April 24, 2023 • 57 mins
Margaret talks with Samantha McVey about the deafblind socialist revolutionary Helen Keller and her complicated legacy as a disability icon.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Are you ready to rumble? Coming in from location?
Speaker 2 (00:11):
We have our hosts, the one and only Margaret kid Joe.
Speaker 1 (00:19):
I've always wanted to do that. I'm Mac.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
But that's amazing.
Speaker 3 (00:23):
That was better than my introduction I had planned, so
we'll go with that.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
I loved it. It was such a broadcasting voice too.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
I don't know if I've ever heard you do that before.
I've never done it before.
Speaker 3 (00:33):
This is just for the two of you, well, for
everyone else who's listening besides the two of us. This
is a show called Cool People Did Cool Stuff, which
is a history podcast. It's the only history podcast that
I believe. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy with me today.
I'm very excited about. This is Samantha McVay. Ye are
(00:54):
you doing yay?
Speaker 2 (00:55):
I'm so excited to be on with you again.
Speaker 3 (00:57):
Yes. Yeah, for anyone who Sophie likes that, I turn
everything into an ad for my other episodes. We had
Sophie on when we talked about the Jane Collective performing.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
Samantha, you said, so, we also had Sophie. I was
technically there.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
You were there.
Speaker 3 (01:12):
It was There's one thing I know about you, you
are not.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
Yes, I was on I think was it your inaugural show.
Speaker 3 (01:23):
It was one of the first episode, first ones.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
Okay, I know it was, right after all the debacle
with turning over Robie Wade.
Speaker 3 (01:30):
Yeah, yes, but well the news cycles moved on, so
fortunately everyone still has full bodily a ton Oh right,
well no, never mind. Okay, So Samantha other people might
know as the host of the podcast Stuff Mom Never
Told You, which is probably not a history podcast because
this is the only history podcast ever, right, yeah, I
(01:53):
think so. Yeah, I think we like claimed that.
Speaker 2 (01:57):
Yeah, I think you should. We pepper in some history.
But typically we are a current affairs type of thing.
We stretch from everything anything that has to do with
intersectional feminism.
Speaker 3 (02:08):
We we do it awesome. And our radio announcer is Sophie. Hi, Sophie,
how are you doing?
Speaker 1 (02:16):
I like, I don't like that title.
Speaker 3 (02:19):
It was so good. Your radio voice was like shocking
because it was that.
Speaker 1 (02:24):
Good, like a boxing match thing announcer.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
I think it's close to announcers.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
My sports announcer boys.
Speaker 3 (02:33):
I mean, okay, it was good, Okay, fair enough. Next time,
when I get an even larger truck and put even
larger wheels on it, I will have you with a
megaphone announce every time that I arrive.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
I mean I would enjoy nothing more than that.
Speaker 2 (02:47):
To it and actually would be amazing.
Speaker 3 (02:52):
Comes from Georgia, I think, I think that's the only
place you're allowed to be with that.
Speaker 2 (02:57):
It's true.
Speaker 3 (02:59):
We in it Ian edits are audio on woman wrote
her theme song. So today I really love not telling
my guests who we're going to talk about before they
show up.
Speaker 2 (03:08):
Blind let's go.
Speaker 3 (03:09):
Yeah, Today we're going to talk about an American icon,
one of the most famous women in US history. We're
going to talk about how complicated her legacy is, how
badly her story is told. Today I'm going to be
curious when you figure out who're talking about. Today, we're
going to talk about probably the most famous person in
the history of the US Socialist Party, although no one
(03:30):
knows she was a socialist. How even more than that,
she's probably the most famous Wobbly. A member of the
Syndicalist Union, Friend of the pod Industrial Workers of the World,
she was one of the founders of the ACOU. She
was a white Southerner who was an early member and
supporter of the NAACP and was an outspoken proponent of
civil rights. That's right. Today we're talking about Helen Keller.
Speaker 2 (03:55):
Oh that he threw me for a loop. Yeah, that
is the plant that you did agree to.
Speaker 3 (04:02):
Thanks, I guess to get it out of the bag.
The reason that people are is complicated is that there's
some eugenics in her. But yeah, and we're going to
talk about how odd it is. And I think that
actually it ended up a more useful way of exploring
some of these concepts than I originally expected. I thought
(04:24):
originally I was going to be like, we're going to
talk about the fact that everyone ignores that Helen Keller
was a socialist, And then I was like, we're gonna
talk about that, but we're going to talk about so
much more too.
Speaker 2 (04:33):
Oh have you ever seen The Miracle Worker?
Speaker 3 (04:37):
No? But I read so much about the Miracle Worker
during this I've like, I've read so many takes on
the Miracle Worker. I don't want to watch it at
the end of this.
Speaker 2 (04:47):
Ah, you shouldn't. We actually performed that as a high
school play. I was in it.
Speaker 3 (04:52):
I won't tell you the character I was in because
it's so degraded. Not degrade, yes, degrading and racist. But
I was in it. Wait, who would be the degrading
racist character for you to have been stuck? Oh?
Speaker 2 (05:01):
Okay, all right, So I am the in my high school,
I'm the only pretty much only minority outside of one
other Asian girl and maybe a few Latino students. So
I was the only non white person in the drama
and in Helen Keller or in the Miracle Worker, there
is a servant but is obviously of black descent. Guess
(05:26):
who played that really problematic role. And they would not
let me not do an accent?
Speaker 3 (05:30):
Cool?
Speaker 2 (05:31):
It is horrifying, and I because of who she was.
She also had children, so I have had to pretend
these little kids were Mike. It was bad and they
were both.
Speaker 3 (05:40):
I think that that is actually a very fitting way
to understand the ongoing harm caused not by Helen Keller,
but by the way people tell her fucking story.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
Oh let's start, Oh god, all right.
Speaker 3 (05:57):
All right. Helen Keller, of course, is famous for what
she believed and not anything else. I'm not trying to
downplay what else she did. She was one of the
first deaf blind people in Western society to be given
the chance to learn to read and write, and was
the first to get a bachelor's degree. We're gonna call
this episode Helen Keller was a Socialist and also complicated.
Because Helen Keller was a socialist and complicated, her legacy
(06:20):
is a disability rights icon is a lot more popular
in abled society than in disability justice communities, who are
critical not only of what gets called inspiration porn, but
also of assimilation as politics more broadly. So we're going
to talk about all that. We're going to talk to
the story of Helen's life, what she did that was
super cool, what she did that was super not cool,
(06:42):
And we're going to talk about the social model of disability,
and in classic form, we're going to start decades before
she was even born. Oh yes, because we're going to
start with another woman whose name is Laura Dewey Bridgeman.
I'm just curious. I had never heard of Laura. Had
you heard of Laura before this?
Speaker 2 (07:03):
I have not.
Speaker 3 (07:04):
Yeah, I Laura Dewey Bridgeman was born in New Hampshire
on December twenty first, eighteen twenty nine, to a farming family.
She's white. I think they're more farm owners than like homesteaders,
because there's references to her her parents' employees at various points.
When she was twenty four months old, she was sick,
(07:24):
she got scarlet fever, and when she recovered, she'd lost
her sense of hearing, sight, and smell, and with smell
goes most of taste, so she was deaf blind, a
specific impairment that it was more common in the nineteenth
century than the twenty first, but still exists. It was
more common back then because it was often caused by
various infections that we have way better ways of treating now.
(07:46):
And when she first lost these senses, she would sit
around and whisper dark dark for a while, because she
knew some words already because she was two years old.
I worry about the way that she was represented as
a youth because I have less information about her, or
I looked up less information about her than I do
about Helen. But I know how Helen Keller is misrepresented,
(08:09):
and actually I believe by the Miracle Worker. Probably as
the story goes, Laura had a really hard time communicating
with her family and was therefore unruly. Was completely unruly.
Only her father could get her to do anything, and
that was by physically restraining her. Basically, a lot of
media will refer to deaf blind children as basically wild animals.
(08:32):
This is not true. This is not true of Helen
Keller's youth, and I'm inferring that it is not true
about Laura's youth. I'm sure it was hard. Don't get
me wrong. Deaf blind folks were at the time usually
treated as essentially hopeless cases. And again I'm saying in
Western society, because that's what I have information about, no
(08:56):
one was known to have learned a consistent way to
communicate it across that barrier, besides some of what are
called home signs, which are basically DIY sign languages that
people develop themselves with their loved ones. But when she
was a kid, Laura was not fully communicative. But when
she was seven, there was a school vaguely nearby called
(09:17):
the Perkins School for the Blind, which I have seen
as being originally in New Hampshire, or maybe it's in Boston.
I'm kind of confused because it's still around, and you
feel like I feel like I should have been able
to find a more concise answer, But it's in New
England alongside of her. The Perkin School of the Blind
is like, hey, let's try to teach her, and specifically
(09:38):
the director of the school who gets held up as
a hero, and we're gonna talk about that, doctor Samuel
Gridley Howe. He taught her and I'm going to quote
from the Perkins School for the Blind's website about this.
He gave her familiar objects such as forks and keys,
with name labels made of raised letters pasted upon them.
(09:58):
When he gave her detached labels with the same words,
she matched them to their objects. How next cut up
the label so each later letter was separate. He spelled
the now familiar words, showed them to Bridgeman, then jumbled
the letters. She was able to rearrange them so they
once again spelled the words. And so this is how
the Sally taught Laura English and how to communicate. She
(10:21):
learned English, she was off. She studied at the school
like the other students, and this accomplishment got written about
all over the world. It's funny because she's not remembered
now because Helen Keller is now the famous first quote unquote,
I'm making air quotes, but no one in the audience
can see that the first stef blind person to you know,
(10:42):
learn how to communicate or whatever, right Charles Dickens met
her and wrote about her, and this increased her fame substantially.
One article I read about her refers to her as
the second most famous woman in the world, after only
Queen Victoria during much of her early life. But this
is kind of it's that media cycle thing, right. We
tend to think of it as like a Twitter brain
(11:03):
thing that people have an attention span of fifteen minutes.
You know, the attention span might have been slower back then,
but it's still ebbs and flows, right, Thousands of people
come to visit her, like literally, at one point there
was more than a thousand people there's here on one day.
Newspapers around the world are covering her story. According to
the author Rosemary Mahoney from her book For the Benefit
(11:26):
of Those who see quote, all over America, little girls
began poking their dolls eyes out, tying green ribbons across them,
and renaming them Laura.
Speaker 2 (11:39):
I don't know what. I don't want to say. Okay,
I feel like I can't give them proper reaction because
I'm like confused. Well, yeah, okay, this is.
Speaker 3 (11:50):
This is why I'm gonna talk about what inspiration porn is.
I'm like wait is it No, it's it's it's weird.
How do I react? Yeah, no, keep going. Yeah, I
think this is an example of the long and the
long history of problematic ways that people have of you
and people with disabilities. Yeah, this is one of those
(12:12):
things that I'm like, I'm glad they didn't hate her.
Speaker 1 (12:17):
Like, what is that equating poking dolls out of somebody's.
Speaker 2 (12:22):
Yeah, it kind of thing. I'm going to say. It's
kind of like cultural appropriation, when you love something a
little too much and then you take it on and
it becomes like problematic and offensive. Oh yeah, maybe it's
along those lines.
Speaker 3 (12:36):
No, you're right, there's almost certainly. Probably I don't know
the history of Halloween well, and I you'd think I would,
but like, yeah, like there's almost certainly people dressing up.
Speaker 2 (12:45):
Yeah you think I would. That was so funny.
Speaker 3 (12:51):
I know more about the history of Christmas than Halloween.
And I feel guilty. My goth card is melting.
Speaker 2 (12:58):
You're failing.
Speaker 3 (12:59):
Yeah, you're failing in this. Let me go get my
goth card out of the coffin in the other room.
Inspiration porn. This is a particular phrase that was coined
by comedians Stella young. I thought I wrote the year
in the script, but I didn't. I think it was
twenty twelve that this particular phrase was coined. She defined
it as quote an image of a person with a disability,
(13:22):
often a kid doing something completely ordinary, like playing or
talking or running, or drawing a picture or hitting a
tennis ball, carrying a caption like your excuse is invalid
or before you quit, try what's wrong with this? The
author Stella continues to say, quote, these modified images exceptionalize
and objectify those of us they claim to represent. It
(13:45):
is no coincidence that these genuinely adorable disabled kids and
these images are never named. It doesn't matter what their
names are. They're just there as objects of inspiration. Our
later subject, Helen Keller, is probably the single most used
in space spiration used as inspiration porn person in the
history of the world. Laura's life was not immune to
(14:06):
it either. And I think the thing that irritates a
lot of people in the disability community is like, Okay,
this idea that the great accomplishment is being normal, right, right,
and it's assimilation specifically, that like all people want to
do is you know, live like everyone else or whatever,
And this is going to be a recurring theme this week.
(14:28):
Back to Laura. As much as she was a student,
she was a test subject. How he wasn't just teaching
her because he was cool and nice. He was using
it as a science experiment.
Speaker 2 (14:41):
So yeah, I was going to ask when you said
thousands of people were visiting her, why so were they
getting knowledge from her? Or were they watching her like.
Speaker 3 (14:49):
A sideshow side show? Okay, yeah, no, they would like
leave with like a piece of her hair, or like
something she had sown, or like and she would buy
I mean she would they would buy the stuff she sewed.
But yeah, no, it's they were like, come see this
(15:09):
wonder of the world.
Speaker 2 (15:11):
Right, Yeah, that's exactly. It literally is like again one
of those side shows, old school circus traveling shows that
I'm like, why would they visiting? Were they trying to
get knowledge? Okay, that's that's cool.
Speaker 3 (15:23):
But yeah, no, okay, they were watching her, and I'm
sure some people were coming and studying this, and we'll
talk about how. I mean it was other students at
the School for the Blind who went on to like
further this style of education and teach teach Helling Keller
later to spoil some of it, you know. But but yeah,
this guy, how he he wanted to know what was
(15:45):
in and what was learned? Right, right, Like what are
we born with? What do we what do we learn
through society? It's this, you know, big question that's been
with Western world ever since the Enlightenment or whatever. So,
for example, when she was eleven, he decided he wanted
to find out if religion is in it or if
it's learned. So he told her teachers to not answer
any questions about God, just to find out if she
(16:07):
would end up religious if she was never taught about God.
But then he skipped down for honeymoon for a year
and some of the evangelical teachers just like taught her evangelicalism.
So he comes back and she's evangelical, and he's like, no,
my science experiment, it's been ruined, you know, poor guy.
Speaker 2 (16:26):
Poor guy.
Speaker 3 (16:27):
Yeah, And so at least according to one narrative, and
I have no reason to doubt it. He kind of
turned on her a little bit at this point. He
started talking about her. He started referring to her as defective.
At one point, apparently he said that the reason she
got scarlet fever is that her parents weren't smart. Not
that her not smart parents had done something not smart
(16:47):
by exposing her to the illness, but literally that they're
not smart brains had created a not smart brain child,
and people with not smart brains were more likely to
be susceptible to illness. Yeah, you know, it's so wow
wow wow.
Speaker 2 (17:08):
So wait, so he turned on her because she became
religious or because that she wasn't exactly what he wanted
her to be the Peatrie dish that he wanted to create.
Speaker 3 (17:17):
I believe it's that I've read a couple different ways
of describing their relationship. This is the most negative way
I've seen, but it's also the one I've read with
the most detail, and it comes from Rosemary Mahoney, who
I'm going to quote again quote how had stated firmly
at the start of his career that the blind were
no different from the sighted, and that blindness was a
superficial handicap, But after ten years of work at the
(17:40):
Perkins Institution, he radically reversed his position. In his sixteenth
annual report, he claimed that his views had been modified
by experience. He stated, this is going to be able us.
This thing that I'm about to read he stated in
emphatic uppercase letters, the blind as a class or inferior
to other persons in mental power and ability. So he sucks.
(18:02):
And this is the guy who found the school for
the blind, and they still credit him as like an icon. Yes,
oh my god. And it's interesting because he's like, he
is the first person that we know of to teach
this style of language to a deaf blind person. There
was actually a deaf blind woman before them, who I
(18:24):
can't remember. Her name is later in the script, who
learned tactile sign language rather than written word.
Speaker 2 (18:31):
Right, So was he using brail? Is that what he's
using or is he using his own system?
Speaker 3 (18:35):
They're using a different system. This is a little bit okay,
it's like around this is the middle of nineteenth century.
I don't remember what year brail started getting standardized.
Speaker 2 (18:43):
I think it's like early eighteen, eighteen hundreds, eighteen twenty something, okay.
Speaker 3 (18:48):
I think that, Oh, okay, No, that's good to know.
And I think that they're also she does learn braille, right, okay,
But the initial stuff that she's handed are this other
alphabet that I can't remember the name of, that's like
a tactile alphabet. Okay, so now I'm going to talk
about all the cool shit how did but for a reason.
Speaker 2 (19:08):
Okay, so I want to pretend like he's cool for a second.
Speaker 3 (19:11):
I got it because it's worth highlighting the way that
people who are otherwise so fucking cool can be ablest
as fuck. Right, So, How's grandfather was at the Boston
Tea Party. I'm famously neutral on the American Revolution as
a later removed from the position of the indigenous and
enslaved people in North America.
Speaker 2 (19:31):
So I just that's fair.
Speaker 3 (19:32):
Whatever. However, how himself, he went and fought in the
Greek Revolution in the nineteen twenties. He brought back Greek
refugee children to personally teach in America. Then he went
to France and fought in the eighteen thirty second French Revolution.
Back in the US, he started an abolitionist newspaper, and
he did not just leave it at starting an abolitionist newspaper,
(19:52):
A lot of people get ridden about in history. It's
like pretty cool because they were abolitionists and they wrote words.
He funded John Brown. He had to flee the country
over fleeing John Brown. His house was a stop on
the underground railroad At one point, him and a couple
of his friends stormed a building, breaking down the door
of the battering Ram, shooting a cop in the face
(20:13):
to rescue a fugitive from slavery named Anthony Burns. This
is part of how the Fugitive Slave Act was passed,
is because of how and his friends shooting a cop
to try and free amn. Okay, this is why it's
so heartbreaking, right they were repelled. He did not successfully
free Anthony Burns, so they raised up the funds to
buy Anthony his freedom. He helped it. He directly helped
(20:35):
at least one other person escape slavery. He probably helped
uncountable others. But there was one other name I found.
During the Civil War, he was a bit older at
this point. He worked to keep disease outbreaks in Union
camps at a minimum. After the Civil War, he worked
with the Freedmen's Bureau to make sure that people had
food and clothes and everything they needed, helping reunite families
and shit. He's like, and then he goes on and
(20:56):
if you read the Wikipedia level of him or whatever,
he's like, he did all this amazing shit, and then
he goes on, goes on to like found the school
for the blind and dedicate his life to teaching people
how to read and like all the shit, and you're like,
it's so but he's so ablest and we're gonna this
is not the only time this is going to happen
in this story.
Speaker 2 (21:18):
So when he because he sounds really cool and did
a lot of cool things in that era. But we
also know a lot of abolitionists, especially white abolitionists, still
did not believe necessarily that the enslaved people were equal.
Was he one of those?
Speaker 3 (21:35):
I found no specific sign one way or the other,
which I don't know my instinct. You know, it's funny,
it is like my instinct would have been like, no,
I don't think he's one of those. But the way
he talks about like and wants to help blind people
and then like fuck them over, Like, yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 2 (21:54):
I'm starting to wonder, you know, what those heroes who
are not real heroes, but because they did a few
good things, right, don't get me wrong. Yeah, love that
he was a part of that.
Speaker 1 (22:03):
Thank you.
Speaker 2 (22:03):
I'm sure you know. There's a lot of good things.
Speaker 3 (22:06):
Obviously, there's a lot of good things that happened out
of that but still yeah a question. Yeah, no, totally.
And then also to just show how like messy the
like white abolitionist culture is. The Perkins Institute that he
founded was named after its benefactor, a rich guy who
donated Thomas Perkins, who donated his mansion to the school.
Thomas Perkins was rich because he bought and sold people. Yeah,
(22:30):
I knew you were going to go there. Yeah, a
wonderful Yeah.
Speaker 2 (22:37):
I hope that building's haunted. Keep going.
Speaker 3 (22:40):
No, no, no, it's almost certainly haunted. His wife was
Julia Ward, who composed the Battle Hymn for the Republic
aka that song Might eyes have seen the glory of
the Coming of the Lord, which was the Union Army's anthem,
which had banger lines like as he Christ died to
make men holy, let us die to make men free.
(23:03):
I don't know, but do you know what Samantha will
set you free? Tell me it's products and services ad.
Speaker 2 (23:12):
I'm so excited. I'm going to buy it right now.
Speaker 3 (23:14):
Whatever it is we're.
Speaker 2 (23:15):
Buying it, tell me I'm doing it right now.
Speaker 1 (23:17):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (23:18):
That's unless it's a car, then I'm screwed. I hope
it's not another ad for joining the Irish Police Force.
I'm there, all right, I got just kidding.
Speaker 3 (23:30):
We're doing so, we're doing, We're committed. Here's the ads
and we're back. And I'm not sure what I'm gonna
do with all this Reagan gold, but you know whatever,
bury it.
Speaker 2 (23:46):
It's fine. Good, We're good. Bury it. It's gonna it'll
be better that way.
Speaker 3 (23:50):
Yeah, Like ten of us are going to go out
to the woods of the shovel bury it, and then
like shoot each other and then bury the bodies with
the things so that a few of us know, a
few of us know who it is.
Speaker 2 (23:58):
Oh, that's escalated very quickly.
Speaker 3 (24:02):
I did an episode about pirates recently. Sorry, I like
coming on not knowing where it came from.
Speaker 2 (24:09):
Yeah, yeah, that just got dark. Okay.
Speaker 3 (24:14):
So anyway, we're talking about how we're talking about the
Perkins School for the Blind, and he's remembered in history
as being this lifelong advocate for the blind. He's not
the only disability advocate who is abless as fuck with
otherwise progressive politics. Who's going to come up in this
episode spoiler alert, the next one who's like this invented
the telephone. Laura, for her part, refused to play nice
(24:36):
with people mistreating her. She was told not to talk,
for example, because her voice wasn't pleasant or whatever the fuck,
and her response was to yell, God gave me much voice.
Speaker 2 (24:46):
Yes, amen, yeah, but yeah.
Speaker 3 (24:51):
Soon the social media circus moved on from her, and
she lived out her life at the school in quiet obscurity.
She became a sewing teacher, She went on summer occasions
with their family. She read Christian books and made her
money selling needlework and teaching at the school. And she
died when she was fifty nine. Actually, I don't know
if she got paid to teach at the school now
that I'm thinking about it. There might have been a
(25:12):
room in the board situation. Yeah, people were not treated well.
Speaker 1 (25:16):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (25:16):
In history, it's one of the weird things about no
one else runs a history podcast on the only one
who runs into this stuff.
Speaker 1 (25:24):
Right, But yeah, say history bad.
Speaker 3 (25:30):
Hmm. No, I'm gonna give it a complicated because there's
so much. There's a lot of cool people in history.
Speaker 1 (25:36):
Did they do cool stuff?
Speaker 3 (25:38):
Yeah? Yeah, totally.
Speaker 2 (25:39):
Yeah, I love that title. I'm gonna start a podcast
with that.
Speaker 3 (25:43):
Damn, you got to it first.
Speaker 1 (25:45):
But I produce that.
Speaker 3 (25:50):
Sometimes I just yeah, I'm excited. I've already got ideas.
Let's go. No problem here, I'm sending you the script.
You can finish that really funny. Just do a reverse
episode where I just give the script to someone who has.
Speaker 2 (26:04):
Just start trying to explain it, not knowing anything about it.
You ask, and then that's just start. I just start
making sure. That was kind of like we just talked
about chat GPT. Yeah, and you they when they don't know,
they just make up shit. So I'm like, yeah, okay,
let's do that.
Speaker 3 (26:19):
That's how you know a man made the chap GPT
exactly all right? Anyway, living on so she she lived
out her life. She died when she was fifty nine.
She wasn't the first deaf blind person to learn language
in Western society. Julia Brace was the woman I mentioned
earlier who is a generation older, communicated by tactile sign language,
(26:40):
preferring it to Braille and written language. She actually went
to the Perkin School for Blind for a moment and
how tried to teach her and she was like, fuck this,
I'm going back to the School for the death and
like I'm I'm in a sign language. I don't want
to learn how to read. And I always say in
Western society, because if if you google who was the
(27:01):
first deaf blind person to learn language, you get pages
and pages about Hell and Keller, which is not true, right,
no one's even no anyway whatever, And so it's like
I couldn't even find non Western examples. If I had
more time, I hope I would have been able to
because I'm very curious after doing this because it's presented
(27:22):
as this like no one had ever done this in history,
and I just don't believe it. Right.
Speaker 2 (27:26):
Well, we know with a history, a lot of things
are still undiscovered, and especially if they're in the marginalized community,
they're going to be less likely known or even talked
about or recorded. So hopefully someone will find out that
there are more. But yeah, you never you can never
absolutely say something when it comes to.
Speaker 3 (27:43):
History totally, especially the first one I gave that.
Speaker 2 (27:46):
Yeah, when it comes to for sure.
Speaker 3 (27:48):
Yeah, So Laura had a friend in a roommate who
was in that who is probably a character in that play.
I believe it was a main character in your play.
Laura's friend and roommate was named Anne Sullivan.
Speaker 2 (28:00):
And Sullivan Okay, yeah, she's.
Speaker 3 (28:02):
Going to go on to be very important in this story.
She's Helen Keller's teacher and lifelong friend. She had a
fucking rough childhood. Have you heard this? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (28:13):
She was.
Speaker 3 (28:13):
She was a blind, first generation, first generation Irish American
woman who had lost her mother and brother to tuberculosis.
Her background includes such notes as after her mother's death,
her dad abandoned her at a boarding house. The boarding
house was subsequently investigated for quote sexually perverted practices and cannibalism. Well, cannibalism.
(28:35):
I don't know if I knew that part. Yeah, that's
the part where you just like hit a light, like
did they eat? I don't know. Maybe they weren't Catholic
and it was just the body of Christ. So Anne
Sullivan did not have an easy childhood. She ended up
going to the Perkins School blind and had a as
(28:59):
far as I can tell, much better life thereafter. I
actually have compared to some of these other places. Whatever. Anyway, Okay,
so which sort of brings us to Helen. We're starting
to transition to talking about Helen. I was planning on
kind of speed running through Helen Keller's learning to communicate,
because while it's fucking cool, it's also something that's been
(29:21):
told a million times and gets twisted for weird propagandistic
and ablest ends, like wow, what a miracle do you know?
Deafblind people are cable of communicating, whereas this actually like
society has figured out how to communicate with me. You know,
it's it's anyway whatever. But the annoying thing is that
I was going to speed run it, and then I
discovered have you heard the conspiracy that Helen Keller didn't exist?
Speaker 2 (29:45):
Yes? Actually I have running No we did not, but yeah,
but I just remember, just because there was that little
bit of like interest from high school about her, I like,
and then not, I feel like someone brought it up
not too long ago.
Speaker 1 (30:02):
Conspiracy theory.
Speaker 2 (30:05):
Yeah, that's what it is. I was like, what's happening? Yeah,
but explain because I did not dig too deep in.
Speaker 1 (30:11):
That was it was TikTok. And then I think, you
guys spread back to Reddit and then it then it
just spread spreads, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (30:19):
As it does.
Speaker 3 (30:21):
It's awful. It's one of the worst. There's a lot
of bad conspiracy theories. This one is just unabashed. Okay,
So it's like the basic idea of this conspiracy is
that there's no way for deafblind people to communicate. So
clearly Helen Keller is a fraud. And this is kind
(30:41):
of like to me, it's like that flatter a thing
where like I feel bad. I've like mentioned this on
the podcast before. I think I had a friend who,
like one winter in like the midst of depression and whatever,
he like messaged me at three in the morning and
he was like, the Earth is round, right, And I'm
like yeah, and He's like, I've been following down some
dark rabbit holes. How do you know the Earth is round?
(31:02):
And I'm like, because I've seen it, because I've been
in an airplane, you know, And because there's people, Yeah,
there's like people who fly round. You could talk to
someone who's flown around the world.
Speaker 2 (31:14):
No one's no, one's gone off the edge of the world.
They've tried.
Speaker 1 (31:17):
Yeah, but conspiracy culture could be so convincing and as spread.
And I mean, like, you know, not everyone has like
like I've worked on scientology and I've worked on QAnon shit,
so it's like it's like nobody and and and like
the number one thing that I learned from working on
(31:40):
those topics is like it just gets people like yeah,
there isn't like even even people that it's just it it's.
Speaker 3 (31:50):
Like a virus.
Speaker 2 (31:51):
Yeah, well it makes it validate something for them, whether
it's uh, and it's going to be really awful, so
I can prepare this way, I can act this way,
or this is why this makes sense because my life
has makes sense and correlates with that for sure.
Speaker 3 (32:06):
Yeah yeah, but yeah.
Speaker 2 (32:09):
I think I didn't dig do too deep on the
hell in keller bit because I like, that doesn't what
purpose does to serve? Moving on?
Speaker 3 (32:15):
But yeah, no, and it's it must have I mean
I think a lot of it because I think it
was I think it was people who just like they
couldn't imagine how they would communicate, so therefore it's impossible,
right and if they say things enough, they say things
like no other how come no other death blind person
has ever been able to communicate or whatever, which is
(32:37):
like easily disproven because we live in a society, right
they do.
Speaker 1 (32:42):
Wait, bagfie, that's their argument.
Speaker 3 (32:45):
Yeah, that's like that is one of their arguments.
Speaker 1 (32:46):
I have never.
Speaker 2 (32:49):
Yeah, a deaf blind person who can communicate, right, like
I have shut up, like they don't exist?
Speaker 3 (32:57):
Yeah, what like literally what.
Speaker 1 (33:01):
Yeh?
Speaker 3 (33:03):
Be fucking for real people and then and so the
conspiracy is either some some go so far say she
literally didn't exist, like there was no woman named Helen
Keller in history, which is like one of those things
where it's like she lived until the sixties. You see
video of her, like.
Speaker 2 (33:22):
It wasn't like it wasn't that long ago, wasn'teen hundreds.
Speaker 3 (33:28):
And other people say that she existed but wasn't actually
deaf blind. She was like one or the other or something,
and she was faking the other one for fame. Yeah.
Another one was that she was deaf blind, but she
wasn't actually communicating and she was being treated like a
ventriloquist dummy by her handlers. And a lot of those
ones are like, see, because there's no way she could
(33:49):
possibly know about socialism because she's never seen anything, or
it was just it's just fucking ableism, right, and I
don't even know how to like like mostly my way
of debunking as being like, you're wrong, that's wrong, you're incorrect,
like but.
Speaker 2 (34:06):
It here's a picture of her, here's her accomplishments, here's
who testifies to what she had. Don't understand what just
because she's able to function and live happily does not
discredit her existence.
Speaker 3 (34:21):
I know, I know it. It it's so awful, and.
Speaker 1 (34:27):
And like.
Speaker 3 (34:29):
I think that's okay. So that's part of why I
don't speed run it. And that's part of why I
actually used the specific example of how Laura learned how
to read is because I feel like, well, I can't
imagine how you could do that and be like okay,
well here's how it happened. And you're like, oh okay,
because like I didn't, you know before I started doing
the researchers, like, well, I don't know the means by which,
right this happened, right, And then I like read about
(34:50):
and it's like, yeah, that makes sense, Like that that's cool,
you know, And so I'm not going to speed run it.
I thought we could skip to the Helen Keller as
revolutionary socialist who didn't believe in party politics but instead
revolutionary socialism, followed by here's a complicated legacy. But first
we're gonna talk whow she learned to communicate? Yes, because
the miracle I'm going to try to perform here is
(35:12):
to get it through people's thick skulls that people with
disabilities are people capable of learning what the fuck? So
Helen Keller on June twenty seventh, eighteen eighty. Helen Keller
was born in Tuscumbia, Alabama, to a slaver family. Her
family was like Slaver Royalty. Her father, Arthur H. Heller,
(35:35):
was a captain in the Confederate Army, related to Robert E. Lee,
the Confederate general she was. But that's just one side
of her family. On her mother's side, her grandfather was
another Confederate general, this time in acting brigadier general named
Charles Adams. Who's this part is kind of fun. His
(35:55):
entire command, Okay, it's whatever. His entire command was conscripts
who wish they weren't out there fighting for slavery. So
during one battle, this general her grandfather lost his entire
command because they all fucked off. They're like yeah, they
were like he was like, go fill in the hole
(36:16):
in the Confederate line, and they were like, we we
don't want to. Like that seems like a good way
to dive for rich people.
Speaker 2 (36:23):
Like You're like, they're like sure, sure, sure, sure, sure
be wipe back. Yeah, I can go get something first. Yeah,
I hear my mom call it.
Speaker 3 (36:30):
Hold on.
Speaker 2 (36:32):
The shovels are way over there, so let let us
go Google grab those stay.
Speaker 3 (36:37):
Here, let my mus get at home. Yeah, that's amazing,
I know. And so there's some cool people in this
history is the Confederate soldiers who did not want to
be because it is worth under noting that they're conscripts
right like they're literally whatever. Anyway, the whole episode about that.
So Helen's granddad, Charles Adams, was also related to John Adams,
(37:00):
the second President of the United States. To his credit
where it is due, John Adams was one of the
only presidents back then who wasn't a slaver. I think
it was literally just John Adams and his son were
the only pre Civil War presidents I could. Someone's going
to be mad at me about saying that. I don't
actually pay much attention to electoral politics until I started
(37:21):
doing this show. Helen was born on what gets called
euphemistically a homestead when people want a whitewash history. It
was a cotton plantation worked by enslave people until a
combination of the Union army and slave people striking and deserting,
and a civil war within the Civil War all worked
together to destroy fucking shadow slavery. Right, that's her lineage.
(37:44):
Helen is born fifteen years after the Civil War ended,
mind you, and she's rad. On the balance, I actually
think that her break from all of this makes her
more rad and probably had at least her fucking granddad
rolling over in his grave. Here's my impression of granddad
rolling over in his grave. I wrote into the script,
and so now I'm stuck reading it. I wrote it
(38:05):
probably two in the morning, but here I am No,
my troops deserted me. No, my most famous descendant found
an organization called the ACOU to help black people's That's
what he's said. Yeah, thanks, I loved it. So right now,
she's a baby. She hasn't started the ACU yet. She's
nineteen months old. She gets really sick. This is probably meningitis,
(38:30):
but that's people's just best guess right now. At the time,
it was probably called oh fuck, our baby is sick
and no one has invented antibiotics yet. She recovers, except
she lost her vision and her hearing and was deaf blind,
and really quickly the historical fog sets in because there's
two stories here. There's the story that's really good for fundraising,
which is the story of the film The Miracle Worker
(38:53):
about how she was basically a wild animal. There's like,
I think there's like a scene where she's like chasing
someone with scissors and and like, yeah, a.
Speaker 2 (39:01):
Whole like dining room scene where they fling food about
and she gets into everybody's plates and she gets ignored,
but she's like yeah, yeah, literally just being on top
of the table, Yeah, eating off of people's plates and
no one's stopping her.
Speaker 3 (39:18):
Yeah, that's for dramatic effect, as far as I can tell,
with roughly no basis in reality. I'm certain that every
child is tantrums, and I'm certain that someone who has
trouble that people don't know how to communicate with has
more tantrums. I am not. But the actual thing that
happened is that little Helen started figuring out how to
(39:39):
communicate with home signs. She had more than sixty of
these because she taught herself how to communicate on some level,
because people do that. She could experience the world through taste,
touch and smell. She knew who was coming because she
could tell the different gates of the different people in
her household based on the vibration and the floor caused
by their footsteps, and to her family's credit, they took
(40:02):
her her condition seriously. Her mother read Charles Dickinson's book
Dickens Is Dickens, Yeah, where he talked about the plural
is Dickey.
Speaker 1 (40:25):
I'm not saying anyone is wrong.
Speaker 2 (40:29):
You do you what you need if you have multiple
let's go.
Speaker 3 (40:33):
Well, he's going to show up later in this episode.
But Mark Twain has that quote about anyone who can
only think of one way to spell a word clearly
suffers from lack of imagination.
Speaker 1 (40:43):
I Mark Twin.
Speaker 3 (40:44):
But yes, so Charles Diggens talks about Laura Bridgman. Mom
reads the book and is like, oh shit, someone else
has dealt with this, Maybe we can do this. So
she talks to a doctor I think like travels to
the mid Atlantic to talk to a doctor, to a
specialist who put her in touch with the anti hero
(41:06):
of today's story. I'm gonna go with anti hero Alexander
Graham Bell.
Speaker 2 (41:11):
Oh okay, did we already do a second ad break?
Speaker 3 (41:16):
Well? Guess what everyone, before you get to hear about telephones,
you get to hear about what happened with his invention,
which is that eventually you all are going to get
listening to ads in the middle of hearing about history
about the guy that's true. Yeah, yeah, it's the very
handy button. Yeah. I hate what I'm like working on
something though, and like I like, my phone's like across
(41:38):
the room and I'm like, I have to listen to anyway.
Speaker 2 (41:45):
But these are amazing personally, These are these are the
best ones.
Speaker 1 (41:50):
Personally. I thoroughly enjoy hearing about Hello Fresh.
Speaker 3 (41:54):
I like the ones that are about other podcasts I
have listened to. Yes, I really like the Alphabet Boys.
I listened to that because I heard an advertised on
the Coolstone podcast. Nice.
Speaker 2 (42:06):
I have no idea what that is, but right on,
I don't need it.
Speaker 3 (42:08):
It's a podcast about the FBI's infiltration of by the way, Margaret,
actually yeah, this is actually yeah, this is just genuinely
and I'm like, I have some quibbles about the way
it represents some stuff, but I got a lot out
of that. So here's some other some actual ads. And
(42:33):
we're back and we're talking about Alexander Graham Bell or
Alec to his friends. For some reason, shut up, no,
it really is. He really was. He was Alec. He
also didn't have a middle name. In his younger life,
he like, but his brothers all had middle names. So
he was like, Dad, how come I don't have a
middle name. So for his like eighth birthday or something,
(42:55):
his dad was like, fine, Graham, you have a middle name. Now,
why didn't I give him a middle name? Did they
just not like him? I feel like you just gave
up on the names.
Speaker 2 (43:04):
Yeah, like he was a.
Speaker 3 (43:05):
Third or fourth or something.
Speaker 1 (43:07):
Can I can I just say I thought the Gwyneth
Pautrick skiing trial was the whitest shit I've heard recently.
But being like, you don't have a middle name, fine,
your Graham?
Speaker 3 (43:18):
Yes, totally, all right, Alec.
Speaker 1 (43:22):
And named himself Alec right.
Speaker 3 (43:26):
And then also, and this is none of this is
in the script because it doesn't actually matter. Uh, he
spelled it with a K. And then later his wife
was like, you gotta change. It's gotta beat with a
C instead of a C K. And so he dropped
the K at his wife's behest And I haven't no idea.
Speaker 2 (43:42):
Why So it was a L E C K.
Speaker 3 (43:45):
Yeah. Originally his nickname, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (43:49):
Alex so l A A A oh that's the nickname because.
Speaker 3 (43:54):
It's Alexander name. And it's funny because history remembers him
as like he is not an alex he has an
Alexander Graham Bell, like he is full three names, you know.
Speaker 1 (44:04):
Right, that reality he was Alec Bell.
Speaker 3 (44:10):
Yeah, yeah, you can't. You can't repeat the kickers too
much though, because he wasn't a racist.
Speaker 1 (44:17):
Fair enough. I think that.
Speaker 2 (44:21):
Because I'm gonna.
Speaker 3 (44:21):
Yell at oh, he participated in some ship that did
some racism. He advocated against racism. All right, we'll get
to it. We'll get to it.
Speaker 2 (44:32):
Okay, Okay, let's go.
Speaker 3 (44:33):
Actually it's in like two paragraphs, it's two sentences, okay.
So Alexander Grambell, our man, Alec he's not really our
man because he's he's obsessed with deafness and trying to
cure it, and he's trying to better the lives of
deaf people. And he's also obsessed with the eugenics. That's
always a thing, that thing that poisons the legacy of
(44:53):
like half the Victorian eras interesting people is back. So
Alexander gram Bell. He's famous for inventing the telephone, which
the acoustic telegraph. All his money came from the telephone,
but he barely liked telephones, he wouldn't keep one in
his office. He invented a bunch of other shit, like
an old timey air conditioner that he used to cool
(45:14):
his house, which was like a fan over ice cubes,
or some shit. Worked on composting toilets. He was one
of the inventors of the metal detector. Supposedly he invented
this while trying to find the bullet in President James
Garfield so doctors could pull it out. There's like a
whole he's an inventor. People like fucking talking about him.
But his main love was human speech, the advocating for it,
(45:35):
the working with the deaf community and pressuring them into
relying on speech instead of sign language. Yeah, it's not
a visual medium. But Samantha's currently side eyeing me.
Speaker 2 (45:46):
Yes, I am sidey.
Speaker 3 (45:48):
So he came from a long line of elocutionists, people
who study speech, the like mechanics and the sounds of speech.
His dad wrote a language designed to describe the mechanics
of articulation, like what sounds are coming out of a
mouth is a language that his dad wrote. His mom
started going deaf when he was twelve, so he became
(46:09):
and he he was always like with her and interpreting
for her and stuff. He became a tutor for deaf people.
He married one of his deaf students, which I think
he was actually uncreepy about.
Speaker 2 (46:24):
Okay, I was gonna say a student, Like, what what
do we say when we say student?
Speaker 3 (46:28):
She was an adult? I believe I didn't actually look
she's younger than him.
Speaker 2 (46:32):
You know, sometimes they consider fourteen year olds adults.
Speaker 3 (46:34):
I know I need to Actually I should have written
how old she was. They had a long courtship, and
his courtship was primarily him writing feminist and anti racist
letters to her. She was white, okay, and but one
of the letters he wrote was sarcastic, and everyone hates him.
So they took his sarcastic letter and claimed that he
(46:57):
was against women's suffrage and that women were more free
than men because they didn't have to do any thinking,
and like all of this stuff. And so I went
into it. I was like really ready to be like
man and he's wrong about fucking everything. And I'm like reading,
I'm like, yeah, fuck this, why is he saying the shit?
And you get to the end of the letter and
you're like, this is sarcasm, like, and he's not subtle
(47:19):
about it. By the end of the letter, like it's
actually decently executed sarcasm. It's two pages long. It talks
about how ridiculous it is that women could be equal
to men and invade men's sacred spaces like astronomy, all
the while referencing women after women after women who were
in these spaces being very good and successful and we're
(47:40):
at least as smart as men and how whatever, and
he like goes on and he's like, look, eventually, there's
gonna be a woman president. And he's Scottish. He listen
to America at this point, but he's Scottish and he's like, whatever,
I'm a subject of the queen and she's a decent queen,
so like, why the fuck would I be against women rulers?
Like this is when he like drops the sarcasm and like,
(48:03):
how before him, you've got someone who has had fairly
good politics for it. For his era, he actively believed
in universal suffrage regardless of race and gender and religion
and property ownership, and he treated the disabled people that
he dedicated his life to in bad ways, or rather,
he advocated things that aren't good He was a huge
(48:27):
proponent of what gets called oralism, and this is an
assimilationist approach to disability, specifically to deafness. He argued that
deaf people would be happier if they integrate into hearing society,
which means no more teaching sign language and instead everyone
should just read lips and learn to speak, and he
used his father's alphabet to teach deaf people to speak.
(48:48):
He also said shit like deaf people should avoid hanging
out with mostly deaf people because it slows assimilation. This
does not look kindly upon by history because it's bad.
Correct with the New York Times, the oralism Bell Champion
was a disaster for the deaf. Well examples, a bound
of deaf people have mastered speech, they do not represent
(49:09):
the larger deaf community. Oralism implicitly teaches a kind of
self abnegation that deaf people are of value only in
so far as they can approximate another kind of person. Okay,
so that's one of his big bad things. I'll talk
by the other one. He's really influential, and Helen Collor
is a reason he's like a long side quest for this,
(49:29):
because I think he's actually almost a He's really important
to understanding Helen Color's position on these things.
Speaker 1 (49:34):
Oh man, I read ahead. This is this is bad.
Speaker 3 (49:40):
Yeah, this's gonna be on a different show.
Speaker 1 (49:42):
Oh no, I was like, oh, the Margaret Show.
Speaker 2 (49:46):
I've been tricked.
Speaker 1 (49:48):
I know, yay. Working title Helen Color was a socialist,
gonna be a bye.
Speaker 3 (49:55):
All right, Margaret.
Speaker 1 (49:56):
Let's let's let's.
Speaker 3 (49:58):
Rip the band in anti Helen on the whole to
be clear, fair enough, rip off the band aid. Yeah,
all right. So Alexander Graham Bell alex was a eugenicist,
not in the way you'd immediately assume when you hear
that word. Now, I've talked about this in a couple
times on the show, and I fucking hate that. I
have to because I hate that so many people are
(50:19):
into eugenics that it keeps cropping up all the time.
But there are two things that prove that eugenics was
one of the worst ideas humanity ever had. The first
one was the Nazis. Most people hear eugenics and they
think of the Nazis improve the human race by killing
everyone who's inferior. Then there's the other terrible thing, which
(50:39):
is the non Nazi, non consensual eugenics, like the US practiced,
the US sterilized so many fucking people, non consensually all
throughout the twentieth century and still frankly, mostly people of color,
people with disabilities, poor people, lots and lots of people,
especially people who are more than one of these things,
(50:59):
but especially people of color. And this is really fucking bad.
And this is why fights for birth control and abortion
were actually really complicated in a lot of communities of color,
and why it's very important that our fight isn't just
for abortion, it's for control over one's body, the right
to have kids, the right to not have kids. We
talked about this last time you were on.
Speaker 2 (51:21):
Yes, we did.
Speaker 3 (51:22):
But the thing that I think that people don't because
you can look back and you can see these things
and it's very fucking clear. But the thing that people
don't necessarily understand is that eugenics was a widespread belief
and I think every corner of society. Yeah, yeah, it
was on the left as well as the right. It
was among working class people as well. People discovered evolution
and hereditary heredity and we're like, sick, let's take an
(51:46):
active hand in it by like fucking with everything you
know in ways that were bad and went bad. The
leftist eugenics was focused on choice, like let's not sterilize everyone,
but instead it was shit like let's have fewer children
as working class people so that the laborpool is smaller
and we're more in demand and can leverage our power better,
which is a framework that now would fit more under
(52:08):
family planning, right, because it's about the family making plans,
it's about the people who have wombs making decisions. This
still led to bad shit because it was tied into
fucking eugenics.
Speaker 1 (52:19):
Right.
Speaker 3 (52:19):
When we talk about planned parenthood as great it is today,
we know the bases and we know why it is
complicated and Sayinger did good things in bad things, Yep, exactly.
I like the first time I had to break Sanger
up on this show, I like almost changed topics. I
was like, I don't want to have to talk about this.
I don't want to talk about Margaret Sanger's it's I
(52:39):
don't want to And then I'm like, all right, this
is cowardice. I will do it. So Alexander Graham Bell
or Alec who is friends. He's into studying heredity and
he learns that deafness is indeed, sometimes congenital can be hereditary.
He writes a whole paper about this, worrying about how
if deaf people marry one and it might make a
(53:01):
race that gets scare quotes of deaf people that said,
and I hate saying that said. People say that he
advocated for bands on marriage between deaf people, which he
never did, and he actually spent decades of his life
trying to prove to people that he never did, because
this also came up while he was alive, and he
spent a lot of his time in communication with the
(53:22):
deaf community, I think the National Association for the Deaf
and about how he was opposed to bands on marriage.
He never advocated for sterility for deaf people. He did
argue for similations politics for deaf people, and like did
his fucking maybe people should. So this is contentious even
(53:44):
within the deaf community at the time. In the nineteen
twenty or so, the National Association that Deaf was concerned
about people marrying one another because everyone was obsessed with eugenics,
and because a lot of the people, not all of
the people, a lot of the people in the disability
community at the time, becaus was how do we stop
people from being disabled, rather than how do we deal
with the social effects of this, which brings us to
(54:08):
the social construction of disability that we now have the
framework that far more people are working under now versus
the medical model of disability that Bell and others were
working under, which we'll talk about on Wednesday. This is
the worst cliffhanger I've ever done. It's a theory cliffhanger.
Speaker 2 (54:29):
I'm hanging on.
Speaker 3 (54:30):
Okay, I appreciate it. It's a really interesting theory. When
I first had this explained to me at a feminist
science fiction convention called wiz Con, it was a mind
blow moment. I was like, oh, that makes sense. You know,
I kind of cut you off.
Speaker 2 (54:45):
I feel like I'm coming into a good lecture, so
I'm excited.
Speaker 3 (54:47):
All right, great, yeah, yeah, that's totally the Oh anyway,
thank you, thank you. But what else is amazing? It's
not these deals, It's Samantha. It's you and the stuff.
Speaker 1 (55:04):
That you do. Is it me? Oh?
Speaker 2 (55:06):
Thank you, I love it. Well, thank you for letting
me be on. But yes, I am on a podcast
called stuff Mom Never Told You. You can find us
on Twitter, Instagram's YouTube, and TikTok if you want to
watch my co host cry about the Last of Us
or Star Wars. That's what we post there.
Speaker 3 (55:29):
You right.
Speaker 2 (55:30):
We also have a book coming out in August.
Speaker 1 (55:33):
You have a book coming out.
Speaker 2 (55:34):
We have a book coming out. Yes, you can go
pre order it. It's it's stuff mom never you, Past, Present.
Speaker 3 (55:42):
And Future, and it's got some cool things. We've got
a lot of great illustrations and like graphic novel portions
to it.
Speaker 2 (55:51):
Gods, thank you. You want to pre order it, you
can pre order it at stuff you should Read dot com.
There's like a whole little section and yeah, it's coming
out in August.
Speaker 1 (56:02):
Yay.
Speaker 3 (56:02):
Fuck yeah, that's exciting. I'm excited. So ifhi, do you
have anything you want to plug?
Speaker 1 (56:09):
Uh buy Samantha's book by Margaret's many books. Uh pre
ordered Jamie Loftus's Raw Dog, which is about hot dogs,
which Margaret play last we record was like maybe you
should give that contexts sure that when you don't bet
if you don't.
Speaker 3 (56:29):
Yeah, yeah, all right, Well that's some stuff and we'll
come back on Wednesday and we'll actually start talking about
Helen Keller.
Speaker 1 (56:39):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
Cool Zone Media for more podcasts from cool Zone Media,
Visit our website cool zonemedia dot com, or check us
out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
get your podcasts.
Are you ready to rumble? Coming in from location?
Speaker 2 (00:11):
We have our hosts, the one and only Margaret kid Joe.
Speaker 1 (00:19):
I've always wanted to do that. I'm Mac.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
But that's amazing.
Speaker 3 (00:23):
That was better than my introduction I had planned, so
we'll go with that.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
I loved it. It was such a broadcasting voice too.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
I don't know if I've ever heard you do that before.
I've never done it before.
Speaker 3 (00:33):
This is just for the two of you, well, for
everyone else who's listening besides the two of us. This
is a show called Cool People Did Cool Stuff, which
is a history podcast. It's the only history podcast that
I believe. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy with me today.
I'm very excited about. This is Samantha McVay. Ye are
(00:54):
you doing yay?
Speaker 2 (00:55):
I'm so excited to be on with you again.
Speaker 3 (00:57):
Yes. Yeah, for anyone who Sophie likes that, I turn
everything into an ad for my other episodes. We had
Sophie on when we talked about the Jane Collective performing.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
Samantha, you said, so, we also had Sophie. I was
technically there.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
You were there.
Speaker 3 (01:12):
It was There's one thing I know about you, you
are not.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
Yes, I was on I think was it your inaugural show.
Speaker 3 (01:23):
It was one of the first episode, first ones.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
Okay, I know it was, right after all the debacle
with turning over Robie Wade.
Speaker 3 (01:30):
Yeah, yes, but well the news cycles moved on, so
fortunately everyone still has full bodily a ton Oh right,
well no, never mind. Okay, So Samantha other people might
know as the host of the podcast Stuff Mom Never
Told You, which is probably not a history podcast because
this is the only history podcast ever, right, yeah, I
(01:53):
think so. Yeah, I think we like claimed that.
Speaker 2 (01:57):
Yeah, I think you should. We pepper in some history.
But typically we are a current affairs type of thing.
We stretch from everything anything that has to do with
intersectional feminism.
Speaker 3 (02:08):
We we do it awesome. And our radio announcer is Sophie. Hi, Sophie,
how are you doing?
Speaker 1 (02:16):
I like, I don't like that title.
Speaker 3 (02:19):
It was so good. Your radio voice was like shocking
because it was that.
Speaker 1 (02:24):
Good, like a boxing match thing announcer.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
I think it's close to announcers.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
My sports announcer boys.
Speaker 3 (02:33):
I mean, okay, it was good, Okay, fair enough. Next time,
when I get an even larger truck and put even
larger wheels on it, I will have you with a
megaphone announce every time that I arrive.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
I mean I would enjoy nothing more than that.
Speaker 2 (02:47):
To it and actually would be amazing.
Speaker 3 (02:52):
Comes from Georgia, I think, I think that's the only
place you're allowed to be with that.
Speaker 2 (02:57):
It's true.
Speaker 3 (02:59):
We in it Ian edits are audio on woman wrote
her theme song. So today I really love not telling
my guests who we're going to talk about before they
show up.
Speaker 2 (03:08):
Blind let's go.
Speaker 3 (03:09):
Yeah, Today we're going to talk about an American icon,
one of the most famous women in US history. We're
going to talk about how complicated her legacy is, how
badly her story is told. Today I'm going to be
curious when you figure out who're talking about. Today, we're
going to talk about probably the most famous person in
the history of the US Socialist Party, although no one
(03:30):
knows she was a socialist. How even more than that,
she's probably the most famous Wobbly. A member of the
Syndicalist Union, Friend of the pod Industrial Workers of the World,
she was one of the founders of the ACOU. She
was a white Southerner who was an early member and
supporter of the NAACP and was an outspoken proponent of
civil rights. That's right. Today we're talking about Helen Keller.
Speaker 2 (03:55):
Oh that he threw me for a loop. Yeah, that
is the plant that you did agree to.
Speaker 3 (04:02):
Thanks, I guess to get it out of the bag.
The reason that people are is complicated is that there's
some eugenics in her. But yeah, and we're going to
talk about how odd it is. And I think that
actually it ended up a more useful way of exploring
some of these concepts than I originally expected. I thought
(04:24):
originally I was going to be like, we're going to
talk about the fact that everyone ignores that Helen Keller
was a socialist, And then I was like, we're gonna
talk about that, but we're going to talk about so
much more too.
Speaker 2 (04:33):
Oh have you ever seen The Miracle Worker?
Speaker 3 (04:37):
No? But I read so much about the Miracle Worker
during this I've like, I've read so many takes on
the Miracle Worker. I don't want to watch it at
the end of this.
Speaker 2 (04:47):
Ah, you shouldn't. We actually performed that as a high
school play. I was in it.
Speaker 3 (04:52):
I won't tell you the character I was in because
it's so degraded. Not degrade, yes, degrading and racist. But
I was in it. Wait, who would be the degrading
racist character for you to have been stuck? Oh?
Speaker 2 (05:01):
Okay, all right, So I am the in my high school,
I'm the only pretty much only minority outside of one
other Asian girl and maybe a few Latino students. So
I was the only non white person in the drama
and in Helen Keller or in the Miracle Worker, there
is a servant but is obviously of black descent. Guess
(05:26):
who played that really problematic role. And they would not
let me not do an accent?
Speaker 3 (05:30):
Cool?
Speaker 2 (05:31):
It is horrifying, and I because of who she was.
She also had children, so I have had to pretend
these little kids were Mike. It was bad and they
were both.
Speaker 3 (05:40):
I think that that is actually a very fitting way
to understand the ongoing harm caused not by Helen Keller,
but by the way people tell her fucking story.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
Oh let's start, Oh god, all right.
Speaker 3 (05:57):
All right. Helen Keller, of course, is famous for what
she believed and not anything else. I'm not trying to
downplay what else she did. She was one of the
first deaf blind people in Western society to be given
the chance to learn to read and write, and was
the first to get a bachelor's degree. We're gonna call
this episode Helen Keller was a Socialist and also complicated.
Because Helen Keller was a socialist and complicated, her legacy
(06:20):
is a disability rights icon is a lot more popular
in abled society than in disability justice communities, who are
critical not only of what gets called inspiration porn, but
also of assimilation as politics more broadly. So we're going
to talk about all that. We're going to talk to
the story of Helen's life, what she did that was
super cool, what she did that was super not cool,
(06:42):
And we're going to talk about the social model of disability,
and in classic form, we're going to start decades before
she was even born. Oh yes, because we're going to
start with another woman whose name is Laura Dewey Bridgeman.
I'm just curious. I had never heard of Laura. Had
you heard of Laura before this?
Speaker 2 (07:03):
I have not.
Speaker 3 (07:04):
Yeah, I Laura Dewey Bridgeman was born in New Hampshire
on December twenty first, eighteen twenty nine, to a farming family.
She's white. I think they're more farm owners than like homesteaders,
because there's references to her her parents' employees at various points.
When she was twenty four months old, she was sick,
(07:24):
she got scarlet fever, and when she recovered, she'd lost
her sense of hearing, sight, and smell, and with smell
goes most of taste, so she was deaf blind, a
specific impairment that it was more common in the nineteenth
century than the twenty first, but still exists. It was
more common back then because it was often caused by
various infections that we have way better ways of treating now.
(07:46):
And when she first lost these senses, she would sit
around and whisper dark dark for a while, because she
knew some words already because she was two years old.
I worry about the way that she was represented as
a youth because I have less information about her, or
I looked up less information about her than I do
about Helen. But I know how Helen Keller is misrepresented,
(08:09):
and actually I believe by the Miracle Worker. Probably as
the story goes, Laura had a really hard time communicating
with her family and was therefore unruly. Was completely unruly.
Only her father could get her to do anything, and
that was by physically restraining her. Basically, a lot of
media will refer to deaf blind children as basically wild animals.
(08:32):
This is not true. This is not true of Helen
Keller's youth, and I'm inferring that it is not true
about Laura's youth. I'm sure it was hard. Don't get
me wrong. Deaf blind folks were at the time usually
treated as essentially hopeless cases. And again I'm saying in
Western society, because that's what I have information about, no
(08:56):
one was known to have learned a consistent way to
communicate it across that barrier, besides some of what are
called home signs, which are basically DIY sign languages that
people develop themselves with their loved ones. But when she
was a kid, Laura was not fully communicative. But when
she was seven, there was a school vaguely nearby called
(09:17):
the Perkins School for the Blind, which I have seen
as being originally in New Hampshire, or maybe it's in Boston.
I'm kind of confused because it's still around, and you
feel like I feel like I should have been able
to find a more concise answer, But it's in New
England alongside of her. The Perkin School of the Blind
is like, hey, let's try to teach her, and specifically
(09:38):
the director of the school who gets held up as
a hero, and we're gonna talk about that, doctor Samuel
Gridley Howe. He taught her and I'm going to quote
from the Perkins School for the Blind's website about this.
He gave her familiar objects such as forks and keys,
with name labels made of raised letters pasted upon them.
(09:58):
When he gave her detached labels with the same words,
she matched them to their objects. How next cut up
the label so each later letter was separate. He spelled
the now familiar words, showed them to Bridgeman, then jumbled
the letters. She was able to rearrange them so they
once again spelled the words. And so this is how
the Sally taught Laura English and how to communicate. She
(10:21):
learned English, she was off. She studied at the school
like the other students, and this accomplishment got written about
all over the world. It's funny because she's not remembered
now because Helen Keller is now the famous first quote unquote,
I'm making air quotes, but no one in the audience
can see that the first stef blind person to you know,
(10:42):
learn how to communicate or whatever, right Charles Dickens met
her and wrote about her, and this increased her fame substantially.
One article I read about her refers to her as
the second most famous woman in the world, after only
Queen Victoria during much of her early life. But this
is kind of it's that media cycle thing, right. We
tend to think of it as like a Twitter brain
(11:03):
thing that people have an attention span of fifteen minutes.
You know, the attention span might have been slower back then,
but it's still ebbs and flows, right, Thousands of people
come to visit her, like literally, at one point there
was more than a thousand people there's here on one day.
Newspapers around the world are covering her story. According to
the author Rosemary Mahoney from her book For the Benefit
(11:26):
of Those who see quote, all over America, little girls
began poking their dolls eyes out, tying green ribbons across them,
and renaming them Laura.
Speaker 2 (11:39):
I don't know what. I don't want to say. Okay,
I feel like I can't give them proper reaction because
I'm like confused. Well, yeah, okay, this is.
Speaker 3 (11:50):
This is why I'm gonna talk about what inspiration porn is.
I'm like wait is it No, it's it's it's weird.
How do I react? Yeah, no, keep going. Yeah, I
think this is an example of the long and the
long history of problematic ways that people have of you
and people with disabilities. Yeah, this is one of those
(12:12):
things that I'm like, I'm glad they didn't hate her.
Speaker 1 (12:17):
Like, what is that equating poking dolls out of somebody's.
Speaker 2 (12:22):
Yeah, it kind of thing. I'm going to say. It's
kind of like cultural appropriation, when you love something a
little too much and then you take it on and
it becomes like problematic and offensive. Oh yeah, maybe it's
along those lines.
Speaker 3 (12:36):
No, you're right, there's almost certainly. Probably I don't know
the history of Halloween well, and I you'd think I would,
but like, yeah, like there's almost certainly people dressing up.
Speaker 2 (12:45):
Yeah you think I would. That was so funny.
Speaker 3 (12:51):
I know more about the history of Christmas than Halloween.
And I feel guilty. My goth card is melting.
Speaker 2 (12:58):
You're failing.
Speaker 3 (12:59):
Yeah, you're failing in this. Let me go get my
goth card out of the coffin in the other room.
Inspiration porn. This is a particular phrase that was coined
by comedians Stella young. I thought I wrote the year
in the script, but I didn't. I think it was
twenty twelve that this particular phrase was coined. She defined
it as quote an image of a person with a disability,
(13:22):
often a kid doing something completely ordinary, like playing or
talking or running, or drawing a picture or hitting a
tennis ball, carrying a caption like your excuse is invalid
or before you quit, try what's wrong with this? The
author Stella continues to say, quote, these modified images exceptionalize
and objectify those of us they claim to represent. It
(13:45):
is no coincidence that these genuinely adorable disabled kids and
these images are never named. It doesn't matter what their
names are. They're just there as objects of inspiration. Our
later subject, Helen Keller, is probably the single most used
in space spiration used as inspiration porn person in the
history of the world. Laura's life was not immune to
(14:06):
it either. And I think the thing that irritates a
lot of people in the disability community is like, Okay,
this idea that the great accomplishment is being normal, right, right,
and it's assimilation specifically, that like all people want to
do is you know, live like everyone else or whatever,
And this is going to be a recurring theme this week.
(14:28):
Back to Laura. As much as she was a student,
she was a test subject. How he wasn't just teaching
her because he was cool and nice. He was using
it as a science experiment.
Speaker 2 (14:41):
So yeah, I was going to ask when you said
thousands of people were visiting her, why so were they
getting knowledge from her? Or were they watching her like.
Speaker 3 (14:49):
A sideshow side show? Okay, yeah, no, they would like
leave with like a piece of her hair, or like
something she had sown, or like and she would buy
I mean she would they would buy the stuff she sewed.
But yeah, no, it's they were like, come see this
(15:09):
wonder of the world.
Speaker 2 (15:11):
Right, Yeah, that's exactly. It literally is like again one
of those side shows, old school circus traveling shows that
I'm like, why would they visiting? Were they trying to
get knowledge? Okay, that's that's cool.
Speaker 3 (15:23):
But yeah, no, okay, they were watching her, and I'm
sure some people were coming and studying this, and we'll
talk about how. I mean it was other students at
the School for the Blind who went on to like
further this style of education and teach teach Helling Keller
later to spoil some of it, you know. But but yeah,
this guy, how he he wanted to know what was
(15:45):
in and what was learned? Right, right, Like what are
we born with? What do we what do we learn
through society? It's this, you know, big question that's been
with Western world ever since the Enlightenment or whatever. So,
for example, when she was eleven, he decided he wanted
to find out if religion is in it or if
it's learned. So he told her teachers to not answer
any questions about God, just to find out if she
(16:07):
would end up religious if she was never taught about God.
But then he skipped down for honeymoon for a year
and some of the evangelical teachers just like taught her evangelicalism.
So he comes back and she's evangelical, and he's like, no,
my science experiment, it's been ruined, you know, poor guy.
Speaker 2 (16:26):
Poor guy.
Speaker 3 (16:27):
Yeah, And so at least according to one narrative, and
I have no reason to doubt it. He kind of
turned on her a little bit at this point. He
started talking about her. He started referring to her as defective.
At one point, apparently he said that the reason she
got scarlet fever is that her parents weren't smart. Not
that her not smart parents had done something not smart
(16:47):
by exposing her to the illness, but literally that they're
not smart brains had created a not smart brain child,
and people with not smart brains were more likely to
be susceptible to illness. Yeah, you know, it's so wow
wow wow.
Speaker 2 (17:08):
So wait, so he turned on her because she became
religious or because that she wasn't exactly what he wanted
her to be the Peatrie dish that he wanted to create.
Speaker 3 (17:17):
I believe it's that I've read a couple different ways
of describing their relationship. This is the most negative way
I've seen, but it's also the one I've read with
the most detail, and it comes from Rosemary Mahoney, who
I'm going to quote again quote how had stated firmly
at the start of his career that the blind were
no different from the sighted, and that blindness was a
superficial handicap, But after ten years of work at the
(17:40):
Perkins Institution, he radically reversed his position. In his sixteenth
annual report, he claimed that his views had been modified
by experience. He stated, this is going to be able us.
This thing that I'm about to read he stated in
emphatic uppercase letters, the blind as a class or inferior
to other persons in mental power and ability. So he sucks.
(18:02):
And this is the guy who found the school for
the blind, and they still credit him as like an icon. Yes,
oh my god. And it's interesting because he's like, he
is the first person that we know of to teach
this style of language to a deaf blind person. There
was actually a deaf blind woman before them, who I
(18:24):
can't remember. Her name is later in the script, who
learned tactile sign language rather than written word.
Speaker 2 (18:31):
Right, So was he using brail? Is that what he's
using or is he using his own system?
Speaker 3 (18:35):
They're using a different system. This is a little bit okay,
it's like around this is the middle of nineteenth century.
I don't remember what year brail started getting standardized.
Speaker 2 (18:43):
I think it's like early eighteen, eighteen hundreds, eighteen twenty something, okay.
Speaker 3 (18:48):
I think that, Oh, okay, No, that's good to know.
And I think that they're also she does learn braille, right, okay,
But the initial stuff that she's handed are this other
alphabet that I can't remember the name of, that's like
a tactile alphabet. Okay, so now I'm going to talk
about all the cool shit how did but for a reason.
Speaker 2 (19:08):
Okay, so I want to pretend like he's cool for a second.
Speaker 3 (19:11):
I got it because it's worth highlighting the way that
people who are otherwise so fucking cool can be ablest
as fuck. Right, So, How's grandfather was at the Boston
Tea Party. I'm famously neutral on the American Revolution as
a later removed from the position of the indigenous and
enslaved people in North America.
Speaker 2 (19:31):
So I just that's fair.
Speaker 3 (19:32):
Whatever. However, how himself, he went and fought in the
Greek Revolution in the nineteen twenties. He brought back Greek
refugee children to personally teach in America. Then he went
to France and fought in the eighteen thirty second French Revolution.
Back in the US, he started an abolitionist newspaper, and
he did not just leave it at starting an abolitionist newspaper,
(19:52):
A lot of people get ridden about in history. It's
like pretty cool because they were abolitionists and they wrote words.
He funded John Brown. He had to flee the country
over fleeing John Brown. His house was a stop on
the underground railroad At one point, him and a couple
of his friends stormed a building, breaking down the door
of the battering Ram, shooting a cop in the face
(20:13):
to rescue a fugitive from slavery named Anthony Burns. This
is part of how the Fugitive Slave Act was passed,
is because of how and his friends shooting a cop
to try and free amn. Okay, this is why it's
so heartbreaking, right they were repelled. He did not successfully
free Anthony Burns, so they raised up the funds to
buy Anthony his freedom. He helped it. He directly helped
(20:35):
at least one other person escape slavery. He probably helped
uncountable others. But there was one other name I found.
During the Civil War, he was a bit older at
this point. He worked to keep disease outbreaks in Union
camps at a minimum. After the Civil War, he worked
with the Freedmen's Bureau to make sure that people had
food and clothes and everything they needed, helping reunite families
and shit. He's like, and then he goes on and
(20:56):
if you read the Wikipedia level of him or whatever,
he's like, he did all this amazing shit, and then
he goes on, goes on to like found the school
for the blind and dedicate his life to teaching people
how to read and like all the shit, and you're like,
it's so but he's so ablest and we're gonna this
is not the only time this is going to happen
in this story.
Speaker 2 (21:18):
So when he because he sounds really cool and did
a lot of cool things in that era. But we
also know a lot of abolitionists, especially white abolitionists, still
did not believe necessarily that the enslaved people were equal.
Was he one of those?
Speaker 3 (21:35):
I found no specific sign one way or the other,
which I don't know my instinct. You know, it's funny,
it is like my instinct would have been like, no,
I don't think he's one of those. But the way
he talks about like and wants to help blind people
and then like fuck them over, Like, yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 2 (21:54):
I'm starting to wonder, you know, what those heroes who
are not real heroes, but because they did a few
good things, right, don't get me wrong. Yeah, love that
he was a part of that.
Speaker 1 (22:03):
Thank you.
Speaker 2 (22:03):
I'm sure you know. There's a lot of good things.
Speaker 3 (22:06):
Obviously, there's a lot of good things that happened out
of that but still yeah a question. Yeah, no, totally.
And then also to just show how like messy the
like white abolitionist culture is. The Perkins Institute that he
founded was named after its benefactor, a rich guy who
donated Thomas Perkins, who donated his mansion to the school.
Thomas Perkins was rich because he bought and sold people. Yeah,
(22:30):
I knew you were going to go there. Yeah, a
wonderful Yeah.
Speaker 2 (22:37):
I hope that building's haunted. Keep going.
Speaker 3 (22:40):
No, no, no, it's almost certainly haunted. His wife was
Julia Ward, who composed the Battle Hymn for the Republic
aka that song Might eyes have seen the glory of
the Coming of the Lord, which was the Union Army's anthem,
which had banger lines like as he Christ died to
make men holy, let us die to make men free.
(23:03):
I don't know, but do you know what Samantha will
set you free? Tell me it's products and services ad.
Speaker 2 (23:12):
I'm so excited. I'm going to buy it right now.
Speaker 3 (23:14):
Whatever it is we're.
Speaker 2 (23:15):
Buying it, tell me I'm doing it right now.
Speaker 1 (23:17):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (23:18):
That's unless it's a car, then I'm screwed. I hope
it's not another ad for joining the Irish Police Force.
I'm there, all right, I got just kidding.
Speaker 3 (23:30):
We're doing so, we're doing, We're committed. Here's the ads
and we're back. And I'm not sure what I'm gonna
do with all this Reagan gold, but you know whatever,
bury it.
Speaker 2 (23:46):
It's fine. Good, We're good. Bury it. It's gonna it'll
be better that way.
Speaker 3 (23:50):
Yeah, Like ten of us are going to go out
to the woods of the shovel bury it, and then
like shoot each other and then bury the bodies with
the things so that a few of us know, a
few of us know who it is.
Speaker 2 (23:58):
Oh, that's escalated very quickly.
Speaker 3 (24:02):
I did an episode about pirates recently. Sorry, I like
coming on not knowing where it came from.
Speaker 2 (24:09):
Yeah, yeah, that just got dark. Okay.
Speaker 3 (24:14):
So anyway, we're talking about how we're talking about the
Perkins School for the Blind, and he's remembered in history
as being this lifelong advocate for the blind. He's not
the only disability advocate who is abless as fuck with
otherwise progressive politics. Who's going to come up in this
episode spoiler alert, the next one who's like this invented
the telephone. Laura, for her part, refused to play nice
(24:36):
with people mistreating her. She was told not to talk,
for example, because her voice wasn't pleasant or whatever the fuck,
and her response was to yell, God gave me much voice.
Speaker 2 (24:46):
Yes, amen, yeah, but yeah.
Speaker 3 (24:51):
Soon the social media circus moved on from her, and
she lived out her life at the school in quiet obscurity.
She became a sewing teacher, She went on summer occasions
with their family. She read Christian books and made her
money selling needlework and teaching at the school. And she
died when she was fifty nine. Actually, I don't know
if she got paid to teach at the school now
that I'm thinking about it. There might have been a
(25:12):
room in the board situation. Yeah, people were not treated well.
Speaker 1 (25:16):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (25:16):
In history, it's one of the weird things about no
one else runs a history podcast on the only one
who runs into this stuff.
Speaker 1 (25:24):
Right, But yeah, say history bad.
Speaker 3 (25:30):
Hmm. No, I'm gonna give it a complicated because there's
so much. There's a lot of cool people in history.
Speaker 1 (25:36):
Did they do cool stuff?
Speaker 3 (25:38):
Yeah? Yeah, totally.
Speaker 2 (25:39):
Yeah, I love that title. I'm gonna start a podcast
with that.
Speaker 3 (25:43):
Damn, you got to it first.
Speaker 1 (25:45):
But I produce that.
Speaker 3 (25:50):
Sometimes I just yeah, I'm excited. I've already got ideas.
Let's go. No problem here, I'm sending you the script.
You can finish that really funny. Just do a reverse
episode where I just give the script to someone who has.
Speaker 2 (26:04):
Just start trying to explain it, not knowing anything about it.
You ask, and then that's just start. I just start
making sure. That was kind of like we just talked
about chat GPT. Yeah, and you they when they don't know,
they just make up shit. So I'm like, yeah, okay,
let's do that.
Speaker 3 (26:19):
That's how you know a man made the chap GPT
exactly all right? Anyway, living on so she she lived
out her life. She died when she was fifty nine.
She wasn't the first deaf blind person to learn language
in Western society. Julia Brace was the woman I mentioned
earlier who is a generation older, communicated by tactile sign language,
(26:40):
preferring it to Braille and written language. She actually went
to the Perkin School for Blind for a moment and
how tried to teach her and she was like, fuck this,
I'm going back to the School for the death and
like I'm I'm in a sign language. I don't want
to learn how to read. And I always say in
Western society, because if if you google who was the
(27:01):
first deaf blind person to learn language, you get pages
and pages about Hell and Keller, which is not true, right,
no one's even no anyway whatever, And so it's like
I couldn't even find non Western examples. If I had
more time, I hope I would have been able to
because I'm very curious after doing this because it's presented
(27:22):
as this like no one had ever done this in history,
and I just don't believe it. Right.
Speaker 2 (27:26):
Well, we know with a history, a lot of things
are still undiscovered, and especially if they're in the marginalized community,
they're going to be less likely known or even talked
about or recorded. So hopefully someone will find out that
there are more. But yeah, you never you can never
absolutely say something when it comes to.
Speaker 3 (27:43):
History totally, especially the first one I gave that.
Speaker 2 (27:46):
Yeah, when it comes to for sure.
Speaker 3 (27:48):
Yeah, So Laura had a friend in a roommate who
was in that who is probably a character in that play.
I believe it was a main character in your play.
Laura's friend and roommate was named Anne Sullivan.
Speaker 2 (28:00):
And Sullivan Okay, yeah, she's.
Speaker 3 (28:02):
Going to go on to be very important in this story.
She's Helen Keller's teacher and lifelong friend. She had a
fucking rough childhood. Have you heard this? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (28:13):
She was.
Speaker 3 (28:13):
She was a blind, first generation, first generation Irish American
woman who had lost her mother and brother to tuberculosis.
Her background includes such notes as after her mother's death,
her dad abandoned her at a boarding house. The boarding
house was subsequently investigated for quote sexually perverted practices and cannibalism. Well, cannibalism.
(28:35):
I don't know if I knew that part. Yeah, that's
the part where you just like hit a light, like
did they eat? I don't know. Maybe they weren't Catholic
and it was just the body of Christ. So Anne
Sullivan did not have an easy childhood. She ended up
going to the Perkins School blind and had a as
(28:59):
far as I can tell, much better life thereafter. I
actually have compared to some of these other places. Whatever. Anyway, Okay,
so which sort of brings us to Helen. We're starting
to transition to talking about Helen. I was planning on
kind of speed running through Helen Keller's learning to communicate,
because while it's fucking cool, it's also something that's been
(29:21):
told a million times and gets twisted for weird propagandistic
and ablest ends, like wow, what a miracle do you know?
Deafblind people are cable of communicating, whereas this actually like
society has figured out how to communicate with me. You know,
it's it's anyway whatever. But the annoying thing is that
I was going to speed run it, and then I
discovered have you heard the conspiracy that Helen Keller didn't exist?
Speaker 2 (29:45):
Yes? Actually I have running No we did not, but yeah,
but I just remember, just because there was that little
bit of like interest from high school about her, I like,
and then not, I feel like someone brought it up
not too long ago.
Speaker 1 (30:02):
Conspiracy theory.
Speaker 2 (30:05):
Yeah, that's what it is. I was like, what's happening? Yeah,
but explain because I did not dig too deep in.
Speaker 1 (30:11):
That was it was TikTok. And then I think, you
guys spread back to Reddit and then it then it
just spread spreads, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (30:19):
As it does.
Speaker 3 (30:21):
It's awful. It's one of the worst. There's a lot
of bad conspiracy theories. This one is just unabashed. Okay,
So it's like the basic idea of this conspiracy is
that there's no way for deafblind people to communicate. So
clearly Helen Keller is a fraud. And this is kind
(30:41):
of like to me, it's like that flatter a thing
where like I feel bad. I've like mentioned this on
the podcast before. I think I had a friend who,
like one winter in like the midst of depression and whatever,
he like messaged me at three in the morning and
he was like, the Earth is round, right, And I'm
like yeah, and He's like, I've been following down some
dark rabbit holes. How do you know the Earth is round?
(31:02):
And I'm like, because I've seen it, because I've been
in an airplane, you know, And because there's people, Yeah,
there's like people who fly round. You could talk to
someone who's flown around the world.
Speaker 2 (31:14):
No one's no, one's gone off the edge of the world.
They've tried.
Speaker 1 (31:17):
Yeah, but conspiracy culture could be so convincing and as spread.
And I mean, like, you know, not everyone has like
like I've worked on scientology and I've worked on QAnon shit,
so it's like it's like nobody and and and like
the number one thing that I learned from working on
(31:40):
those topics is like it just gets people like yeah,
there isn't like even even people that it's just it it's.
Speaker 3 (31:50):
Like a virus.
Speaker 2 (31:51):
Yeah, well it makes it validate something for them, whether
it's uh, and it's going to be really awful, so
I can prepare this way, I can act this way,
or this is why this makes sense because my life
has makes sense and correlates with that for sure.
Speaker 3 (32:06):
Yeah yeah, but yeah.
Speaker 2 (32:09):
I think I didn't dig do too deep on the
hell in keller bit because I like, that doesn't what
purpose does to serve? Moving on?
Speaker 3 (32:15):
But yeah, no, and it's it must have I mean
I think a lot of it because I think it
was I think it was people who just like they
couldn't imagine how they would communicate, so therefore it's impossible,
right and if they say things enough, they say things
like no other how come no other death blind person
has ever been able to communicate or whatever, which is
(32:37):
like easily disproven because we live in a society, right
they do.
Speaker 1 (32:42):
Wait, bagfie, that's their argument.
Speaker 3 (32:45):
Yeah, that's like that is one of their arguments.
Speaker 1 (32:46):
I have never.
Speaker 2 (32:49):
Yeah, a deaf blind person who can communicate, right, like
I have shut up, like they don't exist?
Speaker 3 (32:57):
Yeah, what like literally what.
Speaker 1 (33:01):
Yeh?
Speaker 3 (33:03):
Be fucking for real people and then and so the
conspiracy is either some some go so far say she
literally didn't exist, like there was no woman named Helen
Keller in history, which is like one of those things
where it's like she lived until the sixties. You see
video of her, like.
Speaker 2 (33:22):
It wasn't like it wasn't that long ago, wasn'teen hundreds.
Speaker 3 (33:28):
And other people say that she existed but wasn't actually
deaf blind. She was like one or the other or something,
and she was faking the other one for fame. Yeah.
Another one was that she was deaf blind, but she
wasn't actually communicating and she was being treated like a
ventriloquist dummy by her handlers. And a lot of those
ones are like, see, because there's no way she could
(33:49):
possibly know about socialism because she's never seen anything, or
it was just it's just fucking ableism, right, and I
don't even know how to like like mostly my way
of debunking as being like, you're wrong, that's wrong, you're incorrect,
like but.
Speaker 2 (34:06):
It here's a picture of her, here's her accomplishments, here's
who testifies to what she had. Don't understand what just
because she's able to function and live happily does not
discredit her existence.
Speaker 3 (34:21):
I know, I know it. It it's so awful, and.
Speaker 1 (34:27):
And like.
Speaker 3 (34:29):
I think that's okay. So that's part of why I
don't speed run it. And that's part of why I
actually used the specific example of how Laura learned how
to read is because I feel like, well, I can't
imagine how you could do that and be like okay,
well here's how it happened. And you're like, oh okay,
because like I didn't, you know before I started doing
the researchers, like, well, I don't know the means by which,
right this happened, right, And then I like read about
(34:50):
and it's like, yeah, that makes sense, Like that that's cool,
you know, And so I'm not going to speed run it.
I thought we could skip to the Helen Keller as
revolutionary socialist who didn't believe in party politics but instead
revolutionary socialism, followed by here's a complicated legacy. But first
we're gonna talk whow she learned to communicate? Yes, because
the miracle I'm going to try to perform here is
(35:12):
to get it through people's thick skulls that people with
disabilities are people capable of learning what the fuck? So
Helen Keller on June twenty seventh, eighteen eighty. Helen Keller
was born in Tuscumbia, Alabama, to a slaver family. Her
family was like Slaver Royalty. Her father, Arthur H. Heller,
(35:35):
was a captain in the Confederate Army, related to Robert E. Lee,
the Confederate general she was. But that's just one side
of her family. On her mother's side, her grandfather was
another Confederate general, this time in acting brigadier general named
Charles Adams. Who's this part is kind of fun. His
(35:55):
entire command, Okay, it's whatever. His entire command was conscripts
who wish they weren't out there fighting for slavery. So
during one battle, this general her grandfather lost his entire
command because they all fucked off. They're like yeah, they
were like he was like, go fill in the hole
(36:16):
in the Confederate line, and they were like, we we
don't want to. Like that seems like a good way
to dive for rich people.
Speaker 2 (36:23):
Like You're like, they're like sure, sure, sure, sure, sure
be wipe back. Yeah, I can go get something first. Yeah,
I hear my mom call it.
Speaker 3 (36:30):
Hold on.
Speaker 2 (36:32):
The shovels are way over there, so let let us
go Google grab those stay.
Speaker 3 (36:37):
Here, let my mus get at home. Yeah, that's amazing,
I know. And so there's some cool people in this
history is the Confederate soldiers who did not want to
be because it is worth under noting that they're conscripts
right like they're literally whatever. Anyway, the whole episode about that.
So Helen's granddad, Charles Adams, was also related to John Adams,
(37:00):
the second President of the United States. To his credit
where it is due, John Adams was one of the
only presidents back then who wasn't a slaver. I think
it was literally just John Adams and his son were
the only pre Civil War presidents I could. Someone's going
to be mad at me about saying that. I don't
actually pay much attention to electoral politics until I started
(37:21):
doing this show. Helen was born on what gets called
euphemistically a homestead when people want a whitewash history. It
was a cotton plantation worked by enslave people until a
combination of the Union army and slave people striking and deserting,
and a civil war within the Civil War all worked
together to destroy fucking shadow slavery. Right, that's her lineage.
(37:44):
Helen is born fifteen years after the Civil War ended,
mind you, and she's rad. On the balance, I actually
think that her break from all of this makes her
more rad and probably had at least her fucking granddad
rolling over in his grave. Here's my impression of granddad
rolling over in his grave. I wrote into the script,
and so now I'm stuck reading it. I wrote it
(38:05):
probably two in the morning, but here I am No,
my troops deserted me. No, my most famous descendant found
an organization called the ACOU to help black people's That's
what he's said. Yeah, thanks, I loved it. So right now,
she's a baby. She hasn't started the ACU yet. She's
nineteen months old. She gets really sick. This is probably meningitis,
(38:30):
but that's people's just best guess right now. At the time,
it was probably called oh fuck, our baby is sick
and no one has invented antibiotics yet. She recovers, except
she lost her vision and her hearing and was deaf blind,
and really quickly the historical fog sets in because there's
two stories here. There's the story that's really good for fundraising,
which is the story of the film The Miracle Worker
(38:53):
about how she was basically a wild animal. There's like,
I think there's like a scene where she's like chasing
someone with scissors and and like, yeah, a.
Speaker 2 (39:01):
Whole like dining room scene where they fling food about
and she gets into everybody's plates and she gets ignored,
but she's like yeah, yeah, literally just being on top
of the table, Yeah, eating off of people's plates and
no one's stopping her.
Speaker 3 (39:18):
Yeah, that's for dramatic effect, as far as I can tell,
with roughly no basis in reality. I'm certain that every
child is tantrums, and I'm certain that someone who has
trouble that people don't know how to communicate with has
more tantrums. I am not. But the actual thing that
happened is that little Helen started figuring out how to
(39:39):
communicate with home signs. She had more than sixty of
these because she taught herself how to communicate on some level,
because people do that. She could experience the world through taste,
touch and smell. She knew who was coming because she
could tell the different gates of the different people in
her household based on the vibration and the floor caused
by their footsteps, and to her family's credit, they took
(40:02):
her her condition seriously. Her mother read Charles Dickinson's book
Dickens Is Dickens, Yeah, where he talked about the plural
is Dickey.
Speaker 1 (40:25):
I'm not saying anyone is wrong.
Speaker 2 (40:29):
You do you what you need if you have multiple
let's go.
Speaker 3 (40:33):
Well, he's going to show up later in this episode.
But Mark Twain has that quote about anyone who can
only think of one way to spell a word clearly
suffers from lack of imagination.
Speaker 1 (40:43):
I Mark Twin.
Speaker 3 (40:44):
But yes, so Charles Diggens talks about Laura Bridgman. Mom
reads the book and is like, oh shit, someone else
has dealt with this, Maybe we can do this. So
she talks to a doctor I think like travels to
the mid Atlantic to talk to a doctor, to a
specialist who put her in touch with the anti hero
(41:06):
of today's story. I'm gonna go with anti hero Alexander
Graham Bell.
Speaker 2 (41:11):
Oh okay, did we already do a second ad break?
Speaker 3 (41:16):
Well? Guess what everyone, before you get to hear about telephones,
you get to hear about what happened with his invention,
which is that eventually you all are going to get
listening to ads in the middle of hearing about history
about the guy that's true. Yeah, yeah, it's the very
handy button. Yeah. I hate what I'm like working on
something though, and like I like, my phone's like across
(41:38):
the room and I'm like, I have to listen to anyway.
Speaker 2 (41:45):
But these are amazing personally, These are these are the
best ones.
Speaker 1 (41:50):
Personally. I thoroughly enjoy hearing about Hello Fresh.
Speaker 3 (41:54):
I like the ones that are about other podcasts I
have listened to. Yes, I really like the Alphabet Boys.
I listened to that because I heard an advertised on
the Coolstone podcast. Nice.
Speaker 2 (42:06):
I have no idea what that is, but right on,
I don't need it.
Speaker 3 (42:08):
It's a podcast about the FBI's infiltration of by the way, Margaret,
actually yeah, this is actually yeah, this is just genuinely
and I'm like, I have some quibbles about the way
it represents some stuff, but I got a lot out
of that. So here's some other some actual ads. And
(42:33):
we're back and we're talking about Alexander Graham Bell or
Alec to his friends. For some reason, shut up, no,
it really is. He really was. He was Alec. He
also didn't have a middle name. In his younger life,
he like, but his brothers all had middle names. So
he was like, Dad, how come I don't have a
middle name. So for his like eighth birthday or something,
(42:55):
his dad was like, fine, Graham, you have a middle name. Now,
why didn't I give him a middle name? Did they
just not like him? I feel like you just gave
up on the names.
Speaker 2 (43:04):
Yeah, like he was a.
Speaker 3 (43:05):
Third or fourth or something.
Speaker 1 (43:07):
Can I can I just say I thought the Gwyneth
Pautrick skiing trial was the whitest shit I've heard recently.
But being like, you don't have a middle name, fine,
your Graham?
Speaker 3 (43:18):
Yes, totally, all right, Alec.
Speaker 1 (43:22):
And named himself Alec right.
Speaker 3 (43:26):
And then also, and this is none of this is
in the script because it doesn't actually matter. Uh, he
spelled it with a K. And then later his wife
was like, you gotta change. It's gotta beat with a
C instead of a C K. And so he dropped
the K at his wife's behest And I haven't no idea.
Speaker 2 (43:42):
Why So it was a L E C K.
Speaker 3 (43:45):
Yeah. Originally his nickname, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (43:49):
Alex so l A A A oh that's the nickname because.
Speaker 3 (43:54):
It's Alexander name. And it's funny because history remembers him
as like he is not an alex he has an
Alexander Graham Bell, like he is full three names, you know.
Speaker 1 (44:04):
Right, that reality he was Alec Bell.
Speaker 3 (44:10):
Yeah, yeah, you can't. You can't repeat the kickers too
much though, because he wasn't a racist.
Speaker 1 (44:17):
Fair enough. I think that.
Speaker 2 (44:21):
Because I'm gonna.
Speaker 3 (44:21):
Yell at oh, he participated in some ship that did
some racism. He advocated against racism. All right, we'll get
to it. We'll get to it.
Speaker 2 (44:32):
Okay, Okay, let's go.
Speaker 3 (44:33):
Actually it's in like two paragraphs, it's two sentences, okay.
So Alexander Grambell, our man, Alec he's not really our
man because he's he's obsessed with deafness and trying to
cure it, and he's trying to better the lives of
deaf people. And he's also obsessed with the eugenics. That's
always a thing, that thing that poisons the legacy of
(44:53):
like half the Victorian eras interesting people is back. So
Alexander gram Bell. He's famous for inventing the telephone, which
the acoustic telegraph. All his money came from the telephone,
but he barely liked telephones, he wouldn't keep one in
his office. He invented a bunch of other shit, like
an old timey air conditioner that he used to cool
(45:14):
his house, which was like a fan over ice cubes,
or some shit. Worked on composting toilets. He was one
of the inventors of the metal detector. Supposedly he invented
this while trying to find the bullet in President James
Garfield so doctors could pull it out. There's like a
whole he's an inventor. People like fucking talking about him.
But his main love was human speech, the advocating for it,
(45:35):
the working with the deaf community and pressuring them into
relying on speech instead of sign language. Yeah, it's not
a visual medium. But Samantha's currently side eyeing me.
Speaker 2 (45:46):
Yes, I am sidey.
Speaker 3 (45:48):
So he came from a long line of elocutionists, people
who study speech, the like mechanics and the sounds of speech.
His dad wrote a language designed to describe the mechanics
of articulation, like what sounds are coming out of a
mouth is a language that his dad wrote. His mom
started going deaf when he was twelve, so he became
(46:09):
and he he was always like with her and interpreting
for her and stuff. He became a tutor for deaf people.
He married one of his deaf students, which I think
he was actually uncreepy about.
Speaker 2 (46:24):
Okay, I was gonna say a student, Like, what what
do we say when we say student?
Speaker 3 (46:28):
She was an adult? I believe I didn't actually look
she's younger than him.
Speaker 2 (46:32):
You know, sometimes they consider fourteen year olds adults.
Speaker 3 (46:34):
I know I need to Actually I should have written
how old she was. They had a long courtship, and
his courtship was primarily him writing feminist and anti racist
letters to her. She was white, okay, and but one
of the letters he wrote was sarcastic, and everyone hates him.
So they took his sarcastic letter and claimed that he
(46:57):
was against women's suffrage and that women were more free
than men because they didn't have to do any thinking,
and like all of this stuff. And so I went
into it. I was like really ready to be like
man and he's wrong about fucking everything. And I'm like reading,
I'm like, yeah, fuck this, why is he saying the shit?
And you get to the end of the letter and
you're like, this is sarcasm, like, and he's not subtle
(47:19):
about it. By the end of the letter, like it's
actually decently executed sarcasm. It's two pages long. It talks
about how ridiculous it is that women could be equal
to men and invade men's sacred spaces like astronomy, all
the while referencing women after women after women who were
in these spaces being very good and successful and we're
(47:40):
at least as smart as men and how whatever, and
he like goes on and he's like, look, eventually, there's
gonna be a woman president. And he's Scottish. He listen
to America at this point, but he's Scottish and he's like, whatever,
I'm a subject of the queen and she's a decent queen,
so like, why the fuck would I be against women rulers?
Like this is when he like drops the sarcasm and like,
(48:03):
how before him, you've got someone who has had fairly
good politics for it. For his era, he actively believed
in universal suffrage regardless of race and gender and religion
and property ownership, and he treated the disabled people that
he dedicated his life to in bad ways, or rather,
he advocated things that aren't good He was a huge
(48:27):
proponent of what gets called oralism, and this is an
assimilationist approach to disability, specifically to deafness. He argued that
deaf people would be happier if they integrate into hearing society,
which means no more teaching sign language and instead everyone
should just read lips and learn to speak, and he
used his father's alphabet to teach deaf people to speak.
(48:48):
He also said shit like deaf people should avoid hanging
out with mostly deaf people because it slows assimilation. This
does not look kindly upon by history because it's bad.
Correct with the New York Times, the oralism Bell Champion
was a disaster for the deaf. Well examples, a bound
of deaf people have mastered speech, they do not represent
(49:09):
the larger deaf community. Oralism implicitly teaches a kind of
self abnegation that deaf people are of value only in
so far as they can approximate another kind of person. Okay,
so that's one of his big bad things. I'll talk
by the other one. He's really influential, and Helen Collor
is a reason he's like a long side quest for this,
(49:29):
because I think he's actually almost a He's really important
to understanding Helen Color's position on these things.
Speaker 1 (49:34):
Oh man, I read ahead. This is this is bad.
Speaker 3 (49:40):
Yeah, this's gonna be on a different show.
Speaker 1 (49:42):
Oh no, I was like, oh, the Margaret Show.
Speaker 2 (49:46):
I've been tricked.
Speaker 1 (49:48):
I know, yay. Working title Helen Color was a socialist,
gonna be a bye.
Speaker 3 (49:55):
All right, Margaret.
Speaker 1 (49:56):
Let's let's let's.
Speaker 3 (49:58):
Rip the band in anti Helen on the whole to
be clear, fair enough, rip off the band aid. Yeah,
all right. So Alexander Graham Bell alex was a eugenicist,
not in the way you'd immediately assume when you hear
that word. Now, I've talked about this in a couple
times on the show, and I fucking hate that. I
have to because I hate that so many people are
(50:19):
into eugenics that it keeps cropping up all the time.
But there are two things that prove that eugenics was
one of the worst ideas humanity ever had. The first
one was the Nazis. Most people hear eugenics and they
think of the Nazis improve the human race by killing
everyone who's inferior. Then there's the other terrible thing, which
(50:39):
is the non Nazi, non consensual eugenics, like the US practiced,
the US sterilized so many fucking people, non consensually all
throughout the twentieth century and still frankly, mostly people of color,
people with disabilities, poor people, lots and lots of people,
especially people who are more than one of these things,
(50:59):
but especially people of color. And this is really fucking bad.
And this is why fights for birth control and abortion
were actually really complicated in a lot of communities of color,
and why it's very important that our fight isn't just
for abortion, it's for control over one's body, the right
to have kids, the right to not have kids. We
talked about this last time you were on.
Speaker 2 (51:21):
Yes, we did.
Speaker 3 (51:22):
But the thing that I think that people don't because
you can look back and you can see these things
and it's very fucking clear. But the thing that people
don't necessarily understand is that eugenics was a widespread belief
and I think every corner of society. Yeah, yeah, it
was on the left as well as the right. It
was among working class people as well. People discovered evolution
and hereditary heredity and we're like, sick, let's take an
(51:46):
active hand in it by like fucking with everything you
know in ways that were bad and went bad. The
leftist eugenics was focused on choice, like let's not sterilize everyone,
but instead it was shit like let's have fewer children
as working class people so that the laborpool is smaller
and we're more in demand and can leverage our power better,
which is a framework that now would fit more under
(52:08):
family planning, right, because it's about the family making plans,
it's about the people who have wombs making decisions. This
still led to bad shit because it was tied into
fucking eugenics.
Speaker 1 (52:19):
Right.
Speaker 3 (52:19):
When we talk about planned parenthood as great it is today,
we know the bases and we know why it is
complicated and Sayinger did good things in bad things, Yep, exactly.
I like the first time I had to break Sanger
up on this show, I like almost changed topics. I
was like, I don't want to have to talk about this.
I don't want to talk about Margaret Sanger's it's I
(52:39):
don't want to And then I'm like, all right, this
is cowardice. I will do it. So Alexander Graham Bell
or Alec who is friends. He's into studying heredity and
he learns that deafness is indeed, sometimes congenital can be hereditary.
He writes a whole paper about this, worrying about how
if deaf people marry one and it might make a
(53:01):
race that gets scare quotes of deaf people that said,
and I hate saying that said. People say that he
advocated for bands on marriage between deaf people, which he
never did, and he actually spent decades of his life
trying to prove to people that he never did, because
this also came up while he was alive, and he
spent a lot of his time in communication with the
(53:22):
deaf community, I think the National Association for the Deaf
and about how he was opposed to bands on marriage.
He never advocated for sterility for deaf people. He did
argue for similations politics for deaf people, and like did
his fucking maybe people should. So this is contentious even
(53:44):
within the deaf community at the time. In the nineteen
twenty or so, the National Association that Deaf was concerned
about people marrying one another because everyone was obsessed with eugenics,
and because a lot of the people, not all of
the people, a lot of the people in the disability
community at the time, becaus was how do we stop
people from being disabled, rather than how do we deal
with the social effects of this, which brings us to
(54:08):
the social construction of disability that we now have the
framework that far more people are working under now versus
the medical model of disability that Bell and others were
working under, which we'll talk about on Wednesday. This is
the worst cliffhanger I've ever done. It's a theory cliffhanger.
Speaker 2 (54:29):
I'm hanging on.
Speaker 3 (54:30):
Okay, I appreciate it. It's a really interesting theory. When
I first had this explained to me at a feminist
science fiction convention called wiz Con, it was a mind
blow moment. I was like, oh, that makes sense. You know,
I kind of cut you off.
Speaker 2 (54:45):
I feel like I'm coming into a good lecture, so
I'm excited.
Speaker 3 (54:47):
All right, great, yeah, yeah, that's totally the Oh anyway,
thank you, thank you. But what else is amazing? It's
not these deals, It's Samantha. It's you and the stuff.
Speaker 1 (55:04):
That you do. Is it me? Oh?
Speaker 2 (55:06):
Thank you, I love it. Well, thank you for letting
me be on. But yes, I am on a podcast
called stuff Mom Never Told You. You can find us
on Twitter, Instagram's YouTube, and TikTok if you want to
watch my co host cry about the Last of Us
or Star Wars. That's what we post there.
Speaker 3 (55:29):
You right.
Speaker 2 (55:30):
We also have a book coming out in August.
Speaker 1 (55:33):
You have a book coming out.
Speaker 2 (55:34):
We have a book coming out. Yes, you can go
pre order it. It's it's stuff mom never you, Past, Present.
Speaker 3 (55:42):
And Future, and it's got some cool things. We've got
a lot of great illustrations and like graphic novel portions
to it.
Speaker 2 (55:51):
Gods, thank you. You want to pre order it, you
can pre order it at stuff you should Read dot com.
There's like a whole little section and yeah, it's coming
out in August.
Speaker 1 (56:02):
Yay.
Speaker 3 (56:02):
Fuck yeah, that's exciting. I'm excited. So ifhi, do you
have anything you want to plug?
Speaker 1 (56:09):
Uh buy Samantha's book by Margaret's many books. Uh pre
ordered Jamie Loftus's Raw Dog, which is about hot dogs,
which Margaret play last we record was like maybe you
should give that contexts sure that when you don't bet
if you don't.
Speaker 3 (56:29):
Yeah, yeah, all right, Well that's some stuff and we'll
come back on Wednesday and we'll actually start talking about
Helen Keller.
Speaker 1 (56:39):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
Cool Zone Media for more podcasts from cool Zone Media,
Visit our website cool zonemedia dot com, or check us
out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
get your podcasts.
Host
Margaret Killjoy
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