My Life on the Road

by Gloria Steinem

  As my last campaign effort, I made hundreds of buttons that said:

  HILLARY SUPPORTS OBAMA

  SO DO I

  Then I got on the plane to Washington, went to join the crowd at her historic and generous concession speech—in which she pledged her wholehearted support to Obama—and distributed the buttons to the audience. They were in great demand.

  IV.

  All my years of campaigning have given me one clear message: Voting isn’t the most we can do, but it is the least. To have a democracy, you have to want one. Still, I realize this fully only by looking back.

  At the beginning of the 1980s, I went to Missouri to campaign for Harriett Woods in her U.S. Senate race. She was a great candidate, and I empathized with the difficult time she’d had as a woman journalist. Her path into politics was so improbable that no one could have made it up. As a mother of two young children, she complained about a noisy manhole cover that awakened them every time a car rolled over it in her otherwise quiet street. When she got nowhere with the city council, she circulated a neighborhood petition to close the street to cars. It worked. This success led her to run for the city council. She won, served eight years, got appointed to the state highway commission, ran a successful race for the state legislature, and was reelected there, too. She also became the producer of a much-loved local television show. All this made her a viable statewide candidate.

  Still, this was not enough for the state Democratic Party. When it came time to choose a primary candidate in a U.S. Senate race, it backed a well-to-do banker who had never run for anything, just written checks. To be fair, Woods might have seemed like a lost cause in Missouri, where no woman had ever won a statewide office. She also wasn’t rich like the banker. But she turned out to have something more important than her party’s blessing: community support and volunteers. She beat the rich guy two to one.

  Suddenly, Harriett Woods was in a race with Republican Senator John Danforth. He was not only the incumbent but a former attorney general of Missouri, an ordained Episcopal priest, and the rich grandson of the founder of Ralston Purina. It was as if she were running against the entire patriarchy.

  When I went to campaign for her, I could see that all the new feminist electoral groups were working their hearts out. So were the volunteers in her statewide network. Though Missouri was often counted as an antichoice state, Woods refused to budge from her support for reproductive freedom.

  In the end, she won in rural Republican areas anyway, including one so conservative that it was known as Little Dixie. But in the final week, she had run out of money and couldn’t answer the last-minute storm of virulent attacks. She lost by less than 2 percent of the vote. This heartbreaking hairbreadth defeat drew special attention, as did the fact that she had been the only female U.S. Senate candidate in the whole country, from either party. It was so clear that she could have won with money to answer attacks that her race inspired the founding of EMILY’s List, a political action committee that supports pro-choice Democratic women candidates. As proof that even failure can be turned to good purpose, this PAC went on to attract three million members and become one of the biggest in the nation, as well as the single biggest resource for women in politics.

  But Danforth did win. He took with him to Washington an African American lawyer named Clarence Thomas, who had been working for Monsanto, the agrochemical giant that gave us Agent Orange, genetically engineered seeds, and more. Indeed, Danforth got him that job, too. As Danforth explained, he was very attracted to Thomas, not only because he was a rare African American conservative, but also because he, too, had studied to be a priest—in his case, a Catholic priest.

  All this happened decades ago. Woods died in 2007 from leukemia at the age of seventy-nine, yet the impact of her loss by a few hundred votes goes on.

  If you don’t believe me, flash-forward to the morning after the 2000 Bush-versus-Gore presidential election, with national results hanging by the thread of a few thousand disputed votes in Florida.

  I just happened to be speaking at Palm Beach County Community College that morning, a long-arranged event unrelated to any election, and its campus just happened to be in a poor area. I’d been asked to talk about social justice movements generally, but I could see that nobody wanted to talk about anything but the election cliffhanger that was upon us.

  A young African American woman rose to say she’d registered to vote by phone, then been challenged at her polling place because “Caucasian” had been printed next to her name. She never did get to vote. An older African American man said he had been denied the right to vote because he was told he had a felony conviction, yet he’d never been accused of a crime, much less convicted of one. Someone shouted out, “Yes, you have—it’s called Voting While Black!” Amid the laughter, another man stood to explain that names of people with felonies had been merged with the voter rolls without checking whether more than one person shared the same name. Then an older white woman said the bus from her retirement home had been sent to the wrong polling place. Others testified that polling places were fewer and lines were longer in poor and more Democratic areas. People had given up because they were hourly workers who lost pay if they weren’t at their jobs. Then a white man of fifty or so said he’d seen the illustration of the ballot only on the way out—and realized he had accidentally voted for an extreme right-wing candidate when he thought he was voting for Al Gore. That caused a dozen more people to groan or shout out that this had also happened to them.

  One by one, people in this random audience told their confusing and disenfranchising experiences. Out of the approximately seven hundred people in the auditorium, at least a hundred had been unable either to vote for their chosen candidate or to vote at all. I wondered: If there are this many in one auditorium, how many in all of Palm Beach County? Or in the state?

  Finally, a white man of thirty or so rose to face me. In the name of his military service to his country, he said, and also of his young daughter, whom he wanted to grow up in a democracy, he asked: “Will you stay and help us organize a protest tomorrow—and the next day and the next—whatever it takes?”

  I could feel a deep pull to say yes. Yet I thought my presence might be used to call this a rebellion instigated by an outsider. Instead, I promised to take the name, address, and polling place of everyone who hadn’t been able to vote at all, or to vote for their chosen candidate, and give them to lawyers for Gore as well as nonpartisan watchdogs outside the state.

  I went home, called election lawyers, and delivered the lists as promised. When Bush’s lead was down to a mere 537 votes out of about six million cast, the reexamination of ballots was stopped. Florida’s secretary of state, Katherine Harris, also the co-chair of Bush’s Florida campaign, declared Bush the winner.

  Calls for a recount were deafening, and supported by the Florida Supreme Court. However, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5 to 4 that there was no uniform recount standard to meet the equal protection clause, and no time to create one. Therefore, the recount was stopped. It was a decision that would be compared with Dred Scott—the nineteenth-century Supreme Court ruling that no black person, slave or free, could ever become a citizen of the United States—for its impact and clear bias.

  Remember: “For want of a nail, the horseshoe was lost, for want of a horseshoe, the horse was lost, for want of a horse, the battle was lost, for want of a battle, the war was lost.” This parable should be the mantra of everyone who thinks her or his vote doesn’t count.

  · If Harriett Woods hadn’t been defeated by less than 2 percent of the votes in Missouri, Danforth wouldn’t have been a U.S. senator.

  · If Danforth hadn’t been senator, Clarence Thomas wouldn’t have gone with him to Washington as a staff member.

  · If Thomas hadn’t been visible in Washington as a rare African American who opposed his community’s majority views, he wouldn’t have been appointed by the first President Bush to head—and to disempower—the Equal Employment Opportunity
Commission, and then to sit on the D.C. Court of Appeals.

  · If Thomas hadn’t been given such credentials, he couldn’t have been nominated by the same President Bush to succeed the great civil rights advocate Justice Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court.

  · If Thomas hadn’t been on the Supreme Court, he couldn’t have supplied the one-vote margin that halted the Florida court-ordered recount.

  · If there had been a recount, Al Gore, not George W. Bush, would have been president—as was concluded by a postelection examination of all uncounted ballots commissioned by twelve major news organizations.10

  · If George W. Bush had not been president, the United States would have been less likely to lose the world’s sympathy after 9/11 by launching the longest war in U.S. history, with more bombs dropped on Afghanistan during fourteen years than in all of World War II, plus billions in tax dollars given to twenty thousand private contractors, and thousands killed and wounded on both sides.

  · If Al Gore, not George W. Bush, had been president, global warming would have been taken seriously. Also, the United States would not have falsified evidence to justify invading oil-rich Iraq, thus starting an eight-year war, and, together with Afghanistan, convincing some in Islamic countries that the United States is waging war against Islam.

  · Without George W. Bush, there would not be the biggest transfer of wealth into private hands in the history of this nation; a pay ratio in which the average CEO earns 475 times more than the average worker (in Canada, it’s 20 times); an executive order giving an estimated $40 billion in tax dollars to Catholic, evangelical, and other religious groups, without congressional approval, often with the appearance of turning churches into a vote delivery system.

  · Without Clarence Thomas to supply the one-vote majority, the Supreme Court might not have ruled that corporations are people, with a right to unlimited political spending in order to continue all the above….

  Well, you get the idea.11 The list goes on.

  We must not only vote but fight to vote. The voting booth really is the one place on earth where the least powerful equal the most powerful.

  I still dream about that veteran and his daughter. I so wish I had said yes. I have no idea whether we in the room could have made a difference. In truth, we don’t know which of our acts in the present will shape the future. But we have to behave as if everything we do matters. Because it might.

  As my mother would say, “Democracy is a seed that can only be planted where you are.”

  A Coda

  Part of traveling over years means coming back to the same place and knowing it for the first time. I had learned my best political lesson in college—I just didn’t know it yet.

  I took a course in geology because I thought it was the easiest way of fulfilling a science requirement. One day the professor took us out into the Connecticut River Valley to show us the “meander curves” of an old-age river.

  I was paying no attention because I had walked up a dirt path and found a big turtle, a giant mud turtle about two feet across, on the muddy embankment of an asphalt road. I was sure it was going to crawl onto the road and be crushed by a car.

  So with a lot of difficulty, I picked up this huge snapping turtle and slowly carried it down the road to the river.

  Just as I had slipped it into the water and was watching it swim away, my geology professor came up behind me.

  “You know,” he said quietly, “that turtle has probably spent a month crawling up the dirt path to lay its eggs in the mud on the side of the road—you have just put it back in the river.”

  I felt terrible. I couldn’t believe what I had done, but it was too late.

  It took me many more years to realize this parable had taught me the first rule of organizing.

  Always ask the turtle.

  FROM GLORIA STEINEM’S PERSONAL COLLECTION

  WITH LORETTA SWIT, RACING TO RAISE MONEY, FREESTATE RACEWAY, LAUREL, MARYLAND, 1982.

  Surrealism in Everyday Life

  A journey—whether it’s to the corner grocery or through life—is supposed to have a beginning, middle, and end, right? Well, the road is not like that at all. It’s the very illogic and the juxtaposed differences of the road—combined with our search for meaning—that make travel so addictive.

  Fortunately, I already had a phrase for this road craziness. As Susanne Langer, the philosopher of mind and art, explained, “The notion of giving something a name is the vastest generative idea that was ever conceived.” It was the good luck and bad luck of writing for That Was the Week That Was (TW3), a pioneer of political satire on television, that caused me to create a category called Surrealism in Everyday Life.

  I.

  In 1963, a time of controversy over civil rights and Vietnam, political scared network executives, and satire still evoked George S. Kaufman’s show business adage “Satire is what closes on Saturday night.” Though TW3 would eventually become the parent of the much sillier Laugh-In, then of such true heirs as Saturday Night Live, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and The Colbert Report, the continuity acceptance department, otherwise known as the censors, was in a snit of nervousness. Because the show really was live, if anyone departed from the script, the only remedy was to bleep a word or pull the plug completely. Censors also once tried to convince us that the Fairness Doctrine of the Federal Communications Commission required writing a prowar joke for every antiwar joke. Fortunately, they couldn’t think of a prowar joke either.

  But limits lead to invention. My favorite skit got past “the suits,” as we mercilessly called all network executives, by hiring a juggler to toss huge butcher knives into the air and keep them circling overhead while the audience barely breathed. After what seemed an eternity, a stagehand appeared with a vaudeville-type placard: THE NUCLEAR ARMS RACE.

  Thanks to Surrealism in Everyday Life, I could comment on such events as the high-rise bordellos being subsidized by the government of Holland. All I had to do was comb through the newspapers of the world every Saturday morning—while also watching Soul Train, thus learning new disco moves at the same time—and search for the sort of events about which one says, “You can’t make this stuff up!”

  I was the only “girl writer,” probably because the power to make people laugh is also a power, so women have been kept out of comedy. Polls show that what women fear most from men is violence, and what men fear most from women is ridicule. Later, when Tina Fey was head writer and star of Saturday Night Live, she could still say, “Only in comedy does an obedient white girl from the suburbs count as diversity.”

  TW3 was fun. It was pioneering. It couldn’t last. But what did last was Surrealism in Everyday Life as a category in my mind. Never again would I be able to confront the unimaginable without imagining an award for it.

  When I began to travel as an organizer and was plunged into irrational juxtapositions on the road, I finally understood why laughter is a mark of wanderers, from the holy fools of Old Russia to the roadies of rock music. It’s the surprise, the unexpected, the out of control. It turns out that laughter is the only free emotion—the only one that can’t be compelled. We can be made to fear. We can even be made to believe we’re in love because, if we’re kept dependent and isolated for long enough, we bond in order to survive. But laughter explodes like an aha! It comes when the punch line changes everything that has gone before, when two opposites collide and make a third, when we suddenly see a new reality. Einstein said he had to be very careful while shaving, because when he had an idea, he laughed—and he cut himself. Laughter is an orgasm of the mind.

  On the road, moments of surrealism may come and go in a second: I’m looking out the scenic window of a train speeding through miles of empty moonlit desert—when acres of neatly arranged abandoned refrigerators flash by. They may also last for hours: I’m returning tired to a sterile hotel lobby, and am invited into a reunion of the last living members of a Negro baseball league, whose stories take me into another world. Since learning
causes our brains to grow new synapses, I like to believe that the road is sharpening my mind and lengthening my life with surprise.

  II.

  It’s 1997, toward the end of my third decade traveling as an organizer, and I’m speaking at a campus near Boston. The postlecture discussion has lasted until midnight, the last plane to New York is long gone, and I must get home so I can leave on another trip in the morning. Fortunately, kindhearted students come to my rescue with a local car service, and even steal a pillow from a dorm so I can sleep all the way home.

  But once on the road, I’m still wide awake with postlecture adrenaline. Also the driver, a cheerful white guy in his fifties, wants to talk. As we make our way through a blinding rainstorm, he explains that we’re safe because he used to be a cross-country trucker driving in all kinds of weather. He pulled down $200,000 a year, and owned his own rig, but quit because he was a stranger to his wife and grandkids. Now that he owns this local car service, he has a family again—but still, he misses, really misses, his old cross-country life.