Almost 20 years before she addressed Rotary International in convention in June of 1957 in Switzerland, Helen Keller was first introduced to Rotary through an article she wrote for the March 1938 issue of The Rotarian. In a featured position in the magazine, it was different from other selections of her work, as Keller spent her “space” discussing what teacher Anne Sullivan has meant to her.

Doug Rudman

She Also Made Circumstances

By Helen Keller

NO QUESTION is more pressing than this: can we master Fate?

As I know from recent travel, that query is still answered negatively in sequestered parts of the world. Uncounted folk still labor without hope of adequate recompense from dawn until dusk. With the sages of old they say, "What was good for my ancestors is good for me." Patient fatalists, they work on in antique garb, using implements older than their empires. The mountains may rise and sink, the stars may shift, the ocean may recede farther and farther from its ancient shores, but these human automatons change their circumstances little or not at all.

The earth they till absorbs their bodies generation after generation; yet they ask for nothing, since they believe it is enough that the earth gives back to them their life with strength renewed for their toil. They accept Fate.

On the other hand, the sons of the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution assert their power over destiny. They are animated by the same spirit as was Napoleon when a general told him that circumstances would render an attack impossible. "I make circumstances," he said. Multitudes of these sons have worked as free men inspired by a purpose – to transform age-long drudgery into an order of things where hands shall create joyously, mind put forth richer blossoms, and knowledge reach wider horizons. They have shared, if to a limited degree, in the fruits of the mighty enterprises they have wrought. Continents have been opened and schools have been established on the principle that education is the common property of all. Our civilization is winged with steam and electricity. Despite tragic blunders and enslavements, this endeavor has brought genuine well-being to the largest number of people in the history of economic administration.

Thus has grown the great philosophy of making circumstances. It has fostered the noblest individuality and the finest sensibilities. Out of this expanded and enriched human nature has come the deliverance of those whose lives Fate seemed to have hopelessly wrecked. In it the crippled of mind and body found a savior. Free men gave the blind and the deaf all possible knowledge to circumvent fettering limitations that they might take their places with normal people in the work and play of the world.

Anne Sullivan played a part in this. Herself a maker of circumstances, she carried still further the work of human emancipation.

She was born of poor Irish immigrants. She was partially blind and untaught. Her parents died. She was flung into the obscurity of an almshouse. Yet by sheer will power and intelligence she pulled herself out of that sordid environment. At the age of 14 she won a transfer to an institution for the blind, where she learned to read with her fingers. Several years later an operation gave her more sight, and she learned to read all over again, this time with her eyes, though they were never strong.

To her, there came one day a letter from a far-off country town in the State of Alabama telling of a little deaf-blind child who had no language but a cry. "Please send me," Anne Sullivan asked. Soon she left the few friends she had and traveled alone to rescue the small captive marooned on the bleak desert of darkness and silence.

Her work required ingenuity, infinite patience, perseverance, and, above all, love. For I was not only blind, deaf, and mute – but I was violently rebellious and destructive. Resolutely, my kind young teacher subdued me, until I had learned obedience without which I could not be taught or gain freedom. Her knowledge of books was scanty, and there was no one near to advise her in her new situation. Day after day, year in and year out, she toiled, devising means to set me free. By thinking her own thoughts and experimenting fearlessly, she won back for me the wonder-world of childhood she had been denied. Nobody, I think, would consider it a wild exaggeration if Anne Sullivan had said with Napoleon, "I make circumstances."