The Story of Helen Keller — The Miracle of the Twentieth Century

The story of Helen Keller is the story of a child suddenly cut off from the world at a very early age, when she was nineteen months old. It is the story of her hard, slow, victorious struggle to return to that world of which she had been deprived. That little blind, mute, and deaf girl became, with the passing of the days, the gifted writer of extraordinary intelligence who never flagged in working, writing, and struggling to better the condition of others and to help them. In short, her story is the story of a half-tamed animal that became with time a sensitive citizen of extraordinary intelligence, who created for herself a distinguished place in our present history.

Helen Keller was born a normal child, in Tuscumbia, in the state of Alabama, on June 27, 1880. She was suddenly deprived of the blessings of sight and hearing as the result of a grave illness which the doctors diagnosed as brain fever. It was expected that the disease would leave its victim feeble-minded, according to the medical theory prevalent at the time; but our heroine, with her strong constitution, came out of it in good health, to enter upon a wild, disordered childhood, with a partial awareness of what went on around her.

It was when Helen reached the age of seven that her teacher, Miss Anne Sullivan, was brought from the Perkins Institution in Boston, at twenty years of age. Her coming was advised by Mr. Alexander Graham Bell, moved by compassion, and the child's parents took his advice; and Miss Sullivan came to accompany Helen like her shadow until 1936, when she died. Anne Sullivan bore a responsibility that demanded inexhaustible patience and untiring courage. Anne brought her little pupil a doll from the students of the Perkins Institution, which she used in training her, attempting to link objects with letters by spelling into the little girl's palm by means of the manual alphabet, which pictures the letters by signs. Here Helen learned the letters with astonishing speed, but she did not know that she was spelling a word, or that a thing called speech existed in this world. And so the number of words she had learned to spell in that mysterious way kept growing...

... And the days passed... and Helen's eagerness for knowledge, discovery, and experiment grew...

One morning she stood with her teacher in the open air beside a water pump, as someone was working the pump to draw water from the well... Miss Sullivan took Helen's hand and placed it under the spout; the child was pleased by the feeling of the water's coolness and kept her hand in it, while with the other hand her teacher began to spell the name of this refreshing liquid, first slowly, then quickly — and behold, she grasped the meaning of what her hand had traced, for she knew that the word "water" meant that cool liquid running over her hand!! Then she bent down quickly and touched the earth and asked her teacher to teach her the letters of its name; and night had not let down its curtains on the evening of that day before Helen had learned thirty words. This was the first step toward Helen's culture and her breadth of learning. She mastered the alphabet with extraordinary speed in both its manual and raised forms which the blind use, and this made reading and writing easy for her. In 1890 she astonished her teacher by asking to learn to speak, after discovering, in some way, that a deaf and blind girl in far-off Norway had managed to learn to talk. Miss Sarah Fuller of the Horace School for Men was the first to take that responsibility upon herself.

In her childhood Helen often repeated that phrase which astonished so many: "Some day I shall go to college" — and she did. In 1896 Helen entered the Cambridge School for Young Ladies to prepare herself for Radcliffe College, which she entered in the fall of 1900. And in 1904 she held the degree of Bachelor of Science. Miss Sullivan was the constant companion who translated for her, by means of the hand signs, all the lectures she had to attend; she encouraged her always and stirred her ambition by planting in her a great confidence in her own success and ability.

Then too, the numerous reference works for the subjects to which Helen had to return were translated by the hand alphabet through Miss Sullivan, who herself nearly went blind from the many long hours she spent in the necessary reading and in conveying the information to Miss Keller.

Two years before she took her degree, Helen was swept into the current of writing and published her first work, "The Story of My Life," which appeared serially in the "Ladies' Home Journal" in 1902. From that time her pen has never once been idle. She uses the typewriter with Braille letters in preparing her publications and then copies them out on the ordinary machine, and the reader rarely finds errors in what she types!!! She has also contributed many articles, continually, to a large number of American magazines, among them: the "Century Magazine," the "Youth's Companion," "McClure's Magazine," the "Atlantic Monthly," and others. She has likewise published several books besides her work "The Story of My Life," among them "Optimism," a valuable essay which appeared in 1903; then "The World I Live In," in 1908; "The Song of the Stone Wall," in 1910; "Out of the Dark," in 1913; "My Religion," in 1927; "My Later Life," in 1930; "Peace at Eventide," in 1932; "Helen Keller in Scotland," in 1933; "Helen Keller's Journal," in 1938; "Let Us Have Faith," in 1941.

Helen Keller received the degree of Doctor of the "Humane Mission" from Temple University in Philadelphia. And in June 1932 the University of Glasgow in Scotland honored her with the degree of Doctor of Laws.

Helen was and still is a woman who loves travel and movement without weariness or boredom. She has made several tours through all parts of the United States and Canada, and delivered many lectures on behalf of the blind. She has also made several journeys to Europe and the East, and even to South Africa and Japan.

From childhood Helen Keller dedicated herself to work for her fellow blind, and for the deaf-blind. She was always ready to serve her cause before legislators, and by means of lectures, and above all by making herself that shining lamp and that lofty example which showed the public, and every doubter, what an individual can accomplish despite the harshness of difficulties.

After the death of her teacher in 1936, Miss Keller moved to the suburbs near New York City. In 1946, while she was on her fact-finding journey in Europe, fire consumed her beautiful white-frame house, in which she had spent many years, gathering during them a sweet bouquet of precious memories after continuous striving. On her return, her friends hastened to her service and helped in rebuilding the house, which they succeeded in restoring exactly as it had been. They are now working to restore that precious treasure which was lost — her library, filled with books printed by the Braille method for the blind.

Helen Keller is a person always at work, of an energy that never flags or tires. Her time is always taken up with writing, with lectures, with contributing to the service of the blind, and with other projects that keep arising for her.

She is a lover of dogs and has a large number of them, and she spends her leisure hours playing with them. She loves the garden too, where the flowers know in her a devoted friend and a lover of nature. She is full of life, feeling everything around her; she takes great delight in people, and so she is always awake and alert to whatever change comes over their feelings; she relishes a joke, and she has the gift of drawing pleasure from life, and a constant longing to read and to learn; her favorite books are the Bible and certain volumes of poetry and philosophy.

In 1914 Miss Polly Thomson became one of the family, for from the time she took up her work, Miss Keller could no longer do without her; she was also an assistant to Mrs. Macy

(Anne Sullivan). Her responsibilities kept growing with the passage of time, and it fell to her to make up for that great loss in the death of Mrs. Macy and to lighten the weight of the grief upon Helen. She is with her still today, serving as her hearing and her sight, carrying her message to the world and the world's message to her.

Helen Keller, this great woman despite her afflictions, is today an authority consulted in national and international relations, and she is adviser to the Foundation for the Blind at home and overseas. She has made many tours, in the course of which she has lectured in Australia, Canada, England, Ireland, Scotland, France, Greece, Italy, Japan, Yugoslavia, Korea, Manchukuo, New Zealand, South Africa, and Southern Rhodesia, besides the United States. She has been granted several prizes and medals, among them the Roosevelt Medal in 1936, and the Yugoslav Order of St. Sava in 1931. She is an honorary member of the Institute of Arts and Letters, and one of the ten women who are the most important women in the world.

Helen Keller visited Beirut at the beginning of last May, and delivered several lectures in packed halls, astonishing her hearers and enchanting them. While she was in West Hall at the American University of Beirut, Mr. Arida played for her one of the hymns she loves, and the whole gathering joined in the singing; whereupon Miss Keller did nothing less than walk to the piano and place her hands upon it — and there she was, facing the crowds and leading them with her hand like a skilled maestro, to their wonder and amazement.

And when she was asked whether she had felt the storm of sharp applause with which she was greeted, she answered that she felt the vibrations, with the breeze, rising up from the soles of her feet.

In appreciation of her singular genius, the Lebanese government conferred on her the gilded medal, and this gesture left the happiest impression in the hearts of those who knew her and loved her.

To sum up, Helen Keller is in truth the miracle of the twentieth century: she is proficient in several languages, keen of intelligence, full of optimism about life despite her hard afflictions, and the sweet smile never leaves those two clear blue eyes, nor that tender, angelic face. She is a pride to woman in every country of the world.

... One of my friends asked her: "If you had one wish whose fulfillment you might ask, what would you ask?"

And her answer came at once... "Peace for the world."

This blind, deaf, mute woman, who has seen nothing of life's sweetness and the beauty of its nature — her wish, despite all her afflictions, was not for herself; rather self-denial and thought for others were her motto, and peace for the world the wish whose fulfillment she asks!! How great an example she is of self-denial, in this life in which the "I" has overwhelmed all else.