Keller, Helen

KELLER, HELEN (1880–1967). Almost everyone knows that Helen Keller, born in Tuscumbia, Alabama, was stricken at the age of nineteen months by a disease that left her deaf, blind, and mute; that she was brought out of her prison of despair and frustration by Anne Sullivan; and that she triumphed over her disabilities, graduating cum laude from Radcliffe College after mastering Greek, Latin, German, and French. In the years that followed, Keller campaigned for the deaf and blind around the world. She also appeared in vaudeville and motion pictures and wrote books of literary distinction. Her accomplishments led Mark Twain to characterize her as “the greatest woman since Joan of Arc,” and to assert that “the two most interesting characters of the nineteenth century are Napoleon and Helen Keller.” Good Housekeeping included her in its selection of “America’s Twelve Greatest Women,” describing Helen Keller as “Living Proof of the Divine Spark in the Human Brain.”

For all her fame, not many people know that this woman was one of the best-known figures in the American socialist movement, a champion of the working class and its struggles against industrial barbarism, a consistent foe of militarism, war, and imperialism, and a militant crusader for a new society. Turning the yellowed pages of radical newspapers and magazines between 1910 and the early 1920s, one frequently finds the name Helen Keller beneath speeches, articles, and letters dealing with major social questions of the era. The radical vision that runs through these writings is the vision of socialism. In the New York Call, daily organ of the Socialist Party, Hattie Schlossberg wrote on 4 May, 1913: “Helen Keller is our comrade, and her socialism is a living vital thing for her. All her speeches are permeated with the spirit of socialism....”

Until her death in 1967 at the age of eighty-seven, J. Edgar Hoover maintained a detailed investigative file on this remarkable and distinguished American whose triumph over her disabilities was an inspiration to millions the world over. To Hoover, Helen Keller was a “writer on radical subjects,” and as such had to have her activities carefully monitored by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and recorded in a file that was stamped “Security Information Confidential.”

When Helen Keller decided after 1921 that her chief life work was to be devoted to raising funds for the American Foundation for the Blind, her activities for the socialist movement diminished but did not cease. No matter what social cause she espoused, Keller was always on the radical side of the movement. A left-wing socialist, she despised “parlor socialists” who quickly abandoned the struggle when the going became difficult and often ended up “hopelessly reactionary.” She supported every workers’ struggle, but she was “heartily disgusted” with the conservative policies of the leadership of the American Federation of Labor (AFL). “If only Jehovah in his infinite mercy would take [Samuel] Gompers to Heaven, there might be some hope of an American labor party worthy of the name,” she wrote in the early 1920s. Because of the AFL’s emphasis on organizing mainly the skilled, white, male workers in craft unions, she lined up with the Industrial Workers of the World. She admired the Wobblies’ militant, innovative tactics, their advocacy of industrial unions under which all workers would be organized regardless of skill, sex, and race, and their belief in the ultimate goal of a new society.

She was also on the side of the militants in the struggle for woman suffrage, advocating the adoption of the militant tactics of the British suffragettes, including hunger strikes. “I believe the women of England are doing right,” she told a reporter for the New York Times. “Mrs. Pankhurst [founder of the British movement] is a great leader. The women of America should follow her example. They would get the ballot much faster if they did. They cannot hope to get anything unless they are willing to fight and suffer for it. The pangs of hunger during the hunger strike are a sample of the suffering they must expect.”

She did not value militancy for its own sake nor even for the sake only of individual causes. “I am a militant suffragist,” she explained, “because I believe suffrage will lead to Socialism and to me Socialism is the ideal cause.”

Herrmann, Dorothy. Helen Keller: A Life. New York, NY: Knopf,1998.

Keller, Helen. Helen Keller: Her Socialist Years; Writings and Speeches. Edited by Philip S. Foner. New York: International Publishers, 1967. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/helenkellerherso00hele/page/10/mode/2up

Papers of Helen Keller, 1898-2003, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute. https://hollisarchives.lib.harvard.edu/repositories/8/resources/9259