Helen Keller

Ivy Green, in Tuscumbia, belonged to people who had owned people. Her father, Arthur Keller, edited the local paper and had been a captain in the Confederate Army. Her mother's father was a Confederate general. An illness at 19 months — recorded then as an acute congestion of the stomach and the brain, and argued over since as meningitis, scarlet fever or rubella — took her sight and her hearing. By seven she had assembled more than 60 signs of her own and a temper the household could not govern. Her mother read Dickens on Laura Bridgman, wrote to Alexander Graham Bell, and Bell pointed the family at Perkins. Anne Sullivan, a 20-year-old graduate of the place, arrived on March 5, 1887.

Radcliffe gave her a bachelor's degree in 1904, the first any deafblind person had earned. The Story of My Life had appeared the year before, and 11 more books followed across six decades. Most of the rest of her working life went to money — raising it for the American Foundation for the Blind, touring 35 countries between 1946 and 1957, meeting every president from Grover Cleveland to Lyndon Johnson, who pinned the Medal of Freedom on her in 1964. BriefHistory has the shape of that public life. The interesting part is where it did not fit her.

In 1915 she wrote in favor of letting infants with severe impairments die rather than treating them, on the grounds that their lives held no value and the children would likely turn criminal. It was a respectable position among American progressives that year, and it is the plainest evidence that the most famous disabled person in the country held the eugenics of her class. The following year she got secretly engaged to Peter Fagan, a young Boston Herald reporter hired to write for her while Sullivan was ill. Her mother and Sullivan broke it up. She was 36, had already joined the Socialist Party and the Industrial Workers of the World, and could not arrange her own marriage. She never married.

She died in her sleep at Arcan Ridge in Easton, Connecticut, on June 1, 1968, at 87. The body was cremated in Bridgeport and the ashes went into Washington National Cathedral beside Anne Sullivan and Polly Thomson, the two women she had lived with. What the century kept was the child. William Gibson's play in 1959 and the film in 1962 both end at the water pump, and when Alabama sent a statue to the Capitol in 2009 it was the seven-year-old at the pump that got cast in bronze. Disability scholars have spent 40 years arguing that the socialist, the ACLU founder and the eugenicist all got left outside the frame.

Helen Keller's life against the full span of the corpus.

• The Story of My Life book
  Written at 22 and never out of print since 1903
• The World I Live In book
  Essays on what perception is like without sight or hearing 1908
• Out of the Dark book
  Her socialist essays, collected 1913
• Helen Keller International company
  Founded to fight preventable blindness overseas 1915
• American Civil Liberties Union company
  She was a founding member 1920
• Teacher: Anne Sullivan Macy book
  Her account of the woman who taught her 1955

• 1882 aged ~2 An illness at 19 months takes her sight and her hearing Recorded at the time as an acute congestion of the stomach and the brain.
• March 5, 1887 aged 6 Anne Sullivan arrives at Ivy Green from Perkins Keller later called it her soul's birthday.
• 1891 aged ~11 Writes The Frost King at 11 and is investigated for plagiarism Perkins concluded she had absorbed a story once read to her and forgotten the source.
• 1904 aged ~24 Graduates cum laude from Radcliffe College
• 1909 aged ~29 Joins the Socialist Party of America
• 1915 aged ~35 Argues in print for withholding treatment from severely impaired infants
• 1916 aged ~36 Her secret engagement to Peter Fagan is broken up by her family
• October 20, 1936 aged 56 Anne Sullivan dies of coronary thrombosis with Keller holding her hand
• September 14, 1964 aged 84 Lyndon Johnson awards her the Presidential Medal of Freedom

• Anne Sullivan 1866–1936
  Teacher who famously educated Helen Keller, breaking through her isolation from deafness and blindness. taught by
• Alexander Graham Bell 1847–1922
  Inventor of the telephone and founder of AT&T, transforming global communication. sent her to Perkins
• Mark Twain 1835–1910
  Author of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, often called the father of American literature. found her a patron
• Eugene V. Debs 1855–1926
  Socialist Party leader who ran for president five times from prison and championed labor rights. campaigned for
• Temple Grandin b. 1947
  Animal scientist whose livestock handling designs reshaped American slaughterhouse welfare standards. inherited the argument