Was Helen Keller a fraud? I've wondered
about that for over a decade, but I
really hesitated to make this video
because we live in an era that just
loves knocking down historical figures.
And I just don't think that's a good
idea to dismiss amazing people because
they held some outdated beliefs. I mean,
you can pick any hero and somebody's out
there with a takedown video on YouTube.
But this one's different because the
question about Helen Keller isn't about
whether she was a bad person. It's about
whether her accomplishments were even
real. Whether the books, the essays, the
political philosophy attributed to her
actually came from her mind or someone
else's. The elephant in the room is that
the skeptics might have a point. I'm Ken
Lort. I dig into topics like this that
make some people uncomfortable and I try
to give you the fairest overview I can.
And I did my best here. In this video,
we'll first look at the legend of Helen
Keller, then take a quick look at
exactly what Keller's condition was,
then ask why don't we see that many more
Helen Kellers because we just don't.
That might have something to do with
Anne Sullivan, the miracle worker. And
finally, we'll try to figure out whose
words were really published. Okay, so
the legend of Helen Keller starts in
Alabama where she was born in 1880. At
19 months old, an illness took her sight
and her hearing. For the next 5 years,
she lived in near total isolation,
unable to communicate beyond a few crude
gestures to her family. Then Anne
Sullivan showed up and the story that
followed became one of the most famous
in American history. Within weeks,
Keller was learning words through finger
spelling into her palm. By age 10, she
could read Braille in English, French,
and German. By her teens, she was
writing essays that drew serious
literary attention and along with Anne
Sullivan, she was world famous for her
whole life. Kella became friends with
Alexander Graham Bell, Edison, Ford,
Einstein, Chaplain, Twain. She met 13
presidents. She graduated from
Radcliffe, Harvard's women's college
with Sullivan at her side, interpreting
lectures into her hand. She was the
first known deafblind person to earn a
bachelor's degree anywhere. Keller wrote
14 books and hundreds of essays and
letters. She used her fame as a
political activist, a suffragist, a
socialist, a co-founder of the ACLU, a
vocal opponent of World War I, and one
of the earliest advocates for people
with disabilities. By any measure,
disabled or not, her resume is
extraordinary. That all stemmed from her
life story and her extraordinary
writing. By age 10, her letters became
remarkably sophisticated. She began
using flowery, somewhat Victorian
language that was very adult-like,
including visual descriptions and
metaphors that made her seem almost
supernatural to the public. In a poem
she wrote at 13, she described the
golds, scarlets, and purples of an
autumn landscape. Or she would write
about how she would delight in the
gorgeous colors of a sunset. She
described lilac, her teacher's favorite
color, as making her think of faces she
had loved and kissed. Gray was like a
soft shawl around the shoulders. Yellow
meant life and was rich in promise. All
that from a young woman who'd been blind
since she was 19 months old. When
critics challenged that visual language,
Keller responded that a blind person
should be allowed to use words whose
meaning one can only guess from analogy.
When a reviewer in the nation called all
her knowledge hearsay knowledge, Keller
fired back that the bulk of the world's
knowledge is in an imaginary
construction. That's a sharp answer, but
there was definitely an imitative
quality that created a scandal that I'll
get to in a minute. And it's important
because very little about Helen Keller's
story can actually be independently
verified. And the more closely you look
at how her words were actually produced,
the harder it becomes to know where she
ends and where the people around her
began. So before that, let's take a look
at something more basic. What was she
actually working with? And as it turns
out, we don't know as much about
Keller's condition as you might think.
The official position from the Perkins
School for the Blind is that Keller
became totally deaf and blind at 19
months old. But no surviving clinical
documentation from 1882 confirms that
with any kind of modern medical
precision. Doctors at the time called
her illness brain fever which in recent
years is believed to have been bacterial
menitis that causes inflammation of the
membranes around the brain which can
permanently damage the optic and
auditory nerves. But no one can really
confirm whether she had a tiny amount of
vision or hearing. I mean the diagnostic
tools available in 1882 Alabama they
couldn't detect minimal vision or
hearing. Today we conduct a battery of
tests and that matters because even a
small amount of residual function is a
big deal because even a minimal audio
input gives the brain something to
organize around. With nothing the brain
needs to build from scratch using
entirely different neural pathways. So
nothing in the record really contradicts
that Keller was totally deafb blind, but
we only have the judgment of doctors
from a different era. So this is a good
time to mention as usual that if I get
any of these facts wrong, let me know in
the comments and I'll address it in a
pin comment below. My sources and
research, they're also in the
description box. So one thing I've
always wondered was why aren't there
more Helen Kellers around? We have more
resources and scientific knowledge than
ever before, but we don't have hundreds
of people deafb blind from birth with
her capabilities. So, I did my best to
research that. And the number of
comparable people is small in the
handfuls, not the hundreds. And I should
note that some of them lost their vision
and hearing a bit later in life. So,
we're not necessarily comparing
identical situations. Haben Germa is
often cited as a modern-day Helen
Keller. She graduated from Harvard Law
School, wrote a best-selling memoir and
became a prominent disability rights
advocate. Her condition was progressive
beginning in early childhood. Robert
Smith does he lost his sight and most of
his hearing to menitis at age five. He
became the first deafline person to earn
a master's degree and published poetry.
Laura Bridgeman actually preceded Keller
by 50 years. She lost her sight,
hearing, taste, and smell to scarlet
fever at age two. She mastered language,
literature, and basic mathematics at
Perkins. She proved the concept was
possible before Helen Keller was born,
but her output never came close to
Keller's in volume or ambition, and she
lived a quieter life. Marie Hurton is
probably the most comparable case. Born
completely deafblind in France in 1885,
she had no language at all until age 10.
She eventually learned to sign, read,
and write, and she taught other
deafblind girls in Braille. absolutely
remarkable, but she really never
produced literary or political work of
any sophistication. There's a consistent
pattern that the earlier and that the
more total the loss, the more modest the
output. And I think we've never seen
anyone produce anything like Keller's
volume and sophistication from a
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So, there have been tens of thousands of
people deafb blind from a young age. Why
aren't we only talking about a handful?
Part of that answer could be that the
pool is smaller than it appears at
first. Because many of these children
have disabilities beyond the sensory
loss, cognitive or physical. The number
who are deafb blind with an otherwise
intact brain, that's a fraction of an
already rare condition. And for most of
human history, children born with these
conditions, they just didn't survive
long or they weren't educated or weren't
documented. Still, it's a hard thing to
get past. I mean, today in first world
countries, we have early screening,
special education mandates, assist of
technology, and dedicated deafb blind
programs. Today, we have resources that
Keller's era couldn't have imagined.
Yet, we still don't have a steady stream
of comparable deafblind college
graduates or published authors. In fact,
the research treats basic communication
as an achievement worth celebrating.
That leaves a problem with no
comfortable answer. Either completely
deafblind people can achieve high
literacy with proper support, in which
case we should have hundreds of modern
examples, or they largely can't, which
means Keller's output requires an
explanation beyond her disability. That
brings us to Anne Sullivan, coined by
Mark Twain as the miracle worker. She
came to the Keller family with a
terrible backstory. She had severe
visual impairment of her own. Her mother
died at a young age. Her father
abandoned the family. She grew up
literally in a poor house. Abject
poverty. Sullivan was 20 years old when
she showed up in Alabama to teach a
six-year-old girl she never met with no
formal training as a teacher of the deaf
blind. Helen Keller became her entire
identity and livelihood from that day
forward. From the beginning, Sullivan
controlled Keller's education
completely. what she learned, how she
learned it, what ideas she was exposed
to. When Sullivan married a Harvard
educated literary critic, he moved in
and started to edit Keller's work,
sometimes heavily by his own admission.
So, Keller's sole interpreter was
married to a man with some serious
literary skill, and they all lived
together under the same roof. That's the
household where Keller developed her
politics. She became a committed
socialist, a suffragist, and a
co-founder of the ACLU. She praised the
Russian Revolution and by World War II
had a line with the Communist Party. The
idea that this happened in a vacuum
inside a household that had a socialist
literary critic editing her words, that
doesn't make much sense. In fact,
Keller's 1912 essay, How I Became a
Socialist. In it, she wrote that
Sullivan handed her the first book on
socialism, not because she was a
socialist, but only because she liked
its writing style. Over time, Keller's
politics ultimately went further left
than either of the other two. So maybe
her convictions were genuinely her own.
But here's the problem. We we can't
verify much of Keller's thinking at all
that didn't pass through Anne Sullivan
first. Now Keller infrequently
communicated through others. She could
type and she did develop the ability to
speak. Here's a bit of that.
>> It is not blindness
or
that brings me.
It is not blindness or deafness that
bring me my darkest hours.
>> So for 33 years, every word Keller ever
published went through Sullivan as the
sole interpreter. Sullivan admitted she
sometimes got the idea of what Keller
was saying, but didn't always know the
exact words. During the time Keller was
with Sullivan and her husband, she
published three books in her 20s. At the
age of 33, she published Out of the
Dark, a sustained work of socialist
argument. Her writing across those three
decades was literary, philosophically
ambitious, and politically sharp. Then
Sullivan died when Keller was 56 and
replaced by Polly Thompson, a woman with
no background in literature or politics,
and the output changed immediately.
Helen Keller's journal published when
Keller was 58. It was thinner and more
emotional. Let Us Have Faith, published
at age 60. It was a collection of short
inspirational essays with no political
edge. teacher, a tribute biography to
Sullivan took nearly 20 years to produce
and is considered her weakest book. A
woman producing sharp political
arguments at 33 was producing
inspirational pamphlets at age 60. The
verbiage changed as well from more
Victorian pros with a biblical cadence
to words that were more grounded, more
emotionally direct. Some critics argued
that the husband, John Macy, was the
biggest inspiration of the early years,
and without him, the writing became less
literary and more authentically Helen
Keller. After Thompson died, a nurse
became Keller's companion, and Keller
stopped publishing altogether. Now, some
find it remarkable that during Vietnam,
the civil rights era, a woman with
Keller's strong opinion stayed silent.
But she was also in her late 70s by that
time, so I just think it's unfair to
draw too much from that. But the
Thompson years, they're harder to
explain away. The decline in ambition
and sophistication that doesn't track
any medical event. It tracks the loss of
Sullivan and her husband. Sullivan's own
biographer wrote that as long as
Sullivan lived, a question remained as
to how much of what was called Helen
Keller was really Anne Sullivan. It's a
question that's at the center of the
Helen Keller legend. Whose words were
they? Now look, I have an editor who
writes many of these words. Every author
does. It's impossible to know without
understanding their process. I mean,
were the fundamental thoughts from her
or someone else? How many of their words
did they write or change in editing? But
when I read some of her letters as a
child, they gave me pause. Here's an
excerpt from one when she turned 13
years old. Late in the afternoon, we
stepped into a gondola and made the trip
through the lagoons. The sun was
setting, and we watched the changing
effects of its soft, rosy light upon the
towers and fair white palaces. When it
was quite dark, the city was illuminated
and the fireworks began. The thousands
of tiny electric lights were reflected
in the water. It looked as if a shower
of golden fish had been caught in an
invisible net. Look, it's reasonable to
question whether any child could write
like that, especially routinely without
massive guidance from someone else. And
the question of whose words were they
became central to a scandal when she was
just 11 years old. She had given a short
story as a gift to Michael Anagnas, the
head of the Perkins School for the Blind
and a massive booster of his star pupil.
She called the story The Frost King, and
it was about how autumn leaves were
painted by fairies. He liked it so much
that he published it in the alumni
magazine, and it was then discovered to
have been plagiarized from somebody
else. Keller and Sullivan said that
three years earlier when Keller was just
eight, Sullivan was on vacation and
another person had read the book to
Keller through finger spelling. That the
ideas had gotten jumbled in her head and
she just thought the story was her own.
That's actually a thing and it's called
cryptonnesia, a phenomenon of
accidentally pulling something from your
memory, a story, a song. But not like
this. Not from a single reading years
back that has an entire plot sequence
and some entire sentences copied
directly. It would be an almost unheard
of level of recall that she never
claimed or exhibited throughout her
entire life. She was hauled before a
panel of eight Perkins officials and
cross-examined. And the panel was split.
The tie was broken by Michael Anagnos
himself in favor of Helen Keller. But
while he technically cleared her name,
he spent the rest of his life convinced
she was a fraud. The relationship
between Keller, him, and the school
ended, and he later called her a living
lie. So, on one hand, this is a single
plagiarism incident with an 11-year-old
girl. I mean, I was still digging holes
in the backyard at that age. But
Keller's writing during that time was
full of passages that closely mirrored
things Sullivan had read to her. heavy
paraphrasing and ideas and again all
through one other woman's hands.
Sullivan acknowledged that Keller's
writing at that age contained extensive
paraphrasing and it was considered part
of her immersive education. So that
makes the Frost King less an isolated
incident and instead a visible example
of something that was happening
consistently. To me, it's fair to say
that Keller's writing that made her
famous, especially in her young years,
came as much from outside her world as
inside her head. That's not a hoax, but
it also isn't what people believed it to
be. In the 1990s, there was something
called facilitated communication. It was
seen as a breakthrough for nonverbal
autistic people. Facilitators would
physically support a person's hand while
they pointed to letters on a board or
keyboard, and the results were
miraculous. People who'd never
communicated were suddenly producing
fluent, sophisticated sentences. Then
researchers ran a simple test. They
asked the autistic person a question
that the facilitator couldn't see. And
what came out was nonsense. Or it
answered the question that the
facilitator had been shown, not the one
the autistic person heard. The texts had
been the facilitator's words the whole
time. Now, they weren't cynical frauds.
They generally believe that they were
helping and they didn't realize that
they were generating the content
themselves. So, I'm not saying that
anything that dramatic happened here or
that Sullivan sat down at a desk and
wrote 14 books and put Keller's name on
it, but I think the truth is messier
than most people say. A genuinely
intelligent woman communicated real
thoughts and real feelings through a
single human filter. That filter was
talented, motivated, and had enormous
pressure to produce a remarkable child.
Keller was Sullivan's entire reputation
and livelihood. I'm in the realm of
speculation now, but I think that
overlap occurred most strongly in
Keller's younger years and continued to
some extent throughout the entire time
Sullivan was with her. Okay. So, if this
is true, none of this erases what Helen
Keller actually was, how she inspired
others, how she fought for her beliefs.
So, Helen Keller was born in a situation
that would have broken so many people.
And she created a remarkable life
despite that. She lived in near total
sensory isolation. Something I can't
even imagine. The question of how many
of the words did she write, that doesn't
negate any of that. It just brings to
light a life that's more complicated
than the legend. And even if that legend
oversold it, her life was remarkable.
So, I'll leave you with one last story
and a segue to another video. In 1915, a
Chicago doctor refused to operate on a
severely disabled newborn, letting the
baby die instead. Eugenics, they were a
lot more popular then, and Helen Keller
wrote a public letter defending the
doctor and endorsing the concept that
doctors should be able to have the
ability to euthanize disabled babies.
Now, the irony was obvious to many given
Helen Keller's disabilities, but it
raises the question, is eugenics really
that bad? People have always tried to
make better humans. It's thought of now
kind of as a horrible part of human
history, but the idea keeps coming back
even today. You might like this video I
produced. In any event, I hope you got
value from this one. See you again.