ABSTRACT
Anne Sullivan greeted her removal from the Tewksbury Almshouse to the Perkins Institution not with joy, but rather with a sense of profound alienation from her more middle-class and upper-middle-class fellow students and teachers. One aspect of her identity that profoundly separated her from her fellow students (and teachers) was—despite her youth—her identification with poor and working-class and Irish political agendas. In the early 1880s, these aspirations had coalesced around the charismatic if mercurial Benjamin Butler, the populist politician and former Civil War general. Meanwhile, despite the paradox of being invited by Butler to assume a major role in Massachusetts government, Franklin Sanborn, who despised the general, refused to aid him and continued to vehemently oppose his brand of politics. The contrast between Sullivan’s and Sanborn’s views is not only of interest in a historical presentation of class and ethnic politics of the nineteenth century, but is illustrative of some of the many differences that have separated broadly liberal reformers from populist political figures (and political machine figures) over the last century and a half. Butler had many similarities to politicians who would emerge later through strong ethnic political machines, such as Boston’s own James Michael Curley and the “Kingfish” Huey Long of Louisiana, and the parallel can even be extended internationally to such varied populists as the Peróns of Argentina, Gamal Nassar and Kwane Nkrumah of Africa, and others who developed a huge personal following with their rhetoric and appeal to the poor. Further, the divide between the young Sullivan and the Yankee establishment can be seen as a foreshadowing of their battles in the years ahead.
