keller dedicated her book, The World I Live In, to Rogers.
posted by Ideefixe at 10:27 AM on April 5, 2015 [1 favorite]


Funny enough they don't teach this part in school.
posted by Pope Guilty at 1:22 PM on April 5 [+] [!]


Slight, derail. For me, this has always been one of the most depressing and frustrating parts of growing up. Realizing what is NOT taught or intentionally left out or somehow overlooked and forgotten.

I recall with sadness the moment when I questioned my grade 9 science teacher about the fact that the chapter on Darwin was not being taught. His response: "We don't have time in our curriculum for all parts of the book." That I was being taught in a high-school in Texas deep in the bible belt was not lost on me, even at that age.

The great thing is that as an adult I can now pick and choose whatever I like and dive as deep as I want into any subject that interests me.
posted by Fizz at 10:27 AM on April 5, 2015 [9 favorites]


Keller's socialism was a major frame-setting device in the excellent book Lies My Teacher Told Me.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 10:29 AM on April 5, 2015 [16 favorites]


I noted In Helens 1933 letter to to German Students she mentions "Do not imagine that your barbarities to the Jews are unknown here."
I didn't realize that atrocities towards Jews were so well known at the time.
posted by smudgedlens at 10:45 AM on April 5, 2015 [2 favorites]


It wasn't a secret that 1930's Germany was a violent and dangerous place for Jews, since the Nazis made no secret of their hatred, though much of the world either didn't care or wrung their hands and oh dear, how awful, but of course we can't be taking in refugees. What was unknown by the outside world until late in the war was the scale of the Holocaust.
posted by Pope Guilty at 10:47 AM on April 5, 2015 [4 favorites]


Crossing off Hitler's name to instead address the letters to the students is a pretty awesome visual from someone who couldn't see it.
posted by MCMikeNamara at 10:54 AM on April 5, 2015


"Better were it for you to have a mill-stone hung around your neck and sink into the sea than to be hated and despised of all men."

I need THIS on a coffee mug.
posted by Fizz at 10:59 AM on April 5, 2015 [5 favorites]


It pleases me that Alabama has a socialist on its state quarter.
posted by vorpal bunny at 11:12 AM on April 5, 2015 [14 favorites]


It pleases me that Alabama has a socialist on its state quarter.

She is also the subject of one of Alabama's two entries in the National Statuary Hall Collection at the U.S. Capitol, and the only statue in the collection that visitors are allowed to touch.
posted by Etrigan at 11:29 AM on April 5, 2015 [8 favorites]


We can never know exactly how Keller became a socialist but it seems amazing that her experience of disability may have been what illuminated to her the other systemic injustices that plague the society. It goes to show that a radical commitment to social justice includes an intersectional understanding of oppression and the ability to recognize similarities between the struggles of various oppressed people. I especially like how she recognizes her own privilege of being born into a wealthy white family and acknowledges that "the power to rise is not within the reach of everyone."I don't think it really matters whether or not her education was funded by an oil tycoon, since none of that seems to have affected her ideology in any way.
posted by winterportage at 11:44 AM on April 5, 2015 [18 favorites]


Thank you, that was a great article. She was an amazing person, truly inspirational.
posted by fallingleaves at 11:53 AM on April 5, 2015 [1 favorite]


For a woman who is often presented as the meek recipient of other people's charity, and object instead of a subject, if you will, that letter is some pretty sharp stuff! Women just don't get to be righteously angry in most history.
posted by GenjiandProust at 12:25 PM on April 5, 2015 [13 favorites]


They've done the same thing to Jesus, pretty much. If you read the New Testament, it's kind of amazing just how anti-wealth acquisition and pro-charity Jesus is. He beat that drum hard. By the standards of modern "Christian" conservatives he'd be hippie, class revolution-inciting, anti-job creation, community organizer scum.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 1:29 PM on April 5, 2015 [18 favorites]


Thanks for posting this. I'd never seen nor heard footage of her speaking. Nor the "fuck you, Nazi students" letter.

And yeah, Helen Keller is brought up in one of two contexts: shitty jokes or inspiration porn. Rarely in the context of her social justice work and extensive writing on that and other topics.

Nitpick: it's weird that the article didn't use the term "deafblind," which is the preferred nomenclature.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 1:37 PM on April 5, 2015


“Congress is not preparing to defend the people of the United States. It is planning to protect the capital of American speculators and investors."

The more things change....
posted by cleroy at 2:43 PM on April 5, 2015 [3 favorites]


winterportage: We can never know exactly how Keller became a socialist...

She did write about how she became a socialist, citing her intellectual influences and the things she's reading.

She notes:

Manual spelling takes time. It is no easy and rapid thing to apsorb through one's fingers a book of 50,000 words on economics. But it is a pleasure, and one which I shall enjoy repeatedly until I have made myself acquainted with all the classic socialist authors.

She also mentions the condescending media coverage of the time, as though she was some empty vessel to be filled with the ideas of those around her, rather than being treated as someone who could think about and analyze what she was reading.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 3:25 PM on April 5, 2015 [7 favorites]


She wrote something about discovering "the sweep of thought in a line of Shakespeare" which was pretty poetic in its own sake.
posted by Trochanter at 3:36 PM on April 5, 2015 [2 favorites]


I didn't realize that atrocities towards Jews were so well known at the time.

Well, she said "barbarities", meaning the racial legislation that the Nazi government had begun passing under the Enabling Act [emergency powers]; the real atrocities per se came later, for the most part. What had been happening was a postwar decade of increasing anti-Semitism in Germany, part of it -- worth noting -- due to Henry Ford paying for a German edition of The International Jew: The World's Problem. (Sample chapter titles: "Jewish Jazz Becomes Our National Music"; "The Scope of Jewish Dictatorship in the U.S."; and the very modern sounding ressentiment of "How Jews Capitalized a Protest Against Jews".) The word anti-Semitism itself was coined in Germany in the 1870s, and there were many notable anti-Semitic incidents across Europe in the years prior to Nazi power. It was a trend, you see, and while the U.S. tended to acknowledge the existence of anti-Semitism here, it was largely considered to be exercised in a more civilized manner; but as a sentiment it remained very socially acceptable (viz. Ford himself), until the end of the war laid bare the truth of the Holocaust.

Still, the thing that's relevant here is that Keller was a socialist, and it was largely the American left that fought racism and anti-Semitism and kept aware of such things. It should be absolutely no surprise that Keller took note of what was happening in Germany at this time and in this manner.
posted by dhartung at 4:59 PM on April 5, 2015 [4 favorites]


Keller's socialism was a major frame-setting device in the excellent book Lies My Teacher Told Me.


I haven't read LMTTM in a while; I remember Keller getting a fair bit of page space, but I don't really remember the book having a frame to be set. Curious what you mean by that; quite probable that I'd missed/forgot something.
posted by PMdixon at 6:01 PM on April 5, 2015


What sort of periodical was the National Socialist?
posted by Joe in Australia at 7:46 PM on April 5, 2015


Might actually be the American Socialist, the official newspaper of the Socialist Party of America.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 8:08 PM on April 5, 2015


They did the same thing to Dr. King.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 8:36 PM on April 5, 2015 [1 favorite]


What sort of periodical was the National Socialist?

I don't see that in any of the links or this post? In any event, her letter about becoming a socialist was published in The [New York] Call^, a publication closely associated with (but not published by) the Socialist Party of America.

The letter to the German students seems to have been released directly to the Associated Press.
posted by dhartung at 11:59 PM on April 5, 2015


It's in Mandolin Conspiracy's link How I Became a Socialist:
No Socialist paper, neither The Call nor the National Socialist, ever asked me for an article.
posted by Joe in Australia at 12:03 AM on April 6, 2015


Not just shitty jokes and inspiration porn, she also invented the \m/ sign and was in league with the Illuminati, or something.
posted by asok at 5:19 PM on April 6, 2015 [2 favorites]


I haven't read LMTTM in a while; I remember Keller getting a fair bit of page space, but I don't really remember the book having a frame to be set. Curious what you mean by that; quite probable that I'd missed/forgot something.

I took it to mean that Loewen uses HK as an example of what we are taught and not taught in schools. We are taught about her disability, how she was able to learn to speak and read, but not that she used her speaking ability to advocate for socialism, because that might lead to difficult conversations. He mentions her and several others including Columbus and Woodrow Wilson as examples of historical people who are glorified or vilified to the point that important parts of their lives are erased from history books.
posted by chaiminda at 11:40 AM on April 7, 2015


I did not know about any of this. Her letter is totally rad.
posted by bardophile at 3:48 AM on April 14, 2015


« Older Tudo fica, tudo "fica"… até ao bum final!   |   pleasureboats lol Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments