Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan: Miracle is Right

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1:44Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here too, and this is Stuff You Should Know. I think this is a long time coming edition. Yeah, I mean, how have we not covered Ann Sullivan and Helen Keller at this point? It's kind of weird. I don't know, but this is the kind of thing that's like, yeah, we still got a few years left in this, you know? Totally, and we're not scraping the bottom of any barrels here. No, we're not even dipping into the top of the barrel yet, everybody. It's still full of pickles. That's right, or cream that has risen to the top. Oh, that's even better.

2:21Pickles and cream. Right. But we're talking about Helen Keller and Ann Sullivan. You probably know who these people are, but if you don't, just very quickly, we should say that Ann Sullivan was a teacher of a young girl and others along the way, but mainly known for her work with a young girl starting from the age of six named Helen Keller, who lost her sight and hearing as a 19-month-old from what is likely bacterial meningitis, even though we don't know for sure. and it's one of the great inspiring stories of all time and especially one that came early on to show to the rest of the world who at the time didn't think that people that had these kinds of afflictions like blindness and being deaf, like if you had both of those, they were basically like, we're going to send you to an institution because we can't teach you anything, you know?

3:18You can't see, you can't hear, we're sorry. Yeah, and at those institutions, they likely died. A lot of them died just from neglect or abuse or all sorts of different reasons just because they were unable to see or hear. And by this time, there was education for the deaf. There was education for the blind. But like you said, the deaf-blind were considered like there's just no way you can teach them. And the reason why is because the only senses they have are touch, smell, and taste. That's about it. and they're just like, we don't know how to teach anybody by taste. Like you just can't do anything with them.

3:58So when you really start to put yourself in Helen Keller's position, totally cut off by the world or from the world, it's just mind boggling and as inspiring as it gets to stop and think about what Ann Sullivan actually did. And then what Helen Keller was able to do after Ann Sullivan did her thing initially. Yeah, for sure. One of the great relationships and partnerships of history, world history, and certainly American history. There had been some schools in place, and there was one recorded deafblind person who had learned language. It was a woman named Laura Bridgman. In the 1830s, she worked with a guy named Samuel Gridley Howell, and he founded what's known as the Perkins School for the Blind in Boston, which will come into play in this story.

4:48But he taught her, and this is what Ann Sullivan would teach Helen Keller, something called the manual alphabet, which is, as Lisa Simpson would say, tapa, tapa, tapa, where letters correspond to taps on a palm. And that is how you, you know, very sort of slowly teach somebody language without with them not being able to see or hear. Yeah, they figured out how to teach somebody language just through touch, which is impressive in and of itself. But the fact that Laura Bridgman had learned that, it was considered like a curiosity, an anomaly. Like, this is not, like, that didn't extend to the idea that you could teach deafblind people anything generally, right?

5:33Yeah, and we should say that Ann Sullivan was vision impaired herself, and that's how she ended up knowing Laura Bridgman from that Perkins School for the Blind. Right. And let's talk a little bit about Ann Sullivan. She had an extraordinarily rough life leading up to about age 14. She was born in 1866 to parents. Her mother was an invalid. Her father abandoned them right after her mother died when she was, I think, eight. By this time, she had lost most of her vision. She had suffered an eye infection. And so she and her brother, Jimmy, they have no—she's eight, and now she's in charge of her little brother.

6:16She's blind, and there's no one helping them any longer. There's no one looking out for them. It's up to her to look out for the both of them in any way she can. And so they had to move into a public poorhouse in Tewksbury. That's right. And we should point out she's vision impaired at this point. I think until she was an adult, she suffered full blindness. Okay. But, you know, rough life. This poor house was awful. There were rumors and reports of cannibalism at the shelter. It was filthy. They were constantly just threatened and in danger, you know, health-wise and otherwise. And there was an inspection at one point of a state board of charities, and a little teenage Ann Sullivan actually convinced them, she had no formal education, convinced a government official who was on site there to send her via tax dollars to that Perkins School for the Blind in Boston where she enrolled and would eventually graduate as Valedictorian of her class.

7:17Yeah, and just to get that point across, when she was 14 is when she was sent to Perkins School. She lived in a poor house for six years. Her brother died four months after they moved there when he contracted tuberculosis. She'd had an incredibly rough life. Her first formal education came at age 14 when she went to Perkins, and six years later, she was valedictorian. Again, despite being unsighted. Like, her story in and of itself is incredibly inspiring, but it just picks up from there. Yeah, for sure. And the reason we sort of mentioned the Perkins stuff, because, like I said, that's where she met Laura Bridgman.

7:55And notably, that's where she learned that manual alphabet because she wanted to converse with Laura Ridgeman. So Keller, like I said, probably lost her sight and her hearing from bacterial meningitis is what they suspect. She was born in 1880. She was completely developmentally on track when this happened at 19 months old. So her life just took a really unfortunate turn. And so from the moment that she was 19 months old until she was six, she was, you know, what some people might call in a trapped state. She was just living in her mind, unable to communicate. Her parents, you know, she reacted very frustratingly, probably not surprisingly, and got increasingly violent with her tantrums.

8:46And by the time she was six, her parents were like, I don't know that we can handle this safely anymore. We don't want to institutionalize her. So they reached out somehow. I think her mom had just remembered, like, reading something about Laura Bridgman and that Perkins school. And I think this is before Helen was even born. And so they, I guess, hopefully put in a phone call to Alexander Graham Bell and said, first of all, thank you for this invention. This is pretty cool that we can call you the inventor. He said, bully, bully. He said, bully, bully. And then they said, but I know you're active in deaf education and I know your son-in-law runs the Perkins School.

9:27What do you think about our daughter? It's a pretty tough case. Yeah. And he was like, this is I think this is just the job for the Perkins School. So he pulled some strings. And that kind of makes it sound like the Perkins School's in Massachusetts. Helen Keller's family was from Alabama. It sounds like her family was wealthy. They were not. Her father was a captain in the Confederate Army during the Civil War. After the Civil War, her family was left poor, so they were not wealthy. I think they had land and everything like that, but she was not nearly as destitute as Ann Sullivan. But I think it's worth the point that as she grew and started living her life, she supported herself.

10:08She didn't come from a wealthy family. Yeah, for sure. In the meantime, while, you know, when she gets sent to school there, Ann Sullivan had already gotten a job offer from Perkins. She was a great student there. She knew that manual sign language. And they said, well, you should just work here. And so on March 3rd, 1886, Helen Keller would meet Ann Sullivan and later call that her soul's birthday. Yeah. So Ann Sullivan was basically sent by Perkins to Tuscumbia, where the Kellers lived in Alabama. and when she got there, I mean, almost immediately, Helen threw a tantrum. Yeah. So Ann Sullivan got to see firsthand right off the bat, like, this is going to be tough.

10:54This girl has learned because her parents are letting her do this. She's learned to express herself through violence, through anger, through intimidation, through the threat of throwing another tantrum. if she doesn't get her way or she can't, someone's not listening to her or something. And Ann Sullivan was a scrappy Irish lass who identified very quickly, like, if I'm going to get through this girl, that stuff has to end immediately. And so they were like, she spent about the first week essentially physically overpowering Helen whenever she threw a tantrum. and by the end of the week had lost a tooth.

11:38I think she'd been punched many times. They went through it. But apparently after just a week, Helen learned like, okay, this lady's not going to put up with that. I should probably try a different tack. And it seems like from that point, she had gained Helen's trust and now they could start with Helen's education. Yeah, I mean, think about it. Helen Keller didn't, she couldn't even figure out who this person was all of a sudden. This new person in her life. Yeah. Who is now physically restraining her. I mean, that was sort of Sullivan's philosophy. She talked about the gateway was obedience, basically.

12:19Eventually, you'll get to love and knowledge. But at first, I have to sit on this girl. Right. You know? Yeah. I mean, she's like, she broke a tooth from me. Give me a break. Yeah, well, very encouragingly, and this is something as someone who's always believed in the healing powers of the great outdoors, getting Helen outside was a very big deal and a very good sort of second step because they could explore nature. It calmed Helen down immediately, and that's where her senses of smell and touch could really be engaged. She later said, Helen did, that if you were deaf and blind, then out in the sun is the best place to be because you could really feel it, you know?

13:00Yeah. So it didn't really occur to me, like I knew that this is a really big deal that Ann Sullivan was able to teach Helen Keller, but it didn't occur to me until I was researching this that that wasn't even the first step. The first step, like if you're teaching a kid something, they're in school, you're saying, okay, now we're going to learn the alphabet. Here's the alphabet. This is what you use the alphabet for, to spell words. This is what this word means for this, right? This is the word for this thing. They know that you're teaching them. So they're understanding that. They're accepting that information.

13:33And that's still hard. It is. That's hard in and of itself. Yeah. There was no way for Ann Sullivan to explain to Helen Keller, I'm here to teach you language. Right. She had to essentially figure out how to break through to Helen Keller so that Helen Keller realized what was going on now and could take it from there, could start to learn. So there was this enormous obstacle before Helen Keller could even begin to learn, which was to understand that she was being taught. Yeah. And to understand that what she was being taught was language, that things had words associated with them. This was brand new to her because, again, she was 19 months old when she lost her sight and hearing.

14:17So she hadn't learned this stuff yet. Yeah. I mean, it's astounding that this worked, quite frankly. And it's due to the hard work and, as we'll see, the fact that Helen Keller, it turns out, was brilliant. So she starts tappa-tappa-tappa into Helen's palm every chance she gets. She'd hand her a doll, tappa-tappa-tappa-D-O-L-L. She gives her some water, tappa-tappa-tappa-W-A-T-E-R. And like you said, you know, for a while, Helen's probably like, what is this person doing? Yeah. Tapping on my hand all the time. eventually she's doing it so much she learns to associate like oh when I get water I'm getting these same taps and eventually there's like a literal aha moment where she gets it and she's like wait a minute I understand this this person is is representing a word for the thing that I'm experiencing by tapping into my palm and she said it was uh she said Helen's face lit up like it was a complete revelation.

15:22Yeah. This very famously happened at a water pump. They were on one of their outdoor walks or hikes, I guess. And they came upon the water pump and she said somebody was pumping water and Anne stuck Helen's hand into the stream of water coming out of the spout and was tapping the same letter, W-A-T-E-R, and just kept doing it over and over and over and over. And that's what finally Helen just put those things together. It just clicked, like you said. And there's a statue of her that was unveiled in the Capitol Rotunda in 2009. And it is of her as an eight-year-old girl standing at this water pump, basically commemorating that incredibly just moving moment, but also incredibly unlikely moment that she got it.

16:14She just got it. And now she was able to start to learn from there. That's incredible. So it went really pretty quickly from that point. She learned 30 words by the end of that day, had a vocabulary of a few hundred words within a few months. And by the time this started when she was was six and into seven, by the time she was eight, she had taught her to read words by feel. She was writing. She was composing sentences and writing in block letters, which is an astounding rate of speed considering her scenario. And maybe that's a good time for a break? Yeah. All right. We'll be right back. Things are off to a really quick start, and we'll see what happens next with Helen Keller and Ann Sullivan.

17:14All right, son. Time to put out this campfire. Dad, we learned about this in school. Oh, did you now? Okay. What's first? Smokey Bear said to... First, drown it with a bucket of water. Then stir it with a shovel. Wow. You sound just like him. Then he said... If it's still warm, then do it again. Where can I learn all this? It's all on SmokeyBear.com with other wildfire prevention tips. Because only you can prevent wildfires. Brought to you by the USDA Forest Service, your state forester and the Ad Council. Segregation in the day, integration at night. When segregation was the law, one mysterious black club owner had his own rules.

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19:23Okay, Chuck. So like you said, Ann Sullivan quickly figured out that Helen Keller was a gifted child. She just had to learn how to learn. And once she learned that, she just took off like like you said. By the time she was a teenager, she was reading, I think, five different languages. She wrote poetry and she was in public speaking. She did public speaking as a teenager on what's called the Chattuqua Lecture Circuit, which was a movement to essentially bring culture and interesting topics to people who lived in rural areas who otherwise might not be exposed to that kind of stuff to give them something to talk about.

20:00And she lectured on this circuit. She appeared on the circuit with Ann Sullivan as a teenager. I think before this, though, she made her way to the Perkins School, right, for her formal education. Yeah, there were three kind of big things that followed education-wise. Between, what is that, like eight years, between 88 and 1896, she went to that Perkins School, like you talked about, got that formal education. She also went to a specialist at the Horace Mann School for the Deaf, so she could learn to speak. And then the third one, they moved to New York City, and Anne's along every step of the way, as we'll see, obviously.

20:41So Helen could go to the Wright-Humason School for the Deaf, where it would continue to sort of improve her speaking, and she could learn to lip-read. And this is like, Sullivan's there, tappa-tappa-tappa, every step of the way. When she goes on the lecture circuit, she's tapping questions like during Q &A, and then Helen would tap the questions back to Sullivan, and she would translate for the audience. As we'll see, this would lead to some suspicion that it was all just an act, which is, you know, fairly upsetting because what they did was remarkable. But this would all end up with Helen Keller eventually wanting to go to college.

21:20Yeah, and just stepping back for just a second, You mentioned how she learned to lip read, and that doesn't make any sense because she was totally blind. She lip read by putting her thumb on, say, Ann Sullivan's voice box, like under her chin. She put a finger on her lips and then put another finger on her sinus cavity. And through feeling what the lips were doing and the vibrations the vocal box was making, she could discern essentially what the person was saying. that's how she learned how to lip read and eventually that's one of the ways that she learned to talk although she found it a failing of her life that she was never able to speak clearly enough that just a stranger on the street could understand her yeah so she like I said she wanted to go to college she wanted to go to Radcliffe it's the Harvard sister school and so Ann Sullivan arranges for her to go to a prep school to get her ready for this for the entrance exams and, again, translating all the curriculum, tapping out those lectures, tapping out the books, like reading basically into her hand, and then translating back to the teachers.

22:31She's there every step of the way when she gets into and attends Radcliffe College, where she eventually would graduate cum laude in 1904 as the very first person with deafblindness to earn a college degree. And like you said, there were scoffers who were like, what is this? There's this woman who's like helping her. Is this really a thing? And like you said, it is upsetting. But the amount of study and attention that was paid to these two, there's just no way they could have kept up a fraud like this for 50 years. It's quite clearly settled that Helen Keller and Ann Sullivan really did all the stuff that they were thought to do.

23:15Yeah, for sure. And we don't want to get into this, but we just so we don't get emails, we will mention that just like this week, there is a really idiotic TikTok trend that started among Generation Z where they have put forth that Helen Keller did not even exist. And it's idiotic and ableist. And so the only reason we mention is so we won't get emails about it. But we don't want to talk more about that. Yeah. Good point. So we should say that the that Helen Keller and Ann Sullivan by this time, they weren't they weren't just famous among deaf blind advocates or blind advocates or deaf advocates or anything like that.

23:54They were in that circle. They also were in academia because they were studied. And but by this time, she's a teenager still, I think, or early 20s after she graduates from Radcliffe. they're world famous. Like, everyone knows who Helen Keller and Ann Sullivan are. Yeah, for sure. I mean, they knew the Rockefellers. They knew Henry Ford. They had met with U.S. presidents. They met Charlie Chaplin when they would eventually film, starring themselves as themselves, the movie Deliverance in 1918. They knew Mark Twain. The book and eventually play title and movie title, the miracle worker came from Mark Twain.

24:37He's the one that coined that term when he wrote a letter to Ann Sullivan calling her that. But all this to say, I think that put a strain on Ann Sullivan's marriage. During this period, she got married to a guy named John Macy. He was a Harvard professor. And he actually helped Helen Keller write the story of my life, her autobiography. But they, you know, they were married for a little while. The marriage didn't work out. And I think a lot of it probably had to do with just their fame and their travels. And it was just a strain on the marriage, it seemed like. Yeah, apparently I saw a documentary called Becoming Helen Keller.

25:14It was really good. But it crushed Ann Sullivan when John Macy left. And, you know, Helen grieved along with her. She said it took a really long time. Helen, like, almost exclusively referred to Ann as teacher. So she was like, it took teacher a really long time to basically get over that. She may have never really gotten over it, but they were a pair again at this point. So they were in the movie, as you said. Helen learns very quickly, like, I like being on stage. This is kind of fun. It's a rush. She apparently could feel the vibration in the floor and through the air and knew when the audience was clapping.

25:55Yeah, you know, interestingly, we can sense through the vibrations and through the air when a Stuff You Should Know tour show is 40 % full. That's right, man. That's right. But she loved that. She thrived on that. And it energized her. That's cool. Yeah, she really liked it. She was also, one of her things was they would demonstrate, you know, how she learned and how she communicated through Anne. but she would deliver in like these these demonstrations like inspirational messages this is the kind of message she's decided to take to the world rather than like get a load of me she's like you're paying me all this attention why don't you pay attention to yourself and how great you can be too at the same time she was shining a massive spotlight on how few opportunities the disabled community in the United States and around the world had at the time, and she was directly responsible for changing those attitudes.

26:57So by the time they hit the stage for real and go on the vaudeville circuit, which is not something I knew until we did this kind of research, it was pretty amazing, they had a third member of their group. You know, their star has risen so much they were like, we need an assistant. And so they hired Polly Thompson in 1914, and they were known as the Three Musketeers. So now they were a trio traveling around on the vaudeville circuit. They had a three-act act wherein they told their story. They did a 20-minute bit where Anne had a monologue sort of giving you the background. It was almost like a live podcast looking at it.

27:36Keller would come in and demonstrate the process, like how she learned to speak. they would kind of show people how it happened, say some of those inspirational words like you were talking about. And then, obviously, with Anne translating, she would do a little Q &A. This sounds a lot like our show, actually. Yeah, we were using the Helen Keller model of live shows. Yeah, except hers was sold out with roaring audiences. Yeah, they were performing in front of thousands and thousands of people. That's amazing. One of the things in that Q &A, there's a list that they compiled, And this list was compiled after they retired from vaudeville.

28:12So like these were, they documented questions and answers that they got. And one of the ones, so there's one, what's your definition of politics was the question one of the audience members asked. And Helen said, the art of promising one thing and doing another. Very famous saying. I saw another one too. Can you feel moonshine? You know, like she could feel sunshine. And she says, no, but I can smell it. I saw that coming. So, I mean, like she was a great wit. And like Ann Sullivan was translating this. Remember, whenever we're talking about like Helen Keller saying something or doing something, Ann Sullivan is standing there holding her hand, tapping into her hand.

28:57Like even though she learned Braille and how to write in block letters and all that, That was still the chief form of communication because Ann Sullivan was so good at essentially translating in real time what was going on. Just say it once. What? Tappa, tappa, tappa. I can't do it as good as you. It keeps cracking me up every time you do. So they eventually get off the vaudeville circuit in 1922. So they had a good run of a handful of years. Ann was tired, basically. She was, you know, older than Helen. And so she kind of lost the pizzazz for it. So they went home for the rest of the 1920s. They still lectured.