After the Miracle, page 34
Days after King was gunned down in Memphis, Winnie received another letter from Phillips demonstrating that his hostility toward the civil rights leader had not lessened in the face of tragedy. “I sure will be glad when this Martin Luther King palava is over with,” he wrote. “The man not only got himself killed but caused the lives of many others over the country to be lost as well as untold millions of dollars of damages for robbing, looting, stealing and what have you.”54
Despite the fact that Phillips had never been particularly close with his sister, who had already left Tuscumbia with Annie before he was born, he appears to have designated himself as the family’s liaison with the AFB in making arrangements for Helen’s funeral long before she died even though Helen was always closer to her sister, Mildred.55 The correspondence between Phillips and Robert Barnett demonstrates that even in death, her wishes and her lifelong legacy would take a back seat to the image those around her chose to mold. Helen’s long-stated desire for a Swedenborgian funeral service in Westport, Connecticut, had quietly been shelved by the AFB after Phillips expressed his objections. Instead, they chose a lavish ceremony at Washington’s National Cathedral where her ashes would be interred alongside Annie’s. “We never went for the Swedenborgian stuff at all and it was hanging regretfully over our heads,” Phillips wrote James Adams in October 1967 when he learned that the AFB had acceded to his request for a Presbyterian service.56
Phillips had also arranged to have a former classmate, Alabama senator Lister Hill, deliver the eulogy. It is difficult to believe that Helen would have approved the choice of Lister—one of the most prominent of the Southern Dixiecrats and a longtime opponent of desegregation. Predictably, the senator’s sentimental tribute made no mention of Helen’s commitment to racial justice nor the myriad other progressive causes she had fought for. Instead, he outlined a long list of her accomplishments from the miracle at the water pump to her mastery of multiple languages and her status as a “citizen of the world” who had worked tirelessly as a “symbol of her own courage and faith to the benefit of millions of her fellow handicapped in America and around the world.”57
In the end, Helen’s request for a Swedenborgian service wasn’t her only wish that was ignored. The list of names Helen had drawn up a few years prior to act as “honorary pallbearers” at her funeral had been quietly shelved by Helen’s trustees while she was incapacitated. The inclusion of honorary pallbearers was a tradition Helen fondly remembered from Annie’s own memorial service a quarter century earlier, and as previously noted, among the names on her list were two prominent friends with disabilities—Peter Salmon, head of the Industrial School for the Blind; and Robert Smithdas, the first deafblind person to receive a graduate degree, with whom Helen had grown closer after Polly’s stroke.58 The inclusion of Smithdas would have undoubtedly delivered a powerful statement to the watching world. And yet neither man ended up being included in the service (although the Perkins School choir, featuring a number of deafblind singers, performed for the assembly of mourners). In a letter to Nella explaining the decision in October 1966, when Helen’s death appeared imminent, Robert Barnett incorrectly claimed that Helen herself had decided against honorary pallbearers at the time of Polly’s death, suggesting that it grew out of “the feeling that choosing among so many possible ones would be too difficult a task.”59 In actuality, Helen had forwarded the list with her choices to the Foundation in July 1961, more than a year after Polly’s death.60
On their way to the National Cathedral on the morning of Helen’s funeral, more than one mourner took note of the encampments scattered around the nation’s capital—an array of three thousand wooden tents erected under the banner of “Resurrection City.”61 Six months earlier, Martin Luther King Jr. had announced his plan to launch a Poor People’s Campaign, which he declared would involve “a trek to the nation’s capital by suffering and outraged citizens.” Dr. King’s goals had gradually evolved over the years from his initial call for desegregation and civil rights to a moral crusade against poverty and unemployment. “The curse of poverty has no justification in our age,” he wrote in 1967. “It is as socially cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization.”62 His words echoed Helen’s own sentiments, voiced more than a half century before King composed that statement, a powerful symbol of the philosophical alignment of their parallel crusades. In a memorable 1912 speech at the dawn of her own public campaigns against war, racism, and social injustice—billed as the “blindness of society to its problems”—she declared, “Poverty is abominable, unnecessary, a disgrace to our civilization, or rather a denial that we are civilized.”63
Dr. King never made it to Washington, but the fruition of his final crusade was well underway on the morning when Helen was laid to rest in June 1968, with thousands of his followers camped nearby to carry on his mission. Now, as the mourners inside the cathedral participated in a service that ignored both her wishes and her legacy, there is no doubt that the spirit of Helen Keller was very much outside with the protesters of Resurrection City.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Helen and Teacher
Myriad books were written about Helen over the course of her lifetime—mostly clichéd accounts of her childhood centered around the miracle at the water pump or heartwarming children’s books about the bond between Helen and her teacher. With the exception of her 1929 memoir, Midstream, few books written before her death focused on Helen’s adult life and accomplishments. In 1956, the literary critic Van Wyck Brooks published a volume called Helen Keller: Sketch for a Portrait—a breezy reminiscence of his friendship with Helen that endeavored to provide a somewhat more complete picture than the superficial efforts that had come before.1 Three years later, Peter Salmon contributed to a somewhat pedestrian biography, The Helen Keller Story, that briefly discussed her socialist politics and highlighted her foreign travels—concluding with a chapter instructing the reader, “How to Behave with a Deaf, a Blind, or a Deafblind Person.”2 But even a decade after her death, nobody had ever attempted a thorough biography about one of the twentieth century’s most celebrated figures.
This would finally change as the centenary of her birth approached. Radcliffe president Martina Horner had recently read a biography of her hero, Eleanor Roosevelt, and concluded that its author, Joseph Lash, would be the ideal candidate to take on a major book about the university’s most famous alumna, Helen Keller, for a series it was sponsoring about notable women. When Horner approached him about the project in 1977, Lash was at first reluctant to take it on, as he was busy working on a companion volume to his 1976 book about the wartime partnership between Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. He began to reconsider, he claimed, after his wife told him it was an “honor” for a women’s college to approach a man to write a biography of a woman. He resolved to undertake the project only if he could be convinced that her papers, held at the American Foundation for the Blind, would provide a “fresh portrait.” When he examined those papers, he concluded that the prospect of writing about Helen was “irresistible.”3 At the same time, he decided that no biography of Helen would be complete if it didn’t also include a portrait of the woman whose life was so intricately connected to hers, and so the book became a dual biography, appropriately titled Helen and Teacher.4
When the book was released three years later, it seemed a revelation—providing a well-rounded portrait that soared far beyond the hagiography that had emerged over the years. The voluminous biography, spanning nearly nine hundred pages, drew on thousands of previously unexamined letters, journals, and obscure archival documents as well as interviews with surviving members of Helen’s inner circle and AFB officials. The book was especially notable for being the first to challenge the narrative around the role of Annie Sullivan—presenting her as a flawed but undeniably important figure in Helen’s life. Indeed, Lash was notably the first chronicler to reveal that Annie had lied to cover up her role in the “Frost King” plagiarism incident and that she had also played a role in sabotaging Helen’s doomed romance with Peter Fagan.
But for many, the most surprising element of the biography was Lash’s lengthy exploration of Helen’s radical politics before she went to work for the AFB. Only readers old enough to remember this chapter of her life would have had any idea that Helen had once been a militant socialist extolling the merits of revolution. Other than a compendium of Helen’s socialist writings and speeches published by a small Marxist press a year before her death, this chapter of her life had been almost thoroughly whitewashed by the time Lash’s biography appeared. The revelation was enough to prompt an article in the Birmingham News noting reactions of “horror and dismay” about the news of her radical past, accompanied by complaints from surviving family members in fiercely conservative Alabama. “My reaction is one of horror,” Helen’s niece Patty Johnson told the paper at the time. “I just hate for people to write things like that. It really is unjust.” She probably didn’t realize the “consequences” of being a socialist or a Communist, Johnson claimed. “It just wasn’t in her nature to be disloyal to America.”5
As it turned out, Joseph Lash was well qualified to write about Helen’s socialist politics. After graduating from City College in 1931 and earning a master’s degree from Columbia, he was appointed an officer of the Student League for International Democracy, a socialist youth organization. From 1936 to 1939, he served as executive secretary of the American Student Union, a coalition of left-wing youth groups. When he died in 1987, his New York Times obituary discussed this chapter of his past: “Caught up in the political ferment of the 1930’s, Mr. Lash recalled that he then considered himself ‘a full-time revolutionary,’ dedicated to fighting Fascism and achieving the goals of international Socialism.”6
Given this background, his sympathetic portrayal of Helen’s Socialist Party years and early radical politics is not altogether surprising. But it is also his own political history that provides a clue to his decidedly unsympathetic and inaccurate description of Helen’s continuing left-wing affiliations during the second half of her life. When the Soviet Union entered into the Nonaggression Pact with Hitler in 1939, Lash later recalled, it brought a “crushing end” to his youthful idealism and his “growing affinity for the Communist Party.”7 As someone who had dedicated years to warning of the dangers of Nazism, he was stunned to discover that he was now required to follow the new party line and refrain from any criticism of Hitler. Unlike the majority of his former comrades and Helen Keller herself, he appeared to immediately recognize the apparent hypocrisy of this stand.
As one of a minority of party followers who quit the movement after the Hitler-Stalin Pact,8 Lash would have been uniquely placed to recognize that Helen’s initial stand against American intervention in the European war and subsequent flip-flop after the invasion of the Soviet Union indicated that she had come under the orbit of the Communist Party as a Fellow Traveler. Instead, he chooses to disingenuously echo the description used by the New York Times, which concluded at the time that she was merely a “convinced pacifist.” Subsequent chroniclers less familiar with the murky political currents of the period simply took Lash’s cue and accepted as gospel this misleading characterization of her initial opposition to US intervention.
Following his disillusionment with left-wing politics, Lash would eventually go on to found the anti-Communist organization Americans for Democratic Action with Eleanor Roosevelt, whom he had first met on a train in 1939. He would become Eleanor’s lifelong friend, biographer, and confidant. Before his death, a series of declassified FBI files revealed that he may have also been her lover, though he always denied the relationship.9
Lash’s rightward turn may explain the condescending tone he takes in explaining Helen’s leadership in the 1940 anti-fascist mission to rescue Loyalist refugees who had fought Franco during the Spanish Civil War. In Helen and Teacher, he writes that she had been “duped by the Communists in the Spanish refugee ship affair.”10 His descriptions of the various political controversies that dogged Helen during the McCarthy era largely continue along this same theme, though he does acknowledge that she retained some of her “radical” beliefs well into the 1940s.
Still, all biographers bring their own biases when writing about their subjects and these lapses don’t necessarily mar what is still considered by many to be the definitive Helen Keller biography. On the surface, Lash possessed the bona fides to write about Helen, and his book was generally well received when it was released.
Four decades after Helen and Teacher was first published, however, new information has surfaced that casts doubt about Lash’s motivations and raises concern about how his book has influenced Helen’s continuing legacy.
In the acknowledgments section of the 1980 edition, Lash writes that the American Foundation for the Blind, the repository for Helen Keller’s papers, “offered me its co-operation without any restrictions on what I could write.”11 As it turns out, there was considerably more to the relationship that Lash failed to acknowledge.
His primary contact at the AFB was a woman named Marguerite Levine, the AFB’s chief archivist, who he describes in his acknowledgment as a “cultivated Frenchwoman.” Born in France, Levine had come to work at the AFB in 1960 after seven years spent working in records management at the March of Dimes. Although she worked with Helen for less than a year, she would later reveal the awe that she felt in her presence, describing Helen as a “secular saint, almost a religion to herself.”12 A notation she left on a newspaper clipping about Helen’s seventy-fifth birthday party in 1955 suggests how fiercely protective Levine was of preserving that saintly image. In the article, the reporter writes about an exchange she witnessed at the party between Helen and Polly after Helen asked for a beer. When Polly told her “Not yet,” Helen snuck one anyway. “Helen does like beer,” Polly said, laughing. Presumably finding this an unseemly portrait when she came across it in the archives, Levine added a personal notation to the clipping, which she scrawled in pencil: “Horrible.”13
In an exit interview that she conducted upon her retirement from the AFB in 1985, Levine noted that the Foundation had “contracted” with Joseph Lash to write a biography of Helen Keller. Appearing to realize her slipup, she quickly corrects herself and states that the Foundation had “made available the Helen Keller collection” to Lash.14 Her slip of the tongue led to a search of the archives to determine what she may have been concealing. Those files include a trove of documentation revealing that the Foundation had in fact signed a contract with Lash—an arrangement that neither he nor the AFB ever formally acknowledged when the book was released.
It wasn’t the first time that the AFB had contracted a writer to tell its story. To commemorate its fiftieth anniversary in 1971, the Foundation commissioned a woman named Frances Koestler to chronicle the history of the AFB, which was published under the title The Unseen Minority. The book—billed as a “social history of blindness in the United States” but focusing primarily on the history of the Foundation—discussed at length Helen’s work with the AFB. The author was granted unrestricted access to many people who had known her for decades. Although Koestler always claimed that she had “complete freedom” and that her book was never censored, the Foundation’s former director Robert Barnett would later confess that he had been forced to intervene to prevent Koestler from turning the book into an “exposé” of Helen.15 Nevertheless, the Foundation did at least acknowledge their formal arrangement with Koestler when the book was published in 1976.
From the time that Lash signed on with the AFB, the pace of his research and writing was astonishing and could have only been accomplished with the assistance of Levine, who had applied for a $10,000 grant to build an office so that Lash could work with her in close collaboration. The original contract is missing from the archives, so we don’t know the exact terms of his agreement, or whether he also had a financial arrangement with Radcliffe, but there is enough available documentation to piece together the key provisions, including evidence that the contract called for the Foundation to receive 25 percent of any TV or movie rights derived from the book.16 It also gave him exclusive access to the contents of the Helen Keller Archives, as William Gibson discovered when he was denied permission to use the archives while he was researching his follow-up to The Miracle Worker in 1981—a Broadway play called Monday after the Miracle. And while the AFB did publicly acknowledge Lash’s “exclusive access” to the archives, few knew the true extent of this arrangement. A full year after the publication of Helen and Teacher, Lash himself personally wrote to Gibson explaining that he was reluctantly barring him from accessing the Keller papers. “Unfortunately, we are in the midst of negotiations for the television and movie rights to HELEN AND TEACHER,” Lash wrote. “I do not wish to cheapen these rights and risk legal challenges on the basis that I gave permission to another writer to go through the Helen Keller materials.”17
Although it’s uncertain whether the original agreement gave the AFB the right to make changes to his manuscript, there is evidence that Lash was sending regular updates to Patricia Smith, director of the AFB information department. Moreover, he was also sending her his chapters to “critique” as the book progressed, despite the fact that Helen had frequently found herself at odds with her longtime employer. Why, then, was Lash giving the Foundation the opportunity to shape the narrative?18
