[PEN-L:33667] Marta Russel on Helen Keller

[Doyle Saylor <djsaylor@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Greetings Economists,
Marta Russel used to be on this list.  This essay analyzes a fold hero in
the U.S.  Helen Keller in later life recoiled from many of her progressive
views.  Marta makes a powerful summary of an icons life.   Well worth the
read.  Not so much for the economic information but in understanding what
defines disabled people and how difficult it is to fight the prejudice.
Marta beautifully talks about what the underlying fight for disabled rights
means.  From a Marxist perspective.

Also a tidbit about Annie Sullivan.  The famous teacher of Hellen Keller as
dramatized in the "Miracle Worker" was put into an orphanage as child and
caged in the basement as incorrigible.  A woman janitor noticed a certain
look in Annie's eyes where everyone else saw only an 'animal'.  This woman
talked to Annie and gave her food.  With time Sullivan began to respond to
being treated decently and the Janitors efforts to get a new hearing for the
mentally 'retarded' Sullivan eventually got her out of a living hell.
Otherwise Sullivan would have lived out her life in a cage in institutions.
The example of the janitor is what gave Sullivan the insight to teach
Keller.  A sense of respect for workers that Keller might have gained from
her famous teacher.
thanks,
Doyle Saylor

ZNet Commentary
Coining Keller January 01, 2003
By Marta Russell


Alabama has a new state quarter bearing the image of Helen Keller. To
be so coined, Keller out-rated a moon rocket and a Cherokee chief.
This quarter will be the first US coin in circulation to include
Braille! How come that took so long?


Less cause for celebration are the articles announcing the coin where
Keller is described as "an Alabama native who overcame blindness and
deafness to become a writer and educator."


Immediately the emails from disability list serves were buzzing about
the Keller coin, in particular about the press's description of
Keller "overcoming" her impairments. Rus Cooper-Dowda from Florida
wrote "What? She OVERCAME 2 disabilities and tried another one after
that? She OVERCAME the other entries and won the Kentucky Derby?"


In case that objection is not clear, I will restate that for
disability activists it is not a matter of overcoming impairment so
much as confronting prejudices and discrimination blind, deaf, and
other impaired persons face in society.


I wondered if the state of Alabama, in so honoring Keller, had it on
record that she was a socialist? Did these officials know that she
was a member of the Socialist Party and later joined the Industrial
Workers of the World, supported the Russian Revolution, women's
suffrage and had come out against the First World War?


More likely the Alabama officials' view of Keller, as do most
Americans', comes from the movie "The Miracle Worker," a film that
portrayed her as an inspirational overcomer. Keller's endearing trait
for Americans, it seems, was that she succeeded "despite" her
impairment with the aide of her nondisabled teacher, Anne Sullivan,
precisely what disability pride activists object to today.


Socialists also retain this image of Keller and of impairment
generally. A prominent left publication's introduction of Keller, for
instance, stated recently that Keller "struck blind and deaf while a
toddler, overcame her disabilities with the help of her teacher ..."


Emma Goldman commended Keller for "overcom[ing] the most appalling
physical disability." Goldman, of course, was a stout eugenicist and
a disability-phobic who found the slightest impairment cause for
eradication.


This only shows us that such old attitudes are still pervasive enough
to require counters such as Dan Wilkins, aka, wheelchair boy, also
Board Chair of The Ability Center of Greater Toledo. Wilkins wrote
"what [Keller] OVERCAME was bigotry, societal alienation and stigma,
and poor support from Alabama's social service system ... but we'll
never see it written up like that..."


Indeed even though Keller was the national figurehead for the
conservative American Foundation for the Blind (AFB), and was
considered "successful" in her superstar fundraising position there,
she was not a self-supporting socialist. She was dependent on the
support of wealthy philanthropists and was nearly always hurting for
money - a matter which would cause Keller to curb her more radical
activities later in years in order to preserve her affiliation with
the AFB charity (charity running against the grain of true socialist
principles) and hence, her source of income.


Indeed, Keller posed a sea of contradictions. Keller's story offers a
way to elaborate upon the contrast between what we might term
disability consciousness and the lack of it. Personally I have lauded
Keller for her socialist commitment to economic revolution yet must
remain conflicted over her definitive message. Sadly, she was not
able to envision disability emancipation. My greatest disappointment
was upon learning that Keller was a supporter of eugenics, the pseudo
science that sought to eliminate people like herself from the gene
pool.


Such self-deprecation existed in marked contrast to her ability to
mount a strong defense when attacked for being mindlessly swayed by
socialists. When the Brooklyn Eagle, for instance, sought to
undermine Keller by explaining away her socialist tendencies as being
the outcome of errors in thinking due to her blindness and deafness
she immediately wrote a retort.


But when Keller denounced the Eagle and other institutions of her
day, she would frequently do it by using disability as a metaphor for
what was unacceptable about them. For example, critiquing the
newspaper, she wrote:


" What an ungallant bird it is! Socially blind and deaf, it defends
an intolerable system, a system that is the cause of much of the
physical blindness and deafness which we are trying to prevent".


In concluding she muses on the kind of book she would like to write,
"I know I shall name it: Industrial Blindness and Social Deafness."


This and other similar comments ("what surgery of politics, what
antiseptic of common sense and right thinking, shall be applied to
cure the blindness of our judges and to prevent the blindness of the
people who are the last resort") did little for disability liberation
but to further demean the impaired body in a disablist society that
was all too willing to go along with the inherent "defectiveness" of
impaired persons implicit in these metaphors and to this day
continues to do so.


Seemingly a nonconformist for her time, Keller actually conformed on
two sides of the disability question. She theorized disability in
keeping with the socialist creed by coupling impairment with
affliction/inferiority/defect stemming from the ills of capitalism;
and did what the AFB expected of her - later curbed her radical
politics so not to offend wealthy patrons who would donate to her
charity of choice, the AFB.


There is a third looming side to her life: Keller's glaring omission
of disability discrimination and civil rights in her writing and
communications. Thanks to the recent work of disability historian Kim
Nielsen, we have a disability perspective analysis of Keller's life.
(see Kim Nielsen, "Helen Keller and the Politics of Civic Fitness,"
in Paul Longmore and Lauri Umansky, eds., THE NEW DISABILITY HISTORY:
AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES (2001).


Unfortunately, the famous Keller never politicized disablement in a
way other than "as a personal affliction spawned by social and
economic injustices that produced physical impairment" (Nielsen). She
never theorized a collective experience that went beyond the medical
impairment or personal affliction theory of impairment into the realm
of equality and civil rights - what we call today a social model of
disablement. Nor did she offer an interpretation of Marx that would
not have demeaned the impaired body to make its point.


Keller was celebrated by socialists for economically connecting
impairment to industrial capitalism in that Keller denounced
capitalism as the cause/producer of impairment. She wrote as long as
"ignorance, poverty, and the unconscious cruelty of our commercial
society" remained "there will there be blind and crippled men and
women." (This inserts the eugenic thread that a worthy social goal
was to rid the world of impaired persons when she was one of those
unwanted outcomes.)


She blamed impairments on poverty, the condition of the working class
i.e., impairment was "a consequence of class inequalities." (Nielson)
Yet her own blindness and deafness was not caused by industrial work
but by a fever when she was a young child. Her middle class family
was able to provide Keller with medical attention and proper
nutrition. Her impairments were not caused by poverty. Yet Keller
believed if poverty and the accident inducing industries of
capitalist enterprise could be eradicated so would impairment.


Capitalism does create disablement but we must define our terms. Like
other social model adherents before me I use the term "disabled" to
designate the socio-economic disadvantages imposed on top of a
physical or mental impairment. This definition stands in critical
contrast to conventional biological or physical definitions that make
it appear that impaired persons are naturally, and therefore,
justifiably excluded from the labor force. It also transcends
determinist conceptions that hold that one is handicapped by
"ableist" biases reflected in the physical environment. In short,
disablement is a political economic state of oppression that arises
from the arrangement of the relations of production and reproduction.


Historically impaired workers have been excluded from capitalist
exploitation. Many disabled persons are unemployed or underemployed
against their will. The social condition of disablement is reproduced
by oppressive social relations exercised through the mode of
production bent on capital accumulation.


Industrial capitalism imposed disablement upon those nonconforming
bodies deemed less or not exploitable by the owners of the means of
production by segregating them into institutions, employing them in
sheltered workshops or much later shoving them out of the workforce
onto poverty based disability benefits. Disabled persons to this day
remain at the bottom of the reserve army of labor - last to be hired
and first to be fired.


Capitalism and social policy under capitalism are detrimental to
disabled persons whether they are workers, would-be workers, or
people who are unable to work. But socialism, so far, has offered no
existing model for disabled persons to emulate either. Disabled
people are marginalized in socialist nations to this day.


Keller did not seem to grasp the concept of economic discrimination.
Other disabled persons, less well known, with less access to the
mainstream press were making some connections to impairment-based
discrimination in the US. The League for the Physically Handicapped,
for instance, was demanding jobs for mobility-impaired persons who
could not get a job in the 1930s. The League formed to oppose
disability discrimination in government and private employment and
considered the lack of access for disabled workers to private sector
jobs an impetus for dissent.


Amongst other sit-ins, members occupied FDR's Works Progress
Administration office insisting on permanent jobs for persons with
physical disabilities whom had been stamped "PH" and deemed
ineligible for work by the federal government. Joining them was The
League for the Advancement of the Deaf. Critics at the time called
these disabled people a communist threat. Keller could have made a
stellar contribution to their movement!


Instead of integrating disabled persons into regular employment, as
the League had demonstrated for however, Roosevelt passed the
Wagner-O'Day Act in 1938 that allowed nonprofit agencies to hire
blind persons in segregated settings to make items to sell to the
Federal Government. Keller had corresponded with the Roosevelts since
1931 yet seemed to make no effort to protest segregated employment.
Rather she believed that blind persons should show their worthiness
by becoming workers by making mops, brooms, deck swabs, mats, or any
items just to be working. It is a puzzling position. Would Keller
herself, educated at Radcliff, have wanted one of those jobs?


By contrast, at the more progressive blind organization, the National
Federation of the Blind (NFB) convention in 1942, blind persons
considered these nonprofit workshops to be exploiting blind workers.
NFB founder Jacobus tenBroek compared the NFB to the American
Federation of Labor:


"Because we are trying to do for our people what organized labor is
trying to do for its people, because of the similarity in
organizational structure, in purpose and in work, and because of the
laboring man's inherent sympathy for the underprivileged and the
conditions under which they live, organized labor has responded more
than generously, materially, morally, and with political support."


In Britain, blind workers registered their own trade union as early
as 1899, and later affiliated their organization with the country's
peak labor body, the Trades Union Congress.


To understand Keller's position is to see that Keller was simply
stuck in the old model of disability -- one that portrays disability
as debilitating and ultimately dehumanizing.


Neilson suggests, in part, Keller was squeezed by notions of civic
fitness that "deemed the disabled body unable to meet the individual
and personal demands of a body politic that depended on
self-government, self-determination, and individual autonomy." In
addition Keller was isolated from other disabled persons. Indeed much
of what the disability movements have solidified today is a direct
result of associating with one another.


For whatever reasons Keller's omission, in the long run, must result
in a politics of self-defeat because it did not challenge inequality
or exclusion based upon disablement. Our multiple disability
movements' efforts have been to change the public's concept of
disability from one of tragedy and cure to one that recognizes
impairment as a natural part of the totality of humankind.


What needs to be coined is that our lives whether deaf, blind,
mobility impaired, developmentally disabled or otherwise are lives
that can be fully lived free from self-deprecation, discrimination
and poverty - all of which might be eradicated by socio-economic
goals which do not rely upon the work ethic or the accumulation of
bodies as founding principles.




Marta Russell can be reached at ap888@xxxxxxxx
http://www.disweb.org --