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Helen Keller

Currency:USD Category:Collectibles / Autographs Start Price:NA Estimated At:800.00 - 1,000.00 USD
Helen Keller

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Auction Date:2018 Dec 05 @ 18:00 (UTC-5 : EST/CDT)
Location:236 Commercial St., Suite 100, Boston, Massachusetts, 02109, United States
ALS - Autograph Letter Signed
ANS - Autograph Note Signed
AQS - Autograph Quotation Signed
AMQS - Autograph Musical Quotation Signed
DS - Document Signed
FDC - First Day Cover
Inscribed - “Personalized”
ISP - Inscribed Signed Photograph
LS - Letter Signed
SP - Signed Photograph
TLS - Typed Letter Signed
TLS, two pages, 7.25 x 10.5, personal letterhead, no date but circa 1941–1945. Letter to Dr. Kingdon, in full: "Nothing could have made me believe that all these weeks would elapse without my giving a sign of the joy and humility I felt when I received your noble, heart-warming letter and Vice-President Wallace’s address at the National Citizens’ Political Action committee luncheon. My reproachful conscience will not be pacified even by the fact that urgent tasks have claimed each day, and are only now relaxing their hold upon me. I prefer to thank you for your account—more moving than any compliment—of Henry Wallace’s finding something to gladden him in my endeavors towards constructive living. Then I am grateful for the happy incentive your energizing faith imparts—the straight-from-the-shoulder Christianity that does not stop with prayer or intellectual light, but flows outward ‘on kindness bent’ into every region of man’s activity.

It was a beautiful surprise that Henry Wallace, full of high-soaring, world-encompassing concerns, should even mention me as a lover of impoverished humanity. Greatly he confirms my own message regarding the primary importance of the spirit ‘to get things done by material means in a concrete, practical way right here on earth.’ He is right about our bondage to the flesh. Too often our senses obstruct and confuse us because we do not use the Spirit to look around and above them and embody the vision in the drive of individual effort. Of course you and I realize how slow the processes of spiritual evolution have been, a little here and there, line upon line, precept upon precept, but now the world is being knitted together so closely by unprecedented methods of speech and example that myriads of different minds can be reached at once through instruction and personal stimulus. If evil powers have taken advantage of this fact with such deadly efficiency the last war years, how much more should we who cherish good be fearless in decision and swift in action to deliver mankind from all darknesses! Confidently I believe that the Word which has gone out of God’s mouth will not return unto Him void, since voices like Henry Wallace’s and your own ring their challenge to those who have ideas, but fail to incarnate them in large scale citizenship. Your message of warm affection to my Polly has made you both fast friends." In fine condition.

Keller, who overcame blindness and deafness from an early age, was a great admirer of Wallace's efforts to secure world peace, and in 1946 wrote to him: 'Rejoicing I watch you faring forth on a renewed pilgrimage looking not downward to ignoble acquiescence or around at fugitive expediency, but upward to mind-quickening statecraft and a life-saving peace for all lands.' A fantastic association piece connecting great activists of the 20th century.