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Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan

By on April 18, 2012 in Education, History, Writings

[1999] “Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am.” These are the words of Helen Keller, whose legendary triumph is the subject of William Gibson’s play, The Miracle Worker.

The story of how Keller first gained awareness of her own existence, and, later, much more, is the story of one of the 20th century’s most remarkable pair of women. Blinded during infancy with neither bone nor air conduction in either ear, Keller’s mother often wished the child dead. Annie Sullivan was hired as her tutor.

Sullivan, whose own childhood had been miserable, began teaching at the Keller home in Tuscumbia, Alabama, in 1887. Undaunted by her impetuous pupil, she immediately applied a fiercely rational education. Sullivan granted the unruly girl no reprieve from instruction. As Helen Keller began to make progress, Sullivan conducted lessons outdoors – in a field or beside the Tennessee River – permitting Keller to fully feel that the world was hers to master.

“It now remains my pleasant task,” Sullivan wrote early in the process, “to direct and mold the beautiful intelligence that is beginning to stir in the child-soul.” Their relationship was forged: the convergence of raw, free will and the ruthless discipline of reason. The result was a transformation from wild child to an exceptionally intelligent girl.

Frederick Tilney, a neurology professor from Columbia University sent to observe Keller, later wrote: “From the very beginning of her instruction this ingenious teacher has arranged every experience so that it might have real pedagogic value, whether in play, in work or in rest, as well as in all other social activities. Helen Keller has been taught to capitalize every opportunity for learning from each impression entering her sensorium.”

Keller could distinguish between roses and wildflowers, she knew when storms were coming – detecting a concentration in her nostrils – and she learned to speak. She mastered French without a textbook or a Braille dictionary, graduated from Radcliffe, became a writer and lecturer and she was able to grasp abstractions. When friends told her that happiness awaited her after life, she instantly asked: “How do you know, if you have not been dead?” The efficacy of Keller’s mind was matched only by her charm. An admirer observed: “Ask her the color of your coat, she will feel it and say ‘black.’ If it happens to be blue, and you tell her so triumphantly, she is likely to answer, ‘Thank you. I am glad you know. Why did you ask me?’”

As Keller gained fame, Sullivan rejected distortions of her student’s deeds: “Helen Keller is neither a ‘phenomenal child,’ ‘an intellectual prodigy,’ nor an ‘extraordinary genius’ but simply a very bright and lovely child, unmarred by self consciousness or any taint of evil. Every thought mirrored on her beautiful face, beaming with intelligence and affection, is a fresh joy, and this workaday world seems fairer and brighter because she is in it.”

Their relationship lasted a lifetime, bearing the indelible mark of instructor and pupil.

“My teacher is so near to me that I scarcely think of myself apart from her,” Keller wrote in her classic autobiography, The Story of My Life. “I feel that her being is inseparable from my own, and that the footsteps of my life are in hers.” Keller called Sullivan “Teacher” for the rest of her days.

Sullivan taught Keller how to think. That Helen Keller chose to think was the proper reward for both.

Originally published in the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1999.

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New Ayn Rand Exhibit at Chapman University

By on March 15, 2012 in Ayn Rand, Books, Culture, History

Attending a reception earlier this month to formally open an exhibit at Chapman University, “Celebrating the Drama and Philosophy of Ayn Rand”, I had the pleasure of being given an extensive and informative tour by Ayn Rand Archives curator Jeff Britting and was surprised to find new and interesting material about works with which I’m extremely familiar. Among the items in the manuscript and photograph exhibit are first-edition copies of Rand’s 75th anniversary edition of We the Living, as well as some manuscript pages and photographs. We the Living, Rand’s first novel, is an excellent and haunting and relevant work of literature (read my 2009 take on We the Living here and my movie review here). Tucked inside an Orange County, California, library, “Celebrating the Drama and Philosophy of Ayn Rand” displays newspaper coverage, including book reviews, book cover designs, artwork, correspondence – with H.L. Mencken, for example – and more. The exhibit, which runs through June 29, also contains material about the publishing of Rand’s insightful collection of excerpted fiction writings and non-fiction essay For the New Intellectual. As philosophy professor Robert Mayhew, whose Essays on We the Living was recently released in its second edition with newly added essays, told me at the end of this interview, We the Living is the closest we have to seeing the 20th century’s greatest writer in her youth.

The Truth About President Kennedy

By on February 5, 2012 in History, Politics

“I’d rather my children red than dead,” President Kennedy told a young White House virgin whom he had summoned for sex, during the so-called Cuban missile crisis, according to the New York Post‘s account of a new book, Once Upon a Secret: My Affair with President John F. Kennedy and Its Aftermath by Mimi Alford. Ms. Alford claims that she was a teen-aged intern who was invited to swim and expected to have sex with the President, Democrat John Kennedy, which she did, and that over the years of their affair she was also subjected to various forms of humiliation including being forced to consume what was probably amyl nitrate and asked to have sex with a Kennedy aide and a Kennedy relative (Ted). The book goes on sale this month.

None of this is surprising. As I recently observed, in posts about Richard Nixon and the Berlin Wall, President Kennedy, who has been sold as a great statesman, especially by MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, was a shifty character and seriously deficient president who was an advocate of government control of economics and communications. If Ms. Alford’s charges are true – and I suspect they are – they add to the evidence that Kennedy was a flawed American president.

According to a piece on Slate, Ms. Alford’s identity was first revealed in 2003 in Robert Dallek’s published portions of a 1964 oral history in which the liaisons were described. Slate – hardly part of a vast, right-wing conspiracy – reports that the New York Daily News then found someone who confirmed JFK’s affair with the teen-aged subordinate. Slate notes that Time magazine’s late White House columnist, Hugh Sidey, who covered the Kennedy administration, wrote in Time that “there was a Mimi,” adding that “there was also a Pam, a Priscilla, a Jill (actually, two of them), a Janet, a Kim, a Mary and a Diana I can think of offhand.”

Given what we know of the sordid history of the Kennedys – their backroom deals, crimes and affinity for fascism – not to mention countless indiscretions, it is long past time the press and their puppet-masters in politics and government stop ignoring and distorting the truth. They should drop the pretense that JFK was a great president and start accounting for his actions. Ultimately, historians will judge the Kennedy family’s legacy on the merits of their ideals in action: trying to force Hollywood moguls to remove Jewish names from film credits to placate Nazis, allowing Soviet construction of the Berlin Wall, refusing to enforce the law on behalf of Americans who are black, creating military disasters including bringing the U.S. to the brink of nuclear war, and creating socialized medicine and HMOs.

The record speaks for itself without new disclosures which confirm what the press already knew: that they also used power to take advantage of those without power. Better red than dead – the opposite of Patrick Henry’s Give me liberty or give me death! – was more or less the Kennedy presidency motto; that it apparently was confirmed by a 19-year-old who lost her innocence to a power-lusting president (who indiscriminately used his power for lust) ought not to shock anyone, least of all the media. Let’s not hear anymore of this Camelot nonsense, except as a warning against media complicity in propagating the government’s lies.

Books: Malcolm X by Manning Marable

By on February 4, 2012 in Books, Culture, History

In Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (Viking, 2011), Manning Marable (1950–2011) presents what appears to be a thorough and meticulous account of his subject, the assassinated black Moslem leader known as Malcolm X. That Marable, who unfortunately died days before the book’s publication, brings impressive credentials to his work – he was a professor of African American studies, history and public affairs at Columbia University, served as founding director of Columbia’s Black History center and is the author of 15 books – underscores the question of why the press and their favored black intellectuals all but ignored this volume, which was published last year with hardly any coverage. Marable, who had taught The Autobiography of Malcolm X, written with, and arguably authored by, Alex Haley (Roots) during Marable’s seminar at Ohio State, had the audacity to approach his topic with real curiosity. So he sheds new light on the facts surrounding Malcolm X’s unsolved assassination, which he hints may have involved the FBI. He further enlightens readers about Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, whom he states advocated Malcolm X’s death. In one of Marable’s more trivial assertions, which has sadly tapped anti-gay prejudice among blacks, he tells us in a brief passage that his subject had been a hustler who probably had sex with men.

There is much to learn here about Malcolm X, whose views are likely to shock many on the left and the right, tracing his origins as an East Coast vagabond through his conversion to Islam, the religion of submission to God, and his advocacy of racial segregation – so-called black separatism – his early alliances with Moslems in Africa and his affiliation with, and split from, the Nation of Islam, a group which continues to exist in the United States with connections to Islamists. It’s a fascinating story, based on interviews with Farrakhan and Malcolm X’s letters and diaries, tracing 20th century American politics and culture, and it is impossible not to make crucial connections to today’s news and events. Not only does one gain insights into the man born Malcolm Little and how he went from birth in Omaha to being arrested in Detroit and assassinated in 1965 by fellow Moslems at the Harlem place where Duke Ellington and Count Basie had played, one will become better acquainted with the sordid story of post-slavery black Americans, once known as Negroes, from Frederick Douglass to Marcus Garvey to Martin Luther King, Jr. (whom Malcolm X sought to differentiate himself from) to today’s entrenched black intellectuals.

We learn that Alex Haley was a liberal Republican. That the Islamic terrorist-supporting Rev. Farrakhan was raised as an Episcopalian and discovered Islam as a Calypso singer known as Louis Eugene Walcott in Chicago at a nightclub called the Blue Angel. That on the night when thousands of federal troops were occupying the University of Mississippi to ensure the enrollment of a Negro named James Meredith, Malcolm X was on talk radio denouncing interracial marriage. But above all in this apparently straightforward and honest biography by an intellectual who expresses gratitude for Malcolm X, one comes away with a spine-chilling report on the insidious spread of collectivism – and an inextricable black American link to Islamism – that haunts us still. That the man who mainstreamed anti-American Moslems in America was downed by Moslems in America is but one of several twists that make more sense in reading Manning Marable’s Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, an ambitious book with a glossary, notes, photographs, index and bibliography.

Books: Catherine the Great

By on November 23, 2011 in Books, History

Russian history readers will welcome Robert K. Massie’s new biography of Catherine the Great. The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Peter the Great, Nicholas and Alexandra, and The Romanovs accounts for the life of the young German princess who came to Russia at 14 and became its ruler for 34 years. Author Massie, who studied American history at Yale and European history at Oxford, reports in Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman (Random House) that the empress had a brilliant mind and an insatiable curiosity, devouring the works of Enlightenment philosophers. When she assumed power, he writes, she made an effort to apply their principles to her rule of what the press release rightly describes as the vast and backward Russian empire. Massie notes that Catherine was “intellectually opposed to serfdom”. As grand duchess, she proposed that serfs be freed every time an estate was sold, though Rhodes scholar Massie is far less contextual about America’s founding fathers owning slaves than he is about a monarch’s interest in the Enlightenment.

Besides Voltaire, Frederick the Great and Marie Antoinette, Catherine also knew and corresponded with the founder of the American navy, John Paul Jones, whom she met and considered for admiralty in the Russian Navy. Jones, who had heard of the post through the American minister to France, Thomas Jefferson, wrote that he was “entirely captivated by her and I put myself into her hands without making any stipulation for my personal advantage.” Massie writes that Catherine was determined to become the embodiment of the “benevolent despot” idealized by Montesquieu.

Praised by Voltaire as the equal of the greatest of classical philosophers, Empress Catherine II ruled Russia from 1729 until 1796, during which time she endured her scheming mother, who considered her daughter, born Sophia Augusta Fredericka, arrogant and rebellious. Of course, Catherine’s mother had become pregnant at 16 and, when the child who would become Catherine was born, mother refused to hold or caress Catherine, handing her off to servants and wet nurses. Catherine married an equally inaccessible husband, Peter, and had a son and heir Paul—and she took in countless young men for sex and companionship. Massie also accounts for her relationship with Gregory Potemkin, her true love and equal, whom Massie asserts may have also been her husband.

Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman is a crisply written, factual narrative about a compelling person in history. She founded a hospital with her own money in order to prevent infanticide, oversaw the building of the Russian navy and became the first royal in the world to be injected with the smallpox vaccine (Jefferson beat her to it) which was an example to mystical people with irrational fears of medicine. More than anything, Massie shows how her active mind worked throughout history, as in this excerpt about Catherine’s childhood lessons about God and religion, during which she dared to ask about circumcision and wondered: “How can the infinite goodness of God be reconciled with the terrors of the Last Judgment? [Her tutor] Wagner, shouting that there were no rational answers to such questions, and that what he told her must be accepted on faith, threatened his pupil with his cane. … Later Sophia wrote, “I am convinced in my inmost soul that Herr Wagner was a blockhead.” She added, “All my life I have had this inclination to yield only to gentleness and reason—and to resist all pressure.”