Mary Frances Berry - History Teaches Us to Resist: How Progressive Movements Have Succeeded in Challenging Times

In memory of Roger Wilkins

WHEN HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of women, men, and children converged on Washington, DC, on January 21, 2017, the day after the inauguration of Donald Trump as president of the United States, they became part of a long protest tradition in the nations capital. The tradition includes Coxeys Army demanding jobs for the unemployed during the economic crisis of 1894 to the Bonus Army of 1932 demanding payment of World War I pensions due to unemployed veterans. It also extends to the Poor Peoples Campaign and encampment on the National Mall in Washington, DC, after the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. to the prochoice and antiabortion rallies of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Marches and other forms of protest, including street theater, and sharing complaints and organizing on social media have become a way to focus national attention on major social and political issues. And even when protests have resulted in uneven immediate success, they have raised important issues that often reverberated beyond the tactics utilized. However, the ease of communications and of organizing protest through social media can obscure the persistence and face-to-face contact necessary for staying organized and achieving policy change.

History teaches us the value of resistance and protest. Women have fought for suffrage since at least 1848. But the 1913 march, marred by efforts to keep black women segregated at the rear, kicked off a series of protests, including hunger strikes, leading finally to the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1920, which prohibited the denial of the vote because of sex. The Bonus marches got hustled away by troops led by General Douglas MacArthur, but in 1936, Congress overrode President Franklin D. Roosevelts veto and paid the veterans the bonus they had sought nine years earlier.

The despair, mourning, and fear that arise after the election of a president who promises devastation to causes supported by large numbers of people are painful and real. But it is also part of the push-pull of American politics. This is true whether the cause is gun rights on the one hand and gun control on the other. Trumps election has generated elation from his supporters and fear and loathing from those who believe that progressive change, whether on immigration, health care, or abortion rights, is at risk. But they should remember that resistance to presidential administrations has led to positive change and defeat of outrageous proposals even in perilous times. It is also worth noting that presidents considered progressive can require massive protest to induce policy decisions; Obama and the Indigenous peoples protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline is one modern example of resistance built on earlier actions on specific issues.

Its crucial to recognize that resistance works even if it does not achieve all the movements goals, and that movements are always necessary, because major change will engender resistance, which must be addressed.

In this book, I will examine several examples of resistance during presidential administrations, beginning with President Franklin Roosevelt, who refused to prevent race discrimination in the defense industry in World War II, despite massive unemployment. We will see how people involved in the protest used what they learned in later movements for progressive change.

The second example is Lyndon B. Johnson, another president who is often considered progressive; yet, while he responded to civil rights protests positively, he persisted in continuing the war in Vietnam. The antiwar protest movement was so effective that it influenced his decision not to seek another term. Richard Nixon (19681974) responded to the momentum generated by the continuing protests by concluding the war, which also ended the need for a draft.

Ronald Reagans two terms offer more recent stories of courageous opposition to reactionary policies, such as ignoring the AIDS crisis and retreating on racial progress, and show how resistance can succeed. The prochoice protests during the George H. W. Bush administration offer another example. There are other instructive stories of partial success and failure, such as opposition to Bill Clintons Dont Ask, Dont Tell policy and his budget cuts and welfare reform and the protests against the war in Iraq and the Patriot Act during George W. Bushs presidency. The movement for LGBTQ rights and the Dreamers (undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as small children) and other immigration protests are built on the style and methods of earlier efforts.

I was actively involved in some of these movements. I started as an antiwar protester as a student at the University of Michigan and then became an overseas correspondent, working as a reporter for local papers in order to go to Vietnam, where I saw the horrors of the war. My friend Joe Wildberger and I stood outside the White House after the Saturday Night Massacre, on October 20, 1973, yelling, Resign! Resign! as others who wanted to protest Nixon joined us. (The so-called massacre refers to Nixons purge of the top leadership of the Justice Department to appoint an acting attorney general who would fire the special prosecutor, who was pursuing the release of the presidents secret recordings.) I was later a member of the US Commission on Civil Rights and fired by President Reagan on October 25, 1983, for opposing his anticivil rights policies. I won a lawsuit against him and continued until I was later appointed by President Clinton as chair of the commission. I was one of three antiapartheid protesters who started the Free South Africa movement in December 1984 and inspired nationwide protests. Two years later, US sanctions against the apartheid regime were enacted by Congress. My experiences confirm historical researchprotest is an essential ingredient of politics and can effect change.

While researching the history of the movements described in this book, I have noticed some problems they have in common. Protesters sometimes have difficulty keeping to a simple goal, and complicated messaging inhibits growth. The March on Washington movement wanted FDR to order jobs for blacks in the defense industry. The Free South Africa movement wanted Congress to pass sanctions to end US business dealings with South Africa to help end apartheid: freedom, yes; apartheid, no. The antiVietnam War movement wanted to stop the war and end the draft.

If the goal is to educate the public about an issue, then idealism is its own reward. One example is Occupy Wall Streets effort in 2011 to elevate the income-inequality issue, while the press kept asking, What are the goals and who are your leaders? The more complicated the initiative, even a legislative one, the harder the work and the longer it takes to achieve success. The Civil Rights Act of 1991, remedying negative Supreme Court employment decisions, was too technical to easily explain on a poster and difficult to pass. It failed in 1990 and had to be restarted. Asking for jobs, while difficult, probably is simpler than obtaining real freedom or making Black Lives Matter, which are both complicated and hard but necessary.

Sometimes failure has reverberations. The confirmation fight over Clarence Thomass nomination to the US Supreme Court helped achieve the Civil Rights Act of 1991, which was challenging to pass but vitally needed. Sometimes a movement must try what looks like desperate, last-minute protest to prevail, as when disability rights protesters in wheelchairs propelled the Americans with Disabilities Act across the congressional finish line by abandoning their chairs and crawling up the Capitol steps.