The People, No

by Frank, Thomas

  Later that year, King began working on what would prove to be his final campaign: a poor people’s march on Washington in which the marchers would remain in the capital city, living in tents and presenting their demand for what he called an “economic bill of rights.” The phrase itself was borrowed from Franklin Roosevelt, and King’s logic was similar to the former president’s: ordinary political rights only took Americans so far; now it was time for this prosperous country to guarantee its citizens a job, a minimum income, housing, and a decent education. His strategy was to re-create the protest of the Bonus Army, which had camped in Washington in 1932 while demanding payments for World War I veterans (and which, in turn, had been inspired by Coxey’s Army, the 1894 march on Washington that had meant so much to the original Populists). 6

  King interrupted his work on the Poor People’s Campaign in early 1968 to make a fateful intervention in a strike of black sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. In that particular city, the civil rights cause had morphed into a movement for workers’ rights, and the going was as tough as it had been in Selma and Birmingham, with huge rallies met by martial law and plenty of police violence. The mayor of Memphis turned out to be as much of a hard-liner against public-sector unions as other southern officials had been against integrated schools and black voter registration.

  In a powerful speech to the strikers there, King looked back over his career as a leader in the struggle for freedom and explained the move from civil rights to economic rights. “With Selma and the voting rights bill one era of our struggle came to a close and a new era came into being,” he recalled.

  Now our struggle is for genuine equality, which means economic equality. For we know now that it isn’t enough to integrate lunch counters. What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn’t earn enough money to buy a hamburger and a cup of coffee? … What does it profit one to have access to the hotels of our city and the motels of our highway when we don’t earn enough money to take our family on a vacation? 7

  * * *

  KING’S STATEMENTS ON economic issues often reflected the thinking of his close associate Bayard Rustin, the political strategist who had helped put together the 1963 March for Jobs and Freedom. Rustin was the supreme pragmatist of the civil rights movement, by which I do not mean he was a lukewarm consensus-seeker who believed that interest-group lobbyists in D.C. could sort everything out. Like King, Rustin imagined big, bold things for the movement, for African Americans, and for the country, and he meant to achieve those things by means of clear-eyed left-wing realpolitik. A master of class analysis, Rustin believed in working through (as one profile of him put it) “the ballot, the union card, and coalition politics.” 8

  Like King, Rustin understood that the movement had to advance to the next challenge after the landmark civil rights acts of 1964 and ’65 had been signed into law. And so, in a much-discussed 1965 article in Commentary magazine, Rustin announced the transition of the civil rights movement from “a protest movement,” as he put it, “into a full-fledged social movement ,” by which he meant a shift from “removing the barriers to full opportunity ” to “achieving the fact of equality. ” 9

  Economic equality, that is. Rustin hoped to eliminate poverty in America with a massive federal employment and housing proposal called the “Freedom Budget.” The cost would be enormous; to achieve the goal, he wrote, would require nothing less than “a refashioning of our political economy.” Rustin well understood the political difficulties ahead. “It is one thing to organize sentiment behind laws that do not disturb consensus politics,” Rustin wrote the next year, “and quite another to win battles for the redistribution of wealth.” 10 How could he hope to bring such a gigantic change about?

  “The answer is simple, deceptively so,” Rustin continued: “through political power .” How to take that power? Again, the answer was straightforward: by building a “coalition of progressive forces which becomes the effective political majority in the United States,” a coalition made up of “Negroes, trade unionists, liberals, and religious groups.” 11

  Especially trade unionists. In the years to come, as Rustin drew closer to the AFL-CIO, he often wrote about the role of organized labor in building his grand coalition of economic reformers. As it happens, these were also the years when the stereotype of white union members as right-wing “hardhats” was coming together, which makes their central position in Rustin’s plans even more remarkable.

  In 1970, union construction workers in New York City attacked and scattered a protest against the Vietnam War; a few weeks later they held a massive pro-war rally in the streets of Manhattan. In 1971, the archetypal blue-collar bigot Archie Bunker made his debut on television—yet, in the face of all that, Rustin published “The Blacks and the Unions,” in which he insisted that the unions of the day were in fact more integrated than nearly any other American institution, even with the reactionary construction unions taken into account. What’s more, Rustin went on, unions naturally gravitated toward integration because they understood (after many hard lessons) that dividing the working class by race meant certain defeat. Most important, for Rustin’s purposes, was that the unions’ political program was identical to the demands of African American leadership. “The problems of the most aggrieved sector of the black ghetto cannot and will never be solved without full employment,” Rustin wrote, “and full employment, with the government as employer of last resort, is the keystone of labor’s program.” 12

  In this way Rustin surveyed the same ground as other figures I have described in these pages, and ran into the same problem: Lifting up people crushed by centuries of racist exploitation meant not only winning the rights of citizenship but also reforming the capitalist system. Any structural reform along these lines was going to be costly, however, and this would make such change difficult. Moral suasion would not suffice here: the only way to get it done would be with a grand coalition of working-class people—a mass movement from the bottom up. Racism was (in addition to everything else) a deadly poison to that coalition, since it fatally undermined solidarity.

  Rustin also faced something new: the problem of liberal anti-populism, by which I mean the growing contempt of enlightened professionals for the lower orders, meaning the white working class. For well-educated liberals in the early 1970s, such people, along with their organizations, appeared to be the nation’s single most reactionary element—supporting the war in Vietnam, resisting busing, putting Richard Nixon in the White House, and so on.

  Rustin would have none of it. After quoting a handful of condescending liberal remarks about union members, he came right to the point: this was not “political opposition” but “a certain class hatred.” More specifically, it represented a “hatred of the elite for the ‘mass.’ ” The upper-class liberals of 1971, he continued, understood alienation rather than solidarity as the heart of radicalism, ignoring organizations of ordinary people that aimed by their very nature for “greater social equality and distributive justice.” 13

  What surprises the disenchanted modern reader about all this is Rustin’s optimistic assumptions about ordinary citizens. It’s a theme that recurred throughout his career. Describing a voter-registration drive in a 1958 letter to Martin Luther King, for example, Rustin wrote, “We urge people to vote. We do not want to influence them to vote for any particular party. We believe in the people. When they are aroused to vote, they will vote intelligently.” 14

  This optimistic thread ran all through the civil rights movement. “I Am A Man” read the placards carried by strikers in the Memphis sanitation workers’ strike—an assertion of rights and equality as fundamental as anything we’ve seen in these pages. When King spoke to those men—trash collectors, remember, who came from society’s lowliest ranks—he said, “So often we overlook the work and the significance of those who are not in professional jobs, of those who are not in the so-called big jobs. But let me say to you tonight, that whenever you are engaged
in work that serves humanity … it has dignity, and it has worth.” 15

  “All labor has dignity,” King continued that night in March 1968—an expression that could have come straight out of a Populist manifesto circa 1891.

  * * *

  THE MOST DYNAMIC populist innovations of the 1960s came not from adults but from radical youth groups like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which was formed after sit-in protests at segregated lunch counters in North Carolina in 1960. SNCC’s leaders stood up to spectacular racist violence during the Freedom Ride campaign and then during efforts to register black voters in the Deep South, and their bravery quickly captured the imagination of liberals nationwide. But what made SNCC remarkable wasn’t really its leaders—it was the group’s determination to enlist ordinary African American citizens for direct actions against the racist system of the South. By “ordinary citizens” I am referring, in many cases, to tenant farmers and sharecroppers, the same group that was the focus of so much Populist activity in the 1890s and of populist culture in the 1930s.

  Traditional civil rights groups would typically build support for their agenda with a charismatic leader, but SNCC took a different approach. Its idea was to move into some area in the Deep South—which was still, one hundred years after the Civil War, more of a giant carceral work farm for African Americans than it was a modern capitalist economy—build a movement among the people who lived there, then continue to organize somewhere else. It was the organized, not the organizer, that mattered in this model. In its early years SNCC was boldly and thoroughly antihierarchical, practicing democracy in its meetings as well as demanding democracy from the white masters of the South. The group insisted, for example, that ordinary people’s knowledge of civil rights law was in some ways superior to that of law professors and law makers; it understood that, as one history of the movement puts it, “experts and leaders did not know how to break down Jim Crow.” Only the people themselves could do that, and so SNCC’s object came to be “to create leadership in each community so that formal leaders would no longer be necessary.” 16

  SNCC’s language was often straightforwardly populist. “We all recognize the fact that if any radical social, political and economic changes are to take place in our society, the people, the masses, must bring them about” was one of the famous lines deleted from SNCC leader John Lewis’s speech at the 1963 March on Washington. “It’s not radical if SNCC people get political offices, or if M. L. King becomes President, if decisions are still made from the top down,” said SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael in 1965. “If decisions get made from the bottom up, then that’s radical.” 17

  “Participatory democracy” was the name the decade gave to the idea that motivated SNCC. The actual phrase was introduced by another student-led group, Students for a Democratic Society—SDS, the main organization of what was then called the New Left. To hear the group’s leaders explain what they meant by “P.D.” you might think you were listening to some latter-day adherent of the old People’s Party, their red-hot Great Plains calamity-talk having somehow been translated into the subdued language of the mid-century multiversity. As SDS’s 1962 Port Huron Statement explained, “participatory democracy” meant

  that decision-making of basic social consequence be carried on by public groupings;

  that politics be seen positively, as the art of collectively creating an acceptable pattern of social relations;

  and furthermore that big economic decisions “should be open to democratic participation and subject to democratic social regulation.”

  There was more to it, of course. Probably too much more—as political platforms go, The Port Huron Statement was a wordy one, with the early printed versions running to some sixty-three densely argued pages. Suffice it to say here that “participatory democracy” eventually became one of the glowing desiderata of the era—like “authenticity,” like “revolution”—a fad concept that students were all on fire to actualize. 18

  A fad, yes, but also something genuinely hopeful. Participatory democracy arose from SDS’s wildly optimistic first principle: that all humans were “infinitely precious and possessed of unfulfilled capacities for reason, freedom, and love.” It was succinctly stated in a later SDS slogan: “Let the people decide.” The echoes of Populism in this kind of talk were obvious, if not always acknowledged by New Leftists themselves: the reverence for the ordinary citizen, the longing for collective democratic action. And, of course, all of it flew straight in the face of the cardinal doctrine of modern anti-populism—that the people are far too ignorant to manage their own affairs.

  The other important way in which the sixties student Left fit the populist profile was its transracial quality. Organizing across color lines was, obviously, close to the heart of what the New Left thought it was. In the early sixties, SDSers enlisted in SNCC’s campaigns for desegregation and black voting rights in the South, learning from them the power of direct action. In the late sixties they came to regard groups like the Black Panthers as the “vanguard” of the socialist revolution they meant to make. In both cases it was the militant black Left that they looked to for leadership.

  This marks a change in the populist tradition, and its significance deserves to be underscored. “For the first time,” writes Michael Kazin, a historian of populism who was also an SDS leader at Harvard University, “significant numbers of white activists proclaimed a desire to take their cues from a primarily black movement.” 19 Generally speaking, populist movements of the past had involved white organizers including blacks in their movements; this time the equation was reversed. African Americans were the leaders; the white Left was a sort of auxiliary to their insurgency in the South.

  Like its predecessors, the New Left was also a mass movement—or, rather, it eventually became one. After 1965, as the Vietnam War became issue number one, the New Left exploded in size. At its zenith, SDS had around one hundred thousand members—small by historical standards, but with a cultural reach that far exceeded those numbers. Its ideas spread from the elite campuses to the vast world of college students, giving us “the Sixties” as everyone remembers it: constant protests, occupations of campus buildings, battles with police outside the Pentagon or the Chicago Hilton, Vietcong flags, gigantic rallies on the Mall in Washington, D.C.

  * * *

  BY THE END of 1968, however, nothing was working out the way it was supposed to. Martin Luther King was murdered less than a month after he declared that “all labor has dignity,” his assassination touching off riots in cities across the country. The Memphis sanitation workers eventually won their strike—today they are AFSCME Local 1733—but the Poor People’s Campaign floundered without King’s leadership. The tent city on the National Mall was constructed as planned, but only after endless organizational difficulties and without ever achieving the spectacular impact of the 1963 March on Washington.

  The shift of emphasis toward economic equality planned by King and Bayard Rustin fared even worse. The Vietnam War absorbed all the resources that the Johnson administration—the last one led by a real New Deal liberal—might have put toward achieving full employment. Rustin’s hopes for the Freedom Budget and a powerful left-wing political coalition were smashed in the process. Although it was hard to see it coming at the time, liberalism was smashed, too, its different factions pulling the Democratic Party to pieces.

  Organized labor never did recover the boldness of the CIO era, as Martin Luther King often urged it to do; instead most unions settled into bureaucratic torpor. King’s plan for reforming the Democratic Party fared no better. As black voters made their numbers felt in the South, the racist political machinery of the region simply changed sides, defecting to the Republicans.

  The Democratic Party itself did the opposite of what the reformers hoped. Instead of embracing a bold agenda of redistribution, the party descended into a civil war in the wake of the Vietnam debacle. The winners of that tussle were ultimately the party’s anti-populists—technocrats
who believed that reforms, if any were warranted, had to come from the highly educated leadership class.

  As for the New Left, it failed to become the next step in the grand march of progress, always remaining a movement of college students, not “the people”. Its members never transcended their essential identity: these were proto-professionals, young people in training for positions in the upper reaches of America’s middle-class society. They were a charming elite and even an alienated elite, but an elite nevertheless. 20

  And they acted like one. In the early days of SDS, the group’s understanding of capitalism didn’t have a whole lot to do with traditional working-class concerns—with hard work for lousy pay, for example, or with monopoly, or with the power of banks. 21 Indeed, what made them a “new” Left was the singular belief that educated people like them, rather than the working class, were now the agents of political progress. In this they bore a strong resemblance to the consensus intellectuals who taught them, scholars who believed progress would come from the enlightened people in society’s higher-educated ranks, not from mass movements or blue-collar workers. “The key was not the proletariat, as socialists for more than a century had believed,” as historian James Miller summarizes one SDS leader’s thinking in the early days; “the key was students.” As Tom Hayden, the principal author of The Port Huron Statement , recalled years later, he had believed that humanity had entered “a whole new period of history in which the Left had to go from a belief in labor as the agency of change to students as an agency of change.” 22

  Social class was a persistent stumbling block for the New Left. One anecdote Miller relates in his history of SDS is how the group’s organizers, trying to bring together the unemployed in several northern cities, eventually lost interest in the poor folks they were trying to help—because those poor folks often turned out to think America needed to fight communism in Vietnam. 23 Let the people decide … and they will disappoint you every single time.