Over the last few years, every time I’ve recieved a quarter in change, I’ve glanced at it on the hopes that it’s a new state quarter design that I haven’t seen yet. Recently I went to the U.S. Mint’s website and noticed that the next quarter to be released (for Alabama) will feature a picture of Helen Keller. The description of the quarter contains the standard “Miracle Worker” mini-biography of Keller as well as praise for her “Spirit of Courage”, but like most books, it comepletely ignores her activism :

Helen Keller was a socialist who believed she was able to overcome many of the difficulties in her life because of her class privilege – a privilege not shared by most of her blind or deaf contemporaries. “I owed my success partly to the advantages of my birth and environment,” she said. ” I have learned that the power to rise is not within the reach of everyone.” More than an icon of American “can-do,” Helen Keller was a tireless advocate of the poor and disenfranchised.
. . .
“So long as I confine my activities to social service and the blind, they compliment me extravagantly, calling me ‘archpriestess of the sightless,’ ‘wonder woman,’ and ‘a modern miracle,” Helen wrote to her friend Robert LaFollette, an early pacifist who ran for president as a third-party Progressive candidate in 1924. “But when it comes to a discussion of poverty, and I maintain that it is the result of wrong economics – that the industrial system under which we live is at the root of much of the physical deafness and blindness in the world – that is a different matter!”
. . .
Why is her activism so consistently left out of her life stories? Stories such as this are perpetuated to fill a perceived need. The mythical Helen Keller creates a politically conservative moral lesson, one that stresses the ability of the individual to overcome personal adversity in a fair world. The lesson we are meant to learn seems to be: “Society is fine the way it is. Look at Helen Keller! Even though she was deaf and blind, she worked hard – with a smile on her face – and overcame her disabilities”

If she were alive now, I’m sure she’d have something interesting to say about the 16% child poverty rate. I also wonder how she’d feel about other people being used as political props.