Our Story

by Bill Moyers

The Progressive magazine, May 2004

Fifty-three years ago, on my sixteenth birthday, I went to work for the daily newspaper in the small East Texas town where I grew up. It was a good place to be a cub reporter-small enough to navigate but big enough to keep me busy and learning something every day. I soon had a stroke of luck. Some of the old timers were on vacation or out sick and I got assigned to cover what came to be known as the Housewives' Rebellion. Fifteen women in my hometown decided not to pay the Social Security withholding tax for their domestic workers. They argued that Social Security was unconstitutional, that imposing it was taxation without representation, and that-here's my favorite part- "requiring us to collect the tax is no different from requiring us to collect the garbage."

The stories I wrote for my local paper were picked up and moved on the Associated Press wire. One day, the managing editor called me over and pointed to the AP ticker beside his desk. Moving across the wire was a notice citing one Bill Moyers and the paper for the reporting we had done on the "Rebellion."

That hooked me, and in one way or another- after a detour through seminary and then into politics and government for a spell-I've been covering the class war ever since. Those women in Marshall, Texas, were its advance guard. They were not bad people. They were regulars at church, their children were my friends, many of them were active in community affairs, their husbands were pillars of the business and professional class in town. They were respectable and upstanding citizens all. So it took me a while to figure out what had brought on that spasm of reactionary rebellion. It came to me one day, much later. They simply couldn't see beyond their own prerogatives. Fiercely loyal to their families, to their clubs, charities, and congregations-fiercely loyal, in other words, to their own kind-they narrowly defined membership in democracy to include only people like them. The women who washed and ironed their laundry, wiped their children's bottoms, made their husband's beds, and cooked their family meals-these women, too, would grow old and frail, sick and decrepit, lose their husbands and face the ravages of time alone, with nothing to show from their years of labor but the crease in their brow and the knots on their knuckles. Even on the distaff side of laissez faire, security was personal, not social, and what injustice existed this side of heaven would no doubt be redeemed beyond the Pearly Gates.

In one way or another, this is the oldest story in America: the struggle to determine whether "we, the people" is a spiritual idea embedded in a political reality-one nation, indivisible-or merely a charade masquerading as piety and manipulated by the powerful and privileged to sustain their own way of life at the expense of others.

I should make it clear that I don't harbor any idealized notion of politics and democracy; I worked for Lyndon Johnson, remember? Nor do I romanticize "the people." You should read my mail-or listen to the vitriol virtually spat at my answering machine. I understand what the politician meant who said of the Texas House of Representatives, "If you think these guys are bad, you should see their constituents."

But there is nothing idealized or romantic about the difference between a society whose arrangements roughly serve all its citizens and one whose institutions have been converted into a stupendous fraud. That difference can be the difference between democracy and oligarchy.

You are the heirs of one of the country's great traditions-the progressive movement that started late in the nineteenth century and remade the American experience piece by piece until it peaked in the last third of the twentieth century. Its aim was to keep blood pumping through the veins of democracy when others were ready to call in the mortician.

Step back with me to the curtain raiser, the founding convention of the People's Party-better known as the Populists-in 1892. Mainly cotton and wheat farmers from the recently reconstructed South and the newly settled Great Plains, they had come on hard, hard times, driven to the wall by falling prices for their crops on one hand and racking interest rates, freight charges, and supply costs on the other. All this in the midst of a booming industrial America. They were angry, and their platform- issued deliberately on the Fourth of July-pulled no punches. "We meet," it said, "in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political, and material ruin.... Corruption dominates the ballot box, the state legislatures, and the Congress and touches even the bench.... The newspapers are largely subsidized or muzzled, public opinion silenced.... The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few."

Furious words from rural men and women who were traditionally conservative and whose memories of taming the frontier were fresh and personal. But in their fury they invoked an American tradition as powerful as frontier individualism-the war on inequality and especially on the role that government played in promoting and preserving inequality by favoring the rich. The Founding Fathers turned their backs on the idea of property qualifications for holding office under the Constitution because they wanted no part of a "veneration for wealth" in the document. Thomas Jefferson, while claiming no interest in politics, built up a Republican Party-no relation to the present one-to take the government back from the speculators and "stock-jobbers," as he called them, who were in the saddle in 1800. Andrew Jackson slew the monster Second Bank of the United States, the 600-pound gorilla of the credit system in the 1830s, in the name of the people versus the aristocrats who sat on the bank's governing board.

All these leaders were on record in favor of small government, but their opposition wasn't simply to government as such. It was to government's power to confer privilege on insiders, on the rich who were democracy's equivalent of the royal favorites of monarchist days. The Populists knew it was the government that granted millions of acres of public land to the railroad builders. It was the government that gave the manufacturers of farm machinery a monopoly of the domestic market by a protective tariff that was no longer necessary to shelter "infant industries." It was the government that contracted the national currency and sparked a deflationary cycle that crushed debtors and fattened the wallets of creditors.

And those who made the great fortunes used them to buy the legislative and judicial favors that kept them on top. So the Populists recognized one great principle: The job of preserving equality of opportunity and democracy demanded the end of any unholy alliance between government and wealth. It was, to quote that platform again, "from the same womb of governmental injustice" that tramps and millionaires were bred.

But how? How was the democratic revolution to be revived? The promise of the Declaration reclaimed? How were Americans to restore government to its job of promoting the general welfare? Here, the Populists made a breakthrough to another principle. In a modern, large-scale, industrial, and nationalized economy it wasn't enough to curb the government's reach. That would simply leave power in the hands of the great corporations whose existence was inseparable from growth and progress. The answer was to turn government at least into the arbiter of fair play, and when necessary the friend, the helper, and the agent of the people at large in the contest against entrenched power. So the Populist platform called for government loans to farmers about to lose their mortgaged homesteads, for government granaries to grade and store their crops fairly, for governmental inflation of the currency, which was a classical plea of debtors, and for some decidedly nonclassical actions like government ownership of the railroad, telephone, and telegraph systems and a graduated-i.e., progressive-tax on incomes, as well as a flat ban on subsidies to "any private corporation." And to make sure the government stayed on the side of the people, the "Pops" called for the initiative and referendum and the direct election of Senators.

Predictably, the Populists were denounced, feared, and mocked as fanatical hayseeds ignorantly playing with socialist fire. They got twenty-two electoral votes for their candidate in '92, plus some Congressional seats and statehouses, but by 1900 Populism was a spent rocket. At the same time, if political organizations perish, their key ideas endure. Much of the Populist agenda would become law within a few years of the party's extinction because their goals were generally shared by a rising generation of young Republicans and Democrats who, justly or not, were seen as less outrageously outdated than the embattled farmers. These were the progressives, your intellectual forebears and mine.

They were a diverse lot, held together by a common admiration of progress-hence the name-and a shared dismay at the paradox of poverty stubbornly persisting in the midst of progress like an unwanted guest at a wedding. Of course they welcomed, just as we do, the new marvels in the gift bag of technology: the telephones, the autos, the electrically powered urban transport and lighting systems, the indoor heating and plumbing, the processed foods and home appliances and machine-made clothing that reduced the sweat and drudgery of home-making and were affordable to an ever-swelling number of people. But they saw the underside, too, the slums lurking in the shadows of the glittering cities, the exploited and unprotected workers whose low-paid labor filled the horn of plenty for others, the misery of those whom age, sickness, accident, or hard times condemned to servitude and poverty with no hope of comfort or security. Henry George noted that "an immense wedge" was being forced through American society by "the maldistribution of wealth, status, and opportunity." And William Allen White, the Kansas country editor and a staunch progressive, said, "A new relationship should be established between the haves and the have-nots."

Here's a small, but representative sampling of the progressives who tried to establish that new relationship.

Jane Addams forsook the comforts of an affluent college graduate's life to live in Hull House in the midst of a disease-ridden and crowded Chicago immigrant neighborhood, determined to make it an educational and social center that would bring pride, health, and beauty into the lives of her poor neighbors. She was inspired by "an almost passionate devotion to the ideals of democracy," to combating the prevailing notion "that the well-being of a privileged few might justly be built upon the ignorance and sacrifice of the many."

Jacob Riis lugged his heavy camera up and down the staircases of New York's disease-ridden, firetrap tenements to photograph the unspeakable crowding, the inadequate toilets, the starved and hollow-eyed children, and the filth on the walls so thick that his crude flash equipment sometimes set it afire. Bound between hard covers, with Riis's commentary, these photographs showed comfortable New Yorkers "how the other half lives."

Lincoln Steffens, college and graduate-school educated, left his books to learn life from the bottom up as a police-beat reporter on New York's streets. Then, as a magazine writer, he exposed the links between city bosses and businessmen that made it possible for builders and factory owners to ignore safety codes and get away with it. His purpose, he said, was "to see if the shameful facts, spread out in all their shame, would not burn through our civic shamelessness and set fire to American pride."

Tom Johnson, the progressive mayor of Cleveland in the early nineteen hundreds, was a businessman converted to social activism. His major battles were to impose regulation, or even municipal takeover, on the private companies that were meant to provide affordable public transportation and utilities but in fact crushed competitors, overcharged customers, secured franchises and licenses for a song, and paid virtually nothing in taxes-all through their pocketbook control of lawmakers and judges. Johnson's argument for public ownership was simple: "If you don't own them, they will own you."

For his part, the brilliant Harvard graduate Louis Brandeis, before rising to the Supreme Court, took on corporate attorneys defending child labor or long and harsh conditions for female workers. Brandeis argued that the state had a duty to protect the health of working women and children.

And who could forget Dr. Alice Hamilton, a pioneer in detecting industrially caused diseases? She spent long years clambering up and down ladders in factories and mineshafts-in long skirts!-tracking down the unsafe toxic substances that sickened the workers whom she would follow right into their sickbeds to get leads on where to hunt.

In a few short years, the progressive spirit made possible the election not only of reform mayors and governors but of national figures like Senator George Norris of Nebraska, Senator Robert M. La Follette of Wisconsin, and even that hard-to-classify political genius Theodore Roosevelt. All three of them Republicans. Here is the simplest laundry list of what was accomplished at state and federal levels: publicly regulated or owned transportation, sanitation, and utilities systems; the partial restoration of competition in the marketplace through improved antitrust laws; increased fairness in taxation; expansion of the public education and juvenile justice systems; safer workplaces and guarantees of compensation to workers injured on the job; oversight of the purity of water, medicines, and foods; conservation of the national wilderness heritage against overdevelopment, and honest bidding on any public mining, lumbering, and ranching.

We take these for granted today- or we did until recently. All were provided not by the automatic workings of free enterprise but by implementing the idea in the Declaration of Independence that the people had a right to governments that best promoted their "safety and happiness."

The mighty progressive wave peaked in 1912. But the ideas leashed by it forged the politics of the twentieth century. Like his cousin Theodore, Franklin Roosevelt argued that the real enemies of enlightened capitalism were "the malefactors of great wealth"-the "economic royalists"-from whom capitalism would have to be saved by reform and regulation. Progressive government became an embedded tradition of Democrats-the heart of FDR's New Deal and Harry Truman's Fair Deal. Even Dwight D. Eisenhower honored the tradition. He didn't want to tear down the house progressive ideas had built-only to put it under different managers. The progressive impulse had its final fling in the landslide of 1964 when LBJ-a son of the West Texas hill country, where the Populist rebellion had been nurtured in the 1890s-won the public endorsement for what he meant to be the capstone in the arch of the New Deal.

I had a modest role in that era. I shared in its exhilarations and its failures. We went too far too fast, overreached at home and in Vietnam, failed to examine some assumptions, and misjudged the rising backlash engendered by the passions of the times. The failure of Democratic politicians and public thinkers to respond to popular discontents allowed a resurgent conservatism to convert public concern and hostility into a reactionary crusade.

We should pause here to consider that Karl Rove's cherished period of American history is that of the McKinley Administration (1897-1901). It was, as I read him, the seminal influence on the man who is said to be George W. Bush's brain. Rove has modeled the Bush presidency on that of William McKinley, and modeled himself on Mark Hanna, the man who virtually manufactured McKinley. Hanna had one consummate passion-to serve corporate and imperial power.

Hanna made McKinley governor of Ohio by shaking down the corporate interests of the day. Fortunately, it was said, McKinley had the invaluable gift of emitting sonorous platitudes as though they were recently discovered truth. Behind his benign gaze the wily intrigues of Mark Hanna saw to it that first Ohio and then Washington were "ruled by business . . . by bankers, railroads, and public utility corporations." Any who opposed the oligarchy were smeared as disturbers of the peace, socialists, anarchists, or worse. Back then they didn't bother with hollow euphemisms like "compassionate conservatism" to disguise the raw reactionary politics that produced government "of, by, and for" the ruling corporate class. They just saw the loot and went for it.

This "degenerate and unlovely age," as one historian calls it, seemingly inspires Karl Rove today.

No wonder that what troubled our progressive forebears was not only the miasma of poverty in their nostrils, but the sour stink of a political system for sale. The United States Senate was a "millionaires' club." Money given to the political machines that controlled nominations could buy overwhelming influence in city halls, statehouses, and even courtrooms. Reforms and improvements ran into the immovable resistance of the almighty dollar. What, progressives wondered, would this do to the principles of popular government? Because all of them, whatever party they subscribed to, were inspired by the gospel of democracy. Inevitably, this swept them into the currents of politics, whether as active officeholders or persistent advocates.

You have to respect the conservatives for their successful strategy in gaining control of the national agenda. Their stated and open aim is to strip from government all its functions except those that reward their rich and privileged benefactors. They are quite candid about it, even acknowledging their mean spirit in accomplishing it. Their leading strategist in Washington, Grover Norquist, has famously said he wants to shrink the government down to the size that it could be drowned in a bathtub. The White House pursues the same homicidal dream without saying so. Instead of shrinking down the government, they're filling the bathtub with so much debt that it floods the house, waterlogs the economy, and washes away services that for decades have lifted millions of Americans out of destitution and into the middle class. And what happens once the public's property has been flooded? Privatize it. Sell it at a discounted rate to the corporations. It is the most radical assault on the notion of one nation, indivisible, that has occurred in our lifetime.

While the social inequalities A / that galvanized progressives in the nineteenth century are resurgent, so is the vision of justice, fairness, and equality. That's a powerful cause, if only there are people around to fight for it.

What will it take to get back in the fight? The first order of business is to understand the real interests and deep opinions of the American people.

And what are those?

That a Social Security card is not a private portfolio statement but a membership ticket in a society where we all contribute to a common treasury so that none need face the indignities of poverty in old age.

That tax evasion is not a form of conserving investment capital but a brazen abandonment of responsibility to the country.

That concentration in the production of goods may sometimes be useful and efficient, but monopoly over the dissemination of ideas is tyranny.

That prosperity requires good wages and benefits for workers.

That the rich have the right to buy more cars than anyone else, more homes, vacations, gadgets and gizmos, but they do not have the right to buy more democracy than anyone else.

And that our nation can no more survive as half democracy and half oligarchy than it could survive "half slave and half free," and that keeping it from becoming all oligarchy is steady work-our work.

What's right and good doesn't come naturally. You have to stand up and fight for it, as if the cause depends on you, because it does. Allow yourself that conceit, to believe that the flame of democracy will never go out as long as there's one candle in your hand.

So go for it. Never mind the odds. Remember what the progressives faced. Karl Rove isn't tougher than Mark Hanna was in his time.

"Democracy is not a lie"-I first learned that from Henry Demarest Lloyd, the progressive journalist whose book, Wealth Against Commonwealth, laid open the Standard Oil trust a century ago. He remarked about the people's "unexhausted virtue and the ever-refreshed strength which can rise equal to any problems of progress. In the hope of tapping some reserve of their power of self-help," he said, "this story is told to the people."

This is your story, the progressive story of America.

Pass it on.

Bill Moyers, winner of more than thirty Emmys, is host of the PBS show "NOW with Bill Moyers. He adapted this article from a speech he gave last year to the Campaign for Americas Future. A first-ever collection of his writings and speeches, "Moyers on America: A Journalist and His Time, " is forthcoming from the New Press.

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