Eleanor Roosevelt Salutes Helen Keller

It is 1955, and though she is seventy-four years old, Helen Keller, celebrity, author, and activist for the disabled, is about to embark on another journey, this one a staggering 40,000-mile tour of India, Pakistan, Burma, the Philippines and Japan. A banquet is held in her honor at which telegrams from President Eisenhower and other notables are read, speeches by the ambassadors to the countries she intends to visit are heard, and, finally, former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt addresses the world’s most famous advocate for the disabled.  Yet, Mrs. Roosevelt argues, we are the ones not in full possession of our senses. “Most of us go through life just a little blind and a little deaf, not…being fully able to hear and understand those with whom we live.” Helen Keller, however, “…somehow understands the needs of the people.” She speaks about touring a hospital built in Finland during World War II conceived of and largely built by “cripples” (the word not having yet taken on its pejorative connotations) and thinking of Keller’s similar determination to succeed despite all odds. There is perhaps an awkward moment, to contemporary listener, when Mrs. Roosevelt advises Keller, should she tire, to take a day off and go sightseeing. She particularly urges her to visit the Taj Mahal. In her concluding remarks, she assures Keller that on this much-publicized trip to Asia, “You love people and in return, they will love you.”

Keller then responds. Much of the value of this recording lies in hearing how she actually sounded. In crooning, barely decipherable phrases, translated by her aide Polly Thomson, she thanks the previous speakers and shares her dream of “helping to eliminate blindness and deafness from the earth. My heart will sing with joy. That is Heaven itself.” It is inexpressibly moving to hear how difficult it was for this woman, who addressed multitudes and was known by millions, to form even the simplest sentence. One begins to understand on an almost visceral level what obstacles she had to overcome. One is also lost in admiration at what she was able to achieve.

Helen Keller (1880-1968) lost the ability to see and hear at nineteen months. Her initial descent into becoming an isolated, uncontrollable “wild child” and subsequent rescue by her first teacher, Annie Sullivan, is known to many through William Gibson’s “The Miracle Worker.” But the truth, as Keller related it “The Story of My Life” (quoted here in her New York Times obituary) is every bit as thrilling as the dramatized version:

We walked down the path to the well-house, attracted by the fragrance of the honeysuckle with which it was covered. Someone was drawing water and my teacher placed my hand under the spout. As the cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten--a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that 'w-a-t-e-r' meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free. There were barriers still, it is true, but barriers that in time could be swept away.

Keller proved to be an exceptional student, attending Radcliffe College and becoming the first blind, deaf person to be awarded a BA degree. By then, her accomplishments had turned her into a well-known figure. She lectured and wrote and crusaded on behalf of the disabled, as well as for many other causes. One interesting aspect of her early public life was a strident embrace of socialism. As the International Socialist Review notes:

The roughly twenty-year period spanning the 1910s and 1920s indisputably represents Keller at her most prolific and radical. Taken as a whole, her various writings and speeches during this time also range over a tremendously large area of subject matter: Capitalism and class struggle, exploitation and revolution, war and imperialism, women’s oppression, racism, and of course, disability. Increasingly, these various issues became integrated into a single condemnation of the established social order. As the socialist and labor movements swelled and advanced during the 1910s, and especially as the cataclysmic nature of capitalism was laid bare with the advent of World War I, Keller—like millions of others across the United States and the world—rapidly and successively abandoned one set of seemingly outworn ideas after another.

“What are you committed to,” an interviewer asked her in 1916, “education or revolution?”

“Revolution,” Keller replied.

In later life, Keller became more closely associated with the generalized, muted, Swedenborgian Christianity we hear her espousing at this banquet. The almost saintly status she attained perhaps obscured more fascinating elements of her rise from near total sensory deprivation to the extraordinarily articulate “vision” of her autobiographical writings. Roger Shattuck, writing in the Harvard Magazine, points out that:

…literary critics such as Van Wyck Brooks, Walter Percy, and Cynthia Ozick, and cognitive scientists such as William James, Oliver Sacks, and Gerald Edelman have found in The Story of My Life and The World I Live In two of the most revealing inside narratives of the formation of what we call human consciousness. The books also offer an exciting case history of an unprecedented feat of individual education against crippling odds and make clear why Alexander Graham Bell, Mark Twain, and Andrew Carnegie regarded Keller and Sullivan as two of the most remarkable women of their time.

Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection.

WNYC archives id: 150716
Municipal archives id: LT6897