After the Miracle, page 42
36. “The Miracle Worker,” IMDB Pro Box Office stats.
37. NBH, Box 11, NBH journal entry, Sept. 18, 1960, NBHC.
38. I submitted a request to the AFB asking how much the Foundation has received from The Miracle Worker over the years and whether the AFB still receives royalties. Haley Linville, business service manager at the AFB, responded that she could “not find records of any royalties received by AFB for The Miracle Worker.”
39. NBH, Box 11, NBH journal entry, Apr. 4, 1960, NBHC.
40. Transcript of unpublished Lash interview with Keith Henney, Nov. 29, 1977, Joseph Lash Papers, Box 53—Interviews, FDRL.
41. Transcript of unpublished Lash interview with Winifred Corbally, Apr. 25, 1978, Joseph Lash Papers, Box 53—Interviews, FDRL.
42. Ibid.
43. Ibid.
44. Helen Keller to Lail Gillies, Aug. 22, 1960, HKA.
45. NBH, Box 11, journal entry, July 2, 1960, NBHC. Nella was not present to witness this incident, but she had been checking in regularly with Seide and Winnie Corbally to keep tabs on her old friend.
46. Dr. Forris B. Chick to Evelyn Seide, Nov. 6, 1961, HKA.
47. “Correspondence between Evelyn D. Seide, Dr. Forris B. Chick, Jansen Noyes, Jr., and James S. Adams regarding the health of Helen Keller, including the course of action after her stroke,” Nov. 6, 1961, HKA.
48. Author interview with Paul Richard McGann, Sept. 24, 2021. He recalls that Robert Smithdas believed Helen had “dementia or Alzheimer’s disease” in her final years.
49. Coretta Scott King to Winifred Corbally, June 3, 1968, HKA.
50. Winifred A. Corbally to Phillips and Ravia Keller, Dec. 9, 1964, HKA.
51. Phillips Keller to Winifred A. Corbally, Apr. 7, 1965, HKA.
52. Ibid.
53. Phillips Keller to Winifred Corbally, Sept. 20, 1965, HKA.
54. Phillips Keller to Winifred Corbally, Apr. 9, 1968, HKA.
55. Phillips was eleven years younger than Helen. She did spend one summer with her brother and his equally conservative wife, Ravia, at their Dallas home, but the experience was not a pleasant one, according to Polly, who told Nella that Helen had no desire to live with Phillips.
56. Phillips Keller to Winifred A. Corbally and James S. Adams, Oct. 21, 1967, HKA.
57. “Copy of eulogy given by Senator Lister Hill at Helen Keller’s funeral,” HKA.
58. “Letter from E. Seide forwarding Helen Keller’s final wishes regarding funeral services,” July 19, 1961, HKA.
59. M. R. Barnett to Nella Braddy Henney, Oct. 6, 1966, HKA.
60. “Letter from E. Seide forwarding Helen Keller’s final wishes regarding funeral services,” July 19, 1961, HKA.
61. Describing the service to Joseph Lash, Winnie Corbally mentioned “the poor people’s march with tents in the capital.”
62. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), p. 165.
63. “Speech written by Helen Keller about the blindness of society to its problems,” 1912, HKA.
Chapter Twenty-Four: Helen and Teacher
1. Van Wyck Brooks, Helen Keller, Sketch for a Portrait (New York: Dutton, 1956).
2. Catherine Owens Peare, The Helen Keller Story (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1959).
3. Jansen Noyes Jr. to Garfield Merner, undated, HKA.
4. Joseph Lash, Helen and Teacher (New York: Delacorte, 1980).
5. “Horror Expressed Following Report,” Birmingham News, July 23, 1981; “Let the Dead Rest Is Reaction to Story on Helen Keller Politics,” Birmingham News, July 12, 1981.
6. “Joseph Lash Is Dead,” New York Times, Aug. 23, 1987, p. 40.
7. Ibid.
8. In their 1998 study, The Soviet World of American Communism, historians John Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Kyrill M. Anderson document a loss of approximately 13 percent of party members after the pact, contradicting the dubious claim of Jeffrey Burds in a book review of The American History of Communism published in the American Historical Review (vol. 124, no. 2 [Apr. 2019], pp. 595–99) that “more than three quarters of American Communists (including most Jews) would abruptly resign from the Communist Party after the Pact.” Haynes and Klehr document CPUSA membership at a peak of 66,000 in January 1939, falling to 50,000 members by January 1941, though the party had dropped from its rolls 7,500 immigrants who weren’t US citizens, which accounts for approximately 50 percent of that loss. A number of other historians have concurred that Burds’s claim is vastly inflated. It is impossible, of course, to estimate how many Fellow Travelers distanced themselves from the party after August 1939.
9. “Secret Hoover Files Show Misuse of FBI,” Washington Post, Dec. 12, 1983. In 1983, a cache of declassified FBI files revealed that an FBI agent named G. C. Burton had written a memo in 1943 revealing that two colonels had told him the army counter-intelligence corps had brought FDR tapes that purported to capture Eleanor Roosevelt having sex in a hotel room with Lash, who was a thirty-three-year-old Army Air Corps sergeant at the time and allegedly under surveillance for suspected involvement with leftist groups. Lash later vehemently denied the affair.
10. Lash, HAT, p. 704.
11. Ibid., p. 14.
12. “Biographical interview, article, and letters of congratulations regarding the retirement of archivist Marguerite Levine from the Helen Keller Archive at the American Foundation for the Blind,” Apr. 1985, AFB.
13. “Helen Likes Beer,” blog post by Justin Gardner, June 1, 2021, APH.
14. “Biographical interview, article, and letters of congratulations regarding the retirement of archivist Marguerite Levine from the Helen Keller Archive at the American Foundation for the Blind,” Apr. 1985, AFB.
15. Unpublished transcript of Joseph Lash interview with Robert Barnett, Mar. 11, 1978, Joseph Lash Papers, Box 53—Interviews, FDRL.
16. Joseph Lash to Marguerite Levine, Dec. 26, 1981, AFB.
17. Joseph Lash to William Gibson, Feb. 21, 1981, AFB.
18. Patricia Smith to Joseph Lash, Apr. 7, 1978, AFB.
19. Transcript of unpublished Lash interview with Nancy Hamilton, Joseph Lash Papers, Box 53—Interviews, FDRL.
20. Joseph Lash to Patricia Smith, Aug. 2, 1978, AFB.
21. Joseph Lash to Marguerite Levine, Dec. 26, 1981, AFB.
22. Nielsen, Radical Lives, 9; Nielsen, Helen Keller: Selected Writings, 235.
23. Keller, Open Door, p. 134.
24. Nielsen, BTMW, introduction.
Epilogue
1. Olivia B. Waxman, “Co-Founding the ACLU, Fighting for Labor Rights and Other Helen Keller Accomplishments Students Don’t Learn in School,” Time, Dec. 15, 2020.
2. Ted Cruz tweet, Dec. 17, 2020.
3. Donald Trump Jr. tweet, Dec. 17, 2020.
4. Stella Young TedX Talk, Sydney, Australia, 2014.
5. Cristina Hartmann, “Helen Keller’s Shadow: Why We Need to Stop Making Movies about Helen Keller,” Disability Visibility Project, Nov. 15, 2021.
6. Email from Marc Safman to Paul Richard McGann, Feb. 15, 2022.
7. Haben Girma, “Texas, Keep Helen Keller in Your Schools,” Santa Fe New Mexican, Sept. 24, 2018.
8. Haben Girma Facebook post, June 24, 2020.
9. Author interview with a producer of Becoming Helen Keller, Jan. 25, 2022.
10. Keller, Midstream, p. 173.
About the Author
Max Wallace is a New York Times bestselling author, historian, and disability advocate. His books include The American Axis, about the Nazi collaboration of two American icons, Charles Lindbergh and Henry Ford; and Muhammad Ali’s Greatest Fight, about Ali’s battle against the US government over the Vietnam War, which was later adapted into a Hollywood movie directed by Stephen Frears. In 2018, his book In the Name of Humanity won the Canadian Jewish Literature Award for Holocaust history. For more than a decade, Wallace has written video description for AMI-TV, the world’s first television network for blind and visually impaired people.
Also by Max Wallace
In the Name of Humanity
The American Axis
Muhammad Ali’s Greatest Fight
Max Wallace, After the Miracle
