After the Miracle, page 17
Two weeks earlier, the Outlook—a weekly magazine prominently associated with former president Theodore Roosevelt—had written an editorial criticizing Helen’s frequent assertion that the war in Europe was a “capitalistic war” and her recent declaration that the war was being pushed to serve the interests of the financier J. P. Morgan. It was a theme frequently trumpeted by the Socialist Party, but such claims were easier to ignore when they came from so-called wild-eyed radicals than the same claims from a widely beloved figure. Helen likely commanded enough respect in mainstream America that her high-profile crusade against US involvement had the potential to change hearts and minds, which may have been seen as a threat to the forces pushing America toward war. As much as it admired her “personality, character and spirit,” the Outlook wrote, it regrets that it “must totally dissent” from her “unsubstantiated” charges. Such allegations weaken her influence, for “even the capitalist is entitled to justice.”16
Fourteen years earlier, Helen had visited President Roosevelt at the White House and later gushed at his efforts to promote the “welfare of the nation.”17 But now Roosevelt, an editor of the Outlook, was one of the leaders of the preparedness movement, and Helen used her Carnegie Hall speech to describe him as “war mad,” calling him the “most bloodthirsty man in the United States.” Perhaps in response to his magazine’s recent attack, she doubled down on her criticism in a newspaper interview after the speech, alluding to his widely publicized exploits as a hunter: “When he is not dreaming of plunging his country into war and shedding the blood of men, he is writing books about his own prowess in shedding the blood of animals.”18
To her deep consternation, the Socialist Party failed to endorse the call for a general strike, arguing that such a tactic was “impractical.” Eugene Debs declared that workingmen should undertake such a strike only if Congress declared war, knowing full well that this would be a nonstarter with the unions that stood to benefit from the influx of jobs a war would bring. Sure enough, only six days after Debs made this declaration, the American Federation of Labor and the railway unions pledged their “service to the country” should war come and revealed that they would call upon all workers to do the same.19 Helen fumed at what she considered a betrayal of her ideals. In a letter to Annie, she later revealed that she had considered “breaking” with the party over its stand: “Teacher, I am going to remain faithful unto the death, with God’s help, in my social beliefs; but I am thoroughly angry with the Socialist Party… It has turned traitor to the workers by saying that it opposes the class war. And the motion to call for a strike against war has been voted down! Shame upon those who wear the mask of Socialism.”20
For a short period, she believed that she had found an unlikely ally when the industrialist Henry Ford suddenly announced that he planned to charter a Peace Ship and invite prominent activists aboard to sail for Europe to convene a peace conference and end the Great War before America could become involved. Helen was among a select group that he invited to join him on the mission, which would have seen Ford and a number of high-profile pacifists meet in Norway with representatives of the belligerent European nations to broker a peace agreement. The prospect of finding common cause with a prominent capitalist thrilled her at first. “The principle underlying Ford’s plan is the General Strike which Gabriel Mirabeau proclaimed about one hundred and forty years ago and which the Industrial Workers of the World have gone to prison for,” she declared. She was so excited at the prospect that she briefly equated Ford’s plan with Karl Marx’s exhortation “Workers, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains.”21 But as she looked further into the auto magnate’s planned mission—widely derided by the press as “the Ship of Fools”—she changed her mind in a hurry. She declined the invitation after she concluded that Ford “belongs to the same class as the diplomats and politicians that made the war” and that the only hope for peace lay in convincing the soldiers themselves to quit fighting.22 A few weeks later, Helen told a reporter that she thought the Peace Ship was a “huge joke.”23 Eventually, Ford’s mission fizzled and he returned to America at the end of December 1915, only five days after his ship, the Oscar II, arrived in Norway, having failed to enlist any of the warring nations in his plan.
Meanwhile, even as she soured on the Socialist Party, Helen’s increasingly fiery approach and her frequent calls for a workers’ revolution had endeared her to new allies in radical political circles. In February 1916, she received a letter from Emma Goldman, calling Helen’s recent Carnegie Hall talk demanding a general strike “one of the most stirring events in my life.” America’s most famous anarchist praised her uncommonly “clear vision and such a deep grasp of the tremendous conflict going on in society today.”24
Although Helen had long believed that Wilson was committed to keeping America out of the European war for as long as possible, Annie struck a more cynical tone. “You know I have never trusted President Wilson,” she wrote from Puerto Rico in the winter of 1917. “He is an egotist, a tyrant at heart… When the bankers get nervous about their loans, they will force him to enter the war.”25 Weeks later, Annie wrote again shortly after Wilson went before a joint session of Congress on April 2 to request a declaration of war against Germany. “Didn’t I tell you that entering the World War was one of the high purposes Providence had in store for America?” she wrote. “The Socialists—the intellectual variety—have behaved in all countries like the proverbial sheep. A few, a very few… have kept their heads. Hatred of Germany will soon transform their idealism into a hundred percent patriotism.”26
Indeed, after America finally entered the war in 1917, Helen found herself forced at first to straddle a fine line between patriotism and sedition. She visited soldiers blinded at the front and announced her intention to raise $1 million in Liberty war bonds while dialing down her previous rhetoric about the folly of the Great War. Predictably, the newspapers resumed their fawning praise. “Here is a noble woman out of a world of darkness and silence, wanting an opportunity to help the cause of liberty and peace,” heralded one Nebraska paper.27
Although she had mostly held her tongue since America’s entry into the war months earlier—focusing instead on where she could ease suffering—her patience was finally exhausted when hundreds of IWW comrades and other radicals were arrested for sedition under the Espionage Act in September 1917. Among the high-profile figures incarcerated were Bill Haywood and Arturo Giovannitti, along with her new admirer, Emma Goldman. “The arrests have startled radical pacifist circles as they have not been stirred since the entrance of the United States into the war,” declared the Brooklyn Times Union.28
Helen could not have been unaware of the reality that, if not for her iconic status, she would have almost certainly been among the first rounded up. No longer content to remain silent, she threw herself into the campaign of Morris Hillquit, one of the most prominent leaders of the Socialist Party of America, who was running for mayor of New York on an anti-war platform. Despite her previous discontent with the party over its failure to endorse a general strike, and severe misgivings about Hillquit—whose reformist ideas she rejected as ineffective—his campaign provided the ideal platform for her to express her continuing disgust over the ongoing war. It would be the first time she weighed in since America joined the hostilities.
Because of its large population of unionized workers and left-leaning immigrants, New York was likely the only city in the nation where a candidate like Hillquit could have found a receptive ear for his platform at the time, but it didn’t stop the local press from likening him to a traitor. Days before the election, the Herald Tribune attacked Hillquit’s admirers as “steeped in un-Americanism… Before this war is over the name of Benedict Arnold will have been displaced by some other name whose acts will have made those of Arnold seem patriotic in comparison.”29
As usual, Helen wasn’t dissuaded by the name-calling of the press. In an open letter to Hillquit the day before the election, she declared that if she were eligible to vote in New York, she would happily cast her vote for the socialist candidate “because a vote for you would be a blow at the militarism that is one of the chief bulwarks of capitalism, and the day that militarism is undermined, capitalism will fall.”30 Here, she took the opportunity to explain why she had waited so long after America entered the war to wade back into the battle:
I have refrained from writing or giving utterance to the fierce protest in my heart against the war madness that is sweeping away the reason and common sense of our people, because I believed that President Wilson would defend our liberties and stay with his strong hand the forces that are invading them… I am not opposed to war for sentimental reasons. The blood of fighting ancestors flows in my veins. I would gladly see our young men go forth to battle if I thought it was a battle for true freedom. I would gladly participate in a war that would really make the world safe for democracy.31
She found no evidence, however, that her country was committed to true democracy. Instead, she charged, the United States had become a “democracy where Negroes may be massacred and their property burned, as was done in East St. Louis; a democracy where lynching and child labor are tolerated.”32
“Though physically blind, she sees with her soul’s vision the true issues of this campaign,” declared the New York Call the following day.33
Despite the broadside she had launched against Woodrow Wilson during Hillquit’s campaign—in which the socialist candidate received a respectable 155,000 votes, 22 percent of the overall vote—Helen once again took advantage of the access that no other radical figure in America enjoyed. In December, she wrote a letter to the president pleading on behalf of her recently incarcerated IWW friends Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Arturo Giovannitti, who had been rounded up with hundreds of other radicals under the Espionage Act in September 1917, despite the fact that, unlike herself, they had taken no part in anti-war propaganda after America entered the war. “They seem to have been arrested because they are associated with the Industrial Workers of the World,” she wrote Wilson. “True, they are honest exponents of a social revolution which they believe will overthrow the present economic system. Their crime is that they see the evils of their time and speak out against them, not always wisely or well.”34
Meanwhile, such was her faith that a better world was right around the corner that she chose an unlikely figure with whom to share her excitement about a recent historic event that had captured her imagination. “For to me the Russian Revolution seems the most wonderful thing that has happened in two thousand years,” Helen wrote President Wilson in December 1917, only a month after the Bolsheviks seized power. “It is like a conscious sun bursting upon a gloomy, disastrous world—a sun which shall heal the nations.”35
It was the first sign of a dramatic shift in Helen’s political philosophy. It would be decades before there was any hint that she had changed her mind.
Chapter Fourteen
“The Human Wonder”
At the beginning of February 1920, the marquee of New York’s famed Palace Theatre heralded a prominent new entertainer on the vaudeville circuit:
FEATURE EXTRAORDINAIRE: HELEN KELLER
The Most Talked of Woman in the World! Blind, deaf, and formerly DUMB, in
“The Sweetest Love Story Ever Told.”1
It was not Helen’s first foray into show business. Two years earlier, she had been approached by a Hollywood producer named Francis Miller proposing a movie about her life. “I believe we have a combination of genius—materials with which we can appeal to the public with the most powerful human drama that the world has yet seen. Its possibilities far exceed the Birth of a Nation,” Miller gushed, a reference to the D. W. Griffith Reconstruction-era silent epic that had grossed millions of dollars at the box office.2 Given the immense interest in her life story, he predicted that Helen would make as much as $100,000 from the project.
Besides the appeal of a large payday, Helen was excited about the prospect of using the medium of film to gain a wider audience for her political beliefs. She was quickly disabused of this idea when the director made it clear that he wanted a “commercial thriller” and that the public was more interested in a heartfelt inspirational story than seeing a headstrong woman with fierce political convictions. Despite engaging in what she described as a “battle of words” with the filmmaker, she sensed early on that it was futile and that none of her cherished ideas would make it into the movie, though she had agreed to appear as herself in the section portraying her life as an adult. “I doubt if the picture will carry any radical message to the people,” she wrote her socialist friend Horace Traubel. “The great forward moving spirit of the world—Marx, Proudhon, Tolstoy, Lenin, Roland Liebknecht—in it among the vital influences shaping and moulding my thought and sympathies.”3 As she expected, the 1919 film—titled Deliverance—failed to capture any of her true spirit. Instead, the finished product was a tawdry melodrama filled with what she would describe as “flights of fancy” and “absurdity.” Although the silent film ignored her socialist politics, it did show her pleading with President Wilson to keep America out of the European war and even included a scene with Helen mounted on a horse as a modern-day Joan of Arc bearing “the standard of justice and humanity.”4
For Helen, the lone bright spot from the experience came when she and Teacher met Charlie Chaplin while filming in Hollywood. Though she had been feted during the trip by a number of the greatest movie stars of the era, including Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, she was left with a “defrauded feeling” because each of the celebrities had ignored Annie—with the lone exception of Chaplin, who had appeared to bond with Teacher. “They had both endured poverties, and the deformations it creates in body and soul,” she later wrote. “They had both struggled for education and social equality… So, it was natural that they should understand each other and form one of the friendships that afford solace to great artists in a world too often unfaithful to the children of genius.”5 He even invited Helen and Annie for a screening of his film A Dog’s Life, and then let her touch his trademark bowler hat and mustache so that she could have a clearer idea of how he appeared on-screen. “He sat beside me and asked again and again if I was really interested and if I liked him and the dog in the picture,” Helen recalled.6 We can only speculate at what Chaplin and the other attendees must have thought at the sound of peals of laughter coming from the famously deafblind woman throughout the screening. Whether or not her encounter with Chaplin was the impetus, Helen would remain a lifelong devotee of movies, especially comedies, attending the cinema on a regular basis while Annie and later companions relayed into her palm the story and action taking place on the screen.
While the film was in postproduction, Helen flew back to New York where the union representing actors and stagehands was locked in a bitter labor dispute. As a newly minted actor herself, she found herself in common cause with the strikers and could be found daily marching down Broadway carrying a picket sign. On more than one occasion, she even led a “strike parade” to New York’s Rialto Theatre.7 Helen had been expected to deliver a speech to the gathering of prominent figures and critics who had been invited to the film’s gala premiere. Instead, she sent a note to the producers declining her box seats and informing them of her decision not to attend. “I am afraid that the actors and some of my friends may construe my presence as a lack of sympathy with the strikers,” she informed the producers.8 “I would rather have my picture fail,” she told reporters, “than not be with the actors and the Actors’ Equity Association in this glorious fight.”9
Deliverance was a commercial flop and failed to deliver the vast sums that she had been promised when she signed on. “We are the kind of people who come out of an enterprise poorer than we went into it,” she wrote about the experience.10 They returned home and Helen soon resumed her political efforts where she had left off—continuing to battle for her radical comrades, including Eugene Debs. Although she had long been disillusioned by the influence of reformers within the Socialist Party, she had not lost faith with Debs, who repeatedly resisted efforts to push his party to the right. Announcing his admiration for Lenin and Trotsky in February 1919, the party leader delivered a fiery speech calling on socialists to “scorn and repudiate the cowardly compromisers within our own ranks, challenge and defy the robber-class power, and fight it out on that line to victory or death.”11 After the Supreme Court upheld his conviction under the Espionage Act in the spring of 1919—concluding that he had intentionally obstructed the draft and America’s military recruitment efforts12—Helen was compelled to write expressing her solidarity:
Once more you are going to prison for upholding the liberties of the people… When I think of the millions who have suffered in all the wicked wars of the past, I am shaken with the anguish of a great impatience… With heartfelt greetings, and with a firm faith that the cause for which you are now martyred shall be all the stronger because of your sacrifice and devotion, I am Yours for the revolution—may it come swiftly, like a shaft sundering the dark!13
She was still so shaken by the assault on her comrades’ political rights that she agreed to sign on as a founding board member of a new organization, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which sought to secure an amnesty for political, industrial, and military prisoners. Although it would later come to be identified as a bastion of liberal rather than leftist values, the ACLU was widely embraced by the far left during these early years as it fought to free an assortment of radical figures imprisoned for their political beliefs.14 By the beginning of 1920, she was so preoccupied with her political battles that income-generating opportunities were in short supply, and Helen and Annie once again found themselves in financial straits—most of the $10,000 advance they had received from Deliverance already spent. When the vaudeville offer came in, it seemed like an answer to their prayers.
