The Zinn Reader (84 page)

8

F
AILURE TO
Q
UIT

This essay (written for Z
Magazine
in 1990, and reprinted in my book
Failure to Quit,
was inspired (if you are willing to call this an inspired piece) by my students of the Eighties. I was teaching a spring and fall lecture course with four hundred students in each course (and yet with lots of discussion). I looked hard, listened closely, but did not find the apathy, the conservatism, the disregard for the plight of others, that everybody (right and left) was reporting about "the me generation."

Ican understand pessimism, but I don't believe in it. It's not simply a matter of faith, but of historical evidence. Not overwhelming evidence, just enough to give hope, because for hope we don't need certainty, only possibility. Which (despite all those confident statements that "history shows..."and "history proves...") is all history can offer us.

When I hear so often that there is little hope for change from the present generation of young people, I think back to the despair that accompanied the onset of the Sixties.

Historians of the late Forties and Fifties (Richard Hofstadter, Louis Hartz) were writing ruefully about a liberal-conservative "consensus" that dominated the United States all through its history and that still prevailed, setting severe limits to change. Herbert Marcuse, at the start of the Sixties, saw American society, American thought, as "one-dimensional," with radical ideas absorbed and deflected, dissent repressed through "tolerance."

One could not read these men, socially conscious, desirous themselves of change yet despairing of it, without feeling a deep pessimism about the possibilities for change in the United States. As the year 1960 began, Princeton philosopher Walter Kaufmann lamented "the uncommitted generation" and wrote: "What distinguishes them is that they are not committed to any cause." Neither he nor Hofstadter, Hartz, Marcuse, nor anyone for that matter, could have predicted what would soon happen.

It was on the first of February in that first year of the new decade that four black students from North Carolina A & T College sat down at a "white" lunch counter in Greensboro, refused to move, and were arrested. In two weeks, sit-ins had spread to fifteen cities in five Southern states. By the year's end, 50,000 people had participated in demonstrations in a hundred cities, and 3,600 had been put in jail.

That was the start of the civil rights movement, which became an anti-war movement, a women's movement, a cultural upheaval, and in its course hundreds of thousands, no, millions of people became committed for a short time, or for a lifetime. It was unprecedented, unpredicted, and for at least fifteen years, uncontrollable. It would shake the country and startle the world, with consequences we are hardly aware of today.

True, those consequences did not include the end of war, exploitation, hunger, racism, military intervention, nationalism, sexism— only the end of legal racial segregation, the end of the war of Vietnam, the end of illegal abortions. It was just a beginning.

The uncommitted generation? I thought so too when, out of the Air Force, married, with two small children, finishing graduate work in history at Columbia University, I went South to teach in Atlanta, Georgia. My job was at Spelman College, where young black women, the daughters of railroad porters, teachers, ministers, maids, laborers, farmers, came to get their degrees. It was 1956. The atmosphere on that tree-lined, fragrant campus was sedate, quiet, careful, and only close attention to what was said and left unsaid revealed deep resentment just below the surface. By 1960, these same quiet students were sitting-in, demonstrating, picketing, going to jail. I learned that it was a serious mistake to interpret lack of action as lack of thought, lack of feeling. Rather, it was the absence of opportunities, openings, examples to emulate, groups to join—but when those appeared, the silence changed to uproar.

There is no such uproar today. There is an uncertain mixture of silence and commotion. The silence deserves attention. In 1984 there was a silent majority in this country that refused to vote for Reagan: 68 percent of the eligible voters (add the 21 percent who voted for Mondale with the 47 percent who didn't bother to vote). This leaves 32 percent who voted for Reagan, which was converted by a timid press and a gullible public into an "overwhelming mandate."

But there is more than silence.

There is a human carry-over from the Sixties. True, there are veterans of those movements who have been swallowed up by the gluttonous tigers of survival and "success" and live, happily or not, inside the bellies of those beasts, making do. But there are others, in the cages, yes, but holding off the carnivores with a chair and a prayer, stubbornly refusing to be eaten, looking for openings and opportunities, pushing the system to its limits while pointing beyond, keeping the spirit of resistance alive.

I think of two of my students at Spelman, among the many who were jailed during the Atlanta sit-ins: Marian Wright, going to Yale Law School, and to Mississippi with the Movement, now the tireless head of the Children's Defense Fund in Washington; Alice Walker, becoming a poet, a novelist, a feminist and political activist. I think of Carolyn Mugar, working with anti-war GIs in the Vietnam years, more recently a labor organizer in southern Massachusetts. Or Bernice Reagon, student leader and Freedom Singer in the Albany, Georgia Movement of 196162, now a folk historian at the Smithsonian, a formidable mind and voice, still a Freedom Singer ("Sweet Honey in the Rock"). And Staughton Lynd, historian, organizer of Freedom Schools in Mississippi, anti-war protester of the Sixties, now a labor lawyer in Ohio.

We all know such people, but it goes far beyond personal connections. There are thousands of local groups around the country—many more than existed in the Sixties—devoted to struggling for tenants' rights or women's rights, or environmental protection, or against the arms race, or to take care of the hungry and the homeless, or those in need of health care. There are now tens of thousands of professionals, many of them veterans of the movements of the Sixties, who bring unorthodox ideas and humane values into courtrooms, classrooms, hospitals.

Over 50,000 people have signed the Pledge of Resistance, committing themselves to protest against U.S. intervention in Central America. A small number, but it represents a large part of the nation, because survey after survey shows a majority of the country opposed to administration policy in Central America. Is it not reasonable to assume that a U.S. invasion of Nicaragua, so lusted after by the Reagan Administration, was forestalled, despite a timid Congress, by recognition that the public would not support such an action?

When activists commit civil disobedience to protest against the CIA or the arms race, or aid to the contras, the degree of their distance from the general sentiment can be measured, at least roughly, by how juries of ordinary citizens react. During the war in Vietnam, when religious pacifists entered draft boards illegally to destroy draft records as a way of protesting the war, juries became increasingly reluctant to convict, and near the end of the war we saw the dramatic acquittal of the Camden 28 by a jury which then threw a party for the defendants.

Acts of civil disobedience today, at a much earlier stage of U.S. intervention, are getting verdicts of acquittal when juries are permitted to listen to the defendants' reasons for their civil disobedience. In the spring of 1984, in Burlington, Vermont, the "Winooski 44" had occupied Senator Stafford's office to protest his support of aid to the contras. The jury heard many hours of testimony about conditions in Nicaragua, the role of the CIA, the nature of the contras, and voted for acquittal. One of the jurors, a local house painter, said: "I was honored to be on that jury. I felt a part of history."

In Minneapolis that same year, seven "trespassers" protesting at the Honeywell Corporation were acquitted. In 1985, men and women blocked the Great Lakes Training Station in Illinois, others blocked the South African Embassy in Chicago, nineteen people in the state of Washington halted trains carrying warheads, and all these won acquittals in court. Last year in western Massachusetts, where a protest against the CIA took place, there was another surprising acquittal. One of the jurors, Donna L. Moody, told a reporter: "All the expert testimony against the CIA was alarming. It was very educational."

Over the past six years, eighteen "Plowshares" actions, involving symbolic sabotage of nuclear weaponry, have resulted mostly in guilty verdicts. In the latest case, involving two Catholic priests and two others who broke into a naval air station near Philadelphia and damaged three aircraft, the judge refused the defense of "necessity" but allowed the jury to hear the defendants' reasons for their actions. The jury was unable to reach a verdict.

Several years ago, when Reagan announced the blockade of Nicaragua, 550 of us sat-in at the federal building in Boston to protest, and were arrested. It seemed too big a group of dissidents to deal with, and charges were dropped. When I received my letter, I saw for the first time what the official complaint against all of us was: "Failure to Quit." That is, surely, the critical fact about the continuing movement for human rights here and all over the world.

We hear many glib dismissals of today's college students as being totally preoccupied with money and self. In fact, there is much concern among students with their economic futures—evidence of the failure of the economic system to provide for the young, more than a sign of their indifference to social injustice. But the past few years have seen political actions on campuses all over the country. For 1986 alone, a partial list shows: 182 students, calling for divestment from South Africa, arrested at the University of Texas; a black-tie dinner for alumni at Harvard called off after a protest on South African holdings; charges dropped against 49 Wellesley protesters after half the campus boycotted classes in support; and more protests recorded at Yale, Wisconsin, Louisville, San Jose, Columbia.

But what about the others, the non-protesting students? Among the liberal arts students, business majors, and ROTC cadets who sit in my classes, there are super-patriots and enthusiasts of capitalism, but also others, whose thoughts deserve some attention:

Writing in his class journal, one ROTC student, whose father was a navy flier, his brother a navy commander: "This one class made me go out and read up on South Africa. What I learned made me sick. My entire semester has been a paradox. I go to your class and I see a Vietnam vet named Joe Bangert tell of his experiences in the war. I was enthralled by his talk...By the end of that hour and a half I hated the Vietnam war as much as he did. The only problem is that three hours after that class I am marching around in my uniform...and feeling great about it. Is there something wrong with me? Am I being hypocritical? Sometimes I don't know..."

Young woman in ROTC: "What really stuck in my mind was the ignorance some people displayed at the end of class. We were discussing welfare. Some students stated that people on welfare were lazy, that if they really wanted to, they could find jobs. Argg! These rich kids (or middle class or whatever) who have all they need and think they're so superior make me angry..."

The same student, after seeing the film
Hearts and Minds:
"General Westmoreland said 'Orientals don't value lives.' I was incredulous. And then they showed the little boy holding the picture of his father and he was crying and crying and crying...I must admit I started crying. What's worse was that I was wearing my Army uniform that day and I had to make a conscious effort not to disappear in my seat."

Young woman in the School of Management: "North broke the law, but will he be punished?... If he is let off the hook then all of America is punished. Every inner-city kid who is sent to jail for stealing food to feed his brothers and sisters is punished. Every elderly person who has to fight just to keep warm on a winter night will be punished.... The law is supposed to be on the common bond—the peace making body. Yet it only serves the function selectively—just when the people in control wish it to."

Surely history does not start anew with each decade. The roots of one era branch and flower in subsequent eras. Human beings, writings, invisible transmitters of all kinds, carry messages across the generations. I try to be pessimistic, to keep up with some of my friends. But I think back over the decades, and look around. And then, it seems to me that the future is not certain, but it is possible.

S
UGGESTIONS FOR
F
URTHER
R
EADING

Some suggestions for further reading (I am not giving a formal listing of publishers, dates, and places because public libraries can easily locate books by title and/or author):

On Race:

I believe the most useful things to read on what Cornel West calls "race matters" (while making the point that race
matters)
are the writings of African-Americans themselves. My own first experience as a teenager, was with Richard Wright's
Native Son,
a startling introduction to the connection between two kinds of crime: those committed by black people out of desperation; those committed by a system of racial and class injustice. Years later, I read Richard Wright's
Black Boy.
That belongs to a group of books that takes you inside the growing-up experiences of black people, revealed in their autobiographical writings. You can go back to slave experiences, as in
The Autobiography of Frederick Douglass,
and then on to this century: W.E.B. Du Bois'
Souls of Black Folk,
Zora Neale Hurston's
Dust
Tracks on a Road;
Alice Walker's essays,
In Search of Our Mothers Gardens,
Langston Hughes'
The Big Sea
and I
Wonder as I Wander,
and Malcolm X's
Autobiography.
Bringing it into the civil rights era, James Farmer's
Lay Bare the Heart.
African-American poetry should be read, not only that by Langston Hughes, but by Countee Cullen, Alice Walker, and others (Arna Bontemps' collection,
American Negro Poetry,
is excellent). There are the novels of Toni Morrison and Octavia Butler, the extraordinary stories and novels of Toni Cade Bambara, the plays of Leroi Jones and August Wilson.

There are many histories of the civil rights movement. I would recommend the oral histories collected by Henry Hampton and Steve Fayer (of the great television series
Eyes on the Prize), Voices of Freedom,
as well as those in Howell Raines'
My Soul is Rested.
Also, the interviews of their parents and grandparents done by Mississippi schoolchildren,
Minds Stayed on Freedom.
There is a wonderful photographic memoir by Danny Lyon,
Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement.

Two splendid biographies stand out: David Levering Lewis'
W.E.B. Du Bois
(though it only goes up to 1919), and Martin Duberman's
Paul Robeson.
And a collection of documents ranging through American history, Gerda Lerner's
Black Women in White America.

For a general history of African-Americans, there is an indispensable reference work: the three volumes of Herbert Aptheker's
A Documentary History of the Negro People in the U.S.
John Hope Franklin's
From Slavery to Freedom
is a classic.

For the history of Latino people, I would recommend the remarkable dual-language book, photos and text by Elizabeth Martinez,
500 Years of Chicano History.
And Ronald Takaki's multicultural history,
A Different Mirror.

On Class:

Perhaps the first book I read that spoke to my own working class upbringing was by Upton Sinclair:
The Jungle.
Then, John Steinbeck's
The Grapes of Wrath,
which, years later, gave my students a better feel for the depression than any non-fiction account of the Thirties. Studs Terkel's
Hard Times
is a fascinating set of interviews with people who remember the depression years. When I began to study American history, I came across Charles Beard's
An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution,
which gave me a powerful insight into the class character of the American Revolution. For that period, I would also recommend Gary Nash's
Class and Society in Early America.
There is a set of essays by American scholars,
The American Revolution,
edited by Alfred Young, which contributes to this approach.

Matthew Josephson's books,
The Robber Barons
and
The Politicos,
expose the close ties between corporate power and political power in the late nineteenth century. Douglas Dowd gives us a charming, radical economic history from 1919 to the 1990s in his memoir,
Blues for America.
One of the first books I read that gave me an idea of the rich complexity and drama of labor history, from the great railroad strikes of 1877 to the San Francisco general strike of 1934, was Samuel Yellen's
American Labor Struggles.

Important to me, as I was becoming conscious of the crucial question of class, was to read Karl Marx's
The Communist Manifesto,
as well as the first volume of
Capital
(I did read the second and third volumes, but mercy requires that I not push them). Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy's
Monopoly Capital,
applies Marxian analysis to the United States after World War II.

Without presenting itself explicitly as a class analysis of American history, Richard Hofstadter's
The American Political Tradition
made clear how behind the sparring of the major political parties throughout the country's history there was a basic consensus around the capitalist system.

On War:

The first blow to my youthful awe of martial heroism came when I was eighteen or so and read Walter Millis'
The Road to War,
a devastating critique of our nation's entrance into World War I. But probably the most powerful influences that, for me, turned the glamour of war into unmitigated horror were novels: Henry Barbusse's
Under Fire,
Erich Maria Remarque's
All Quiet on the Western Front,
and even more, Dalton Trumbo's
Johnny Got His Gun,
all part of the revulsion that came after the first World War.

Despite my enthusiastic participation in World War II as an Air Force bombardier, it did not take long after the war to begin to reconsider the question of whether any war, even that "best of wars" (as I termed it, ironically, in one of my essays later) was justified. Probably the first piece of writing that turned me in that direction was John Hersey's
Hiroshima.
Later, the novels
Catch-22
by Joseph Heller, and
Slaughterhouse Five
by Kurt Vonnegut, fit perfectly into my now-cynical view of that war.

My studies and teaching in American history, giving me a close look at U.S. foreign policy, persuaded me that our military interventions abroad, in Latin America, in the Pacific, were part of the empire-building among the Western nations, for reasons of political power and corporate profit. William Appleman Williams'
The Tragedy of American Diplomacy,
was an early influence. For books on Vietnam, I would recommend Marilyn Young's vibrant, powerful history,
The Vietnam Wars.
On U.S. foreign policy since the inception of the cold war, there is no better guide than the writings of Noam Chomsky. I will just mention a few of his books:
Necessary Illusions, Deterring Democracy,
and
Manufacturing Consent
(the latter written with Edward Herman).

For alternatives to war, there are a number of books by Gene Sharp, especially
The Politics of Non-Violent Direct Action.

On Law:

I became aware of the injustice built into our legal system— against the poor, against blacks, against foreigners, against radicals—for the first time about the case of Sacco & Vanzetti. Indeed, it was a novel by Upton Sinclair,
Boston,
which introduced me to that dramatic moment in our history. Then I read a fascinating book by Louis Joughin and Edmund Morgan,
The Legacy of Sacco and Vanzetti.
I was introduced to the trial of the eight anarchists in the Haymarket Affair of 1886 by reading the novel by Howard Fast,
The American.
That led me to a book on the Haymarket events by Henry David,
The Haymarket Affair.
The name Clarence Darrow came up again and again in the trials of radicals and labor leaders, and I would recommend a collection of his addresses to the jury,
Clarence Darrow for the Defense.

To get a picture of how American law, through the 19th century, began more and more to benefit the rich and powerful, one should read Harvard law professor Morton Hurwitz's
The Transformation of American Law.
On the trials of anti-war protesters in World War I, there is the classic by Zecchariah Chafee,
Free Speech in the United States.
A good survey of the anti-Communist hysteria of the cold war period is in David Caute's
The Great Fear.

On issues of civil disobedience, there is the classic essay by Henry David Thoreau,
On Civil Disobedience.
Also, the writings of Tolstoy on this subject, when he had decided to stop writing novels and turn his attention to social issues, are collected in
On Civil Disobedience and Nonviolence.
I found philosophical grounding for ideas on civil disobedience in Albert Camus'
The Rebel.
Martin Luther King's
Letter from the Birmingham City Jail
is a passionate defense of civil disobedience.

On History:

I had not thought much about the social role of the historian until I read Robert Lynd's
Knowledge for What?
Alfred North Whitehead's
The Aims of Education
explores such questions too. Another thoughtful book about the problems of writing history (objectivity, morality, science, etc.) is the book by the British historian E.H. Carr,
What is History?

In the early 20th century, an American writer, James Harvey Robinson, wrote a provocative book on this subject,
The New History.
There is an excellent collection of essays by Hans Meyerhoff,
The Philosophy of History in Our Time.
And a superb book by Peter Novick on the issue of objectivity among historians,
That Noble Dream.

In the Sixties, Jesse Lemisch, a young radical historian, wrote a biting critique of the historical profession:
On Active Service in War and Peace.
There are certain historians who represent for me the ideal joining of impeccable research and social conscience. One is the British historian E.P. Thompson, who wrote
The Making of the English Working Class.
Another is an American, Richard Drinnon, as in his brilliant book about American expansionism,
Facing West.

On Means and Ends:

I became interested in anarchist thought in the Sixties, when I read Richard Drinnon's biography of Emma Goldman,
Rebel in Paradise.
This led me to her own marvelous autobiography,
Living My Life,
and to her essays and speeches, collected in
Anarchism and Other Essays.
Her lifelong friend Alexander Berkman, after spending fourteen years in prison for the attempted murder of the industrialist Henry Clay Frick, wrote the classic
Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist.
He also wrote one of the best short explanations of anarchism in his pamphlet-book
The ABC of Anarchism.
Selections from these books and from his letters can be found in the volume edited by Gene Fellner,
Life of an Anarchist.
The Russian anarchistanthropologist Peter Kropotkin has had a group of his essays printed in
Revolutionary Pamphlets.

George Orwell's
Homage to Catalonia
gives a fascinating account of what happened in Barcelona at the start of the Spanish Civil War when anarchists took over the city. This suggested a possible model of what a good society would be like, and I found an earlier possible model in the Paris Commune of 1871. There is a first person account of that remarkable event by Lissagaray,
History of the Commune of 1871,
and a later analysis by Frank Jellinek,
The Paris Commune of 1871.

Staughton and Alice Lynd have put together an extraordinary collection,
Non-Violence in America,
which traces non-violent thought and action from the earliest days to the present. There is an older collection on this subject, international in scope, edited by Mulford Sibley,
The Quiet Battle.