Helen Keller, Baby Bollinger, and the Black Stork
A portrait in American Eugenics and the duality of human nature
None of us is wholly good or wholly evil. We are the product of thousands of inputs: culture, timeframe, our choices, parents, peers, diet, education, intellectual capacity, and so much more. It’s even trickier when we try to examine historical figures through a contemporary lens.
Helen Keller is no exception. In 1915, she supported a surgeon’s decision to allow a disabled newborn to die rather than to perform surgical intervention.
The Good
As a child of the 1970s, I wasn’t alone in idolizing Keller. I read The Story of My Life. I watched Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke in The Miracle Worker. The young linguist inside me marveled at Sullivan’s attempts (and success) at breaking through a barrier of darkness and silence, an effort that culminated in a very real miracle: the association between an object and a linguistic signifier. With one little word, ‘water,’ a world opened.
Keller’s life is the story of tenacity and persistence, of a modern and man-made miracle. To list her accomplishments — both personal and philanthropic — would take a book. Here I offer only a few:
- At twenty-three (1903), she publishes her autobiography…
