Helen Keller

Helen Adams Keller (June 27, 1880 – June 1, 1968) was an American author, disability rights advocate, political activist and lecturer. Born in West Tuscumbia, Alabama, she lost her sight and her hearing after a bout of illness when she was 19 months old. She then communicated primarily using home signs until the age of seven, when she met her first teacher and life-long companion Anne Sullivan. Sullivan taught Keller language, including reading and writing. After an education at both specialist and mainstream schools, Keller attended Radcliffe College of Harvard University and became the first deafblind person in the United States to earn a college diploma.

Keller was also a prolific author, writing 14 books and hundreds of speeches and essays on topics ranging from animals to Mahatma Gandhi. Keller campaigned for those with disabilities and for women's suffrage, labor rights, and world peace. In 1909, she joined the Socialist Party of America (SPA). She was a founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

Keller's autobiography, The Story of My Life (1903), publicized her education and life with Sullivan. The playwright William Gibson wrote a theatrical adaptation, The Miracle Worker, in 1959, which he adapted as a film under the same title in 1962. Her birthplace has been designated and preserved as a National Historic Landmark. Since 1954, it has been operated as a house museum and sponsors an annual "Helen Keller Day".

Keller was born Helen Adams Keller on June 27, 1880, in Tuscumbia, Alabama, the daughter of Arthur Henley Keller (1836–1896), and Catherine Everett (née Adams) Keller (1856–1921), known as "Kate". The Keller family lived on a homestead, Ivy Green, which her paternal grandfather had built decades earlier. She had four siblings: two full siblings, Mildred Campbell (née Keller) Tyson and Phillip Brooks Keller; and two older half-brothers from her father's first marriage, James McDonald Keller and William Simpson Keller.

Keller's father worked for many years as an editor of the Tuscumbia North Alabamian. He had served as a captain in the Confederate Army. The family was part of the slaveholding elite before the American Civil War, but lost status later. Her mother was the daughter of Charles W. Adams, a Confederate general. Keller's paternal lineage was traced to Casper Keller, a native of Switzerland. One of Helen's Swiss ancestors was the first teacher for the deaf in Zürich. Keller reflected on this fact in her first autobiography, asserting 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".

At 19 months old, Keller contracted an unknown illness described by doctors as "an acute congestion of the stomach and the brain". Contemporary doctors believe it may have been meningitis, caused by the bacterium Neisseria meningitidis (meningococcus), by rubella, scarlet fever, or by Haemophilus influenzae, which can cause the same symptoms but is less likely because of its 97% juvenile mortality rate at that time.

Keller was able to recover from her illness, but was left permanently blind and deaf, as she recalled in her autobiography, "at sea in a dense fog". At that time, Keller was able to communicate somewhat with Martha Washington, who was two years older and the daughter of the family cook, and understood the girl's signs;by the age of seven, Keller had more than 60 home signs to communicate with her family, and could distinguish people by the vibration of their footsteps.

In 1886, Keller's mother, inspired by an account in Charles Dickens' American Notes of the successful education of Laura Bridgman, a deaf and blind woman, dispatched the young Keller and her father to consult physician J. Julian Chisholm, an eye, ear, nose and throat specialist in Baltimore, for advice. 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. It was then located in South Boston. Michael Anagnos, the school's director, asked Anne Sullivan, a 20-year-old alumna of the school who was visually impaired, to become Keller's instructor. It was the beginning of a nearly 50-year-long relationship Sullivan developed with Keller as her governess and later her companion.

In May 1888, Keller started attending the Perkins Institute for the Blind. In 1893, Keller, along with Sullivan, attended William Wade House and Finishing School. In 1894, Keller and Sullivan moved to New York to attend the Wright-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 of Harvard University, 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 as a member of Phi Beta Kappa, becoming the first deafblind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree. She maintained a correspondence with the Austrian pedagogue and philosopher Wilhelm Jerusalem, who was one of the first to discover her literary talent.

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 using the Tadoma method, which means using her fingers to feel the lips and throat of the speaker. She became proficient at using braille, and also used fingerspelling to communicate. 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.

Anne Sullivan stayed as a companion to Keller long after she taught her. Sullivan married John Macy in 1905, and her health started failing around 1914. Polly Thomson (February 20, 1885 – 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.

Keller moved to Forest Hills, Queens, together with Sullivan and Macy, and used the house as a base for her efforts on behalf of the American Foundation for the Blind. While in her 30s, Keller had a love affair and became secretly engaged; she also defied her teacher and family by attempting an elopement with the man she loved, Peter Fagan, who was known as "the fingerspelling socialist", and was a young Boston Herald reporter sent to Keller's home to act as her private secretary when Sullivan fell ill. At the time, her father had died and Sullivan was recovering in Lake Placid and Puerto Rico. Keller had moved with her mother to Montgomery, Alabama.

Sullivan died in 1936, with Keller holding her hand, after falling into a coma as a result of coronary thrombosis. 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 originally hired to care for Thomson in 1957, stayed on after Thomson's death and was Keller's companion for the rest of her life.

Keller was very fond of Akita dogs. She visited Akita Prefecture in June 1937 and asked about Hachikō, a loyal dog who searched for his deceased master for about 10 years. She began keeping Akitas as pets and introduced them to America. In 1948, she touched the re-made statue of Hachikō at Shibuya Station. The first Akita given to her was Kamikaze-Go, who was the first Akita to travel overseas from Japan and the first Akita in America. He died of an infection two months after arriving in America and Keller was given Kamikaze-Go's brother, Kenzan-Go. Keller nicknamed the dog Go-Go and they were great companions from day one. Go-Go even spent his first night at Keller's home sleeping at the foot of her bed.

On January 22, 1916, Keller and Sullivan traveled to the small town of Menomonie in western Wisconsin to deliver a lecture at the Mabel Tainter Memorial Building. Details of her talk were provided in the weekly Dunn County News on January 22, 1916:A message of optimism, of hope, of good cheer, and of loving service was brought to Menomonie Saturday—a message that will linger long with those fortunate enough to have received it. This message came with the visit of Helen Keller and her teacher, Mrs. John Macy, and both had a hand in imparting it Saturday evening to a splendid audience that filled The Memorial. The wonderful girl who has so brilliantly triumphed over the triple afflictions of blindness, dumbness and deafness, gave a talk with her own lips on "Happiness", and it will be remembered always as a piece of inspired teaching by those who heard it.

Keller became a world-famous speaker and author. She was an advocate for people with disabilities, amid numerous other causes. She traveled to twenty-five different countries giving motivational speeches about deaf people's conditions. She was a suffragist, pacifist, Christian 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 1916, she sent money to the NAACP, as she was ashamed of the Southern un-Christian treatment of "colored people".

In 1920, Keller helped to found the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). She 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 from Grover 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 political radicals allied with leftist politics.

Keller, who believed that the poor were "ground down by industrial oppression", wanted children born into poor families to have the same opportunities to succeed that she had enjoyed. She wrote, "I owed my success partly to the advantages of my birth and environment. I have learned that the power to rise is not within the reach of everyone."

In 1909, Keller became a member of the Socialist Party of America (SPA); she 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 effects of war; in addition, she supported causes that opposed military intervention. She had speech therapy to have her voice understood better by the public. When the Rockefeller-owned press refused to print her articles, she protested until her work was finally published.

Keller wrote a total of 12 published books and several articles. One of her earliest pieces of writing, at age 11, was The Frost King (1891). There were allegations that this story had been plagiarized from The Frost Fairies by Margaret Canby. An investigation into the matter revealed that the allegations were correct. However, it was felt by the Perkins schoolmaster Michael Anagnos that Keller may have experienced a case of cryptomnesia, which was that she had Canby's story read to her but forgot about it, while the memory remained in her subconscious.

At age 22, with help from Sullivan and Sullivan's husband John Macy, Keller published her autobiography, The Story of My Life (1903). It recounts the story of her life up to age 21 and was written during her time in college. In an article Keller wrote in 1907, she brought to public attention the fact that many cases of childhood blindness could be prevented by washing the eyes of every newborn baby with a disinfectant solution. At the time, only a fraction of doctors and midwives were doing this. Thanks to Keller's advocacy, this commonsense public health measure was swiftly and widely adopted.

In 1908, Keller wrote The World I Live In, giving readers an insight into how she felt about the world. Out of the Dark, a series of essays on socialism, was published in 1913.

Keller, along with her friend Mark Twain, also became involved in the dispute about the authorship of the Shakespeare plays, which they discussed extensively during Keller's, Sullivan's and Macy's visit to Twain's home in 1909. In a review Keller published of George Greenwood's book The Shakespeare Problem Restated, she wrote that "Shakespeare of Stratford is not to be even thought of as a possible author of the most wonderful plays in the world." She soon became convinced by the claims of William Stone Booth that the works' true author was Francis Bacon and that Bacon had hidden an acrostic in every one of the plays contained in the First Folio. She asked Richard Watson Gilder, the editor of The Century Magazine, if he'd be willing to publish an article by her advocating for Booth's hypothesis, but he declined.

When Keller was young, Anne Sullivan introduced her to Phillips Brooks, who introduced her to Christianity, Keller famously saying: "I always knew He was there, but I didn't know His name!" Her spiritual autobiography, My Religion, was published in 1927 and then in 1994 extensively revised by Ray Silverman, and re-issued under the title Light in My Darkness. It advocates the teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg, the Christian theologian and mystic who gave a spiritual interpretation of the teachings of the Bible and who claimed that the Second Coming of Jesus Christ had already taken place. Keller described the core of her belief in these words:

The Helen Keller Archives in New York are owned by the American Foundation for the Blind. The archive is currently housed at the Museum of the American Printing House for the Blind on a long-term loan. Archival material of Keller stored in New York at the offices of Helen Keller International was lost when the Twin Towers were destroyed in the September 11 attacks. The material lost included first editions of her books, correspondence with the director of the Royal National Institute of Blind People, and photographs. There is also some archival material at Perkins School for the Blind.

Keller had a series of strokes in 1961 and spent the last years of her life at her home. In 1964, she was made an honorary member of the Southern Dames of America during their second national assembly in Washington, D.C. On September 14, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, one of the United States' two highest civilian honors. In 1965, she was elected to the National Women's Hall of Fame at the New York World's Fair. Keller devoted much of her later life to raising funds for the American Foundation for the Blind. She died in her sleep on June 1, 1968, at her home, Arcan Ridge, located in Easton, Connecticut, at the age of 87. A service was held at the Washington National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., and her body was cremated in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Her ashes were buried at the Washington National Cathedral next to her constant companions, Anne Sullivan and Polly Thomson.