I told of Henry David Thoreau’s decision to break the law in protest against our invasion of Mexico in 1846, and began to give a brief history of civil disobedience in the United States.
The essential ingredients of these struggles for justice are human beings who, if only for a moment, if only while beset with fears, step out of line and do “something”, however small. And even the smallest, most unheroic of acts adds to the store of kindling that may be ignited by some surprising circumstance into tumultuous change.
I said, the rule of law maintains things as they are. Therefore, to begin the process of change, to stop a war, to establish justice, it may be necessary to break the law, to commit acts of civil disobedience, as Southern blacks did, as antiwar protesters did.
Slaves hung on determinedly to their selves, to their love of family, their wholeness. A shoemaker on the South Carolina Sea Islands expressed in his own way: “I’se lost an arm, but it hasn’t gone out of my brains.
Perhaps the most important thing I learned was about democracy, that democracy is not our government, our constitution, our legal structure. Too often they are enemies of democracy. Certainly this was the experience of African-Americans in this country for two hundred years. With the government failing to enforce the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, black men, women, and children decided to do that on their own.
We need to dig under the rubble of war and point out that the Bush administration is using the war as a cover for worsening the income gap in this country, while paying no attention to the problems of most of the American people, while enriching corporations.
Very soon after the Fourteenth Amendment became law, the Supreme Court began to demolish it as a protection for blacks, and to develop it as a protection for corporations.
Now, with the British out of the way, the Americans could begin the inexorable process of pushing the Indians off their lands, killing them if they resisted. In short, as Francis Jennings puts it, the white Americans were fighting against British imperial control in the East, and for their own imperialism in the West. Before.
Women struggled to enter the all-male professional schools. Dr. Harriot Hunt, a woman physician who began to practice in 1835, was twice refused admission to Harvard Medical School. But she carried on her practice, mostly among women and children. She believed strongly in diet, exercise, hygiene, and mental health. She organized a Ladies Physiological Society in 1843 where she gave monthly talks. She remained single, defying convention here too.
The very poor could not be counted on to support the government. They were like the slaves and Indians – invisible most of the time, but frightening to the elite if they started an uprising. Other citizens, though, might support the system. Farmers who owned their land, better-paid laborers, and urban office workers were paid just enough, and flattered just enough, that in a crisis they would be loyal to the system and the upper classes that dominated it. Big.
Just as African Americans had learned that they did not have enough strength to make good the promises of emancipation, working people learned that they were not united or strong enough to defeat the combination of private wealth and government power. But their fight would continue.
The well-paid leaders of the AFL were protected from criticism by tightly controlled meetings and by “goon” squads – hired toughs originally used against strikebreakers but after a while used to intimidate and beat up opponents inside the union.
It has spread among skilled workers, white-collar workers, professionals; for the first time in the nation’s history, perhaps, both the lower classes and the middle classes, the prisoners and the guards, were disillusioned with the system.
Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of leaders and millions have been killed because of this obedience. Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves and the grand thieves are running the country. That’s our problem.
But I was open to anything my students wanted to do, refusing to accept the idea that a teacher should confine his teaching to the classroom when so much was at stake outside it.
At a certain point he startled me by saying, “You know, this is not a war against fascism. It’s a war for empire. England, the United States, the Soviet Union – they are all corrupt states, not morally concerned about Hitlerism, just wanting to run the world themselves. It’s an imperialist war.
Noam and I had first met in the summer of 1965, on a plane ride to Mississippi with a delegation to protest the jailing of civil rights workers there. The antiwar movement brought us closer together, and Noam and his wife Carol, Roz, and I became friends. Of all the movement people I knew, there was no one person who combined such extraordinary intellectual power with such commitment to social justice.
Our laws are the output of a system which clothes rascals in robes and honesty in rags.
True, fascism was not to be tolerated by decent people. But neither was racism or colonialism or slave labor camps – one or another of which was a characteristic of all of the Allied powers. And granted, fascism was worse, admitting of no opening for change. But was war the answer? Was the only way to deal with fascism to engage in a bloodbath which left forty million people dead?
Everything in history, once it has happened, looks as if it had to happen exactly that way. We can’t imagine any other. But I am convinced of the uncertainty of history, of the possibility of surprise, of the importance of human action in changing what looks unchangeable.
As a schoolboy I had been taught to be proud of our nation’s march across the continent – it was always labeled “Westward Expansion.” Expansion – it seemed almost biological. We just grew.