Helen Keller as political crusader? Max Wallace reveals what happened ‘After The Miracle’ in new biography

Now, bestselling writer and disability rights advocate Max Wallace’s fascinating fourth book, “After the Miracle,” reclaims the life of the international icon through the lens of her pioneering political activism, including speaking out against racism, poverty and disability. Speaking by phone recently from his Toronto home, Wallace said he hoped to challenge the well-worn narrative that her teacher Annie Sullivan was the one responsible for Keller’s extraordinary achievements, her miracle worker.

“Helen’s been reduced to a secondary character in her own story, the cliché of the six-year-old deafblind girl at the water pump. Frozen in time. A secular saint famous for one thing,” he said. It was Helen, though, who was prodigiously gifted, a woman fluent in six languages, articulate in her writing, calling out demagogues and injustice, her rage palpable.

While writing his previous book, “In the Name of Humanity: The Secret Deal to End the Holocaust,” Wallace discovered that Keller’s book “How I Became A Socialist” (1912) was one of the few books by Americans burned by the Nazis when they took power. He was “intrigued by the idea that one of the world’s most beloved figures attracted the ire of the world’s most ruthless dictator.” That’s when his research about Keller began in earnest and he learned “that throughout the 1930s she was like the original anti-Fascist.”

In May 1933, for example, Keller wrote a letter to Hitler: “History has taught you nothing if you think you can kill ideas. Tyrants have tried to do that often before, and the ideas have risen up in their might and destroyed them … Do not imagine your barbarities to the Jews are unknown here.”

“She was reading periodicals and newspapers in German, so she was calling him out in real time. She was so savvy about world politics that she wrote about a conspiracy alarmingly imminent. About Franco and Hitler,” Wallace said.

Much earlier, after Keller was the first deafblind person to graduate from Radcliffe College, where she’d studied under Charles Copeland, the same composition professor as poet T.S. Eliot and novelist John Dos Passos, she joined the Socialist Party. “Predictably her politics were blamed on her disabilities. A move that always infuriated her. And, unfortunately, during her earliest socialist period, she used a lot of stale rhetoric, which doesn’t convince in any era,” Wallace said.

Around the same time, in 1911, however, Keller had an epiphany in which she recognized a link between disability and capitalism: she had recently learned that industrial accidents caused by a lack of workplace safety were responsible for blindness and other disabilities in America. She believed poverty was society’s greatest plague. She called it the “unconscious cruelty of commercial society … an abomination.”

“She travelled the world decades later talking about systemic poverty and how cycles of poverty lead to disability. Her lawyer wanted her to talk about her story of overcoming disability. But she’d talk about commercial greed and poverty. She was frustrated that people only wanted to hear about her inspirational life story and the hagiography of Annie Sullivan,” Wallace said.

Keller made a horrific public misstep in 1915 — something that stains her legacy to this day — when she embraced eugenics and came to the defence of a Chicago doctor who allowed a disabled baby to die, a fact that Wallace did not gloss over, instead quoting what Helen shockingly, for the time, wrote: “he performed a service to society as well as to the hopeless being spared from a life of misery.” Wallace said that her flirtation with eugenics continues to taint Keller’s legacy in the disability community even today.

Late in the editing process, Wallace also discovered that Keller’s father was the first Ku Klux Klan member in Alabama, a fact that underscored her shame about her Southern family’s slave-owning past, a shame she shared with Mark Twain, one of her dearest friends. She would recall with affection time spent with Twain, “when talk was fragrant with tobacco and flamboyant with profanity.” Keller also wrote that they bonded over social justice: “He knew that we do not think with our eyes and ears, and that our capacity for thought is not measured by five senses.”

“I was most struck in my research by Helen’s crusades in anti-Black racism and how poignant it was to read her correspondence from 1915 to 1916,” Wallace said. In 1916, the NAACP appealed to her to endorse its work. She did and also donated $100, a significant sum that was then equal to almost one-fifth of the average annual income. She wrote, “What a comment upon our social justice is the need of an association like yours! … a most blind, stupid, inhuman prejudice … Let us hurl our strength against the iron gates of prejudice until they fall, and their bars are sundered.” Unsurprisingly, three years later Keller would become a founding member of the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union).

The most exciting part of Wallace’s research involved interviewing Gandhi’s grandchildren about Keller’s 1951 tour of South Africa, which lasted two-and-a-half months. “They remembered clearly her visit three years after apartheid began and how important it was for a famous American to come and speak out, standing up for people of colour,” he said. Keller gave an interview in which she went on the record about the appalling treatment of Black South Africans. “It was one of the many times that people around Helen exerted intense pressure to downplay her controversies. It was like political whack-a-mole trying to maintain her image as a secular saint,” Wallace said.

Eight years after that the African National Congress wrote to Helen requesting her public support when a then-unknown Nelson Mandela and other party members fighting against apartheid were put on trial for high treason and faced the death penalty. “Seventy-nine-year-old Helen did not hesitate. She issued an appeal for funds and condemned the poison of racism and oppression,” Wallace said.

With whiplash narrative drive this meticulously researched account of Keller’s legacy clarifies the lifelong commitment of a progressive radical whose social justice advocacy remains timeless. It’s an essential read that shifts the well-worn tale of one of the 20th century’s most intrepid figures.

Janet Somerville is the author of “Yours, for Probably Always: Martha Gellhorn’s Letters of Love & War 1930-1949,” available now as an audiobook read by Ellen Barkin.