After the Miracle, page 31
Once Polly became less of a constant presence given her declining health in the late 1950s, Smithdas and Helen began to form a newfound bond, thanks in part to Salmon’s concerted efforts to bring them together. Most notably, Smithdas claimed that he was instrumental in enlightening Helen about what he believed were Alexander Graham Bell’s misguided eugenic views about deaf people. Smithdas revealed that during the course of their friendship, after he filled her in about the inventor’s history, Helen told him that Bell had “lied” to her.40 He was a close enough friend by 1960 that he was among a small group invited to attend her eightieth birthday party that year.41 Thirteen months later, Helen included both Smithdas and Peter Salmon on a list of honorary pallbearers she wished to have at her funeral,42 and Helen would end up leaving a substantial portion of her estate to Salmon to fund his work for the deafblind community.43
Whatever role Polly may have had in shielding Helen from people with disabilities, there is no question that Helen herself had conspicuously pulled back from involvement with domestic causes and appearances tied to disability during her final years, and not necessarily because she was slowing down due to age. It appears, rather, that she had become deeply uncomfortable with the public adulation and her status as a symbol, which pulled her in many directions as people tried to claim her as their own. “Everybody wanted to adopt Helen Keller… to their own aggrandizement,” noted Robert Barnett, who revealed that during the 1950s, Helen refused to lend her name to any cause unless she could study it firsthand—demanding to see the budget and plans before she would grant approval, even when it involved naming a high school after her.44 This observation would suggest that she likely applied the same due diligence before attaching herself to the various political causes that those around her always claimed she had embraced without knowing all the facts.
Although she met with tens of thousands of people with disabilities during her foreign travels, she refused almost all invitations from American organizations dedicated to disability issues during the last decade of her life. While she happily accepted an honorary degree bestowed by Harvard in 1955, for example, she rebuffed numerous requests to attend the dedication of schools and organizations for blind Americans that proliferated during the 1950s.45
Although Helen was spending less time at the AFB, she still kept an office at the Foundation’s Manhattan headquarters and would commute in from Connecticut at least once a week to attend to correspondence or business matters. In the evenings, Helen and Polly would usually meet Nella for drinks and dinner at the Harvard Club and take in a Broadway play with Ruth Gordon or Kit Cornell and Nancy Hamilton with Polly rapidly communicating the dialogue into her palm. In between, they could often be found shopping at chic Manhattan department stores such as Bergdorf Goodman or Bendel’s, where they racked up bills totaling thousands of dollars for expensive hats and dresses. Polly would usually charge these to the AFB expense account, much to Robert Barnett’s chagrin. Frances Koestler later explained these extravagances by claiming that Helen was “very vain.”46 But a 1954 entry in Nella’s journal suggests that there may have been another explanation. Following a screening of Nancy Hamilton’s documentary in January that year, Nella told Helen that her sister, Mildred, had commented about how nice she looked in the film. To this, Helen responded, “I want all the handicapped to look nice, so they won’t repel people.”47 While Helen’s activism and most of her ideas were quite progressive and forward-thinking, comments like this are a reminder that some of her questionable attitudes and language around disability were shaped by the stigma and entrenched beliefs of her time.
When she wasn’t traveling, shopping, or attending eclectic dinner parties with her close social circle, Helen’s greatest joy during these years was taking long walks along the sloping hillside to the woods at Arcan Ridge or tending to her scented garden. She described the “odorous flood of roses and peonies”—her favorite flowers—and could often be found on her knees weeding for hours at a time. Ever since childhood in Alabama and later vacationing at Red Farm, she had regarded the outdoors as a refuge and credited her “friendship with nature” as the most important factor in maintaining her health. On these walks, she was usually accompanied by her Alsatian, Ettu, and her dachshund, Tinker—the latest of the array of dogs that were among her most treasured companions for much of her life, one of which she once described as her “brother that barks.”48 And yet she never employed a guide dog. During this era, it was still widely believed that such dogs were impractical or unsafe for somebody who was both deaf and blind, although deafblind people have used guide dogs since the 1980s when the first organizations started training canines to adapt to their unique needs.49 She also kept more than fifty bird feeders on the grounds of Arcan Ridge and instructed her household staff to keep them filled with seed at all times. Although she couldn’t see or hear the birds, cardinals would often venture onto the balcony and eat from her hands. Her delight in having them near invokes an observation by one of her companions, who once noted that Helen had “ten eyes, one on the tip of each finger.”50
Meanwhile, in the three years since the tempest over Helen’s World Council of Peace endorsement, she had steadfastly avoided public controversy while she finished the long-planned biography of Annie. Her plans to write the book had been dramatically interrupted by the fire that destroyed Arcan Ridge and most of Helen’s cherished possessions in 1946. These included Annie’s papers and the nearly finished manuscript that she had worked on for years as a tribute to her beloved teacher. Firefighters never ascertained how the blaze started, but the original manuscript was one of many valuable documents lost to history. After the house was rebuilt the following year, friends presented Helen with a new braille typewriter so she could start over. Helen had long complained that Nella’s 1933 biography did not “present Teacher as I know her,” and she vowed to “write something about her more to my liking.”51 The book was finally published in 1955 titled Teacher: Anne Sullivan Macy, a Tribute by the Foster Child of her Mind. Despite its awkward format—in which Helen refers to herself in the third person while she eulogizes Annie—the biography was mostly well received. Reviewing it in the Kansas City Star, Ruth Robinson wrote, “One lays the volume down with a sense of having been in contact for a brief while with a truly great soul—the soul of Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan. For the two were virtually one.”52
During this period, Helen had lost none of her passion for politics. When Eisenhower finally turned against McCarthy after the Wisconsin senator attempted to smear Secretary of Defense George Marshall as a Communist, it marked the end for the demagogue as a political force—if not the end of the Red Scare that he had helped perpetuate. Nella reported that Helen was thrilled while following the televised Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954 that would bring him down. “Much jubilation because of the turn affairs have taken on the McCarthy question,” she recorded in her journal.53
In the summer of 1955, Helen also closely followed coverage of the murder of Emmett Till—the fourteen-year-old Black Chicagoan who had been brutally killed while visiting family in rural Mississippi, allegedly for flirting with a white woman. When Till’s body was recovered from the Tallahatchie River, it was so badly disfigured that he could only be identified by a ring bearing his initials. News of the murder set off a wave of revulsion throughout the country that is often credited with kick-starting the American civil rights movement. Helen had first read about the case in Life magazine, which ran photos of Till’s funeral accompanied by a heartfelt editorial commenting on the failure of authorities to prosecute those responsible. Although Nella’s efforts to rein in Helen’s radical tendencies over the years may have been motivated by a desire to shield her reputation from the increasingly anti-Communist hysteria sweeping the nation, Life magazine was anything but a radical publication, so her response to the editorial comes off as disingenuous at best. In October 1955, Nella wrote Polly upon learning that the Till case had stirred Helen to action:
The Emmett Till thing reached me only yesterday. I will talk with you about it by telephone. I see no reason why you and Helen should not contribute to the NAACP if you want to, but I would rather you would not do it merely on the strength of that overwrought editorial in Life. I followed the whole hideous and horrible story very closely in the Times. It is not as simple as Life’s editorial makes it out to be.54
When the press reported that Helen had contributed to the civil rights organization, it inspired at least one angry missive from an AFB contributor canceling his financial support for the Foundation and accusing Helen of contributing to a “devil-inspired” group that threatened to divide America “as nothing has ever done since the Civil War.”55
Leslie Weary wrote, “Until I read some authoritative statement that you have disassociated yourself from the N.A.A.C.P., it would be better that you save postage and stationery wasted on me.”56
That same year, a week after Helen’s seventy-fifth birthday, she suddenly found herself in the middle of yet another tempest when she received a request to send a birthday greeting to an old friend, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, who had been arrested in 1951 and convicted under the Smith Act with sixteen other Communists. She was accused of conspiring to “teach and advocate violent overthrow” of the government. Flynn, one of the leaders of the American Communist Party, was serving a two-year federal prison sentence in West Virginia when the request arrived from one of her comrades, Muriel Symington. “I felt very close to your life and work last fall when my dear friend Elizabeth Gurley Flynn granted me the privilege of typing her autobiography from the outset of her career to the tragic conclusion of the Sacco and Vanzetti case,” Symington wrote Helen in July 1955. “During the chronicle of those crowded years—fruitful fighting on many fronts—your name and the names of many other distinguished Americans crop up many times. But none of them elicited from her pen greater affection and respect than she exhibited for you.”57
Helen was all too glad to oblige her request and thought nothing of it until the Foundation was informed that Helen’s birthday greeting had been reprinted in the Daily Worker, the Communist Party newspaper, blown up as a full-page featuring Helen’s message:
Loving birthday greetings, dear Elizabeth Flynn. May the sense of serving mankind bring strength and peace into your brave heart—Affectionately, Helen Keller.58
Within days, the most notorious anti-Communist publication in the nation, the New Counterattack, reprinted her greeting while encouraging its readers to write Helen and express their indignation. “The name of Helen Keller for millions of Americans has come to mean courage, triumph over adversity, and hope. The name also has a timely and special meaning for the Communist Party: It is being used as part of its propaganda.”59
By now, the Foundation likely wasn’t surprised by yet another crisis involving Helen’s purported Communist sympathies and containing these periodic controversies must have seemed like a game of whack-a-mole. The AFB knew what had to be done when dozens of irate letters poured in from indignant funders and “patriots” demanding action be taken. It is unclear whether Robert Barnett enlisted Nella or whether Helen’s longtime confidante took it upon herself to undertake damage control, but she soon fired off a letter to the only person she believed could talk sense into Helen. Her letter to Polly strongly suggests that Helen had been resisting the need for an apology, and once again Nella resorts to emotional manipulation to rein in Helen’s political fire:
No one who cares for Helen can fail to be gravely concerned in this crisis and Helen herself is wrong if she looks upon it with indifference. For many years, she has been the willing and ardent world spokesman for the blind, the deaf, the deaf-blind and other handicapped groups and whatever she does reflects upon them.60
She compared Helen’s stature to that of “royalty” and argued that it carried the same type of responsibility. That is why she can’t be allowed to make such “impulsive, unthinking statements.” Communists “all over the world,” Nella believed, would use the statement for propaganda purposes. “You both may have passport complications the next time you plan a trip, for whatever purpose,” she told Polly. “Helen’s film may be affected and her book, but the blind of the world are more important than she is and they are the ones that will suffer most.”61
Whether or not Nella’s letter was the impetus, Helen appeared to grasp the seriousness of the situation to a greater degree than she had after she endorsed the Stalinist World Council of Peace gathering three years earlier. A form letter in her name was promptly dispatched to each of the dozens of people who had responded to the New Counterattack plea. “This encounter with the communists has taught me, as I should have known before, how exceedingly alert and careful we must be at all times,” she writes, claiming that she had first met Gurley Flynn decades earlier “among the advocates of miners and other unions who were struggling for fair living conditions.” Flynn, she explained, was among the many figures with whom she discussed “tormenting questions” while she attempted to “understand labor problems, strikes, and the tangled history that surrounds them.” Since that time, however, Helen claimed to have had no contact or correspondence with her except for a message of condolence she sent after the death of Flynn’s son. “Since I joined the American Foundation for the Blind in 1924, I have been so absorbed in work for the exiles of the dark that I have had little time to devote to other activities,” the letter concluded.62
It was a disingenuous response bordering on dishonesty. Gurley Flynn was more than the casual acquaintance that Helen implied here. She had, in fact, once been a close comrade in the IWW for whom Helen had personally pleaded with President Wilson in 1917 after Flynn and a number of other comrades were accused of sedition. In 1920, Helen and Flynn were founding members of the ACLU, served on the board together, and frequently appeared at the same gatherings, though there is little evidence that they had much contact in the years since. Still, as innocuous as the birthday greeting was, Helen was very much aware of Flynn’s continuing ties to the Communist Party and the fact that she had recently been incarcerated for allegedly planning to “overthrow the United States government.” And yet she could hardly have known that her private greeting to an old friend would become public.
Helen’s continuous political vacillation around Communism throughout the 1950s has left a confusing trail for historians and biographers attempting to assess her evolving beliefs. Her repeated acquiescence in downplaying those beliefs—ostensibly to safeguard her efforts on behalf of the blind community—also raises a question that is difficult to answer. Could she have accomplished anything if she had stood firm in her convictions and used her celebrity and influence to change the hearts and minds of her countless admirers about the social issues and disability politics that she held dear? Except for the period of her public Socialist Party crusades between 1912 and 1924, and her reemergence into radical politics during the 1940s, most of her writing and speeches usually focused on “inspirational” platitudes that fed into an image for which she had long been a willing accomplice. “The infinite wonders of the universe are revealed to us in exact measure as we are capable of receiving them,” she wrote in her twelfth and final book, a 1957 volume called The Open Door—a selection of writings that professed to set forth her “philosophy and faith.”63 With the exception of Midstream and The Story of My Life, “she didn’t have too much to say in her books,” observed her longtime Doubleday editor in chief, Ken McCormick.64
Whatever the reason, Helen had apparently long since decided that speaking her mind would do little good and might even jeopardize her disability advocacy efforts. Coincidentally or not, this attitude appears to date back to the period when she was first considering going to work for the American Foundation for the Blind. Just weeks before she signed on with the AFB in 1924, Helen wrote to the left-wing senator Robert La Follette explaining why she hadn’t been in contact after he secured the Progressive Party presidential nomination that year even though her “heart rejoiced” at the news. She implied that she had decided against working on his campaign because she assumed the media would inevitably dismiss her beliefs about abolishing poverty and the links between capitalism and blindness—preferring her instead to talk about “superficial” charities that “make smooth the way of the prosperous.” Those attitudes, she informed the senator, explain “my silence on subjects which are of vital interest to me.”65 Although she had occasionally broken that silence in the years since, we can assume she concluded that her celebrity could better be served by what she called “channels of satisfying sympathy and work” on behalf of the blind community. To that end, she was all too willing to give the public what she knew they wanted to hear while only occasionally letting her guard down to provide a window into the issues that remained of vital interest to her. It’s difficult to assess whether the periodic political controversies involving her leftist affiliations during this decade were inadvertent. Or did they in fact reflect her frustration about the necessity of holding her tongue for the sake of expediency?
The backlash over the Gurley Flynn greeting marked the last time that Helen would be caught up in a public controversy, though privately she continued to hold strong political convictions. Nella’s journal entry from December 1956 captures Helen’s thoughts on the recent reelection of Eisenhower and Nixon. “She seethes at Nixon just as she did at McCarthy when he was at his height. She has to have some target for her accumulated resentments and I am inclined to think it may be a good idea for her to concentrate them against one person. Not that she can do them all this way, for she has too many. Her dislike of Eisenhower is only somewhat less than her dislike of Nixon, but she is more prudent about expressing it.”66
If Helen had transformed into a “Cold War liberal” during the ’50s, as Kim Nielsen supposed, it was not evident to Marvel Dobbs, who had gone to work in the AFB’s Department of Education during this period. Dobbs often worked closely with Helen and later described her as a “sister socialist” during the period that they worked together. “She remained true to her socialist principles to the end. Of that I am sure,” Dobbs recalled in 1977.67 One of Helen’s close friends, the literary critic Van Wyck Brooks, also claimed that she remained convinced of the “socialist point of view” throughout her life.68
