Most children are taught in elementary school about the “wonder-child” that was Helen Keller. Students can dictate facts about Helen Keller overcoming her disabilities of being blind and deaf with the help of her teacher Anne Sullivan. But what became of Helen Keller’s life after this event? What most people do not know is that Helen Keller graduated college, became a human rights activist, and fought for most of her life to be heard, although she has been “made mute by history.”1 In her adult life she strove to make social changes, and yet has been immortalized only as the deaf-blind child who overcame her disabilities. This paper will look into Helen Keller’s adult life that has been much ignored and overlooked by society, and why exactly that is.
Let us first begin with some background history of Helen Keller. Helen Keller was born on June 27, 1880, in rural Tuscumbia, Alabama. Helen was born a normal, healthy baby girl with no disabilities. It was not until the age of eighteen months that Helen developed her disabilities. As seems to be the case, Helen became stricken with a severe, mysterious illness (perhaps Scarlet Fever) that eventually left her deaf and blind. The illness was over just as soon as it had come, forever changing young Helen’s life. Born into a bright, colorful world of wonder Helen was left alone in the dark silence that was now her life.
Helen began to act out as she grew older. She was deemed uncontrollable by her parents who were considering taking her to a mental institution because they did not know how to handle such a child. It was not until Helen’s mother remembered reading a piece by Charles Dickens about his meeting with a deaf-blind girl named Laura Bridgman, that things began to change. It was from this article that the Kellers learned about the manual alphabet, and began to implore the help of doctors. The searching led the family to Dr. Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone. Bell was a teacher for the deaf, and had invented the telephone with hopes that it might serve as a hearing aid to his students.2 Bell led the Keller family to Michael Anagnos, director of the Perkins Institution and Massachusetts Asylum for the Blind in Boston.3 Perkins Institution was where Laura Bridgman, under the help of a Dr. Howe, learned to communicate with the outside world.
It is through the communication with Michael Anagnos that Helen Keller’s life was transformed. Through Anagnos, a twenty five year old half-blind teacher named Anne Sullivan came to befriend young Helen. Through violent tantrums, Anne persevered through the darkness to reach Helen.
The scene at the water pump is deemed the “miracle” in young Helen’s life. Although “miracle” may not be the appropriate word here, “breakthrough” is. It is at this water pump that Anne Sullivan is first able to communicate with young Helen through the use of the manual alphabet.
From that point on, Helen’s life was dramatically changed forever. Helen was now well-behaved. She obeyed her teacher, and was ready to learn. And learn she did. It is said that Helen learned language and communication in as little as six weeks. The amount of information that she learned in six weeks had taken Laura Bridgman three years to conquer.4 Helen was only seven years old.
Media soon picked up on the “miracle-child” Helen Keller. A few years later at the age of twelve, Helen wrote an article for the magazine Youth’s Companion entitled “My Life.”5 Ten years later, in 1902, “My Life” was revised and expanded into “The Story of My Life,” which appeared in six consecutive issues of Ladies’ Home Journal. Eventually “The Story of My Life” was made into a book, published in 1903, while Helen was attending Radcliffe College. Keller dreamed of one day writing about social injustices and her political views. By writing for Ladies’ Home Journal, she hoped to accomplish this. However, from editors and readers alike, Helen soon learned that no one was interested in hearing about her thoughts on political issues. The public merely wanted to know about her education, and how she overcame her disabilities. And so to “pay the bills,” Helen, along with the help of her teacher and constant companion Anne Sullivan, obliged the public for the time being.
In 1900, Helen was admitted into Radcliffe College. The people at Radcliffe were hesitant to admit Helen at first because she was the first deaf-blind person to be admitted into college. The administrators asked Helen to focus for a year on writing and speech before entering Radcliffe. Adamant about attending this school, Helen obliged. Helen had also been accepted into Cornell University and the University of Chicago. She insisted, however, in attending Radcliffe partly because, she later wrote, that “they didn’t want me.”6 While at college, Helen and Anne worked together and studied hard. Helen continued to write and work on stories about her life and education. In 1904, she graduated from Radcliffe with honors. Upon graduation, author Leslie Garrett writes, “She was now the most well-educated deaf-blind person in the world.”7
Most books written about Helen Keller state that after obtaining her college degree of Bachelor of Arts from Radcliffe College, Helen went on to give lectures around the country, worked hard as an advocate for the blind, and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Johnson shortly before her death. While all of this is true, it transforms Helen Keller into something that she was not: passive. In her book Midstream: My Later Life, Helen Keller wrote, “I resolved that whatever role I did play in life it would not be a passive one.”8 Helen Keller’s life was anything but passive. Children’s books such as Helen Keller and A Picture Book of Helen Keller, both by David A. Adler, confine Helen to a wonder-child who never grew up. The problem with this, besides that it is an inaccurate view of Keller’s life, is that it restricts Helen to only being a young girl who overcame her disabilities. While we learn an important lesson of overcoming adversity presented to us, such as that of young Helen, we do not learn anything else about her life. There is so much to learn from the adult Helen, the person that fought for women’s rights and against social injustice to make the United States a better place for people of all ways of life to live in.
After college, Helen began what her life work was to become: striving for social changes to help the blind. She quickly learned that most blindness was caused by poverty; poor living conditions, lack of nutrition, and no access to medical care all contributed to people becoming blind.9 In 1907 Helen wrote a groundbreaking article for Ladies’ Home Journal “that talked about ophthalmia neonatorum, an infection that mothers with syphilis…passed to their infants, causing blindness.”10 Infected women were likely to pass the bacteria to the infants during childbirth. The bacteria would most likely spread to the eyes of the infants infected and cause blindness. Helen began to rally forces to convince the medical establishment to treat children’s eyes at birth with a cleansing solution of silver nitrate as a regular procedure.11 Preventing the infection was simple and cheap, yet it was not required by the law to do so, so it was not commonly offered. This angered Helen very much. “She felt that mothers needed to demand this treatment for their babies. Blindness caused by this lack of treatment could be – and should be – wiped out.”12 This article for the Ladies’ Home Journal indicated a beginning of the controversial woman that Helen Keller became in the early twentieth century.
The next year, Helen wrote another book entitled The World I Live In. This book was a collection of essays that described how Helen used her keen sense of smell and touch through vibrations to balance the loss of her sight and hearing. It was greatly praised by reviewers and the public. Once again, Helen had obliged to write about what the masses wanted to know: herself. She later wrote, “I found myself utterly confined to one subject—myself, and it was not long before I exhausted it.”13 It was not long until Helen started to write about things that she truly cared about.
In 1909, Helen made news again: she became a member of the Socialist Party. John Macy, her editor and future husband of Anne Sullivan, was a socialist as well, and had a great influence on Helen and her political views. Helen would love to sit and listen to him relate his ideals to her, many of which mirrored that of her own. “To Helen, socialism was about equality, peace, and education for all. … [Her politics] pointed to her instinctive urge to champion the cause of anyone in need of help: the poor, the oppressed, the uneducated.”14 In an interview written by Barbara Bindley for the New York Tribune in 1916, Helen explained her reason for becoming a socialist by stating,
It is my nature to fight as soon as I see wrongs to be made right. So after I read Wells and Marx and learned what I did, I joined a Socialist branch. I made up my mind to do something. And the best thing seemed to join a fighting party and help their propaganda.15
Understanding that Helen Keller was a socialist is the first step in understanding why she is such a divisive character in history. Her political views were the very essence of what molded her into who she was as an adult. In an article for the New York Call, she once wrote, “…I love the red flag and what it symbolizes to me and other Socialists.”16 By examining the time period in which she lived in, one can clearly see that being a socialist in the pre-World War One era was in itself controversial. Although socialism was gaining ground in the first two decades of the twentieth century, upon the United Stated entering the First World War, socialism and all activities of the like were condemned. As Fred Pelka, author of “Helen Keller & the FBI” writes,
…She came of age in an America where racial segregation was law, unions were violently suppressed, birth control was illegal and the idea of women as voters (let alone politicians) was dismissed as laughably absurd. Keller publicly took a position on all these issues, and was vehemently criticized for doing so.17
As we will see later, Helen spoke out against many different social injustices during her dynamic life. Knowing that Helen Keller was a socialist is the beginning of understanding who she was and why she is and should be an important figure in history.
Helen was very strong in her political beliefs throughout her entire life. She never backed down when presented with a challenge or criticized publicly for her ideas. She stood up for what she believed in no matter the cost. She demonstrated this strength in convictions “when multimillionaire Andrew Carnegie offered Helen five thousand dollars a year through a plan that supported outstanding Americans, she declined.”18 Money was scarce from not being able to work, and not having many opportunities to publish her writings. However, despite the tight finances, Helen could not take money from a famous Capitalist who made his fortune from producing steel and profiting off the labor of his workers. It was everything that Helen was against. She and Anne knew that there were other ways to earn money, and they would find out just exactly what that was. (Unfortunately, due to a financial crisis of her own, in 1914 Helen was forced to accept Mr. Carnegie’s offer and he became a benefactor for Helen for the rest of her life. She needed the financial assistance and was not too proud to admit that fact and ask for help.)
When Helen became a socialist in 1909, she became a “national voice for socialism and working class solidarity.”19 Being a Socialist, Helen was a staunch rival of capitalism, as demonstrated by not accepting Andrew Carnegie’s offer of financial help. She is credited to have written, “I am the determined foe of the capitalist system, which denies the workers the rights of human beings. I consider it fundamentally wrong, radically unjust and cruel.”20 She worked hard against President Wilson’s hypocritical war machine and gave full support to different worker unions. “She supported radical unions like the Industrial Workers of the World, becoming a Wobbly herself.”21 Her support of workers unions was a great passion for Helen, as she felt connected with the worker on “how the country’s least powerful people were being treated.”22
Helen Keller also worked hard for Women’s rights and became a suffragist. In 1912, Helen became one of the first people to speak out in favor of birth control and the work of Margaret Sanger.23 In an article entitled “Why Men Need Women Suffrage” published in the New York Call in May 1913, Keller wrote,
Rights are things we get when we are strong enough to make good our claim to them. Men spent hundreds of years and did much hard fighting to get the rights they now call divine, immutable and inalienable. Today women are demanding rights that tomorrow nobody will be foolhardy enough to question.24
As one can see, Helen Keller was ahead of her time. She knew that women would gain the right to vote. She had no doubt in her mind. She knew that later on in her life she would eventually see women gain the right to vote, and she was correct. With the addition of the Nineteenth Amendment into the United States Constitution, women gained the right to vote.
Reiterating her point in the same article, Keller wrote,
When women vote men will no longer be compelled to guess at their desires--and guess wrong. Women will be able to protect themselves from man-made laws that are antagonistic to their interests. Some persons like to imagine that man's chivalrous nature will constrain him to act humanely toward woman and protect her rights. Some men do protect some women. We demand that all women have the right to protect themselves and relieve man of this feudal responsibility.25
One can clearly see through this quote from Helen Keller that she was a dynamic woman who stood up for what she believed in, whether it was a popular belief or not.
Helen’s next book, Out of the Dark, was published in 1913. Helen believed at the time that she could no longer obliged the public by simply writing stories about her life and education as she had done in previous years. Out of the Dark was a collection of essays in which Helen examined and explained her socialist political views to the reader. As one might expect, although certainly not Helen or Anne, the book was a failure. Once again, Helen was reminded that the public did not want to read about her political views. “Most [people] wanted her to be…the saintlike handicapped woman who accepted her fate with a gentle smile on her face.”26 Perhaps because Helen had portrayed that image for so much of her life, the public just could not accept the fact that she was not that person any longer. As she continued to “fight openly for her causes, she suffered criticism and even disdain. She couldn’t possibly know politics, some newspapers claimed, because of her handicaps.”27 Despite all the setbacks and condemnation of her, Helen continued to fight for the causes that she believed in, including the suffragist movement, and worker unions.
In an effort to earn an income and help John and Anne (Sullivan) Macy, whom Helen permanently lived with and were her constant companions, Helen and Anne embarked on a lecture tour around the continental United States. In order to help with the lecture, Helen began perfecting her speech. Interestingly, “Helen Keller never learned the sign language of the North American Deaf Community.”28 Instead of learning the language of the Deaf, Helen had sentences “manually spelled into her hand and then vocalized her responses.”29 The lecture tour demonstrated this, along with other aspects of Helen’s education including lip-reading. Helen had almost perfected this trait by reading lips through the vibration the voice produced. “By placing the middle finger on the speaker’s nose, her forefinger on the lips, and her thumb on the larynx, she could “hear” what people were saying.”30
The lecture tour was a great success. Thousands of people came out to hear Helen speak and learn about the “miracle” that was Helen Keller. After the first lecture, Helen had broken down in tears of humiliation only to realize that the vibrations that she felt on the floor were not people leaving but was the thunderous applause from the audience.31 Long time friend Alexander Graham Bell had been there to introduce Helen to the stage before the lecture. Congratulating her afterward he said, “You have learned to speak, and I believe you are meant to break down the barriers which separate the deaf from mankind.”32 Helen, Anne, and later Polly Thompson, then secretary and later Helen’s companion after Anne’s death, traveled the country on the lecture tour for nearly two years.
Despite being extremely busy traveling the country giving lecture after lecture to full houses, Helen still found time to support organizations that she cared deeply about. In 1918, Helen helped found the American Civil Liberties Union. This union was set up to help fight for the freedom of speech. Helen was also a large supporter for civil rights organizations such as the NAACP. “W.E.B. DuBois printed news of her financial donations and the text of her letter of support in the organization’s publication.”33 In her letter of support for the NAACP, Keller wrote,
Ashamed in my very soul, I behold in my beloved south-land the tears of those oppressed, those who must bring up their sons and daughters in bondage to be servants, because others have their fields and vineyards, and on the side of the oppressor is power.34
It can be said that Helen Keller was probably one of the most devoted people of her time. She cared deeply about her fellow people living in despair, and tried her hardest to make an effort to help invoke change for them. This can be clearly seen through her support of these different organizations.
With the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915, the United States entered World War One in 1917. Helen was enraged that the country was going to war. She wished for the neutrality that the country had promised earlier. Upon the United States entering the war, suddenly socialism was now looked on in a different light. “Helen’s socialist views were not only daring, they were considered dangerous. The government clamped down on anyone and anything that didn’t agree with its own pro-war stand.”35 With the war effort on full bloom, the cost of living soon began to rise in effect. Now that their lecture tour was over, largely due in part to the failing health of Anne Sullivan-Macy, Helen had to now come up with another source of income.
It was then, in 1918, that Hollywood came knocking on Helen’s door. Films were gaining ground during this time, and Helen could not decline the promise of a large paycheck (Helen had been told that she might earn a salary between $50,000 and $100,000 if she agreed to make the film36) and the chance to tell her story in a new light: on screen. Helen was excited about the release, despite the conflicts that had arisen on-set about the accuracy of the film. The film, entitled Deliverance, was a silent film that featured Helen, her mother Kate and younger brother Phillips, and even an appearance by the famous actor Charlie Chaplin. However, at the premier of the film Helen was torn between standing up for what she believed in, and giving support to the industry that had helped her get on-screen. Being the radical person that she was, “Helen supported the Actors Equity Union’s strike by refusing to cross the picket line to attend the opening – and joining a protest march with the striking actors.”37 Helen so deeply cared about her fellow workers that she refused to attend the premier of her own movie just to show her support. That is true devotion and dedication to a cause! The film, launched with a huge publicity campaign, did horribly in the box office and turned out to be a financial disaster. Helen and Anne received little from their hard work during the filming, and once again were on the prowl, hunting for jobs.
With their finances close to ruins, despite the financial help of Andrew Carnegie, (apparently, Helen and Anne loved to splurge. States author Leslie Garrett: “When they had money, they spent it.”38) Helen decided to create a vaudeville act in 1920 in order to have an income and be able to financially take care of Anne whose health and marriage were slowly deteriorating. “Vaudeville was America’s first form of mass entertainment, featuring live stage shows by a variety of performers.”39 The performers included acrobats, dancers, singers, and comedians. Although Anne was completely against this idea, believing that vaudeville was, as commonly thought, vulgar. Realizing that they needed the money, Anne agreed and she and Helen worked on a twenty-minute act pared-down from their lecture performance. They spoke on how Anne came to know Helen, and how Helen came to learn that everything had a name (the “Miracle at the water pump” discussed earlier).40 The twenty minute act, performed twice daily, earned them two thousand dollars a week. The pair continued to travel on the vaudeville circuit for two years until it became apparent that they had completely exhausted their telling story to the point where everyone knew their story, and no longer came to the show.
In 1923, Helen began the work that would become her main focus for the rest of her life: campaigning for the American Foundation for the Blind. Garrett writes,
The AFB worked to help other agencies that worked for the blind. It undertook national and international projects such as developing a single Braille code to be used nationwide, increasing the number of books available in Braille, and finding jobs for the blind.41
With the promise of a monthly salary of two thousand dollars, Helen, Anne, and Polly began another national tour to raise a goal of two million dollars for the foundation.42 The foundation soon realized that Helen Keller’s name had power. She soon began addressing politicians and lawmakers to assist the AFB. The women were to keep an arduous traveling schedule. “From 1924 until 1927, Helen traveled coast to coast and addressed 250,000 people at 249 meetings in 123 cities.”43
With the American Foundation for the Blind employing Helen to fundraise, she had to agree to not indulge her radical political ideas into her fundraising talks. In a private letter to Robert La Follette, a third party candidate running for presidency in 1924, Helen wrote,
So long as I confine my activities to social service and the blind, they compliment me extravagantly, calling me ‘archpriestess of the sightless,’ ‘wonder woman,’ and ‘a modern miracle,’ but when it comes to a discussion of poverty, and I maintain that it is the result of wrong economics—that the industrial system under which we live is at the root of much of the physical deafness and blindness in the world—that is a different matter!44
Clearly, her strong political views are something that stayed with Helen for all of her life. In spite of her frustration with not being able to speak out in favor of her political ideas, Helen kept her promise to the AFB and did not speak of her political beliefs for the next twenty years until 1944 when she gave support of a fourth term for Franklin D. Roosevelt. Even if the Foundation’s concerns about Helen’s political views deterring people from making donations was valid, was it correct of the AFB in putting restrictions on Helen? As Nielsen points out, “Her detractors and political opponents succeeded in doing what her blindness and deafness had not. They robbed her of her political voice, denying her the full expression of citizenship.”45 Regardless of the restrictions placed upon her, Helen did more to raise public understanding and awareness about the blind than anyone had previously done.
In the years following her fundraising campaign, Helen took off a few years to concentrate on her writing once again. In 1927 she published My Religion, which detailed her religious beliefs, and later in 1929, the second installment of her autobiography, Midstream: My Later Life was published.
Helen and Polly then began touring not only the country, but the world, to continue to raise awareness and donations for the AFB. (Anne was too ill-stricken to make the difficult journeys.) In 1929, Helen was able to lobby for the Congress to designate $75,000 to help support the blind. “This was the first time that the United States government had ever funded programs for the blind.”46 Helen became an international spokesperson for AFB, traveling to different countries such as the former Yugoslavia and Japan. A huge success for Helen came in 1935 when President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed into action the Social Security Act which “offered unemployment insurance, retirement funds, and assistance for children and the disabled. …The blind were included in the category of ‘disabled,’ which meant they could apply for financial help.”47
With the death of long time companion and friend, Anne Sullivan in 1936, Helen and Polly devoted all of their attention on fundraising. They spent a great deal of time overseas campaigning and vacationing while dealing with the loss of their dear friend.
The United States entering the Second World War brought Helen into a new stage in her life. The war had created a plethora of wounded soldiers who, Helen believed, needed her help in overcoming their newly created disabilities. She and the AFB began organizing visits to the wounded soldiers. Helen later wrote that her visits were “the crowning experience of my life.”48
For the rest of Helen Keller’s life, she toured the world campaigning for the American Foundation for the Blind. A documentary film about Helen’s life was released in 1954 entitled Helen Keller in Her Story. The film received an Academy Award in 1955 for best feature-length documentary film. In 1959 The Miracle Worker opened on Broadway to great reviews. The play “tells the story of young Helen when Annie Sullivan first arrived.”49 The play went on to become a film, and earned Academy Awards for both the actors who played Helen and Anne.
In 1961, after suffering from minor strokes and developing diabetes, Helen retired from her work with AFB. In 1964, President Johnson awarded Helen with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which is the nation’s highest civilian honor, for all of her hard work throughout her entire life. Four years later, after suffering a severe heart attack, Helen died peacefully in her sleep on June 1, 1968.
Helen Keller was a truly one-of-a-kind person. Not only did her disabilities set her apart from her peers, but her spirit and devotion did as well. She had a true desire to help people and bring about a social change. This can be seen many times over in her lifetime. “She believed that she was able to overcome many of the difficulties in her life because of her class privilege – a privilege not shared by most of her blind or deaf contemporaries.”50 She knew that she was a famous icon within American society and used it to her advantage to help promote justice.
This was evident in her adult life, as well as in her childhood. When Helen was around the age of ten, she learned of a boy, Tommy Stringer, who was stricken with the same, yet worse conditions as herself. Tommy, who came from a poor family in Pittsburgh, was unable to receive much help with his disabilities because of his family’s poor social and economic status. Upon learning about his situation, Helen began to raise money so that Tommy could attend the Perkins Institution in Boston and begin receiving help. The money raised equaled around two thousand dollars and paid for two years’ full tuition for Tommy Stringer to attend Perkins Institution.51 Helen’s devotion began early in life, and stayed with her until the very end.
I believe that Helen’s downfall and the reason that perhaps she has been overlooked by contemporaries is because of her socialist ties. I suppose that is one reason why her legacy has, in recent decades since her death, been swept under the rug and ignored by history. However, Helen Keller is not one to be overlooked. She led a dynamic life that she believed was far more important than her interesting beginning. She was not the immortal, wonder-child that people made her out to be. She was a controversial figure of her time. Even though she was a socialist and spoke out against the “American Way” in order to help the down-trodden, this is not a reason to overlook all the important accomplishments that she made throughout her life.
Helen demonstrated this devotion to help the under-privileged throughout her entire life, in every aspect of it. She is the embodiment of what everyone wants, or should want, to be: a person striving for a more just world. I believe that she is unique in the fact that she allowed her beliefs to become who she was. All too often people today will believe and fight for one cause and when their goal is either attained or abandoned, they go back to their regular lives. Not Helen Keller. These issues, these causes that she fought so hard for, were her life. They were everything she was about; without them Helen Keller would not have been the important figure that she is. When one goal in the fight against injustice was achieved, she would move onto another cause, focusing all of her attention on that one issue. She never gave up throughout her entire life. She continued to support unions, women’s and civil rights throughout her entire life all the while working hard for the AFB. She did not give up even when she was going against the grain, when she was shunned by the public for her views, and when she began to lose her publishing rights because she was so radical. She believed that in order to make change, one must first think. “People do not like to think. If one thinks, one must reach conclusions; and conclusions are not always pleasant. They are a thorn in the spirit. But I consider it a priceless gift and a deep responsibility to think.”52 Without thinking, nothing in life will ever change. Helen was willing to think and reach conclusions that were not agreeable in order to invoke a change in the world that she lived in, in order to help everyone. Loewen writes, “Keller…never wavered in her belief that our society needed radical change.”53 Helen Keller displayed this throughout her entire life. This is the real reason why Keller should be remembered in history. Not because she “overcame” her disabilities, but because she strove for a better, more just society, in which everyone could be free.
1 James W. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (New York: Touchstone, 1995), 20.
2 Helen Keller, The Story of My Life, with a foreword by Roger Shattuck with Dorothy Herrmann (New York: Doubleday, 1903; reprint, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2003), x, (page citation is to the reprint edition).
3 Ibid., x.
4 Ibid., xiv.
5 Ibid., xv.
6 Leslie Garrett, Helen Keller (London: DK Publishing, Inc., 2004), 85.
7 Garrett, 90.
8 Helen Keller, Midstream: My Later Life (New York: Crowell Publishing Company, 1929; reprint, New York: Greenwood Press, Publishers, 1968).
9 Garrett, 94.
10 Garrett, 95.
11 Lois P. Nicholson, Helen Keller: Humanitarian, (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1996), 71.
12 Garrett, 95.
13 Nicholson, 70.
14 Garrett, 94.
15 New York Tribune (New York), 16 January 1916.
16 New York Call (New York), 3 November 1912.
17 Fred Pelka, “Helen Keller & the FBI,” Ragged Edge 5 (Sept 2001): 1.
18 Garrett, 95.
19“The Socialist Legacy of Helen Keller: An Introduction to the Writings of Helen Keller,” Helen Keller Reference Archive, (2000) 1.
20 Outlook, 27 September 1913, vol. 105. Available at Kim E. Nielson, ed., Helen Keller: Selected Writings (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 55.
21 Ruth Hubbard, “The Truth About Helen Keller: Children’s Book About Helen Keller Distort Her Life,” Rethinking Schools Online (Fall 2002): 4.
22 Garrett, 97.
23 Hubbard, 4.
24 New York Call (New York), 17 October 1913. Available at <http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/keller-helen/works/1910s/13_10_17.htm>.
25 New York Call (New York), 17 October 1913. Available at <http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/keller-helen/works/1910s/13_10_17.htm>.
26 Garrett, 97.
27 Garrett, 97-98.
28 The Socialist Legacy of Helen Keller: An Introduction to the Writings of Helen Keller,” Helen Keller Reference Archive, (2000) 2.
29 The Socialist Legacy of Helen Keller: An Introduction to the Writings of Helen Keller,” Helen Keller Reference Archive, (2000) 2.
30 Nicholson, 72.
31 Nicholson, 74.
32 Nicholson, 74.
33 Hubbard, 4.
34 Hubbard, 4.
35 Garrett, 103.
36 Nicholson, 84.
37 Hubbard, 4.
38 Garrett, 107.
39 Garrett, 105.
40 Joan Dash, The World At Her Fingertips: The Story of Helen Keller, (New York: Scholastic, 2001), 168-175.
41 Garrett, 108.
42 Laurie Lawlor, Helen Keller: Rebellious Spirit, (New York: Holiday House, 2001), 140.
43 Lawlor, 140.
44 Helen Keller, to Robert La Follette, 27 July 1924, Kim Nielsen, ed., Helen Keller: Selected Writings (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 70.
45 Nielsen, 70.
46 Garrett, 110.
47 Garrett, 114.
48 Dorothy Herrmann, Helen Keller: A Life, (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999), 289.
49 Garrett, 120.
50 Hubbard, 1.
51 Helen Keller, The Story of My Life, xiii-xiv.
52 Justice (Pittsburgh, PA), 25 October 1913. Available at <http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/keller-helen/works/1910s/13_10_25.htm>.
53 Loewen, 22.
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