ABSTRACT
It is the great irony, of course, that Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, the rescuer of Annie Sullivan from the almshouse at Tewksbury and a defender of Helen Keller in the “Frost King” episode, would come to be a major nemesis of the two women. But while numerous elements of our story are personal and particular—Sanborn’s loyalty to the memory of his mentor Samuel Gridley Howe and his growing closeness to the Howe family; Keller and Sullivan’s pent-up anger at their treatment by the Perkins Institution—in many ways the change reflects the very different dynamics the new century brought to the relationship between social classes and ethnic groups and to some extent between the sexes and people of different ability. Yankee elites in Massachusetts had prided themselves on their openness to change and felt they in good conscience had made genuine efforts to accommodate others in their midst. But now the demographic facts were clear: the Yankees became a minority, and nothing they could do would stop it. When conflict became more apparent, considerable anger was raised at groups (as well as individuals) who were charged as “ingrates” or as “biting the hand that feeds.” A new breed of opponents arose for whom aggressive attacks on the upper-class Yankees became something of a sport, personified, for example, by charismatic Irish politicians such as John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald and James Michael Curley.
