You picture the little girl at the water pump. The FBI pictured a radical threat. This episode dismantles the sanitized statue built around Helen Keller and recovers the fierce, brilliant, politically dangerous woman history smoothed away. Born in 1880 to a former Confederate elite family in Tuscumbia, Alabama, she lost her sight and hearing at 19 months, invented over 60 home signs to communicate, and finally cracked the code of language when Anne Sullivan spelled "water" into her hand in 1887. That famous moment was not the finish line. It was the starting gun.

From there she raced into the highest tiers of American life: the first deafblind person in the United States to earn a Bachelor of Arts, a friend of Mark Twain, a founding member of the ACLU, and, to the horror of the newspapers that once adored her, a card-carrying socialist alig ...