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June 27
The Stratford Martyrs, Johann Eichhorn, and Helen Keller
David Barnhart
June 27, 2025
A “Little” Free Library in Eisenach, Germany, 2022. Own photo.
Today in 1556, as England see-sawed between Protestant and Roman Catholic persecutions, thirteen Protestant leaders were executed for heresy. They were known as the Stratford Martyrs.
Today marks the death, in 1827, of Johann Gottfried Eichhorn, one of the early scholars who brought historical-critical methods to the study of the Bible.
Today also marks the birth, in 1880, of Helen Keller, advocate for the rights of workers and the disabled.
Reflection:
Helen Keller is one of Alabama’s most famous historical figures, and was born in Tuscumbia. Though many elementary students in Alabama (like me) learned of her through the film The Miracle Worker, her significance to American history was never taught to us. We knew only that she was deaf and blind, and she became the source of many ableist “Helen Keller” jokes. What I only learned later was that these jokes were decades old, and were intended to disparage and overshadow her actual significance as an advocate for workers’ rights.
James Loewen, author of Lies My Teacher Told Me, writes this about Helen Keller:
“Helen Keller is taught as a blind and deaf girl who overcame her handicap, not the 64 years of her adult life. The truth is that Keller was a radical socialist. She came to realize that to deal solely with blindness was to treat the symptom, not the cause. She learned that blindness was concentrated in the lower class — men who were poor might be blinded by industrial accidents; poor women who became prostitutes faced the additional danger of syphilitic blindness. Thus Keller learned how the social class system controls people’s opportunities in life.…
“At the time Keller became a socialist, she was one of the most famous women on the planet. Her conversion to socialism caused a new storm of publicity — this time outraged newspapers that had extolled her courage and intelligence now emphasized her handicap — charging that she had no independent sensory input and was in thrall to those who fed her info.
“Keller helped found the ACLU. She sent $100 to the NAACP with a letter of support that appeared in its magazine — a radical act for a white person from Alabama in the ‘20s.”
Helen Keller wrote:
“The few own the many because they possess the means of livelihood of all ... The country is governed for the richest, for the corporations, the bankers, the land speculators, and for the exploiters of labor. The majority of mankind are working people. So long as their fair demands - the ownership and control of their livelihoods - are set at naught, we can have neither men's rights nor women's rights. The majority of mankind is ground down by industrial oppression in order that the small remnant may live in ease.”
I shared this quote from Helen Keller when I mentioned Emanuel Swedenborg on January 29:
“Since my seventeenth year, I have tried to live according to the teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg. By "church" he did not mean an ecclesiastical organization, but a spiritual fellowship of thoughtful men and women who spend their lives for a service to mankind that outlasts them. He called it a civilization that was to be born of a healthy, universal religion — goodwill, mutual understanding, service from each to all, regardless of dogma or ritual.”
Prayer: God of the prophets, you continue to raise up voices, but we often choose not to see, hear, or understand. Give us the sense, and not just the senses, to hear, understand, and act. Amen.