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For all of this fame, however, not many know that Keller was also a prominent figure in the American socialist movement: a champion of the working class against industrial oppression, a consistent foe of militarism and imperialism, and a crusader for a better society.

==Out of the Darkness and Silence==

Keller was born on June 27, 1880, in Tuscumbia, Alabama, to Arthur Keller and Kate Adams Keller. Her first nineteen months were unremarkable, until she contracted a brief unidentifiable illness, characterized by a high fever that left her deaf and blind, and with only snippet memories of the broad fields, wide sky, and tall trees of Tuscumbia. Physicians declared the Kellers’ daughter a hopeless case, suggesting that she be permanently institutionalized, but the devoted parents kept searching for ways to lift her from dark silence. They discovered the Perkins Institute, a training school for the blind in Boston, and inquired about a teacher for Helen. After some discussion, the headmaster sent Anne Sullivan to Tuscumbia, where she was met with an out-of-control, frustrated, and depressed six-year-old child—yet one with a hidden radiance and an eagerness which Sullivan was anxious to tap.

The outstanding results of the relationship between student and teacher were made famous by the 1962 film ''The Miracle Worker,'' which profiled Sullivan’s ability to connect with Keller and eventually provide her with the tools to learn and communicate by finger spelling words in the palm of her hand.<ref>''The Miracle Worker,'' dir. Arthur Penn (Playfilm Productions, 1962).</ref> Keller’s quick mastery of that method launched her to organized classroom study at the Perkins Institute, where she learned to read Braille and to communicate more freely via the manual alphabet. Her vocal speaking practice was begun at the Horace Mann School for the Deaf in Boston. Although her speech would never be perfectly clear (something she regretted all her life), by the age of ten, she could at least make herself heard, and excitedly reported to Sullivan, “I am not dumb now.” <ref>Hattie Schlossberg on Helen Keller's speech patterns, interview, ''New York Call,'' May 4, 1913.</ref>

==Birth of a Leftist Consciousness==

The experience of isolation, the realization that mutual understanding and cooperation can overcome silence and darkness, and the sheer determination to be heard—all of Keller’s literal experiences—were easily translated into a push to overcome the figurative isolation, silence, and darkness that many marginalized groups were experiencing in American society during the 1910s, the period just after Keller graduated from Radcliffe. By this time, she was living with Sullivan and her new husband, John Macy, a young Harvard University instructor and a social critic. Macy was angry about the inequality he believed was caused by the machinations of the U.S. capitalist system. He was also sympathetic to the oppressive circumstances under which workers labored and the squalid conditions in which they and their families lived.

This made sense to Keller, and she set out to read all she could on socialism, subscribing to German socialist periodicals printed in Braille, and she asked a friend to visit three times per week to finger spell entire articles from the ''International Socialist Review'' and the ''National Socialist,'' and other readings (such as works by Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Karl Kautsky) from the Macys’ home library. “It is no easy and rapid thing to absorb through one’s fingers a book of 50,000 words on economics. But it is a pleasure, and one which I shall enjoy repeatedly until I have made myself acquainted with all the classic socialist authors.”<ref>Helen Keller, "How I Became a Socialist," ''New York Call,''Nov. 3, 1912.</ref> She finished her foundational preparation and officially joined the Socialist party, a fact made public in 1912, but she was a bit vexed about what her disabilities would allow her to do for the movement. Recalling her reading of ''New World for Old,'' however, she renewed her sense of the role she could play in helping realize socialism’s triumph over the political, economic, and social ills of the day. Wells had written that “an immense amount of intellectual work remains to be done for socialism. . . . The battle for socialism is to be fought not simply at the polls and in the market place but at the writing desk and in the study.”<ref>Wells, ''New World for Old,'' 52.</ref>

==By Choice or by Coercion?==

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