After the Miracle, page 16
Annie also unequivocally denied the story, issuing her own statement describing it as an “abominable falsehood.” But even if those closest to Helen believed the union was unthinkable, the public and the press appeared to have no such qualms. Responding to Annie’s description of the engagement, the Selma Times weighed in: “Why shouldn’t Miss Keller marry her secretary? What makes the idea of it abominable? It is abominable only in the sense that it would shatter an ideal. Miss Keller is idealized by the American people almost as a spiritual prodigy. If married, she would lose something of the hallowed association her name invokes.”20
The New York Tribune was one of the few outlets that rushed to defend Annie, arguing, “Mrs. Macy’s opposition to her pupil’s marriage was not based on selfishness but on realization that it would hinder the further development of a marvellous girl, and so romance has been shattered.”21 Annie’s biographer Kim Nielsen would later speculate that the opposition of Teacher and the Keller family to the union may have been due to “eugenic fears about her possible reproduction and sexuality.”22 But Helen’s great-grandniece Keller Johnson-Thompson, who grew up hearing the saga of Peter Fagan from her grandmother Katherine Tyson, has a different theory to explain Annie’s vehement opposition. “I think Annie Sullivan may have been jealous or threatened by the idea of Helen marrying Fagan,” says Johnson-Thompson, who still resides in Tuscumbia, not far from Ivy Green. “She needed to be needed. What would have happened to Annie if they had married?”23
Years earlier—when Helen found herself on the brink of physical and emotional exhaustion while she prepared for Radcliffe—Annie had indeed fought back desperately against the attempts by Helen’s friends and family to separate her from her pupil. In relation to that episode, Joseph Lash posed a question that would appear to apply equally to the Fagan affair: “Had Annie thought in terms of what was best for Helen? She was as incapable of asking herself that question in relation to herself as any star-crossed lover. The friends that had rallied to help… had realized that these two, for better or worse, were married for life.”24
Fagan’s daughter, Ann Fagan Ginger, later recounted what her father had told her of what happened next and implied that the family’s vehement opposition to the marriage may have been directly tied to the controversy around Helen’s controversial support for the NAACP a few months earlier—a period in which she had been spending all her waking hours with Fagan. “As I have pieced it together, Helen’s mother didn’t like my father because he was a Socialist and believed in the equality of blacks and whites. Mrs. Keller was a Southerner,” explained Fagan Ginger in 1984.25
Having received blanket denials from all the parties involved that a marriage was to take place, the Boston Globe—the paper that first reported the marriage rumors—declared the Keller-Fagan romance “finis.” As it turned out, it was anything but.
While Annie departed for Lake Placid, Kate quickly spirited Helen back to Mildred’s home in Montgomery, where she had moved in 1907 following her marriage to a man named Warren Tyson. But the family had very much underestimated Fagan’s resilience, little knowing that he had already arranged to follow them back to Alabama. Fagan’s daughter described a secretive plan devised by Helen and Fagan before they left Boston: “My father had written a message to Helen on the braille typewriter but in code saying that he would go to Alabama, drive in front of her house on a certain day, and he would stay there and if she wanted to come live with him and be his wife, all she had to do was walk out the door and he would be there.” He was aware of the danger of this plan, she recalled, noting that “he didn’t want the [brother-in-law] to shoot him in the process, which I guess there were stories in the paper that he would do.”26
And indeed, when Helen’s sister, Mildred, came out onto the porch one morning and saw a strange man spelling into Helen’s hand, she immediately fetched her husband, Warren, who rushed out with a shotgun. Fagan stood his ground and declared his intention to marry Helen before retreating. “As I recall, Helen’s mother was there, too, so I guess everybody made the decision for Helen,” disclosed Helen’s great-nephew Bill Johnson. “It was the notion that it was a bad idea for Helen and it’s a good thing that they ran that rascal off.”27 Days later, Mildred woke in the middle of the night to the sound of someone on the porch. It was Helen, who had packed a suitcase and was waiting for Fagan to pick her up to elope. For reasons unknown, he never showed up.
Helen continued to correspond with Fagan for a time until he married a woman named Sarah Robinson in 1917.28 She would never find love again, though she would receive a number of marriage proposals from admirers she never met, including one from a life insurance salesman named Fred Elder six years after the thwarted elopement. In September 1922, she wrote Elder a poignant letter refusing his recent proposal of marriage:
As it is, we are like two boats signalling each other in a dense fog. I try vainly to visualise you in my thoughts as a real man. In spite of your very self-revealing letter, you seem remote, almost mythical. Through the wise, loving ministrations of my teacher, Mrs. Macy, who since my earliest childhood has been a light to me in all dark places, I faced consciously the strong sex-urge of my nature and turned that life-energy into channels of satisfying sympathy and work. I never dreamed of suppressing that God-given, creative impulse, I simply directed the whole force of my heart-energy to the accomplishment of difficult tasks and the service of others less fortunate than myself.29
Writing about the doomed romance in her 1929 memoir, Midstream, Helen claimed that she had acted “exactly opposite” to her nature and that the relationship with Fagan was destined to fail because of “the unhappiness I had caused my dear ones”—apparently resigned to a life that often prioritized others’ happiness or feelings over her own.
“The brief love will remain in my life a little island of joy surrounded by dark waters,” she wrote. “I am glad that I have had the experience of being loved and desired. The fault was not in the loving but in the circumstances. A lovely thing tried to express itself; but conditions were not right or adequate, and it never blossomed. Yet the failure, perhaps, only serves to set off the beauty of the intention. I see it all now with a heart that has grown sad in growing wiser.”30
Well aware that Teacher herself had conspired with her family to thwart the engagement during its initial stages, Helen appeared to downplay Annie’s role by alluding to the fact that she was far away in Lake Placid when the elopement eventually fizzled. “As time went on, the young man and I became involved in a net of falsehood and misunderstanding. I am sure that if Mrs. Macy had been there, she would have understood, and sympathized with us both,” she wrote somewhat unconvincingly, perhaps unwilling to face the truth.31
Chapter Thirteen
Helen vs. Teddy Roosevelt
The dawn of 1917 saw Helen mired in a form of involuntary exile. Following doctor’s orders, Annie had left Lake Placid to continue her convalescence in Puerto Rico while Helen remained with her mother and Mildred in Montgomery, where she had been spirited away months before in an effort to distance her from Peter Fagan. It was the longest she had ever been away from Teacher. Her correspondence with Annie provides biographers a valuable window into the mindset of both figures during this period.
In a letter Helen sent Annie in March 1917, she complains that she has been largely cut off from the lively circle of intellectuals and radicals who had been a fixture of their lives back home for most of the last decade. Stuck in Alabama, she lamented, her days were spent on trivialities. “So, you see what glorious entertainment mine is,” she writes. “Parties, dresses, babies, weddings and obesity are the topics of conversation… I try to meet people and be interested in them, but I’m afraid it is mostly pretence.”1
She was also cut off from the cause that had become something of an obsession. For much of the previous two years, Helen’s political activities had centered on the movement to keep America from intervening in the Great War, which had raged in Europe since the summer of 1914. The United States was moving ever closer to joining the hostilities, and she had thrown herself into the battle to keep America out of the fray. Every day she could sense the drumbeats of war approaching. “A company of Alabama soldiers is back from the border, and the city streets are full of them,” she wrote Annie that winter. “Mother says they are fine looking men, and I sicken at the thought of the South giving its new strength to another war.”2
Annie, too, was alarmed at the thought of war but complained that she felt out of the loop from her vantage point in Puerto Rico. “The war, or rumors of war seem to have knocked the mail’s galley West. I know very little of what is going on,” she wrote. “We seldom see a paper; and when we do, it’s two weeks old. So, I don’t know this minute whether we are at war with Germany or not. And bless you, I don’t seem to care greatly.”3
But Helen cared a great deal. Her tireless crusade against “preparedness” for war had already caused deep divisions within her circles. Rather than preach pacifism or neutrality, her rhetoric had given the impression to some of her friends and comrades that she favored Germany over the Western Allies. This came to a head when she asked her German publisher to turn over the royalties from the sales of her books to all German soldiers blinded at the front until the end of the war. “I am neutral yes,” she told a reporter, “but I consider my second country the land of Beethoven, Goethe, Kant and Karl Marx.” Despite the fact that she had never visited the country, she was fluent in the language and frequently read Germanic books and periodicals. “My admiration for Germany has been heightened by their brilliant organization, their spirit and wild courage,” she revealed.4 In a letter to her mother, she implied that these sentiments had sparked something of a backlash: “I haven’t taken sides, as you know; but I get hot because almost everybody is down upon Germany. Not a word is said about the centuries in which ‘perfidious Albion’ has pushed her conquests to the ends of the earth, strewing her path with blood, tears and untold crimes.”5
Although women had not yet won the right to vote, and she still formally supported the Socialist Party ticket, Helen had given qualified support to Woodrow Wilson in the presidential election of 1916, reasoning that he was the best chance to keep America out of the war. She believed that Wilson had “kept the faith” by opposing the “preparedness insanity” for as long as possible. “He has announced to the world that America stands ready to join a league of nations to prevent war. If the nations are honest in their protestations that they are arming and fighting for peace and security, here is their opportunity to obtain peace and security without any more fighting,” she told an audience in 1916.6
During her earliest Chautauqua talks, Helen had discussed a wide range of topics—from socialism and suffragism to the importance of love and understanding in bringing people together. By 1916, however, her lectures were primarily focused on one theme—keeping America out of the war. Though she lamented that pacifists are often “pelted with abuse,” she framed her crusade as a patriotic duty. “If I were less an American, I should follow the brass band of preparedness or keep silent as a clam,” she told her audience. “But this is my country, and I love it. I will not sit still and see a few excited leaders stampede it into war or preparedness for war.”7
Although they were paid between $250 and $500 per lecture, the Chautauqua contract required Helen and Annie to cover their own expenses, and the tour wasn’t as lucrative as they might have hoped. The constant travel was exhausting and took a physical toll on both women. But Helen was fast becoming one of the most influential anti-war voices in the country, and her booking agent, M. J. Stevenson, implored her to keep up the momentum, promising her a percentage of the gate if she embarked on a new tour of the Midwest. There is a “tremendous demand” for her preparedness lectures, he wrote in the spring of 1916. If she wished to serve “the cause,” the tour would be a chance to reach “thousands of people.”8
As she traveled the country warning against the forces pushing America toward war, there was a marked change in her goals. No longer was her rhetoric aimed at opinion makers and the White House. Now, she directed her warnings at the working class, who she warned were destined to be the cannon fodder in the inevitable coming war.
Although she remained an admirer of Eugene Debs, her disillusionment with the Socialist Party had been festering for years because of the party’s increasingly moderate approach and appeared to have reached a breaking point by 1913 after the party voted to expel Big Bill Haywood, with whom she had become enamored during the Lawrence Textile Strike early on in her conversion to socialism.9 If she had once attempted to remain neutral by urging conciliation within the party, any doubts about her sympathies were laid to rest in January 1916 when she granted an interview to Barbara Brindley of the New-York Tribune in which she announced that she had become a committed member of Haywood’s Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Brindley starts off by asking what had transformed Helen from the “sweet sentimentalist of women’s magazine days” into an “uncompromising radical.”10 Here, Helen reveals the epiphany that she had been hinting at for some time, and that had become a consistent theme in her activism—the explicit links between disability and capitalism. Her awakening, she explained, came after she was appointed to the Massachusetts commission tasked with investigating conditions among the blind community: “For the first time I, who had thought blindness a misfortune beyond human control, found that too much of it was traceable to wrong industrial conditions, often caused by selfishness and greed of the employers.”
The reporter was especially interested in the fact that Helen had come to these conclusions after she left college. Did she get any of this knowledge from her life at Radcliffe, Brindley wondered. “No!” came the emphatic reply. “College isn’t the place to go for ideas. I thought I was going to college to be educated… Schools seem to love the dead past and live in it… Education taught me that it was a finer thing to be a Napoleon than to create a new potato.”
Explaining that it was her “nature” to fight, she had concluded that she must join a “fighting party” to help with their propaganda. That’s when she became a socialist. In the years since, however, she had come to identify more as a syndicalist. “I became an IWW because I found out the Socialist party was too slow. It is sinking in the political bog. It is almost impossible for the party to keep its revolutionary character so long as it occupies a place under government and seeks office under it.”
It is the workers, she declared, who must declare freedom for themselves. “Nothing can be gained by political action. That is why I became an IWW.” It was the Lawrence strike in 1912, she revealed, that convinced her that it was better to improve conditions for all people “at once” rather than incrementally. At this, the reporter asked whether she was committed to revolution or education. “Revolution!” came the swift reply. “We can’t have education without revolution. We have tried peace education for 1900 years and it has failed. Let us try revolution and see what it will do now. I am not for peace at all hazards. I regret this war, but I have never regretted the blood of the thousands spilled during the French Revolution.” The workers, she noted, are learning a lesson that will soon come in handy when they are mired in the trenches of the war that she knew was coming. “My cause will emerge from the trenches stronger than it ever was. Under the obvious battle waging there, there is an invisible battle for the freedom of man.”
Here, she invokes the historical comparison that others, including Mark Twain, had long ago sensed from her passionate calling. “I feel like Joan of Arc at times. My whole being becomes uplifted. I, too, hear the voices that say, ‘Come,’ and I will follow, no matter what the trials I am placed under. Jail, poverty, calumny, they matter not. Truly he has said, ‘Woe unto you that permits the least of mine to suffer.’”11
Although she publicly declared her membership in the IWW for the first time in 1916, her allegiance to the “Wobblies,” as its members were known, was already apparent months earlier when she waged a very public crusade to free Joe Hill—the Swedish-born union organizer. Hill, born Joseph Hillstrom, was known as “Labor’s Poet,” and composed some of the IWW’s best-known songs, including “There Is Power in a Union.” He had been arrested on a trumped-up charge of murder in January 1914, accused of killing a man and his son in a Utah grocery store. The subsequent trial attracted worldwide attention while thousands of supporters around the world appealed for his freedom, convinced that Hill had been framed because of his militant union activities.
Although Hill had countless prominent supporters calling for his freedom, only one had the ear of the president of the United States. Long aware that her celebrity status could be used effectively in support of her political goals, Helen wrote to Wilson pleading for him to “use your great power and influence to save one of the nation’s helpless sons.”12 But the case had been tried under Utah state law, Wilson explained, and even he didn’t have the power to grant clemency. “I was very much affected by your telegram and wish most sincerely it was in my power to do something, but unhappily there is nothing I can do,” the president wrote back. “The matter lies entirely beyond my jurisdiction and power. I have been deeply interested in the case but am balked of all opportunity.”13
Undeterred, she wrote Utah governor William Spry, who did have the power to spare Hill: “Thousands of intelligent people believe Hillstrom is innocent. I shall feel doubly deaf and blind if I learn tomorrow that this young singer has been taken from us.”14 But, to her dismay, Spry remained unmoved by her appeal and Hill was executed by firing squad in November 1915.
In January 1916, the same month that she declared herself an IWW, Helen delivered a speech at New York’s Carnegie Hall calling for a general strike under the auspices of the recently formed Women’s Peace Party. “The future of America rests on the backs of eighty million working men and women and their children,” she told the packed gathering. “We are facing a grave crisis in our national life. The few who profit from the labor of the masses want to organize the workers into an army which will protect the interests of the capitalists… And we are whetting our sword to scare the victors into sharing the spoils with us. Now, the workers are not interested in the spoils; they will not get any of them anyway.”15
