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Thought into Action

Lawrence Goodwyn on Democratic Movements

By Hayden Childs
The
Populist Moment: A Short History of Agrarian Revolt in America
Lawrence Goodwyn
Breaking the Barrier: The Rise of Solidarity
in Poland
Lawrence Goodwyn
Lawrence Goodwyn got his education as a
field reporter for the leftist Texas Observer in the early and
mid-1960s while covering
the Civil Rights Movement. When he later attended graduate school,
he realized that most of the academics he encountered had no idea
how people formed movements throughout history. He’d seen
it firsthand from the ground floor; they’d read about it
in books written from a safe remove by intellectuals. He had no
use for what he saw as an inherently elitist view of movements;
they had no use for an outsider who didn’t fall into simple
philosophical categories. It was clear there was going to be no
love lost between them.
However, despite his public harsh words for
some of his fellow historians (some of which appear in critical
essays on authorities
printed at the end of his treatises), Goodwyn has become one of
the most prominent historians in the United States on the strength
of his writing and no-nonsense approach to research. He has yet
to write a word about his experiences as a reporter covering the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee when it was tearing down
Jim Crow, piece by piece — well, not directly, at least. He’s
instead used his knowledge about social movements to dissect similar
movements in recent history, first domestically (with the Populist
political party from the end of the 19th century) and later abroad
(when Solidarity erupted in Poland in the late 1970s).
Goodwyn’s theory of social movements is
based on his observations of SNCC in their prime, as well as and
his common-sense arguments:
1) In order to communicate, people must have the freedom to express
ideas as equals (Goodwyn describes this as creating a “democratic
space”); 2) for ideas to flourish, this democratic space
must be extended to others through an education and recruitment
program (or, as Goodwyn names it, a “movement culture”;
and 3) to successfully challenge the hegemony of received culture,
the movement must become political while continuing to be led from
the bottom up, so that the voice of the movement is truly democratic.
These may seem like simple guidelines, but democratic
movements are surprisingly rare in history, since the vast level
of organization
and open lines of communication that must be built for real democratic
action to occur are daunting. There must be one clear issue to
catalyze the participants and inspire them to throw their differences
aside. In his books The Populist Moment and Breaking
the Barrier,
Goodwyn has documented two notable movements in recent history
that share these traits of democratic action, despite the differences
in time, culture and catalyzing issue.
In The Populist Moment, Goodwyn finds
the roots and raison
d’être for what became one of the
largest third parties of the Industrial Age in a farmers’ revolt
against the crop lien system. The United States had abandoned
the gold standard during the Civil
War, and the banking interests that pushed the nation’s monetary
policy back to the gold standard after the war devalued the worth
of land and crops to the point that, by the end of the 1880s, farmers
throughout the South, whether rich or poor, black or white, teetered
on the edge of financial collapse.
Enter the local merchant, the sole resident of most farming communities
who could actually get a loan from the bank. Farmers would take
a lien from the merchants to acquire the necessities of living
and working, which the merchants would provide at some undisclosed
interest. At the end of the harvest season, the farmer and the
merchant would meet to discuss the farmer’s debt, and somehow
the farmer would always owe more. After a few years of this, the
farmer’s debt to the merchant was so great that he eventually
had to sell his property to cover his debt and would wind up a
tenant farmer on what had been his own farm. Thus did more than
half of all farmers in the South go from landowners to tenants
or sharecroppers between the end of the Civil War and the turn
of the century.
Goodwyn gives us perspective on the issue, reminding
us of the various near-movements based around monetary policy after
the Civil
War such as the Greenback Party and the Grange. In the late 1870s,
a few Hill Country Texas farmers decided to band together as the
Farmers Alliance to fight the crop lien system using the idea of
cooperative strength. The Alliance intended to get credit en masse
and form their own cooperative-owned stores, but it found no banks
willing to extend credit, and instead floundered for a few years
until it attracted a visionary Mississippian, S.O. Daws — one
of the greatest and most unsung movement organizers ever. The Alliance
gave Daws the title of “Traveling Lecturer” and sent
him off to organize Alliances within other counties and states.
By 1885, the Alliance was 50,000 strong.
Goodwyn documents the growth of the Farmers Alliance, the early
successes of the cooperative movement, and the emergence of some
of the leaders of the party. He describes how the Alliance sent
lecturers across the South and into Kansas and the Midwest; and
he tells how everywhere the lecturers went, the allure of the cooperative
store brought together massive state Alliances and suballiances,
(as in Texas, January 1887, with 200,000 members out of a population
of 1.6 million). Eventually, one of the emergent leaders of the
Farmers Alliance, Charles Macune, hit upon the endgame idea that
would liberate all Alliancemen from the crop lien system: the sub-treasury.
Across the nation, the Alliance was finding its sources for credit
disappearing, and the Alliance lecturers spread the word about
the sub-treasury plan far and wide.
The sub-treasury was a simple plan: all Alliancemen, whether landowner
or tenant, black or white, would donate their assets to a central
state Alliance bank. Each state would buy supplies collectively
for all members and would market their crops collectively. The
landowners would provide collateral, and the tenant farmers would
mortgage a portion of their crops. As Goodwyn puts it, “The
farmers would sink or swim together; the landless would escape
the crop lien, too, or none of them would.” Dramatic stuff.
However, there were laws against this type of
action. The Farmers Alliance had to become explicitly political,
which led to the formation
of the Populist Party. Goodwyn’s narrative carries the story
in a near-breathless way as the burgeoning hope of the Populists
inevitably goes sour. Eventually, in-fighting between the true
believers and the politically opportunistic resulted in a betrayal
of the ideals of the party; but it is a testament to Goodwyn’s
strengths as a writer and a philosopher that you hope, as you read
their tale, these plucky, smart farmers will buck the system and
their movement will succeed. But, of course, history tells us otherwise.
The farmers were doomed, their movement stolen by opportunistic
and powerful men without a connection to the grassroots, men who
didn’t understand the need for a sub-treasury. The Party
leadership eventually endorsed William Jennings Bryan (the Democratic
Party nominee in 1896, a bearer of the silver monetary standard)
for President, an endorsement Bryan himself disdained. The Populist
moment passed and left shattered hopes in its wake.
Despite what you may remember about the eventual
downfall of the original Solidarity movement, Breaking the Barrier is
a more optimistic story. Goodwyn again provides the perspective,
plumbing the history
of Poland’s various labor uprisings from the 1950s through
the early 1970s to show us how shipyard workers could bank their
demand of worker-controlled trade unions on the threat of a General
Strike. Goodwyn details the means of communication for the Solidarity
movement: where the Populists had a web of lecturers able to pass
messages across the South and Midwest in days, the Solidarity movement
had not just loudspeakers in the Gdansk shipyard so that all of
the striking workers in the shipyard could hear the negotiations
of the strike committee, but also a secret web of messengers carrying
word to and from shipyards in other cities about the strike’s
progress. Goodwyn discusses how Lech Walesa, an electrician and
one of the principal leaders of the Gdansk shipyard strike, had
spent 10 years following the 1970 revolt discussing with his friends
and coworkers the possibility of their catalytic issue — worker-run
free trade unions within a Soviet satellite state like Poland.
He also points out the difference between the intellectuals who
arrived to help by listening and those who arrived with the assumption
that their credentials gave them reason to be in charge.
Most of us remember that Solidarity made the
Polish government blink. For most of 1981, Solidarity spread the
hope of democratic
culture throughout the country, but it was, unfortunately, too
much too fast for most who participated in it. Without the time
spent forging bonds over the catalytic issue, as the shipyard workers
had done for 10 years in Gdansk, most workers in Poland saw this
as an opportunity to make greater demands of government and many
intellectuals throughout the county saw Solidarity as a means to
greater power. The Soviets threatened removal of the Polish government,
and the government responded by cracking down on the workers and
establishing a military dictatorship. When Solidarity re-emerged
in 1989, it was a pale shell of itself, and Walesa, re-elected
as its leader, was notably unsure of the task before him.
Again, Goodwyn’s writing and thought turns what could be
dry history into a page-turner. Again, the reader longs for these
smart shipyard workers to succeed against the terrible odds. And
again, the promise of far-reaching democratic action proves to
be too fragile to survive entry into the political arena.
Breaking the Barrier may be the more accessible of the two books;
sadly, Oxford University Press has long since allowed it to fall
out of print. Still, copies show up on eBay and campus bookstores.
This generation is blessed and cursed by not having the clear moral
choices of past movements. The forces of oppression and control
are as alive today as they were in the late 19th century U.S. or
in 1980 Poland, but they have grown more subtle and the choices
more elusive. This doesn’t mean, however, that it’s
not worth fighting them. As Goodwyn shows, battling corrupt power
starts with a conversation. The trick, one of the most precious
and difficult tricks ever conceived by man, is turning that conversation
into lasting action. Goodwyn tells us that creating democracy is
earth-shatteringly difficult, but it is the most important thing
that we can do.

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