Was Helen Keller Really a Socialist? (Yes, and the IWW Loved Her)

Yes. Helen Keller joined the Socialist Party of Massachusetts in 1909, wrote and lectured for socialism for years, moved further left to open support for the Industrial Workers of the World by 1916, campaigned against American entry into World War I, defended Eugene Debs while he sat in federal prison, helped found the ACLU in 1920, and stayed a woman of the left until her death in 1968. None of this is hidden or disputed; her political essays sit in public archives anyone can read. It just never made the textbook.

The story everyone knows stops at age seven

The version taught in school runs from Tuscumbia, Alabama, where Keller was born on June 27, 1880, through the illness at nineteen months that left her deaf and blind, to the water pump in April 1887 where Anne Sullivan spelled w-a-t-e-r into one hand while water ran over the other. It is a true story and a great one, and it ends with eighty-one years of her life still to go.

James Loewen opened Lies My Teacher Told Me (1995) with this exact case. Surveying American history textbooks, he found Keller compressed into an inspirational child, the disability conquered, the politics gone. The adult Keller noticed the same treatment in her own lifetime. Endorsing Robert La Follette’s third-party presidential run in 1924, she wrote to him: “So long as I confine my activities to social service and the blind, they compliment me extravagantly, calling me ‘arch priestess of the sightless,’ ‘wonder woman,’ and a ‘modern miracle.’” The compliments, she went on, ran out the moment she talked about poverty.

How she got there

Keller graduated from Radcliffe cum laude in 1904, the first deafblind person to earn a bachelor of arts. Her route to socialism ran through her own cause. Working on the prevention of blindness, she kept finding that blindness in America tracked poverty: industrial accidents that maimed workers, diseases that spread where families were poor, and treatable conditions among people who could afford no treatment. She concluded that the misfortune she had been assigned to personify was, much of the time, manufactured by economic arrangements, and she said so in print for the rest of the decade. She joined the Socialist Party in 1909 and published her political essays as Out of the Dark in 1913.

The press that had spent twenty years celebrating her turned fast. The Brooklyn Eagle, whose editor had praised her extravagantly before, now wrote that her political mistakes sprang from “the manifest limitations of her development.” Her reply, in the essay How I Became a Socialist in the New York Call of November 3, 1912, is the best thing ever written about being condescended to:

Oh, ridiculous Brooklyn Eagle What an ungallant bird it is Socially blind and deaf, it defends an intolerable system, a system that is the cause of much of the physical blindness and deafness which we are trying to prevent.

“The Eagle and I are at war,” she added, and she meant it. She read her socialism in three languages, in braille and in books spelled into her hand, and she was done letting anyone claim her disability as an argument against her conclusions.

The IWW years

By 1916 the Socialist Party’s patient electoral road had lost her. In January of that year she sat for an interview with Barbara Bindley of the New York Tribune, published under the title Why I Became an IWW, and explained the move in the plainest terms available:

I became an IWW because I found out that the Socialist Party was too slow. It is sinking in the political bog.

The Industrial Workers of the World, the one big union of the era’s radical left, embraced her, and she spent the war years at full volume. At Carnegie Hall on January 5, 1916, speaking against the preparedness campaign that was walking the country toward war, she told the crowd:

Strike against war, for without you no battles can be fought

The same years held the rest of her politics. She supported women’s suffrage and birth control. In 1916, an Alabama-born white woman, she sent the NAACP money and a public letter of support that ran in The Crisis, its magazine. And when Eugene Debs was imprisoned under the Espionage Act for his Canton speech, she wrote to him on March 11, 1919, in a letter preserved in her collected writings, that she would count it an honor to share the charge:

I write because I want you to know that I should be proud if the Supreme Court convicted me of abhorring war, and doing all in my power to oppose it.

The two of them are the twin poles of this site’s Debs biography: the orator who went to prison for the speech, and the most famous woman in America saying she wished the indictment had named her too.

The long second act

In 1920 Keller was among the founders of the American Civil Liberties Union, alongside Roger Baldwin and Crystal Eastman, an organization built in direct response to the wartime prosecutions that had caged Debs. From 1924 she worked with the American Foundation for the Blind, the job the later, safer version of her fame was built on: decades of testimony, fundraising, and travel to dozens of countries for blind welfare. The radical did not retire so much as get edited. The FBI kept a file on her connections to the left, and J. Edgar Hoover’s bureau was still noting her name on petitions in the 1940s and 1950s.

Lyndon Johnson gave her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964. She died at home in Easton, Connecticut on June 1, 1968, twenty-six days short of her 88th birthday, and the obituaries led with the water pump.

Why the erasure matters

Keller’s socialism was the reasoned conclusion of the most documented education in American history, and cutting it from her story rewrites her from an author into a mascot. She saw the edit coming a century before the textbooks finished it, which is why the La Follette letter reads the way it does. The record is all still there: the 1912 essay, the Tribune interview, the Carnegie Hall speech, the letter to Debs. She wrote it down so it could be quoted. Quote her.