"Saint? Helen Keller"

Rev. Bruce Russell-Jayne
March 1, 2009.

It is fitting to honor and celebrate our foremothers today.  International Women’s Day, this coming Sunday, March 8th – commemorates women’s rights and peace.  We owe much to women throughout history who brought messages of love, equality, and peace; messages which still need voicing.  The stories of historical figures are framed in the circumstances of their eras, but the hero we honor this morning can give us insight for our own lives and times.  It behooves us to listen to the words of reformers who have gone before us as we address some of the thornier human rights issues that still plague us.  One of the sources from which UUs draw inspiration is: “Words and deeds of prophetic men and women which challenge us to confront powers and structures of evil with justice, compassion, and the transforming power of love.”   As religious liberals we continue the struggle to bring about universal respect for human dignity in our country and throughout the world. 

Although she was not a UU, I honor Helen Keller as one of our progressive forebears, a woman who achieved personal greatness, a woman who clearly made the world a better place.  We admire her, a woman who displayed the fortitude to endure misfortune and the strength of character to face opposition unflinchingly.  Helen Keller’s life offers a wonderful example of an individual who, with help, overcame challenges and who in turn helped other people through adversity.  Every school child learns of her personal courage.  Hers is a story about a provocative, gutsy woman.   Helen’s life story contains messages which challenge us to solve problems of society which she first militated against almost a century ago.
However, Helen’s entire story isn’t often told now days.
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Helen, who was born in 1880 in Tuscumbia, Alabama lost both sight and hearing and became mute due to encephalitis when she was a toddler.  For young Helen, trying to communicate was extremely difficult and frustrating.  Living without sight, hearing or speech is almost impossible for me to comprehend.  Imagine for a moment if you can, young Helen eating a meal with her family and trying to tell them she didn’t like the food she was given.  She devised hand gestures to communicate with her family, but when they didn’t create the intended effect, she often flew into uncontrollable rages that terrified them.  "Sometimes," she later wrote, "I stood between two persons who were conversing and touched their lips. I could not understand, and was vexed.  I moved my lips and gesticulated frantically without result. This made me so angry at times that I kicked and screamed until I was exhausted."

Her family was very frustrated with the tantrums of this wild child and thought she was just too much to handle.  They meant well, but they couldn’t comfort her.  Sealed off from the world, imagine how lonely and un-loved she must have felt.  Her hopeless family could not know who she really was, could not understand what a vibrant personality was growing in isolation from them.   

Relatives advised Helen’s parents to send her to an institution to live.  In desperation, they sought help from the Perkins School for the Blind in Massachusetts.  Perkins School sent Anne Sullivan, a recent graduate of the school, to tutor Helen at her home in Alabama.  At Perkins, Sullivan had seen other blind deaf people learn to communicate through touching.  Anne saw that Helen was determined and skillful in getting what she needed.  She interpreted Helen’s tantrums as displays of courage and assertiveness. 

Anne used her finger to make patterns representing the alphabet in Helen's hand.  Helen quickly learned to finger-spell but did not yet relate the patterns to names for objects until one day Anne put Helen's hand under the spout of the outdoor water pump.  As the cool water gushed over Helen’s hand, Anne spelled "w-a-t-e-r" into the other hand.  Suddenly, the signals had meaning in Helen's mind.  She began to understand words as sets of symbols.  Helen rapidly learned more words, and within two years could read Braille and print English in block letters.  Through persistence and love, Sullivan broke through Keller's walls of silence and darkness and succeeded in conveying the "mystery of language” to her.

Anne went back to Boston with Helen so she could attend Perkins School.  With language Keller became the first blind-deaf person to effectively communicate with the sighted and hearing world; she was able to speak to it and live in it.  At age 24 Keller graduated cum laude from Radcliffe College, the first deafblind person to earn a bachelor of arts degree.  She proved how language could liberate the blind and the deaf.  She wrote, "Literature is my utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised."  A year before graduation, Keller wrote her first book - The Story of My Life.  This later became a play entitled The Miracle Worker whose title honors Anne Sullivan whose love and patience helped transform a wild child into a world famous, highly intelligent, articulate and sensitive woman who wrote, spoke and labored incessantly for the betterment of others.

Helen Keller is the subject of countless children’s books, and dozens of websites mention her prominently.  In almost all of these, the “miracle” of learning to read is the focus.  They summarize her adult life as one of “courage,” and of course her work for the deaf and blind is mentioned.   Helen wrote numerous books, columns, articles and speeches.  There is much from which to choose, but most frequently used in today’s media are quotes like this:
“Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.”
She is held up as a role model for children to teach an object lesson that anyone, even the most challenged, through strength of character and hard work can overcome the odds to become successful in life.
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Helen, despite her earlier displays of rage, is supposed to have developed a saintly character.  I quote the Grace Products website, one which sells a recent video about her, describing Keller’s character, “Helen spent a life in helping others. She had boundless energy.  Many noted her kindness, generosity and enthusiasm.  She thought the best of people and typically brought out the best.  She had numerous friends, and an endless communication with dignitaries around the world, but she never lost a sense of true empathy for the poor of the world--for the disabled.”   Grace Products likes this Keller quote:
“The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched.  They must be felt within the heart.”

This truly warm and beautiful sentiment helps us picture her as Saint Helen, but this depiction is a myth.  The Helen Keller known through The Miracle Worker and most children’s’ books is a very incomplete version of the real woman.  They leave out much of her personality and work.  We do Keller a disservice if we keep her bound in this sterilized, partial view of her life.  During her lifetime, Keller did her best to topple her saintly image.  She once quipped to Patty Duke, that her greatest joy after walks in the garden was her martini.

So here is - The Rest of the Story:  “Helen Keller was a radical, a committed socialist thinker and activist whose powerful and outspoken analysis of disability, class and capitalism kept her under illegal FBI surveillance for most of her adult life.”   I can assure you, you wouldn’t have heard this part of Keller’s life story in Paul Harvey’s conservative radio commentary.   You may have heard that Paul Harvey died last week; may he rest in peace.

People who only experience the The Miracle Worker version of Keller might be surprised to discover these other dimensions of her life. "My work for the blind," she wrote, "has never occupied a center in my personality.  My sympathies are with all who struggle for justice."
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Keller did begin her activism working for the blind, and she soon became interested in the causes for blindness.  When scientific research made her aware that children were being blinded after they contracted syphilis from their mothers at birth, she was instrumental in getting doctors to establish a process for disinfecting the eyes of newborns.  As she analyzed the sources of suffering in American society, she began to see disabilities as issues of social justice, and she broadened her involvement to include other progressive causes.  International Women’s Day is held on the anniversary of the women’s march in New York City in 1908 against child labor and in favor of women’s suffrage.  Keller’s high profile support for these issues clearly established her as part of the first wave of feminism, but her social critique did not stop there.

Keller, the Alabamian, came to believe in both racial and sexual equality.  She financially supported civil rights organizations like the NAACP, and she openly embraced Margaret Sanger’s very unpopular efforts to promote birth control.  She worked tirelessly for the poor, was an outspoken pacifist during both World Wars, and helped form the American Civil Liberties Union.  She came to all of these causes through her socialist ideology.  She was an active member of the Industrial Workers of the World, better known as the Wobblies, a radical labor union.  She believed that social inequality and war were symptoms of a fundamentally corrupt economic system based on greed and the relentless pursuit of profit.  She thought equality simply could not exist in a capitalist society.   Keller was always adamant in her vision:  She said, "I have entered the fight against the economic system in which we live. It is to be a fight to the finish and I ask no quarter.”   There is little wonder that she was on the FBI watch list.

Keller’s writings were often radical for her day and are still controversial in ours.  Here is an excerpt from her socialist speech, Strike Against War, delivered before the Women's Peace Party at Carnegie Hall in New York City in 1916 when World War I was in full swing.

“We are not free unless the men who frame and execute the laws represent the interests of the lives of the people and no other interest… From time immemorial men have followed with blind loyalty the strong men who had the power of money and of armies.  Even while battlefields were piled high with their own dead they have tilled the lands of the rulers and have been robbed of the fruits of their labor.  They have built palaces and pyramids, temples and cathedrals that held no real shrine of liberty… It is your duty to insist upon more radical measure.  It is your business to see that no child is employed in an industrial establishment or mine or store, and that no worker is needlessly exposed to accident or disease.  It is your business to make them give you clean cities, free from smoke, dirt and congestion.  It is your business to make them pay you a living wage.  It is your business to see that…everyone has a chance to be well born, well nourished, rightly educated... Strike against all ordinances and laws and institutions that continue the slaughter of peace and the butcheries of war… Be not dumb, obedient slaves in an army of destruction.  Be heroes in an army of construction.”

Social conservatives, who stress the ability of individuals to overcome adversity in our supposedly fair and equal society, never tell this side of Helen Keller.  We live in times no less dangerous than Keller’s.  Her World War I era speech reminds us that we must be diligent and oppose attempts to reframe history in support of narrow dogmas that would trample free thinking and enslave the human spirit.
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In writing this sermon I was tempted to cherry pick only the parts of Keller’s story that support current UU points of view.  But in fairness I must report that she, along with several other prominent liberals of her day, supported Eugenics, a now discredited concept which grew out of Social Darwinism.  Eugenics stated that ethnic groups achieve success or dominance because of inherent genetic superiority; it proposed improving the human race by keeping inferior people from breeding.  I guess that alone might keep her from sainthood.

Helen Keller was a complex woman – there were parts of her life that liberals hold up and parts that conservatives like to talk about.  This only increases my respect for her.  She was a whole person, not only because she became successful in a sighted and hearing world, not only because she had compassion and worked for others, but also because she was restless, she made people angry, and she made mistakes.

Could the courage, the life-long tenacity that Keller displayed as she lobbied for human rights, have existed if she had not felt helpless as a child?  Isolated and afraid, she struggled to get her family to understand her, and this “wild” energy became one of her strengths in her fights for justice.  Sometimes struggling through difficulties is character building.  Her deaf-blindness allowed her to identify with others who face barriers in life.  She understood the feelings of others who are held back from full personhood by circumstances beyond their control.

At the same time, if her parents had not been able to hire a full time tutor or send her to the leading school for the blind, would she have become famous or even have learned to read and write?  Keller saw that her deaf and blind contemporaries did not benefit from the privileges she had.  She said, “I owed my success partly to the advantages of my birth and environment…  The power to rise is not within the reach of everyone.”  She was much more than an example of American “can-do”.   She was a tireless advocate for those who were not realizing the American dream. Her gutsy challenge to the world order of her day was a pain in a lot of people’s sides.

She is the kind of person we should emulate, if not sanctify.  What better example can we give our children than Helen Keller, a powerful woman who believed the human spirit must be free and who worked with others toward a more humane and just world?  What better values can we teach our children than to use their right to free inquiry to dig out “The Rest of The Story”?