Helen keller
Helen Adams Keller (June 27, 1880 – June 1, 1968) was an American author, political activist, and lecturer. She was the first deaf-blind person to earn a bachelor of arts degree. The story of how Keller's teacher, Anne Sullivan, broke through the isolation imposed by a near complete lack of language, allowing the girl to blossom as she learned to communicate, has become widely known through the dramatic depictions of the play and film The Miracle Worker. Her birthplace in West Tuscumbia, Alabama, is now a museum[1] and sponsors an annual "Helen Keller Day". Her birthday on June 27 is commemorated as Helen Keller Day in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania and was authorized at the federal level by presidential proclamation by President Jimmy Carter in 1980, the 100th anniversary of her birth.
A prolific author, Keller was well-traveled and outspoken in her convictions. A member of the Socialist Party of America and theIndustrial Workers of the World, she campaigned for women's suffrage, labor rights, socialism, antimilitarism, and other similar causes. She was inducted into theAlabama Women's Hall of Fame in 1971[2] and was one of twelve inaugural inductees to the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame on June 8, 2015.[3] Keller proved to the world that deaf people could all learn to communicate and that they could survive in the hearing world. She also taught that deaf people are capable of doing things that hearing people can do. One of the most famous deaf people in history, she is an idol to many deaf people in the world.[4]
Early childhood and illness
Helen Adams Keller was born on June 27, 1880, in Tuscumbia, Alabama.[5] Her family lived on a homestead, Ivy Green,[1] that Helen's grandfather had built decades earlier.[6] She had two siblings, Mildred Campbell and Phillip Brooks Keller, and two older half-brothers from her father's prior marriage, James and William Simpson Keller.[7][8]
Her father, Arthur H. Keller,[9] spent many years as an editor for the Tuscumbia North Alabamian, and had served as a captain for the Confederate Army.[5][6] Her paternal grandmother was second cousins with Robert E. Lee.[10] Her mother, Kate Adams,[11] was the daughter of Charles W. Adams, a Confederate general.[12] Though originally from Massachusetts, Charles Adams also fought for the Confederate Army during the American Civil War, earning the rank of colonel (and acting brigadier-general). Her paternal lineage was traced to Casper Keller, a native ofSwitzerland.[10][13] One of Helen's Swiss ancestors was the first teacher for the deaf in Zurich. Keller reflected on this coincidence in her first autobiography, stating "that there is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his."[10]
Helen Keller was born with the ability to see and hear. At 19 months old, she contracted an unknown illness described by doctors as "an acute congestion of the stomach and the brain",[14] which might have been scarlet feveror meningitis.[5][15] The illness left her both deaf and blind. At that time, she was able to communicate somewhat with Martha Washington, the six-year-old daughter of the family cook, who understood her signs;[16]:11by the age of seven, Keller had more than 60home signs to communicate with her family. Even though blind and deaf, Helen Keller had passed through many obstacles and she learned to live with her disabilities. She learned how to tell which person was walking by from the vibrations their footsteps would make. The sex and age of the person could be identified by how strong and continuous the steps were.[17]
In 1886, Keller's mother, inspired by an account in Charles Dickens' American Notesof the successful education of another deaf and blind woman, Laura Bridgman, dispatched the young Keller, accompanied by her father, to seek out physician J. Julian Chisolm, an eye, ear, nose, and throat specialist inBaltimore, for advice.[18] Chisholm referred the Kellers to Alexander Graham Bell, who was working with deaf children at the time. Bell advised them to contact the Perkins Institute for the Blind, the school where Bridgman had been educated, which was then located inSouth Boston. Michael Anagnos, the school's director, asked 20-year-old former studentAnne Sullivan, herself visually impaired, to become Keller's instructor. It was the beginning of a 49-year-long relationship during which Sullivan evolved into Keller'sgoverness and eventually hercompanion.[16]:Introduction, Key Figures
Sullivan arrived at Keller's house in March 1887, and immediately began to teach Helen to communicate by spelling words into her hand, beginning with "d-o-l-l" for the doll that she had brought Keller as a present. Keller was frustrated, at first, because she did not understand that every object had a word uniquely identifying it. In fact, when Sullivan was trying to teach Keller the word for "mug", Keller became so frustrated she broke the mug.[19] Keller's breakthrough in communication came the next month, when she realized that the motions her teacher was making on the palm of her hand, while running cool water over her other hand, symbolized the idea of "water"; she then nearly exhausted Sullivan demanding the names of all the other familiar objects in her world.
Helen Keller was viewed as isolated, but was very in touch with the outside world. She was able to enjoy music by feeling the beat and she was able to have a strong connection with animals through touch. She was delayed at picking up language, but that did not stop her from having a voice.[20]
Formal education
In May 1888, Keller started attending the Perkins Institute for the Blind. In 1894, Keller and Sullivan moved to New York to attend theWright-Humason School for the Deaf, and to learn from Sarah Fuller at the Horace Mann School for the Deaf. In 1896, they returned to Massachusetts, and Keller entered The Cambridge School for Young Ladies before gaining admittance, in 1900, to Radcliffe College,[21] where she lived in Briggs Hall,South House. Her admirer, Mark Twain, had introduced her to Standard Oil magnate Henry Huttleston Rogers, who, with his wife Abbie, paid for her education. In 1904, at the age of 24, Keller graduated from Radcliffe, becoming the first deaf blind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree. She maintained a correspondence with the Austrian philosopher and pedagogue Wilhelm Jerusalem, who was one of the first to discover her literary talent.[22]
Determined to communicate with others as conventionally as possible, Keller learned to speak, and spent much of her life giving speeches and lectures on aspects of her life. She learned to "hear" people's speech by reading their lips with her hands—her sense of touch had heightened. She became proficient at using braille[23] and reading sign languagewith her hands as well. Shortly before World War I, with the assistance of the Zoellner Quartet, she determined that by placing her fingertips on a resonant tabletop she could experience music played close by.[24]
Example of her lectures
On January 22, 1916, Keller and Sullivan traveled to the small town of Menomonie in western Wisconsin to deliver a lecture at theMabel Tainter Memorial Building. Details of her talk were provided in the weekly Dunn County News on January 22, 1916:
When part of the account was reprinted in the January 20, 2016, edition of the paper under the heading "From the Files", the column compiler added
Companions
Helen Keller in 1899 with lifelong companion and teacher Anne Sullivan. Photo taken by Alexander Graham Bellat his School of Vocal Physiology and Mechanics of Speech.
Anne Sullivan stayed as a companion to Helen Keller long after she taught her. Sullivan married John Macy in 1905, and her health started failing around 1914. Polly Thomson (February 20, 1885[26] – March 21, 1960) was hired to keep house. She was a young woman from Scotland who had no experience with deaf or blind people. She progressed to working as a secretary as well, and eventually became a constant companion to Keller.[27]
Keller moved to Forest Hills, Queens, together with Sullivan and Macy, and used the house as a base for her efforts on behalf of theAmerican Foundation for the Blind.[28] "While in her thirties Helen had a love affair, became secretly engaged, and defied her teacher and family by attempting an elopement with the man she loved."[29] He was "Peter Fagan, a young Boston Herald reporter who was sent to Helen's home to act as her private secretary when lifelong companion, Anne, fell ill."[30]
Anne Sullivan died in 1936 after a coma as a result of coronary thrombosis,[31]:266 with Keller holding her hand.[32]:255 Keller and Thomson moved to Connecticut. They traveled worldwide and raised funds for the blind. Thomson had a stroke in 1957 from which she never fully recovered, and died in 1960. Winnie Corbally, a nurse whom they originally hired to care for Thomson in 1957, stayed on after her death and was Keller's companion for the rest of her life.[28]
Political activities
Helen Keller portrait, 1904. Due to a protruding left eye, Keller was usually photographed in profile. Both her eyes were replaced in adulthood with glass replicas for "medical and cosmetic reasons".[32]
The few own the many because they possess the means of livelihood of all ... The country is governed for the richest, for the corporations, the bankers, the land speculators, and for the exploiters of labor. The majority of mankind are working people. So long as their fair demands—the ownership and control of their livelihoods—are set at naught, we can have neither men's rights nor women's rights. The majority of mankind is ground down by industrial oppression in order that the small remnant may live in ease.
Keller went on to become a world-famous speaker and author. She is remembered as anadvocate for people with disabilities, amid numerous other causes. The Deaf community was widely impacted by her. She traveled to twenty-five different countries giving motivational speeches about Deaf people's conditions.[34] She was a suffragette, pacifist,radical socialist, birth control supporter, and opponent of Woodrow Wilson. In 1915 she and George A. Kessler founded the Helen Keller International (HKI) organization. This organization is devoted to research in vision, health and nutrition. In 1920, she helped to found the American Civil Liberties Union(ACLU). Keller traveled to over 40 countries with Sullivan, making several trips to Japan and becoming a favorite of the Japanese people. Keller met every U.S. President fromGrover Cleveland to Lyndon B. Johnson and was friends with many famous figures, including Alexander Graham Bell, Charlie Chaplin and Mark Twain. Keller and Twain were both considered radicals at the beginning of the 20th century, and as a consequence, their political views have been forgotten or glossed over in the popular mind.[35]
Keller was a member of the Socialist Partyand actively campaigned and wrote in support of the working class from 1909 to 1921. Many of her speeches and writings were about women's right to vote and the impacts of war. She had speech therapy in order to have her voice heard better by the public. When the Rockefeller-owned press refused to print her articles, she protested until her work was finally published.[31] She supported Socialist Party candidate Eugene V. Debs in each of his campaigns for the presidency. Before readingProgress and Poverty, Helen Keller was already a socialist who believed thatGeorgism was a good step in the right direction.[36] She later wrote of finding "inHenry George's philosophy a rare beauty and power of inspiration, and a splendid faith in the essential nobility of human nature."[37]
Keller claimed that newspaper columnists who had praised her courage and intelligence before she expressed her socialist views 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:
Keller joined the Industrial Workers of the World (the IWW, known as the Wobblies) in 1912,[35] saying that parliamentary socialism was "sinking in the political bog". She wrote for the IWW between 1916 and 1918. In Why I Became an IWW,[39] Keller explained that her motivation for activism came in part from her concern about blindness and other disabilities:
The last sentence refers to prostitution andsyphilis, the former a frequent cause of the latter, and the latter a leading cause of blindness. In the same interview, Keller also cited the 1912 strike of textile workers inLawrence, Massachusetts for instigating her support of socialism.
Keller supported eugenics. In 1915 she wrote in favor of refusing life-saving medical procedures to infants with severe mental impairments or physical deformities, stating that their lives were not worthwhile and they would likely become criminals.[40][41] Keller also expressed concerns about human overpopulation.[42][43]
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