Are you ready to rumble? Coming in from location?
We have our hosts, the one and only Margaret kid Joe.
I've always wanted to do that. I'm Mac.
But that's amazing.
That was better than my introduction I had planned, so we'll go with that.
I loved it. It was such a broadcasting voice too.
Wow.
I don't know if I've ever heard you do that before. I've never done it before.
This is just for the two of you, well, for everyone else who's listening besides the two of us. This is a show called Cool People Did Cool Stuff, which is a history podcast. It's the only history podcast that I believe. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy with me today. I'm very excited about. This is Samantha McVay. Ye are you doing yay?
I'm so excited to be on with you again.
Yes. Yeah, for anyone who Sophie likes that, I turn everything into an ad for my other episodes. We had Sophie on when we talked about the Jane Collective performing.
Samantha, you said, so, we also had Sophie. I was technically there.
You were there.
It was There's one thing I know about you, you are not.
Yes, I was on I think was it your inaugural show.
It was one of the first episode, first ones.
Okay, I know it was, right after all the debacle with turning over Robie Wade.
Yeah, yes, but well the news cycles moved on, so fortunately everyone still has full bodily a ton Oh right, well no, never mind. Okay, So Samantha other people might know as the host of the podcast Stuff Mom Never Told You, which is probably not a history podcast because this is the only history podcast ever, right, yeah, I think so. Yeah, I think we like claimed that.
Yeah, I think you should. We pepper in some history. But typically we are a current affairs type of thing. We stretch from everything anything that has to do with intersectional feminism.
We we do it awesome. And our radio announcer is Sophie. Hi, Sophie, how are you doing?
I like, I don't like that title.
It was so good. Your radio voice was like shocking because it was that.
Good, like a boxing match thing announcer.
I think it's close to announcers.
My sports announcer boys.
I mean, okay, it was good, Okay, fair enough. Next time, when I get an even larger truck and put even larger wheels on it, I will have you with a megaphone announce every time that I arrive.
I mean I would enjoy nothing more than that.
To it and actually would be amazing.
Comes from Georgia, I think, I think that's the only place you're allowed to be with that.
It's true.
We in it Ian edits are audio on woman wrote her theme song. So today I really love not telling my guests who we're going to talk about before they show up.
Blind let's go.
Yeah, Today we're going to talk about an American icon, one of the most famous women in US history. We're going to talk about how complicated her legacy is, how badly her story is told. Today I'm going to be curious when you figure out who're talking about. Today, we're going to talk about probably the most famous person in the history of the US Socialist Party, although no one knows she was a socialist. How even more than that,
she's probably the most famous Wobbly. A member of the Syndicalist Union, Friend of the pod Industrial Workers of the World, she was one of the founders of the ACOU. She was a white Southerner who was an early member and supporter of the NAACP and was an outspoken proponent of civil rights. That's right. Today we're talking about Helen Keller.
Oh that he threw me for a loop. Yeah, that is the plant that you did agree to.
Thanks, I guess to get it out of the bag. The reason that people are is complicated is that there's some eugenics in her. But yeah, and we're going to talk about how odd it is. And I think that actually it ended up a more useful way of exploring
some of these concepts than I originally expected. I thought originally I was going to be like, we're going to talk about the fact that everyone ignores that Helen Keller was a socialist, And then I was like, we're gonna talk about that, but we're going to talk about so much more too.
Oh have you ever seen The Miracle Worker?
No? But I read so much about the Miracle Worker during this I've like, I've read so many takes on the Miracle Worker. I don't want to watch it at the end of this.
Ah, you shouldn't. We actually performed that as a high school play. I was in it.
I won't tell you the character I was in because it's so degraded. Not degrade, yes, degrading and racist. But I was in it. Wait, who would be the degrading racist character for you to have been stuck? Oh?
Okay, all right, So I am the in my high school, I'm the only pretty much only minority outside of one other Asian girl and maybe a few Latino students. So I was the only non white person in the drama and in Helen Keller or in the Miracle Worker, there is a servant but is obviously of black descent. Guess who played that really problematic role. And they would not let me not do an accent?
Cool?
It is horrifying, and I because of who she was. She also had children, so I have had to pretend these little kids were Mike. It was bad and they were both.
I think that that is actually a very fitting way to understand the ongoing harm caused not by Helen Keller, but by the way people tell her fucking story.
Oh let's start, Oh god, all right.
All right. Helen Keller, of course, is famous for what she believed and not anything else. I'm not trying to downplay what else she did. She was one of the first deaf blind people in Western society to be given the chance to learn to read and write, and was the first to get a bachelor's degree. We're gonna call this episode Helen Keller was a Socialist and also complicated.
Because Helen Keller was a socialist and complicated, her legacy is a disability rights icon is a lot more popular in abled society than in disability justice communities, who are critical not only of what gets called inspiration porn, but also of assimilation as politics more broadly. So we're going
to talk about all that. We're going to talk to the story of Helen's life, what she did that was super cool, what she did that was super not cool, And we're going to talk about the social model of disability, and in classic form, we're going to start decades before she was even born. Oh yes, because we're going to start with another woman whose name is Laura Dewey Bridgeman. I'm just curious. I had never heard of Laura. Had you heard of Laura before this?
I have not.
Yeah, I Laura Dewey Bridgeman was born in New Hampshire on December twenty first, eighteen twenty nine, to a farming family. She's white. I think they're more farm owners than like homesteaders, because there's references to her her parents' employees at various points.
When she was twenty four months old, she was sick, she got scarlet fever, and when she recovered, she'd lost her sense of hearing, sight, and smell, and with smell goes most of taste, so she was deaf blind, a specific impairment that it was more common in the nineteenth century than the twenty first, but still exists. It was more common back then because it was often caused by various infections that we have way better ways of treating now.
And when she first lost these senses, she would sit around and whisper dark dark for a while, because she knew some words already because she was two years old. I worry about the way that she was represented as a youth because I have less information about her, or I looked up less information about her than I do about Helen. But I know how Helen Keller is misrepresented, and actually I believe by the Miracle Worker. Probably as the story goes, Laura had a really hard time communicating
with her family and was therefore unruly. Was completely unruly. Only her father could get her to do anything, and that was by physically restraining her. Basically, a lot of media will refer to deaf blind children as basically wild animals. This is not true. This is not true of Helen Keller's youth, and I'm inferring that it is not true about Laura's youth. I'm sure it was hard. Don't get me wrong. Deaf blind folks were at the time usually
treated as essentially hopeless cases. And again I'm saying in Western society, because that's what I have information about, no one was known to have learned a consistent way to communicate it across that barrier, besides some of what are called home signs, which are basically DIY sign languages that people develop themselves with their loved ones. But when she
was a kid, Laura was not fully communicative. But when she was seven, there was a school vaguely nearby called the Perkins School for the Blind, which I have seen as being originally in New Hampshire, or maybe it's in Boston. I'm kind of confused because it's still around, and you feel like I feel like I should have been able to find a more concise answer, But it's in New
England alongside of her. The Perkin School of the Blind is like, hey, let's try to teach her, and specifically the director of the school who gets held up as a hero, and we're gonna talk about that, doctor Samuel Gridley Howe. He taught her and I'm going to quote from the Perkins School for the Blind's website about this. He gave her familiar objects such as forks and keys, with name labels made of raised letters pasted upon them. When he gave her detached labels with the same words,
she matched them to their objects. How next cut up the label so each later letter was separate. He spelled the now familiar words, showed them to Bridgeman, then jumbled the letters. She was able to rearrange them so they once again spelled the words. And so this is how the Sally taught Laura English and how to communicate. She learned English, she was off. She studied at the school like the other students, and this accomplishment got written about
all over the world. It's funny because she's not remembered now because Helen Keller is now the famous first quote unquote, I'm making air quotes, but no one in the audience can see that the first stef blind person to you know, learn how to communicate or whatever, right Charles Dickens met her and wrote about her, and this increased her fame substantially. One article I read about her refers to her as the second most famous woman in the world, after only
Queen Victoria during much of her early life. But this is kind of it's that media cycle thing, right. We tend to think of it as like a Twitter brain thing that people have an attention span of fifteen minutes. You know, the attention span might have been slower back then, but it's still ebbs and flows, right, Thousands of people come to visit her, like literally, at one point there was more than a thousand people there's here on one day.
Newspapers around the world are covering her story. According to the author Rosemary Mahoney from her book For the Benefit of Those who see quote, all over America, little girls began poking their dolls eyes out, tying green ribbons across them, and renaming them Laura.
I don't know what. I don't want to say. Okay, I feel like I can't give them proper reaction because I'm like confused. Well, yeah, okay, this is.
This is why I'm gonna talk about what inspiration porn is. I'm like wait is it No, it's it's it's weird. How do I react? Yeah, no, keep going. Yeah, I think this is an example of the long and the long history of problematic ways that people have of you and people with disabilities. Yeah, this is one of those things that I'm like, I'm glad they didn't hate her.
Like, what is that equating poking dolls out of somebody's.
Yeah, it kind of thing. I'm going to say. It's kind of like cultural appropriation, when you love something a little too much and then you take it on and it becomes like problematic and offensive. Oh yeah, maybe it's along those lines.
No, you're right, there's almost certainly. Probably I don't know the history of Halloween well, and I you'd think I would, but like, yeah, like there's almost certainly people dressing up.
Yeah you think I would. That was so funny.
I know more about the history of Christmas than Halloween. And I feel guilty. My goth card is melting.
You're failing.
Yeah, you're failing in this. Let me go get my goth card out of the coffin in the other room. Inspiration porn. This is a particular phrase that was coined by comedians Stella young. I thought I wrote the year in the script, but I didn't. I think it was
twenty twelve that this particular phrase was coined. She defined it as quote an image of a person with a disability, often a kid doing something completely ordinary, like playing or talking or running, or drawing a picture or hitting a tennis ball, carrying a caption like your excuse is invalid or before you quit, try what's wrong with this? The author Stella continues to say, quote, these modified images exceptionalize
and objectify those of us they claim to represent. It is no coincidence that these genuinely adorable disabled kids and these images are never named. It doesn't matter what their names are. They're just there as objects of inspiration. Our later subject, Helen Keller, is probably the single most used in space spiration used as inspiration porn person in the history of the world. Laura's life was not immune to
it either. And I think the thing that irritates a lot of people in the disability community is like, Okay, this idea that the great accomplishment is being normal, right, right, and it's assimilation specifically, that like all people want to do is you know, live like everyone else or whatever, And this is going to be a recurring theme this week. Back to Laura. As much as she was a student, she was a test subject. How he wasn't just teaching
her because he was cool and nice. He was using it as a science experiment.
So yeah, I was going to ask when you said thousands of people were visiting her, why so were they getting knowledge from her? Or were they watching her like.
A sideshow side show? Okay, yeah, no, they would like leave with like a piece of her hair, or like something she had sown, or like and she would buy I mean she would they would buy the stuff she sewed. But yeah, no, it's they were like, come see this wonder of the world.
Right, Yeah, that's exactly. It literally is like again one of those side shows, old school circus traveling shows that I'm like, why would they visiting? Were they trying to get knowledge? Okay, that's that's cool.
But yeah, no, okay, they were watching her, and I'm sure some people were coming and studying this, and we'll talk about how. I mean it was other students at the School for the Blind who went on to like further this style of education and teach teach Helling Keller later to spoil some of it, you know. But but yeah, this guy, how he he wanted to know what was in and what was learned? Right, right, Like what are we born with? What do we what do we learn
through society? It's this, you know, big question that's been with Western world ever since the Enlightenment or whatever. So, for example, when she was eleven, he decided he wanted to find out if religion is in it or if it's learned. So he told her teachers to not answer any questions about God, just to find out if she would end up religious if she was never taught about God.
But then he skipped down for honeymoon for a year and some of the evangelical teachers just like taught her evangelicalism. So he comes back and she's evangelical, and he's like, no, my science experiment, it's been ruined, you know, poor guy.
Poor guy.
Yeah, And so at least according to one narrative, and I have no reason to doubt it. He kind of turned on her a little bit at this point. He started talking about her. He started referring to her as defective. At one point, apparently he said that the reason she
got scarlet fever is that her parents weren't smart. Not that her not smart parents had done something not smart by exposing her to the illness, but literally that they're not smart brains had created a not smart brain child, and people with not smart brains were more likely to be susceptible to illness. Yeah, you know, it's so wow wow wow.
So wait, so he turned on her because she became religious or because that she wasn't exactly what he wanted her to be the Peatrie dish that he wanted to create.
I believe it's that I've read a couple different ways of describing their relationship. This is the most negative way I've seen, but it's also the one I've read with the most detail, and it comes from Rosemary Mahoney, who I'm going to quote again quote how had stated firmly at the start of his career that the blind were no different from the sighted, and that blindness was a superficial handicap, But after ten years of work at the
Perkins Institution, he radically reversed his position. In his sixteenth annual report, he claimed that his views had been modified by experience. He stated, this is going to be able us. This thing that I'm about to read he stated in emphatic uppercase letters, the blind as a class or inferior to other persons in mental power and ability. So he sucks. And this is the guy who found the school for the blind, and they still credit him as like an icon. Yes,
oh my god. And it's interesting because he's like, he is the first person that we know of to teach this style of language to a deaf blind person. There was actually a deaf blind woman before them, who I can't remember. Her name is later in the script, who learned tactile sign language rather than written word.
Right, So was he using brail? Is that what he's using or is he using his own system?
They're using a different system. This is a little bit okay, it's like around this is the middle of nineteenth century. I don't remember what year brail started getting standardized.
I think it's like early eighteen, eighteen hundreds, eighteen twenty something, okay.
I think that, Oh, okay, No, that's good to know. And I think that they're also she does learn braille, right, okay, But the initial stuff that she's handed are this other alphabet that I can't remember the name of, that's like a tactile alphabet. Okay, so now I'm going to talk about all the cool shit how did but for a reason.
Okay, so I want to pretend like he's cool for a second.
I got it because it's worth highlighting the way that people who are otherwise so fucking cool can be ablest as fuck. Right, So, How's grandfather was at the Boston Tea Party. I'm famously neutral on the American Revolution as a later removed from the position of the indigenous and enslaved people in North America.
So I just that's fair.
Whatever. However, how himself, he went and fought in the Greek Revolution in the nineteen twenties. He brought back Greek refugee children to personally teach in America. Then he went to France and fought in the eighteen thirty second French Revolution. Back in the US, he started an abolitionist newspaper, and he did not just leave it at starting an abolitionist newspaper, A lot of people get ridden about in history. It's like pretty cool because they were abolitionists and they wrote words.
He funded John Brown. He had to flee the country over fleeing John Brown. His house was a stop on the underground railroad At one point, him and a couple of his friends stormed a building, breaking down the door of the battering Ram, shooting a cop in the face to rescue a fugitive from slavery named Anthony Burns. This is part of how the Fugitive Slave Act was passed, is because of how and his friends shooting a cop to try and free amn. Okay, this is why it's
so heartbreaking, right they were repelled. He did not successfully free Anthony Burns, so they raised up the funds to buy Anthony his freedom. He helped it. He directly helped at least one other person escape slavery. He probably helped uncountable others. But there was one other name I found. During the Civil War, he was a bit older at this point. He worked to keep disease outbreaks in Union
camps at a minimum. After the Civil War, he worked with the Freedmen's Bureau to make sure that people had food and clothes and everything they needed, helping reunite families
and shit. He's like, and then he goes on and if you read the Wikipedia level of him or whatever, he's like, he did all this amazing shit, and then he goes on, goes on to like found the school for the blind and dedicate his life to teaching people how to read and like all the shit, and you're like, it's so but he's so ablest and we're gonna this is not the only time this is going to happen in this story.
So when he because he sounds really cool and did a lot of cool things in that era. But we also know a lot of abolitionists, especially white abolitionists, still did not believe necessarily that the enslaved people were equal. Was he one of those?
I found no specific sign one way or the other, which I don't know my instinct. You know, it's funny, it is like my instinct would have been like, no, I don't think he's one of those. But the way he talks about like and wants to help blind people and then like fuck them over, Like, yeah, I don't know.
I'm starting to wonder, you know, what those heroes who are not real heroes, but because they did a few good things, right, don't get me wrong. Yeah, love that he was a part of that.
Thank you.
I'm sure you know. There's a lot of good things.
Obviously, there's a lot of good things that happened out of that but still yeah a question. Yeah, no, totally. And then also to just show how like messy the like white abolitionist culture is. The Perkins Institute that he founded was named after its benefactor, a rich guy who donated Thomas Perkins, who donated his mansion to the school. Thomas Perkins was rich because he bought and sold people. Yeah, I knew you were going to go there. Yeah, a wonderful Yeah.
I hope that building's haunted. Keep going.
No, no, no, it's almost certainly haunted. His wife was Julia Ward, who composed the Battle Hymn for the Republic aka that song Might eyes have seen the glory of the Coming of the Lord, which was the Union Army's anthem, which had banger lines like as he Christ died to make men holy, let us die to make men free. I don't know, but do you know what Samantha will set you free? Tell me it's products and services ad.
I'm so excited. I'm going to buy it right now.
Whatever it is we're.
Buying it, tell me I'm doing it right now.
Yeah.
That's unless it's a car, then I'm screwed. I hope it's not another ad for joining the Irish Police Force. I'm there, all right, I got just kidding.
We're doing so, we're doing, We're committed. Here's the ads and we're back. And I'm not sure what I'm gonna do with all this Reagan gold, but you know whatever, bury it.
It's fine. Good, We're good. Bury it. It's gonna it'll be better that way.
Yeah, Like ten of us are going to go out to the woods of the shovel bury it, and then like shoot each other and then bury the bodies with the things so that a few of us know, a few of us know who it is.
Oh, that's escalated very quickly.
I did an episode about pirates recently. Sorry, I like coming on not knowing where it came from.
Yeah, yeah, that just got dark. Okay.
So anyway, we're talking about how we're talking about the Perkins School for the Blind, and he's remembered in history as being this lifelong advocate for the blind. He's not the only disability advocate who is abless as fuck with otherwise progressive politics. Who's going to come up in this episode spoiler alert, the next one who's like this invented the telephone. Laura, for her part, refused to play nice
with people mistreating her. She was told not to talk, for example, because her voice wasn't pleasant or whatever the fuck, and her response was to yell, God gave me much voice.
Yes, amen, yeah, but yeah.
Soon the social media circus moved on from her, and she lived out her life at the school in quiet obscurity. She became a sewing teacher, She went on summer occasions with their family. She read Christian books and made her money selling needlework and teaching at the school. And she died when she was fifty nine. Actually, I don't know if she got paid to teach at the school now that I'm thinking about it. There might have been a room in the board situation. Yeah, people were not treated well.
Yeah.
In history, it's one of the weird things about no one else runs a history podcast on the only one who runs into this stuff.
Right, But yeah, say history bad.
Hmm. No, I'm gonna give it a complicated because there's so much. There's a lot of cool people in history.
Did they do cool stuff?
Yeah? Yeah, totally.
Yeah, I love that title. I'm gonna start a podcast with that.
Damn, you got to it first.
But I produce that.
Sometimes I just yeah, I'm excited. I've already got ideas. Let's go. No problem here, I'm sending you the script. You can finish that really funny. Just do a reverse episode where I just give the script to someone who has.
Just start trying to explain it, not knowing anything about it. You ask, and then that's just start. I just start making sure. That was kind of like we just talked about chat GPT. Yeah, and you they when they don't know, they just make up shit. So I'm like, yeah, okay, let's do that.
That's how you know a man made the chap GPT exactly all right? Anyway, living on so she she lived out her life. She died when she was fifty nine. She wasn't the first deaf blind person to learn language in Western society. Julia Brace was the woman I mentioned earlier who is a generation older, communicated by tactile sign language,
preferring it to Braille and written language. She actually went to the Perkin School for Blind for a moment and how tried to teach her and she was like, fuck this, I'm going back to the School for the death and like I'm I'm in a sign language. I don't want
to learn how to read. And I always say in Western society, because if if you google who was the first deaf blind person to learn language, you get pages and pages about Hell and Keller, which is not true, right, no one's even no anyway whatever, And so it's like I couldn't even find non Western examples. If I had more time, I hope I would have been able to because I'm very curious after doing this because it's presented as this like no one had ever done this in history,
and I just don't believe it. Right.
Well, we know with a history, a lot of things are still undiscovered, and especially if they're in the marginalized community, they're going to be less likely known or even talked about or recorded. So hopefully someone will find out that there are more. But yeah, you never you can never absolutely say something when it comes to.
History totally, especially the first one I gave that.
Yeah, when it comes to for sure.
Yeah, So Laura had a friend in a roommate who was in that who is probably a character in that play. I believe it was a main character in your play. Laura's friend and roommate was named Anne Sullivan.
And Sullivan Okay, yeah, she's.
Going to go on to be very important in this story. She's Helen Keller's teacher and lifelong friend. She had a fucking rough childhood. Have you heard this? Yeah?
She was.
She was a blind, first generation, first generation Irish American woman who had lost her mother and brother to tuberculosis. Her background includes such notes as after her mother's death, her dad abandoned her at a boarding house. The boarding house was subsequently investigated for quote sexually perverted practices and cannibalism. Well, cannibalism. I don't know if I knew that part. Yeah, that's the part where you just like hit a light, like
did they eat? I don't know. Maybe they weren't Catholic and it was just the body of Christ. So Anne Sullivan did not have an easy childhood. She ended up going to the Perkins School blind and had a as far as I can tell, much better life thereafter. I actually have compared to some of these other places. Whatever. Anyway, Okay, so which sort of brings us to Helen. We're starting
to transition to talking about Helen. I was planning on kind of speed running through Helen Keller's learning to communicate, because while it's fucking cool, it's also something that's been told a million times and gets twisted for weird propagandistic and ablest ends, like wow, what a miracle do you know? Deafblind people are cable of communicating, whereas this actually like society has figured out how to communicate with me. You know,
it's it's anyway whatever. But the annoying thing is that I was going to speed run it, and then I discovered have you heard the conspiracy that Helen Keller didn't exist?
Yes? Actually I have running No we did not, but yeah, but I just remember, just because there was that little bit of like interest from high school about her, I like, and then not, I feel like someone brought it up not too long ago.
Conspiracy theory.
Yeah, that's what it is. I was like, what's happening? Yeah, but explain because I did not dig too deep in.
That was it was TikTok. And then I think, you guys spread back to Reddit and then it then it just spread spreads, Yeah.
As it does.
It's awful. It's one of the worst. There's a lot of bad conspiracy theories. This one is just unabashed. Okay, So it's like the basic idea of this conspiracy is that there's no way for deafblind people to communicate. So clearly Helen Keller is a fraud. And this is kind of like to me, it's like that flatter a thing where like I feel bad. I've like mentioned this on
the podcast before. I think I had a friend who, like one winter in like the midst of depression and whatever, he like messaged me at three in the morning and he was like, the Earth is round, right, And I'm like yeah, and He's like, I've been following down some dark rabbit holes. How do you know the Earth is round? And I'm like, because I've seen it, because I've been in an airplane, you know, And because there's people, Yeah,
there's like people who fly round. You could talk to someone who's flown around the world.
No one's no, one's gone off the edge of the world. They've tried.
Yeah, but conspiracy culture could be so convincing and as spread. And I mean, like, you know, not everyone has like like I've worked on scientology and I've worked on QAnon shit, so it's like it's like nobody and and and like the number one thing that I learned from working on those topics is like it just gets people like yeah, there isn't like even even people that it's just it it's.
Like a virus.
Yeah, well it makes it validate something for them, whether it's uh, and it's going to be really awful, so I can prepare this way, I can act this way, or this is why this makes sense because my life has makes sense and correlates with that for sure.
Yeah yeah, but yeah.
I think I didn't dig do too deep on the hell in keller bit because I like, that doesn't what purpose does to serve? Moving on?
But yeah, no, and it's it must have I mean I think a lot of it because I think it was I think it was people who just like they couldn't imagine how they would communicate, so therefore it's impossible, right and if they say things enough, they say things like no other how come no other death blind person has ever been able to communicate or whatever, which is like easily disproven because we live in a society, right they do.
Wait, bagfie, that's their argument.
Yeah, that's like that is one of their arguments.
I have never.
Yeah, a deaf blind person who can communicate, right, like I have shut up, like they don't exist?
Yeah, what like literally what.
Yeh?
Be fucking for real people and then and so the conspiracy is either some some go so far say she literally didn't exist, like there was no woman named Helen Keller in history, which is like one of those things where it's like she lived until the sixties. You see video of her, like.
It wasn't like it wasn't that long ago, wasn'teen hundreds.
And other people say that she existed but wasn't actually deaf blind. She was like one or the other or something, and she was faking the other one for fame. Yeah. Another one was that she was deaf blind, but she wasn't actually communicating and she was being treated like a
ventriloquist dummy by her handlers. And a lot of those ones are like, see, because there's no way she could possibly know about socialism because she's never seen anything, or it was just it's just fucking ableism, right, and I don't even know how to like like mostly my way of debunking as being like, you're wrong, that's wrong, you're incorrect, like but.
It here's a picture of her, here's her accomplishments, here's who testifies to what she had. Don't understand what just because she's able to function and live happily does not discredit her existence.
I know, I know it. It it's so awful, and.
And like.
I think that's okay. So that's part of why I don't speed run it. And that's part of why I actually used the specific example of how Laura learned how to read is because I feel like, well, I can't imagine how you could do that and be like okay,
well here's how it happened. And you're like, oh okay, because like I didn't, you know before I started doing the researchers, like, well, I don't know the means by which, right this happened, right, And then I like read about and it's like, yeah, that makes sense, Like that that's cool, you know, And so I'm not going to speed run it. I thought we could skip to the Helen Keller as revolutionary socialist who didn't believe in party politics but instead
revolutionary socialism, followed by here's a complicated legacy. But first we're gonna talk whow she learned to communicate? Yes, because the miracle I'm going to try to perform here is to get it through people's thick skulls that people with disabilities are people capable of learning what the fuck? So Helen Keller on June twenty seventh, eighteen eighty. Helen Keller was born in Tuscumbia, Alabama, to a slaver family. Her
family was like Slaver Royalty. Her father, Arthur H. Heller, was a captain in the Confederate Army, related to Robert E. Lee, the Confederate general she was. But that's just one side of her family. On her mother's side, her grandfather was another Confederate general, this time in acting brigadier general named Charles Adams. Who's this part is kind of fun. His entire command, Okay, it's whatever. His entire command was conscripts
who wish they weren't out there fighting for slavery. So during one battle, this general her grandfather lost his entire command because they all fucked off. They're like yeah, they were like he was like, go fill in the hole in the Confederate line, and they were like, we we don't want to. Like that seems like a good way to dive for rich people.
Like You're like, they're like sure, sure, sure, sure, sure be wipe back. Yeah, I can go get something first. Yeah, I hear my mom call it.
Hold on.
The shovels are way over there, so let let us go Google grab those stay.
Here, let my mus get at home. Yeah, that's amazing, I know. And so there's some cool people in this history is the Confederate soldiers who did not want to be because it is worth under noting that they're conscripts right like they're literally whatever. Anyway, the whole episode about that. So Helen's granddad, Charles Adams, was also related to John Adams, the second President of the United States. To his credit where it is due, John Adams was one of the
only presidents back then who wasn't a slaver. I think it was literally just John Adams and his son were the only pre Civil War presidents I could. Someone's going to be mad at me about saying that. I don't actually pay much attention to electoral politics until I started doing this show. Helen was born on what gets called
euphemistically a homestead when people want a whitewash history. It was a cotton plantation worked by enslave people until a combination of the Union army and slave people striking and deserting, and a civil war within the Civil War all worked together to destroy fucking shadow slavery. Right, that's her lineage. Helen is born fifteen years after the Civil War ended,
mind you, and she's rad. On the balance, I actually think that her break from all of this makes her more rad and probably had at least her fucking granddad rolling over in his grave. Here's my impression of granddad rolling over in his grave. I wrote into the script, and so now I'm stuck reading it. I wrote it probably two in the morning, but here I am No, my troops deserted me. No, my most famous descendant found an organization called the ACOU to help black people's That's
what he's said. Yeah, thanks, I loved it. So right now, she's a baby. She hasn't started the ACU yet. She's nineteen months old. She gets really sick. This is probably meningitis, but that's people's just best guess right now. At the time, it was probably called oh fuck, our baby is sick and no one has invented antibiotics yet. She recovers, except she lost her vision and her hearing and was deaf blind, and really quickly the historical fog sets in because there's
two stories here. There's the story that's really good for fundraising, which is the story of the film The Miracle Worker about how she was basically a wild animal. There's like, I think there's like a scene where she's like chasing someone with scissors and and like, yeah, a.
Whole like dining room scene where they fling food about and she gets into everybody's plates and she gets ignored, but she's like yeah, yeah, literally just being on top of the table, Yeah, eating off of people's plates and no one's stopping her.
Yeah, that's for dramatic effect, as far as I can tell, with roughly no basis in reality. I'm certain that every child is tantrums, and I'm certain that someone who has trouble that people don't know how to communicate with has more tantrums. I am not. But the actual thing that happened is that little Helen started figuring out how to communicate with home signs. She had more than sixty of these because she taught herself how to communicate on some level,
because people do that. She could experience the world through taste, touch and smell. She knew who was coming because she could tell the different gates of the different people in her household based on the vibration and the floor caused by their footsteps, and to her family's credit, they took her her condition seriously. Her mother read Charles Dickinson's book Dickens Is Dickens, Yeah, where he talked about the plural is Dickey.
I'm not saying anyone is wrong.
You do you what you need if you have multiple let's go.
Well, he's going to show up later in this episode. But Mark Twain has that quote about anyone who can only think of one way to spell a word clearly suffers from lack of imagination.
I Mark Twin.
But yes, so Charles Diggens talks about Laura Bridgman. Mom reads the book and is like, oh shit, someone else has dealt with this, Maybe we can do this. So she talks to a doctor I think like travels to the mid Atlantic to talk to a doctor, to a specialist who put her in touch with the anti hero of today's story. I'm gonna go with anti hero Alexander Graham Bell.
Oh okay, did we already do a second ad break?
Well? Guess what everyone, before you get to hear about telephones, you get to hear about what happened with his invention, which is that eventually you all are going to get listening to ads in the middle of hearing about history about the guy that's true. Yeah, yeah, it's the very handy button. Yeah. I hate what I'm like working on something though, and like I like, my phone's like across the room and I'm like, I have to listen to anyway.
But these are amazing personally, These are these are the best ones.
Personally. I thoroughly enjoy hearing about Hello Fresh.
I like the ones that are about other podcasts I have listened to. Yes, I really like the Alphabet Boys. I listened to that because I heard an advertised on the Coolstone podcast. Nice.
I have no idea what that is, but right on, I don't need it.
It's a podcast about the FBI's infiltration of by the way, Margaret, actually yeah, this is actually yeah, this is just genuinely and I'm like, I have some quibbles about the way it represents some stuff, but I got a lot out of that. So here's some other some actual ads. And we're back and we're talking about Alexander Graham Bell or Alec to his friends. For some reason, shut up, no, it really is. He really was. He was Alec. He also didn't have a middle name. In his younger life,
he like, but his brothers all had middle names. So he was like, Dad, how come I don't have a middle name. So for his like eighth birthday or something, his dad was like, fine, Graham, you have a middle name. Now, why didn't I give him a middle name? Did they just not like him? I feel like you just gave up on the names.
Yeah, like he was a.
Third or fourth or something.
Can I can I just say I thought the Gwyneth Pautrick skiing trial was the whitest shit I've heard recently. But being like, you don't have a middle name, fine, your Graham?
Yes, totally, all right, Alec.
And named himself Alec right.
And then also, and this is none of this is in the script because it doesn't actually matter. Uh, he spelled it with a K. And then later his wife was like, you gotta change. It's gotta beat with a C instead of a C K. And so he dropped the K at his wife's behest And I haven't no idea.
Why So it was a L E C K.
Yeah. Originally his nickname, Yeah.
Alex so l A A A oh that's the nickname because.
It's Alexander name. And it's funny because history remembers him as like he is not an alex he has an Alexander Graham Bell, like he is full three names, you know.
Right, that reality he was Alec Bell.
Yeah, yeah, you can't. You can't repeat the kickers too much though, because he wasn't a racist.
Fair enough. I think that.
Because I'm gonna.
Yell at oh, he participated in some ship that did some racism. He advocated against racism. All right, we'll get to it. We'll get to it.
Okay, Okay, let's go.
Actually it's in like two paragraphs, it's two sentences, okay. So Alexander Grambell, our man, Alec he's not really our man because he's he's obsessed with deafness and trying to cure it, and he's trying to better the lives of deaf people. And he's also obsessed with the eugenics. That's always a thing, that thing that poisons the legacy of like half the Victorian eras interesting people is back. So Alexander gram Bell. He's famous for inventing the telephone, which
the acoustic telegraph. All his money came from the telephone, but he barely liked telephones, he wouldn't keep one in his office. He invented a bunch of other shit, like an old timey air conditioner that he used to cool his house, which was like a fan over ice cubes, or some shit. Worked on composting toilets. He was one of the inventors of the metal detector. Supposedly he invented this while trying to find the bullet in President James Garfield so doctors could pull it out. There's like a
whole he's an inventor. People like fucking talking about him. But his main love was human speech, the advocating for it, the working with the deaf community and pressuring them into relying on speech instead of sign language. Yeah, it's not a visual medium. But Samantha's currently side eyeing me.
Yes, I am sidey.
So he came from a long line of elocutionists, people who study speech, the like mechanics and the sounds of speech. His dad wrote a language designed to describe the mechanics of articulation, like what sounds are coming out of a mouth is a language that his dad wrote. His mom started going deaf when he was twelve, so he became and he he was always like with her and interpreting for her and stuff. He became a tutor for deaf people.
He married one of his deaf students, which I think he was actually uncreepy about.
Okay, I was gonna say a student, Like, what what do we say when we say student?
She was an adult? I believe I didn't actually look she's younger than him.
You know, sometimes they consider fourteen year olds adults.
I know I need to Actually I should have written how old she was. They had a long courtship, and his courtship was primarily him writing feminist and anti racist letters to her. She was white, okay, and but one of the letters he wrote was sarcastic, and everyone hates him. So they took his sarcastic letter and claimed that he was against women's suffrage and that women were more free than men because they didn't have to do any thinking, and like all of this stuff. And so I went
into it. I was like really ready to be like man and he's wrong about fucking everything. And I'm like reading, I'm like, yeah, fuck this, why is he saying the shit? And you get to the end of the letter and you're like, this is sarcasm, like, and he's not subtle about it. By the end of the letter, like it's
actually decently executed sarcasm. It's two pages long. It talks about how ridiculous it is that women could be equal to men and invade men's sacred spaces like astronomy, all the while referencing women after women after women who were in these spaces being very good and successful and we're at least as smart as men and how whatever, and he like goes on and he's like, look, eventually, there's
gonna be a woman president. And he's Scottish. He listen to America at this point, but he's Scottish and he's like, whatever, I'm a subject of the queen and she's a decent queen, so like, why the fuck would I be against women rulers? Like this is when he like drops the sarcasm and like, how before him, you've got someone who has had fairly
good politics for it. For his era, he actively believed in universal suffrage regardless of race and gender and religion and property ownership, and he treated the disabled people that he dedicated his life to in bad ways, or rather, he advocated things that aren't good He was a huge proponent of what gets called oralism, and this is an
assimilationist approach to disability, specifically to deafness. He argued that deaf people would be happier if they integrate into hearing society, which means no more teaching sign language and instead everyone should just read lips and learn to speak, and he used his father's alphabet to teach deaf people to speak. He also said shit like deaf people should avoid hanging out with mostly deaf people because it slows assimilation. This does not look kindly upon by history because it's bad.
Correct with the New York Times, the oralism Bell Champion was a disaster for the deaf. Well examples, a bound of deaf people have mastered speech, they do not represent the larger deaf community. Oralism implicitly teaches a kind of self abnegation that deaf people are of value only in so far as they can approximate another kind of person. Okay, so that's one of his big bad things. I'll talk
by the other one. He's really influential, and Helen Collor is a reason he's like a long side quest for this, because I think he's actually almost a He's really important to understanding Helen Color's position on these things.
Oh man, I read ahead. This is this is bad.
Yeah, this's gonna be on a different show.
Oh no, I was like, oh, the Margaret Show.
I've been tricked.
I know, yay. Working title Helen Color was a socialist, gonna be a bye.
All right, Margaret.
Let's let's let's.
Rip the band in anti Helen on the whole to be clear, fair enough, rip off the band aid. Yeah, all right. So Alexander Graham Bell alex was a eugenicist, not in the way you'd immediately assume when you hear that word. Now, I've talked about this in a couple times on the show, and I fucking hate that. I have to because I hate that so many people are into eugenics that it keeps cropping up all the time. But there are two things that prove that eugenics was
one of the worst ideas humanity ever had. The first one was the Nazis. Most people hear eugenics and they think of the Nazis improve the human race by killing
everyone who's inferior. Then there's the other terrible thing, which is the non Nazi, non consensual eugenics, like the US practiced, the US sterilized so many fucking people, non consensually all throughout the twentieth century and still frankly, mostly people of color, people with disabilities, poor people, lots and lots of people, especially people who are more than one of these things, but especially people of color. And this is really fucking bad.
And this is why fights for birth control and abortion were actually really complicated in a lot of communities of color, and why it's very important that our fight isn't just for abortion, it's for control over one's body, the right to have kids, the right to not have kids. We talked about this last time you were on.
Yes, we did.
But the thing that I think that people don't because you can look back and you can see these things and it's very fucking clear. But the thing that people don't necessarily understand is that eugenics was a widespread belief and I think every corner of society. Yeah, yeah, it was on the left as well as the right. It was among working class people as well. People discovered evolution and hereditary heredity and we're like, sick, let's take an active hand in it by like fucking with everything you
know in ways that were bad and went bad. The leftist eugenics was focused on choice, like let's not sterilize everyone, but instead it was shit like let's have fewer children as working class people so that the laborpool is smaller and we're more in demand and can leverage our power better, which is a framework that now would fit more under family planning, right, because it's about the family making plans,
it's about the people who have wombs making decisions. This still led to bad shit because it was tied into fucking eugenics.
Right.
When we talk about planned parenthood as great it is today, we know the bases and we know why it is complicated and Sayinger did good things in bad things, Yep, exactly. I like the first time I had to break Sanger up on this show, I like almost changed topics. I was like, I don't want to have to talk about this. I don't want to talk about Margaret Sanger's it's I don't want to And then I'm like, all right, this is cowardice. I will do it. So Alexander Graham Bell
or Alec who is friends. He's into studying heredity and he learns that deafness is indeed, sometimes congenital can be hereditary. He writes a whole paper about this, worrying about how if deaf people marry one and it might make a race that gets scare quotes of deaf people that said,
and I hate saying that said. People say that he advocated for bands on marriage between deaf people, which he never did, and he actually spent decades of his life trying to prove to people that he never did, because this also came up while he was alive, and he spent a lot of his time in communication with the deaf community, I think the National Association for the Deaf and about how he was opposed to bands on marriage.
He never advocated for sterility for deaf people. He did argue for similations politics for deaf people, and like did his fucking maybe people should. So this is contentious even
within the deaf community at the time. In the nineteen twenty or so, the National Association that Deaf was concerned about people marrying one another because everyone was obsessed with eugenics, and because a lot of the people, not all of the people, a lot of the people in the disability community at the time, becaus was how do we stop people from being disabled, rather than how do we deal with the social effects of this, which brings us to
the social construction of disability that we now have the framework that far more people are working under now versus the medical model of disability that Bell and others were working under, which we'll talk about on Wednesday. This is the worst cliffhanger I've ever done. It's a theory cliffhanger.
I'm hanging on.
Okay, I appreciate it. It's a really interesting theory. When I first had this explained to me at a feminist science fiction convention called wiz Con, it was a mind blow moment. I was like, oh, that makes sense. You know, I kind of cut you off.
I feel like I'm coming into a good lecture, so I'm excited.
All right, great, yeah, yeah, that's totally the Oh anyway, thank you, thank you. But what else is amazing? It's not these deals, It's Samantha. It's you and the stuff.
That you do. Is it me? Oh?
Thank you, I love it. Well, thank you for letting me be on. But yes, I am on a podcast called stuff Mom Never Told You. You can find us on Twitter, Instagram's YouTube, and TikTok if you want to watch my co host cry about the Last of Us or Star Wars. That's what we post there.
You right.
We also have a book coming out in August.
You have a book coming out.
We have a book coming out. Yes, you can go pre order it. It's it's stuff mom never you, Past, Present.
And Future, and it's got some cool things. We've got a lot of great illustrations and like graphic novel portions to it.
Gods, thank you. You want to pre order it, you can pre order it at stuff you should Read dot com. There's like a whole little section and yeah, it's coming out in August.
Yay.
Fuck yeah, that's exciting. I'm excited. So ifhi, do you have anything you want to plug?
Uh buy Samantha's book by Margaret's many books. Uh pre ordered Jamie Loftus's Raw Dog, which is about hot dogs, which Margaret play last we record was like maybe you should give that contexts sure that when you don't bet if you don't.
Yeah, yeah, all right, Well that's some stuff and we'll come back on Wednesday and we'll actually start talking about Helen Keller.
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