Civil Rights, Labor, Women’s Rights, and the Pattern of Movements That Seemed Radical Until They Won and Then Seemed Obvious
Civil Rights, Labor, Women’s Rights, and the Pattern of Movements That Seemed Radical Until They Won and Then Seemed Obvious
Every Right You Take for Granted Was Considered Dangerous Radicalism Within Living Memory
Here is a useful exercise for understanding social movements: take any right that Americans currently consider obvious and uncontroversial, and look up what respectable opinion said about it fifty years before it was established. The eight-hour workday was called communist agitation. Women’s suffrage was called a threat to the family, civilization, and the sanity of women, who were considered too emotional for the franchise by men who were, at that precise moment, presiding over World War I. The Civil Rights Act was called an unconstitutional federal overreach into private property rights, a position held not merely by segregationists but by a significant portion of the legal establishment. Same-sex marriage was considered a definitional impossibility within the memory of people who are currently serving in Congress. The pattern is consistent: what movements demand is radical until it wins, at which point it becomes obvious, and within a generation, people are genuinely unclear what all the fuss was about.
This pattern should produce humility about which current demands will be regarded as obvious in fifty years. It does not, broadly speaking, produce this humility. Each generation is quite confident it has sorted the genuinely radical from the merely overdue, and each generation is partially wrong in ways that become visible only in retrospect. This is not an argument for accepting every current demand. It is an argument for the epistemological modesty that American political culture finds deeply inconvenient and therefore largely ignores.
The Labor Movement: They Died for Your Weekend
The American labor movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries is responsible for: the eight-hour workday, the five-day workweek, the end of child labor, workplace safety regulations, the minimum wage, employer-provided health insurance, and the general principle that workers are entitled to something more than whatever an employer feels like paying on a given Tuesday. These gains are now so embedded in American economic life that many of the people who benefit from them most vocally oppose the unions that won them, which is a form of ingratitude so thorough it constitutes a kind of achievement.
The labor movement achieved these gains through strikes, which were illegal for much of the movement’s history, and through political organizing, which was considered subversive, and through violence – on both sides, though the side doing most of the killing was generally the employers and the Pinkertons they hired – and through the eventual recognition by Congress and the courts that workers had rights that the market would not spontaneously provide. The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 established the legal right to organize. Union membership peaked at approximately 35% of the workforce in the 1950s. It stands at approximately 10% today, having declined continuously since 1980 through a combination of deindustrialization, globalization, legal changes that made organizing more difficult, employer opposition, and the political success of a conservative movement that correctly identified unions as the organizational infrastructure of the Democratic Party and acted accordingly. The weekend remains. The movement that won it is diminished. The people enjoying the weekend are often unaware of the connection. This is either the movement’s greatest success – so thoroughly won that it became invisible – or its greatest vulnerability – so thoroughly forgotten that its gains can be eroded without the public noticing until the erosion is complete.
The Civil Rights Movement: Nonviolence Against Violence, Patience Against History
The Civil Rights Movement is the most studied social movement in American history and the one most frequently cited as a model for subsequent movements. Its achievements – the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Fair Housing Act of 1968 – transformed American law. Its methods – nonviolent direct action, strategic use of media, legal challenges, coalition building, mass mobilization – have been adopted by movements across the ideological spectrum. Its martyrs – Medgar Evers, Emmett Till, the four girls killed in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. – give it a moral weight that makes it politically radioactive to oppose in retrospect, which is why the politicians who opposed it most strenuously in 1964 were, by 1984, carefully repositioning their recorded votes as youthful errors or misunderstood procedural objections.
The Civil Rights Movement succeeded because it made the cost of maintaining segregation – in international reputation, in domestic political stability, in the moral coherence of American Cold War messaging about freedom and democracy – higher than the cost of ending it. President Kennedy sent federal troops to the University of Mississippi while simultaneously broadcasting American democracy to a world watching the Soviet Union point to Birmingham and ask which system was actually committed to human dignity. The movement created conditions in which the political calculation changed. It did not change hearts. It changed calculations. The hearts followed, slowly, partially, and not uniformly. The voting rights the movement won were partially gutted by the Supreme Court in 2013, which held that the preclearance requirements of the Voting Rights Act were based on outdated data, in a decision that produced new voting restrictions in the affected states within hours of its announcement, which is either a coincidence or a data point about whose calculations had changed and whose had not.
Women’s Suffrage: 72 Years of Being Told to Wait
The women’s suffrage movement began at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 and ended with the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 – 72 years of organized demand for the right to vote, conducted by women who were told, with remarkable consistency across seven decades, that the time was not right, that women did not actually want to vote, that voting would unsex women, that women’s proper sphere was the home, and that more pressing matters demanded attention. The more pressing matters changed across 72 years. The advice to wait did not. The women did not wait. They organized, petitioned, marched, were arrested, went on hunger strikes, were force-fed in prison, and continued until the amendment passed, at which point the people who had told them to wait for 72 years explained that of course women deserved the vote and always had, and expressed mild bafflement that anyone had ever thought otherwise.
The Nineteenth Amendment guaranteed women the right to vote. It did not guarantee that women’s votes would be counted equally – Black women in Southern states faced the same disenfranchisement mechanisms as Black men and would not effectively gain voting rights until 1965. The suffrage movement was itself divided on race; some suffragist leaders explicitly argued for women’s suffrage on the grounds that educated white women deserved the vote more than Black men who already had it, which is a position that has not aged well and which the movement’s hagiographic history tends to skip past with some speed. Social movements are coalitions of humans with human limitations, and the Civil Rights Movement, the labor movement, the suffrage movement, and every other movement that history now regards as obviously correct were also organizations with internal contradictions, strategic disagreements, and moral failures that their subsequent celebration tends to smooth over. This is not a reason to dismiss their achievements. It is a reason to apply the same critical lens to current movements that we apply to historical ones, which is something current movements understandably resist.
SOURCE: The London Prat