Helen Keller was a socialist, suffragist and ACLU co-founder, not just a miracle
Most people remember Helen Keller at a water pump, learning her first word. Fewer know the adult: a Radcliffe graduate who wrote 14 books, joined the Socialist Party in 1909, helped found the American Civil Liberties Union, backed birth control and women's votes, and brought the first Akita dog to America.
Keller was born on 27 June 1880 in Tuscumbia, Alabama, into a family that had belonged to the slaveholding elite before the Civil War; her father had been a Confederate captain. At 19 months an illness left her blind and deaf. Doctors now suspect meningitis, rubella or scarlet fever. By seven she was using more than 60 home signs and could recognise people by the vibration of their footsteps.
Her mother had read in Charles Dickens's American Notes about Laura Bridgman, a deafblind woman who had been educated successfully. That led the family to a Baltimore specialist, then to Alexander Graham Bell, and on to the Perkins Institute, whose director sent a 20-year-old former pupil, Anne Sullivan. She arrived on 5 March 1887, a date Keller later called her soul's birthday, and began spelling words into her hand. The breakthrough came the following month when Keller linked the finger motions to cool water running over her other hand, and she immediately wanted names for everything.
Sullivan stayed nearly 50 years. Keller's schooling, paid for by the Standard Oil magnate Henry Huttleston Rogers after Mark Twain introduced them, took her to Radcliffe, where she graduated in 1904 at 24 as a Phi Beta Kappa member, the first deafblind person to earn a bachelor's degree. She learned to speak, read speech by touching lips and throat with the Tadoma method, and discovered she could feel music through a resonant tabletop.
Her politics were radical for her time. She co-founded Helen Keller International in 1915 with George Kessler, sent money to the NAACP in 1916, opposed Woodrow Wilson and campaigned as a pacifist. She met every president from Grover Cleveland to Lyndon Johnson. On a 1937 visit to Akita Prefecture she asked about the faithful dog Hachiko, and her first Akita, Kamikaze-Go, became the first of the breed in America. William Gibson later dramatised her childhood as The Miracle Worker. She died on 1 June 1968.
Source: Helen Keller
