Radical Americans; 6; Past, Present and Future

The following program is a presentation of National Educational Television. The sixth, in a series on the malcontent political minority, most left and right. Hello, I'm Donald Fouser, reporter on The Radical Americans. The thesis of these programs has been that radical ideas are a tradition in this country, and today have a right to be heard. Concepts of what a radical or not radical change from generation to generation, and yesterday's radical ideas are today's accepted political philosophy. But as a definition, we have maintained that political radicalism is a philosophy that would alter the present political system radically. That is, at the root, it would make the system significantly different. In 19th century America established a tradition for radicalism, a heritage for today. The abolitionists were radical, maintained that certain kinds of private property were immoral, slaves were private property, it was not like to own slaves, there were radical political parties

in the 19th century, they were essentially free silver parties, green back parties, cheap money parties, tied with a form of agrarian discontent. The main thrust was anti-industrial, that somehow the industrial society didn't lead to the good life and somehow had to be altered radically by land distribution as in the Homestead Act or through easy money. In our own century probably the most impressive successful radical movement was the labor movement. Today it is the move for civil rights, for equal rights, for Negroes and the disenfranchised poor whites. Today we take a look at several aspects of the history of radicalism in this century. Radicalism in the past by definition has always been considered left of center. It is only in the last few years, with the emergence of a vocal, ultra-conservative right, that the right has also been identified as radical. The radical left is, so far, the more significant movement. One of the spawning grounds for radicalism in this country is the northern Midwest,

especially Wisconsin and Minnesota. This is the home territory of vice president Hubert Humphrey. We ask Tim to assess the contribution of the political radical in this country. Well, if you mean by radical a Dr. Nair communist or Dr. Nair extreme right-wingers, pseudo-fascist, I don't think they contribute much but trouble. They're not really progressive, they try to call themselves either radicals or progressives, particularly the left wing, the communist, but he's not, he's a reactionary, he's a mental reactionary, he's a victim of dogma and doctrine, he has an insufferable kind of locked-in set of attitudes that have no movement or flexibility. And I don't call that kind of person radical or even progressive or liberal. They stand in their own way and their own feet as communist, as Dr. Nair communist. But now if by radicals, if you mean the indigenous, native-born, local vintage type of protesting

movement out of the American fabric or social fabric, I think they make a great contribution, an important one. They are the ones that shake up the established order. They compel the political parties as we know in America to take another look, to make some adjustments, the truth is that most of these liberal radical movements have been absorbed. Unofficial philosopher of the new left, a radical, and a historian at Yale University, Stoughton Linde. There's important evidence of radical dissent in the American past and one of the things which I feel I'm trying to do as a historian is to get across to the young people that some of the things that matter to them have mattered to other people in the times past as well.

And they needn't feel, so to speak, out on the end of an existential doc in the midst of a hostile time space continuum that they stand at the end of a respectable and honorable tradition which has included Tom Pames and Henry Thoreau's and many others who were good patriotic Americans in whom our textbooks now glorify. The rise of the labor movement in this century raised a question about its future. Should labor attempt to remain radical and outside the political system, or should labor try to become absorbed into mainstream America and in doing so somehow alter the mainstream. Writer about radicals and radicalism, Professor Daniel Bell of Columbia University. You've always had a kind of indigenous churning up of the society from many different sources. In many instances, the kinds of radicals, let's say, that the working party in 1828 began was very quickly absorbed by the Democratic Party. And this has always been an aspect of the society, too, that you haven't had these rigid party lines which have rejected various demands made upon the society.

It's been more adapted with fluid and the result is that the movement somehow got lost in the absorption process. The radicalism of the 30s seems to be somewhat different, the radicalism of the CIO, because this is radicalism in part which was intensified by the very fierce resistance on the part of large corporations, intensified to the extent of trying to break the unions and sometimes trying to be very violently, hiring strike breakers using tear gas, calling out troops or having private troops to this sort, as soon as the accommodation was reached and very largely reached during the war, when there's a sense of nationality fostered by the need for closing ranks and you've got maintenance, membership clauses, union security clauses, et cetera. Then the unions began to build, in a sense, their own structural roots inside the factories, grievance procedures, contracts. Take a look at a labor contract 20 years ago in a labor contract today, a union contract that's still known with real industry will be a 2,300-page document, extraordinary technical, covering all kinds of contingencies in this way.

It doesn't necessarily deal with the, make a man less angry or middle than about a circumstance, but already the union as a union has a place within the system. Well, I'm very skeptical of that orientation because it's that very experience with the labor movement that I think some of us feel offers a precedent to be avoided rather than to be followed. The labor movement became something of a left wing in the Democratic Party, but it did so at a price, and I would say that the price was above all the tacit agreement to support American foreign policy, the quid pro quo being a variety of social reforms and benefiting a particular group within the country. I think many of us feel that it would be tragic if the civil rights movement or other protest groups today were to work within the Democratic Party at the price of that kind of tacit agreement to support what seems to us often at a liquidist foreign policy.

The war on poverty sprang into being shortly after the publication of a book The Other America by Michael Harrington. His thesis was that 20 to 25 percent of the country was in poverty and something should be done about it. To now heads the league for industrial democracy, a radical educational organization oriented toward labor. Michael Harrington. I think one has to make a series of distinctions about the labor movement. First of all, generally speaking, the ideology of the American labor movement is liberalism. That is to say social change within the general structure of American society. Given that goal, it seems to me that for all the criticisms one can make of the labor movement. Nevertheless, it is the largest single institution politically supporting domestic social change in the United States. And if you look for where you get the support for Medicare or for the anti-poverty legislation or for an education act, the labor movement and the representatives who in a sense

derive their support from the unions are really the bulk of that. In addition, I think that there are trade unionists who represent something beyond day-to-day liberalism and who do have a much more radical perspective. I think that there are probably proportionately fewer trade unionists today who have this radical vision than in the 30s because for a whole variety of reasons, the obvious extremity of the problems in the 30s, labor in general was more radical. But I think that trade unionists who are associated with the LID do have this radical vision. The labor movement in its early days was a radical movement. I wouldn't call it very radical now. Why did it stay radical? Well, it achieves so many of its objectives. Sometimes I think people forget that a movement has objectives to achieve. And once it achieves most of those objectives, then it moves more slowly but more

sure fluidly to other objectives. The labor movement has the right to organize now and it understands the art of collective bargaining. It has improved a lot of the working men both organized and unorganized, but it continues to move into new areas. For example, the United Automobile Workers almost have what you call a guaranteed annual wage, which was a radical departure 25 years ago. The health and welfare benefits are frankly more generous than most any program of socialized medicine that any European country has. I've said a number of times that American corporations have more radical, progressive fringe benefits for their employees than any government ever thought of. Much more so than Medicare or Social Security under our governmental structure and yet it's all done in the name of free enterprise. What did this way? I think that in the last four or five years, the number of ideas that we have accepted or profess to accept are extraordinary.

The Automation Commission advising the President of the United States has just come out endorsing the proposal that we guarantee an annual income as a right for every citizen. I was associated with a group called the ad hoc committee on the Triple Revolution, which proposed this less than two years ago, and at the time the editorial writers regarded this as a bunch of nuts who wanted to subsidize lazy people, now in less than two years and about 23 months. An idea goes, so to speak, from the Fringe of Society, where it's argued and held by a few radical intellectuals, and it becomes the unanimous proposal of a commission, including businessmen, to the President of the United States. So in terms of ideas, I think we're moving very fast. What disturbs me is I think that quite often our rhetoric outruns our commitment, for example, in the State of the Union message, President Johnson said, and it's absolutely true, that we have to completely rebuild entire cities, that there is a fundamental crisis of urban life that central city cores are actually rotting away.

So he said, that's what I'm going to do. That's part of the great society, and we're going to rebuild cities. So then the budget comes out, and one discovers that what he has proposed now for that is $5 million of think money, which is really something within the scope of a decent-sized foundation. It's hardly big enough for the federal government, $5 million is a nickel or a dime in federal government budget terms. More than that, the President has said that he is going to go all the way up in the first phase of this program to about $2.5 billion. But that, again, is utterly inadequate, New York City could spend $2.5 billion on Harlem alone. And I also think it's ironic that this money amounts to only a little more than General Motors made in profit this year, and that gives a certain sense of our priority. So my concern is that we have been accepting good ideas in the last five years. But I think sometimes we accept them, we proclaim them, we put a few million dollars into

them, and then we act as if we've solved something, I don't think we have at all. The frustration Michael Harrington feels today has been shared by radicals of the past. Six times socialist party candidate for president of the United States, Norman Thomas, on the contributions of his party to political argument. You could go back to the origin of the president's power party, our socialist party, which is 1900, the first year at Rand Dabbs, it was made of party in 1991. We were pioneers in proposing everything you can think of in principle. We call it immediate demands, but demands that would help the people now in the way to a fuller socialism, which socialism would require, for instance, the capture of the natural resources for the people and utilities and so on. But we proposed all kinds of things, unemployment insurance, responsibility to the government for unemployment, collective bargaining, the rights of unions to organize, to strike and to bargain.

We were pioneers on women's suffrage, we were pioneers on the income tax, I don't know whether people love us, but it's a very essential form of taxation. You can hardly think of anything, that in principle we didn't make some proposals, often less adequate than were later adopted. Another force in the 20th century radicalism were the progressives, vice president Humphrey. I think that sort of a radical progressive movement has a great deal to offer to American life. We've seen the same thing in American economics. The modern American corporation is a radical departure from the early capitalist structure. Former credit was a very radical departure from the established credit structure of American banking, the whole housing program ensured mortgages, radical departure from normal lines of credit and normal banking practices.

The savings alone is an association, truly a radical innovation in American economics. So the word radical, if you think of it in terms of how it seeks to change all patterns in a constructive manner, then I think it has had a decidedly significant effect. I'm sure that one would say in the beginning days of, well, the women's suffrage movement was a radical movement. Many people thought was very radical, and yet it had a great impact. The fight for the income tax was a highly radical proposal, and led by, well, people that felt that the tax structure was unjust and inequitable, and they made a bitter struggle to change it. The argument still ranges among radicals today. Should they hold out for their ideals, or should they take what they can get in terms of social change now? Michael Harrington spells out their dilemma. Their two dangers, one danger is that you become so utterly radical that you lose all

sense of contact with reality, and all relationship to serious social movements. That is, to me, radicalism does not mean. As I think it does to some people who don't understand this problem, simply making the most bold sounding proposal. Let's send the trillion dollars to India overlooking the fact that India does not even have the personnel to absorb a trillion dollars of capital. So the one danger of the radical, it seems to me, as it falls into a sectarian utopianism, which has no relation to the actual lives of people, poor people, workers, Negroes, etc. And just sounds good. The other danger is that the radical will, in terms of relating to the actual existing movements of people. Mute his proposals, lower his sights, and instead of thinking in terms of fundamental problems and restructuring society, will accept some kind of accommodation, some kind of adjustment of the society.

So it seems to me that the radical vocation is an ambiguous or a tense vocation, in which one both tries to look as far beyond as possible, and at the same time to stay as rooted in the actual, present reality as possible. Mute leaned on the other hand, believes in the radical pressing his demands, staying outside political alignments. One thing seems to me clear, and that is, that you have rather a different situation than in the 1930s, because it seems to me that what happened at the end of the 1930s, where in the labor movement there was much the same kind of ferment, that there was in the civil rights movement during the last 10 years, what happened at the end of the 1930s was that labor on the hall became a part of the established scheme of things. One more vested interest in the cluster of vested interests from which labor had previously been excluded. Now, I think this could easily have happened to the civil rights movement, had it not

been for the Vietnamese war, and what has happened instead is that a sizeable number of people in the civil rights movement, rather than, so to speak, taking their slice of the pie and sitting down happily to hurt people, have developed a new kind of identification with poor and dark-skinned people all over the world, in Vietnam or the Congo or Santa Domingo as well as in Mississippi, so that there is a kind of tension it seems to me in the civil rights movement now that there was not in the labor movement in the late 1930s. Not all radicals feel that civil rights and anti-Vietnam war are interconnected. Radical journalist who publishes his own weekly newsletter, IF Stone. The older radical movements in peace movements have sort of an envious of the mass character of the civil rights movement, have tried to find some way to hitch a ride, so to speak on the back of the civil rights movement, civil rights movement represents the aspirations of a big section of the population, the Negroes, the Mexican-Americans, the Puerto Ricans,

the poor Indians, and they're a real mass movement, and they have a real mass base, and the countries on the defense in, after all a national ideology is human equality. And while ideology like religion is often ignored, you just talk about it, it's still it's there, and a country like ours, based on the idea of human equality, cannot go on denying equality to these people's second class citizens. And yesterday's radicals are today's policy. I think that's a fact. I wouldn't say that yesterday's radicals are today's conservatives, because that's not true. I think yesterday's radicals are today's season political leaders frequently, because you learn a great deal, you get bumped around and like stones in the rolling waves on the shoreline that you have, it has a tendency to polish the rather rough edges, and yet you're a part of the movement that still continues.

There are new movements, of course, taking place, the civil rights movement, which many people termed a radical movement, is essentially an indigenous American protest movement. And another nice thing about this new generation of kids is that while all the old time movements, splitters, and mouths, and trustees, and communists are there, that the large body of them are very different from their fathers. They don't want prefabricated solutions. They realize the very complicated world. They realize that a lot of human problems are not really soluble. You learn how to mitigate them and moderate them and live with them, and then no easy answers. Any answers to many of these things, you have to willingness to struggle and make things, and check, put some check on evil. They're willing to do this, and they're willing to listen if you talk in those terms. They don't, they don't, they're ready for can to talk of that kind. They don't want easy party line ways out, and this is very encouraging in my opinion.

It's often put the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was written in the streets of Birmingham, and the Civil Rights Act of 1965 on the road between Selma and Montgomery. Now to what extent that will be true in the national dialogue about Vietnam, I think it's a bit soon to say. There's no doubt that direct action, whether in civil rights or in peace, does create tensions and hostilities, as well as opening up dialogue, and as always the question as to whether more tension and hostility than readiness to communicate is the result of what you do. All the scare newspaper headlines, the violence, the mass marching raise a serious question. Can radicalism destroy the society it seeks to improve? Professor Daniel Bell. Well, I was talking about the fragility of institutions and the whole question of threats to a society in these terms.

Let me give you two illustrations, or as I may sound. In 1993 there was a tremendous amount of unemployment on rest in this country, and a number of people decided the one to march on Washington. They start out from Ohio, led by a man with the other, they have a general Jacob Coxie. You may remember the phrase Coxie's army. He wasn't a real general, he was simply given the appellation at that time. Well, after several weeks, about 400 people straggled into Washington to try to have a big demonstration with even some intention in the part of the notion of some of them overthrowing the government this way. The Coxie's army is sort of a ragtag and bobtail army, in this respect. In 1963 when Martin Luther King and Phil Randolph want to organize a march on Washington, a quarter of a million people poured in and made a very impressive demonstration and a cause we could all support. But it also seems to me gives pause to the proposition that now the possibility of actually marching on Washington, mobilizing people, gives a very different sense of politics than was possible, rating the late 19th and early 20th century.

And to this extent, emphasize what I'd call here the fragility again of political institutions. And I was tied in with one other aspect, let's say, of American life, which has always been the case, which is very often the unwillingness to respect the law and the fundamental sense. The idea, well, it's only a law we might as well disregard what the hell, besides if we can cut a corner and get moving too fast, et cetera. My own feeling about civil disobedience and direct action, emphasizes one or two things particularly first. I just think there's a difference between a style of law breaking which involves shooting a man in the back as so often in the south. And that kind of conscientious law breaking which has been practiced by a long line of figures beginning with Socrates and coming down to Gandhi, which in effect says, I feel I cannot obey this particular law.

However, I will disobey it in such a way that at least the immediate consequences fall on myself rather than on others. And if in the judgment of society, I must be punished for my act, I will accept that punishment cheerfully in the hope that through my action, I will have communicated with others in a way that I couldn't have by any other means. The techniques of radicalism aside, what is the influence of the radical left today, Professor Daniel Bell? Fundamentally, most of the new new radicalism, and certainly my third of my new new new new, are not really political movement in the more limited sense we've talked about in the name me, of trying to actually win office, change things. There, in the sense of fundamentally taking attitudes, trying many respects of the best, deal with moral problems, raise moral questions, and therefore as a political movement, they've bound to some extent to begin to fail to falter. So they knew left of the college campus I think represents a spirit of inquiry, a spirit

of the desire of social participation on the part of the youth of America that no longer is the victim of poverty and depression and recession. It is possibly a more thoughtful protest than we've had in the past. Much of the protest of the past was because there were so many evident evils. I mean, you didn't have a job, or the interest rates were too high, or there was them. Actually, there was great economic injustice and political injustice. Now, while there's still enough of that to arouse anybody's sensitivity today, it isn't quite as obvious, particularly for some of the young people that are in the protest movements. They're not the children of the poor. And they're not people that have been denied an education. They're not folks that never had a job or couldn't get one. They're actually, many of them are, most of them are people of well-to-do families, or at least middle-income families.

They're from the college campuses where they're getting the best education in the world, and they have had a chance for a full and rewarding social life. Then why is it that they are a protest? Because I think they have in some way a guilt complex that it's almost too good for them. But more importantly, they possibly feel that this, which there's been theirs, should be shared more equitably and generously by those who have not had this privilege. So while they're not protesting against the injustice to themselves, they're protesting against the fact that there is still injustice or inequity that affects others in the society. And when this does affect others, it in a sense diminishes your own worth and your own dignity and your own happiness. It's maybe a more perceptive, a more generous and a more basic type of dissent than many of us knew in our younger days. If the past is any gauge, the radicals on the left are probably the harbingers of the way

society will move in the future. What's happened increasingly is that radical positions have been quickly taken over by the center and incorporated into the center. If you take only civil rights as an example, a really radical rebellion against the society of a large part of the country is suddenly supported by the government itself, and the government takes over the radical position. This makes it tough on radicals who seek to build parties and movements. So it has become the role of the radical in our society to challenge our comfortable assumption and get things moving. Thank you.

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