February 3, 2026 • 43 mins
Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan were one of the most amazing non-magical duos in history. Imagine living trapped in your own mind – unable to see or hear – and then imagine learning to read, traveling the world, and becoming an ambassador of peace.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is Stuff you
should Know. I think this is a long time coming edition.
Speaker 1 (00:21):
Yeah, I mean, how have we not covered Ann Sullivan
and Helen Keller at this point? It's kind of weird.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
I don't know. But this is the kind of thing
that's like, yeah, we still got a few years left
in this, you.
Speaker 1 (00:31):
Know, totally. And we're not scraping the bottom of any
barrels here.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
No, we're not even dipping into the top of the
barrel yet. Everybody, it's still full.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
Of pickles, that's right, or cream that has risen to
the top.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
Oh, that's even better. Pickles and cream.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
Right, But we're talking about Helen Keller and An Sullivan.
You probably know who these people are. But if you don't,
just very quickly we should say that I Sullivan was
a teacher of a young girl and others along the way,
but mainly known for her work with a young girl
starting from the age of six named Helen Keller, who
(01:11):
lost her sight in hearing as a nineteen month old
from what is likely bacterial meningitis, even though we don't
know for sure, and it's one of the great inspiring
stories of all time, and especially one that came early
on to show to the rest of the world who
at the time didn't think that people that had these
(01:33):
kinds of afflictions like blindness and being deaf, Like if
you had both of those, they were basically like, we're
going to send you to an institution because we can't
teach you anything. You know, you can't see, you can't hear.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
We're sorry, yeah, And at those institutions they likely died.
A lot of them died just from neglect or abuse
or all sorts of different reasons, just because they were
unable to see or hear. And by this time, there
was education for the deaf, there was education for the blind,
but like you said, the deaf blind were considered like,
there's just no way you can teach them. And the
(02:08):
reason why is because the only senses they have are touch, smell,
and tastete that's about it. And that like they're just like,
we don't know how to teach anybody by taste, Like
you just can't do anything with them. So when you
really start to put yourself in Helen Keller's positions, totally
(02:28):
cut off by the world or from the world. It's
just mind boggling and as inspiring as it gets to
stop and think about what Ann Sullivan actually did and
then what Helen Keller was able to do after Ann
Sullivan did her thing.
Speaker 1 (02:46):
Initially, Yeah, for sure, one of the great relationships and
partnerships of history. Yeah, world history and certainly American history.
There had been some schools in place, and there was
one recording did deaf blind person who had learned language.
It was a woman named Laura Bridgman. In the eighteen
thirty She worked with a guy named Samuel Gridley Howe
(03:09):
and he founded what's known as the Perkins School for
the Blind in Boston, which will come into play in
this story. But he taught her, and this is what
Anne Sullivan would teach Helen Keller, something called the manual alphabet,
which is as Lisa Simpson would say, Tapa tapa tapa,
where letters correspond to taps on a palm. And that
(03:30):
is how, you you know, very sort of slowly teach
somebody language without with them not being able to see
or hear.
Speaker 2 (03:38):
Yeah, they figured out how to teach somebody language just
through touch, which is impressive in and of itself. But
the fact that Laura Bridgman had learned that it was
a it was considered like a curiosity and anomaly like
this is not like that didn't extend to the idea
that you could teach deaf blind people anything generally. Right.
Speaker 1 (03:59):
Yeah, And we should say that Ann Sullivan was vision
impaired herself, and that's how she ended up knowing Laura
Bridgman from that Perkin School for the Blind.
Speaker 2 (04:07):
Right, And let's talk a little bit about Ann Sullivan.
She had an extraordinarily rough life man leading up to
about age fourteen. She was born in eighteen sixty six
to parents. Her mother was an invalid. Her father abandoned
them right after her mother died when she was I
(04:29):
think eight. By this time, she had lost most of
her vision. She had suffered an eye infection, and so
she and her brother Jimmy, they have no She's eight
and now she's in charge of her little brother. She's
blind and there's no one helping them any longer. There's
no one looking out for them. It's up to her
(04:49):
to look out for the both of them in any
way she can and so they had to move into
a public poor house in Tewksbury.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
That's right, And we should point out she's vision impaired
at this I think until she was an adult she
suffered full blindness. Okay, but you know, rough life. This
poorhouse was awful. There were rumors and reports of cannibalism
at the shelter. It was filthy. They were constantly just
threatened and in danger, you know, health wise and otherwise.
(05:19):
And there was an inspection at one point of a
state board of charities, and a little teenage Anne Sullivan
actually convinced them she had no formal education, convinced a
government official who was on site there to send her
via tax dollars to that Perkin School for the Blind
in Boston, where she enrolled and would eventually graduate as
(05:42):
valid victorian of her class.
Speaker 2 (05:43):
Yeah, and just to get that point across, when she
was fourteen is when she was sent to Perkins School.
She lived in a poorhouse for six years. Her brother
died four months after they moved there when he contracted tuberculosis.
She'd had an incredibly rough life. Her first formal education
came at age fourteen when she went to Perkins, and
(06:04):
six years later she was valedictorian again despite being uncited. Like,
her story in and of itself is incredibly inspiring, but
it just picks up from there.
Speaker 1 (06:15):
Yeah, for sure. And the reason we sort of mentioned
the Perkins stuff because, like I said, that's where she
met Laura Bridgman, and notably, that's where she learned that
manual alphabet because she wanted to converse with Laura Bridgman.
So Keller, like I said, probably lost her her sight
and her hearing from bacterial meningitis is what they suspect. Yeah,
(06:38):
she was born in eighteen eighty. She was completely developmentally
on track when this happened at nineteen months old. So
her life just took a really unfortunate turn. And so
from the moment that she was nineteen months old until
she was six, she was you know what some people
might call in a trapped state. She was just living
(06:59):
in her mind, unable to communicate her parents. You know,
she reacted very frustratingly, probably not surprisingly, and got increasingly
violent with her tantrums. And by the time she was six,
her parents were like, I don't know that we can
handle this safely anymore. We don't want to institutionalize her.
(07:20):
So they reached out somehow. I think her mom had
just remembered, like reading something about Laura Bridgman and that
Perkins School, and I think this is before Helen was
even born, and so they, I guess hopefully, put in
a phone call to Alexander Graham Bell and said, first
of all, thank you for this invention. This is pretty
(07:43):
cool that we can call you the inventor.
Speaker 2 (07:44):
He said, bully bully.
Speaker 1 (07:46):
He said, bully bully. And then they said, but I
know you're active in death education, and I know your
son in law runs the Perkins School. What do you
think about our daughter. It's a pretty tough case.
Speaker 2 (07:57):
Yeah, And he was like, this is I think this
is just the job for the Perkins School. So he
pulled some strings and that kind of makes it sound
like the Perkins School's in Massachusetts. Helen Keller's family was
from Alabama. It sounds like her family was wealthy. They
were not. Her father was a captain in the Confederate
Army during the Civil War. After the Civil War, her
(08:18):
family was left poor, so they were not wealthy. I
think they had land and everything like that, but she
was not nearly as destitute as Anne Sullivan. But I
think it's worth the point that as she grew and
started living her life, she supported herself. She didn't come
from a wealthy family.
Speaker 1 (08:36):
Yeah for sure. In the meantime, while, you know, when
she gets in to school there, Anne Sullivan had already
gotten a job offer from Perkins. She was a great
student there. She knew that manual sign language, and they said, well,
we should just work here. And so on March third,
eighteen eighty six, Helen Keller would meet Anne Sullivan and
later call that her soul's birthday.
Speaker 2 (08:58):
Yeah. So Anne Sullivan was sent by Perkins to t Scumbia,
where the Kellers lived in Alabama, and she when she
got there, i mean almost immediately, Helen through a tantrum.
So Anne Sullivan got to see firsthand, right off the bat,
like this is going to be tough. This girl has
(09:21):
learned because her parents are letting her do this. She's
learned to express herself through violence, through anger, through intimidation,
through the thread of throwing another tantrum if she doesn't
get her way or she can't someone's not listening to
her or something. And Anne Sullivan was a scrappy Irish
(09:42):
lass who identified very quickly like if I'm going to
get through this girl. That stuff has to end immediately,
and so they were like, she spent about the first
week essentially physically overpowering Helen whenever she through a tan
and by the end of the week had lost the tooth.
(10:04):
I think she'd been touched many times they went through it.
But apparently after just a week Helen learned like, Okay,
this lady's not going to put up with that. I
should probably try a different tack. And it seems like
from that point she had gained Helen's trust and now
they could start with Helen's education.
Speaker 1 (10:25):
Yeah, I mean, you think about it. Helen Keller didn't.
She couldn't even figure out who this person was all
of a sudden, this new person in her life, yeah,
who is now physically restraining her. I mean that was
sort of Sullowan's philosophy. She talked about. The gateway was obedience. Basically,
eventually you'll get to love and knowledge, but at first
(10:47):
I have to I have to sit on this girl.
Speaker 2 (10:50):
Right, you know. Yeah, I mean she's like, she broke
a tooth from me, give me a break.
Speaker 1 (10:56):
Yeah, well, very encouragingly. And this is something as one
who's always believed in the healing powers of the great outdoors.
Getting Helen outside was a very big deal and a
very good sort of second step because they could explore nature.
It calmed Helen down immediately, and that's where her senses
of smell and touch could really be engaged.
Speaker 2 (11:16):
She's later said, Helen did that if you were deaf
and blind, then out in the sun is the best
place to be, oh, because you can really feel it,
you know. Yeah, So it didn't really occur to me,
like I knew that this is a really big deal
to Anne Sullivan was able to teach Helen Keller, but
it didn't occur to me until I was researching this
(11:36):
that that wasn't even the first step. The first step,
like if you're teaching a kid something there in school,
you're saying, Okay, now we're going to learn the alphabet.
Here's the alphabet. This is what you use the alphabet
for to spell words. This is what this word means
for this right, this is the word for this thing.
They know that you're teaching them, so they're understanding that
(11:57):
they're accepting that information.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
That's still hard.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
It is that's hard in and of itself. Yeah, there
was no way for Anne Sullivan to explain to Helen Keller,
I'm here to teach you language. Right, she had to
essentially figure out how to break through to Helen Keller
so that Helen Keller realized what was going on now
and could take it from there could start to learn.
(12:23):
So there was this enormous obstacle before Helen Keller could
even begin to learn, which was to understand that she
was being taught and to understand that what she was
being taught was language, that things had words associated with them.
This was brand new to her because again she was
nineteen months old when she lost her sight in hearing,
(12:43):
so she hadn't learned this stuff yet.
Speaker 1 (12:46):
Yeah, I mean, it's astounding that this worked, quite frankly,
and it's due to hard work. And as we'll see
the fact that Helen Keller turns out was brilliant. So
she starts Tapa tap a tap into Helen's palm. Every
chance she gets, she'd hand her a doll, Tapa tapa
tapa doll. She gives her some water, Tapa tapa tapa
(13:10):
w a t e R. And like you said, you know,
for a while, Helen's probably like, what is this person doing?
Tapping on my hand all the time. Eventually she's doing
it so much she learns to associate, like, oh, when
I get water, I'm getting these same taps. And eventually
there's like a literal aha moment where she gets it
(13:32):
and she's like, wait a minute, I understand this person
is representing a word for the thing that I'm experiencing
by tapping into my palm. And she said it was.
She said, Helen's face lit up like it was a
complete revelation.
Speaker 2 (13:48):
Yeah, this very famously happened at a water pump. They
were on one of their outdoor walks or hikes, I guess,
and they came upon the water pump and she said,
somebody was pumping water and Anne stuck Helen's hand into
the stream of water coming out of the spout and
was tapping the same letters wat er and just kept
(14:11):
doing it over and over and over and over. And
that's what finally, Helen just put those things together, just clicked,
like you said. And there's a statue of her that
was unveiled in the Capitol rotunda in two thousand and nine,
and it is of her as an eight year old
girl standing at this water pump basically commemorating that incredibly
(14:34):
just moving moment, but also incredibly unlikely moment that she
got it. She just got it, and now she was
able to start to learn from there.
Speaker 1 (14:45):
That's incredible. So it went really pretty quickly from that point.
She learned thirty words by the end of that day,
had a vocabulary of a few hundred words within a
few months. And by the time this started when she
was six and then to seven, by the time she
was eight, she had taught her to read words by feel.
(15:07):
She was writing. She was composing sentences and writing in
block letters, which is an astounding rate of speed considering
her scenario. And maybe that's a good time for a break. Yeah,
all right, we'll be right back. Things are off to
a really quick start, and we'll see what happens next
with Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan.
Speaker 2 (15:48):
Okay, Chuck, So, like you said, Anne Sullivan quickly figured
out that Helen Keller was a gifted child. She just
had to learn how to learn, and once she learned that,
she just took off. Like you said, by the time
she was a teenager, she was reading i think five
different languages, she wrote poetry, and she was in public speaking.
(16:09):
She did public speaking as a teenager and what's called
the Chattaquah Lecture Circuit, which was a movement to essentially
bring culture and interesting topics to people who lived in
rural areas who otherwise might not be exposed to that
kind of stuff, to give them something to talk about.
And she lectured on the circuit. She appeared on the
circuit with Anne Sullivan as a teenager. I think before
(16:33):
this though, she made her way to the Perkins School
right for her formal education.
Speaker 1 (16:38):
Yeah, there were three kind of big things that followed
education wise, between what is that like eight years between
eighty eight and eighteen ninety six, she went to that
Perkin School like you talked about, got that formal education.
She also went to a specialist at the horse Man
School for the death so she could learned to speak.
(17:00):
And then the third one they moved to New York City.
So and you know, ends along every step of the
way as we'll see obviously, so Helen could go to
the right Humusin School for the Deaf where it would
continue to sort of improve her speaking and she could
learn to lip read. And this is like Sullivan's there.
Tapa Tapa Tapa every step of the way. When she
(17:22):
goes on the lecture circuit, she's tapping questions like during
Q and A, and then Helen would tap the questions
back to Sullivan and she would translate for the audience.
As we'll see, this would lead to some suspicion that
it was all just an act, which is, you know,
fairly upsetting because what they did was remarkable. But this
would all end up with Helen Keller eventually wanting to
(17:44):
go to college.
Speaker 2 (17:46):
Yeah, and just stepping back for just a second, you
mentioned how she learned to lip read, and that doesn't
make any sense because she could she was totally blind.
She lip read by putting her thumb on say Anne
Sullivan's voice box around like under her chin. She put
a finger on her lips and then put another finger
(18:06):
on her sinus cavity, and through feeling what the lips
were doing and the vibrations the vocal box was making,
she could discern essentially what the person was saying. That's
how she learned how to lip read, and eventually that's
one of the ways that she learned to talk, although
she found it a failing of her life that she
was never able to speak clearly enough that just a
(18:29):
stranger on the street could understand her.
Speaker 1 (18:32):
Yeah, So, like I said, she want to go to college,
she goes to She want to go to Radcliffe. It's
the Harvard's sister school. And so Anne Sullivan arranges for
her to go to a prep school to get her
ready for this, for the entrance exams and again translating
all the curriculum, tapping out those lectures, tapping out the
books like reading basically to her into her hand and
(18:55):
then translating back to the teachers. She's there every step
of the way when she gets into and attends Radcliffe College,
where she eventually would graduate Kuum Laudie in nineteen oh
four as the very first person with deaf blindness to
earn a college degree.
Speaker 2 (19:11):
And like you said, there were scoffers who were like,
what is this. There's this woman who's like helping her.
Is this really a thing? And like you said, it
is upsetting. But the amount of study and attention that
was paid to these too, there's just no way they
could have kept up a fraud like this for fifty years.
(19:31):
It's quite clearly settled that Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan
really did all the stuff that they were thought to do.
Speaker 1 (19:40):
Yeah for sure. And we don't want to get into this,
but we just so we don't get emails, we will
mention that, just like this week, there is a really
idiotic TikTok trend that started among Generation Z where they
have put forth that Helen Keller did not even exist,
idiotic and ablests. And so the only reason we mentioned
(20:03):
is so we won't get emails about it, but we
don't want to talk more about that.
Speaker 2 (20:06):
Yeah, good point. So we should say that that Helen
Keller and Ann Sullivan by this time they weren't just
famous among deaf blind advocates or blind advocates or deaf
advocates or anything like that. They were in that circle.
They also were in academia because they were studied. But
by this time she's a teenager still, I think her
(20:29):
early twenties, after she graduates from Radcliffe, they're world famous.
Like everyone knows who Helen Keller and An Sullivan are.
Speaker 1 (20:39):
Yeah for sure. I mean they knew the Rockefellers, they
knew Henry Ford, they had met with US presidents, They
met Charlie Chaplin when they would eventually film starring themselves
as themselves in movie Deliverance in nineteen eighteen. They knew
Mark Twain the book and eventually play title and movie
(21:00):
title the Miracle Worker came from Mark Twain. He's the
one that coined that term when he wrote a letter
to Anne Sullivan calling her that. But all this to say,
I think that put a strain on Anne Sullivan's marriage.
During this period, she got married to a guy named
John Macy. He was a Harvard professor and he actually
helped Helen Keller write the Story of My Life, her autobiography.
(21:24):
But they, you know, they were married for a little while.
The marriage didn't work out, and I think a lot
of it probably had to do with just their fame
and their travels, and it was it was just a
strain on the marriage.
Speaker 2 (21:35):
It seemed like, yeah, apparently I saw a documentary called
Becoming Helen Keller. It was really good, but it crushed
Anne Sullivan when John Macy left. Yeah, and you know,
Helen grieved along with her. She said it took a
really long time. Helen like almost exclusively referred to Anne
as teacher. So she was like, it took it took
teacher a really long time to basically get over that
(21:58):
she may she may have never really gotten over it.
But they they were a pair again at this point,
so they were in a movie. As you said, Helen
learns very quickly, like I like being on stage. This
is kind of fun. It's a rush. She apparently could
feel the vibration in the floor and through the air
when and knew when the audience was clapping.
Speaker 1 (22:20):
Yeah, you know, interestingly weaken since through the vibrations and
through the air when a stuff you should know, tour
show is forty percent full.
Speaker 2 (22:30):
That's right, man, that's right. But she loved that. She
thrived on that and it energized her so cool. Yeah,
she really liked it. She was also one of her
things was they would demonstrate, you know, how she learned
and how she communicated through Anne, but she would deliver
in like these these demonstrations, like inspirational messages. This is
(22:53):
the kind of message she's decided to take to the world.
Rather than like get a load of me, She's like,
you're paying me all this attention. Why don't you pay
attention to yourself and how great you can be too.
At the same time, she was shining a massive spotlight
on how few opportunities the disabled community in the United
(23:14):
States and around the world had at the time, and
she was directly responsible for changing those attitudes.
Speaker 1 (23:22):
So by the time they hit the stage for real
and go on the vaudeville circuit, which is not something
I knew until we did this kind of research, it
was pretty amazing. They had a third member of their group.
Their star risen so much they were like, we need
an assistant, yea, and so they hired Polly Thompson in
nineteen fourteen, and they were known as the Three Musketeers.
(23:45):
So now they were a trio traveling around on the
vaudeville circuit. They had a three act act where they
told their story. They did a twenty minute bit where
Anne had a monologue sort of giving you the background.
It was almost like a live podcast looking at it.
Keller would come in and demonstrate the process, like how
(24:05):
she learned to speak. They would kind of show people
how it happened, say some of those inspirational words like
you were talking about and then obviously with a translating
she would do a little Q and A. This sounds
a lot like our show, actually it is.
Speaker 2 (24:16):
Yeah, we were using the Helen Keller model of live shows.
Speaker 1 (24:20):
Yeah, except hers was sold out with rowing audiences.
Speaker 2 (24:24):
Yeah, they were performing in front of thousands and thousands
of people.
Speaker 1 (24:27):
That's amazing.
Speaker 2 (24:29):
One of the things that Q and A there's a
list that they compiled, and this list was compiled after
they retired from vaudeville, so like these were they documented
questions and answers that they'd gotten. And one of the ones,
so there's one, what's your definition of politics? Was the
question one of the audience members asked, and Helen said,
(24:52):
the art of promising one thing and doing another.
Speaker 1 (24:55):
Very famous, saying.
Speaker 2 (24:56):
I saw another one too. Can you feel moons shine?
You know, like she could feel sunshine and she says no,
but I can smell it.
Speaker 1 (25:06):
I saw that coming, So.
Speaker 2 (25:07):
I mean like she was a great wit. And it's
like Anne Sullivan was translating this. Remember whenever we're talking
about like Helen Keller saying something or doing something, Ann
Sullivan is standing there holding her hand, tapping into her hand.
Like even though she learned braille and how to write
in block letters and all that, that was still a
(25:27):
chief form of communication. Because Anne Sullivan was so good
at essentially translating in real time what was going on.
Speaker 1 (25:37):
Just say it once what Tapa, tapa, tapa.
Speaker 2 (25:42):
I can't do it as good as you. It keeps
cracking me up every time you do.
Speaker 1 (25:47):
So they eventually get off the vaudeville circuit in nineteen
twenty two. So they had a good run of a
handful of years. Anne was tired. Basically she was, you know,
older than Helen, and so she kind of lost the
pizaz for it. So they went home for the rest
of the nineteen twenties. They still lectured, they still traveled,
they still did lobbying and then fundraising and stuff like that.
(26:07):
Obviously working with all the causes you might expect, like
the American Foundation for the Blind. Also became very socially active,
and we'll talk at the end of you know, a
little bit about Helen Keller's later work as a social activist,
which was pretty vast. But they were traveling all over
the world at this point and everyone loved them. Maybe
(26:30):
we should take a break, though, because you know, like
every story of every great partnership, it was a little
more complicated than it might seem on the surface. Yeah, right,
we'll be right back, all right, So we promised talk
(27:02):
nothing salacious or anything like that.
Speaker 2 (27:04):
No thankfully.
Speaker 1 (27:05):
But you know, anytime you're working that closely with someone
over that many years, there're going to be some you know,
it can get complicated. And it was complicated for them
except with us, Yeah exactly. I mean they were lifelong partners,
but they were reliant on each other in a way
that maybe wasn't always the healthiest for either of them.
Like Helen wanted to get married when she was in
(27:27):
her mid thirties. She was engaged to a journalist named
Peter Fagan, but Anne didn't think she should, and so
she got together with her parents, who also didn't think
that she should, and they kept her from getting married.
Speaker 2 (27:38):
Yeah, and there's a quote from Helen who basically publicly
embraced that decision and was like, yeah, that was the
right decision. She said, love makes us blind.
Speaker 1 (27:48):
Man.
Speaker 2 (27:49):
She was sharp, she was super sharp. I'm seriously go
watch that for everybody. Go watch but Becoming Helen Keller
Think is about an hour and a half and it
is a really great documentary.
Speaker 1 (28:00):
So, you know, I mentioned not healthy for either of them.
So Helen was dependent on Anne. Obviously, Anne was also
dependent on Helen because Helen was the one who had
the benefactors, and you know, they weren't cutting checks to
Anne Sullivan. They were sort of helping to support Helen
Keller because everybody loved her and everyone wanted, you know,
(28:21):
a little piece of her by helping you know, out
with finances. But Anne was basically dependent on Helen financially
her entire life.
Speaker 2 (28:32):
Yeah, because, I mean they both made their money on
the vaudeville circuit and lectures. But Helen's books were pretty
especially The Story of My Life, her first autobiography. She
ended up writing fourteen books. Chuck, Yeah, it's incredible, but
it was a really widely read, big best selling novel,
So she definitely made money off of her books, and
(28:54):
I mean, Anne was just part of it. So I
don't think Helen ever held any of that over her head.
But she couldn't just be like, all right, so long, Helen,
good luck. I'm gonna go enjoy the good life eating caviare.
Speaker 1 (29:08):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. You know, we did talk a little
bit about the controversy of people poopooing them at the time,
but we should say kind of specifically that like Radcliffe
didn't it seems like they begrudgingly let her into the
school right, and there were some snobs there that you know,
one of the quotes was, we should just say outright
that miss Sullivan is entering Radcliffe instead of Helen Keller,
(29:31):
a blind, deaf and dumb girl. So I just we
only mentioned that because it happened. It's really awful, because
what they did was nothing short of well miraculous.
Speaker 2 (29:42):
Yeah, and even earlier than that, Chuck, I saw that
a lot of the people who were the heads of
the Perkins School were essentially supported a smear campaign that
they were frauds because they felt that Anne Sullivan's success overshadowed,
you know, the wor that the Perkins School had done
in educating Helen Keller. They weren't getting enough credit essentially, right.
(30:05):
And then also there was a lot of classism to
it too, because these were wealthy benefactors who started the
school and ran it and Anne Sullivan was a poor
Irish girl who came from the bottom rung of society
at the time. Yeah, so what could she do? So yeah,
they were smeared like throughout their life. And they were
both aware of this, like this wasn't like kept from them.
(30:27):
They were two sharp women, so they knew that this
was everything that they did was questioned and they knew it.
But rather than shout back of their critics or whatever,
they just did more and more and proved over and
over again that this was a this was all legitimate.
That's what makes this story so wonderful. Is it actually happened.
(30:50):
And when you stop and think about what's actually going
on here, just past the narrative, it's like, I've become
an enormous fan of Helen Keller and At Sullivan. Just FYI.
Speaker 1 (31:02):
Your stan Yeah, I guess so. I love it. I
am too. I saw that Miracle Worker when I was
a kid, so it had a big impact on me
as a ute.
Speaker 2 (31:11):
I've got it coming up.
Speaker 1 (31:13):
Yeah, it's good. Patty Duke fantastic. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (31:16):
And Anne Bancroft, right, Yeah, they walk alike and they
talked alike.
Speaker 1 (31:23):
So in the nineteen thirties, this is when Ann Sullivan's
health takes a turn for the worst. You know, she
had a tough go of it. She never had like
the best of health, but in the nineteen thirties it
really went downhill. She had completely lost her sight by
nineteen thirty five, and in nineteen thirty six she died
from a coordinary thrombosis. Helen Keller was right there holding
(31:46):
her hand. I can't imagine what she was tapping. Hopefully
that was between them and she was. Anne Sullivan was
the first woman to have her ashes interred at the
Washington National Cathedral. Wow, and was eventually laid to rest
at the Chapel of Saint Joseph of Arimathea in.
Speaker 2 (32:03):
The in the National Cathedral. That's right, that's amazing. It
gets even better, as you'll see. This was a huge,
huge blow to Helen because she lost her best friend,
she lost her teacher, remember she always referred to as teacher,
and she lost her her first and probably strongest bridge
(32:23):
to the outside world. Fortunately, Polly had been around for
more than twenty years now, so she was more than
capable of stepping in and being the bridge between Helen
and the rest of the world after Anne died. So
it's not like Helen was, you know, just bereft. She
was just grief stricken. And one other thing too. There's
(32:45):
a New Yorker article from nineteen thirty called Helen Keller
at forty nine, and it's just this profile on her
while she's still living, and it's a really good, like
just a peek into her regular life. But she fed herself,
she did her own she dressed herself. She was very,
very independent. But when she was trying to communicate with somebody,
(33:06):
she had to have another person because other people couldn't
understand her. And then one other thing, Chuck, I realized,
I'm on a tie rate here. But the reason she
couldn't express herself in other ways is because she didn't
know sign language, because there was a movement at the
time that sign language was not a valid way of
communicating that everyone, including people who couldn't speak, needed to
(33:29):
learn how to speak. That was the only way of
communicating that was legitimate. So she needed somebody to translate
for her because she could never get that down pat
And like I said, her inability to do that haunted
her like a great life failing essentially, which is very sad.
Speaker 1 (33:48):
Yeah, super sad. There is some kind of kind of
light here in the form of a trip that she
took and wanted Helen. There had been an invitation before
and died from the Nippon Lighthouse in Japan to do
a speaking tour there, and Helen didn't want to leave
Anne behind because she was in poorth health at the time.
(34:08):
Apparently in Japan then about one point five percent of
their death and or blind citizens didn't were not able
to be educated or you didn't have access to that.
And so after Anne died, Helen honored her by going
to Japan and completing that trip with Polly as her companion.
They went to thirty three cities in ten weeks, spoke
(34:30):
in front of about a million people, and the next year,
clearly as a result of this, Japan started expanding their
public services for education and their accessibility programs for people
with all sorts of other abilities.
Speaker 2 (34:47):
You said that Helen Keller went to Japan in nineteen
thirty eight. She went again in nineteen forty eight after
World War Two and was essentially the first ambassador to
begin healing between the United States and Pan after she
toured Hiroshima and came back and told everybody what she
saw nice.
Speaker 1 (35:05):
So I think it was like a few decades that
Helen Keller went on after Ann Sulliman passed. She lived
all the way till nineteen sixty eight, which I don't
think I knew she passed away on June first. I'm
kind of in her sleep. In nineteen sixty eight and
she was laid to rest with Anne Ann Polly, who
(35:26):
died eight years previous, at Washington National Cathedral, so that trio,
the Three Musketeers lived together in perpetuity, which is super sweet.
Speaker 2 (35:34):
Yeah, it is super sweet. And you mentioned The Miracle
Worker with Patty Duke and An Bankroft. They both won
Academy Awards for it. It's just a again, I haven't
seen it, but it's just this beloved story. It's great,
and it basically ends after she starts to learn, right,
like she's a young girl the whole time.
Speaker 1 (35:52):
Correct, Yeah, I mean I was a kid, So I
can't remember if there's like a coda or anything like that,
but it's yeah, it's about their sort of early days together.
And certainly, I mean there's more movies to be made.
If someone wanted to make a movie about her activism
later in life, that would be really something, right.
Speaker 2 (36:11):
Yeah, we should talk about that because there's a narrative
that formed around her that everybody wanted, which was Helen
Keller was this angelic, pure girl who overcame incredible odds
and proves that if you work hard enough, you can
accomplish anything. And she realized that that's what people wanted.
So that's kind of the part that she acted publicly.
(36:33):
But this was after she had tried to take the
limelight that she was in and cast it on a
bunch of different social movements that she was genuinely involved
in and like, genuinely cared about. There was a bunch
of them actually, So even after she kind of stopped
talking about the publicly, she was still involved in this
(36:53):
stuff for the rest of her life.
Speaker 1 (36:55):
Oh yeah, I mean, she was involved in the civil
rights movement fifty years before the Civil Rights era, during
the Jim Crow era. And you know, as you pointed out,
she was an Alabama kid whose dad was a Confederate officer,
and they didn't they didn't like her doing this stuff.
Not not her parents necessarily, but just people and other
family in Alabama. They didn't like it. They didn't like
(37:18):
that she was working with the NAACP. She was a
founding member of the ACLU and also a staunch socialist
and borderline communist at one point.
Speaker 2 (37:30):
Yeah, she was a member of the Socialist Party and
she appeared at rallies with Ann and then she found
that the Socialists weren't effective enough in defending workers' rights,
so she joined up with the Industrial Workers of the World,
which was more radical, contained lots of anarchists, and it
was like if being a socialist was a scandalist, like
(37:53):
being a wobbly was like really scandalous, and she was.
She was a card carrying member. She was also hugely
into women's rights. She was a suffragist because remember she
was very active before women even had the right to
vote in the US and I believe the UK. And
she also talked publicly about stuff that you weren't supposed
(38:14):
to talk about, but for really important reasons.
Speaker 1 (38:19):
Right, yeah, I mean, who's going to tell Helen Keller
to stifle you know?
Speaker 2 (38:25):
That's exactly right. Like she got away part of a
lot of stuff that someone who wasn't deaf, blind would
have not gotten away with.
Speaker 1 (38:33):
Oh, for sure, she would talk about birth control and
public way before anyone would venereal diseases, for sure, especially gonorrhea,
because that at the time would cause blindness and infants
when a mother would pass it along at birth. And
so she was in like the pages of Ladies Home
Journal in the forties and fifties talking about rates of
(38:55):
blindness because of gonorrhea and that's just not the kind
of thing that appeared in those kind of magazs scenes
at the time.
Speaker 2 (39:01):
No, And there's one other thing, being a women's rights advocate.
She's she had a quote that I saw in that documentary.
It was women's inferiority is a man made issue. Man.
Speaker 1 (39:14):
She's just like a T shirt factory.
Speaker 2 (39:16):
So let's yeah, nice, yeah, well let's make that a
stuff you should know T shirt huh.
Speaker 1 (39:24):
Yeah, but you know, give her credit, of course, yeah, yeah,
yeah dot dot Josh Clark.
Speaker 2 (39:30):
Right, so, I mean, chuck, she couldn't possibly get any
better than this, right.
Speaker 1 (39:38):
I mean could she? She could have something else?
Speaker 2 (39:40):
I do. I have two things. One, she loved dogs.
She always had a dog. In fact, when she was
living in Queen's later in life she had eight of them.
That's great in and of itself. But in the lead
up to World War Two, her sure books have been
translated into German and they didn't like that. The Nazi
(40:01):
part didn't like it. So her books were among some
of the ones chosen to be burned at Nazi rallies.
Speaker 1 (40:07):
That's a that's a feather in your cat.
Speaker 2 (40:08):
Heck, yeah it is.
Speaker 1 (40:10):
So she was like to think that we'd have our
book burned.
Speaker 2 (40:13):
I would like to think so too. Yeah, so she
was this amazing person that all of this other stuff
just gets overlooked because again, her story typically stops at
that water pump after she gets it right. And she
just led this incredibly full, rich life. What I guess
she was like eighty years old when she died. And yeah,
(40:35):
Susan is an a genuinely amazing person.
Speaker 1 (40:40):
I think Josh Clark is a crush.
Speaker 2 (40:44):
Maybe you're a smitten kitten. I am Tapa Tapa Tapa.
Speaker 1 (40:49):
Oh there we go.
Speaker 2 (40:51):
Uh you got anything else? No, sir, Okay, that's it
for Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan and Polly Thompson. And
let me say one other thing, chuck, because it's not
talked about, like is just a matter of course. She
wrote her own stuff after like later in life, using
Braille typewriters. So I mean she was just as fully
(41:13):
competent person. I'm just going to keep adding facts until
you start listener mail.
Speaker 1 (41:22):
Hey guys, I love your show on data centers. I
was giving you one more chance.
Speaker 2 (41:27):
Helen Keller was essentially a walking data center.
Speaker 1 (41:32):
People. But want to let you know people working from
remote locations using IBM terminals actually happened in the early
nineteen eighties, and I was one of them. I worked
remotely from home writing my dissertation in nineteen eighty three.
My equipment was an IBM thirty thirty computer terminal, a
twelve hundred BAWD phone modem, a mainframe housed at a
(41:53):
remote location, in my case at Phillips North America, New
York City. The software I used was an IBM pro
called Script. I think I remember Script actually programs like
I do. Yeah, it's like I'm pre word perfect.
Speaker 2 (42:05):
Yeah, I'm floppy disks right, Yeah, it had to be.
Speaker 1 (42:10):
It was before word perfect would come into common usage.
But Script was basically using one step up from machine language.
For example, if you wanted to indent for a new paragraph,
you would type the period I N five to make it,
you know, indent five spaces, or for double space it
was period. It looks like LL two and so on
(42:33):
for all formatting. If it sounds primitive and cumbersome, it was,
but far better than an electric typewriter, as you could
correct anything without using wide out. So it was progress
in a sense and actually saved a huge amount of
time for me. So it was long before two thousand
and eight that people got to work remotely, though it
was rather primitive. Thanks for another great episode that is
(42:53):
from Danielle Greenberg.
Speaker 2 (42:55):
Very nice, Danielle.
Speaker 1 (42:56):
Yeah, it's pretty funny.
Speaker 2 (42:57):
It was funny antiquated, I guess is what you call
it today, Danielle.
Speaker 1 (43:02):
Right, that's right.
Speaker 2 (43:04):
Thanks again, Danielle. And if you want to be like
Danielle and send us a great email that takes us
down memory lane in some ways, you can do that,
send it off to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (43:17):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is Stuff you
should Know. I think this is a long time coming edition.
Speaker 1 (00:21):
Yeah, I mean, how have we not covered Ann Sullivan
and Helen Keller at this point? It's kind of weird.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
I don't know. But this is the kind of thing
that's like, yeah, we still got a few years left
in this, you.
Speaker 1 (00:31):
Know, totally. And we're not scraping the bottom of any
barrels here.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
No, we're not even dipping into the top of the
barrel yet. Everybody, it's still full.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
Of pickles, that's right, or cream that has risen to
the top.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
Oh, that's even better. Pickles and cream.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
Right, But we're talking about Helen Keller and An Sullivan.
You probably know who these people are. But if you don't,
just very quickly we should say that I Sullivan was
a teacher of a young girl and others along the way,
but mainly known for her work with a young girl
starting from the age of six named Helen Keller, who
(01:11):
lost her sight in hearing as a nineteen month old
from what is likely bacterial meningitis, even though we don't
know for sure, and it's one of the great inspiring
stories of all time, and especially one that came early
on to show to the rest of the world who
at the time didn't think that people that had these
(01:33):
kinds of afflictions like blindness and being deaf, Like if
you had both of those, they were basically like, we're
going to send you to an institution because we can't
teach you anything. You know, you can't see, you can't hear.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
We're sorry, yeah, And at those institutions they likely died.
A lot of them died just from neglect or abuse
or all sorts of different reasons, just because they were
unable to see or hear. And by this time, there
was education for the deaf, there was education for the blind,
but like you said, the deaf blind were considered like,
there's just no way you can teach them. And the
(02:08):
reason why is because the only senses they have are touch, smell,
and tastete that's about it. And that like they're just like,
we don't know how to teach anybody by taste, Like
you just can't do anything with them. So when you
really start to put yourself in Helen Keller's positions, totally
(02:28):
cut off by the world or from the world. It's
just mind boggling and as inspiring as it gets to
stop and think about what Ann Sullivan actually did and
then what Helen Keller was able to do after Ann
Sullivan did her thing.
Speaker 1 (02:46):
Initially, Yeah, for sure, one of the great relationships and
partnerships of history. Yeah, world history and certainly American history.
There had been some schools in place, and there was
one recording did deaf blind person who had learned language.
It was a woman named Laura Bridgman. In the eighteen
thirty She worked with a guy named Samuel Gridley Howe
(03:09):
and he founded what's known as the Perkins School for
the Blind in Boston, which will come into play in
this story. But he taught her, and this is what
Anne Sullivan would teach Helen Keller, something called the manual alphabet,
which is as Lisa Simpson would say, Tapa tapa tapa,
where letters correspond to taps on a palm. And that
(03:30):
is how, you you know, very sort of slowly teach
somebody language without with them not being able to see
or hear.
Speaker 2 (03:38):
Yeah, they figured out how to teach somebody language just
through touch, which is impressive in and of itself. But
the fact that Laura Bridgman had learned that it was
a it was considered like a curiosity and anomaly like
this is not like that didn't extend to the idea
that you could teach deaf blind people anything generally. Right.
Speaker 1 (03:59):
Yeah, And we should say that Ann Sullivan was vision
impaired herself, and that's how she ended up knowing Laura
Bridgman from that Perkin School for the Blind.
Speaker 2 (04:07):
Right, And let's talk a little bit about Ann Sullivan.
She had an extraordinarily rough life man leading up to
about age fourteen. She was born in eighteen sixty six
to parents. Her mother was an invalid. Her father abandoned
them right after her mother died when she was I
(04:29):
think eight. By this time, she had lost most of
her vision. She had suffered an eye infection, and so
she and her brother Jimmy, they have no She's eight
and now she's in charge of her little brother. She's
blind and there's no one helping them any longer. There's
no one looking out for them. It's up to her
(04:49):
to look out for the both of them in any
way she can and so they had to move into
a public poor house in Tewksbury.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
That's right, And we should point out she's vision impaired
at this I think until she was an adult she
suffered full blindness. Okay, but you know, rough life. This
poorhouse was awful. There were rumors and reports of cannibalism
at the shelter. It was filthy. They were constantly just
threatened and in danger, you know, health wise and otherwise.
(05:19):
And there was an inspection at one point of a
state board of charities, and a little teenage Anne Sullivan
actually convinced them she had no formal education, convinced a
government official who was on site there to send her
via tax dollars to that Perkin School for the Blind
in Boston, where she enrolled and would eventually graduate as
(05:42):
valid victorian of her class.
Speaker 2 (05:43):
Yeah, and just to get that point across, when she
was fourteen is when she was sent to Perkins School.
She lived in a poorhouse for six years. Her brother
died four months after they moved there when he contracted tuberculosis.
She'd had an incredibly rough life. Her first formal education
came at age fourteen when she went to Perkins, and
(06:04):
six years later she was valedictorian again despite being uncited. Like,
her story in and of itself is incredibly inspiring, but
it just picks up from there.
Speaker 1 (06:15):
Yeah, for sure. And the reason we sort of mentioned
the Perkins stuff because, like I said, that's where she
met Laura Bridgman, and notably, that's where she learned that
manual alphabet because she wanted to converse with Laura Bridgman.
So Keller, like I said, probably lost her her sight
and her hearing from bacterial meningitis is what they suspect. Yeah,
(06:38):
she was born in eighteen eighty. She was completely developmentally
on track when this happened at nineteen months old. So
her life just took a really unfortunate turn. And so
from the moment that she was nineteen months old until
she was six, she was you know what some people
might call in a trapped state. She was just living
(06:59):
in her mind, unable to communicate her parents. You know,
she reacted very frustratingly, probably not surprisingly, and got increasingly
violent with her tantrums. And by the time she was six,
her parents were like, I don't know that we can
handle this safely anymore. We don't want to institutionalize her.
(07:20):
So they reached out somehow. I think her mom had
just remembered, like reading something about Laura Bridgman and that
Perkins School, and I think this is before Helen was
even born, and so they, I guess hopefully, put in
a phone call to Alexander Graham Bell and said, first
of all, thank you for this invention. This is pretty
(07:43):
cool that we can call you the inventor.
Speaker 2 (07:44):
He said, bully bully.
Speaker 1 (07:46):
He said, bully bully. And then they said, but I
know you're active in death education, and I know your
son in law runs the Perkins School. What do you
think about our daughter. It's a pretty tough case.
Speaker 2 (07:57):
Yeah, And he was like, this is I think this
is just the job for the Perkins School. So he
pulled some strings and that kind of makes it sound
like the Perkins School's in Massachusetts. Helen Keller's family was
from Alabama. It sounds like her family was wealthy. They
were not. Her father was a captain in the Confederate
Army during the Civil War. After the Civil War, her
(08:18):
family was left poor, so they were not wealthy. I
think they had land and everything like that, but she
was not nearly as destitute as Anne Sullivan. But I
think it's worth the point that as she grew and
started living her life, she supported herself. She didn't come
from a wealthy family.
Speaker 1 (08:36):
Yeah for sure. In the meantime, while, you know, when
she gets in to school there, Anne Sullivan had already
gotten a job offer from Perkins. She was a great
student there. She knew that manual sign language, and they said, well,
we should just work here. And so on March third,
eighteen eighty six, Helen Keller would meet Anne Sullivan and
later call that her soul's birthday.
Speaker 2 (08:58):
Yeah. So Anne Sullivan was sent by Perkins to t Scumbia,
where the Kellers lived in Alabama, and she when she
got there, i mean almost immediately, Helen through a tantrum.
So Anne Sullivan got to see firsthand, right off the bat,
like this is going to be tough. This girl has
(09:21):
learned because her parents are letting her do this. She's
learned to express herself through violence, through anger, through intimidation,
through the thread of throwing another tantrum if she doesn't
get her way or she can't someone's not listening to
her or something. And Anne Sullivan was a scrappy Irish
(09:42):
lass who identified very quickly like if I'm going to
get through this girl. That stuff has to end immediately,
and so they were like, she spent about the first
week essentially physically overpowering Helen whenever she through a tan
and by the end of the week had lost the tooth.
(10:04):
I think she'd been touched many times they went through it.
But apparently after just a week Helen learned like, Okay,
this lady's not going to put up with that. I
should probably try a different tack. And it seems like
from that point she had gained Helen's trust and now
they could start with Helen's education.
Speaker 1 (10:25):
Yeah, I mean, you think about it. Helen Keller didn't.
She couldn't even figure out who this person was all
of a sudden, this new person in her life, yeah,
who is now physically restraining her. I mean that was
sort of Sullowan's philosophy. She talked about. The gateway was obedience. Basically,
eventually you'll get to love and knowledge, but at first
(10:47):
I have to I have to sit on this girl.
Speaker 2 (10:50):
Right, you know. Yeah, I mean she's like, she broke
a tooth from me, give me a break.
Speaker 1 (10:56):
Yeah, well, very encouragingly. And this is something as one
who's always believed in the healing powers of the great outdoors.
Getting Helen outside was a very big deal and a
very good sort of second step because they could explore nature.
It calmed Helen down immediately, and that's where her senses
of smell and touch could really be engaged.
Speaker 2 (11:16):
She's later said, Helen did that if you were deaf
and blind, then out in the sun is the best
place to be, oh, because you can really feel it,
you know. Yeah, So it didn't really occur to me,
like I knew that this is a really big deal
to Anne Sullivan was able to teach Helen Keller, but
it didn't occur to me until I was researching this
(11:36):
that that wasn't even the first step. The first step,
like if you're teaching a kid something there in school,
you're saying, Okay, now we're going to learn the alphabet.
Here's the alphabet. This is what you use the alphabet
for to spell words. This is what this word means
for this right, this is the word for this thing.
They know that you're teaching them, so they're understanding that
(11:57):
they're accepting that information.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
That's still hard.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
It is that's hard in and of itself. Yeah, there
was no way for Anne Sullivan to explain to Helen Keller,
I'm here to teach you language. Right, she had to
essentially figure out how to break through to Helen Keller
so that Helen Keller realized what was going on now
and could take it from there could start to learn.
(12:23):
So there was this enormous obstacle before Helen Keller could
even begin to learn, which was to understand that she
was being taught and to understand that what she was
being taught was language, that things had words associated with them.
This was brand new to her because again she was
nineteen months old when she lost her sight in hearing,
(12:43):
so she hadn't learned this stuff yet.
Speaker 1 (12:46):
Yeah, I mean, it's astounding that this worked, quite frankly,
and it's due to hard work. And as we'll see
the fact that Helen Keller turns out was brilliant. So
she starts Tapa tap a tap into Helen's palm. Every
chance she gets, she'd hand her a doll, Tapa tapa
tapa doll. She gives her some water, Tapa tapa tapa
(13:10):
w a t e R. And like you said, you know,
for a while, Helen's probably like, what is this person doing?
Tapping on my hand all the time. Eventually she's doing
it so much she learns to associate, like, oh, when
I get water, I'm getting these same taps. And eventually
there's like a literal aha moment where she gets it
(13:32):
and she's like, wait a minute, I understand this person
is representing a word for the thing that I'm experiencing
by tapping into my palm. And she said it was.
She said, Helen's face lit up like it was a
complete revelation.
Speaker 2 (13:48):
Yeah, this very famously happened at a water pump. They
were on one of their outdoor walks or hikes, I guess,
and they came upon the water pump and she said,
somebody was pumping water and Anne stuck Helen's hand into
the stream of water coming out of the spout and
was tapping the same letters wat er and just kept
(14:11):
doing it over and over and over and over. And
that's what finally, Helen just put those things together, just clicked,
like you said. And there's a statue of her that
was unveiled in the Capitol rotunda in two thousand and nine,
and it is of her as an eight year old
girl standing at this water pump basically commemorating that incredibly
(14:34):
just moving moment, but also incredibly unlikely moment that she
got it. She just got it, and now she was
able to start to learn from there.
Speaker 1 (14:45):
That's incredible. So it went really pretty quickly from that point.
She learned thirty words by the end of that day,
had a vocabulary of a few hundred words within a
few months. And by the time this started when she
was six and then to seven, by the time she
was eight, she had taught her to read words by feel.
(15:07):
She was writing. She was composing sentences and writing in
block letters, which is an astounding rate of speed considering
her scenario. And maybe that's a good time for a break. Yeah,
all right, we'll be right back. Things are off to
a really quick start, and we'll see what happens next
with Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan.
Speaker 2 (15:48):
Okay, Chuck, So, like you said, Anne Sullivan quickly figured
out that Helen Keller was a gifted child. She just
had to learn how to learn, and once she learned that,
she just took off. Like you said, by the time
she was a teenager, she was reading i think five
different languages, she wrote poetry, and she was in public speaking.
(16:09):
She did public speaking as a teenager and what's called
the Chattaquah Lecture Circuit, which was a movement to essentially
bring culture and interesting topics to people who lived in
rural areas who otherwise might not be exposed to that
kind of stuff, to give them something to talk about.
And she lectured on the circuit. She appeared on the
circuit with Anne Sullivan as a teenager. I think before
(16:33):
this though, she made her way to the Perkins School
right for her formal education.
Speaker 1 (16:38):
Yeah, there were three kind of big things that followed
education wise, between what is that like eight years between
eighty eight and eighteen ninety six, she went to that
Perkin School like you talked about, got that formal education.
She also went to a specialist at the horse Man
School for the death so she could learned to speak.
(17:00):
And then the third one they moved to New York City.
So and you know, ends along every step of the
way as we'll see obviously, so Helen could go to
the right Humusin School for the Deaf where it would
continue to sort of improve her speaking and she could
learn to lip read. And this is like Sullivan's there.
Tapa Tapa Tapa every step of the way. When she
(17:22):
goes on the lecture circuit, she's tapping questions like during
Q and A, and then Helen would tap the questions
back to Sullivan and she would translate for the audience.
As we'll see, this would lead to some suspicion that
it was all just an act, which is, you know,
fairly upsetting because what they did was remarkable. But this
would all end up with Helen Keller eventually wanting to
(17:44):
go to college.
Speaker 2 (17:46):
Yeah, and just stepping back for just a second, you
mentioned how she learned to lip read, and that doesn't
make any sense because she could she was totally blind.
She lip read by putting her thumb on say Anne
Sullivan's voice box around like under her chin. She put
a finger on her lips and then put another finger
(18:06):
on her sinus cavity, and through feeling what the lips
were doing and the vibrations the vocal box was making,
she could discern essentially what the person was saying. That's
how she learned how to lip read, and eventually that's
one of the ways that she learned to talk, although
she found it a failing of her life that she
was never able to speak clearly enough that just a
(18:29):
stranger on the street could understand her.
Speaker 1 (18:32):
Yeah, So, like I said, she want to go to college,
she goes to She want to go to Radcliffe. It's
the Harvard's sister school. And so Anne Sullivan arranges for
her to go to a prep school to get her
ready for this, for the entrance exams and again translating
all the curriculum, tapping out those lectures, tapping out the
books like reading basically to her into her hand and
(18:55):
then translating back to the teachers. She's there every step
of the way when she gets into and attends Radcliffe College,
where she eventually would graduate Kuum Laudie in nineteen oh
four as the very first person with deaf blindness to
earn a college degree.
Speaker 2 (19:11):
And like you said, there were scoffers who were like,
what is this. There's this woman who's like helping her.
Is this really a thing? And like you said, it
is upsetting. But the amount of study and attention that
was paid to these too, there's just no way they
could have kept up a fraud like this for fifty years.
(19:31):
It's quite clearly settled that Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan
really did all the stuff that they were thought to do.
Speaker 1 (19:40):
Yeah for sure. And we don't want to get into this,
but we just so we don't get emails, we will
mention that, just like this week, there is a really
idiotic TikTok trend that started among Generation Z where they
have put forth that Helen Keller did not even exist,
idiotic and ablests. And so the only reason we mentioned
(20:03):
is so we won't get emails about it, but we
don't want to talk more about that.
Speaker 2 (20:06):
Yeah, good point. So we should say that that Helen
Keller and Ann Sullivan by this time they weren't just
famous among deaf blind advocates or blind advocates or deaf
advocates or anything like that. They were in that circle.
They also were in academia because they were studied. But
by this time she's a teenager still, I think her
(20:29):
early twenties, after she graduates from Radcliffe, they're world famous.
Like everyone knows who Helen Keller and An Sullivan are.
Speaker 1 (20:39):
Yeah for sure. I mean they knew the Rockefellers, they
knew Henry Ford, they had met with US presidents, They
met Charlie Chaplin when they would eventually film starring themselves
as themselves in movie Deliverance in nineteen eighteen. They knew
Mark Twain the book and eventually play title and movie
(21:00):
title the Miracle Worker came from Mark Twain. He's the
one that coined that term when he wrote a letter
to Anne Sullivan calling her that. But all this to say,
I think that put a strain on Anne Sullivan's marriage.
During this period, she got married to a guy named
John Macy. He was a Harvard professor and he actually
helped Helen Keller write the Story of My Life, her autobiography.
(21:24):
But they, you know, they were married for a little while.
The marriage didn't work out, and I think a lot
of it probably had to do with just their fame
and their travels, and it was it was just a
strain on the marriage.
Speaker 2 (21:35):
It seemed like, yeah, apparently I saw a documentary called
Becoming Helen Keller. It was really good, but it crushed
Anne Sullivan when John Macy left. Yeah, and you know,
Helen grieved along with her. She said it took a
really long time. Helen like almost exclusively referred to Anne
as teacher. So she was like, it took it took
teacher a really long time to basically get over that
(21:58):
she may she may have never really gotten over it.
But they they were a pair again at this point,
so they were in a movie. As you said, Helen
learns very quickly, like I like being on stage. This
is kind of fun. It's a rush. She apparently could
feel the vibration in the floor and through the air
when and knew when the audience was clapping.
Speaker 1 (22:20):
Yeah, you know, interestingly weaken since through the vibrations and
through the air when a stuff you should know, tour
show is forty percent full.
Speaker 2 (22:30):
That's right, man, that's right. But she loved that. She
thrived on that and it energized her so cool. Yeah,
she really liked it. She was also one of her
things was they would demonstrate, you know, how she learned
and how she communicated through Anne, but she would deliver
in like these these demonstrations, like inspirational messages. This is
(22:53):
the kind of message she's decided to take to the world.
Rather than like get a load of me, She's like,
you're paying me all this attention. Why don't you pay
attention to yourself and how great you can be too.
At the same time, she was shining a massive spotlight
on how few opportunities the disabled community in the United
(23:14):
States and around the world had at the time, and
she was directly responsible for changing those attitudes.
Speaker 1 (23:22):
So by the time they hit the stage for real
and go on the vaudeville circuit, which is not something
I knew until we did this kind of research, it
was pretty amazing. They had a third member of their group.
Their star risen so much they were like, we need
an assistant, yea, and so they hired Polly Thompson in
nineteen fourteen, and they were known as the Three Musketeers.
(23:45):
So now they were a trio traveling around on the
vaudeville circuit. They had a three act act where they
told their story. They did a twenty minute bit where
Anne had a monologue sort of giving you the background.
It was almost like a live podcast looking at it.
Keller would come in and demonstrate the process, like how
(24:05):
she learned to speak. They would kind of show people
how it happened, say some of those inspirational words like
you were talking about and then obviously with a translating
she would do a little Q and A. This sounds
a lot like our show, actually it is.
Speaker 2 (24:16):
Yeah, we were using the Helen Keller model of live shows.
Speaker 1 (24:20):
Yeah, except hers was sold out with rowing audiences.
Speaker 2 (24:24):
Yeah, they were performing in front of thousands and thousands
of people.
Speaker 1 (24:27):
That's amazing.
Speaker 2 (24:29):
One of the things that Q and A there's a
list that they compiled, and this list was compiled after
they retired from vaudeville, so like these were they documented
questions and answers that they'd gotten. And one of the ones,
so there's one, what's your definition of politics? Was the
question one of the audience members asked, and Helen said,
(24:52):
the art of promising one thing and doing another.
Speaker 1 (24:55):
Very famous, saying.
Speaker 2 (24:56):
I saw another one too. Can you feel moons shine?
You know, like she could feel sunshine and she says no,
but I can smell it.
Speaker 1 (25:06):
I saw that coming, So.
Speaker 2 (25:07):
I mean like she was a great wit. And it's
like Anne Sullivan was translating this. Remember whenever we're talking
about like Helen Keller saying something or doing something, Ann
Sullivan is standing there holding her hand, tapping into her hand.
Like even though she learned braille and how to write
in block letters and all that, that was still a
(25:27):
chief form of communication. Because Anne Sullivan was so good
at essentially translating in real time what was going on.
Speaker 1 (25:37):
Just say it once what Tapa, tapa, tapa.
Speaker 2 (25:42):
I can't do it as good as you. It keeps
cracking me up every time you do.
Speaker 1 (25:47):
So they eventually get off the vaudeville circuit in nineteen
twenty two. So they had a good run of a
handful of years. Anne was tired. Basically she was, you know,
older than Helen, and so she kind of lost the
pizaz for it. So they went home for the rest
of the nineteen twenties. They still lectured, they still traveled,
they still did lobbying and then fundraising and stuff like that.
(26:07):
Obviously working with all the causes you might expect, like
the American Foundation for the Blind. Also became very socially active,
and we'll talk at the end of you know, a
little bit about Helen Keller's later work as a social activist,
which was pretty vast. But they were traveling all over
the world at this point and everyone loved them. Maybe
(26:30):
we should take a break, though, because you know, like
every story of every great partnership, it was a little
more complicated than it might seem on the surface. Yeah, right,
we'll be right back, all right, So we promised talk
(27:02):
nothing salacious or anything like that.
Speaker 2 (27:04):
No thankfully.
Speaker 1 (27:05):
But you know, anytime you're working that closely with someone
over that many years, there're going to be some you know,
it can get complicated. And it was complicated for them
except with us, Yeah exactly. I mean they were lifelong partners,
but they were reliant on each other in a way
that maybe wasn't always the healthiest for either of them.
Like Helen wanted to get married when she was in
(27:27):
her mid thirties. She was engaged to a journalist named
Peter Fagan, but Anne didn't think she should, and so
she got together with her parents, who also didn't think
that she should, and they kept her from getting married.
Speaker 2 (27:38):
Yeah, and there's a quote from Helen who basically publicly
embraced that decision and was like, yeah, that was the
right decision. She said, love makes us blind.
Speaker 1 (27:48):
Man.
Speaker 2 (27:49):
She was sharp, she was super sharp. I'm seriously go
watch that for everybody. Go watch but Becoming Helen Keller
Think is about an hour and a half and it
is a really great documentary.
Speaker 1 (28:00):
So, you know, I mentioned not healthy for either of them.
So Helen was dependent on Anne. Obviously, Anne was also
dependent on Helen because Helen was the one who had
the benefactors, and you know, they weren't cutting checks to
Anne Sullivan. They were sort of helping to support Helen
Keller because everybody loved her and everyone wanted, you know,
(28:21):
a little piece of her by helping you know, out
with finances. But Anne was basically dependent on Helen financially
her entire life.
Speaker 2 (28:32):
Yeah, because, I mean they both made their money on
the vaudeville circuit and lectures. But Helen's books were pretty
especially The Story of My Life, her first autobiography. She
ended up writing fourteen books. Chuck, Yeah, it's incredible, but
it was a really widely read, big best selling novel,
So she definitely made money off of her books, and
(28:54):
I mean, Anne was just part of it. So I
don't think Helen ever held any of that over her head.
But she couldn't just be like, all right, so long, Helen,
good luck. I'm gonna go enjoy the good life eating caviare.
Speaker 1 (29:08):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. You know, we did talk a little
bit about the controversy of people poopooing them at the time,
but we should say kind of specifically that like Radcliffe
didn't it seems like they begrudgingly let her into the
school right, and there were some snobs there that you know,
one of the quotes was, we should just say outright
that miss Sullivan is entering Radcliffe instead of Helen Keller,
(29:31):
a blind, deaf and dumb girl. So I just we
only mentioned that because it happened. It's really awful, because
what they did was nothing short of well miraculous.
Speaker 2 (29:42):
Yeah, and even earlier than that, Chuck, I saw that
a lot of the people who were the heads of
the Perkins School were essentially supported a smear campaign that
they were frauds because they felt that Anne Sullivan's success overshadowed,
you know, the wor that the Perkins School had done
in educating Helen Keller. They weren't getting enough credit essentially, right.
(30:05):
And then also there was a lot of classism to
it too, because these were wealthy benefactors who started the
school and ran it and Anne Sullivan was a poor
Irish girl who came from the bottom rung of society
at the time. Yeah, so what could she do? So yeah,
they were smeared like throughout their life. And they were
both aware of this, like this wasn't like kept from them.
(30:27):
They were two sharp women, so they knew that this
was everything that they did was questioned and they knew it.
But rather than shout back of their critics or whatever,
they just did more and more and proved over and
over again that this was a this was all legitimate.
That's what makes this story so wonderful. Is it actually happened.
(30:50):
And when you stop and think about what's actually going
on here, just past the narrative, it's like, I've become
an enormous fan of Helen Keller and At Sullivan. Just FYI.
Speaker 1 (31:02):
Your stan Yeah, I guess so. I love it. I
am too. I saw that Miracle Worker when I was
a kid, so it had a big impact on me
as a ute.
Speaker 2 (31:11):
I've got it coming up.
Speaker 1 (31:13):
Yeah, it's good. Patty Duke fantastic. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (31:16):
And Anne Bancroft, right, Yeah, they walk alike and they
talked alike.
Speaker 1 (31:23):
So in the nineteen thirties, this is when Ann Sullivan's
health takes a turn for the worst. You know, she
had a tough go of it. She never had like
the best of health, but in the nineteen thirties it
really went downhill. She had completely lost her sight by
nineteen thirty five, and in nineteen thirty six she died
from a coordinary thrombosis. Helen Keller was right there holding
(31:46):
her hand. I can't imagine what she was tapping. Hopefully
that was between them and she was. Anne Sullivan was
the first woman to have her ashes interred at the
Washington National Cathedral. Wow, and was eventually laid to rest
at the Chapel of Saint Joseph of Arimathea in.
Speaker 2 (32:03):
The in the National Cathedral. That's right, that's amazing. It
gets even better, as you'll see. This was a huge,
huge blow to Helen because she lost her best friend,
she lost her teacher, remember she always referred to as teacher,
and she lost her her first and probably strongest bridge
(32:23):
to the outside world. Fortunately, Polly had been around for
more than twenty years now, so she was more than
capable of stepping in and being the bridge between Helen
and the rest of the world after Anne died. So
it's not like Helen was, you know, just bereft. She
was just grief stricken. And one other thing too. There's
(32:45):
a New Yorker article from nineteen thirty called Helen Keller
at forty nine, and it's just this profile on her
while she's still living, and it's a really good, like
just a peek into her regular life. But she fed herself,
she did her own she dressed herself. She was very,
very independent. But when she was trying to communicate with somebody,
(33:06):
she had to have another person because other people couldn't
understand her. And then one other thing, Chuck, I realized,
I'm on a tie rate here. But the reason she
couldn't express herself in other ways is because she didn't
know sign language, because there was a movement at the
time that sign language was not a valid way of
communicating that everyone, including people who couldn't speak, needed to
(33:29):
learn how to speak. That was the only way of
communicating that was legitimate. So she needed somebody to translate
for her because she could never get that down pat
And like I said, her inability to do that haunted
her like a great life failing essentially, which is very sad.
Speaker 1 (33:48):
Yeah, super sad. There is some kind of kind of
light here in the form of a trip that she
took and wanted Helen. There had been an invitation before
and died from the Nippon Lighthouse in Japan to do
a speaking tour there, and Helen didn't want to leave
Anne behind because she was in poorth health at the time.
(34:08):
Apparently in Japan then about one point five percent of
their death and or blind citizens didn't were not able
to be educated or you didn't have access to that.
And so after Anne died, Helen honored her by going
to Japan and completing that trip with Polly as her companion.
They went to thirty three cities in ten weeks, spoke
(34:30):
in front of about a million people, and the next year,
clearly as a result of this, Japan started expanding their
public services for education and their accessibility programs for people
with all sorts of other abilities.
Speaker 2 (34:47):
You said that Helen Keller went to Japan in nineteen
thirty eight. She went again in nineteen forty eight after
World War Two and was essentially the first ambassador to
begin healing between the United States and Pan after she
toured Hiroshima and came back and told everybody what she
saw nice.
Speaker 1 (35:05):
So I think it was like a few decades that
Helen Keller went on after Ann Sulliman passed. She lived
all the way till nineteen sixty eight, which I don't
think I knew she passed away on June first. I'm
kind of in her sleep. In nineteen sixty eight and
she was laid to rest with Anne Ann Polly, who
(35:26):
died eight years previous, at Washington National Cathedral, so that trio,
the Three Musketeers lived together in perpetuity, which is super sweet.
Speaker 2 (35:34):
Yeah, it is super sweet. And you mentioned The Miracle
Worker with Patty Duke and An Bankroft. They both won
Academy Awards for it. It's just a again, I haven't
seen it, but it's just this beloved story. It's great,
and it basically ends after she starts to learn, right,
like she's a young girl the whole time.
Speaker 1 (35:52):
Correct, Yeah, I mean I was a kid, So I
can't remember if there's like a coda or anything like that,
but it's yeah, it's about their sort of early days together.
And certainly, I mean there's more movies to be made.
If someone wanted to make a movie about her activism
later in life, that would be really something, right.
Speaker 2 (36:11):
Yeah, we should talk about that because there's a narrative
that formed around her that everybody wanted, which was Helen
Keller was this angelic, pure girl who overcame incredible odds
and proves that if you work hard enough, you can
accomplish anything. And she realized that that's what people wanted.
So that's kind of the part that she acted publicly.
(36:33):
But this was after she had tried to take the
limelight that she was in and cast it on a
bunch of different social movements that she was genuinely involved
in and like, genuinely cared about. There was a bunch
of them actually, So even after she kind of stopped
talking about the publicly, she was still involved in this
(36:53):
stuff for the rest of her life.
Speaker 1 (36:55):
Oh yeah, I mean, she was involved in the civil
rights movement fifty years before the Civil Rights era, during
the Jim Crow era. And you know, as you pointed out,
she was an Alabama kid whose dad was a Confederate officer,
and they didn't they didn't like her doing this stuff.
Not not her parents necessarily, but just people and other
family in Alabama. They didn't like it. They didn't like
(37:18):
that she was working with the NAACP. She was a
founding member of the ACLU and also a staunch socialist
and borderline communist at one point.
Speaker 2 (37:30):
Yeah, she was a member of the Socialist Party and
she appeared at rallies with Ann and then she found
that the Socialists weren't effective enough in defending workers' rights,
so she joined up with the Industrial Workers of the World,
which was more radical, contained lots of anarchists, and it
was like if being a socialist was a scandalist, like
(37:53):
being a wobbly was like really scandalous, and she was.
She was a card carrying member. She was also hugely
into women's rights. She was a suffragist because remember she
was very active before women even had the right to
vote in the US and I believe the UK. And
she also talked publicly about stuff that you weren't supposed
(38:14):
to talk about, but for really important reasons.
Speaker 1 (38:19):
Right, yeah, I mean, who's going to tell Helen Keller
to stifle you know?
Speaker 2 (38:25):
That's exactly right. Like she got away part of a
lot of stuff that someone who wasn't deaf, blind would
have not gotten away with.
Speaker 1 (38:33):
Oh, for sure, she would talk about birth control and
public way before anyone would venereal diseases, for sure, especially gonorrhea,
because that at the time would cause blindness and infants
when a mother would pass it along at birth. And
so she was in like the pages of Ladies Home
Journal in the forties and fifties talking about rates of
(38:55):
blindness because of gonorrhea and that's just not the kind
of thing that appeared in those kind of magazs scenes
at the time.
Speaker 2 (39:01):
No, And there's one other thing, being a women's rights advocate.
She's she had a quote that I saw in that documentary.
It was women's inferiority is a man made issue. Man.
Speaker 1 (39:14):
She's just like a T shirt factory.
Speaker 2 (39:16):
So let's yeah, nice, yeah, well let's make that a
stuff you should know T shirt huh.
Speaker 1 (39:24):
Yeah, but you know, give her credit, of course, yeah, yeah,
yeah dot dot Josh Clark.
Speaker 2 (39:30):
Right, so, I mean, chuck, she couldn't possibly get any
better than this, right.
Speaker 1 (39:38):
I mean could she? She could have something else?
Speaker 2 (39:40):
I do. I have two things. One, she loved dogs.
She always had a dog. In fact, when she was
living in Queen's later in life she had eight of them.
That's great in and of itself. But in the lead
up to World War Two, her sure books have been
translated into German and they didn't like that. The Nazi
(40:01):
part didn't like it. So her books were among some
of the ones chosen to be burned at Nazi rallies.
Speaker 1 (40:07):
That's a that's a feather in your cat.
Speaker 2 (40:08):
Heck, yeah it is.
Speaker 1 (40:10):
So she was like to think that we'd have our
book burned.
Speaker 2 (40:13):
I would like to think so too. Yeah, so she
was this amazing person that all of this other stuff
just gets overlooked because again, her story typically stops at
that water pump after she gets it right. And she
just led this incredibly full, rich life. What I guess
she was like eighty years old when she died. And yeah,
(40:35):
Susan is an a genuinely amazing person.
Speaker 1 (40:40):
I think Josh Clark is a crush.
Speaker 2 (40:44):
Maybe you're a smitten kitten. I am Tapa Tapa Tapa.
Speaker 1 (40:49):
Oh there we go.
Speaker 2 (40:51):
Uh you got anything else? No, sir, Okay, that's it
for Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan and Polly Thompson. And
let me say one other thing, chuck, because it's not
talked about, like is just a matter of course. She
wrote her own stuff after like later in life, using
Braille typewriters. So I mean she was just as fully
(41:13):
competent person. I'm just going to keep adding facts until
you start listener mail.
Speaker 1 (41:22):
Hey guys, I love your show on data centers. I
was giving you one more chance.
Speaker 2 (41:27):
Helen Keller was essentially a walking data center.
Speaker 1 (41:32):
People. But want to let you know people working from
remote locations using IBM terminals actually happened in the early
nineteen eighties, and I was one of them. I worked
remotely from home writing my dissertation in nineteen eighty three.
My equipment was an IBM thirty thirty computer terminal, a
twelve hundred BAWD phone modem, a mainframe housed at a
(41:53):
remote location, in my case at Phillips North America, New
York City. The software I used was an IBM pro
called Script. I think I remember Script actually programs like
I do. Yeah, it's like I'm pre word perfect.
Speaker 2 (42:05):
Yeah, I'm floppy disks right, Yeah, it had to be.
Speaker 1 (42:10):
It was before word perfect would come into common usage.
But Script was basically using one step up from machine language.
For example, if you wanted to indent for a new paragraph,
you would type the period I N five to make it,
you know, indent five spaces, or for double space it
was period. It looks like LL two and so on
(42:33):
for all formatting. If it sounds primitive and cumbersome, it was,
but far better than an electric typewriter, as you could
correct anything without using wide out. So it was progress
in a sense and actually saved a huge amount of
time for me. So it was long before two thousand
and eight that people got to work remotely, though it
was rather primitive. Thanks for another great episode that is
(42:53):
from Danielle Greenberg.
Speaker 2 (42:55):
Very nice, Danielle.
Speaker 1 (42:56):
Yeah, it's pretty funny.
Speaker 2 (42:57):
It was funny antiquated, I guess is what you call
it today, Danielle.
Speaker 1 (43:02):
Right, that's right.
Speaker 2 (43:04):
Thanks again, Danielle. And if you want to be like
Danielle and send us a great email that takes us
down memory lane in some ways, you can do that,
send it off to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (43:17):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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Josh Clark
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