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Nonfiction Views: Max Wallace on 'The Political Crusades of Helen Keller', plus book news [1]

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Date: 2023-04-11  

The early years of Helen Keller’s life were first portrayed to a great extent in the same way as I learned about her late in her life, as a boy growing up in the 1960s. My knowledge of her was almost entirely shaped by the 1962 movie The Miracle Worker: a girl rescued from the limitations of being blind and deaf by the steadfast and miraculous work of her teacher, Anne Sullivan. As Max Wallace points out in his new book After the Miracle: The Political Crusades of Helen Keller, Anne Bancroft won the Oscar for her portrayal in the movie of Anne Sullivan, while Patty Duke won Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of Keller, in effect assigning Keller a supporting role in her own story.

Wallace points out that this echoed the creation of her life story from the beginning. The first several chapters of the book take us through Keller’s early years and learning, and show how her first book, The Story of My Life, published in 1902, when she was 22 and attending Radcliffe College, was shaped by various forces to highlight the role of the teacher over the student.

But, oh, her life in between those early and late years! Before reading this book, I confess that I was unaware of what an outspoken political activist she was. Early on, she spoke out against Jim Crow laws, and opposed America's entry into World War One. She was giving money to the NAACP as early as 1916, and helped found the American Civil Liberties Union in 1920. She was a suffragette, a supporter of birth control, and had joined the Socialist Party in 1909. She spoke out against Hitler as early as 1933, and spoke out against Senator Joseph McCarthy during the height of his anti-Communism witch hunts in the 1950s.

Keller’s political journey began in her twenties with her embrace of socialism, which is covered in several chapters. From there, she became active in the suffragist movement. Indeed, she was more attracted to the movement as represented by Britain’s Emily Pankhurst, who advocated direct action and civil disobedience to further the cause. Keller expressed doubt about the more genteel ways of the American suffragist movement, writing

“So long as the franchise is denied to a large number of those who serve and benefit the public, so long as those who vote are at the beck and call of party machines, the people are not free, and the day of women’s freedom seems still to be in the far future,” she wrote. “It makes no difference whether the Tories or the Liberals in Great Britain, the Democrats or the Republicans in the United States, or any party of the old model in any other country get the upper hand. To ask any such party for women’s rights is like asking a czar for democracy...We choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee. We elect expensive masters to do our work for us, and then blame them because they work for themselves and for their class.”

In a 1913 interview with the New York Times, Keller praised Pankurst and endorsed the “smashing of windows, hunger strikes, anything that will bring publicity to the cause.” She further declared to the paper that “I believe suffrage will lead to socialism, and to me socialism is the ideal cause.” She explicitly linked her support for women’s rights larger issues of class. For example, in her 1913 response to anarchist leader Emma Goldman being arrested in New York City for distributing pamphlets on birth control, she wrote

“The arrest of Emma Goldman for teaching effective methods of birth control seems to me to have raised the only important issue in the whole fight for family limitation...Many mothers already desire to limit the number of offspring. They live among families so large and so poor that hunger forces them to send their young children to labor...The law is offended only when someone takes direct action against the frightfulness of the industrial conflict. This is no mere fight to keep a woman out of prison; it is a battle for the freedom of all women. Anyone that refuses to take part in it because Emma Goldman happens to be an anarchist, is guilty of treason to the cause of the workers.”

Also in 2013, Keller responded to an appeal from NAACP cofounder Oswald Garrison Villard for support for their cause. She responded with a check for one hundred dollars and a letter which said in part

“Nay let me say it, this great republic of ours is a mockery when citizens in any section are denied the rights which the Constitution guarantees them, when they are openly evicted, terrorized and lynched by prejudiced mobs, and their persecutors and murderers are allowed to walk abroad unpunished. The United States stands ashamed before the world whilst ten million of its people remain victims of a most blind, stupid, inhuman prejudice.”

Keller’s radical stances had generated increasing criticism in the media, and this letter crossed a line for many, particularly in her native state of Alabama. W. E. B. DuBois proudly reprinted her letter in The Crisis, but afterward an anonymous donor paid to have it reprinted in the Selma Journal for quite the opposite reason: to expose to a wide white Southern audience what Keller stood for. People, including whites, were lynched for expressing such ideas.

We can imagine how Helen Keller would view the Black Lives Matter movement by considering her public denunciation of the police in the case of Isaac Woodward, a Black soldier returning home to South Carolina after serving in the Pacific theater of World War II. He got into an altercation with the Greyhound bus driver over a request for a bathroom break. The police were summoned, and they beat the young soldier to the point of blinding him. Of the incident, Keller wrote that it was “a glimpse into another abyss of evil, learning how a police officer blinded a colored veteran, reportedly in ‘self-defence.’

Not all of her stances were noble, and the book doesn’t shy away from those controversies. She flirted with the eugenics movement in her early years, surprising for someone who herself would have been deemed irredeemably defective. In her support for the Loyalist cause in the Spanish Civil War, and her support for America’s intervention in World War II, she seemed driven not only by a prescient view of the evils of fascism, but also by a blinkered view of the purported Communism being practiced in the Soviet Union. Indeed, Chapter 18 is entitled “Fellow Traveler,” using the pejorative term used during the Cold War for those with Communist sympathies. She came under heavy suspicion from Senator Mccarthy and his ilk for her connections to Communism. She publicly pushed back against McCarthy, but was probably protected from the worst of the anti-Communist excesses by her celebrity rather than her fighting.

Late in her life, in 1959, after she had been less public with her politics for some years, Keller received an appeal from someone representing the South African legal defense committee, asking her to endorse their representation of Nelson Mandela against the South African government’s prosecution of them for treason. It was not a popular cause in the United States, mired as it was in Cold War paranoia of anything with the taint of Communism. By this time, Keller’s firebrand politics of her earlier years had faded from public awareness, once again overtaken by the sentimental portrait of the young girl as had been portrayed in the 1957 Playhouse 90 television drama The Miracle Worker (which began its Broadway run in 1959 and adapted for Hollywood in 1962. She could have played it safe and avoided stirring up another controversy, but she did not do so. She issued a public statement against apartheid: “Freedom-loving, law-abiding men and women should unite throughout the world to uphold those who are denied their rights to advancement and education and shall never cease until all lands are purged from the poison of racism and oppression.”

Keller suffered a series of strokes in 1962, and for the rest of her life stayed mainly at home, devoted primarily to raising funds for the American Society for the Blind. She died in 1968. This book is a welcome appraisal of her fascinating political life.

BOOK NEWS

Over the past couple weeks, we’ve had some discussion in Nonfiction Views over the ‘sensitivity edits’ of new editions of classic books, removing words, descriptions or incidents that might be offensive to modern readers (see HERE and HERE.) The New York Times offered up a new wrinkle this week, revealing that these edits are being done remotely to the ebook versions (the link should be free for all to read):

In Britain, Clarissa Aykroyd, a Kindle reader of Dahl’s “Matilda,” watched a reference to Joseph Conrad disappear. (U.S. editions of Dahl’s books were unaffected.) Owners of Stine’s “Goosebumps” books lost mentions of schoolgirls’ “crushes” on a headmaster and a description of an overweight character with “at least six chins.” Racial and ethnic slurs were snipped out of Christie’s mysteries. In each case, e-books that had been published and sold in one form were retroactively (and irrevocably) altered, highlighting what consumer rights experts say is a convention of digital publishing that customers may never notice or realize they signed up for. Buying an e-book doesn’t necessarily mean it’s yours. “Nobody reads the terms of service, but these companies reserve the right to go in there and change things around,” said Jason Schultz, the director of New York University’s Technology Law and Policy Clinic and a co-author of “The End of Ownership.”

We all know about the Republican drive to ban books from libraries, but in Missouri it seems the GOP would like to ban libraries themselves...or at least remove funding from them:

Republicans who control the Missouri House have passed a budget that doesn’t give its public libraries a single cent of state money. The lawmakers were angered that the Missouri Association of School Librarians and the Missouri Library Association had the temerity to challenge a law Missouri lawmakers passed last year removing certain material deemed too sexually explicit from school libraries.

THIS WEEK’S NEW HARDCOVERS

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An Ordinary Man: The Surprising Life and Historic Presidency of Gerald R. Ford, by Richard Norton Smith. Fifty bucks and 832 pages! Sorry, that was my first reaction to seeing the price and size of this book. But for students of history and presidential politics, it is notable. For many Americans, President Gerald Ford was the genial accident of history who controversially pardoned his Watergate-tarnished predecessor, presided over the fall of Saigon, and became a punching bag on Saturday Night Live. Yet as Richard Norton Smith reveals in a book full of surprises, Ford was an underrated leader whose tough decisions and personal decency look better with the passage of time. Drawing on hundreds of interviews and thousands of documents, Smith recreates Ford’s hardscrabble childhood in Michigan, his early anti-establishment politics and lifelong love affair with the former Betty Bloomer, whose impact on American culture he predicted would outrank his own. As president, Ford guided the nation through its worst Constitutional crisis since the Civil War and broke the back of the most severe economic downturn since the Great Depression—accomplishing both with little fanfare or credit. Ford’s presidency arguably set the course for post-liberal America and a post-Cold War world.

I Swear: Politics Is Messier Than My Minivan, by Katie Porter. The Congresswoman and California Senate candidate offers a political memoir more down-to earth and funny than most. She reveals how her challenges as an Iowa farmgirl diverted her to the Ivy League and how she came to see herself as a Californian, teaching law and raising three kids. Never having run for office before, Katie Porter charted a new path in 2018 when she was elected to Congress as a Democrat in historically conservative Orange County, California. Underestimated as a single mom and chided for her progressive values, Katie defied expectations. She shares why she made the jump from academia to politics and how she quickly mastered the art of making CEOs and cabinet members squirm when they bluff and bloviate instead of doing the job for America. Full of candid and inspiring stories—from how Katie lent Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez a pair of sneakers during the Capitol attack on January 6, 2021, to her kids’ lightly illegal campaign hijinks—this is a book by an exhausted, committed parent who just doesn’t have the time for nonsense in her house or in the House of Representatives.

Koresh: The True Story of David Koresh and the Tragedy at Waco, by Stephen Talty. The third of this season’s major books marking the 30th anniversary of Waco. In his signature immersive storytelling, Talty reveals how Koresh’s fixation on holy war, which would deliver the Davidians to their reward and confirm himself as Christ, collided with his paranoid obsession with firearms to destructive effect. Their deadly, 51-day standoff with the embattled FBI and ATF, he shows, embodied an anti-government ethic that continues to resonate today.

Breakup: A Marriage in Wartime, by Anjan Sundaram. After ten years of reporting from central Africa for The New York Times, Associated Press, and others, Anjan Sundaram finds himself living a quiet life in Shippagan, Canada, with his wife and newborn. But when word arrives of preparations for ethnic cleansing in the Central African Republic, he is suddenly torn between his duty as a husband and father, and his moral responsibility to report on a conflict unseen by the world. Soon he is traveling through the CAR, with a driver who may be a spy, bearing witness to ransacked villages and locals fleeing imminent massacre, fielding offers of mined gold and hearing stories of soldiers who steal schoolbooks for rolling paper. When he refuses to return home, journeying instead into a rebel stronghold, he learns that there is no going back to the life he left behind. Breakup illuminates the personal price that war correspondents pay as they bear witness on the frontlines of humanitarian crimes across the world. This brilliantly introspective, grounded account of one man’s inner turmoil in the context of a dangerous journey through a warzone is sure to become a modern classic.

A Madman's Will: John Randolph, Four Hundred Slaves, and the Mirage of Freedom, by Gregory May. Few legal cases in American history are as riveting as the controversy surrounding the will of Virginia Senator John Randolph (1773–1833), which—almost inexplicably—freed all 383 of his slaves in one of the largest and most publicized manumissions in American history. So famous is the case that Ta-Nehisi Coates has used it to condemn Randolph’s cousin, Thomas Jefferson, for failing to free his own slaves. With this groundbreaking investigation, historian Gregory May now reveals a more surprising story, showing how madness and scandal shaped John Randolph’s wildly shifting attitudes toward his slaves—and how endemic prejudice in the North ultimately deprived the freedmen of the land Randolph had promised them. Sweeping from the legal spectacle of the contested will through the freedmen’s dramatic flight and horrific reception in Ohio, A Madman’s Will is an extraordinary saga about the alluring promise of freedom and its tragic limitations.

Grand Delusion: The Rise and Fall of American Ambition in the Middle East, by Steven Simon. The culmination of almost forty years at the highest levels of policymaking and scholarship, Grand Delusion is Steven Simon’s tour de force, offering a comprehensive and deeply informed account of U.S. engagement in the Middle East. Simon begins with the Reagan administration, when American perception of the Middle East shifted from a cluster of faraway and frequently skirmishing nations to a shining, urgent opportunity for America to (in Reagan’s words) “serve the cause of world peace and the future of mankind.” Simon’s sharp sense of irony and incisive writing bring a complex history to life. He questions the motives behind America's commitment to Israel; explodes the popular narrative of Desert Storm as a “good war”; and calls out the devastating consequences of our mistakes, particularly for people of the region trapped by the onslaught of American military action and pitiless economic sanctions.

The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England, 1603-1689, by Jonathan Healey. A fresh, exciting history of seventeenth-century England, a time of revolution when society was on fire and simultaneously forging the modern world. "Jonathan Healey's book is an impressive achievement. It focuses on the English political crises, setting them in an up-to-date social, intellectual and cultural context. Healey's spare but engaging narrative is brought to life at every stage with individual experiences. The reader is in safe hands, guided by a historian who is on top of the best work on many areas of seventeenth-century life, and who has made his own distinctive contribution to our understanding of seventeenth-century society." --Michael Braddick, Times Literary Supplement

Magnificent Rebel: Nancy Cunard in Jazz Age Paris, by Anne de Courcy. Paris in the 1920s was bursting with talent in the worlds of art, design and literature. The city was at the forefront of everything new and exciting; there was no censorship; life and love were there for the taking. At its center was the gorgeous, seductive English socialite Nancy Cunard, scion of the famous shipping line. Her lovers were legion, but this book focuses on five of the most significant and a lifelong friendship. Her affairs with acclaimed writers Ezra Pound, Aldous Huxley, Michael Arlen and Louis Aragon were passionate and tempestuous, as was her romance with black jazz pianist Henry Crowder. Her friendship with the famous Irish novelist George Moore, her mother’s lover and a man falsely rumored to be Nancy’s father, was the longest-lasting of her life. Highly intelligent, a gifted poet and widely read, she founded a small press that published Samuel Beckett among others. A muse to many, she was also a courageous crusader against racism and fascism. She left Paris in 1933, at the end of its most glittering years and remained unafraid to live life on the edge until her death in 1965.

Lebron, by Jeff Benedict. The definitive biography of basketball superstar LeBron James, based on three years of exhaustive research and more than 250 interviews. What makes LeBron’s story so compelling is how he won his destiny despite overwhelmingly long odds, in a drama worthy of a Dickens novel. As a child, he was a scared and lonely little boy living a nomadic existence in Akron, Ohio. His mother, who had LeBron when she was sixteen, would sometimes leave him on his own. Destitute and fatherless, he missed close to one hundred days of school in the fourth grade. Desperate, his mother placed him with a family that gave him stability and put a basketball in his hands. Today LeBron produces Hollywood films and television shows, has a social media presence that includes more than one hundred million followers, engages in political activism, takes outspoken stances on racism and social injustice, and transforms lives through his visionary philanthropy. He went from a lost boy in Akron to a beloved hero who uses his fortune to educate underprivileged children and lift up needy families—and brought home Cleveland’s first NBA championship.

On the Origin of Time: Stephen Hawking's Final Theory, by Thomas Hertog. Hawking’s early work on the origins of the universe and of life ran into a crisis when the math predicted many big bangs producing a multiverse—countless different universes, most of which would be far too bizarre to ​harbor life. Holed up in the theoretical physics department at Cambridge, Stephen Hawking and his friend and collaborator Thomas Hertog worked on this problem for twenty years, developing a new theory of the cosmos that could account for the emergence of life. Peering into the extreme quantum physics of cosmic holograms and venturing far back in time to our deepest roots, they were startled to find a deeper level of evolution in which the physical laws themselves transform and simplify until particles, forces, and even time itself fades away. This discovery led them to a revolutionary idea: The laws of physics are not set in stone but are born and co-evolve as the universe they govern takes shape. As Hawking’s final days drew near, the two collaborators published their theory, which proposed a radical new Darwinian perspective on the origins of our universe.

Once Upon a Prime: The Wondrous Connections Between Mathematics and Literature, by Sarah Hart. While the title might suggest a self-justifying book written by ChatBot, Professor Sarah Hart shows us the myriad connections between math and literature, and how understanding those connections can enhance our enjoyment of both. Did you know, for instance, that Moby-Dick is full of sophisticated geometry? That James Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness novels are deliberately checkered with mathematical references? That George Eliot was obsessed with statistics? That Jurassic Park is undergirded by fractal patterns? That Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie wrote mathematician characters? From sonnets to fairytales to experimental French literature, Professor Hart shows how math and literature are complementary parts of the same quest, to understand human life and our place in the universe. As the first woman to hold England’s oldest mathematical chair, Professor Hart is the ideal tour guide, taking us on an unforgettable journey through the books we thought we knew, revealing new layers of beauty and wonder. As she promises, you’re going to need a bigger bookcase.

True West: Sam Shepard's Life, Work, and Times, by Robert Greenfield. A revelatory biography of the world-famous playwright and actor Sam Shepard, whose work was matched by his equally dramatic life, including collaborations with the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan as well as tumultuous relationships with Patti Smith, Joni Mitchell, and Jessica Lange.

All book links in this diary are to my online bookstore The Literate Lizard. If you already have a favorite indie bookstore, please keep supporting them. If you’re able to throw a little business my way, that would be appreciated. Use the coupon code DAILYKOS for 15% off your order, in gratitude for your support (an ever-changing smattering of new releases are already discounted 15% each week). We also partner Libro.fm for audiobooks. Libro.fm is similar to Amazon’s Audible, with a la carte audiobooks, or a $14.99 monthly membership which includes the audiobook of your choice and 20% off subsequent purchases during the month.

READERS & BOOK LOVERS SERIES SCHEDULE

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