Most often remembered for her own challenges, Helen Keller focused on the challenges and oppression of the working class
Helen Keller was a member of the Socialist Party of America and the Industrial Workers of the World. But not just a member — she was an influential thought leader in the movement. In particular, she developed a disability politics grounded in Marxist theory. She wrote for the IWW, she was a prolific public speaker, she walked picket lines. She avidly supported the presidential campaigns of the person she considered her greatest hero, democratic socialist Eugene Debs, and remained outspoken in her leftist political views even during the Cold War period. She was also a leader in the struggle for women’s rights, and unlike some of her fellow socialists of the time, she was an outspoken opponent of racism in America. Keller was a co-founder of the ACLU. She attributed her political philosophy and activism in part to having studied how disabilities were often the result of poverty and poor work environments. She said she was also inspired by the 1912 Lawrence (Mass.) textile strike.
Keller was already well-known before she became politically active (she graduated from Radcliffe in 1904 at age 24, having become the first deaf-blind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree), which made for some interesting contrasts in how some people treated her before and after she advocated socialism. Here is how she owned one of her critics:
The editor of the Brooklyn Eagle wrote that her "mistakes sprung out of the manifest limitations of her development." Keller responded to that editor, referring to having met him before he knew of her political views:
“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. ... Oh, ridiculous Brooklyn Eagle! Socially blind and deaf, it defends an intolerable system, a system that is the cause of much of the physical blindness and deafness which we are trying to prevent.”
Here’s a portion of how Time magazine in 2015 described “Helen Keller’s Forgotten Radicalism”:
Keller called for the dismantling of an economic order in which “the working class lives in want while the master class lives in luxury.”
Like many radicals of the 1910s and 1920s, Keller was concerned with multiple social-justice causes—she was a pacifist, a suffragist, a birth-control advocate, a supporter of the NAACP and a co-founder of the ACLU. But it was Keller’s socialist values that informed her position on other issues; she opposed World War I, for instance, on the grounds that it served capitalist interests, and helped create the ACLU as a way to protect striking workers from jail and deportation.
Despite these activities, Keller is more commonly remembered for the fundraising and advocacy work she did on behalf of the American Federation for the Blind, a largely apolitical organization. In fact, Keller’s leftist sympathies occasionally ruffled feathers with the conservative members of the American Federation. Her radical views also made her a target of FBI surveillance for most of her life. Still, Keller continued to support socialist and communist leaders, even in the midst of Cold War McCarthyism.
Keller has been given the Martin Luther King Jr. treatment: the more difficult and controversial aspects of her life have been neutralized in educational curricula, as well as in the public imagination. But during a time in which one in four disabled adults live in poverty in the United States, her perspectives on economic injustice remain significant.
For an in-depth, scholarly yet very readable article on Keller, I highly recommend another 2015 article, Keith Rosenthal’s “The politics of Helen Keller — Socialism and Disability” in International Socialist Review. There you’ll find some of those “more difficult” aspects alluded to in the above excerpt. For example, Keller was an unreserved supporter of the Soviet Union:
Up until 1941, Keller had publicly been against the United States’ entry into the war, which she described as an imperialist conflict, just the same as she had described World War I. Even when Britain and France declared war on Germany, Keller still maintained that the working class had no interest in the war.
Keller was not complacent or ambivalent, however, about the very real danger that the rise of fascism posed to the world. … By the end of the 1930s, while powerful Americans such as famed automobile industrialist Henry Ford were still financing and publicly extolling the virtues of the Nazi regime, and even the president of the United States was refusing entry to Jewish refugees of Hitler’s terror, Keller was speaking out vigorously against these crimes against humanity.
…
Still, Keller’s antiwar position remained inviolate. Instead, she advocated an international boycott of the fascist governments of Italy and Germany; she called upon soldiers and citizens within these countries to actively resist the militarism and racism of their respective governments; and she was part of various campaigns to push the “democratic countries” to accept all the refugees of fascism without exception.
Then, in June 1941, Keller dramatically changed her position on the war following the German invasion of Russia. Virtually overnight, the Soviet Union and all Communist parties declared it the duty of workers everywhere to advocate that their government enter the war on the side of Russia. Naturally, Keller, like millions of others who still had illusions in the socialist character of the Soviet Union, responded to this call. She justified her new pro-war stance by declaring that the “rankly imperialist” war had suddenly “develop[ed] into a people’s war of liberation.” Along with the CP and most of the rest of the Left, Keller dispensed with her previous language denouncing the United States as an undemocratic capitalist nation and instead praised Stalin’s new ally, President Franklin Roosevelt, as the champion of democracy and freedom.
As Rosenthal aptly puts it, “Helen Keller is one of the most widely recognized figures in US history that people actually know very little about.” I’ll close with an excerpt Rosenthal provides of a typical question and answer session from one of Keller’s public speaking events:
Q: Who is your favorite hero?
A: Eugene Debs. He dared to do what other men were afraid to do.
Q: Who are three greatest men of our time?
A: [Vladimir] Lenin, [Thomas] Edison, [Charlie] Chaplin.
Q: Do you think the voice of the people is heard at the polls?
A: No, I think money talks so loud that the voice of the people is drowned.
Q: What do you think of capitalism?
A: It has outlived its usefulness.
Q: What do you think of Soviet Russia?
A: It is the first organized attempt of workers to establish an order of society in which human life and happiness shall be of first importance, and not the conservation of property for a privileged class.
Q: Do you believe spiritualism is the cure for the world’s troubles?
A: No. I think the world’s troubles are caused chiefly by wrong economic conditions, and the only cure for them is social reorganization.
Q: Which is the greatest affliction—deafness, dumbness, or blindness?
A: None.
Q: What then is the greatest human affliction?
A: Boneheadedness.