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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 And I just don't think that's a good idea to dismiss amazing people because they held some outdated beliefs.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 
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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 
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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 
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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 
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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 
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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 
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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 
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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 
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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 
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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 
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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 
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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. 
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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. 
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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 comparable starting point. Today's sponsor is Private Internet Access, and they're all about encrypting and protecting your data. Whenever you're browsing online in an unprotected 
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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. 
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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 
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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 
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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 
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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 
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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 >> 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 
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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, 
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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 
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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 
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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 
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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 
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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. 
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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 
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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, 
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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 
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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 
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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 
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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 
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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 
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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 
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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 
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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.