It seems we need to begin to resign ourselves to the reality of the Trump presidency.
We are more than one month in, and no one has rescued us from his stumbling around the oval office like the proverbial bull in the china shop crashing into the delicately balanced institutions of our democracy. Absent some political miracle, such as Republicans recognizing that they are supposed to serve the country and not their own power, he could conceivably remain in office for at least four years.
We should not allow those for years to pass quietly. It may often seem that demonstrations, protests, and even general strikes serve no immediate, concrete purpose, but they do. They make it clear to Trump that he does not have the support of all of the American people, and it also makes it clear to our congressional representatives. And to our allies overseas who are increasingly concerned about our new direction. More importantly, they confirm that we are not alone in our disgust with the vulgarian in chief.
In Hell No: The Forgotten Power of the Vietnam Peace Movement, Tom Hayden reminds us of just how powerful a protest movement can become. Sadly, as time passes, the reason for the protests remain vivid in our history, but the protests themselves, and the victories they achieved, are being slowly erased from our collective memory. As Hayden writes,
Truth, it is said, is war’s first casualty. Memory is its second.
Hell No is his final attempt to remind us. And in many ways he succeeds.
Hell No: The Forgotten Power of the Vietnam Peace Movement
Published by: Yale University Press
January 31, 2017
168 pages
As the founder of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and author of the Port Huron Statement, Tom Hayden’s activism began in his early college years, and continued all of the way until his death on October 26, 2016. An early supporter of Bernie Sanders, he switched his allegiance to Hillary Clinton, as he wrote in The Nation last April:
I intend to vote for Hillary Clinton in the California primary for one fundamental reason. It has to do with race. My life since 1960 has been committed to the causes of African Americans, the Chicano movement, the labor movement, and freedom struggles in Vietnam, Cuba and Latin America. In the environmental movement I start from the premise of environmental justice for the poor and communities of color. My wife is a descendant of the Oglala Sioux, and my whole family is inter-racial.
Because before he was an anti-war activist, he was a Freedom Rider, beaten and arrested for his work registering African-American voters in Georgia and Mississippi. The year 1964 found him working as a community organizer in Newark, New Jersey.
In his book he credits the civil rights movement as well as the feminist movement for forming the foundation of the anti-war movement. Interestingly, both of those earlier protest movements are still a part of our collective memory, while the anti-war protests are being forgotten, as the “war makers seek to win on the battlefield of memory what they lost on the battlefields of war.” To give an idea of the scope of the movement, Hayden writes that:
During the Vietnam peace movement era, Americans took to the streets in numbers exceeding one hundred thousand on at least a dozen occasions, sometimes reaching half a million. At least twenty-nine young Americans were killed while protesting the war. Tens of thousands were arrested. The greatest student strike in American history shut down campuses for weeks. Black people rose in hundreds of urban rebellions inspired partly by the shift from the War on Poverty to the Vietnam War. GIs rebelled on scores of bases and ships, some refused orders, others threw their medals on the steps of Congress, and a few attacked their superior officers, prompting warnings about the actual “collapse” of the armed forces by the seventies. Significant peace candidates appeared in congressional races by 1966 and became a significant force in presidential politics by 1968. President Johnson was forced to renounce his reelection hopes because of a revolt within his own party in 1968, and his successor, Richard Nixon, would ultimately resign after escalating a secret war and unleashing spies and provocateurs against dissenters at home.
In addition to being partly responsible for bringing down two presidents as well as ending a war, the movement led directly to the vote being granted to those over the age of 18. The rioting in Chicago during the Democratic Convention of 1968 has often been blamed for the loss of the presidency to Richard Nixon, which completely ignores that fact that most of those protesting the war were doing so in the streets because they had no voice at the ballot box. Nixon’s victory, according to Hayden, was due more to Hubert Humphrey’s inability to divorce himself from Johnson’s war.
Hayden’s book traces this powerful anti-war movement from its earliest days as teach-ins on college campuses where the war and its roots were discussed, through the organizing of the SDS and the recruiting of students from campuses across the country who came together to adopt the Port Huron Statement. He openly discusses the divisions within the movement and the splinter groups that grew from it, including those that advocated violence. He reminds us of how powerful our voices can become, as long as they are united and persistent.
Hayden passed away before Trump was elected. If he were alive, the advice he would no doubt give protesters today is pretty much contained within the covers of this slim 168-page essay. It has a lot to do with perseverance.
The lesson we learned was that we had to keep marching and mobilizing and expanding our base again and again.
And that is the important lesson we need to apply today. Whether we march on behalf of immigrants, Muslims, scientists, or women, we need to keep marching. And even to consider a general strike.
By “general strike” I do not mean a planned or coordinated campaign, nor one led by radical vanguards, but rather a widespread refusal on the part of vast numbers of people to any longer take part in the usual habits of daily life, instead withdrawing their participation in the regnant political culture all at once for an extended period of time. This sort of phenomenon requires a level of desperation and evinces a massive discontent much more spontaneous than controlled as part of a general disintegration of the status quo. Recent examples include Tunisia in 2010 or the half million immigrants who gathered peaceably in downtown Los Angeles on March 25, 2006, with similar protests in one hundred other American cities.
It may take a long time for the movement to bear fruit. But each march against the Trump administration is a seed planted that, given continuing support, will grow—and eventually become an orchard that’s impossible to ignore.