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