Helen Keller is not only an essential historical figure, but she is also still highly relevant today. The previously untold story of how, more than a century ago, “fake news” was deployed to discredit Keller and distract from her eloquent and persuasive support of Socialism, speaks as much about the present as the past.
By Victoria Martínez
In her lifetime, Helen Keller[1] was an American national treasure, and even something of a global superstar. The notoriety she had gained as a child in the 1880s, when her story of learning to read, write and communicate despite being blind, deaf and “mute” made international news, only increased throughout her life thanks to her ongoing accomplishments and advocacy for social causes. Nevertheless, it is the image of the young Helen Keller with her teacher, the “miracle worker” Anne Sullivan, that many people most associate with her.
This was as true in 1912 and 1913, when Keller began to draw widespread attention as a public speaker, as it was in 2018, when a handful of “educators” in Texas decided that she is a non-essential historical figure and should be removed from elementary school curriculum[2]. In her own time, even as a highly educated woman in her 30s with a noted career as a successful author and social activist, Keller was still frequently described with pseudo-paternal condescension as “the famous deaf, blind and mute girl.” But Keller was about to shred this public image of her and involuntarily set off a media debacle that is strikingly familiar today.
The Blindness of the People
Helen Keller had long been an advocate of causes related to blindness and other physical disabilities, and it was through this advocacy and the constant feeding of her intellectual curiosity that she came to embrace Socialism in 1909, particularly as an answer to the social problems of the day.
“As the years went by, and I read more widely, I learned that the miseries and failures of the poor are not always due to their own faults, that multitudes of men, for some strange reason, fail to share in the much talked of progress of the world,” Keller recalled.[3]
Extreme wealth inequality, exploitative labor practices, the proliferation of inner-city tenements and slums, insufficient health and human services for the poor, and gender and racial inequality, were major problems of the early 20th century that Keller took immensely seriously. She had never shied away from using her position to promote such causes, and she had always articulated her arguments intelligently and rationally.
“Our worst foes are ignorance, poverty, and the unconscious cruelty of our commercial society,” she told the Massachusetts Association for Promoting the Interests of the Blind in February 1911. “These are the causes of blindness; these are the enemies which destroy the sight of children and workmen and undermine the health of mankind.”[4]
Although she had used her own voice then, and her speech was reprinted in various newspapers, it was not until the summer of 1912, when her literal and figurative voice had grown stronger and bolder, that her words began to receive greater attention. Initially, she spoke to audiences primarily about her personal experiences and in support of the blind and deaf. But as time passed, she increasingly used her public platform to speak about social issues like women’s rights, safe labor practices, and better working and living conditions for the poor.
At the same time, events were unfolding that gave her the confidence to openly advocate for Socialism. Although she had joined the Socialist Party in Massachusetts in 1909, she had only rarely publicly discussed Socialism before the newspapers caught wind of her affiliation in early 1912. When they did, the articles and editorials they published were frequently either attacks on her abilities or attempts to position her as a Socialist dupe.
“On such negative and relatively insignificant matters have been written many editorials in the capitalist press and in the Socialist press. The clippings fill a drawer,” Keller wrote in an essay published in the Socialist daily newspaper, The New York Call in November 1912. The essay, “How I Became a Socialist,” was intended, she wrote, “to make a statement of my position and correct some false reports and answer some criticisms which seem to me unjust.”[5]
More significantly, she mused knowingly, “If on such a small quantity of fact so much comment has followed, what will the newspapers do if I ever set to work in earnest to write and talk in behalf of socialism?”[6]
In fact, she had already set to work doing just that.
“One of the things I want to write about is the social blindness from which so many people seem to suffer, an inability to see and to understand the fundamental conditions underlying the relations between the workpeople and their employers,” she told The New York World in September 1912. “The key of the situation lies in the central fact of our present industrial system—the ownership of everything by the few.”[7]
The theme of the metaphorical loss of senses such as sight, hearing, and speech, which she referred to as “social blindness,” was one that she used and returned to often. In doing so, she was demonstrating an acuity that transcends the traditional senses of the average person, then as now. In her sightless, noiseless world, she realized that most people fail to use not only their senses, but also their minds, to their fullest capacity.
“I learn that our physicians are making great progress in the cure and the prevention of blindness. What surgery of politics, what antiseptic of common sense and right thinking, shall be applied to cure the blindness of our judges, and to prevent the blindness of the people, who are the court of last resort?” Keller had written in 1911.[8]
For Keller, Socialism provided solutions to social blindness and a future in which she envisioned:
“There will be strife, but no aimless, self-defeating strife. There will be competition, but no soul-destroying, hand-crippling competition. There will be only honest emulation in cooperative effort. There will be example to instruct, companionship to cheer, and to lighten burdens. Each hand will do its part in the provision of food, clothing, shelter, and the other great needs of man, so that if poverty comes all will bear it alike, and if prosperity shines all will rejoice in its warmth.”[9]
This became her guiding message as she embarked on a highly publicized lecture tour in early 1913. As she drew both crowds and her fair share of positive media coverage, her name became suddenly and inexplicably linked in the newspapers with Spanish royalty.
“The Dumb to Teach the Dumb”
At the same time Keller was traveling the east coast on her lecture tour speaking on issues of social importance, the newspapers were describing her as preparing to leave at any moment for Spain at the personal request of the country’s queen to become teacher to her “deaf and dumb” son, Infante (Prince) Jaime.
The previous November, it had been reported that the physician to the Spanish Royal Court, Vicente Llorente y Matos, had just completed an extended visit to the U.S. on a private mission for King Alfonso XIII and Queen Victoria Eugenia of Spain to gather the best medical knowledge available for the treatment of their second son. According to The New York Times and other newspapers, part of that mission was to interview Helen Keller. For whatever reason, no such meeting ever took place between Dr. Llorente and Keller, so the task was reportedly passed on to the Spanish Ambassador.
In April 1913, The New York Times rehashed and elaborated on this story, but was still only reporting that the King and Queen wanted the ambassador to merely interview Keller. Other newspapers followed with similar stories, both in the fall and spring. Amid this benign news cycle appeared a bizarre article in the popular Boston Post.
“Helen Keller to Teach the Spanish Prince Jaime. The Famous Mute Tells Her Plan to the Sunday Post,” the headline blared on March 30, 1913.[10]
Nearly everything about the article was either false or inaccurate, as John Albert Macy – Anne Sullivan’s husband[11] – stated to the press the following day: “There is not a bit of truth in it.”[12] But the damage had been done. The sensational story spread rapidly and persisted despite repeated denials.
Keller had been on the receiving end of “fake news” before – quite recently in fact, and in connection with Socialism. This time, however, the news persisted for years instead of months, despite repeated denials. In 1916, she wrote in a letter, “That story has been in circulation for almost three years. There is no foundation whatever for it, yet it seems to persist despite anything I can do to contradict it.”[13]
By late spring 1913, speculation had reached fever pitch that Keller would be installed at the Spanish royal court to teach the prince in the same way Anne Sullivan had taught her.
As the false reports gained traction and became more elaborate in detail, they also became fodder for public criticism in the newspapers of Keller as a proponent of Socialism. The most significant of these criticisms was that levelled in an editorial published in New York’s Evening Sun on June 4, 1913, which elicited a forceful published response from Keller.
A few days earlier, the Evening Sun’s sister paper, The Sun, printed a supposed dispatch from Madrid, Spain dated May 20, which reported, “Miss Helen Keller… has arrived at the Royal Palace and during the next few months she will teach the unfortunate little Prince…”.[14]
In fact, on May 20, the Boston Transcript reported that Keller had enjoyed a rowboat ride on the pond at Boston’s Public Garden just that morning. The paper also reported on the lecture she had delivered the previous day at Boston’s Shubert Theatre.
Between this and the repeated denials, it wouldn’t have been hard for almost anyone, never mind a journalist or newspaper editor, to ascertain that Helen Keller was most certainly not in Madrid tutoring the prince. All except the editor of New York’s Evening Sun, that is, who threw caution – and common sense – to the wind and attacked Keller and her political views as unsuitable for such an appointment.
“Perhaps it is feared at the court that she may carry her teaching a little too far and impart some of her latest discoveries to the young Prince. For… [she] has turned her attention to the terrible evils of the capitalistic system under which she was brought up, and has learned to reiterate all the socialistic jargon with that extraordinary quickness and fluency which she has shown in everything she has acquired. It might be inconvenient in these days to turn a Prince into a dispenser of socialistic commonplace.”[15]
If he thought his target was an easy one, he was sorely mistaken. Not only was Keller a well-educated and highly-articulate woman capable of arguing her position quite effectively, she was also far better informed on the subject of the Spanish prince than the editor of the Evening Sun.
“You set out with the assumption that a piece of newspaper gossip is a fact,” she wrote in her published response a few days later. “You make no effort to ascertain the truth. You put spur to your fancy, and your gallop is accelerated by the speed of your motion. You strike out blindly to right, to left, above, far and near, at random. You cut and thrust in the dark, vain, implacable man! You almost prove that it is impossible to be just and a capitalist. Mr. Editor, it is you who are deaf and dumb and blind.”[16]
Keller’s assessment struck at the heart of what was either sheer ignorance or willful disregard of the truth on the part of the Evening Sun’s editor, Frank H. Simonds, who, as the chief editorial writer, had almost certainly penned the editorial. Though Simonds was a seasoned New York journalist and went on to win a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing at another newspaper in 1917, he had demonstrated a clear lack of personal and journalistic integrity with his Helen Keller editorial.
At the very least, Simonds had lived up to the Evening Sun’s long history of sensationalism by not only perpetuating the refuted story, but also by politicizing it to attack and discredit Keller. Then, as now, false narratives became a weapon employed by journalists with an agenda.
A Mind Trained to Think
Throughout her life – particularly when she was speaking and writing as a political activist – Helen Keller was confronted with the limited vision and social blindness of her critics, who saw value in her and her story only insofar as it remained easy and unthreatening. Even today, if Helen Keller’s “radical” views were more well-known, it’s likely that she would slip severely in the estimation of many whose knowledge of her is currently limited to some version of “The Miracle Worker.”[17]
On the other hand, this limited understanding of Keller and all that she did and stood for may very well be what is preventing her from being recognized as truly essential and relevant in the first place. After all, it is not just students who stand to benefit from an education that includes Helen Keller.
Right now, one of the skills desperately needed in the world is critical thinking. Countless adults lack it, and few children are learning it. Most people speak more than they listen, write (or at least type) more than they read, and argue more than they seek to learn. Despite, or perhaps because of, social media, we are undeniably suffering from social blindness. More than one hundred years ago, in July 1913, Keller summarized both the problem and the solution when she stated in an address at a conference in Massachusetts:
“I have the advantage of a mind trained to think, and that is the difference between myself and most people, not my blindness and their sight.”[18]
To this, I would add that unlike Keller’s blindness, mental and social blindness are – more often than not – a matter of choice.
Postscript: I authored this article in fall 2018, after reading that the Board of Education in my home state of Texas had voted to remove Helen Keller, Hillary Clinton, and other historically important women from the elementary school history curriculum. Fortunately, due in part to public outcry, the decision was reversed not long after. Soon after writing this, a history magazine expressed interest in publishing it. However, since that has never happened, I have decided to publish it here now.
[1] Helen Adams Keller (1880-1968), who at 19-months-old contracted an unknown illness that rendered her deaf and blind.
[2] See Postscript.
[3] Keller, Helen. “The Hand of the World.” American Magazine Dec. 1912: 43-45. Rpt. in Helen Keller: Her Socialist Years. Philip S. Foner, ed. New York: International Publishers, 1967. 38-45.
[4] Keller, Helen. “The Conservation of Eyesight.” Speech delivered to the Massachusetts Association for Promoting the Interests of the Blind, 14 Feb. 1911. Rpt. in Helen Keller, Public Speaker: Sightless but Seen, Deaf but Heard. Lois J. Einhorn. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998. 91.
[5] Keller, Helen. “How I Became a Socialist.” The New York Call. (3 Nov 1912). Rpt. in Foner, 21.
[6] ibid
[7] “Deaf, Dumb and Blind, Yet Keenly Observant and Thoughtful, Helen Keller Talks of Her Life and Life Work to The World.” The New York World 22 Sept. 1912.
[8] Keller, Helen. “In Defense of Fred Warren.” The New York Call. 1 Jan. 1911. Rpt. in Foner, 28.
[9] Keller, “The Hand of the World” 44-45
[10] “Helen Keller to Teach the Spanish Prince Jaime.” Boston Post 30 Mar. 1913.
[11] Keller and the Macy’s lived together at the time, with John acting as Helen’s editor and manager.
[12] “Helen Keller Not to Teach.” Boston Evening Transcript. 31 Mar. 1913.
[13] Keller, Helen. “To Dr. Kerr Love.” 26 Sept 1916. Rpt. in Helen Keller in Scotland: A Personal Record Written by Herself. Ed. James Kerr Love. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1933. 73.
[14] “Helen Keller to Aid Prince. Will Give Lessons to Deaf and Dumb Son of King Alfonso.” The Sun (New York) 1 June 1913.
[15] “Helen Keller and Her Pupil.” Evening Sun (New York) 4 June 1913. Rpt. in Foner, 122.
[16] Keller, Helen. “To the Editor of the New York Evening Sun.” Evening Sun (New York) 8 June 1913.
[17] Originally a 1957 play based on Keller’s 1903 autobiography, The Story of My Life, “The Miracle Worker” took on a life of its own in subsequent years and is arguably still the dominant narrative of Helen Keller’s life.
[18] Foner, Philip S., ed. Helen Keller: Her Socialist Years. New York: International Publishers, 1967. 53.
A Bit of History 