[There’s more to Helen Keller than her inspiring story of
overcoming serious physical disabilities.]
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HELLEN KELLER’S FORGOTTEN RADICALISM  
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Jessica Max Stein
September 20, 2023
The Indypendent
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_ There’s more to Helen Keller than her inspiring story of
overcoming serious physical disabilities. _

Young Helen Keller (left) with Anne Sullivan (right), who taught her
how to communicate despite being deaf and blind 1897.,
Wikimedia-Commons Library-of-Congres

 

In December 2020, over 50 years after Helen Keller’s death, the
renowned deafblind woman became ensnared in controversy, as she often
had in life. “Helen Keller is not radical at all,” Black
disability-rights activist Anita Cameron told _Time_ magazine.
“Just another, despite disabilities, privileged white person, and
yet another example of history telling the story of privileged white
Americans.” Ironically, right-wing figures from Ted Cruz to Donald
Trump, Jr. jumped in to defend Keller — a lifelong avowed radical
socialist — from “wokeism.” Around the same time, a viral TikTok
video accused Keller of being a “fraud,” arguing that no deafblind
person could have written books, graduated (with honors) from
Radcliffe, flown an airplane or achieved many of her storied
accomplishments. 

As all this shows, Helen Keller has long been reduced to
“inspiration porn,” a term coined by disability activist Stella
Young to describe how disabled people are often objectified to uplift
the nondisabled. Keller has been reduced to the cliché of the
disabled overachiever, seemingly unimpeded and unbothered by her
disabilities. Little of her life is remembered beyond the
“miracle” moment in 1886 when her teacher Annie Sullivan got
through to her inaccessible six-year-old self. Keller’s fascinating
and complicated story has become largely hidden from history.    

While previous conventional wisdom about Keller largely restricted her
radicalism to the early 20th century, ­Wallace lays out evidence that
she actually shifted even further left after World War I, identifying
not just as a socialist, but as a Communist.

Fortunately, scholar and disability advocate Max Wallace restores
Keller’s legacy as an empowered, independent thinker and activist in
his new biography, _After the Miracle: The Political Crusades of
Helen Keller_. The book refreshingly reestablishes Keller’s agency.
All the ink spilled over the last century about Keller —
biographies, historical novels, plays, movies, articles and the like
— enables Wallace to circumvent the typical chronological narrative
and just stick to his focus: reinscribing Keller’s radicalism. 

While many credit Keller’s socialist awakening to ­Sullivan’s
husband John Macy, Wallace provides evidence that she identified as a
socialist well before he did, and in fact likely brought him over to
the cause. Indeed, Macy is nowhere to be found in Keller’s 1912
essay “How I Became a Socialist,” written three years after she
joined the party; in it, she largely cites reading as opening her mind
to the cruelty of capitalism, particularly poverty’s connection to
disability. 

A huge public figure in the early 20th century, Keller was also hugely
public about her politics. She staunchly opposed America entering the
first world war, publicly supported the Russian revolution, joined the
­International Workers of the World (IWW) and fiercely supported
women’s right to vote. “I believe suffrage will lead to
socialism,” she told _The New York Times_, “and to me socialism
is the ideal cause.” Wallace smartly notes that Keller made public
remarks far worse than many of those arrested, imprisoned and/or
deported under the 1918 Sedition Act, yet remained untouched.  

Curiously, the ableism Keller endured could also protect her, as many
people simply assumed that she had been tricked or manipulated into
her beliefs. She caused a stir when in 1916 she sent a check for $100
(about $3,000 today) to the NAACP, accompanied by a passionate letter
decrying racism as “a denial of Christ.” This was a far cry from
her roots growing up in postbellum Alabama as the daughter of a
­Confederate soldier and granddaughter of slave owners. Keller’s
letter was published in the NAACP newsletter _The Crisi_s, then
reprinted in Alabama’s _Selma Journal_ ­— alongside a broadside
that insisted Keller’s impressionable mind must have been
“poisoned” by her Northern teachers. Again, Keller’s perceived
lack of agency provided a dubious security; for, as Wallace argues,
she very well could have been lynched for her beliefs. 

While previous conventional wisdom about Keller largely restricted her
radicalism to the early 20th century, ­Wallace lays out evidence that
she actually shifted even further left after World War I, identifying
not just as a socialist, but as a Communist. She praised Lenin and the
Russian Revolution in her 1929 memoir Midstream; that same year, she
told a reporter that she was “a socialist and a Bolshevik”. 

Indeed, by World War II, Wallace says there’s “absolutely no doubt
that Helen had become a Fellow ­Traveler” with the Communist Party,
embracing the party without formally becoming a member. He cites
Keller’s positions on the war, which closely ­mirrored the
party’s: despite being so anti-fascist as to support the Spanish
­loyalists in the Spanish Civil War, Keller opposed U.S. entry into
World War II until Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, at which point she
did an abrupt about-face. Her fat FBI file documented her friendships
with known and suspected ­Communists, from John Reed, to Howard Fast,
to Dorothy Parker (not to mention that joyful anarchist firecracker
Emma Goldman). In 1952 Keller publicly endorsed a Stalinist gathering,
the Congress of the Peoples for Peace, cabling, “Am with you in your
splendid movement.”  

But Keller wasn’t merely a reflexive party follower. Wallace
highlights her keen international ­perspective. She visited South
­Africa and decried its system of apartheid over 30 years before the
issue became a worldwide concern; while there, she befriended
Gandhi’s family and praised his campaign against British
colonialism. She read and wrote in five different languages (in
Braille!), subscribed to numerous international newspapers, and
closely followed world events. 

What’s more, Wallace reinscribes not just Keller’s radicalism, but
also her spirited personality. He portrays her quick wit; even
comedian Harpo Marx, another friend, told a reporter he had trouble
keeping up with her dry humor. And while history has written off
Keller as a spinster, Wallace explores her little-known affair with
fellow socialist Peter Fagan. The two applied for a marriage license
and planned to elope; but Fagan stood her up, and broke her heart.
Wallace even indulges in the far-fetched speculation that Keller and
her longtime teacher Sullivan may have been lovers; though it’s
doubtful that they were ­romantically involved, they were certainly
family to each other. 

_After the Miracle: The Political Crusades of Helen Keller
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Max Wallace Grand Central Publishing, 2023; 416 pages

Above all, Wallace reminds us, Keller thought for herself. Though she
never quite conceived of ­disability as marking an oppressed class in
itself, she was ahead of her time in seeing how it is so often linked
to race, gender and class oppression. She saw how capitalism could
cause or exacerbate disabilities, ironically a situation which has in
many ways worsened with time. Keller was cognizant of the relationship
between poverty and disability — and indeed, acutely aware of her
privilege. Her legendary can-do attitude came not from being
“inspirational,” but from a complex understanding of her situation
that included the knowledge of just how comparatively lucky she
actually was. And she wanted to share the wealth ­— or, more
accurately, redistribute it. Keller died in 1968 at age 87, remaining,
in one friend’s words, “true to her socialist principles to the
end.” 

_JESSICA MAX STEIN (“Max”) has been a New York-based writer since
the early 90s. She teaches writing and literature at the City
University of New York (CUNY), and received her M.F.A. in creative
writing from Brooklyn College._

_Stein is writing Funny Boy: The Richard Hunt Biography
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performer Richard Hunt. Biographers International Organization honored
the Funny Boy book proposal as one of three finalists for its
2016 Hazel Rowley Prize
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_Stein’s writing has been cited in the New York Times, received an
Amy Award for young writers from Poets and Writers magazine, and won
an Ippie for Best Editorial from the Independent Press Association. A
reporter and former editor of the Indypendent,
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published work in over 100 magazines and journals, including a
longtime column at The Bilerico Project.
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_See Stein’s Patreon
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book and read exclusive excerpts!_

_Contact the author at richard.hunt.biography at gmail dot com._

_THE INDYPENDENT is a New York City-based newspaper
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* Helen Keller
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* disability representation
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* socialism
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* anti-war
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* IWW
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* Russian Revolution
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* NAACP
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* Book Review
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