Book Review: ‘Seven Social Movements That Changed America,’ by Linda Gordon

SEVEN SOCIAL MOVEMENTS THAT CHANGED AMERICA, by Linda Gordon

This is what political upheaval looks like when delivered from on high: The president of the United States directs the world’s richest man to descend on federal agencies and treat them like a private company, slashing funding and purging workers, with nary a peep from the Republican majority in Congress.

But as the standard-bearer of the MAGA movement, President Trump also owes his ascendancy to a political transformation that bubbled up from below. “Social movements have changed the world as often and as profoundly as wars, natural disasters and elections have done,” the historian Linda Gordon writes in “Seven Social Movements That Changed America.” They are entwined with democracy as both a product of mass political power and a factor in its spread. And even when they adopt the language of populism, they can also promote authoritarianism, at least for those people excluded from their ranks. One chapter in her book traces the revival in the 1920s of the Ku Klux Klan, whose middle-class recruits made virulent bigotry mainstream.

Gordon’s chapter on the Klan is an outlier in a book that is otherwise filled with 20th-century movements she admires. (Her previous work of history was “The Second Coming of the KKK.”) “Seven Social Movements” begins with settlement houses, which helped migrants and the poor get toeholds in the cities, and ends with the second-wave feminist groups Bread and Roses and the Combahee River Collective.

In between she explores the rise and fall of the 1920s Klan; the campaign for old-age pensions; the swell of activism among the unemployed during the Great Depression; the Montgomery bus boycott in Jim Crow Alabama; and the United Farm Workers union under Cesar Chavez. The variety of her examples means that her working definition of a social movement is necessarily imprecise: “large-scale, participatory activism, beyond electoral politics, aimed at social and political change.”

This big-tent approach makes it harder for Gordon to tease out common threads, but she does select a few. Charismatic leadership, for example, is often double-edged. It can be a galvanizing force, supplying a movement with crucial energy along with a sense of direction. She tells the strange, circuitous story of a doctor by the name of Francis Townsend, who — at the age of 67 — created what Gordon calls “the largest social movement of the 1930s” that also happens to be “the least studied social movement in American history.” Townsend’s call for pensions for the elderly culminated in the Social Security Act of 1935.

Such a momentous policy looked like a towering success, even if Townsend went on to rail against Social Security as woefully insufficient, throwing in his lot with far-right demagogues like Father Charles Coughlin. In the chapter on the United Farm Workers, Gordon shows how Chavez commanded a cult of personality while letting his organization deteriorate: “There was no accurate record of how many union members were current, how many paid dues, whether dues corresponded to hours of work or who got what jobs.” Chavez, she writes, “was becoming a tyrant without a movement to tyrannize.”

But a lack of hierarchy can imperil a movement, too. Gordon, who writes about the feminist collective Bread and Roses from her experience as a participant, recalls how commitments to respond “to each other’s emotional needs” could sometimes “erode efficient decision making.” The motivation behind such commitments were noble: a desire for the movement to be a microcosm of the world it wanted to bring about. Moreover, Gordon notes, the fixation on participatory democracy could be self-defeating. The absence of organizational structure generated a vacuum, inadvertently amplifying the power and privilege of those women who could attend endless meetings because they happened to have more time on their hands.

The second-wave feminists Gordon writes about were still effective at pushing some of their ideas into the American mainstream. Even when organizations falter, movements can live on. A successful movement is one whose achievements become so embedded in the culture that they get taken for granted. “Younger generations of women are surprised and shocked when they learn about the many laws and practices that constricted women’s lives a half century ago,” Gordon writes. “The fact that these achievements are under attack should not keep us from celebrating what was accomplished — and understanding that these gains were produced by a social movement.”

She isn’t wrong, but it’s the kind of pat generalization that sits incongruously with the roiling history she so painstakingly describes. After all, as one of her earlier chapters shows, a very different set of “achievements” might be credited to the 1920s K.K.K.

The second Klan eventually collapsed under the weight of its leadership’s corruption, much of which came to light when the K.K.K.’s Grand Dragon in Indiana was convicted of torturing, raping and murdering his secretary. Feeling abandoned by the Klan, the Grand Dragon released documents detailing a web of graft. But the Klan — which at one point had as many as five million adherents — had already succeeded in normalizing and intensifying a culture of bigotry. This, Gordon suggests, was perhaps its “greatest accomplishment.”

Gordon is too restrained as a writer to go in for much editorializing, but she does quote from a speech about fascism that the novelist Toni Morrison delivered three decades ago. “Before there is a final solution, there must be a first solution, a second one, even a third,” Morrison said, reflecting on how a society slides from cruel rhetoric into violence. “The move toward a final solution is not a jump. It takes one step, then another, then another.”

SEVEN SOCIAL MOVEMENTS THAT CHANGED AMERICA | By Linda Gordon | Liveright | 515 pp. | $39.99