Wherein A Historian Tries To Figure Out How To Fix This Disaster

Not-drunk history with Erik Loomis!

I’ve been really privileged in the last few years to publish some of my This Day in Labor History posts at Wonkette. I’d like to thank the regular crew here at Wonkette for letting me do this and for this indulgence. Because my new book, Organizing America: Stories of Americans Who Fought for Justice has been published by The New Press today!!! Yay!! Let me tell you, writing a book is freaking hard. Even when you’ve done it a few times. You’d think it gets easier. It does not!

It doesn’t help that America is such a mess right now. As a historian and a teacher, I want to both figure out what we can learn from the past to help us figure out where to go and to communicate that to my students, who are often as depressed and horrified about what has happened to our country as those of us who have lived the last few decades of it.

So I wrote short biographies of twenty Americans in order to provide readers some lessons and hope. The first thing to know is that no one is perfect. I focused on these people’s personal flaws as well as their amazing successes. We weigh down our current young people by creating myths about the greats of the past. We turn Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Cesar Chavez into our own Mount Rushmore of social change. We look upon them as heroes rather than as humans. When we cannot live up to what these legends did, we feel like we have failed. We might say “King would have known how to build a giant social movement today and we don’t know how.” I don’t think that’s true. I think we can accomplish just as much as any past great leader of social change did. In fact, I think we can accomplish more.

Part of my belief about this is that I know the stories of these great organizers’ failures as well as I do their successes. The truth about past greats of our history is that they barely knew what they were doing any more than we do. They tried and failed. They screwed up. They had personal flaws that got in the way of the movement. They had egos and political miscues and losing campaigns. We can be like these greats because they were people, not mythological heroes. Learning from their success and their mistakes can help us win today.

Second, I feel very strongly that we in the lefty world ask for perfection from everyone and are too often damning of those who we agree with 90 percent of the time, but might not agree with 10 percent of the time. Social media makes this worse; all those likes reinforce our most exclusive elements. This can mean some hard conversations — what if that 10 percent is on an issue that means a lot to us. But we really need to be more forgiving of people. Specifically, we need to organize them. Organizing people is not surrounding yourself with people who believe what you do. It’s taking people who aren’t where you are and moving them toward where you think they should be, not by talking at them but by talking to them. Yes, that includes if they voted for Donald Trump or supported overturning Roe or oppose transgender rights. People do change and we have to encourage those changes by working with them on what we do agree with, not shunning them for what don’t agree with. That doesn’t mean that we accept their positions that oppress others — far from it. But it does mean that we can’t work on those things until we find common ground to start the conversation. That requires real listening and the commitment to move forward. But we can all do this.

So, for example, I wrote about Myles Horton, who founded the Highlander Center to organize white southerners and then civil rights workers to make change in the South. Horton loathed racism and he refused to allow segregation at Highlander. That made for some really uncomfortable situations! But the only way he would turn someone away is if they held onto their belief in segregation so much that they would not share this organizing space with Black southerners. Tough conversations led to a lot of people rethinking their prejudice.

Eugene Debs moved from being a racist in his early years to being anti-racist as he aged, for example. This early history doesn’t cheapen him. It makes him a real life person who needed to grow and who did grow. Daniel Berrigan was a righteous warrior against the Vietnam War and American militarism and he thought abortion was as great a crime as Hiroshima or My Lai. Does that mean we dismiss him today? I sure hope not!

I discuss how it took Yuri Kochiyama until middle age to find a political awakening, at which time she became friends with Malcolm X and a foremother of the Asian American rights movement. Just because you weren’t awake to the world when you are young doesn’t mean you won’t be when you are older. I follow how organizers organized people who then became organizers on their own, such as Ella Baker organizing young people in the Civil Rights movement and then a chapter on the greatest of her organizing finds, Bob Moses, the architect of the Mississippi movement. When Moses burned out as a young man and disappeared from organizing for many years, he did not sell out. He gave what he could and just couldn’t give anymore.

I remind us that not every white person in the past was a racist, telling the story of Benjamin Lay, the disabled Quaker who became the first warrior against slavery in colonial America. I remind readers that for all the racism that often infected women in the Suffrage movement, there were people such as Lydia Maria Child attempting to overcome that racism and develop ideas of universal rights all the way back in the mid-19th century. I focus on really well known people such as Debs, Ida B. Wells, and Dolores Huerta and the still obscure such as Kochiyama, the gay rights leader Barbara Gittings, and Richard Oakes, who led the Alcatraz occupation by Native Americans. I revive once famous people now largely forgotten such as Mike Quill, the New York transit union leader, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the “Rebel Girl” who became the radical voice of early 20th century America.

I can’t quite cover every social movement in American history in a short book — but I did the best I could. This isn’t a list of the twenty greatest organizers or my favorite organizers or anything like that. They are twenty Americans I think have a lot of teach us.

Finally, this organizing has to happen in person. Online spaces have their place, but we know now just how social media has created the toxicity harnessed by the far right for their evil schemes. Online spaces can be useful — such as Wonkette! But we need to be around other people. There’s been so many articles of late on the decline of so-called “third spaces,” the type of places we met each other outside of home and work. Instead of joining softball leagues or going bowling or having a drink at the bar, we retreat to the internet. We are participating in the hollowing out of American society every evening when we choose to disappear instead of engage. It’s easy, I know. But if we can learn one thing from the history of organizing, it’s that it requires people learning to love and trust one another with their lives and that isn’t going to happen online.

None of this gives us all the answers to Trumpism and the horrors we are facing. But without a return to organizing — actual organizing, person to person in real life, surrounding ourselves with other human bodies in the spaces around us — I know that we cannot stop this end of American democracy.

Well, anyway, all we can do is our part to try and figure this out. This is what I have so far. The twenty book chapters are short, so you can easily pick it up and put it down. It might challenge you in spots but I hope it inspires you over and over again. I hope it helps give you courage to do a little more than you are already doing, whatever that is. Together, we can come together and organize each other and save this country. So check out the book at your favorite bookstore or online site and let me know if you want me to talk to your group or whatever else I can do to help us all out by talking a bit about our history of making change together.