HELLEN KELLER

A severe illness left her blind and deaf as an infant, but she refused to let her disability stop her from making her mark on life. Her success as a scholar and lecturer inspired millions. She proved to the world that one could overcome almost any obstacle. She is Helen Keller, an American Woman of Achievement. Lift every voice and sing Till earth and heaven ring Ring with the harmonies of liberty Let us march on till victory is won The time was the turn of the last century. A deaf and blind 19-year-old woman named Helen Keller finished taking the entrance exams for Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts, typing her answers on a braille writer. Although her test scores were excellent, the college faced a difficult decision about accepting Helen Keller as a student because of the challenges her disabilities presented. In 1899 she took the advanced test, and the college authorities were obviously not at all convinced that she should come. To everyone's amazement, perhaps even including Helen's, she was able to pass the entrance exams into Radcliffe. She was fluent in English, French, German, Greek. She knew the history of all of those countries, and she was an extraordinary writer. And in point of fact, she was the highest scorer, I believe, in English in the entrance exams to Radcliffe. At first, Radcliffe turned her down. But Keller had faced down adversity of a far greater magnitude before, so she persisted. There are some letters in the archives which show people trying to put pressure on the college authorities. And there's one letter in particular from Helen herself really asking the college to take a chance and to let her come. In part, Keller's letter reads, I realize that the obstacles in the way of my receiving a college education are very great. To others, they may seem insurmountable. But dear sir, a true soldier does not acknowledge defeat before the battle. And they duly admitted her in the fall of 1900. Four years later, Helen Keller, with the help of her guide and teacher, Annie Sullivan, graduated from Radcliffe College with honors. For Keller, it was another challenge met, another achievement in the life of one of this century's most remarkable and admirable women. Helen Keller was born on June 27, 1880, in the small town of Tuscumbia, Alabama. Her parents, Kate and Arthur Keller, were thrilled by the vivacious, inquisitive, and bright baby girl. Then in February 1882, 19-month-old Helen became seriously ill. She had this fever, and when she eventually came out of it and fully, quote, recovered, she was completely deaf and completely blind. The family, of course, was a complete loss with what to do. And like so many families, what happens is, of course, as the child grows older and older, the family has problems with this whole thing. When it's a baby, it isn't so bad. But as a child develops, what do they do? And being the sort of family they were, the father was an educated man. He was the editor of a newspaper and the owner of a newspaper. He was a well-read man. He realized that this wasn't going to be enough just to have the child around. Something had to be done, and he reached out. Helen's father was determined to see his daughter cured. He traveled to doctors up and down the East Coast looking for a miracle. Helen changed from a lively, curious girl into a withdrawn and angry child, striking out and unable to communicate in any way other than a crude sign language. Later in her life, Keller explained what life was like for her then. The desire to express myself grew. The few signs I used became less and less adequate, and my failure to make myself understood were invariably followed by outbursts of passion. I struggled, not that struggled. Help matters, but the spirit of resistance was strong within me. After a while, the need of some means of communication became so urgent that these outbursts occurred daily, sometimes hourly. But there was to be no instant cure for Helen Keller. In desperation, her father took Helen to Washington to see the world-famous inventor of the telephone and educator of the deaf. He was able to make connections with ophthalmologists and people like Alexander Graham Bell. And it was through that contact with Bell that you get connection made with Perkins Institution for the Blind. Helen later recounted her first meeting with Bell. He understood my signs, and I knew it and loved him at once. But I did not dream that interview would be the door through which I should pass from darkness into light, from isolation to friendship, companionship, knowledge, love. While Bell continued to play an important role in Helen's life for decades, it was his introduction to Perkins Institute in Boston that started a new life for the girl. Bell had Mr. Keller write to the school's director, Michael Anagnos, to suggest the right kind of teacher for Helen. Anagnos had no trouble approving a young woman for the Kellers. Annie Sullivan, a 21-year-old orphan of Irish immigrants, was, according to Anagnos, exceedingly intelligent, strictly honest, industrious and ladylike in her manner, familiar with the methods of teaching deaf, mute and blind children. Annie Sullivan, herself a student at Perkins, was just graduating, herself low vision, and someone who wanted to teach, and she was recommended to go down to Duscumbia, where she did go. And the story picks up with Annie Sullivan being perhaps the greatest teacher of all in that she introduced Helen Keller to the world. Until Annie Sullivan arrived and really worked with her and made that connection again, the real connection, when she opened that door, when she showed Helen, yes, there are other ways of communicating, then there was a liberation. This is the birthday of her soul. Annie realized that Helen was smart, but had not found any way of expressing herself. Information was being received and understood, but not communicated back to the outside world. So the connection, the understanding of language that Annie Sullivan helped Helen achieve was the pivotal point in her life. She was able to express some of the basic needs for food, for water, for toileting, some of those basic needs she was able to express. But very few other needs were expressed. Very few of those needs that you and I have every day for learning, to explore the exploratory needs, for companionship. And that was all locked in. The story of the pump and water where we get this very dramatic incident is the business of connection. Annie has been trying, trying, trying to get her not to just repeat, not just to say doll cup. Keller described the incident in her book, The Story of My Life. Someone was drawing water, and my teacher placed my hand under the spout and as the cool stream gushed over one hand, she spelt into the other the word water. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly, I felt a misty consciousness, as if something forgotten, a thrill of returning thought, and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that W-A-T-E-R meant the wonderful, cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free. Everything had a name, and each name gave birth to a new thought. Annie Sullivan had worked a miracle. She not only allowed Helen Keller to survive, if you will, but she allowed Helen Keller to thrive through the understanding that words and symbols mean something in the world. Once the secret was revealed, the floodgates opened, and Helen was determined to make up for lost years. She learned to read in Braille, the raised dot system developed for blind people. She learned to write in the square hand script, fashionable at the time. And Annie continually talked to Helen by spelling words into her hand. In this scene, filmed many years later, Helen is talking with her companion, Polly Thompson. This was the primary communications tool for Helen for her whole life. She just gobbled up learning, and the unfortunate thing is she didn't have access to the wonderful technology that's available for blind people today. A deafblind person can sit down in front of a device, electronic device, and get this morning's newspaper in Braille. But for Helen Keller to get the newspaper, Ann Sullivan had to sit down with her, or someone as skilled as Ann Sullivan, and spell out letters at a time, the headlines. I mean, it would take her two minutes to go over maybe two or three sentences of a headline in the newspaper. And if she wanted more, just imagine the time that it took for Helen Keller to ingest all this information, and miraculously, so quickly, she was able to give it back with new, brand new information, her own brain working, her own ideas, after getting such little information into that brain, coming back and giving so much back to society. It's just incredible to think of it. Helen's education became a nonstop acquiring of knowledge. Soon enough, Helen needed more exposure to the world, and she and Annie went to the Perkins Institute in Boston, where Helen had access to a large Braille library, and to many other children who were sight-impaired. They decided, the two of them together, by the time she was in high school, that this indeed was a very gifted child, and even though in those days, which we're now talking about the late 1800s, early 1900s, women going to college was not a very common thing. It was a desire that both Annie and Helen shared, that she should go to college. The idea of going to Radcliffe, I think, stems from the business of our own intellectual development. People like Annie Sullivan, but especially, I think, people like Alexander Graham Bell, who she knew very well, Mark Twain, who she knew very well, the others, the intellectuals in the Boston area. When she was a student, she typed on her Braille typewriter, because then she could test herself. She could see if she'd been making mistakes, and then these would have been transcribed for her, for the professors. Taking an examination was a big problem. Again, the college authorities were very concerned to show that she was doing everything properly, and they particularly wanted to exclude Annie Sullivan from the room, in fact, from the college premises. Ms. Sullivan was asked to leave as soon as the examination papers started over from Harvard Yard, so that they were not, she never saw them. There were two proctors in the examination room, and Helen was given her own room. There was a proctor to supervise Helen, and there was another proctor to supervise the first proctor. Radcliffe was hard work for both Helen and Annie, but there was a very social side to Helen as well. She was obviously quite popular with her classmates. She was elected the vice president of the class every year, and they recalled how she would come to the class dances. These were dances where just other women students were present, and they would dance with each other and stop and have ice cream and so on. She often went bicycling with Annie Sullivan on the back of a tandem and was quite well known around Cambridge. She was a star, no surprise, at Radcliffe, and was very much influenced by a Professor Copeland, who was an English professor known lovingly as Copeland, who noticed very soon that Helen had an amazing gift for writing. And so Helen did do a great deal of writing and was very successful even in college in publishing her writing. At some point, Curtis Bock, who was the editor of the Ladies Home Journal, got wind of this, and he visited her and persuaded her to write the story of her life, her autobiography. Keller's stories then got published as a book, The Story of My Life, which was published when she was still at Radcliffe. It was immediately successful nationwide and added to her already considerable fame. Her writing was enormously important to her. That was the only way in which she could reach out to people. As I said, her speaking was not very good, and unless you knew the manual alphabet or could pick up her speech as her teacher, Annie Sullivan, could by putting her hand on her throat, it was impossible to have very much contact. So her writing was both important for the public but also must have been the only way in which she could really express her thoughts. After graduating from college, Helen and Annie were faced with a dilemma. How were they to support themselves in the coming years? Annie married a Harvard instructor named John Macy, and the three of them lived happily together for a number of years. Helen wrote countless magazine articles about the blind and deaf, proclaimed her politics by coming out in favor of women's suffrage, pacifism, and socialism. In 1908, she published a second book, The World I Live In, describing how she functioned in the world of hearing and seeing people. She was a great supporter of all kinds of causes, progressive causes. She was a socialist. She was in favor of abortion. She was an activist on behalf of blacks, a member of the NAACP. She supported the textile workers on strike at Lawrence. She really put herself on the line, but above all, she put herself on the line for the handicapped. In need of money and still looking for outlets for her thoughts, Helen and Annie took to the lecture circuit for years. It was the beginning of a new and successful career that Helen would pursue for the next half century. So she went on tour to give lectures, and these were very fine lectures, very elegant lectures, where Annie would come out and introduce the fact that this is a woman that she's worked with since childhood, and then at the end, Helen Keller would come out. In spite of her disabilities, Helen Keller became one of America's best-loved public speakers. With Annie repeating Helen's thoughts, they communicated more than just words, but also the will to overcome obstacles. They became embodiments and symbols of the human spirit. In the aftermath of World War I, Helen Keller was very active in showing the veterans that disabilities could be overcome. She was concerned with the blinded vets of World War I and actually went around traveling to various hospitals to visit them to give them hope. By 1919, Helen Keller's fame was such that she and Annie were invited to Hollywood to make a movie. She goes out and has this incredible experience of being involved in the early cinema, the early movie-making, and they want to show her doing extraordinary things, and so they got her involved in things like horseback riding, flying in an aeroplane. It showed her first aeroplane ride, a daring feat at that time. She's taken around, you know, she becomes a sort of celebrity. People like Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks Sr. and other, Mary Pickford, I believe, are all sort of involved, and she's another darling. You've got to remember as well that Helen was a very beautiful young lady. This movie told Helen Keller's life. It was a flop, a complete flop, and in point of fact the money she made from that film barely paid her expenses out to Los Angeles and back. But in brushing with that crowd, if you will, she became known and knowledgeable about vaudeville and the vaudeville circuit, and went into the vaudeville circuit with Annie Sullivan Macy. Although Annie didn't fully accept their new life on stage, economic necessity kept them traveling the country for the next five years. The show consisted of Annie telling the audience about Helen's education and then Helen answering questions from the audience. Because her speech was almost impossible for most people to understand, Annie made a translation for the crowds. And I let her speak by putting her hand on my face how we talked with our mouths. I am not dumb now. Because of Annie's deteriorating health, they were now accompanied by another woman, Polly Thompson. But more importantly, Helen made a career move that was one of the most important in her life. She became involved with the fledgling American Foundation for the Blind and forever after was associated with aiding the sight-impaired. The American Foundation for the Blind was established and was looking for someone to lead forth the organization in terms of fundraising and contacted Helen Keller, and that relationship began in 1923. Until 1968, where she died. Keller worked ceaselessly as a fundraiser for the AFB, accompanied by both Annie and Polly. Over the next decades, Helen met many of the world's great leaders and artists. She was never far from the public eye. Between trips, she also was able to write several books, all of which were greeted warmly by the public. While many people disagreed with her liberal stance on women's rights, labor unions, abortion and other controversial issues, Helen Keller was by now a national treasure and her views were given wide circulation. After giving herself selflessly for nearly half a century to Helen's care, Annie Sullivan was nearly blind herself. When Annie finally died, Helen Keller lost her greatest champion. Annie came back and fortunately died in 1936, and it was probably the greatest tragedy in Helen's lifetime. She really felt, and it was true, that part of her had very much died with Annie. Now with Polly Thompson taking Annie's place, Helen continued her world travels. As a guest of the Japanese government in 1937, Helen took the country by storm, giving 97 lectures in 39 Japanese cities. Her message was world peace, and she was devastated when the peace was broken at Pearl Harbor. Back in the United States, she published another book and then spent the World War II years touring military hospitals to cheer up the wounded soldiers. Helen did what she did during World War I, and that was to visit with war-blinded soldiers, but all over Europe. With the war over, Helen and Polly resumed their travel on behalf of the American Foundation for the Blind and other organizations. They went to Australia, South Africa, Israel, Asia, mostly as emissaries for the United States government, helping to organize and promote programs for the disabled. And no matter where Helen Keller went, she spread hope. But time was also running out for both Helen and Polly. Polly Thompson, on one of her trips with Helen, succumbed unfortunately to a stroke, and then when she came back with Helen, had another stroke and was quite ill for some time in Westport, Connecticut, at their home in Argon Ridge. Polly died in 1960, and Helen's life changed when she had a stroke the next year. She lived quietly in Westport, keeping up with her heavy correspondence and seeing friends. Then in June 1968, Helen Keller died, just a few weeks shy of her 88th birthday. A great American was finally laid to rest next to Annie and Polly in Washington's National Cathedral. Her legacy is that of a person who overcame so much adversity. She overcame the adversity of being handicapped by blindness and deafblindness, handicapped by being a woman of her time. These are her struggles. Her legacy is that she opened doors. Once the door was opened by Annie, she opened and continued to open doors. I think that is the great legacy of Helen Keller. I think the real legacy of Helen Keller is her belief in the human spirit and her belief that regardless of what one is given in life to deal, if one works hard enough, it can be overcome. And her belief in people. And most of all, her belief in education and the need for education to be someone who is contributing to the world. If somebody who is so completely handicapped in so remarkable a way could manage to be so effective, then who are we to complain about whatever goes wrong in our lives? I think Helen Keller's legacy is no matter what the adversity, no matter what kind of problems, what kind of challenges that life offers you as an individual, there are ways you can deal with challenges and be successful and control your own destiny and while doing so, making life better for other people. She was able to prove that. And again, many people didn't believe she was able to do it, but she was able to prove that throughout her entire life. Helen Keller, an American woman of achievement.