American Masters: “Becoming Helen Keller” (Straight Ahead Pictures, Disability History Museum, ITVS, WGBH, PBS, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 9 p.m. KPBS was showing a program I was very much looking forward to, an American Masters special called “Becoming Helen Keller.” I feared for the worst when the program was preceded by a written disclaimer saying that some of the descriptions of physical disability in the archive footage might be considered offensive to a modern audience, but I was glad not only that the pmakers of this program, consulting producer: Laurie Block and associate producers Helen Dobrowski, Nate Christy, and K.C. Forcier (who weren’t credited on the PBS Web site or imdb.com but are listed on a separate Web page for the film, https://www.becominghelenkeller.org/producers-partners) used actual people with disabilities for the commentary and most of the talking-head interviews. The show was narrated by a woman who, like Helen Keller herself, is both blind and deaf (the two words get mashed up these days into “deafblind,” yet another indication of how ghastly the language is becoming under the lash of political correctness), but who has a much more comprehensible speaking voice which I attribute to improvements in education for people with disabilities since Keller’s time. (My husband Charles suggested that the narrator became deaf relativeliy late iu life after she had heard well enough to develop speech normally.)

Helen Keller was born June 27, 1890 in Tuscumbia, Alabama to a father who had been a captain in the Confederate Army and a mother who’d been a schoolteacher – the program briefly noted towards the end that she had siblings but didn’t mention them beyond that, and I couldn’t help but wonder if there were any tensions similar to those in the recent (and marvelous) ABC-TV sitcom Speechless between the normally abled kids and their supercrip sister. At 18 months Keller developed an illness, described by her doctors at the time as “congestion of the stomach and the brain,” which rendered her both blind and deaf. She recalled in her first book, The Story of My Life, about her descent into darkness and silence. The part of Helen Keller’s story everybody knows is how her parents sent word to a school for the blind in Boston asking for a teacher who could work with her as a live-in and help her learn to communicate. They sent Annie Sullivan, whom Keller referred to throughout their more than 50 years together as “Teacher,” and Sullivan managed to deal with the feisty Keller until she finally broke through to her. The scene everyone remembers because it was dramatized in William Gibson’s play The Miracle Worker and the 1962 film made from it – Helen Keller furiously working a water pump in her family’s yard and saying “Wa-wa, wa-wa” as she recognizes that the liquid the pump is emitting has a name, “water” – is the vision we see of her in the statue erected in her honor in the Capitol in 2009.

Part of the inspiration for this documentary was the irritation of some activists in the disability community that a woman who lived to be 87 and was deeply involved in many of the social and political movements of her time was being reduced to a child even in a sculpture that was meant to honor her, and part of it was one of the researchers running into a publication from 1924 that named Helen Keller as “one of the 10 most dangerous women in America.” (I’d like to know who published this list, and who the other nine women were.) Helen Keller received her formal education at the Perkins School for the Blind in Boston, which had sent Annie Sullivan to her in the first place, and when she finished high school there she wanted to go to Harvard. Since Harvard didn’t yet accept women, she had to content herself with its all-female sister school, Radcliffe, where she excelled even though Annie Sullivan had to attend her classes with her, finger-spelling the words of the lecture as the professor delivered it, while her fellow students agreed to share their notes with her, transcribed into Braille so she could read them. As a young woman growing up in the 1910’s, and a well-educated woman at that, Keller started reading socialist literature and studying the social conflicts of her age. She was encouraged by Annie Sullivan and her husband, John Macy, but it’s quite clear that her dedication to causes beyond equal rights for people with disabilities came from her own thought and reading.

Long before that horrible word “intersectionality” was created, Helen Keller was living it: she joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the most radical large-scale labor organization in U.S. history. She joined picket lines of striking workers for the IWW and other unions. She was active in the women’s suffrage movement and for women’s rights in general, and despite her white Southern heritage (both her father and her maternal grandfather had been Confederate officers) she also embraced the African-American civil rights movement, giving money to the NAACP and publicly associating herself with its most radical founding member (and only African-American on the NAACP’s first board), W. E. B. DuBois. She is also listed on a Web site for the film as a co-founder of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in 1920. Keller was also a pacifist who opposed U.S. entry into World War I, though in both world wars she volunteered to visit veterans’ hospitals and give support to soldiers who had been blinded in combat. She also organized a campaign against gonorrhea and the so-called “sore eyes” syndrome that frequently afflicted babies born to mothers with gonorrhea and often led to the babies becoming blind in early childhood. (It made me wonder if this had been the mysterious “illness” that had blinded and deafened Keller in the first place.) Like the “intersectionalists” of today, Keller saw all forms of oppression as linked and felt an obligation to struggle against all of them – though the show addressed one rather nasty lapse in her social consciousness.

In 1915, when a doctor refused treatment to a baby with severe disabilities and allowed the child to die instead, Keller wrote an article supporting his decision on the ground that since the child’s disabilities were so severe they would have never had a developed brain and been capable of thought, which has been interpreted by some modern writers as Keller supporting the eugenics movement. (Eugenics was a school of thought that held that the human race could and should be “improved” by selective breeding of the most genetically “fit” and letting the “unfit” die off. Eugenics got a bad name when the Nazis enthusiastically embraced it and used it as one of their justifications for the Holocaust.) Keller later reversed herself on the issue, but it’s still a live controversy; though virtually no one today would advocate for denying medical treatment to a baby already born, a lot of people in the pro-choice movement defend aborting babies who are shown in pre-natal tests to have spina bifida, Down’s syndrome or other incurable genetic diseases that would either severely restrict or totally eliminate their chances for any kind of free or independent life.

As Keller grew older, following a brief attempt at a marriage which she quickly abandoned even though she wanted the love (including sex) of a man (itself one of the most interesting parts of Keller’s story: the bond between her and Annie Sullivan was so intense and so much the ruling passion of both their lives that it broke up both their marriages, and one would think the psychologists would have a field day over this one – as would the dramatists), she largely retreated from her other causes and focused on the rights of people with disabilities. She spent decades as an advocate of the American Foundation for the Blind even though – as this show documents – one of their main programs was to make recorded books available for blind people, which of course would have been useless for someone like Keller who was both deaf and blind. (There’s a still photo of Keller in the 1930’s posing with one of the giant 16-inch phonograph discs that were the medium for recording audiobooks then. Later they became LP records, often playing at 16 ⅔ or even 8 ⅓ rpm rather than the 33 ⅓ rpm of music LP’s, then cassettes, and now recorded books for blind customers are done digitally as voice files on flash drives mounted inside large cartridges with outside labels printed in Braille.) Keller became an official traveling ambassador for the U.S. State Department throughout the 1950’s and kept up a grueling tour schedule even though she hated travel – she once compared staying in a hotel to being lost at sea in the middle of the ocean with no landmarks – and continued a heavy public schedule until her own health started to fail and Polly Thomson, a Scotswoman who had taken Sullivan’s place as her traveling companion and interpreter, died in 1960, eight years before Keller’s own death.

Becoming Helen Keller was one of the most riveting programs I’ve ever seen on PBS, far more moving than the cartoon account we got of Keller’s childhood (and featuring fascinating footage of her and Annie Sullivan together, though by the time they appeared in sound films Sullivan was a matronly-looking heavy-set woman who didn’t at all resemble Anne Bancroft, who played her in The Miracle Worker with the young Patty Duke as Keller), and particularly fascinating in the clips showing Helen Keller speaking. She had learned how to talk by putting her fingers on Sullivan’s face, one on her mouth and one on her nose, to figure out by touch what vibrations were created when people spoke so she could learn to move her mouth that way herself. The result was surprisingly intelligible even though I found myself only able to make out about half the words Keller was saying and I was grateful for the interpreters – first Sullivan, then Thomson – standing by her and repeating what she had just said. (It was a bit jarring when Thomson was her interpreter since she never lost her thick Scottish accent.) As I noted at the outset of these comments, the fact that the narrator of this program is a deaf blind woman who spoke perfectly intelligible English (with a sign-language interpreter shown in the lower left-hand corner of the screen for deaf but sighted viewers), and I assume that’s an example of the progress that’s been made in educating the blind and deaf – thanks largely to the movement Helen Keller spearheaded, which included standardizing Braille in the early 1930’s so all Braille texts published in the U.S. would use the same system instead of several different incompatible ones.

The show also touched on various movements in the education of the deaf, including Alexander Graham Bell’s promotion of so-called “oralism,” which held that deaf people should be trained to speak as best they could and the use of sign language should be discouraged. (This is still a sore point among a lot of deaf activists, who insist that sign is their language and they should be encouraged, not discouraged, to use it. I noticed a bit of consciousness-raising in Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct novels, which featured police detective Steve Carella and his deaf wife Teddy; in the early novels they talked to each other by reading lips, but as the series progressed McBain had Steve learn to sign so he could talk to his wife in her language.) Becoming Helen Keller is a fascinating and little-known story of a woman who, as the show pointed out, has survived in the culture as either a secular saint or the butt of rather cruel jokes – like the ones that were published in a 1970’s book called The Sickest Joles of All Time: “How do you get back at Helen Keller? Rearrange her furniture.” “How did Helen Keller burn her fingers? She tried to read the waffle iron.” The best joke ever made about Helen Keller came from politically conscious comedian Mort Sahl, who noted that Keller was one of the tens of thousands of allegedly “subversive” Americans J. Edgar Hoover had kept files on in his career as head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Sahl joked, “I wonder if he gave a medal to the FBI agent who followed Helen Keller without being seen.”