Helen Keller

Helen Keller: Thirty Words Before Dinner

On 5 April 1887 a young teacher held a child's hand under a water pump and spelled a word into her palm. By the end of that evening the child had learned thirty more. Helen Keller was six, had been deaf and blind since infancy, and had just discovered that the finger movements people made against her skin were not a game but a system. Almost everything she did over the next eighty-one years followed from that afternoon, and she spent much of her life insisting that the afternoon was not the whole story.

The Dense Fog

Helen Adams Keller was born on 27 June 1880 in Tuscumbia, Alabama. At nineteen months an unidentified illness -- possibly rubella, scarlet fever or meningitis -- took her sight and hearing permanently. She later described the years before language as being at sea in a dense fog: not merely isolated but without the means to know she was isolated.

Anne Mansfield Sullivan arrived on 3 March 1887. She was twenty, a graduate of the Perkins School, and visually impaired herself. She taught through the manual alphabet, spelling words into Keller's hand relentlessly and without evident result until the pump. The partnership lasted nearly fifty years.

Radcliffe

Keller learned the manual alphabet and braille, and in 1890, at ten, began speech lessons -- a far harder project, and one whose results were always imperfect. She studied at the Perkins Institute, the Wright-Humason School and, from 1898, the Cambridge School for Young Ladies. In the autumn of 1900 she entered Radcliffe College, and in 1904 she graduated with a Bachelor of Arts *cum laude*, the first deafblind person in the United States to earn a college degree. Sullivan sat beside her throughout, spelling lectures into her hand.

The Writer

She began publishing while still an undergraduate. *The Story of My Life* appeared in 1903, has been translated into fifty languages and has never gone out of print. Eleven more books followed, along with an archive of more than 475 speeches and essays covering faith, the prevention of blindness, birth control, fascism and atomic energy. The range is worth noting: the public wanted a miracle child and she kept writing about politics.

The Radical

Keller joined the Socialist Party of America in 1909 and later the Industrial Workers of the World. She was a pacifist who publicly opposed American entry into the First World War, a campaigner for women's suffrage, an advocate for birth control, and an early member of the group that founded the American Civil Liberties Union. In 1915 she founded the organisation now called Helen Keller International. This is the part of her biography that inspirational retellings tend to drop, and it was not incidental: she argued that blindness was concentrated among the poor and industrially injured, which made it a political condition as much as a medical one.

Forty Years at AFB

She joined the American Foundation for the Blind in 1924 and worked there for over four decades. The output was legislative and institutional rather than literary: state commissions for the blind, rehabilitation centres, accessible education, and in 1946 a dedicated service for deafblind people. She raised money continuously and she was very good at it.

Between 1946 and 1957 she made seven overseas trips, visiting thirty-five countries across five continents. In 1948 General Douglas MacArthur sent her to Japan as America's first Goodwill Ambassador. In 1955, aged seventy-five, she completed a forty-thousand-mile, five-month tour of Asia. She met Winston Churchill, Jawaharlal Nehru and Golda Meir; her friends and acquaintances included Eleanor Roosevelt, Albert Einstein, Charlie Chaplin, Franklin Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy.

Why Helen Is Called a Genius

The strongest evidence is contemporaneous and comes from a hard judge. Mark Twain declared that "the two most interesting characters of the 19th century are Napoleon and Helen Keller," which is not a compliment he distributed freely. The specific cognitive feat behind it is language acquisition through touch alone. Keller had to build an entire symbolic system -- grammar, abstraction, metaphor, eventually multiple languages and a college curriculum -- with no auditory or visual input, learning literature she could not hear read aloud and taking a Radcliffe degree *cum laude* through a hand spelling into her palm. That is a genuine and rare achievement in the acquisition and manipulation of abstraction, and it is not what an inspirational-poster reading of her life describes.

The counter-case is real. Her accomplishment is inseparable from Anne Sullivan's teaching and from decades of constant mediation, which makes it almost impossible to isolate Keller's own contribution in the way one can for a mathematician or composer. The question surfaced early and painfully: at eleven her story "The Frost King" was found to closely parallel a work by Margaret Canby, and although cryptomnesia rather than deliberate theft was the likely explanation -- Alexander Graham Bell and Twain both rushed to her defence and mocked her accusers -- the episode fed a lasting suspicion about how much of her prose was hers. Her writing is significant as advocacy rather than as original thought; she produced no theory anyone cites for its ideas alone. And her judgement was not infallible: in 1915 she publicly supported eugenics, a position that sits very badly against a life spent arguing for the value of disabled people.

The honest verdict is that Keller's genius was linguistic and adaptive rather than creative -- an extraordinary capacity to acquire and deploy a symbolic world she had almost no channel to receive.

Legacy

She collected honorary doctorates from Temple, Harvard, Glasgow, Berlin, Delhi and the Witwatersrand, an honorary Academy Award in 1955, the Lions Humanitarian Award in 1961 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964. After a stroke in 1960 she lived quietly in Westport, Connecticut, making her last major public appearance at a Lions Clubs meeting in 1961. She died on 1 June 1968, weeks short of eighty-eight, having been famous since she was eight. The institutions she built have outlasted the sentimental version of her, and disability advocates have spent recent decades recovering the socialist who wrote about industrial accidents from beneath the miracle child at the water pump.

Achievements

• Presidential Medal of Freedom — 1964
• Knight of the Legion of Honour
• Order of St. Sava
• Knight of the Order of the Southern Cross
• Educated at Radcliffe College and Harvard University