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The Real Helen Keller

Helen Keller (left) and Annie Sullivan

Helen Keller, the legendary campaigner for the disabled, was born in Alabama in 1880. When she was 19 months old, she fell ill with 'acute congestion of the stomach and brain' – possibly meningitis – which left her deaf and blind. Five years later, her isolation ended when her teacher Annie Sullivan taught her the 'manual alphabet', tapping out letters on her hand. Keller learned to read Braille, to write and even to speak. She gained admission to the prestigious Radcliffe College, where she wrote The Story of My Life. After graduating, Keller devoted her life to work for the blind and deaf.

That is the heroic version of the story. The real Helen Keller was a more complex character: a woman who rejected her teachers' methods, became a political radical who attracted the attentions of the FBI, and wrote books inspired by the Christian mystic Emanuel Swedenborg.

Educating the educators

Helen Keller met Annie Sullivan through Alexander Graham Bell, a specialist in education for the blind and deaf, who advised Keller's father to contact the Boston-based Perkins Institution, where 50 years previously Samuel Howe had taught Laura Bridgman, a deafblind girl, to read. The Institution sent a teacher to live with the Kellers – 21-year-old Joanna 'Annie' Sullivan.

The Kellers were prosperous; Helen's father was a newspaper editor and an influential local figure. So Helen was supported financially by the family as well as by benefactors such as the railway magnate Andrew Carnegie. Sullivan, by contrast, was the daughter of poor Irish immigrants. Her motives for working with the Kellers were unheroic, as she wrote later, 'I came here simply because circumstances made it necessary for me to earn my living.'

Samuel Howe had taught Laura Bridgman by using raised print and subsequently the manual alphabet; Sullivan opted for the manual alphabet. But in 1890, Keller's next teacher, Sarah Fuller, took a different approach. She began teaching her to lip-read – touching her hand to the speaker's face – and to speak. This was a teaching method which aimed to integrate deaf people into society. Although it had a positive side, it also came to be seen as a way of making disability invisible. So while Keller was eager to communicate with the hearing world, she later criticised Fuller's approach; Sullivan's methods, she argued, were closer to the usual way children acquire language, and signing was a language in its own right.

Meanwhile, Sullivan's success had been widely publicised. The heroic Helen Keller was born: the first biographies appeared before their subject was 10 years old. The real Keller became an able scholar, attending a school for the deaf, then a mainstream preparatory school (equivalent to a sixth-form college) and Radcliffe, where she wrote her life story for the Ladies' Home Journal.

At Radcliffe, she met John Macy, a young lecturer and journalist. Macy assisted Keller and became a close friend to her and Sullivan. In 1905, after Keller graduated, Macy married Sullivan; the three lived together until the marriage broke up in 1913. The couple never divorced; Annie lived with Keller until her death in 1936. For her part, Keller had an affair with a radical journalist, Peter Fagan, in 1916; plans to marry were thwarted by the opposition of Sullivan and Keller's family.

Macy, a socialist, introduced Keller to radical books by authors such as Henry David Thoreau, William James, HG Wells and Karl Marx. Following her success in the Ladies' Home Journal, Keller became a campaigning journalist. She wrote about childhood blindness and its associations with poverty and venereal disease – a taboo subject. She spoke in favour of contraception; Margaret Sanger, founder of the Planned Parenthood movement, was a personal friend. Keller was a founder member of the American Civil Liberties Union in 1920; in 1916 she sent a donation to the recently founded National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, a bold act for a white Southern lady. She also studied Swedenborg and joined the Swedenborgian New Church

Red Keller

Helen Keller

Keller was not simply a high-minded reformer – she was also a revolutionary. She joined the Socialist Party of the USA in 1909 and the anarcho-syndicalist union Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in 1912. Keller opposed US entry into the First World War and toured the country calling for American neutrality. She was critical of the Suffragettes ('What good can votes do when ten-elevenths of the land of Great Britain belongs to 200,000?') and dismissed the prospect of reform: 'It is the workers themselves who must secure freedom for themselves. Nothing can be gained by political action.'

After 1913, Keller and Sullivan devoted themselves to journalism and public speaking. They made a – disastrous – film in 1918, and spent four years in vaudeville, presenting a potted version of Keller's story and taking questions from the audience: 'Who are the three greatest men of our time?' 'Lenin, Edison and Charlie Chaplin.'

In 1924, Keller joined the recently founded American Foundation for the Blind (AFB) as a fundraiser. Funded by well-to-do Republican circles, the AFB's achievements included unifying the diverse systems of Braille then in use.

While this charitable role ended Keller's political activities, she retained radical sympathies. In 1955 she caused controversy by sending birthday greetings to Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, a Communist and former IWW organiser; Flynn was serving a two-year prison sentence, having been arrested during a Cold War crackdown on the Communist Party. There was a storm of protest; Keller had to write to 28 AFB donors, disavowing Communist sympathies.

Keller died in 1967. She is buried alongside Sullivan at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC – an American hero whose real life has been largely forgotten.

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