Helen Keller was a socialist, and was even on the FBI’s radar

The fact that Helen Keller was a socialist activist is one thing that the United States of America wants to forget about her. She joined the Socialist Party in 1909 and spent the next more than ten years actively campaigning and writing in favor of the working class. She was under FBI observation for more than 30 years as a result of her strong political ideas.

History often remembers people with disabilities in neutered forms. Grew up knowing Helen Keller as the American wild child of The Miracle Worker, the little girl who couldn’t see or hear, but learned to communicate nonetheless and grew up to earn a bachelor’s degree. Rarely is it acknowledged that she was also a fiery socialist who advocated for labor rights and women’s suffrage. John Gianvito’s new documentary Her Socialist Smile, currently playing at the New York Film Festival, is an effort to restore Helen Keller as a political figure.

The Keller from popular culture that is reframed and given new intellectual credibility in the movie is portrayed as an activist and thinker. As she pushed for a Marxist understanding of the oppression of all people, including those with disabilities, she took the topic of disability rights out of the purview of philanthropy and drew a clear connection between disability and poverty and disease. She even advocated for a Braille version of God and the State by Bakunin. At a socialist gathering in Montclair, New Jersey, Keller gave her first public address at the age of 32 despite having severe fear and trepidation. We are sophisticated and comfortable because of the poor and the uneducated, she remarked.