December 18, 2008
By Bill Ramsey
St. Louis - Pax Christi members from St. Louis University will vigil at Drexel Square in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago. They are one contingent populating “Camp Hope: Count Down to Change,” a 19-day presence just blocks from President-elect Barack Obama’s home. Dozens of Midwest groups will take a day in Hyde Park, urging Obama to enact eight executive orders. Each order is based on a campaign promise. Each one points Obama, and the social movements that find hope in his election, toward a more fundamental change.
In this interval between administrations, with two wars raging, an imploding economy, and an impending climate crisis, it is critical that social movements step forward and engage those who are about to assume office. The fundamental social changes we claim as our common history - the abolition of slavery, universal suffrage, social security, the right to form unions, and initiatives toward disarmament - were achieved when social movements insisted that new presidents take immediate actions, which then became the impetus for more profound changes.
These days count. Standing between election and inauguration, they are a fulcrum on which we can leverage change. The helm is in transition and those who row can change the course. Setting down our oars and speculating how the new captain will steer is not an option. Undercurrents that seduce new administrations away from progressive change are swelling under the bow, ready to pirate away all prospects for a new direction. What the crew does now and in the months to come is crucial.
Let’s look at our history. When Abraham Lincoln was elected, he was not an abolitionist. He was morally opposed to slavery, but devoted to the Constitution which enshrined slavery. He believed that slavery would fade away as new states outlawed it. Embedded economic interests in both the North and the South were threatened by the prospect of abolition. These were the undercurrents of his time, restraining his moral insight.
Lincoln did not engineer the momentum toward the Emancipation Proclamation and the Amendments which eventually removed slavery from the Constitution. Abolitionists, black and white, inspired by their counterparts in England and emboldened by their own decades of rowing against the current, insisted that Lincoln’s “fade away” approach was too little and too late.
Slaves rebelled, left their plantations and showed up at Union Army camps, forcing the Commander-in-Chief’s hand. Less than two years after his inauguration, Lincoln ignored the vested interests, and issued an executive order, the Emancipation Proclamation. The abolitionist movement did not disband. Instead it pointed to the fact that the executive order had created a new group of human beings, not accounted for in the Constitution, and pressured the President and Congress to enact amendments that would bestow full citizenship on the former slaves.
In 1912 when the “social activist” Woodrow Wilson was elected president, the women’s suffrage movement was advancing full-sail, but the new president was not on board. Embedded interests found safety in the rule by a male majority. The suffragists did not tether their sails. They formed two organizations.
One employed traditional forms of persuasion to press Wilson and Congress for the passage of a constitutional amendment authorizing universal suffrage. Not until 1914 did the amendment secure even a simple majority, much less the requisite two-thirds majority. The other group of women, most of them younger, employed the radical tactics of British suffragists. They emphasized attention-getting parades and vigils, making women's suffrage an unavoidable topic even for those who opposed it.
When the U.S. entered World War I, the first group supported war and encouraged women to work outside the home on behalf to the war effort. This “contribution” to the war served suffragists' argument that women deserved the vote. The other group opposed the war, making their case, using President Wilson's own words, that the war was being fought for democracy and that it should be democracy for all. They picketed the White House and were arrested and they conducted hunger strikes in prison. Finally, in early 1918, Wilson urged a compliant Congress to pass what became, once ratified in 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment.
In 1932 when Franklin Roosevelt was elected to office, the country was devastated by the Great Depression. Business interests were retrenched, holding fast to economic practices that had led to the catastrophe. Activists staged marches, conducted rent strikes, blocked evictions, held relief demonstrations, and formed unemployment councils.
As Roosevelt entered the White House, coal miners were digging their own coal and placing the bootlegged coal into the market. In January 1933, auto workers, without a union, struck for the right to organize unions. And 18 months into the new administration, textile workers walked out of mills from Maine to Alabama in the largest strike in U.S. history.
Roosevelt proposed and Congress enacted emergency measures: the Federal Emergency Relief Act and National Industrial Recovery Act. As unions and unemployment councils campaigned, Roosevelt’s New Deal emerged, building on these emergency measures. The Public Works Administration, the Social Security Act, the National Labor Relations Act, the Walsh-Healy Government Contract Act, and the Fair Labor Standards Act were all established. A social safety net was created and working people gained the right to form unions and collective bargaining. A minimum wage, 8 hour day, 40 hour week became law and child labor was prohibited.
The lunch counter sit-ins of the early Sixties lured the Kennedy administration into the dilemma of how deeply it would commit the resources of the U.S. Justice Department to the Civil Rights Movement. Both John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy (his Attorney General) were reluctant, but as the movement in the South presented them with occasions for federal government intervention to protect participants, they lifted themselves out of their reluctance. The more profound changes - signaled by the 1964 Public Accommodation and the 1965 Voters Rights Act - emerged from these early decisions responding to the opportunities that young Civil Rights activists created in the early months of the new President's term.
Newly released documents, detailed in Jim Douglass’ book, JFK and the Unspeakable, indicate that Kennedy viewed the Limited Nuclear Test Ban treaty as a first step toward an agreement with the Soviet Union for general and complete disarmament. As he came into office, mothers around the country were sending their children’s baby teeth to the basement of the World Community Center in St. Louis where they were labeled for testing by Washington University. The tests confirmed that atmospheric nuclear weapons tests were contaminating a whole generation, and thus provided political incentive for Kennedy’s Test Ban Treaty.
In the spring of 1962, Quakers vigiled outside the Kennedy White House, calling for nuclear disarmament and withdrawal from Vietnam. Kennedy invited six of them to the Oval Office to hear their case for peace. Little did they know that journalist and social activist Norman Cousins was already facilitating a secret correspondence between Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Pope John XXIII.
Buried in the Kennedy achieves is evidence that grassroots pressure like the Baby Tooth Project’s findings, the moral appeal of the Quaker Delegation, and revelations arising out of the secret correspondence, were turning Kennedy away from his Cold War premises. With Khrushchev he realized that nuclear disarmament was the only possible course of action after the Cuban Missile crisis. Emissaries were carrying conciliatory messages between Kennedy and Castro. Orders to withdraw from Vietnam had been issued.
Fourteen years later, there was another Quaker vigil. This time the venue was President-elect Carter’s home in Plains, Georgia. The Quakers and other peace groups had been campaigning against the production of the B-1 Bomber and for amnesty for Vietnam War resisters.
On December 18, 1976, 180 Quakers conducted a 24 hour vigil. The president-elect came out and greeted each vigiler. His mother joined the vigil. Despite residual bitter divisions over Vietnam and an undercurrent of pressure from military contractors, on his second day in office, Carter granted amnesty to draft resisters and within six months he cancelled the B-1 Bomber program.
We live in an historic and dangerous moment. The legacy of abolitionists, suffragists, unemployment councils, unionists, and peace activists points us toward Camp Hope and beyond Hyde Park to a long-term challenging engagement with this new president. The undercurrents that are maneuvering Obama away from the change he promised are counting on us set down our oars and drift with Obama in their direction. Heave Ho!