Thanks to Kos commentators Pluto and Don Mikulecky for re-introducing me to a great American Socialist of the early 20th century, a woman by the name of Helen Keller.
Keller, although blind and deaf from birth, was neither blind nor deaf to the horrors of the capitalist society in which she lived. So much so that she has something in common with WikiLeaks Julian Assange.
Assange has been viciously personally attacked in the press for being a potential sexual molester, a paranoid and arrogant narcissist motivated only by self-aggrandizement. Thus does the press work to deflect the world’s attention from Assange’s exposure of video and documents showing the reality of our horrible war in Afghanistan and the dismal diplomatic machinations of the U.S. and the world’s political leaders.
Meanwhile, a hundred years ago, the American press sought to deflect attention from Keller’s socialist critique of capitalist society by attacking her solidarity with America’s socialist movement as being the product of a mind enfeebled by blindness and deafness, who was, thereby, subject to being exploited by the lawless and disreputable socialists.
Years prior to 1912, the press had extolled the virtues of Helen Keller due to her extraordinary educational achievements at the hands of her teacher and friend, Anne Sullivan Macy. Together, Keller and Macy conducted a well-publicized campaign to obtain services for the deaf and blind. Keller was an icon of charitable fund-raising, much touted by the American press. Then, Keller had the audacity to openly support the Socialist movement by publishing letters supportive of socialists in upper New York State, agreeing to serve on their board of directors. This news enraged the traditional press.
Common Cause newspaper wrote: "It would be difficult to imagine anything more pathetic than the present exploitation of poor Helen Keller by the Socialists of Schenectady.” Many other newspapers followed suit.
The attack on her thinking as being a product of her incapacities prompted Ms. Keller to pen a essay, How I Became a Socialist, which simultaneously demonstrated that, far from enfeebled, her mind was far, far superior to that of the deluded editorial writers. She noted that she had learned about socialism through reading H.G. Wells, Karl Kautsky and kept current on socialist newspapers in the English, French and German languages. Her witty rejoinder to the Brooklyn Eagle newspaper attack on her is particularly succulent, but the entire essay is well worth reading:
The Brooklyn Eagle says, apropos of me, and socialism, that Helen Keller's "mistakes spring out of the manifest limitations of her development." Some years ago I met a gentleman who was introduced to me as Mr. McKelway, editor of the Brooklyn Eagle. It was after a meeting that we had in New York in behalf of the blind. At that time the compliments he paid me were so generous that I blush to remember them. But now that I have come out for socialism he reminds me and the public that I am blind and deaf and especially liable to error. I must have shrunk in intelligence during the years since I met him. Surely it is his turn to blush. It may be that deafness and blindness incline one toward socialism. Marx was probably stone deaf and William Morris was blind. Morris painted his pictures by the sense of touch and designed wall paper by the sense of smell.
The N.Y. Times routinely railed against the socialists in its early twentieth century editorials, as it now rails against Julian Assange. On September 21, 1912, the Times carried an editorial entitled "The Contemptible Red Flag." Calling it detestable, a symbol of lawlessness and anarchy to be condemned by “all right-minded persons”.
A few days later, the Times had the effrontery to ask Ms. Keller, who claimed to hang a much-beloved red flag in her study, to write an article for them. She responds in her essay:
Yet the editor of the Times wants me to write him an article! How can he trust me to write for him if I am a suspicious character? I hope you will enjoy as much as I do the bad ethics, bad logic, bad manners that a capitalist editor falls into when he tries to condemn the movement which is aimed at this plutocratic interests...
...the newspapers have been of great assistance in the work which we have been trying to do for the blind. It costs them nothing to give their aid to work for the blind and to other superficial charities. But socialism — ah, that is a different matter! That goes to the root of all poverty and all charity. The money power behind the newspapers is against socialism, and the editors, obedient to the hand that feeds them, will go to any length to put down socialism and undermine the influence of socialists.
Keller ends her essay by noting that she had long considered writing a book for the socialist movement, a book she envisioned titling "Industrial Blindness, Social Deafness".
Sounds rather current, doesn’t it? Indeed, Helen Keller is a prime example of how successful the American media (and text-book publishing industry) has been in suppressing knowledge about this important American voice for socialism. Socialism itself has been effectively demonized, so much so that the Republican Party then turned it sights on demonizing liberals, progressives and Democrats. With today’s Koch-generated Tea Party, now even moderate Republicans have become targets for extreme conservative attacks.
Similarly, the American news media, including the N.Y. Times, gives frequent lip service to the notion of freedom of the press and would like to have us believe that it guards its First Amendment rights zealously (well, as long as the U.S. government gives it permission to publish). When real issues of press freedom arise, such as those raised by WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, our media beats a hasty and nasty retreat, even daring to suggest that Assange is not “really”a journalist and thus is not really entitled to First Amendment protections.
The major U.S. press has been firmly controlled by the rich owners of our capitalist corporations since Helen Keller’s day, a hundred years ago, the concentration of many newspapers, TV and radio into the hands of even fewer, wealthier corporations, since that time has made its tyranny much, much worse. Today, five or six big corporations own almost 90 per cent of our media. The era of hundreds of home town newspapers, tv and radio is long gone.
The internet and internet-spawned groups like WikiLeaks and Anonymous are our only hope of maintaining access to real, factual information. We must support and protect them, we must keep the internet free and independent; otherwise we too shall end up virtually blind, deaf and pathetically unable to sustain any semblance of democracy in our country, much less create a new, human-needs based, socialist economic system.