This is
Your Story - The Progressive Story of America. Pass It On.
By Bill Moyers
t r u t h o u t | Statement Wednesday 04 June 2003
Text of speech to the
Take Back America conference sponsored by the Campaign for Americas Future.
Thank you for this award and for this occasion. I
don't deserve either, but as George Burns said, I have arthritis and I don't
deserve that, either.
Tomorrow is my 69th birthday and I cannot imagine a
better present than this award or a better party than your company.
Fifty three years ago tomorrow, on my 16th birthday, I
went to work for the daily newspaper in the small East Texas town where I grew
up. It was a good place to be a cub reporter small enough to navigate but big
enough to keep me busy and learning something every day. I soon had a stroke of
luck. Some of the old timers were on vacation or out sick and I got assigned to
cover what came to be known as the Housewives' Rebellion. Fifteen women in my
home town decided not to pay the social security withholding tax for their
domestic workers. They argued that social security was unconstitutional, that
imposing it was taxation without representation, and that here's my favorite
part "requiring us to collect (the tax) is no different from requiring
us to collect the garbage." They hired themselves a lawyer none other
than Martin Dies, the former congressman best known, or worst known, for his
work as head of the House Committee on Un-American Activities in the 30s and
40s. He was no more effective at defending rebellious women than he had been
protecting against communist subversives, and eventually the women wound up
holding their noses and paying the tax.
The stories I wrote for my local paper were picked up
and moved on the Associated Press wire. One day, the managing editor called me
over and pointed to the AP ticker beside his desk. Moving across the wire was a
notice citing one Bill Moyers and the paper for the reporting we had done on
the "Rebellion."
That hooked me, and in one way or another after a
detour through seminary and then into politics and government for a spell
I've been covering the class war ever since. Those women in Marshall, Texas
were its advance guard. They were not bad people. They were regulars at church,
their children were my friends, many of them were active in community affairs,
their husbands were pillars of the business and professional class in town.
They were respectable and upstanding citizens all. So it took me awhile to
figure out what had brought on that spasm of reactionary rebellion. It came to
me one day, much later. They simply couldn't see beyond their own prerogatives.
Fiercely loyal to their families, to their clubs, charities and congregations
fiercely loyal, in other words, to their own kind they narrowly defined
membership in democracy to include only people like them. The women who washed
and ironed their laundry, wiped their children's bottoms, made their husband's
beds, and cooked their family meals these women, too, would grow old and
frail, sick and decrepit, lose their husbands and face the ravages of time
alone, with nothing to show from their years of labor but the crease in their
brow and the knots on their knuckles; so be it; even on the distaff side of
laissez faire, security was personal, not social, and what injustice existed
this side of heaven would no doubt be redeemed beyond the Pearly Gates. God
would surely be just to the poor once they got past Judgment Day.
In one way or another, this is the oldest story in America:
the struggle to determine whether "we, the people" is a spiritual
idea embedded in a political reality one nation, indivisible or merely a
charade masquerading as piety and manipulated by the powerful and privileged to
sustain their own way of life at the expense of others.
Let me make it clear that I don't harbor any idealized
notion of politics and democracy; I worked for Lyndon Johnson, remember? Nor do
I romanticize "the people." You should read my mail or listen to
the vitriol virtually spat at my answering machine. I understand what the
politician meant who said of the Texas House of Representatives, "If you
think these guys are bad, you should see their constituents."
But there is nothing idealized or romantic about the
difference between a society whose arrangements roughly serve all its citizens
and one whose institutions have been converted into a stupendous fraud. That
difference can be the difference between democracy and oligarchy.
Look at our history. All of us know that the American
Revolution ushered in what one historian called "The Age of Democratic
Revolutions." For the Great Seal of the United States the new Congress
went all the way back to the Roman poet Virgil: Novus Ordo Seclorum"
"a new age now begins." Page Smith reminds us that "their
ambition was not merely to free themselves from dependence and subordination to
the Crown but to inspire people everywhere to create agencies of government and
forms of common social life that would offer greater dignity and hope to the
exploited and suppressed" to those, in other words, who had been the
losers. Not surprisingly, the winners often resisted. In the early years of
constitution-making in the states and emerging nation, aristocrats wanted a
government of propertied "gentlemen" to keep the scales tilted in
their favor.
Battling on the other side were moderates and even those radicals
harboring the extraordinary idea of letting all white males have the vote.
Luckily, the weapons were words and ideas, not bullets. Through compromise and
conciliation the draftsmen achieved a Constitution of checks and balances that
is now the oldest in the world, even as the revolution of democracy that
inspired it remains a tempestuous adolescent whose destiny is still up for grabs.
For all the rhetoric about "life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness," it took a civil war to free the slaves and another hundred
years to invest their freedom with meaning. Women only gained the right to vote
in my mother's time. New ages don't arrive overnight, or without "blood,
sweat, and tears."
You know this. You are the heirs of one of the
country's great traditions the progressive movement that started late in the
l9th century and remade the American experience piece by piece until it peaked
in the last third of the 20th century. I call it the progressive movement for
lack of a more precise term. Its aim was to keep blood pumping through the
veins of democracy when others were ready to call in the mortician.
Progressives exalted and extended the original American revolution. They
spelled out new terms of partnership between the people and their rulers. And
they kindled a flame that lit some of the most prosperous decades in modern
history, not only here but in aspiring democracies everywhere, especially those
of western Europe.
Step back with me to the curtain-raiser, the founding
convention of the People's Party better known as the Populists in 1892. The
members were mainly cotton and wheat farmers from the recently reconstructed
South and the newly settled Great Plains, and they had come on hard, hard
times, driven to the wall by falling prices for their crops on one hand and
racking interest rates, freight charges and supply costs on the other. This in
the midst of a booming and growing industrial America. They were angry, and
their platform issued deliberately on the 4th of July pulled no punches.
"We meet," it said, "in the midst of a nation brought to the
verge of moral, political and material ruin....Corruption dominates the ballot
box, the [state] legislatures and the Congress and touches even the
bench.....The newspapers are largely subsidized or muzzled, public opinion
silenced....The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up
colossal fortunes for a few."
Furious words from rural men and women who were
traditionally conservative and whose memories of taming the frontier were fresh
and personal. But in their fury they invoked an American tradition as powerful
as frontier individualism the war on inequality and especially on the role
that government played in promoting and preserving inequality by favoring the
rich. The Founding Fathers turned their backs on the idea of property
qualifications for holding office under the Constitution because they wanted no
part of a 'veneration for wealth" in the document. Thomas Jefferson, while
claiming no interest in politics, built up a Republican Party no relation to
the present one to take the government back from the speculators and
"stock-jobbers," as he called them, who were in the saddle in 1800.
Andrew Jackson slew the monster Second Bank of the United States, the 600-pound
gorilla of the credit system in the 1830s, in the name of the people versus the
aristocrats who sat on the bank's governing board.
All these leaders were on record in favor of small
government but their opposition wasn't simply to government as such. It was
to government's power to confer privilege on insiders; on the rich who were
democracy's equivalent of the royal favorites of monarchist days. (It's what
the FCC does today.) The Populists knew it was the government that granted
millions of acres of public land to the railroad builders. It was the
government that gave the manufacturers of farm machinery a monopoly of the
domestic market by a protective tariff that was no longer necessary to shelter
"infant industries." It was the government that contracted the
national currency and sparked a deflationary cycle that crushed debtors and
fattened the wallets of creditors. And those who made the great fortunes used
them to buy the legislative and judicial favors that kept them on top. So the
Populists recognized one great principle: the job of preserving equality of
opportunity and democracy demanded the end of any unholy alliance between
government and wealth. It was, to quote that platform again, "from the
same womb of governmental injustice" that tramps and millionaires were
bred.
But how? How was the democratic revolution to be
revived? The promise of the Declaration reclaimed? How were Americans to
restore government to its job of promoting the general welfare? And here, the
Populists made a breakthrough to another principle. In a modern, large-scale,
industrial and nationalized economy it wasn't enough simply to curb the government's
outreach. That would simply leave power in the hands of the great corporations
whose existence was inseparable from growth and progress. The answer was to
turn government into an active player in the economy at the very least
enforcing fair play, and when necessary being the friend, the helper and the
agent of the people at large in the contest against entrenched power. So the
Populist platform called for government loans to farmers about to lose their
mortgaged homesteads for government granaries to grade and store their crops
fairly for governmental inflation of the currency, which was a classical plea
of debtors and for some decidedly non-classical actions like government
ownership of the railroad, telephone and telegraph systems and a graduated
i.e., progressive tax on incomes and a flat ban on subsidies to "any
private corporation." And to make sure the government stayed on the side
of the people, the 'Pops' called for the initiative and referendum and the
direct election of Senators.
Predictably, the Populists were denounced, feared and
mocked as fanatical hayseeds ignorantly playing with socialist fire. They got
twenty-two electoral votes for their candidate in '92, plus some Congressional
seats and state houses, but it was downhill from there for many reasons.
America wasn't and probably still isn't ready for a new major party. The
People's Party was a spent rocket by 1904. But if political organizations
perish, their key ideas don't - keep that in mind, because it give prospective
to your cause today. Much of the Populist agenda would become law within a few
years of the party's extinction. And that was because it was generally shared
by a rising generation of young Republicans and Democrats who, justly or not,
were seen as less outrageously outdated than the embattled farmers. These were
the progressives, your intellectual forebears and mine.
One of my heroes in all of this is William Allen
White, a Kansas country editor a Republican who was one of them. He
described his fellow progressives this way:
"What the people felt about the vast injustice
that had come with the settlement of a continent, we, their servants
teachers, city councilors, legislators, governors, publishers, editors,
writers, representatives in Congress and Senators all made a part of our
creed. Some way, into the hearts of the dominant middle class of this country,
had come a sense that their civilization needed recasting, that their
government had fallen into the hands of self-seekers, that a new relationship
should be established between the haves and the have-nots."
They were a diverse lot, held together by a common
admiration of progress hence the name and a shared dismay at the paradox of
poverty stubbornly persisting in the midst of progress like an unwanted guest
at a wedding. Of course they welcomed, just as we do, the new marvels in the
gift-bag of technology the telephones, the autos, the electrically-powered
urban transport and lighting systems, the indoor heating and plumbing, the
processed foods and home appliances and machine-made clothing that reduced the
sweat and drudgery of home-making and were affordable to an ever-swelling
number of people. But they saw the underside, too the slums lurking in the
shadows of the glittering cities, the exploited and unprotected workers whose
low-paid labor filled the horn of plenty for others, the misery of those whom
age, sickness, accident or hard times condemned to servitude and poverty with
no hope of comfort or security.
This is what's hard to believe hardly a century had
passed since 1776 before the still-young revolution was being strangled in the
hard grip of a merciless ruling class. The large corporations that were called
into being by modern industrialism after 1865 the end of the Civil War had
combined into trusts capable of making minions of both politics and government.
What Henry George called "an immense wedge" was being forced through
American society by "the maldistribution of wealth, status, and opportunity."
We should pause here to consider that this is Karl
Rove's cherished period of American history; it was, as I read him, the seminal
influence on the man who is said to be George W.'s brain. From his own public
comments and my reading of the record, it is apparent that Karl Rove has
modeled the Bush presidency on that of William McKinley, who was in the White
House from 1897 to 1901, and modeled himself on Mark Hanna, the man who
virtually manufactured McKinley. Hanna had one consummate passion to serve corporate
and imperial power. It was said that he believed "without compunction,
that the state of Ohio existed for property. It had no other function...Great
wealth was to be gained through monopoly, through using the State for private
ends; it was axiomatic therefore that businessmen should run the government and
run it for personal profit."
Mark Hanna Karl Rove's hero made William McKinley
governor of Ohio by shaking down the corporate interests of the day.
Fortunately, McKinley had the invaluable gift of emitting sonorous platitudes
as though they were recently discovered truth. Behind his benign gaze the wily
intrigues of Mark Hanna saw to it that first Ohio and then Washington were
"ruled by business...by bankers, railroads and public utility corporations."
Any who opposed the oligarchy were smeared as disturbers of the peace,
socialists, anarchists, "or worse." Back then they didn't bother with
hollow euphemisms like "compassionate conservatism" to disguise the
raw reactionary politics that produced government "of, by, and for"
the ruling corporate class. They just saw the loot and went for it.
The historian Clinton Rossiter describes this as the
period of "the great train robbery of American intellectual history."
Conservatives or better, pro-corporate apologists hijacked the vocabulary
of Jeffersonian liberalism and turned words like "progress",
"opportunity", and "individualism" into tools for making
the plunder of America sound like divine right. Charles Darwin's theory of
evolution was hijacked, too, so that conservative politicians, judges, and
publicists promoted, as if it were, the natural order of things, the notion
that progress resulted from the elimination of the weak and the "survival
of the fittest."
This "degenerate and unlovely age," as one
historian calls it, exists in the mind of Karl Rove the reputed brain of
George W. Bush as the seminal age of inspiration for the politics and
governance of America today.
No wonder that what troubled our progressive forebears
was not only the miasma of poverty in their nostrils, but the sour stink of a
political system for sale. The United States Senate was a "millionaire's
club." Money given to the political machines that controlled nominations
could buy controlling influence in city halls, state houses and even
courtrooms. Reforms and improvements ran into the immovable resistance of the
almighty dollar. What, progressives wondered, would this do to the principles
of popular government? Because all of them, whatever party they subscribed to,
were inspired by the gospel of democracy. Inevitably, this swept them into the
currents of politics, whether as active officeholders or persistent advocates.
Here's a small, but representative sampling of their
ranks. Jane Addams forsook the comforts of a middle-class college graduate's
life to live in Hull House in the midst of a disease-ridden and crowded Chicago
immigrant neighborhood, determined to make it an educational and social center
that would bring pride, health and beauty into the lives of her poor neighbors.
She was inspired by "an almost passionate devotion to the ideals of
democracy," to combating the prevailing notion "that the well being
of a privileged few might justly be built upon the ignorance and sacrifice of
the many." Community and fellowship were the lessons she drew from her
teachers, Jesus and Abraham Lincoln. But people simply helping one another
couldn't move mountains of disadvantage. She came to see that "private
beneficence" wasn't enough. But to bring justice to the poor would take
more than soup kitchens and fundraising prayer meetings. "Social
arrangements," she wrote, "can be transformed through man's conscious
and deliberate effort." Take note not individual regeneration or the
magic of the market, but conscious, cooperative effort.
Meet a couple of muckraking journalists. Jacob Riis
lugged his heavy camera up and down the staircases of New York's
disease-ridden, firetrap tenements to photograph the unspeakable crowding, the
inadequate toilets, the starved and hollow-eyed children and the filth on the
walls so thick that his crude flash equipment sometimes set it afire. Bound
between hard covers, with Riis's commentary, they showed comfortable New
Yorkers "How the Other Half Lives." They were powerful ammunition for
reformers who eventually brought an end to tenement housing by state
legislation. And Lincoln Steffens, college and graduate-school educated, left
his books to learn life from the bottom up as a police-beat reporter on New
York's streets. Then, as a magazine writer, he exposed the links between city
bosses and businessmen that made it possible for builders and factory owners to
ignore safety codes and get away with it. But the villain was neither the
boodler nor the businessman. It was the indifference of a public that
"deplore[d] our politics and laud[ed] our business; that transformed law,
medicine, literature and religion into simply business. Steffens was out to
slay the dragon of exalting "the commercial spirit" over the goals of
patriotism and national prosperity. "I am not a scientist," he said.
"I am a journalist. I did not gather the facts and arrange them patiently
for permanent preservation and laboratory analysis....My purpose was. ...to see
if the shameful facts, spread out in all their shame, would not burn through
our civic shamelessness and set fire to American pride."
If corrupt politics bred diseases that could be fatal
to democracy, then good politics was the antidote. That was the discovery of
Ray Stannard Baker, another journalistic progressive who started out with a
detest for election-time catchwords and slogans. But he came to see that
"Politics could not be abolished or even adjourned...it was in its essence
the method by which communities worked out their common problems. It was one of
the principle arts of living peacefully in a crowded world," he said
[Compare that to Grover Norquist's latest declaration of war on the body
politic. "We are trying to change the tones in the state capitals - and
turn them toward bitter nastiness and partisanship." He went on to say
that bi-partisanship is another name for date rape."]
There are more, too many more to call to the witness
stand here, but I want you to hear some of the things they had to say. There
were educators like the economist John R. Commons or the sociologist Edward A.
Ross who believed that the function of "social science" wasn't simply
to dissect society for non-judgmental analysis and academic promotion, but to
help in finding solutions to social problems. It was Ross who pointed out that
morality in a modern world had a social dimension. In "Sin and
Society," written in 1907, he told readers that the sins "blackening
the face of our time" were of a new variety, and not yet recognized as
such. "The man who picks pockets with a railway rebate, murders with an
adulterant instead of a bludgeon, burglarizes with a 'rake-off' instead of a
jimmy, cheats with a company instead of a deck of cards, or scuttles his town
instead of his ship, does not feel on his brow the brand of a malefactor."
In other words upstanding individuals could plot corporate crimes and sleep the
sleep of the just without the sting of social stigma or the pangs of
conscience. Like Kenneth Lay, they could even be invited into the White House
to write their own regulations.
And here are just two final bits of testimony from
actual politicians first, Brand Whitlock, Mayor of Toledo. He is one of my
heroes because he first learned his politics as a beat reporter in Chicago,
confirming my own experience that there's nothing better than journalism to
turn life into a continuing course in adult education. One of his lessons was
that "the alliance between the lobbyists and the lawyers of the great
corporation interests on the one hand, and the managers of both the great
political parties on the other, was a fact, the worst feature of which was that
no one seemed to care."
And then there is Tom Johnson, the progressive mayor
of Cleveland in the early nineteen hundreds a businessman converted to social
activism. 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, and paid virtually
nothing in taxes all through their pocketbook control of lawmakers and
judges. Johnson's argument for public ownership was simple: "If you don't
own them, they will own you. It's why advocates of Clean Elections today argue
that if anybody's going to buy Congress, it should be the people." When
advised that businessmen got their way in Washington because they had lobbies
and consumers had none, Tom Johnson responded: "If Congress were true to
the principles of democracy it would be the people's lobby." What a
radical contrast to the House of Representatives today!
Our political, moral, and intellectual forbearance
occupy a long and honorable roster. They include wonderful characters like Dr.
Alice Hamilton, a pioneer in industrially-caused diseases, who spent long years
clambering up and down ladders in factories and mineshafts in long skirts!
tracking down the unsafe toxic substances that sickened the workers whom she
would track right into their sickbeds to get leads and tip-offs on where to
hunt. Or Harvey Wiley, the chemist from Indiana who, from a bureaucrat's desk
in the Department of Agriculture, relentlessly warred on foods laden with risky
preservatives and adulterants with the help of his "poison squad" of
young assistants who volunteered as guinea pigs. Or lawyers like the brilliant
Harvard graduate Louis Brandeis, who took on corporate attorneys defending
child labor or long and harsh conditions for female workers. Brandeis argued
that the state had a duty to protect the health of working women and children.
To be sure, these progressives weren't all saints.
Their glory years coincided with the heyday of lynching and segregation, of
empire and the Big Stick and the bold theft of the Panama Canal, of immigration
restriction and ethnic stereotypes.
Some were themselves businessmen only hoping to control an unruly
marketplace by regulation. But by and large they were conservative reformers.
They aimed to preserve the existing balance between wealth and commonwealth.
Their common enemy was unchecked privilege, their common hope was a better
democracy, and their common weapon was informed public opinion.
In a few short years the progressive spirit made
possible the election not only of reform mayors and governors but of national
figures like Senator George Norris of Nebraska, Senator Robert M. LaFollette of
Wisconsin, and even that hard-to-classify political genius, Theodore Roosevelt.
All three of them Republicans. Here is the simplest laundry-list of what was
accomplished at state and Federal levels: Publicly regulated or owned
transportation, sanitation and utilities systems. The partial restoration of
competition in the marketplace through improved antitrust laws. Increased
fairness in taxation. Expansion of the public education and juvenile justice
systems. Safer workplaces and guarantees of compensation to workers injured on
the job. Oversight of the purity of water, medicines and foods. Conservation of
the national wilderness heritage against overdevelopment, and honest bidding on
any public mining, lumbering and ranching. We take these for granted today or
we did until recently. All were provided not by the automatic workings of free
enterprise but by implementing the idea in the Declaration of Independence that
the people had a right to governments that best promoted their "safety and
happiness."
The mighty progressive wave peaked in 1912. But the
ideas leashed by it forged the politics of the 20th century. Like his cousin
Theodore, Franklin Roosevelt argued that the real enemy of enlightened
capitalism was "the malefactors of great wealth" the "economic
royalists" from whom capitalism would have to be saved by reform and
regulation.
Progressive government became an embedded tradition of Democrats
the heart of FDR's New Deal and Harry Truman's Fair Deal, and honored even by
Dwight D. Eisenhower, who didn't want to tear down the house progressive ideas
had built only to put it under different managers. The progressive impulse
had its final fling in the landslide of 1969 when LBJ, who was a son of the
West Texas hill country, where the Populist rebellion had been nurtured in the
1890s, won the public endorsement for what he meant to be the capstone in the
arch of the New Deal.
I had a modest role in that era. I shared in its
exhilaration and its failures. We went too far too fast, overreached at home
and in Vietnam, failed to examine some assumptions, and misjudged the rising
discontents and fierce backlash engendered by war, race, civil disturbance,
violence and crime. Democrats grew so proprietary in this town that a fat,
complacent political establishment couldn't recognize its own intellectual
bankruptcy or the beltway that was growing around it and beginning to separate
it from the rest of the country. The failure of democratic politicians and
public thinkers to respond to popular discontents to the daily lives of
workers, consumers, parents, and ordinary taxpayers allowed a resurgent
conservatism to convert public concern and hostility into a crusade to
resurrect social Darwinism as a moral philosophy, multinational corporations as
a governing class, and the theology of markets as a transcendental belief
system.
As a citizen I don't like the consequences of this
crusade, but you have to respect the conservatives for their successful
strategy in gaining control of the national agenda. Their stated and open aim
is to change how America is governed - to strip from government all its
functions except those that reward their rich and privileged benefactors. They
are quite candid about it, even acknowledging their mean spirit in
accomplishing it. Their leading strategist in Washington - the same Grover
Norquist has famously said he wants to shrink the government down to the size
that it could be drowned in a bathtub. More recently, in commenting on the
fiscal crisis in the states and its affect on schools and poor people, Norquist
said, "I hope one of them" one of the states "goes
bankrupt." So much for compassionate conservatism. But at least Norquist
says what he means and means what he says. The White House pursues the same
homicidal dream without saying so. Instead of shrinking down the government,
they're filling the bathtub with so much debt that it floods the house,
water-logs the economy, and washes away services for decades that have lifted
millions of Americans out of destitution and into the middle-class. And what
happens once the public's property has been flooded? Privatize it. Sell it at a
discounted rate to the corporations.
It is the most radical assault on the notion of one
nation, indivisible, that has occurred in our lifetime. I'll be frank with you:
I simply don't understand it or the malice in which it is steeped. Many
people are nostalgic for a golden age. These people seem to long for the Gilded
Age. That I can grasp. They measure America only by their place on the material
spectrum and they bask in the company of the new corporate aristocracy, as
privileged a class as we have seen since the plantation owners of antebellum
America and the court of Louis IV. What I can't explain is the rage of the
counter-revolutionaries to dismantle every last brick of the social contract.
At this advanced age I simply have to accept the fact that the tension between
haves and have-nots is built into human psychology and society itself it's
ever with us. However, I'm just as puzzled as to why, with right wing wrecking
crews blasting away at social benefits once considered invulnerable, Democrats
are fearful of being branded "class warriors" in a war the other side
started and is determined to win. I don't get why conceding your opponent's
premises and fighting on his turf isn't the sure-fire prescription for
irrelevance and ultimately obsolescence. But I confess as well that I don't
know how to resolve the social issues that have driven wedges into your ranks.
And I don't know how to reconfigure democratic politics to fit into an age of
soundbites and polling dominated by a media oligarchy whose corporate journalists
are neutered and whose right-wing publicists have no shame.
What I do know is this: While the social dislocations
and meanness that galvanized progressives in the 19th century are resurgent so
is the vision of justice, fairness, and equality. That's a powerful combination
if only there are people around to fight for it. The battle to renew democracy
has enormous resources to call upon - and great precedents for inspiration.
Consider the experience of James Bryce, who published "The Great Commonwealth"
back in 1895 at the height of the First Gilded Age. Americans, Bryce said,
"were hopeful and philanthropic." He saw first-hand the ills of that
"dark and unlovely age," but he went on to say: " A hundred
times I have been disheartened by the facts I was stating: a hundred times has
the recollection of the abounding strength and vitality of the nation chased
away those tremors."
What will it take to get back in the fight?
Understanding the real interests and deep opinions of the American people is
the first thing. And what are those? That a Social Security card is not a
private portfolio statement but a membership ticket in a society where we all
contribute to a common treasury so that none need face the indignities of
poverty in old age without that help. That tax evasion is not a form of
conserving investment capital but a brazen abandonment of responsibility to the
country. That income inequality is not a sign of freedom-of-opportunity at
work, because if it persists and grows, then unless you believe that some
people are naturally born to ride and some to wear saddles, it's a sign that
opportunity is less than equal. That self-interest is a great motivator for
production and progress, but is amoral unless contained within the framework of
community. That the rich have the right to buy more cars than anyone else, more
homes, vacations, gadgets and gizmos, but they do not have the right to buy
more democracy than anyone else. That public services, when privatized, serve
only those who can afford them and weaken the sense that we all rise and fall
together as "one nation, indivisible." That concentration in the
production of goods may sometimes be useful and efficient, but monopoly over
the dissemination of ideas is evil. That prosperity requires good wages and
benefits for workers. And that our nation can no more survive as half democracy
and half oligarchy than it could survive "half slave and half free"
and that keeping it from becoming all oligarchy is steady work our work.
Ideas have power as long as they are not frozen in
doctrine. But ideas need legs. The eight-hour day, the minimum wage, the
conservation of natural resources and the protection of our air, water, and
land, women's rights and civil rights, free trade unions, Social Security and a
civil service based on merit all these were launched as citizen's movements
and won the endorsement of the political class only after long struggles and in
the face of bitter opposition and sneering attacks. It's just a fact: Democracy
doesn't work without citizen activism and participation, starting at the
community. Trickle down politics doesn't work much better than trickle down
economics. It's also a fact that civilization happens because we don't leave
things to other people. What's right and good doesn't come naturally. You have
to stand up and fight for it as if the cause depends on you, because it does.
Allow yourself that conceit - to believe that the flame of democracy will never
go out as long as there's one candle in your hand.
So go for it. Never mind the odds. Remember what the
progressives faced. Karl Rove isn't tougher than Mark Hanna was in his time and
a hundred years from now some historian will be wondering how it was that
Norquist and Company got away with it as long as they did how they waged war
almost unopposed on the infrastructure of social justice, on the arrangements
that make life fair, on the mutual rights and responsibilities that offer
opportunity, civil liberties, and a decent standard of living to the least
among us.
"Democracy is not a lie" I first learned
that from Henry Demarest Lloyd, the progressive journalist whose book,
"Wealth against Commonwealth," laid open the Standard trust a century
ago. Lloyd came to the conclusion to "Regenerate the individual is a half
truth. The reorganization of the society which he makes and which makes him is
the other part. The love of liberty became liberty in America by clothing
itself in the complicated group of strengths known as the government of the
United States." And it was then he said: "Democracy is not a lie.
There live in the body of the commonality unexhausted virtue and the
ever-refreshed strength which can rise equal to any problems of progress. In
the hope of tapping some reserve of their power of self-help," he said,
"this story is told to the people."
This is your story the progressive story of America.
Pass it on.
Bill Moyers's
Presidential Address
By John Nichols
The Nation Monday 09 June 2003
Democratic presidential candidates were handed a dream
audience of 1,000 "ready-for-action" labor, civil rights, peace and
economic justice campaigners at the Take Back America conference organized in
Washington last week by the Campaign for America's Future. And the 2004
contenders grabbed for it, delivering some of the better speeches of a campaign
that remains rhetorically -- and directionally -- challenged. But it was a
non-candidate who won the hearts and minds of the crowd with a "Cross of
Gold" speech for the 21st century.
Recalling the populism and old-school progressivism of
the era in which William Jennings Bryan stirred the Democratic National
Convention of 1896 to enter into the great struggle between privilege and
democracy -- and to spontaneously nominate the young Nebraskan for president --
journalist and former presidential aide Bill Moyers delivered a call to arms
against "government of, by and for the ruling corporate class."
Condemning "the unholy alliance between government
and wealth" and the compassionate conservative spin that tries to make
"the rape of America sound like a consensual date," Moyers charged
that "rightwing wrecking crews" assembled by the Bush Administration
and its Congressional allies were out to bankrupt government. Then, he said,
they would privatize public services in order to enrich the corporate interests
that fund campaigns and provide golden parachutes to pliable politicians. If
unchecked, Moyers warned, the result of these machinations will be the
dismantling of "every last brick of the social contract."
"I think this is a deliberate, intentional
destruction of the United States of America," said Moyers, as he called
for the progressives gathered in Washington -- and for their allies across the
United States -- to organize not merely in defense of social and economic
justice but in order to preserve democracy itself. Paraphrasing the words of
Abraham Lincoln as the 16th president rallied the nation to battle against
slavery, Moyers declared, "our nation can no more survive as half
democracy and half oligarchy than it could survive half slave and half
free."
There was little doubt that the crowd of activists
from across the country would have nominated Moyers by acclamation when he finished
a remarkable address in which he challenged not just the policies of the Bush
Administration but the failures of Democratic leaders in Congress to
effectively challenge the president and his minions. In the face of what he
described as "a radical assault" on American values by those who seek
to redistribute wealth upward from the many to a wealthy few, Moyers said he
could not understand why "the Democrats are afraid to be branded class
warriors in a war the other side started and is winning."
Several of the Democratic presidential contenders who
addressed the crowd after Moyers picked up pieces of his argument. Former US
Senator Carol Moseley Braun actually quoted William Jennings Bryan, while North
Carolina Senator John Edwards and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry tried --
with about as much success as Al Gore in 2000 -- to sound populist. Former
House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt promised not to be
"Bush-lite," and former Vermont Governor Howard Dean drew warm
applause when he said the way for Democrats to get elected "is not to be
like Republicans, but to stand up against them and fight."
Ultimately, however, only the Rev. Al Sharpton and Congressional
Progressive Caucus co-chair Dennis Kucinich came close to matching the fury and
the passion of the crowd.
Kucinich, who earned nine standing ovations for his
antiwar and anti-corporate free trade rhetoric, probably did more to advance
his candidacy than any of the other contenders. But he never got to the place
Moyers reached with a speech that legal scholar Jamie Raskin described as one
of the most "amazing and spellbinding" addresses he had ever heard.
Author and activist Frances Moore Lappe said she was close to tears as she
thanked Moyers for providing precisely the mixture of perspective and hope that
progressives need as they prepare to challenge the right in 2004.
That, Moyers explained, was the point of his address,
which reflected on White House political czar Karl Rove's oft-stated admiration
for Mark Hanna, the Ohio political boss who managed the campaigns and the
presidency of conservative Republican William McKinley. It was McKinley who
beat Bryan in 1896 and -- with Hanna's help -- fashioned a White House that
served the interests of the corporate trusts.
Comparing the excesses of Hanna and Rove, and McKinley
and Bush, Moyers said "the social dislocations and the meanness" of
the 19th century were being renewed by a new generation of politicians who,
like their predecessors, seek to strangle the spirit of the American revolution
"in the hard grip of the ruling class."
To break that grip, Moyers said, progressives of today
must learn from the revolutionaries and reformers of old. Recalling the
progressive movement that rose up in the first years of the 20th century to
preserve a "balance between wealth and commonwealth," and the
successes of the New Dealers who turned progressive ideals into national
policy, Moyers told the crowd to "get back in the fight." "Hear
me!" he cried. "Allow yourself that conceit to believe that the flame
of democracy will never go out as long as there is one candle in your
hand."
While others were campaigning last week, Moyers was tending the flame of democracy. In doing so, he unwittingly made himself the candle holder-in-chief for those who seek to spark a new progressive era.