{"id":325,"date":"2003-06-11T11:09:54","date_gmt":"2003-06-11T11:09:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.jmatt.net\/?p=325"},"modified":"2013-11-28T02:42:08","modified_gmt":"2013-11-28T02:42:08","slug":"bill-moyers-for-president","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.redhorse.me\/?p=325","title":{"rendered":"Bill Moyers for President?"},"content":{"rendered":"

He’s not running, but maybe he should be. Email from a local activist alerted me to an article in The Nation<\/i><\/a> about the recent Take Back America conference<\/a>. Not surprisingly, the conference attracted a number of Democratic presidential wannabes. But, according to The Nation<\/i>‘s John Nichols, “it was a non-candidate (Moyers) who won the hearts and minds of the crowd with a ‘Cross of Gold’ speech for the 21st century”, in his acceptance of the America’s Future Lifetime Leadership Award. The article provides a link to Moyers’ speech in PDF format<\/a>, but since I hate messing with PDF downloads, and since Moyers said to “pass it on”, I don’t think anybody will object if I include the text that Richard thoughtfully mailed.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Moyers was a tough act for the candidates to follow, although Nichols says that some tried bravely with varying success. As a note of personal interest to me, he says that “only the Rev. Al Sharpton and Dennis Kucinich came close to matching the fury and the passion of the crowd.” I’ve been on the Kucinich bandwagon<\/a> for a while now, and was inspired by this news (and another appeal from his campaign) to donate again<\/a> today. Since Bill Moyers isn’t running, Kucinich seems like the next best choice (even I can’t take Al Sharpton seriously).<\/p>\n

\nI’m puzzled by Kucinich’s lack of popular success. I know that candidates with strong progressive views usually have a problem attracting the money they need to run a serious campaign. But with somebody like him in the race, I don’t see how anybody can get excited about the more “mainstream” candidates like Lieberman<\/a> and Daschle, who are almost indistinguishable from Republicans (I didn’t even see any mention of whether they attended the conference). I sometimes get a slightly rose-colored perception of reality, as frequent messages from the Kucinich campaign and other progressive sources lull me into a feeling that the rest of the world is getting the message. But then I’m faced with the reality that he’s not getting that kind of favorable publicity in more popular media outlets. (The most recent mention of him I’ve seen in a major news source was Maureen Dowd’s NY Times<\/i> op-ed<\/a> about shopping, in which she states “The impulse to shop for new clothes occurs to most of the men I know only when their cuffs are so frayed that they are trailing tentacles and their seven-year old crew necks have more hole than sweater. It seemed perfectly natural when Dennis Kucinich had a dark brown stain on his light blue tie at a recent presidential candidates’ forum.”) I just don’t understand exactly why the candidates that arouse the most passion get the least attention.<\/p>\n

\nOh well, enough of my babbling. I promised you Bill Moyer’s speech. As Richard said, “It is a bit long, but Wow!” Enjoy. And, as Moyers says, pass it on.<\/p>\n

\n


\nThis is Your Story – The Progressive Story of America.
\nPass It On.
<\/b>
\nby Bill Moyers<\/i><\/p>\n

\nText of speech to the ‘Take Back America’ Conference
\nJune 4, 2003
\nWashington, DC<\/p>\n

\nThank you for this award and for this occasion. I don’t
\ndeserve either, but as George Burns said, I have arthritis
\nand I don’t deserve that, either.<\/p>\n

\nTomorrow is my 69th birthday and I cannot imagine a
\nbetter present than this award or a better party than your
\ncompany.<\/p>\n

\nFifty three years ago tomorrow, on my 16th birthday, I
\nwent to work for the daily newspaper in the small East
\nTexas town where I grew up. It was a good place to be a
\ncub reporter – small enough to navigate but big enough
\nto keep me busy and learning something every day. I
\nsoon had a stroke of luck. Some of the old timers were
\non vacation or out sick and I got assigned to cover what
\ncame to be known as the Housewives’ Rebellion. Fifteen
\nwomen in my home town decided not to pay the social
\nsecurity withholding tax for their domestic workers. They
\nargued that social security was unconstitutional, that
\nimposing it was taxation without representation, and that
\n– here’s my favorite part – “requiring us to collect (the
\ntax) is no different from requiring us to collect the
\ngarbage.” They hired themselves a lawyer – none other
\nthan Martin Dies, the former congressman best known,
\nor worst known, for his work as head of the House
\nCommittee on Un-American Activities in the 30s and
\n40s. He was no more effective at defending rebellious
\nwomen than he had been protecting against communist
\nsubversives, and eventually the women wound up
\nholding their noses and paying the tax.<\/p>\n

\nThe stories I wrote for my local paper were picked up
\nand moved on the Associated Press wire. One day, the
\nmanaging editor called me over and pointed to the AP
\nticker beside his desk. Moving across the wire was a
\nnotice citing one Bill Moyers and the paper for the
\nreporting we had done on the “Rebellion.”<\/p>\n

\nThat hooked me, and in one way or another – after a
\ndetour through seminary and then into politics and
\ngovernment for a spell – I’ve been covering the class
\nwar ever since. Those women in Marshall, Texas were
\nits advance guard. They were not bad people. They
\nwere regulars at church, their children were my friends,
\nmany of them were active in community affairs, their
\nhusbands were pillars of the business and professional
\nclass in town. They were respectable and upstanding
\ncitizens all. So it took me awhile to figure out what had
\nbrought on that spasm of reactionary rebellion. It came
\nto me one day, much later. They simply couldn’t see
\nbeyond their own prerogatives. Fiercely loyal to their
\nfamilies, to their clubs, charities and congregations –
\nfiercely loyal, in other words, to their own kind – they
\nnarrowly defined membership in democracy to include
\nonly people like them. The women who washed and
\nironed their laundry, wiped their children’s bottoms,
\nmade their husband’s beds, and cooked their family
\nmeals – these women, too, would grow old and frail, sick
\nand decrepit, lose their husbands and face the ravages
\nof time alone, with nothing to show from their years of
\nlabor but the crease in their brow and the knots on their
\nknuckles; so be it; even on the distaff side of laissez
\nfaire, security was personal, not social, and what
\ninjustice existed this side of heaven would no doubt be
\nredeemed beyond the Pearly Gates. God would surely
\nbe just to the poor once they got past Judgment Day.<\/p>\n

\nIn one way or another, this is the oldest story in America:
\nthe struggle to determine whether “we, the people” is a
\nspiritual idea embedded in a political reality – one nation,
\nindivisible – or merely a charade masquerading as piety
\nand manipulated by the powerful and privileged to
\nsustain their own way of life at the expense of others.
\nLet me make it clear that I don’t harbor any idealized
\nnotion of politics and democracy; I worked for Lyndon
\nJohnson, remember? Nor do I romanticize “the people.”
\nYou should read my mail – or listen to the vitriol virtually
\nspat at my answering machine. I understand what the
\npolitician meant who said of the Texas House of
\nRepresentatives, “If you think these guys are bad, you
\nshould see their constituents.”<\/p>\n

\nBut there is nothing idealized or romantic about the
\ndifference between a society whose arrangements
\nroughly serve all its citizens and one whose institutions
\nhave been converted into a stupendous fraud. That
\ndifference can be the difference between democracy and
\noligarchy.<\/p>\n

\nLook at our history. All of us know that the American
\nRevolution ushered in what one historian called “The
\nAge of Democratic Revolutions.” For the Great Seal of
\nthe United States the new Congress went all the way
\nback to the Roman poet Virgil: Novus Ordo Seclorum” –
\n“a new age now begins.” Page Smith reminds us that
\n“their ambition was not merely to free themselves from
\ndependence and subordination to the Crown but to
\ninspire people everywhere to create agencies of
\ngovernment and forms of common social life that would
\noffer greater dignity and hope to the exploited and
\nsuppressed” – to those, in other words, who had been
\nthe losers. Not surprisingly, the winners often resisted. In
\nthe early years of constitution-making in the states and
\nemerging nation, aristocrats wanted a government of
\npropertied “gentlemen” to keep the scales tilted in their
\nfavor. Battling on the other side were moderates and
\neven those radicals harboring the extraordinary idea of
\nletting all white males have the vote. Luckily, the
\nweapons were words and ideas, not bullets. Through
\ncompromise and conciliation the draftsmen achieved a
\nConstitution of checks and balances that is now the
\noldest in the world, even as the revolution of democracy
\nthat inspired it remains a tempestuous adolescent whose
\ndestiny is still up for grabs. For all the rhetoric about “life,
\nliberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” it took a civil war to
\nfree the slaves and another hundred years to invest their
\nfreedom with meaning. Women only gained the right to
\nvote in my mother’s time. New ages don’t arrive
\novernight, or without “blood, sweat, and tears.”<\/p>\n

\nYou know this. You are the heirs of one of the country’s
\ngreat traditions – the progressive movement that started
\nlate in the l9th century and remade the American
\nexperience piece by piece until it peaked in the last third
\nof the 20th century. I call it the progressive movement for
\nlack of a more precise term. Its aim was to keep blood
\npumping through the veins of democracy when others
\nwere ready to call in the mortician. Progressives exalted
\nand extended the original American revolution. They
\nspelled out new terms of partnership between the people
\nand their rulers. And they kindled a flame that lit some of
\nthe most prosperous decades in modern history, not only
\nhere but in aspiring democracies everywhere, especially
\nthose of western Europe.<\/p>\n

\nStep back with me to the curtain-raiser, the founding
\nconvention of the People’s Party – better known as the
\nPopulists – in 1892. The members were mainly cotton
\nand wheat farmers from the recently reconstructed
\nSouth and the newly settled Great Plains, and they had
\ncome on hard, hard times, driven to the wall by falling
\nprices for their crops on one hand and racking interest
\nrates, freight charges and supply costs on the other. This
\nin the midst of a booming and growing industrial
\nAmerica. They were angry, and their platform – issued
\ndeliberately on the 4th of July – pulled no punches. “We
\nmeet,” it said, “in the midst of a nation brought to the
\nverge of moral, political and material ruin….Corruption
\ndominates the ballot box, the [state] legislatures and the
\nCongress and touches even the bench…..The
\nnewspapers are largely subsidized or muzzled, public
\nopinion silenced….The fruits of the toil of millions are
\nboldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few.”<\/p>\n

\nFurious words from rural men and women who were
\ntraditionally conservative and whose memories of taming
\nthe frontier were fresh and personal. But in their fury
\nthey invoked an American tradition as powerful as
\nfrontier individualism – the war on inequality and
\nespecially on the role that government played in
\npromoting and preserving inequality by favoring the rich.
\nThe Founding Fathers turned their backs on the idea of
\nproperty qualifications for holding office under the
\nConstitution because they wanted no part of a
\n‘veneration for wealth” in the document. Thomas
\nJefferson, while claiming no interest in politics, built up a
\nRepublican Party – no relation to the present one – to
\ntake the government back from the speculators and
\n“stock-jobbers,” as he called them, who were in the
\nsaddle in 1800. Andrew Jackson slew the monster
\nSecond Bank of the United States, the 600-pound gorilla
\nof the credit system in the 1830s, in the name of the
\npeople versus the aristocrats who sat on the bank’s
\ngoverning board.<\/p>\n

\nAll these leaders were on record in favor of small
\ngovernment – but their opposition wasn’t simply to
\ngovernment as such. It was to government’s power to
\nconfer privilege on insiders; on the rich who were
\ndemocracy’s equivalent of the royal favorites of
\nmonarchist days. (It’s what the FCC does today.) The
\nPopulists knew it was the government that granted
\nmillions of acres of public land to the railroad builders. It
\nwas the government that gave the manufacturers of farm
\nmachinery a monopoly of the domestic market by a
\nprotective tariff that was no longer necessary to shelter
\n“infant industries.” It was the government that contracted
\nthe national currency and sparked a deflationary cycle
\nthat crushed debtors and fattened the wallets of
\ncreditors. And those who made the great fortunes used
\nthem to buy the legislative and judicial favors that kept
\nthem on top. So the Populists recognized one great
\nprinciple: the job of preserving equality of opportunity
\nand democracy demanded the end of any unholy
\nalliance between government and wealth. It was, to
\nquote that platform again, “from the same womb of
\ngovernmental injustice” that tramps and millionaires
\nwere bred.<\/p>\n

\nBut how? How was the democratic revolution to be
\nrevived? The promise of the Declaration reclaimed? How
\nwere Americans to restore government to its job of
\npromoting the general welfare? And here, the Populists
\nmade a breakthrough to another principle. In a modern,
\nlarge-scale, industrial and nationalized economy it
\nwasn’t enough simply to curb the government’s
\noutreach. That would simply leave power in the hands of
\nthe great corporations whose existence was inseparable
\nfrom growth and progress. The answer was to turn
\ngovernment into an active player in the economy at the
\nvery least enforcing fair play, and when necessary being
\nthe friend, the helper and the agent of the people at
\nlarge in the contest against entrenched power. So the
\nPopulist platform called for government loans to farmers
\nabout to lose their mortgaged homesteads – for
\ngovernment granaries to grade and store their crops
\nfairly – for governmental inflation of the currency, which
\nwas a classical plea of debtors – and for some decidedly
\nnon-classical actions like government ownership of the
\nrailroad, telephone and telegraph systems and a
\ngraduated – i.e., progressive tax on incomes and a flat
\nban on subsidies to “any private corporation.” And to
\nmake sure the government stayed on the side of the
\npeople, the ‘Pops’ called for the initiative and referendum
\nand the direct election of Senators.<\/p>\n

\nPredictably, the Populists were denounced, feared and
\nmocked as fanatical hayseeds ignorantly playing with
\nsocialist fire. They got twenty-two electoral votes for their
\ncandidate in ’92, plus some Congressional seats and
\nstate houses, but it was downhill from there for many
\nreasons. America wasn’t – and probably still isn’t – ready
\nfor a new major party. The People’s Party was a spent
\nrocket by 1904. But if political organizations perish, their
\nkey ideas don’t – keep that in mind, because it give
\nprospective to your cause today. Much of the Populist
\nagenda would become law within a few years of the
\nparty’s extinction. And that was because it was generally
\nshared by a rising generation of young Republicans and
\nDemocrats who, justly or not, were seen as less
\noutrageously outdated than the embattled farmers.
\nThese were the progressives, your intellectual forebears
\nand mine.<\/p>\n

\nOne of my heroes in all of this is William Allen White, a
\nKansas country editor – a Republican – who was one of
\nthem. He described his fellow progressives this way:
\n“What the people felt about the vast injustice that had
\ncome with the settlement of a continent, we, their
\nservants – teachers, city councilors, legislators,
\ngovernors, publishers, editors, writers, representatives in
\nCongress and Senators – all made a part of our creed.
\nSome way, into the hearts of the dominant middle class
\nof this country, had come a sense that their civilization
\nneeded recasting, that their government had fallen into
\nthe hands of self-seekers, that a new relationship should
\nbe established between the haves and the have-nots.”<\/p>\n

\nThey were a diverse lot, held together by a common
\nadmiration of progress – hence the name – and a shared
\ndismay at the paradox of poverty stubbornly persisting in
\nthe midst of progress like an unwanted guest at a
\nwedding. Of course they welcomed, just as we do, the
\nnew marvels in the gift-bag of technology – the
\ntelephones, the autos, the electrically-powered urban
\ntransport and lighting systems, the indoor heating and
\nplumbing, the processed foods and home appliances
\nand machine-made clothing that reduced the sweat and
\ndrudgery of home-making and were affordable to an
\never-swelling number of people. But they saw the
\nunderside, too – the slums lurking in the shadows of the
\nglittering cities, the exploited and unprotected workers
\nwhose low-paid labor filled the horn of plenty for others,
\nthe misery of those whom age, sickness, accident or
\nhard times condemned to servitude and poverty with no
\nhope of comfort
\nor security.<\/p>\n

\nThis is what’s hard to believe – hardly a century had
\npassed since 1776 before the still-young revolution was
\nbeing strangled in the hard grip of a merciless ruling
\nclass. The large corporations that were called into being
\nby modern industrialism after 1865 – the end of the Civil
\nWar – had combined into trusts capable of making
\nminions of both politics and government. What Henry
\nGeorge called “an immense wedge” was being forced
\nthrough American society by “the maldistribution of
\nwealth, status, and opportunity.”<\/p>\n

\nWe should pause here to consider that this is Karl
\nRove’s cherished period of American history; it was, as I
\nread him, the seminal influence on the man who is said
\nto be George W.’s brain. From his own public comments
\nand my reading of the record, it is apparent that Karl
\nRove has modeled the Bush presidency on that of
\nWilliam McKinley, who was in the White House from
\n1897 to 1901, and modeled himself on Mark Hanna, the
\nman who virtually manufactured McKinley. Hanna had
\none consummate passion – to serve corporate and
\nimperial power. It was said that he believed “without
\ncompunction, that the state of Ohio existed for property.
\nIt had no other function…Great wealth was to be gained
\nthrough monopoly, through using the State for private
\nends; it was axiomatic therefore that businessmen
\nshould run the government and run it for personal profit.”
\nMark Hanna – Karl Rove’s hero – made William
\nMcKinley governor of Ohio by shaking down the
\ncorporate interests of the day. Fortunately, McKinley had
\nthe invaluable gift of emitting sonorous platitudes as
\nthough they were recently discovered truth. Behind his
\nbenign gaze the wily intrigues of Mark Hanna saw to it
\nthat first Ohio and then Washington were “ruled by
\nbusiness…by bankers, railroads and public utility
\ncorporations.” Any who opposed the oligarchy were
\nsmeared as disturbers of the peace, socialists,
\nanarchists, “or worse.” Back then they didn’t bother with
\nhollow euphemisms like “compassionate conservatism”
\nto disguise the raw reactionary politics that produced
\ngovernment “of, by, and for” the ruling corporate class.
\nThey just saw the loot and went for it.<\/p>\n

\nThe historian Clinton Rossiter describes this as the
\nperiod of “the great train robbery of American intellectual
\nhistory.” Conservatives – or better, pro-corporate
\napologists – hijacked the vocabulary of Jeffersonian
\nliberalism and turned words like “progress”,
\n“opportunity”, and “individualism” into tools for making
\nthe plunder of America sound like divine right. Charles
\nDarwin’s theory of evolution was hijacked, too, so that
\nconservative politicians, judges, and publicists promoted,
\nas if it were, the natural order of things, the notion that
\nprogress resulted from the elimination of the weak and
\nthe “survival of the fittest.”
\nThis “degenerate and unlovely age,” as one historian
\ncalls it, exists in the mind of Karl Rove – the reputed
\nbrain of George W. Bush – as the seminal age of
\ninspiration for the politics and governance of America
\ntoday.<\/p>\n

\nNo wonder that what troubled our progressive forebears
\nwas not only the miasma of poverty in their nostrils, but
\nthe sour stink of a political system for sale. The United
\nStates Senate was a “millionaire’s club.” Money given to
\nthe political machines that controlled nominations could
\nbuy controlling influence in city halls, state houses and
\neven courtrooms. Reforms and improvements ran into
\nthe immovable resistance of the almighty dollar. What,
\nprogressives wondered, would this do to the principles of
\npopular government? Because all of them, whatever
\nparty they subscribed to, were inspired by the gospel of
\ndemocracy. Inevitably, this swept them into the currents
\nof politics, whether as active officeholders or persistent
\nadvocates.<\/p>\n

\nHere’s a small, but representative sampling of their
\nranks. Jane Addams forsook the comforts of a middle-
\nclass college graduate’s life to live in Hull House in the
\nmidst of a disease-ridden and crowded Chicago
\nimmigrant neighborhood, determined to make it an
\neducational and social center that would bring pride,
\nhealth and beauty into the lives of her poor neighbors.
\nShe was inspired by “an almost passionate devotion to
\nthe ideals of democracy,” to combating the prevailing
\nnotion “that the well being of a privileged few might justly
\nbe built upon the ignorance and sacrifice of the many.”
\nCommunity and fellowship were the lessons she drew
\nfrom her teachers, Jesus and Abraham Lincoln. But
\npeople simply helping one another couldn’t move
\nmountains of disadvantage. She came to see that
\n“private beneficence” wasn’t enough. But to bring justice
\nto the poor would take more than soup kitchens and
\nfundraising prayer meetings. “Social arrangements,” she
\nwrote, “can be transformed through man’s conscious
\nand deliberate effort.” Take note – not individual
\nregeneration or the magic of the market, but conscious,
\ncooperative effort.<\/p>\n

\nMeet a couple of muckraking journalists. Jacob Riis
\nlugged his heavy camera up and down the staircases of
\nNew York’s disease-ridden, firetrap tenements to
\nphotograph the unspeakable crowding, the inadequate
\ntoilets, the starved and hollow-eyed children and the filth
\non the walls so thick that his crude flash equipment
\nsometimes set it afire. Bound between hard covers, with
\nRiis’s commentary, they showed comfortable New
\nYorkers “How the Other Half Lives.” They were powerful
\nammunition for reformers who eventually brought an end
\nto tenement housing by state legislation. And Lincoln
\nSteffens, college and graduate-school educated, left his
\nbooks to learn life from the bottom up as a police-beat
\nreporter on New York’s streets. Then, as a magazine
\nwriter, he exposed the links between city bosses and
\nbusinessmen that made it possible for builders and
\nfactory owners to ignore safety codes and get away with
\nit. But the villain was neither the boodler nor the
\nbusinessman. It was the indifference of a public that
\n“deplore[d] our politics and laud[ed] our business; that
\ntransformed law, medicine, literature and religion into
\nsimply business. Steffens was out to slay the dragon of
\nexalting “the commercial spirit” over the goals of
\npatriotism and national prosperity. “I am not a scientist,”
\nhe said. “I am a journalist. I did not gather the facts and
\narrange them patiently for permanent preservation and
\nlaboratory analysis….My purpose was. …to see if the
\nshameful facts, spread out in all their shame, would not
\nburn through our civic shamelessness and set fire to
\nAmerican pride.”<\/p>\n

\nIf corrupt politics bred diseases that could be fatal to
\ndemocracy, then good politics was the antidote. That
\nwas the discovery of Ray Stannard Baker, another
\njournalistic progressive who started out with a detest for
\nelection-time catchwords and slogans. But he came to
\nsee that “Politics could not be abolished or even
\nadjourned…it was in its essence the method by which
\ncommunities worked out their common problems. It was
\none of the principle arts of living peacefully in a crowded
\nworld,” he said [Compare that to Grover Norquist’s latest
\ndeclaration of war on the body politic. “We are trying to
\nchange the tones in the state capitals – and turn them
\ntoward bitter nastiness and partisanship.” He went on to
\nsay that bi-partisanship is another name for date rape.”]<\/p>\n

\nThere are more, too many more to call to the witness
\nstand here, but I want you to hear some of the things
\nthey had to say. There were educators like the
\neconomist John R. Commons or the sociologist Edward
\nA. Ross who believed that the function of “social
\nscience” wasn’t simply to dissect society for non-
\njudgmental analysis and academic promotion, but to
\nhelp in finding solutions to social problems. It was Ross
\nwho pointed out that morality in a modern world had a
\nsocial dimension. In “Sin and Society,” written in 1907,
\nhe told readers that the sins “blackening the face of our
\ntime” were of a new variety, and not yet recognized as
\nsuch. “The man who picks pockets with a railway rebate,
\nmurders with an adulterant instead of a bludgeon,
\nburglarizes with a ‘rake-off’ instead of a jimmy, cheats
\nwith a company instead of a deck of cards, or scuttles
\nhis town instead of his ship, does no
\nt feel on his brow
\nthe brand of a malefactor.” In other words upstanding
\nindividuals could plot corporate crimes and sleep the
\nsleep of the just without the sting of social stigma or the
\npangs of conscience. Like Kenneth Lay, they could even
\nbe invited into the White House to write their own
\nregulations.<\/p>\n

\nAnd here are just two final bits of testimony from actual
\npoliticians – first, Brand Whitlock, Mayor of Toledo. He is
\none of my heroes because he first learned his politics as
\na beat reporter in Chicago, confirming my own
\nexperience that there’s nothing better than journalism to
\nturn life into a continuing course in adult education. One
\nof his lessons was that “the alliance between the
\nlobbyists and the lawyers of the great corporation
\ninterests on the one hand, and the managers of both the
\ngreat political parties on the other, was a fact, the worst
\nfeature of which was that no one seemed to care.”<\/p>\n

\nAnd then there is Tom Johnson, the progressive mayor
\nof Cleveland in the early nineteen hundreds – a
\nbusinessman converted to social activism. His major
\nbattles were to impose regulation, or even municipal
\ntakeover, on the private companies that were meant to
\nprovide affordable public transportation and utilities but
\nin fact crushed competitors, overcharged customers,
\nsecured franchises and licenses for a song, and paid
\nvirtually nothing in taxes – all through their pocketbook
\ncontrol of lawmakers and judges. Johnson’s argument
\nfor public ownership was simple: “If you don’t own them,
\nthey will own you. It’s why advocates of Clean Elections
\ntoday argue that if anybody’s going to buy Congress, it
\nshould be the people.” When advised that businessmen
\ngot their way in Washington because they had lobbies
\nand consumers had none, Tom Johnson responded: “If
\nCongress were true to the principles of democracy it
\nwould be the people’s lobby.” What a radical contrast to
\nthe House of Representatives today!<\/p>\n

\nOur political, moral, and intellectual forbearance occupy
\na long and honorable roster. They include wonderful
\ncharacters like Dr. Alice Hamilton, a pioneer in
\nindustrially-caused diseases, who spent long years
\nclambering up and down ladders in factories and
\nmineshafts – in long skirts! – tracking down the unsafe
\ntoxic substances that sickened the workers whom she
\nwould track right into their sickbeds to get leads and tip-
\noffs on where to hunt. Or Harvey Wiley, the chemist from
\nIndiana who, from a bureaucrat’s desk in the Department
\nof Agriculture, relentlessly warred on foods laden with
\nrisky preservatives and adulterants with the help of his
\n“poison squad” of young assistants who volunteered as
\nguinea pigs. Or lawyers like the brilliant Harvard
\ngraduate Louis Brandeis, who took on corporate
\nattorneys defending child labor or long and harsh
\nconditions for female workers. Brandeis argued that the
\nstate had a duty to protect the health of working women
\nand children.<\/p>\n

\nTo be sure, these progressives weren’t all saints. Their
\nglory years coincided with the heyday of lynching and
\nsegregation, of empire and the Big Stick and the bold
\ntheft of the Panama Canal, of immigration restriction and
\nethnic stereotypes. Some were themselves
\nbusinessmen only hoping to control an unruly
\nmarketplace by regulation. But by and large they were
\nconservative reformers. They aimed to preserve the
\nexisting balance between wealth and commonwealth.
\nTheir common enemy was unchecked privilege, their
\ncommon hope was a better democracy, and their
\ncommon weapon was informed public opinion.<\/p>\n

\nIn a few short years the progressive spirit made possible
\nthe election not only of reform mayors and governors but
\nof national figures like Senator George Norris of
\nNebraska, Senator Robert M. LaFollette of Wisconsin,
\nand even that hard-to-classify political genius, Theodore
\nRoosevelt. All three of them Republicans. Here is the
\nsimplest laundry-list of what was accomplished at state
\nand Federal levels: Publicly regulated or owned
\ntransportation, sanitation and utilities systems. The
\npartial restoration of competition in the marketplace
\nthrough improved antitrust laws. Increased fairness in
\ntaxation. Expansion of the public education and juvenile
\njustice systems. Safer workplaces and guarantees of
\ncompensation to workers injured on the job. Oversight of
\nthe purity of water, medicines and foods. Conservation
\nof the national wilderness heritage against
\noverdevelopment, and honest bidding on any public
\nmining, lumbering and ranching. We take these for
\ngranted today – or we did until recently. All were
\nprovided not by the automatic workings of free enterprise
\nbut by implementing the idea in the Declaration of
\nIndependence that the people had a right to
\ngovernments that best promoted their “safety and
\nhappiness.”<\/p>\n

\nThe mighty progressive wave peaked in 1912. But the
\nideas leashed by it forged the politics of the 20th
\ncentury. Like his cousin Theodore, Franklin Roosevelt
\nargued that the real enemy of enlightened capitalism
\nwas “the malefactors of great wealth” – the “economic
\nroyalists” – from whom capitalism would have to be
\nsaved by reform and regulation. Progressive government
\nbecame an embedded tradition of Democrats – the heart
\nof FDR’s New Deal and Harry Truman’s Fair Deal, and
\nhonored even by Dwight D. Eisenhower, who didn’t want
\nto tear down the house progressive ideas had built –
\nonly to put it under different managers. The progressive
\nimpulse had its final fling in the landslide of 1969 when
\nLBJ, who was a son of the West Texas hill country,
\nwhere the Populist rebellion had been nurtured in the
\n1890s, won the public endorsement for what he meant to
\nbe the capstone in the arch of the New Deal.<\/p>\n

\nI had a modest role in that era. I shared in its exhilaration
\nand its failures. We went too far too fast, overreached at
\nhome and in Vietnam, failed to examine some
\nassumptions, and misjudged the rising discontents and
\nfierce backlash engendered by war, race, civil
\ndisturbance, violence and crime. Democrats grew so
\nproprietary in this town that a fat, complacent political
\nestablishment couldn’t recognize its own intellectual
\nbankruptcy or the beltway that was growing around it
\nand beginning to separate it from the rest of the country.
\nThe failure of democratic politicians and public thinkers
\nto respond to popular discontents – to the daily lives of
\nworkers, consumers, parents, and ordinary taxpayers –
\nallowed a resurgent conservatism to convert public
\nconcern and hostility into a crusade to resurrect social
\nDarwinism as a moral philosophy, multinational
\ncorporations as a governing class, and the theology of
\nmarkets as a transcendental belief system.<\/p>\n

\nAs a citizen I don’t like the consequences of this
\ncrusade, but you have to respect the conservatives for
\ntheir successful strategy in gaining control of the national
\nagenda. Their stated and open aim is to change how
\nAmerica is governed – to strip from government all its
\nfunctions except those that reward their rich and
\nprivileged benefactors. They are quite candid about it,
\neven acknowledging their mean spirit in accomplishing it.<\/p>\n

\nTheir leading strategist in Washington – the same Grover
\nNorquist – has famously said he wants to shrink the
\ngovernment down to the size that it could be drowned in
\na bathtub. More recently, in commenting on the fiscal
\ncrisis in the states and its affect on schools and poor
\npeople, Norquist said, “I hope one of them” – one of the
\nstates – “goes bankrupt.” So much for compassionate
\nconservatism. But at least Norquist says what he means
\nand means what he says. The White House pursues the
\nsame homicidal dream without saying so. Instead of
\nshrinking down the government, they’re filling the
\nbathtub with so much debt that it floods the house,
\nwater-logs the economy, and washes away services for
\ndecades that have lifted millions of Americans out of
\ndestitution and into the middle-class. And what happens
\nonce the public’s property has been flooded? Privatize it.
\nSell it at a discounted rate to the corporations.<\/p>\n

\nIt is the most radical assault on the notion of one nation,
\nindivisible, that has occurred in our lifetime. I’ll be frank
\nwith you: I simply don’t understand it – or the malice in
\nwhich it is steeped.
\nMany people are nostalgic for a
\ngolden age. These people seem to long for the Gilded
\nAge. That I can grasp. They measure America only by
\ntheir place on the material spectrum and they bask in the
\ncompany of the new corporate aristocracy, as privileged
\na class as we have seen since the plantation owners of
\nantebellum America and the court of Louis IV. What I
\ncan’t explain is the rage of the counter-revolutionaries to
\ndismantle every last brick of the social contract. At this
\nadvanced age I simply have to accept the fact that the
\ntension between haves and have-nots is built into human
\npsychology and society itself – it’s ever with us.
\nHowever, I’m just as puzzled as to why, with right wing
\nwrecking crews blasting away at social benefits once
\nconsidered invulnerable, Democrats are fearful of being
\nbranded “class warriors” in a war the other side started
\nand is determined to win. I don’t get why conceding your
\nopponent’s premises and fighting on his turf isn’t the
\nsure-fire prescription for irrelevance and ultimately
\nobsolescence. But I confess as well that I don’t know
\nhow to resolve the social issues that have driven wedges
\ninto your ranks. And I don’t know how to reconfigure
\ndemocratic politics to fit into an age of soundbites and
\npolling dominated by a media oligarchy whose corporate
\njournalists are neutered and whose right-wing publicists
\nhave no shame.<\/p>\n

\nWhat I do know is this: While the social dislocations and
\nmeanness that galvanized progressives in the 19th
\ncentury are resurgent so is the vision of justice, fairness,
\nand equality. That’s a powerful combination if only there
\nare people around to fight for it. The battle to renew
\ndemocracy has enormous resources to call upon – and
\ngreat precedents for inspiration. Consider the experience
\nof James Bryce, who published “The Great
\nCommonwealth” back in 1895 at the height of the First
\nGilded Age. Americans, Bryce said, “were hopeful and
\nphilanthropic.” He saw first-hand the ills of that “dark and
\nunlovely age,” but he went on to say: ” A hundred times I
\nhave been disheartened by the facts I was stating: a
\nhundred times has the recollection of the abounding
\nstrength and vitality of the nation chased away those
\ntremors.”<\/p>\n

\nWhat will it take to get back in the fight? Understanding
\nthe real interests and deep opinions of the American
\npeople is the first thing. And what are those? That a
\nSocial Security card is not a private portfolio statement
\nbut a membership ticket in a society where we all
\ncontribute to a common treasury so that none need face
\nthe indignities of poverty in old age without that help.
\nThat tax evasion is not a form of conserving investment
\ncapital but a brazen abandonment of responsibility to the
\ncountry. That income inequality is not a sign of freedom-
\nof-opportunity at work, because if it persists and grows,
\nthen unless you believe that some people are naturally
\nborn to ride and some to wear saddles, it’s a sign that
\nopportunity is less than equal. That self-interest is a
\ngreat motivator for production and progress, but is
\namoral unless contained within the framework of
\ncommunity. That the rich have the right to buy more cars
\nthan anyone else, more homes, vacations, gadgets and
\ngizmos, but they do not have the right to buy more
\ndemocracy than anyone else. That public services, when
\nprivatized, serve only those who can afford them and
\nweaken the sense that we all rise and fall together as
\n“one nation, indivisible.” That concentration in the
\nproduction of goods may sometimes be useful and
\nefficient, but monopoly over the dissemination of ideas is
\nevil. That prosperity requires good wages and benefits
\nfor workers. And that our nation can no more survive as
\nhalf democracy and half oligarchy than it could survive
\n“half slave and half free” – and that keeping it from
\nbecoming all oligarchy is steady work – our work.<\/p>\n

\nIdeas have power – as long as they are not frozen in
\ndoctrine. But ideas need legs. The eight-hour day, the
\nminimum wage, the conservation of natural resources
\nand the protection of our air, water, and land, women’s
\nrights and civil rights, free trade unions, Social Security
\nand a civil service based on merit – all these were
\nlaunched as citizen’s movements and won the
\nendorsement of the political class only after long
\nstruggles and in the face of bitter opposition and
\nsneering attacks. It’s just a fact: Democracy doesn’t work
\nwithout citizen activism and participation, starting at the
\ncommunity. Trickle down politics doesn’t work much
\nbetter than trickle down economics. It’s also a fact that
\ncivilization happens because we don’t leave things to
\nother people. What’s right and good doesn’t come
\nnaturally. You have to stand up and fight for it – as if the
\ncause depends on you, because it does. Allow yourself
\nthat conceit – to believe that the flame of democracy will
\nnever go out as long as there’s one candle in your hand.
\nSo go for it. Never mind the odds. Remember what the
\nprogressives faced. Karl Rove isn’t tougher than Mark
\nHanna was in his time and a hundred years from now
\nsome historian will be wondering how it was that
\nNorquist and Company got away with it as long as they
\ndid – how they waged war almost unopposed on the
\ninfrastructure of social justice, on the arrangements that
\nmake life fair, on the mutual rights and responsibilities
\nthat offer opportunity, civil liberties, and a decent
\nstandard of living to the least among us.<\/p>\n

\n“Democracy is not a lie” – I first learned that from Henry
\nDemarest Lloyd, the progressive journalist whose book,
\n“Wealth against Commonwealth,” laid open the Standard
\ntrust a century ago. Lloyd came to the conclusion to
\n“Regenerate the individual is a half truth. The
\nreorganization of the society which he makes and which
\nmakes him is the other part. The love of liberty became
\nliberty in America by clothing itself in the complicated
\ngroup of strengths known as the government of the
\nUnited States.” And it was then he said: “Democracy is
\nnot a lie. There live(s) in the body of the commonality
\nunexhausted virtue and the ever-refreshed strength
\nwhich can rise equal to any problems of progress. In the
\nhope of tapping some reserve of their power of self-
\nhelp,” he said, “this story is told to the people.”<\/p>\n

\nThis is your story – the progressive story of America.<\/p>\n

\nPass it on.<\/p>\n

\n

This is me again .. congratulations for making it all the way through! I just had to add a couple of comments about Moyers’ mention of<\/p>\n

\n“Tom Johnson, the progressive mayor of Cleveland in the early nineteen hundreds … His major battles were to impose regulation, or even municipal takeover, on the private companies that were meant to provide affordable public transportation and utilities but in fact crushed competitors, overcharged customers, secured franchises and licenses for a song …. Johnson’s argument for public ownership was simple: “If you don’t own them, they will own you.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Local readers will of course see the parallel with the ongoing battle here over the ownership of Kentucky-American water company. And Johnson’s story brings to mind a more recent progressive former mayor of Cleveland, whose tenure in the late 1970s was most known for keeping his campaign pledge not to sell the municipal electric utility to private interests. His opponents accused him of bankrupting the city, although history has proven him right. He can now claim to have confronted the Enron of his day, and received a commendation from the Cleveland City Council in 1998 for his foresight 20 years earlier. His name is Dennis Kucinich.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

He’s not running, but maybe he should be. Email from a local activist alerted me to an article in The Nation about the recent Take Back America conference. Not surprisingly, the conference attracted a number of Democratic presidential wannabes. But, according to The Nation‘s John Nichols, “it was a non-candidate (Moyers) who won the hearts… Continue reading Bill Moyers for President?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-325","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9mOtr-5f","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.redhorse.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/325","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.redhorse.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.redhorse.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.redhorse.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.redhorse.me\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=325"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.redhorse.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/325\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.redhorse.me\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=325"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.redhorse.me\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=325"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.redhorse.me\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=325"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}