Today, March 3rd, we salute 3 titans of American history: Alexander Graham Bell, Anne Sullivan Macy and Helen Keller.
Alexander Graham Bell was born on this day in 1847. Famous for his pioneering work with the telephone, Bell was also very influential in the field of education for the deaf. In 1886 Helen Keller’s parents Captain Arthur Keller and Kate Adams Keller contacted Bell seeking assistance for their deaf and blind daughter. Bell put them in touch with the Perkins School for the Blind in Boston, Massachusetts, and Perkins subsequently recommended Anne Mansfield Sullivan as a governess for their child.
Anne was a fiery and brilliant young woman. The daughter of poor Irish immigrants, she surmounted a childhood of poverty and neglect. Anne developed trachoma when she was 7 and remained legally blind until she was 15. At age 9 her mother died of tuberculosis and the following year, she and her brother Jimmie were sent to the infamous Tewksbury Almshouse where Jimmie died 3 months later. At age 14, she succeeded in getting herself transferred to Perkins, and in 1886 she graduated valedictorian of her class.
On March 3rd 1887, twenty year old Anne arrived in Tuscumbia, Alabama to teach her 6 year old pupil. Helen Keller described her arrival this way in her 1902 autobiography The Story of My Life :
The most important day I remember in all my life is the one on which my teacher, Anne Mansfield Sullivan, came to me. I am filled with wonder when I consider the immeasurable contrasts between the two lives which it connects…
On the afternoon of that eventful day, I stood on the porch, dumb, expectant. I guessed vaguely from my mother's signs and from the hurrying to and fro in the house that something unusual was about to happen, so I went to the door and waited on the steps. The afternoon sun penetrated the mass of honeysuckle that covered the porch, and fell on my upturned face. My fingers lingered almost unconsciously on the familiar leaves and blossoms which had just come forth to greet the sweet southern spring. I did not know what the future held of marvel or surprise for me. Anger and bitterness had preyed upon me continually for weeks and a deep languor had succeeded this passionate struggle.
…I felt approaching footsteps, I stretched out my hand as I supposed to my mother. Some one took it, and I was caught up and held close in the arms of her who had come to reveal all things to me, and, more than all things else, to love me.
Anne took all that she had learned about hardship and transformed it to foster and teach her young deaf-blind pupil. Helen rapidly learned to read braille and conversed using the manual sign language, she also learned to articulate words. Alexander Graham Bell continued to be very important in the lives of the young teacher and her pupil. Bell profoundly believed in Sullivan’s exceptional pedagogical abilities and encouraged her to teach others how to teach. Anne, deeply embarrassed about her past, was very grateful for Bell’s constant reassurance and validation. In a sweet example of Bell’s affection for Anne, in April 1905 he secretly sent a check to Helen for $194 to choose a wedding present for her teacher and fiancé John Albert Macy. Bell went out of his way to make sure that the money remained a secret.
Transcription of the envelope:
A Secret for Helen Keller
I don't want Miss Sullivan
Or Mr. Macey (sic.) to read this
note. Let someone else
read it to Helen.
Alexander Graham Bell
Image: Original caption reads: "The group who broke the ground for the Volta Bureau in 1893 [Now the Alexander Graham Bell Association for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing]. The first four seated on the grass [left to right] are Elsie Bell, now Mrs. Grosvenor; Anne Sullivan, Helen Keller’s famous teacher; Helen Keller, spade in hand; Marian Bell, now Mrs. Fairchild. Alexander Graham Bell is the large man near the right, behind the girl in a white blouse and sailor hat. His uncle, David Charles Bell, stands near him, partly hidden, and his father, Alexander Melville Bell, is on the extreme left, hat in hand. Beside A.M.B is John Hitz, first superintendent of the Volta Bureau. The ladies seated on chairs are Mrs. David Charles Bell, and Mrs. Alexander Melville Bell."
