Posted on 05/17/2005 8:41:55 AM PDT by Dubya
TUSCUMBIA, ALA. - It’s impossible to miss the ubiquitous brown signs for Ivy Green, the birthplace of Helen Keller. She’s the pride of this northern Alabama town. People here celebrate her life with an annual festival and performances of the play The Miracle Worker, and her childhood home is like a shrine.
Visitors learn that her father was a captain in the Confederacy. They see the water pump where the blind and deaf child made the connection that things have names, with teacher Anne Sullivan spelling w-a-t-e-r into her hand. Photos of the adult Helen with U.S. presidents hang in a museum.
Not on display are Ms. Keller’s membership in the Socialist Party, her letters praising the work of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, her anti-war essays or much about her as a founder of the American Civil Liberties Union. Alabama’s favorite daughter was left of center, to say the least. Very different from the political conservatism so dominant in her home state.
But her politics didn’t keep Ms. Keller off the state quarter. And her statue will soon appear in the U.S. Capitol, replacing educator, congressman and Confederate Gen. Jabez Lamar Monroe Curry as one of Alabama’s two entries in the National Statuary Hall. Supporters say that’s because Ms. Keller is universally beloved for her courage over adversity, her championing of the underdog, her indomitable brilliance. A different take Some historians have a slightly different take. They agree she was one of the country’s most remarkable women but say Alabama history tends to freeze her at age 7 or gloss over her adulthood complexities. Most people have no clue she was a leftist.
"What we do is we sanitize people to make them heroes or heroines. . . . And, frankly, I’m not sure that’s a bad thing. Society needs more heroes and heroines," said Auburn University history professor Wayne Flynt, who described Ms. Keller as a "crusading socialist" in his latest book, Alabama in the 20th Century.
"She was very politically liberal for her time, and that’s what makes her controversial in Alabama today," Dr. Flynt said. "Does Alabama really want an extremely liberal woman who was a suffragist, who was a pacifist and didn’t want to go to war, who attacked big business for child labor?"
The state legislature has approved the Keller statue, as did a congressional committee. With Alabama first lady Patsy Riley promoting it and raising funds, the project is moving swiftly and with little opposition.
The idea to replace Gen. Curry with Ms. Keller started at the Alabama Institute for Deaf and Blind. Then-President Joe Busta helped push through supporting legislation three years ago.
The plan for the statue is to display the 7-year-old Helen at the backyard water pump.
"It’s the image that’s best known throughout the state, the country and the world. That singular moment at the pump where she makes the connection to language," said Mr. Busta, now vice president of development and alumni relations at the University of South Alabama.
Ms. Keller will be one of the few women displayed at the Capitol and the first person ever with disabilities.
"That’s heavy stuff," Mr. Busta said. "She not only represents us well, but she represents all in our state and country and world with disabilities."
Some of Ms. Keller’s relatives still live in Alabama. Great-nephew William Johnson Jr., a Tuscumbia lawyer, remembers visits with his grandmother’s famous sister. But conversation was not political. He was 25 when she died in 1968, so he did not know her during her most active days. But he believes her socialism faded as she aged and as times changed. Her radical views "Her early radical political views came about in the earlier 1900s to 1925. I don’t know whether it was a phase. In any event, she apparently didn’t pursue it in her more mature years. Everybody gets to be a radical when they’re young," Mr. Johnson said.
It would be fair to view that side of her as "almost a historical relic," he said.
But not one of the relics chosen for display at Ivy Green. An adult Helen is pictured reading a Braille Bible. A white-haired Helen is framed with her favorite scripture, the 23rd Psalm.
Ivy Green director Sue Pilkilton said few visitors seem interested in Ms. Keller’s politics, and besides, she said, Ivy Green’s role is to preserve her birthplace and the water pump, where the "miracle" happened.
But Ms. Pilkilton has her own beliefs. She sees Ms. Keller as a Christian socialist, looking out for the less fortunate. If her views ever strayed into the extreme, it was likely because she was influenced by radicals around her.
"We’ve got to remember, Helen, being deaf and blind, someone always had to be the one talking with her, telling her views, telling her feelings." Ms. Pilkilton said. "She could read only what people gave her. . . . There wasn’t much for the blind in that time." Voracious reader Suggestions that she was a puppet or a plagiarist dogged Ms. Keller while she was living. But her writings describe a voracious reader of American and German books, and newspapers from all over the world. Ms. Keller often disagreed politically with her teacher, Anne Sullivan Macy, who stayed with her as an adult, among the companions who finger-spelled books to her.
Ms. Macy’s husband was a socialist, and Ms. Keller’s doubters believed he influenced her. She responded to her critics in the 1912 essay, How I Became a Socialist.
"Mr. Macy may be an enthusiastic Marxist propagandist, though I am sorry to say he has not shown much enthusiasm for propagating his Marxism through my fingers," she wrote. "Mrs. Macy is not a Marxist or a socialist."
Ms. Keller joined the Socialist Party in 1909.
"There’s no arguing that," said Victoria Ott, an assistant professor of history at Birmingham-Southern College who specializes in Southern women.
"In spite of the historical proof of the futility of war, the United States is preparing to raise a billion dollars and a million soldiers in preparation for war," she wrote when the United States entered World War I. "Behind the active agitators for defense you will find J.P. Morgan & Co., and the capitalists who have invested their money in shrapnel plants, and others that turn out implements of murder." ACLU founder The American Civil Liberties Union grew out of groups that had defended the rights of conscientious objectors during World War I, and in 1920 Ms. Keller was one of the founding members.
Ms. Keller further blamed greedy industrialists for allowing dangerous work conditions that caused blindness and perpetuated poverty.
"Why is it that so many workers live in unspeakable misery? With their hands they have built great cities, and they cannot be sure of a roof over their head. They have gone into the bowels of the earth for diamonds and gold, and they haggle for a loaf of bread. They plow and sow and fill our hands with flowers while their own hands are filled with dust," she once said, according to a collection of quotes assembled by the Birmingham-based Helen Keller Foundation for Research and Education.
More than once, she said that without her family’s relative prosperity, she would never have had the privilege of schools and teachers, unavailable to the impoverished masses.
After World War II, Ms. Keller was best known for visiting veterans who had lost their sight in the war. Some argue that her focus on veterans changed her pacifist views, signaling the end of her left-wing phase.
Left-leaning movements, the ACLU, advocates for the blind and disabled, feminists and, of course, Alabama all try to claim Ms. Keller. In the upshot, it can seem as though interest groups have appropriated Ms. Keller to be what they want her to be. Or maybe, because she was so accomplished and dynamic, she was all those things.
"Part of what’s going on here, she lived 88 years, and the political context of the United States in the 19-teens is very different from the political context of the U.S. in the 1950s," said Kim Nielsen, a history professor at University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, author of The Radical Lives of Helen Keller.
Post World War II, "everyone was expressing their political views differently," Dr. Nielsen said. The Roosevelt administration ushered in an era of social welfare programs, labor protections and increased public education, Dr. Nielsen pointed out. Of note, one of the most famous quotes concerning Ms. Keller came from FDR: "If Helen Keller’s for it, I’m for it."
In her day, Ms. Keller recognized that many people disagreed with her.
"She read people she agreed and didn’t agree with, people who changed her mind. She loved to have people around her who argued with her because she enjoyed it," Dr. Nielsen said.
I did not realize she was a liberal.
Does that mean that it is acceptable once again to tell Helen Keller jokes?
She was born and lived to a great age despite her disabilities because her parents were good Christian people who believed she was a gift to them from the Lord.
Yet she threw her support behind Margaret Sanger, who believed that women like Helen keller should never have been born.
helen Keller deserves all the recognition and respect that we would give to a Jew who supported Hitler.
I didn't know she was such a leftist. Now I understand why we spent so much time in school learning about her.
I wouldn't want her to go to war, either. She probably couldn't shoot worth a damn.
;-)
She tried to read a stucco wall.
I wonder if they are going to do a musical about Helen Keller..
Question:
What did Helen Keller say when she was falling down the stairs?
Answer:
(imagine me gyrating back and forth frantically doing sign language)
I seriously doubt that any leftists and liberals today even know what Chapter of the Bible to find this verse in!! They certainly do not know it or can even recite the first words of it.
What did Helen Keller ever really know about the real world?
Her moral vision was commensurate with her physical vision.
Why was her leg yellow?
Her dog was blind, too.
If Ms. Keller were alive today and informed of the untold millions upon millions of deaths that socialism and the despots of socialism would inflict on the world, I am certain that she would repent of her foolish eailier views of her life.
At least the State didn't starve her to death.
Some of her writings were anything but liberal. Perhaps her most famous quotation is "There is no slave without a king among his ancestors and there is no king without a slave among his ancestors." Makes reparations sorta difficult following that line.
Helen Keller died in 1968, and she was still lucid up to that point.
She was able to address the public on civil rights issues, her love of the wacky system known as Swedenborgianism, and was quite up on current events.
Yet she never saw the need to publicly disavow her avid support of Soviet Communism.
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