Between Involvement and Utopia:
Past and Present

by Douglas Dowd

[The following is a talk given in Italian on 2004.11.25 at the Aula Magna, on Via Castiglione, University of Bologna, for the students of the School of Pedagogy. It was the closing speech of the day. Doug notes, "It is inconceivable that such a meeting would be held in a university in the U.S.A., let alone by its education faculty."]

Introduction

I am honored and pleased to speak to this wonderful gathering; but also much challenged, for the questions to be dealt with are as complicated as they are vital. My effort to do so will combine conclusions from personal experiences with my understanding of social and political history. My political involvement began in the 1930s; I begin with that.

In retrospect, I realize that the times that prompted me to become involved in efforts to achieve a decent and safe society were also a period in which — as with these times — it appeared to be virtually impossible to succeed in any degree.

I also recall that those who were pessimistic then were wrong at least as often as those who were optimistic. Why? Because it is quite simply impossible to predict the future of the social process, whether for better or for worse; societies, especially modern societies, are extraordinarily complicated and, in ways rarely understood even after major changes, delicately balanced.

Before going on, it is important to note some crucial linguistic differences, those between pessimism and despair and between optimism and hope. Your Antonio Gramsci underscored that with his famous epigram "Pessimism of the intellect; optimism of the will": words made all the more inspiring when we remember that he wrote them while deathly ill in a fascist prison.

A Clamorous World

My political life began in San Francisco in 1934, as all hell was breaking loose. The 1920s had been hailed as "the prosperity decade"; but already in 1929 the worst depression in U.S. and world history had begun. The Twenties had been ruled over confidently and arrogantly by about 200 giant industrial and financial companies. Directly or indirectly, they ran the economy and, as now, controlled national and regional governments and the media, with little dissent. Adding to their power was that the entire educational system, from kindergarten to the Ph.D., served as an approving audience for U.S. capitalism — so much so that the left economist Thorstein Veblen's study The Higher Learning in America was all too accurately subtitled: On the Conduct of Universities by Businessmen.

All of this was made especially clear in the long-standing U.S. laws favoring business interests against workers and, thereby legalizing desperately low wages and abusive working conditions. Unions were legal, but the law proclaimed that it was not legal to strike, that to do so would "violate the rights of private property" — equivalent to saying you may have an army, but no weapons. In consequence, as the 1930s began, what unions did exist were weak and/or corrupted, directly or indirectly controlled by and for the companies — the theme of the 1950s film "On the Waterfront" (with Marlon Brando) which some of you may have seen.

In 1932, as the economy continued its downward spiral, a new president was elected: Franklin D. Roosevelt. When elected, his socioeconomic position had been almost identical with the conservative Herbert Hoover, whom he had defeated. However, by 1935, FDR had come to support and to propose liberal social policies — which so infuriated the business world that he was accused of being "a traitor to his class." What had happened?

The official unemployment rate in 1933 was 25 percent (and that was an understatement). All but the top 10 percent of families in the nation were living in conditions of desperation, with about half "ill-fed, ill-housed, and ill-clothed," as FDR later put it. In 1933, all banks, faced with long lines of depositors whose "deposits" had been speculated away, were closed by government decree. And FDR's other economic policies were also to protecting business, neither designed nor able to assist people in their time of survival needs. In my own family (with only a mother), when I was only eleven, both my brother and I had to find work in order to supplement my mother's income as a teacher — which had been cut by 50 percent in 1930 — "take it, or leave."

Almost shocking in its suddenness given those conditions, from 1933 workers all over the country began their fight for "unions of their own choosing" and, although illegally, unleashed innumerable strikes.

Most spectacular of those early eruptions was the dockworkers' strike in San Francisco of 1934. It was met by ruthless and violent business and governmental opposition, despite — and because — of which, what had begun as a seemingly hopeless strike for an effective union became the first general strike in U.S. history; and for weeks, San Francisco was shut down.

I was then 14, and a typical high school student — reading "boys' books" concerned with adventure and heroism, intent more upon girls and my basketball skills than with anything else. Normal. However, when workers began to be shot and killed in the streets, I could not help but pay attention; soon after, to my surprise, I found myself joining a huge funeral procession on the city's main street.

Simultaneously or soon after, workers in autos, steel, electrical goods, rubber tires, and textiles were also organizing and striking — strenuously — and, still, illegally. When, as often, their tactics included the occupation of factories ("sit-down" strikes), they were dependent upon families and friends for the provision of food from outside. In numerous ensuing struggles, many were shot down and some killed, including wives and children, by governmental troops in the streets and fields surrounding the plants. But all of the strikes were won.

Had I and others in those years been asked to predict the outcome of all that turmoil, the virtually unanimous answer would have been: "They don't have a chance." So it seemed; but as worker militancy continued, spread, and deepened, it also gained increased public support — so much so that in 1935 FDR's main advisers told him that without a substantial shift to the left in his socioeconomic policies, he would lose the election of 1936.

Thus it was that the liberal "New Deal" began: Through their efforts and courage, what had been a powerless and denigrated working class had changed the "odds" from unfavorable to favorable. But something more had happened: The victories for workers and unionism came to benefit also the non-unionized population. From the mid-1930s up into the 1960s, there ensued a chain of legislation providing minimum wages and maximum hours and safety conditions on the job and the prohibition of child labor; plus some progress toward improved and more available public education, health care, and housing; and, if less obviously, a jump up for the socioeconomic and political "health" of the nation. FDR was re-elected for three more terms, until he died in 1945.

The Civil Rights and Antiwar Movements

Now I take a great leap ahead from the 1930s to the 1960s. As with the 1930s, but in greatly different world, two major political movements emerged "from the bottom up," one to gain rights for blacks which, as citizens, they should always have had, the other against a war thousands of miles away which never should have occurred. As earlier, neither seemed to have a chance of victory. I was much involved in both.

Black people's struggles had begun as an accompaniment of U.S. slavery, with steadily rising resistance by blacks and (in lesser numbers) whites — most famously with the efforts of abolitionists and the "underground railroad" in the years leading up to the Civil War. The defeat of the Southern slave states and the abolition of slavery did not, however, bring about the abolition of racism. Indeed, not only did racism continue in the South after the war when, under northern military occupation, blacks' rights began to be protected but it intensified in both the South and the North — up to and beyond the Second World War — as it does still now.

The always growing "freedom movement" from the 1960s on combined politics with literature with music, and it was much stimulated by the participation of blacks in the U.S. military during the Second World War; of course: If blacks could be wounded and die for their country, could they not also vote? And gain an education? And a decent job?

Taken together, those numerous and long-standing efforts of U.S. blacks produced W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, the Black Panthers, and many other groups that went south to struggle for the civil rights of blacks in what came to be called the "hot summer of 1964," given that name because of the widespread beating and jailing of many volunteers, three of whom were murdered by white sheriffs in Mississippi.

By then, no longer a boy but a professor at Cornell University I was part of a Cornell group that spent three summers on the Mississippi border. During that violent period, when we sought governmental protection through the FBI office in the South, not only were we refused but were treated abusively — in sickening contrast with the film glorifying the FBI in that time and place.

However, by 1966 and, once more, against all odds, the blacks in the area had begun — only begun — to achieve their civil rights, and steps were being taken to lessen the harshness of their social condition: For example, in the cotton-raising county where we worked in 1964–66 there were NO schools for black children and NO doctors or dentists for blacks of any age. By the 1970s, that had begun to change. A bit. For a while.

Meanwhile, in the 1960s, the U.S. was waging war in Vietnam. It had been a French colony since the 1830s. During World War II, FDR had promised Ho Chi Minh (leader of the North Vietnamese movement against the French) that the U.S. would see to it that they would gain independence after the war. That agreement was made in North Vietnam by OSS (paramilitary) agents of the U.S. who were working with the Vietnamese to help rescue our downed air crews (with which I was involved).

FDR died in 1945 and was replaced by the militaristic Harry Truman who immediately violated that agreement and, indeed, helped in the hasty transportation of French soldiers from France to Haiphong immediately after the war. The U.S. went on to finance the French war against the Vietnamese, which they lost at the Battle of Dienbienphu, in 1954. At which point, we took over.

All of thas was virtually unknown to all but a handful of people in the U.S.A. Among that handful were a few dozen professors, myself included, who were studying and teaching about Southeast Asia.

As U.S. covert involvement grew, we put together a group called the Inter-University Committee for a Debate on Vietnam: "the teach-in movement." The teach-ins, held in campus auditoriums, were debates between a prof and a governmental representative (CIA, Army, State Department). When we began in 1964 our audiences were small and mostly hostile; but by 1966 — the U.S. finally openly involved — the auditoriums were jammed with students — not least by young men subject to the draft, who cheered us and booed the governmental speakers.

In consequence, by the summer of 1966, the government, its war rationale continually exposed as deception, ceased to provide speakers. The teach-ins had done their job; what had been ill-received and seemed a folly when we began had made it both possible and necessary to add popular resistance to education. So it was that in a coalition with other groups — concerned with blacks' and women's rights, with peace, with unions, with poverty — in 1966 we turned our efforts toward organizing mass antiwar demonstrations, until war's end in 1975. We were called "The Mobe" (the Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam). (By now you may wonder how I found any time for my job as a professor. That's another story.)

As with the teach-ins, when the Mobe's public demonstrations began, they were unpopular to the point of danger: Workers whose jobs were tied to military production were prominent among those who sought to disrupt our marches with beatings and throwing stones. However. By 1969 we had trouble finding places spacious enough to accommodate the crowds of hundreds of thousands. Indeed, on one day late in 1969, a "national" demonstration was organized to take place in many cities simultaneously. That day there were 20 million people standing in public places all over the country to oppose the war. When we began in 1966, a crowd of 20 thousand was seen as a triumph.

Nor is it irrelevant here to recall what may be seen as a different sort of victory. In April 1970, the war still raging, along with Noam Chomsky and and the head of a religious antiwar coalition, I was invited to go to Hanoi for discussions with the North Vietnamese, and to examine some of the war destruction in the cities and the countryside. We were neither the first nor the last to be invited for such meetings.

We met with Vietnamese journalists, soldiers, academics, and "ordinary people"; but also with Prime Minister Pham Van Dong. He asked us many questions about the reactions of the people in the U.S. concerning the war, but he also wished to have us convey his and the Vietnamese people's gratitude for the antiwar movement's part in assuring that, except by the use of nuclear weapons, the U.S. could not win that war; that the Vietnamese would outlast the U.S. troops, its bombs, napalm, and Agent Orange — which, taken together, killed at least three million people in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, most of them civilians, many of them children.

It is important to note here that neither I nor anyone I worked with in those efforts ever thought that we could stop that obscene war; we thought, rather, that it was our obligation to make the effort, come what may. That is, as with optimism/pessimism regarding workers' struggles, so also with the civil rights and antiwar efforts. Consciously or not, many of us were living up to the spirit expressed by La Passionaria, an icon of the Spanish Civil War: "It is better to die on our feet than to live on our knees." Put differently, we were seeking not to be like what after World War II came to be called "the Good Germans": Those Germans who, when the Nazi horror began were appalled but said or did nothing; then became accustomed to them; then, after the war, said how disapproving they had been.

It was not optimism, but hope and self-respect that energized us; hope based on the belief that we were by no means unique in our attitudes; that, although for various reasons we had politically responded to horrors sooner than others, those others would ultimately be prompted to join us. And great numbers of them did.

This is another way of pointing to an important historical fact: Whether good or bad, there has never been a movement for social change begun by a majority — whether to start or to stop wars, to end or to deepen racism, to improve or to harm the lot of the majority; whether to move their society to the Left or to the Right. Indeed, what would be very difficult to explain would be if a majority were to initiate a movement for change; it is in the very nature of societies that the "majority" — naturally — accepts what is "normal"; the status quo.

Be that as it may, did "we win" the struggles noted above?

Sort of. As the saying goes, some battles were won, but the war to bring about a safe and sane and decent nation was by no means "won"; or, if it was on its way to being won, subsequently it was lost again.

Since the mid-1970s. union membership in the private sector in the U.S.A. has declined from over a third of wage-workers (itself inadequate) to under a tenth. That decline was inevitably accompanied by a virtually complete loss of liberal/left political strength on the state and national levels and, consequently, the erosion or end of social policies (in health care, housing, jobs, incomes, pensions, affirmative action, even of voting) that affect all, and most critically, minorities and the poor.

As for war, it hardly needs saying that since the 1980s the U.S.A. has become always more warlike in both actions and rhetoric, contributing to a political climate always more threatening to civil liberties, civil rights and socioeconomic decency.

Meanwhile, as both cause and effect, the U.S. government at all levels, never fully representative, has become a club of bought and sold legislators who listen mostly, or only, to lobbyists and campaign financiers — accompanied and aided by the consumerism that has induced most people to become fixated on borrowing to buy what they don't need, and to they pay little serious attention to their government's not providing what we do need — peace and environmental protection included.

Which takes us to the present. For over 70 years, I have paid close attention to socioeconomic/political matters and those regarding war and peace. Not one of those years has passed that have not stirred my anger, fears, worries, and disgust. The present situation, with or without Bush in the White house — but especially with him — has multiplied those feelings. Is it thus a time for pessimism? It surely is not a time for optimism, of course. But pessimism? Anger, fear, worry, and disgust, yes; pessimism, no.

Much earlier I noted the impossibility of accurate predictions (except by luck), and referred to the delicacy of the social balance. It is the latter as it affects today's society I now wish to discuss.

First, what are among today's most disturbing realities and ongoing tendencies? As I am speaking to an Italian audience, it is appropriate to point to the shift toward rightist policies that has taken place since Berlusconi has been Prime Minister: An always more serious erosion of social polices put in place from the 1960s on, as regards education, health, pensions and the like, on the one hand. while in the same years national policies toward immigrants and the poor were made harsher and those benefitting the rich and powerful were made more generous — with the latest outrage being a substantial alteration of the Italian Constitution that increases Berlusconi's power beyond the point of disgust to danger.

However, what happens in Italy does not threaten the rest of the world — as does, however, the substantial and accelerating rightward shift of the U.S.A.: economically, environmentally, militarily, politically and culturally. Although the first Bush administration is generally understood not to have won but stolen the election of 2000, it nevertheless implemented many harmful policies in all of those realms. Now that it can claim to have been re-elected, it must be expected to take that as a mandate to do whatever else it wishes to do, no matter the increase in already great damage at home and abroad.

In seeking to undo whatever useful reforms were made from the 1930s through the 1960s, because today's world is more closely interdependent, more fragile and explosive than ever in the past, its policies are worse than reactionary. Plus: the U.S. is a nation whose people are easily manipulated by realistic and contrived fears, armed with an arsenal of "weapons of mass destruction" — which we have already used (nukes in Hiroshima, and chemical in Vietnam). It is known that we are prepared to use all of them and more if and when the White House sees fit to do so.

So what are the "delicate balances" that might reverse the foregoing tendencies? First, it may be asserted that what could turn out to be among those "balances" must remain unknown, as usual, until they have had their effect. But there are some that are known, and in several realms: that fragile global economy, a deepening and widening military and political abyss in the Middle East, as abrasive political clashes becoming common: everywhere.

In a time when the social existence becomes always more disagreeable, frustrating, and frightening, the temptation is strong to look the other way and indulge one's own needs and pleasures; which, to the degree that such behavior becomes common, makes a worse world all the more likely — most especially in our world, especially in the United States. We are taught from childhood to be competitive — an attitude best and most terribly characterized by a U.S. professional football coach, Vince Lombardi, of Italian descent, but representing none of its positive qualities. When a journalist asked him "Is it true, Coach Lombardi, that you believe 'winning is everything'?" "Hell, no!" was his response; "Winning is the only thing." To which he may well have added, "by any means available."

To the degree that such a standard guides us personally and politically, the world cannot but become always more dangerous, more disgusting, more tragic — it has always been that way in my life time, if less so than now. A central notion of this conference has had to do with "utopia" — a term I have always taken to refer to "nowhere." In all my efforts, I have never had a "utopian" society as my aim. However, I have been working toward ends which, were they ever to succeed fully, might well meet that word's definition — a continuing movement for a fully democratic society that would make possible a sane, decent, peaceable, interesting, and comfortable world for all, a world in which all peoples, everywhere, would have their basic needs (for nutrition, shelter, education, health, and opportunity) met. That is, "fully" democratic means not just political democracy (voting, etc.), but social and economic democracy, in which social power is dispersed equally among all people.

I have never believed that such a society would or could come to be in my life; nor in your or your children's and grandchildren's lives. What I do believe is possible is a

sustained movement toward such goals. For, when progress is made — toward a strong union, toward health care, better education, etc — those who have brought that about and those who are benefitting from it all begin to have their ideas and their perspectives altered, become able to see that more of the same and some related policies are necessary, possible, and worth working for, as those who become part of the effort multiply.

Working politically expands our horizons and changes both those who work for it and others who, up to then, have not.

To which there a warning must be added: If and when ordinary people construct an effective movement for socioeconomic change, those accustomed to rule are themselves prompted to organize and, by any means necessary, to seek to stop progressive movements.

Fascism — which a British philosopher called "capitalism with the gloves off" (where the "gloves" were political democracy and common decency) — began here in Italy, and did so in response to a movement which, as the 1920s began, was the strongest and best-organized workers' movement in the world — to be repeated in one form or another in Germany, in Japan, and elsewhere.

Faced with such possibilities, the reaction of many might understandably be to hold back and hope for the best: Just what those who rule want; and formerly unthinkably horrible conditions will become even worse.

We live in such times; there have been bad times in the past, also, of course; but because there have also always been some who have fought for a better world, the worst has often — although not always — been averted. This is not a proper occasion to pursue that generalization in sufficient detail; but the efforts of one of your greatest writers — Primo Levi — shed light on it.

Levi was born of a Jewish family in Turin, in 1919. He became a chemist and then, during World War II, a member of the partigiani, fighting against the fascists and nazis. He was captured by the Germans and sent to a concentration camp. Because he was a chemist, he was put to work instead of being killed. After the war he wrote many non-fiction books and one novel.

All were concerned with the what I have been concerned with here today: the threats and challenges to the human spirit in terrible times. His novel was entitled Se non ora, quando? That was one of three questions raised by Rabbi Hillel over 2,000 years ago: If I am not for myself, who will be? If am for myself alone, what am I? And, if not now, when?

It is easier to ask those questions than to answer them. Levi's response serves to help us bring out the best in ourselves. Easier said than done, of course.

My own way of answering was to become politically involved when and where I could. The resulting experiences were not always pleasant. There more defeats than victories, and the victories were usually partial and temporary. Also,I have always worked with many different groups, but I have never agreed fully with everything any group stood for, nor liked all the people I have worked with. Nor have all of them liked me. But long ago I came to realize that full agreement and universal affection are not what politics — or life — is about.

Now, as I look back on a long and what I view as a wonderful life, I realize that among the several positive and splendid elements of that life, one that was central was my political involvement — no matter what.

May you be so fortunate.

2004.11.26