Despite her controversial political beliefs, Helen Keller contributed greatly to society throughout her adult and later-adult life.
Helen went on to become a world-famous speaker and author. She is remembered as an advocate for the handicapped, as well as numerous causes. She was a suffragist, a pacifist and a birth control supporter. In 1915 she founded Helen Keller International, a non-profit organization for preventing blindness. Helen and Anne Sullivan traveled all over the world to over 39 countries, and made several trips to Japan, becoming a favorite of the Japanese people. Helen Keller met every U.S. President from Grover Cleveland to Lyndon B. Johnson and was friends with many famous figures including Alexander Graham Bell, Charlie Chaplin and Mark Twain.
Helen Keller was a member of the Socialist Party and actively campaigned and wrote in support of the working classes from 1909 to 1921. She supported Socialist Party candidate Eugene V. Debs in each of his campaigns for the presidency. Her political views were reinforced by visiting workers. In her words, "I have visited sweatshops, factories, crowded slums. If I could not see it, I could smell it."
Newspaper columnists who had praised her courage and intelligence before she came out as a socialist now called attention to her disabilities. The editor of the Brooklyn Eagle wrote that her "mistakes sprung out of the manifest limitations of her development." Keller responded to that editor, referring to having met him before he knew of her political views:
"At that time the compliments he paid me were so generous that I blush to remember them. But now that I have come out for socialism he reminds me and the public that I am blind and deaf and especially liable to error. I must have shrunk in intelligence during the years since I met him...Oh, ridiculous Brooklyn Eagle! Socially blind and deaf, it defends an intolerable system, a system that is the cause of much of the physical blindness and deafness which we are trying to prevent."
On September 14, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson awarded Helen Keller the Presidential Medal of Freedom, one of the United States' top two highest civilian honors.
Keller devoted much of her later life to raise funds for the American Foundation for the Blind. She died on June 1, 1968, passing away 26 days before her 88th birthday, in her Easton, Connecticut home.
In 2003, the state of Alabama honored Keller — a native of the state — on its state quarter. The Helen Keller Hospital is also dedicated to her.
2006-08-27 10:09:22
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answer #1
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answered by Anonymous
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she became a womans suffragette and a communist- which is why no one talks about what she did with her education because it would be realized that it was a waste of time
2006-08-27 15:44:19
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answer #2
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answered by Anonymous
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