Keller, Helen (1880–1968)

Working-Class Revolution

Annie Sullivan Macy gave Keller a copy of H. G. Wells's New Worlds for Old and Keller's socialist career began. This is plain to see in her own books Out of the Dark and The Socialist Writings of Helen Keller in which her reading and her personal experience melded into fighting for child labor laws and unionization. Keller saw that working conditions caused debilitating diseases, including blindness. During her international speaking engagements, she chastised the capitalists for their abuses and championed the welfare of the worker. It was the worker that allowed capitalists to wallow in their profits. Keller believed that because of these propensities—selfishness, abuse, and combativeness—on the part of the barons of business that man's better instincts were threatened.

So it was that she was there for the Lawrence textile mills strike of 1912. She wrote vehemently against the Rockefellers and their major role in the Ludlow Massacre in Colorado: 13 people shot, 11 children and two women burned to death by the bought and paid for National Guard. Keller was a Wobbly, a member of the Industrial Workers of the World. Her books were banned in Berlin in 1933 while Goebbels preached his propaganda. There was nothing passive about this woman's life. Indeed, she advocated extreme measures such as strikes and window smashing in the fight for freedom from low wages, poor working conditions, and child labor.

Perhaps her most vituperative criticisms were against child labor. Misery, degradation, blindness, crookedness, sin—all found their greatest expression in the working conditions of children. Simply the fact of children working was anathema to Keller. How did such drudgery help the children, help the family? Child labor was an abhorrent practice that robbed children of life and only its abolition was acceptable.

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