Helen Keller (1880 - 1968)

Sun Jun 27, 1880

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Helen Keller, born on this day in 1880, was an American socialist author and disability rights advocate who became the first deaf-blind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree. Keller was subject to FBI surveillance for most of her life.

In 1909, Keller joined the American Socialist Party and campaigned for its candidates, including Eugene V. Debs, the SP leader who ran for U.S. president from his prison cell in 1920.

Keller supported striking workers, including those murdered in the 1914 Colorado Ludlow Massacre, calling owner John D. Rockefeller a “monster of capitalism.” She defined herself as a “militant suffragist”, campaigning for women’s right to vote because she believed this was linked to the struggle for socialism.

Contemporary critics either lambasted Keller for her radical politics or attempted to neutralize her as a “wonder woman”. In a 1924 letter to a U.S. Senator, Keller wrote “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.’ But when it comes to a discussion of poverty, and I maintain that it is the result of wrong economics - that the industrial system under which we live is at the root of much of the physical deafness and blindness in the world - that is a different matter!”

By the time Keller died in 1968, at the age of 87, she had been under FBI surveillance for most of her adult life.