Helen Keller: Her Socialist Years

Helen Adams Keller (6/27/1880–6/1/68), author, political activist & lecturer, was the 1st deafblind person to earn a BA. She campaigned for women's suffrage, labor rights, socialism & other radical causes. She was as an advocate for the disabiled, a suffragist, a pacifist, an opponent of Woodrow Wilson, a radical socialist & a birth control supporter. In 1915 she & George Kessler founded the Helen Keller Internat'l organization, devoted to research in vision, health & nutrition. In 1920 she helped to found the ACLU. She traveled to over 40 countries. She met every President from Grover Cleveland to Lyndon B. Johnson & was friends with famous figures like Alexander Graham Bell, Charlie Chaplin & Mark Twain. Keller & Twain were both considered radicals at the beginning of the 20th century. As a consequence, their political views have been forgotten or glossed over. She was a member of the Socialist Party & campaigned & wrote in support of the working class from 1909 to 1921. She supported SP candidate Eugene V. Debs in each of his campaigns for the presidency. Before reading Progress & Poverty, she was already a socialist who believed that Georgism was a good step in the right direction. She later wrote of finding "in Henry George’s philosophy a rare beauty & power of inspiration, & a splendid faith in the essential nobility of human nature." Newspaper columnists who had praised her courage & intelligence before she expressed socialist views now called attention to her disabilities. The editor of the Brooklyn Eagle wrote that her "mistakes sprung out of the manifest limitations of her development." She responded to that editor, referring to having met him before he knew of her political views: "At that time the compliments he paid me were so generous that I blush to remember them. But now that I have come out for socialism he reminds me & the public that I am blind & deaf & especially liable to error. I must have shrunk in intelligence during the years since I met him....Oh, ridiculous Brooklyn Eagle! Socially blind & deaf, it defends an intolerable system, a system that is the cause of much of the physical blindness & deafness which we are trying to prevent." She joined the Industrial Workers of the World in 1912, saying that parliamentary socialism was "sinking in the political bog". She wrote for the IWW between 1916 & 1918. In Why I Became an IWW, she explained that her motivation for activism came in part from her concern about blindness & other disabilities. She also cited the 1912 strike of textile workers in Lawrence, MA for instigating her support of socialism.