David Wagner - Miracle Worker and the Transcendentalist: Annie Sullivan, Franklin Sanborn, and the Education of Helen Keller

The Miracle Worker and the Transcendentalist

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F ew Americans have not heard or read about the famous story of Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan, if only through the play and movie The Miracle Worker. Both women have consistently, since the late nineteenth century, appeared near the top of lists of best-known Americans, and particularly of best-known American women. But most Americans dont know much about the history of how Anne Sullivan (Macy after 1905) (18661936), once a pauper in a large Massachusetts poorhouse, came to her role as the miracle worker who taught the deaf and blind Helen Keller (18801968). Few living Americans know much at all about Sullivan, though Americans from Mark Twain to Alexander Graham Bell to Charlie Chaplin thought she was one of the most important Americans of her time. Nor do most contemporaries know how controversial the education of Helen Keller by Annie Sullivan was at the time. While large crowds of people gathered to greet the women for many decades, and they were invited to a number of prestigious settings including the White House, there were many others who believed they were charlatans attempting to trick the public into believing that a deaf and blind child could not only read and sign, but do so in several languages. Others, particularly among the philanthropists of Boston, could not believe that the famous work of Samuel Gridley Howe (18011876) was replicated by an Irish pauper. The great Howe was a New England hero who had worked his wonders years before with a quiet and restrained deafblind woman named Laura Bridgman, as well as aiding European revolutions and fighting for abolitionism. How could his fame and his task been done again so easily by someone untrained?