After the Miracle, page 14
Despite her own embrace of oralism, and years of painstaking lessons with voice teachers, however, Helen—to her lifelong frustration—never quite mastered speech. Although those who knew her well could make out her words, expressed in a guttural style that she would claim was not a “pleasant voice,” she could often only make herself understood if she spoke very slowly, syllable by syllable. She lamented that she had only “partially conquered the hostile silence” and would frequently describe her failure to “speak normally” as one of her greatest disappointments.17
Bell would eventually distance himself from eugenics, as he witnessed the extreme iterations that resulted in compulsory sterilization laws passed in many states and later helped inspire the Nazis’ euthanasia program—as described in historian Edwin Black’s landmark 2003 work, The War against the Weak.18 But, as Bell’s biographer Katie Booth observed, “It also remains true that his work to promote oralism at all costs laid the groundwork for those eugenic ideas to flourish with the deaf in mind.”19
Still, despite her role in promoting oralism, there is no direct evidence tying Helen’s own embrace of the odious philosophy to her longtime mentor even if she was almost certainly aware of his troubling beliefs. It is just as likely that her own support for eugenics was influenced by a contemporary trend that saw an array of so-called progressive figures champion the movement during the period of her socialist zenith. Historian Diane Paul has documented the wide variety of prominent left-wing intellectuals and writers who advocated the “improvement of the genetic stock through selective breeding”—a group that included George Bernard Shaw, Julian Huxley, and the man that Helen credited with her conversion to socialism, H. G. Wells.20 Wells was among its most enthusiastic proponents, hailing eugenics as the first step toward the removal “of detrimental types and characteristics” and the “fostering of desirable types” in their place.21
Regardless of where she had drawn her understanding of the purported benefits of a cause that hoped to eradicate people like her, Helen’s entrance into a debate that gripped the nation in the autumn of 1915 came as a shock in many quarters.
Among the many prominent Americans who weighed in about the fate of the Bollinger baby was the celebrated suffragist Jane Addams. “A physician or hospital board has not the right to assume the prerogative that any person shall be killed but is required by the highest moral law to save every life that possibly can be saved,” she argued in a widely printed newspaper essay at the height of the debate. Addams offered a list of “great defectives” who had emerged as among the greatest men and women of society in spite of their disabilities. She cited Helen Keller as the prime example: “She was not born with deformities, but they came afterward—blindness, deafness, loss of power of speech. Despite all these obstacles, she refused to be discouraged or thrown into discard. She is an accomplished woman today—a benefit to the world.”22
As she was America’s most famous person with disabilities at the time, one can assume that Americans were not surprised to watch Helen Keller’s name being summoned by Addams during the ongoing debate about the Bollinger baby. It almost certainly came as a jolt, however, when Helen herself weighed in with an article in the Pittsburgh Press two weeks later defending Haiselden’s decision. Considering the compassion that she had always displayed for the most vulnerable members of society, her words were especially jarring:
When Dr. HJ Haiselden permitted the Bollinger Baby to die in a Chicago hospital, he performed a service to society as well as to the hopeless being spared from a life of misery. No one cares about that pitiful, useless lump of flesh, but that baby has lived not in vain, because its death has brought us face to face with many questions of eugenics and control of the birth rate—questions we have been side-stepping because we are afraid of them. The hue and cry raised about the “murder” of this poor, mindless, crippled, half-dead little creature, indicates a deep-rooted error in American thinking… We have refused to listen to the Dr. Haiseldens when they have tried to rub into us the fact that the world is already flooded with unhappy, unhealthy, mentally unsound persons that should never have been born.23
Some of Haiselden’s detractors argued that Helen herself might have been one of those discarded, though at least one paper pointed out that this was not a fitting argument since she had not actually been born deafblind. “The comparison of this breathing human flesh as has been made and Helen Keller and those of less deformities is odious,” declared the Washington Herald—one of the few papers that defended Haiselden’s actions at the time. “Such cases are not in the same class and are therefore not comparable. Dr. Haiselden conscientiously performed a merciful deed by not forcing life on this monstrosity.”24
While it was Helen’s defense of Haiselden that attracted the most attention, she also used the same article to weigh in on the case of William Sanger, who had been arrested two months earlier for distributing a pamphlet advocating birth control written by his wife, the prominent activist Margaret Sanger. In this passage, Helen appears to explicitly link her eugenic beliefs to the misery caused by overpopulation—an argument that had also frequently been used by Margaret, a longtime proponent of eugenics. “Already countless mothers are obliged to work outside and leave their little ones without proper care,” Helen wrote. “Unwatched, exposed to all the influences of evil, these children of the poor grow or waste away as they may, like plants in sandy soil, among rocks, weeds and rubbish, bereft of light and sunshine. Those who survive bring into the world, in spite of themselves, an ever-larger number of deformed, sickly, feeble-minded children, and the incalculable mischief of an uncontrolled birth-rate sucks up the vitality of the human race.”25 There is no record of Alexander Graham Bell’s thoughts about the case of the Bollinger baby, but since he had long rejected “negative eugenics,” he would have presumably disapproved of his protégé’s shocking stand.
Meanwhile, an autopsy conducted five days after John Bollinger’s death revealed that Harry Haiselden may have deliberately exaggerated the baby’s health prognosis to further his own eugenic agenda. After the autopsy and hearing, a coroner’s jury comprised of six prominent Chicago physicians and surgeons declared in a statement, “We find no evidence from the physical defects in the child that it would have become mentally or morally defective.” Although the jury affirmed Haiselden’s right not to operate, it concluded that a number of the baby’s physical “defects” might have been corrected by plastic surgery and grafting.26 One juror publicly disputed Haiselden’s widely reported claim that John Bollinger would have ended up a “mental defective” if he had been allowed to live. “The brain was all right as far as we could tell,” he said. “There was no physical evidence that the child would have ended up physically or morally oblique.”27 Although he was never charged for his role in the baby’s death, Haiselden was later expelled from the Chicago Medical Society for his actions.28
A month later, writing in the New Republic, Helen appeared to soften her tone by proposing a science-based mechanism—a jury of expert physicians—to draw the line on a case-by-case basis and decide the fate of babies born with severe birth defects. Despite her more tempered approach, however, she uses the piece to simply double down on her eugenic arguments, asserting that a “mental defective… is almost sure to be a potential criminal.”29
As near as can be determined, this is the last time she ever weighed in on the controversy. She never renounced her position on the Bollinger baby, nor did she address it again. Two decades later, however, she would take a very different course when the Nazis—very much inspired by the American and British eugenics movements—used similar arguments to justify their monstrous crimes. Then, Helen would use her role as a disability icon to place herself on the right side of history. But her brief flirtation with eugenics and her role as a poster child for Alexander Graham Bell’s oralist crusade against American Sign Language would forever taint her legacy among some segments of the disability community.
Chapter Eleven
Helen vs. Jim Crow
Born only fifteen years after the abolition of slavery, Helen’s earliest experiences with race were probably not much different than those of any other middle-class white child growing up in the postbellum South. A little more than 40 percent of the population of Tuscumbia in 1880 was African American, though most of the Black population lived in shanties far from the pristine confines of Ivy Green, the Keller household.1
Information is scant on what became of the Keller family’s enslaved workers after abolition and whether any continued working for the household. In the 1830 federal census—at a time when Ivy Green was still a sprawling 640-acre cotton plantation—Arthur’s father, David Keller, is recorded as enslaving 49 people, including 18 children under the age of ten.2 By the time of the 1850 “slave census,” his widow, Mary F. Keller, is recorded enslaving 16 people.3 There is no existing record after that.
The first hint of the Keller family’s relationship with the Black servants who worked for them during Helen’s childhood comes from Helen herself, who wrote in The Story of My Life about a “little colored girl”—the child of the family cook—whom she referred to as “Martha Washington.” Helen would later admit that she made that name up because she couldn’t remember the girl’s real name, which was eventually revealed to be Mary Hart.4 Helen recounts bossing the young girl around under threat of violence when she was young: “Martha Washington understood my signs, and I seldom had any difficulty in making her do just as I wished,” she wrote. “It pleased me to domineer over her, and she generally submitted to my tyranny rather than risk a hand-to-hand encounter.”5 It would appear, however, that Helen’s treatment of the girl reflected how she had been taught to treat servants generally and may have predated her awareness of racial differences.
In a report to Michael Anagnos about Helen’s progress shortly after arriving in Tuscumbia, Annie described the first time Helen became conscious of race: “On being told that she was white and that one of the servants was black, she concluded that all who occupied a similar menial position were of the same hue; and whenever I asked her the color of a servant, she would say ‘black.’”6
The attitude of Captain Keller, who had served the Confederacy as an assistant quartermaster at the siege of Vicksburg,7 likely set the tone for the family’s attitudes toward race. “His view of the Civil War was that the South had been the innocent martyr, the North the mercenary aggressor,” writes Joseph Lash. “He was kind to Negroes, providing they kept their place, were deferential and polite. ‘We never think of them as human beings,’ he told a shocked Northern visitor.”8 The visitor may have been more shocked by something Lash neglected to mention. Arthur Keller, in fact, was allegedly the first man in Alabama to “take the obligations of the Klan,” as his former newspaper, the North Alabamian, reported after his death.9 The earliest known Ku Klux Klan chapter in Tuscumbia dates to April 1868, and was implicated in the lynching of three Black men in September of that year.10 There is no evidence, however, linking Arthur Keller to the incident, nor is there any indication that Helen ever knew of her father’s purported Klan affiliations.
It wasn’t until she embraced left-wing politics later on that she appears to have given any significant thought to racial matters. And, although her opinions on other contemporary issues were often very much influenced by a socialist analysis, the party’s stand on the “Negro question” was anything but clear-cut by the time Helen stirred up a hornet’s nest that would shake her world.
In a 1903 essay titled “The Negro in the Class Struggle,” Socialist Party leader Eugene Debs set out his party’s position on race. “The whole world is under obligation to the Negro, and that the white heel is still upon the black neck is simply proof that the world is not yet civilized,” he wrote. “The history of the Negro in the United States is a history of crime without a parallel.” Rather than using this observation to champion Black liberation, however, he employed somewhat equivocating language about the support the Socialist Party could provide, maintaining that “we have nothing special to offer the Negro, and we cannot make separate appeals to all the races… The Socialist Party is the party of the working class, regardless of color—the whole working class of the whole world.”11
According to one biographer, Debs—although a lifelong opponent of racial discrimination—“refused to concede that poor Negroes were in a worse position than poor white people.”12 Still, his views on race were considerably more enlightened than some of his comrades’, especially those of Victor Berger, who would become the first socialist ever elected to Congress in 1910. “There can be no doubt that the negroes and mulattoes constitute a lower race than the Caucasian and indeed even the Mongolian have the start of them in civilization by many thousand years—so that negroes will find it difficult ever to overtake them,” Berger wrote in a 1902 editorial, concluding with a claim even more disturbing: “The many cases of rape which occur wherever negroes are settled in large numbers prove, moreover, that the free contact with the whites has led to the further degeneration of the negroes, as of all other inferior races. In the case of the negro all the savage instincts of his forefathers in Africa come to the surface.”13
At successive party conventions between 1901 and 1919, members reaffirmed that the struggle for Negro equality was part of the larger economic question and therefore deserved no special consideration. Debs’s declaration that “we have nothing special to offer the Negro” became the party line, though some have used these words out of context to falsely imply that the Socialist Party was indifferent to American racism.
Annie Sullivan also had a mixed record when it came to race. Her biographer Nella Henney claimed that she considered herself “vigorously pro-Negro and anti-Southern.”14 Such a position was not altogether surprising for somebody who had been educated at Perkins, whose co-founder, Samuel Gridley Howe, was a noted abolitionist. And yet despite her professed liberal beliefs, Annie’s history also reveals a trail of casual and explicit racism. Shortly after she arrived in Tuscumbia, she wrote a disturbing letter to her former housemother, Sophia Hopkins, about Helen’s progress: “After supper we go to my room and do all sorts of things until eight, when I undress the little woman and put her to bed. She sleeps with me now. Mrs. Keller wanted to get a nurse for her; but I concluded I’d rather be her nurse than look after a stupid, lazy negress.”15 In another letter, she wrote, “Helen plays with her dolls or frolics in the yard with the little darkies, who were her constant companions before I came.”16 Later, after a fact-finding mission with John Macy to study the “Negro question,” she noted that she had come within “smelling distance” of the subject.17 This sort of casual racism, of course, was hardly unusual for the time, even for an ostensibly racially enlightened New Englander. And yet it serves to make Helen’s own evolution on racial issues all the more noteworthy, given the attitudes of those closest to her.
For Helen, it is difficult to pinpoint any specific epiphany that served as a touchstone for her own position on race, but the roots may be traced back to a visit from two men one afternoon in 1891 when she was eleven years old and studying at the Perkins School for the Blind. William James was one of America’s preeminent philosophers at the time and a distinguished Harvard professor of scientific psychology. We have no record of what inspired his excursion to Perkins that day, but it is fair to assume that the outing was influenced by Helen’s rising celebrity given how many others were attracted for similar visits. On this visit, James brought along one of his Harvard protégés, W. E. B. Du Bois, who would soon emerge as one of the most prominent civil rights activists in America, a brilliant scholar and an influential voice for African American equality. But on this occasion, he was still fresh from his undergraduate degree, years away from becoming a national figure. Du Bois would later recall the impression Helen made upon him during this visit. “When I was studying philosophy at Harvard under William James, we made an excursion one day out to Roxbury,” he wrote. “We stopped at the Blind Asylum and saw a young girl who was blind and deaf and dumb and yet who, by infinite pains and loving sympathy, had been made to speak without words and to understand without sounds. She was Helen Keller. Perhaps because she was blind to color differences in this world, I became intensely interested in her, and all through my life I have followed her career.”18
Helen would also keenly remember the visit, writing, “Most pleasantly I remember the day when Professor William James and [Du Bois] came to see me at Perkins in South Boston. I felt Mr. Du Bois’s kindly interest in me, and the dynamic quality of his personality. As I grew older, I understood more fully his wonderful climb to manhood and the tireless zeal with which he has inspired and changed the lives of countless negro men and women, so that they maintain their struggle towards the equality of all human beings in opportunity, education, and self-fulfilment which is true civilization.”19
Almost two decades after his visit to Perkins, Du Bois would play an instrumental role in founding a new movement following the Springfield race riots of 1908. The riot, sparked by the arrests of two Black men falsely accused of rape and murder, along with a number of other incidents of contemporaneous racial violence in America, galvanized a group of Black and white activists to come together on February 12, 1909. It was at this meeting—held on the centenary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth—that they founded a national organization known as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.20 Du Bois would go on to serve as editor of the NAACP’s monthly magazine, The Crisis.
In the years since he first encountered Helen, Du Bois, like herself, had emerged as a prominent socialist. Despite the movement’s continuing vacillation on issues of race, he had no hesitation about defying the party line, and in 1913, he declared that the race question was “the great test of the American socialist.”21 Three years later, Helen received a direct appeal from Oswald Garrison Villard, cofounder and vice president of the NAACP. In contrast to Du Bois, Villard considered himself a syndicalist and rejected the “parliamentary socialism” of Eugene Debs, which he believed stood for “half measures, for palliatives, for concessions.”22 Recognizing that Helen, too, had shifted to a like-minded stance by 1916, Villard issued an appeal for her to endorse the NAACP. He knew well that the support of a prominent white Southerner could provide a tremendous boost for the fledgling organization. The deeply personal letter she wrote in response may have been one of Helen’s finest and most poignant pieces of writing, free of the stale socialist rhetoric that characterized much of her other political writing from this period:
