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The Fifty Most Influential Progressives of the Twentieth Century... Liberals/Interest
(Part 1)
The Fifty Most Influential Progressives of the Twentieth Century... Liberals/Interest
http://www.thenation.com/slideshow/154631/slide-show-fifty-most-influential-progressives-twentieth-century
September 16, 2010
Go here to read Peter Dreier's introduction to this series detailing the lives and legacies of the fifty most influential progressives of the twentieth century. Go here to see the eleven reader-selected American progressives who Nation readers think made the biggest difference in the twentieth century-and the activists, advocates and politicians who are already defining the twenty-first.
Eugene Debs (1855-1926) (1 of 51)
Through his leadership of the labor movement, his five campaigns as a Socialist candidate for president and his spellbinding and brilliant oratory, Debs popularized ideas about civil liberties, workers’ rights, peace and justice and government regulation of big business. In 1893 he organized the nation’s first industrial union, the American Railway Union, to unite all workers within one industry, and he led the Pullman Strike of 1894. He was elected city clerk of Terre Haute and served in the Indiana State Assembly in 1884. In 1900, 1904, 1908, 1912 and 1920, Debs ran for president on the Socialist Party ticket. His speeches and writing influenced popular opinion and the platforms of Democratic Party candidates. His 1920 campaign took place while he was in Atlanta’s federal prison for opposing World War I; he won nearly 1 million votes.
Further Reading:
Statement to the Court by Eugene Debs.
Eugene Debs: Citizen and Socialist by Nick Salvatore.
The Bending Cross: A Biography of Eugene Victor Debs by Ray Ginger.
Jane Addams (1860-1935) (2 of 51)
Jane Addams pioneered the settlement house movement and was an important Progressive Era urban reformer, the “mother” of American social work, a founder of the NAACP, a champion of women’s suffrage, an antiwar crusader and winner of the 1931 Nobel Peace Prize. Addams carved out a new way for women to become influential in public affairs. In 1889 she and her college friend, Ellen Gates Starr (1859-1940), founded Hull House in Chicago’s immigrant slums, inspired by similar efforts she had seen in England. Initially, the women at Hull House took care of children, nursed the sick, offered kindergarten classes and evening classes for immigrant adults. They then added an art gallery, public kitchen, gym, swimming pool, coffeehouse, cooperative boarding club for girls, book bindery, art studio, music school, drama group, circulating library and employment bureau. Hull House soon became a hub of social activism around labor and immigrant rights, crusades against political corruption, slum housing, unsafe workplaces and child labor. It was the inspiration for other settlement houses in cities across the country.
Further Reading:
Twenty Years at Hull House by Jane Addams.
Jane Adams: Spirit in Action by Louise W. Knight.
The Education of Jane Addams by Victoria Biss Brown.
Louis Brandeis (1856-1941) (3 of 51)
Louis Brandeis was a crusading lawyer and Supreme Court justice. Appointed by Woodrow Wilson in 1916, he served until 1939. His writings and activism changed American attitudes and law about the need to restrain corporate power, outlined in his book Other People’s Money and How the Bankers Use It (1914). As a “people’s lawyer” in Boston, he fought railroad monopolies, defended labor laws and helped create policies to address poverty-an approach that is now called public interest law. He pioneered the use of expert testimony (called the Brandeis Brief) in court cases, paving the way for an approach to the law that relied on empirical evidence. In 1908 he represented the state of Oregon in Muller v. Oregon before the Supreme Court. The issue was whether a state could limit the hours that female workers could work, which employers argued was an infringement on the “freedom of contract” between employers and their employees. His legal argument was relatively short, but he included more than 100 pages of documentation, including reports from social workers, doctors, factory inspectors and other experts, which showed that working long hours destroyed women’s health and well-being. Brandeis won the case and changed the field of litigation.
Further Reading:
Other People's Money-And How the Bankers Use It by Louis Brandeis.
Louis D. Brandeis: A Life by Melvin I. Urofsky.
Louis D. Brandeis: Justice for the People by Philippa Strum.
Florence Kelley (1859-1932) (4 of 51)
Florence Kelley was a leading organizer against sweatshops and an advocate for children’s rights, the minimum wage and the eight-hour workday. Part of the first generation of women to attend college, she joined the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, was active in women’s suffrage and was a founder of the NAACP. She worked at Hull House from 1891 to 1899 and the Henry Street Settlement in New York City from 1899 to 1926. In 1893 Governor John Altgeld appointed her Illinois’s first chief factory inspector, a position she used to expose abusive working conditions, especially for children. She successfully lobbied for the creation of the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics so that reformers would have adequate information about the condition of workers. In 1908 she gathered sociological and medical evidence for Muller v. Oregon and in 1917 gathered similar information for Bunting v. Oregon to make the case for an eight-hour workday.
From The Nation's Archives:
Shall Women Be Equal Before the Law? by Florence Kelley and Elsie Hill.
Further Reading:
Modern Industry: In Relation to the Family, Health, Education and Morality by Florence Kelley.
Florence Kelley and the Nation's Work by Kathryn Kish Sklar.
John Dewey (1859-1952) (5 of 51)
A philosopher, psychologist and education reformer, Dewey was an engaged activist, a prolific writer for popular magazines and the leading exemplar of American pragmatism. He founded the “laboratory school” at the University of Chicago to put his ideas about progressive education into practice. His ideas about “experiential learning” influenced several generations of educators. An early supporter of teachers’ unions and academic freedom, he spoke out and organized against efforts to restrict freedom of ideas, helped found the NAACP and supported women’s suffrage.
From The Nation's Archives:
The Future of Radical Political Action by John Dewey.
Further Reading:
Democracy and Education by John Dewey.
John Dewey and American Democracy by Robert B. Westbrook.
Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870-1920 by James T. Kloppenberg.
Lincoln Steffens (1866-1936) (6 of 51)
As a writer and editor for McClure’s magazine and later for The American Magazine, he (along with colleagues Ida Tarbell and Ray Stannard Baker) was an influential practitioner of “muckraking” journalism. In The Shame of the Cities (1904), he exposed corruption by local governments, which took advantage of poor immigrants and colluded with business power brokers. After visiting the Soviet Union in 1919, he became an enthusiastic supporter of the Russian Revolution, famously proclaiming, “I have been over into the future, and it works.” He later soured on Soviet-style communism.
From The Nation's Archives:
Report of Lincoln Steffens.
Further Reading:
The Shame of the Cities by Lincoln Steffens.
Lincoln Steffens: A Biography by Justin Kaplan.
W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963) (7 of 51)
Du Bois was a civil rights activist, sociologist, historian, polemicist and editor. He was the first African-American to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard and a founder of the NAACP. In his studies and books he challenged America’s ideas about race and helped lead the early crusade for civil rights. Du Bois’s intellectual and political battles with Booker T. Washington shaped the ongoing debate about the nature of racism and the struggle for racial justice, summarized in his book The Souls of Black Folk (1903), in which he described blacks’ “double consciousness” and famously predicted, “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.” From 1910 to 1934 he served as editor of The Crisis, the NAACP’s monthly magazine, which became a highly visible and often controversial forum for criticism of white racism, lynching and segregation, and for information about the status of black Americans. It gave exposure to many young African-American writers, poets and agitators. Du Bois was a Socialist, although he often disagreed with the party, particularly on matters of race. His writings had enormous influence on civil rights activists and on the burgeoning fields of black history and black studies.
From The Nation's Archives:
The Hosts of Black Labor by W.E.B. Du Bois.
Further Reading:
The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois.
W.E.B. Du Bois, 1868-1919: Biography of a Race by David L. Lewis.
W.E.B. Bu Bois, 1919-1963: The Fight for Equality and the American Century by David L. Lewis.
Upton Sinclair (1878-1968) (8 of 51)
A Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Sinclair wrote ninety books, most of which were novels that exposed social injustice or studies of powerful institutions (including religion, the press and oil companies). His 1906 novel The Jungle, which vividly described awful conditions in the meatpacking industry, caused a public uproar that led to passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act. In 1934, in the depths of the Depression, he left the Socialist Party and won the Democratic nomination for governor of California on a platform to “end poverty in California.” The state’s powerful agricultural, oil and media industries mounted an expensive negative campaign to attack Sinclair and help elect his Republican opponent. Sinclair lost, but his campaign mobilized millions of voters, helped push FDR to the left and changed California politics for the next several decades.
From The Nation's Archives:
My Private Utopia, by Upton Sinclair.
Further Reading:
The Jungle by Upton Sinclair.
Radical Innocent: Upton Sinclair by Anthony Arthur.
Upton Sinclair and the Other American Century by Kevin Mattson.
Margaret Sanger (1879-1966) (9 of 51)
Sanger worked as a nurse among poor women on New York City’s Lower East Side and became an advocate for women’s health. In 1912 she gave up nursing and dedicated herself to the distribution of information about birth control (a term she’s credited with inventing), risking imprisonment for violating the Comstock Act, which forbade distribution of birth control devices or information. She wrote articles on health for the Socialist Party paper The Call and wrote several books, including What Every Girl Should Know (1916) and What Every Mother Should Know (1916). In 1921 she founded the American Birth Control League, which eventually became Planned Parenthood. In 1916 she set up the first birth control clinic in the United States, and the following year she was arrested for “creating a public nuisance.” Her activism helped change public opinion and led to changes in laws giving doctors the right to give birth control advice (and later, birth control devices) to patients.
From The Nation's Archives:
The Pope’s Position on Birth Control by Margaret Sanger.
Further Reading:
What Every Girl Should Know and What Every Mother Should Know by Margaret Sanger.
Birth Control In America: The Career of Margaret Sanger by David M. Kennedy.
Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America by Ellen Chesler.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) (10 of 51)
Gilman was a pathbreaking feminist, humanist and socialist, whose lectures and writing challenged the dominant ideas about women’s role in society and helped shape the movement for women’s suffrage and rights. After attending her first suffrage convention in 1886, she began writing a column on suffrage for The People. She addressed the 1896 conference of the National American Woman Suffrage Association in Washington and testified for suffrage before Congress. She called women “subcitizens” and their disenfranchisement “arbitrary, unjust, unwise.” Her semiautobiographical short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892) described a woman who suffers a mental breakdown resulting from a “rest cure”-prescribed by her physician husband-of complete long-term isolation in her bedroom. In many books, including Women and Economics (1898), The Home (1903), Human Work (1904) and The Man-Made World (1911), she argued that women would be equal to men only when they were economically independent, and she encouraged women to work outside the home and for men and women to share house-work. She believed that housekeeping, cooking and childcare should be professionalized. Girls and boys, she thought, should be raised with the same clothes, toys and expectations. Gilman’s efforts complemented the activism of feminists like Alice Stokes Paul (1885-1977), who organized pickets, parades and hunger strikes to win passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920.
From The Nation's Archives:
Birth Control, Religion and the Unfit by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
Further Reading:
Women and Economics and Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Biography by Cynthia J. Davis.
Roger Baldwin (1884-1981) (11 of 51)
A pacifist and social activist, Baldwin was a founder, in 1917, of the American Civil Liberties Union (originally the National Civil Liberties Bureau), created to defend the rights of antiwar conscientious objectors, and served as its executive director until 1950. Under his leadership the ACLU litigated many landmark cases, including the Scopes Trial, the Sacco and Vanzetti murder trial and the challenge to the ban on James Joyce’s Ulysses.
From The Nation's Archive:
Editorial on General Douglas MacArthur by Roger Baldwin.
Further Reading:
Liberty Under the Soviets and A New Slavery: Forced Labor, the Communist Betrayal of Human Rights by Roger Baldwin.
Roger Nash Baldwin and the American Civil Liberties Union by Robert C. Cotrell.
Frances Perkins (1880-1965) (12 of 51)
Perkins was labor secretary for the first twelve years of Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency and the first woman to hold a cabinet post. Within FDR’s inner circle she advocated for Social Security, the minimum wage, workers’ right to unionize and other New Deal economic reforms. Inspired by Jacob Riis’s exposé of New York’s slums, How the Other Half Lives, and by reformer Florence Kelley, she joined the settlement house movement and worked for the New York Consumers’ League, lobbying the state legislature to limit the workweek for women and children to fifty-four hours. She marched in suffrage parades and gave street-corner speeches in favor of women’s suffrage. She joined the Socialist Party but soon switched to the Democratic Party. In 1918 New York Governor Al Smith appointed her to the state’s Industrial Commission, and in 1929 Governor Franklin Roosevelt appointed her the state’s industrial commissioner. She expanded factory investigations, reduced the workweek for women to forty-eight hours and championed minimum wage and unemployment insurance laws, all ideas she took to Washington when she joined FDR’s cabinet.
From The Nation's Archives:
Rise of a Labor Leader by Frances Perkins.
Further Reading:
Social Insurance for the US, a radio address by Frances Perkins.
The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life and Legacy of Frances Perkins by Kirstin Downey.
John L. Lewis (1880-1969) (13 of 51)
Joining his father as a miner at 16, Lewis became active in the United Mine Workers of America, working his way up to president, a post he held from 1920 to 1960. Under Lewis the UMWA committed money and staff to organizing drives in the rubber, auto and steel industries, helping to create a national wave of industrial unionism. In 1938 Lewis was elected president of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) at its founding convention and became a major public face of the nation’s growing and increasingly militant labor movement. In 1948 the UMWA won a historic agreement with coal companies establishing medical and pension benefits for miners, financed in part by a royalty on every ton of coal mined.
From The Nation's Archives:
An Inter-Union Labor Struggle by John L. Lewis.
Further Reading:
Labor and the Nation by John L. Lewis.
John L. Lewis: A Biography by Melvyn Dubofsky and Warren Van Tine.
Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962) (14 of 51)
Roosevelt was born to privilege but became one of the most visible social activists of her generation. She used her prominence as first lady to advocate for reform, giving visibility to movements for workers’ rights, women’s rights and civil rights and pushing FDR and his advisers to support progressive legislation. She held press conferences and voiced her opinions in radio broadcasts and a regular newspaper col-umn. She visited coal mines, slums and schools to draw attention to the plight of the disadvantaged and to lobby for reform laws. Her resignation from the Daughters of the American Revolution-to protest its ban on black singer Marian Anderson performing at Constitution Hall-made a controversial and powerful statement for racial justice. In 1948, as a delegate to the United Nations, she helped draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which affirmed equality for all people regardless of race, creed or color.
From The Nation's Archives:
Fear is the Enemy by Eleanor Roosevelt.
Further Reading:
The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt.
Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume I: 1884-1933 by Blanche Wiesen Cook.
Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume II: The Defining Years, 1933-1938 by Blanche Wiesen Cook.
Norman Thomas (1884-1968) (15 of 51)
Thomas was America’s most visible socialist from the 1930s through the ’50s. Ordained a Presbyterian minister in 1911, he became a crusader for the “social gospel” as the leader of several churches and head of a settlement house in Harlem. His pacifism and opposition to World War I led him to join the Socialist Party. After writing about reform issues for Christian publications, he joined The Nation as associate editor. In 1922 he became co-director of the League for Industrial Democracy and was a founder of the National Civil Liberties Bureau. He ran for governor, mayor, State Senate and City Council on the Socialist Party ticket. Starting in 1928 he ran for president six times, gaining a public voice as an articulate national “conscience” and spokesman for democratic socialism. Thomas was one of the few public figures to oppose the internment of Japanese-Americans. He helped start the racially integrated Southern Farmers Tenants Union, campaigned for labor rights, birth control and allowing Jewish victims of Nazism to enter the United States. At his eightieth birthday celebration, in 1964, he received plaudits from Martin Luther King Jr., Chief Justice Earl Warren and Vice President-elect Hubert Humphrey. An early critic of the Vietnam War, he gave a famous antiwar speech in 1968, proclaiming, “I come to cleanse the American flag, not burn it.”
From The Nation's Archives:
The Pacifist's Dilemma by Norman Thomas.
Further Reading:
Is Conscience A Crime? and Socialism Re-examined by Norman Thomas.
Norman Thomas: The Last Idealist by W.A. Swanberg.
A.J. Muste (1885-1967) (16 of 51)
Like Norman Thomas, Muste graduated from Union Theological Seminary. He began his career as a Dutch Reformed Church minister but soon became a Quaker as well as a leading pacifist, antiwar activist, socialist and union organizer. In the early 1920s he led Brookwood Labor College, a training center for union activists, and during the 1930s he led several key sit-downs. From 1940 to 1953 he headed the religious pacifist organization Fellowship of Reconciliation and helped found the Congress on Racial Equality, a militant civil rights group that pioneered the use of civil disobedience and trained many movement activists. In the 1960s he led delegations of pacifists and religious leaders to Saigon and Hanoi to try to end the war in Vietnam.
From The Nation's Archives:
Workers’ Education in the United States by A.J. Muste.
Further Reading:
The Essays of A.J. Muste.
Abraham Went Out: A Biography of A.J. Muste by Jo Ann Robinson.
Sidney Hillman (1887-1946) (17 of 51)
An immigrant from Lithuania, garment worker in Chicago and lifelong socialist, Hillman led successful strikes and organizing drives, became a union leader and served as president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers from 1914 to 1946. By 1920 the union had contracts with 85 percent of the nation’s garment manufacturers (representing some 177,000 workers) and had reduced the workweek to forty-four hours. In the 1920s Hillman’s ACWA pioneered “social unionism,” including union-sponsored co-op housing, unemployment insurance for union members and a bank to make loans to members and businesses with union contracts. One of the founders, in 1935, of the CIO (and later its vice president), Hillman became an influential adviser to FDR and Senator Robert Wagner, helping draft laws for workers’ rights. As chair of the CIO’s first political action committee in 1943, he mobilized union voters in election campaigns across the country, which became the model for building an electoral organization among union members.
From The Nation's Archives:
Correspondence: RAIC Declares a Dividend by Sidney Hillman.
Further Reading:
Reconstruction of Russia and Task of Labor by Sidney Hillman.
Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor by Steve Fraser.
Henry Wallace (1888-1965) (18 of 51)
As FDR’s agriculture secretary (1933-40) and then vice president (1940-44), Wallace played a central role in pushing for progressive New Deal initiatives, especially policies to help struggling farmers. Wallace was a crusading publisher of Wallaces' Farmer magazine and an Iowa farmer who pioneered the use of high-yield strains of corn. Wallace became increasingly radical and outspoken, and FDR dumped him as vice president in 1944. After serving as editor of The New Republic, he made an unsuccessful run for president in 1948 on the Progressive Party ticket, opposing racial segregation, the cold war and Truman’s tepid support for unions. Wallace was abandoned by many liberals who thought his platform was too radical and who worried that his campaign would take enough votes away from Truman to turn the White House over to the Republicans. He garnered less than 2 percent of the popular vote.
From The Nation's Archives:
How to Elect a Progressive Congress by Henry Wallace.
Further Reading:
The Price of Free World Victory, a speech by Henry Wallace.
American Dreamer: A Life of Henry A. Wallace by John C. Culver and John Hyde.
A. Philip Randolph (1889-1979) (19 of 51)
Randolph founded the first African-American labor union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, in the 1920s. A leading socialist writer, orator and civil rights pioneer, he built bridges between the civil rights and labor movements. He edited the Socialist newspaper The Messenger. In an early editorial, Randolph wrote: “The history of the labor movement in America proves that the employing classes recognize no race lines. They will exploit a White man as readily as a Black man... They will exploit any race or class in order to make profits. The combination of Black and White workers will be a powerful lesson to the capitalists of the solidarity of labor.” Randolph helped bring African-Americans into the labor movement while also criticizing union leaders for excluding blacks. In 1941, as the country was gearing up for war, Randolph threatened to organize a march on Washington to protest blacks’ exclusion from well-paid defense industry jobs. The strategy worked. In June 1941 FDR signed an executive order that called for an end to discrimination in defense plant jobs, America’s first “fair employment practices” reform. Randolph led the 1963 March on Washington, in which more than 250,000 Americans joined together under the slogan “Jobs and Freedom.”
Further Reading:
Excerpts from Randolph's keynote address to the Policy Conference of the March on Washington Movement in Detroit, Michigan, September 26, 1942.
A. Philip Randolph: A Biographical Portrait by Jervis Anderson.
Walter Reuther (1907-70) (20 of 51)
Reuther rose from the factory floor to help build the United Auto Workers into a major force in the auto industry, the labor movement and the left wing of the Democratic Party. He helped shape the modern labor movement, which created the first mass middle class. He led the 1937 sit-down at the General Motors factory in Flint, Michigan, a major turning point in labor history. After World War II he pushed for a large-scale conversion of the nation’s industrial might to promote peace and full employment. In 1946 he led a 116-day strike against GM, calling for a 30 percent wage increase without an increase in the retail price of cars and challenged GM to “open its books.” In 1948 GM agreed to a historic contract tying wage raises to the general cost-of-living and productivity increases. During his term as UAW president from 1946 until his death in 1970, the union grew to more than 1.5 million members and negotiated model grievance procedures, safety and health provisions, pensions, health benefits and “supplemental unemployment benefits” that lifted union members into the middle class and helped cushion the hardships of economic booms and busts. In the 1960s he led the labor movement’s support for civil rights, was an early opponent of the Vietnam War and an ally of Cesar Chavez’s effort to organize migrant farmworkers. Reuther became president of the CIO in 1952 and helped negotiate the 1955 merger of the AFL and CIO.
From The Nation's Archives:
Postscript to Collier’s World War III by Walter Reuther.
Further Reading:
Labor Day Address by Walter Reuther.
Walter Reuther: The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit by Nelson Lichtenstein.
Paul Robeson (1898-1976) (21 of 51)
Robeson was perhaps the most all-around talented American of the twentieth century. He was an internationally renowned concert singer, actor, college football star and professional athlete, writer, linguist (he sang in twenty-five languages), scholar, orator, lawyer and activist in the civil rights, union and peace movements. Though he was one of the century’s most famous figures, his name was virtually erased from memory by government persecution during the McCarthy era. The son of a runaway slave, Robeson won a four-year academic scholarship to Rutgers, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and graduated as valedictorian. Despite violence and racism from teammates, he won fifteen varsity letters in sports (baseball, football, basketball and track) and was twice named to the All-American Football Team. He attended Columbia Law School, then took a job with a law firm but quit when a white secretary refused to take dictation from him. He never practiced law again. In London, Robeson earned international acclaim for his lead role in Othello (1944). He starred in many plays and musicals and made eleven films, many with political themes. He promoted African independence, labor unions, friendship between the United States and the Soviet Union, African-American culture, civil liberties and Jewish refugees fleeing Hitler’s Germany. In 1945 he headed an organization that challenged Truman to support an antilynching law. Because of his political views, his performances were constantly harassed. In the late 1940s he was blacklisted. Most of his concerts were canceled, and his passport was revoked in 1950.
Further Reading:
Paul Robeson Speaks: Writings, Speeches, Interviews, 1918-1974.
Paul Robeson: A Biography by Martin B. Duberman.
Saul Alinsky (1909-72) (22 of 51)
Alinsky is known as the founder of modern community organizing. He taught Americans, especially the urban poor and working class, how to organize to improve conditions in their communities. Trained as a criminologist at the University of Chicago, he realized that criminal behavior was a symptom of poverty and powerlessness. In 1939, to improve living conditions in a Chicago slum near the stockyards, he created the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council, an “organization of organizations” comprising unions, youth groups, small businesses, block clubs and the Catholic Church. It engaged in pickets, strikes and boycotts to improve neighborhood conditions. His Industrial Areas Foundation trained organizers (including Cesar Chavez) and built grassroots groups in different cities, challenging local political bosses and corporations. He codified his organizing ideas in two books-Reveille for Radicals (1946) and Rules for Radicals (1971)-which influenced several generations of progressive movements and activists.
Further Reading:
Reveille for Radicals and Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky.
Let Them Call Me Rebel: Saul Alinsky: His Life and Legacy by Sanford D. Horwitt.
Woody Guthrie (1912-67) (23 of 51)
Guthrie, the legendary songwriter and folk singer, is best known for “This Land Is Your Land,” considered America’s alternative national anthem. He traveled from his native Oklahoma across the nation, writing songs about migrant workers, union struggles, government public works projects and the country’s natural beauty, including “I Ain’t Got No Home,” “Tom Joad,” “So Long It’s Been Good to Know Yuh,” “Roll on Columbia,” “Pastures of Plenty,” “Grand Coulee Dam” and “Deportee.” As a member of the Almanac Singers, Guthrie wrote and performed protest songs on behalf of unions and radical organizations. Many of his songs are still recorded by other artists and have influenced generations of performers, including Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Bruce Springsteen.
Further Reading:
This Land Is Your Land by Woody Guthrie.
Ramblin' Man: The Life and Times of Woody Guthrie by Ed Cray.
Woody Guthrie: A Life by Joe Klein.
Earl Warren (1891-1974) (24 of 51)
Warren, chief justice from 1953 to 1969, took the Supreme Court in an unprecedented liberal direction. With the help of progressive justices William O. Douglass and William J. Brennan, the Warren Court dramatically expanded civil rights and civil liberties. The Republican Warren used his considerable political skills to guarantee that the 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education was unanimous. In another landmark case, Gideon v. Wainwright (1963), the Warren Court ruled that courts are required to provide attorneys for defendants in criminal cases who cannot afford their own lawyers. In New York Times Co. v. Sullivan (1964), the Court significantly expanded free speech by requiring proof of “actual malice” in libel suits against public figures. The 1965 Griswold v. Connecticut decision established the right to privacy and laid the groundwork for Roe v. Wade (1973). In Miranda v. Arizona (1966), the Court ruled that detained criminal suspects, prior to police questioning, must be informed of their constitutional right to an attorney and against self-incrimination. After serving as Alameda County district attorney, Warren was elected California’s attorney general in 1938 and four years later was elected governor, serving until 1953. In that post he approved the rounding up of Japanese-Americans into detention camps. In 1948 he was the Republican Party’s unsuccessful vice presidential candidate on a ticket with Thomas Dewey. When Eisenhower nominated Warren to the Supreme Court, he thought he was appointing a conservative jurist and later reportedly said that it was the “biggest damn fool mistake” he’d ever made.
Further Reading:
Brown v. Board of Education Ruling, 1954.
Justice for All: Earl Warren and the Nation He Made by Jim Newton.
Chief Justice: A Biography of Earl Warren by Ed Cray.
Ella Baker (1903-86) (25 of 51)
After graduating from North Carolina’s Shaw University in 1927 as valedictorian, Baker began a lifelong career as a social activist. She served as a mentor to several generations of civil rights activists without drawing much attention to herself. In 1940 she became an organizer for the NAACP, traveling to many small towns and big cities across the South and developing a network of activists. In 1957 Baker moved to Atlanta to help Martin Luther King Jr. organize the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), running a voter registration campaign. After black college students organized a sit-in at the Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, on February 1, 1960, Baker left the SCLC to help the students spread the sit-in movement. That April she helped them create the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) at a conference at her alma mater.
Further Reading:
Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision by Barbara Ransby.
(Part 1)
The Fifty Most Influential Progressives of the Twentieth Century... Liberals/Interest
http://www.thenation.com/slideshow/154631/slide-show-fifty-most-influential-progressives-twentieth-century
September 16, 2010
Go here to read Peter Dreier's introduction to this series detailing the lives and legacies of the fifty most influential progressives of the twentieth century. Go here to see the eleven reader-selected American progressives who Nation readers think made the biggest difference in the twentieth century-and the activists, advocates and politicians who are already defining the twenty-first.
Eugene Debs (1855-1926) (1 of 51)
Through his leadership of the labor movement, his five campaigns as a Socialist candidate for president and his spellbinding and brilliant oratory, Debs popularized ideas about civil liberties, workers’ rights, peace and justice and government regulation of big business. In 1893 he organized the nation’s first industrial union, the American Railway Union, to unite all workers within one industry, and he led the Pullman Strike of 1894. He was elected city clerk of Terre Haute and served in the Indiana State Assembly in 1884. In 1900, 1904, 1908, 1912 and 1920, Debs ran for president on the Socialist Party ticket. His speeches and writing influenced popular opinion and the platforms of Democratic Party candidates. His 1920 campaign took place while he was in Atlanta’s federal prison for opposing World War I; he won nearly 1 million votes.
Further Reading:
Statement to the Court by Eugene Debs.
Eugene Debs: Citizen and Socialist by Nick Salvatore.
The Bending Cross: A Biography of Eugene Victor Debs by Ray Ginger.
Jane Addams (1860-1935) (2 of 51)
Jane Addams pioneered the settlement house movement and was an important Progressive Era urban reformer, the “mother” of American social work, a founder of the NAACP, a champion of women’s suffrage, an antiwar crusader and winner of the 1931 Nobel Peace Prize. Addams carved out a new way for women to become influential in public affairs. In 1889 she and her college friend, Ellen Gates Starr (1859-1940), founded Hull House in Chicago’s immigrant slums, inspired by similar efforts she had seen in England. Initially, the women at Hull House took care of children, nursed the sick, offered kindergarten classes and evening classes for immigrant adults. They then added an art gallery, public kitchen, gym, swimming pool, coffeehouse, cooperative boarding club for girls, book bindery, art studio, music school, drama group, circulating library and employment bureau. Hull House soon became a hub of social activism around labor and immigrant rights, crusades against political corruption, slum housing, unsafe workplaces and child labor. It was the inspiration for other settlement houses in cities across the country.
Further Reading:
Twenty Years at Hull House by Jane Addams.
Jane Adams: Spirit in Action by Louise W. Knight.
The Education of Jane Addams by Victoria Biss Brown.
Louis Brandeis (1856-1941) (3 of 51)
Louis Brandeis was a crusading lawyer and Supreme Court justice. Appointed by Woodrow Wilson in 1916, he served until 1939. His writings and activism changed American attitudes and law about the need to restrain corporate power, outlined in his book Other People’s Money and How the Bankers Use It (1914). As a “people’s lawyer” in Boston, he fought railroad monopolies, defended labor laws and helped create policies to address poverty-an approach that is now called public interest law. He pioneered the use of expert testimony (called the Brandeis Brief) in court cases, paving the way for an approach to the law that relied on empirical evidence. In 1908 he represented the state of Oregon in Muller v. Oregon before the Supreme Court. The issue was whether a state could limit the hours that female workers could work, which employers argued was an infringement on the “freedom of contract” between employers and their employees. His legal argument was relatively short, but he included more than 100 pages of documentation, including reports from social workers, doctors, factory inspectors and other experts, which showed that working long hours destroyed women’s health and well-being. Brandeis won the case and changed the field of litigation.
Further Reading:
Other People's Money-And How the Bankers Use It by Louis Brandeis.
Louis D. Brandeis: A Life by Melvin I. Urofsky.
Louis D. Brandeis: Justice for the People by Philippa Strum.
Florence Kelley (1859-1932) (4 of 51)
Florence Kelley was a leading organizer against sweatshops and an advocate for children’s rights, the minimum wage and the eight-hour workday. Part of the first generation of women to attend college, she joined the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, was active in women’s suffrage and was a founder of the NAACP. She worked at Hull House from 1891 to 1899 and the Henry Street Settlement in New York City from 1899 to 1926. In 1893 Governor John Altgeld appointed her Illinois’s first chief factory inspector, a position she used to expose abusive working conditions, especially for children. She successfully lobbied for the creation of the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics so that reformers would have adequate information about the condition of workers. In 1908 she gathered sociological and medical evidence for Muller v. Oregon and in 1917 gathered similar information for Bunting v. Oregon to make the case for an eight-hour workday.
From The Nation's Archives:
Shall Women Be Equal Before the Law? by Florence Kelley and Elsie Hill.
Further Reading:
Modern Industry: In Relation to the Family, Health, Education and Morality by Florence Kelley.
Florence Kelley and the Nation's Work by Kathryn Kish Sklar.
John Dewey (1859-1952) (5 of 51)
A philosopher, psychologist and education reformer, Dewey was an engaged activist, a prolific writer for popular magazines and the leading exemplar of American pragmatism. He founded the “laboratory school” at the University of Chicago to put his ideas about progressive education into practice. His ideas about “experiential learning” influenced several generations of educators. An early supporter of teachers’ unions and academic freedom, he spoke out and organized against efforts to restrict freedom of ideas, helped found the NAACP and supported women’s suffrage.
From The Nation's Archives:
The Future of Radical Political Action by John Dewey.
Further Reading:
Democracy and Education by John Dewey.
John Dewey and American Democracy by Robert B. Westbrook.
Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870-1920 by James T. Kloppenberg.
Lincoln Steffens (1866-1936) (6 of 51)
As a writer and editor for McClure’s magazine and later for The American Magazine, he (along with colleagues Ida Tarbell and Ray Stannard Baker) was an influential practitioner of “muckraking” journalism. In The Shame of the Cities (1904), he exposed corruption by local governments, which took advantage of poor immigrants and colluded with business power brokers. After visiting the Soviet Union in 1919, he became an enthusiastic supporter of the Russian Revolution, famously proclaiming, “I have been over into the future, and it works.” He later soured on Soviet-style communism.
From The Nation's Archives:
Report of Lincoln Steffens.
Further Reading:
The Shame of the Cities by Lincoln Steffens.
Lincoln Steffens: A Biography by Justin Kaplan.
W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963) (7 of 51)
Du Bois was a civil rights activist, sociologist, historian, polemicist and editor. He was the first African-American to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard and a founder of the NAACP. In his studies and books he challenged America’s ideas about race and helped lead the early crusade for civil rights. Du Bois’s intellectual and political battles with Booker T. Washington shaped the ongoing debate about the nature of racism and the struggle for racial justice, summarized in his book The Souls of Black Folk (1903), in which he described blacks’ “double consciousness” and famously predicted, “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.” From 1910 to 1934 he served as editor of The Crisis, the NAACP’s monthly magazine, which became a highly visible and often controversial forum for criticism of white racism, lynching and segregation, and for information about the status of black Americans. It gave exposure to many young African-American writers, poets and agitators. Du Bois was a Socialist, although he often disagreed with the party, particularly on matters of race. His writings had enormous influence on civil rights activists and on the burgeoning fields of black history and black studies.
From The Nation's Archives:
The Hosts of Black Labor by W.E.B. Du Bois.
Further Reading:
The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois.
W.E.B. Du Bois, 1868-1919: Biography of a Race by David L. Lewis.
W.E.B. Bu Bois, 1919-1963: The Fight for Equality and the American Century by David L. Lewis.
Upton Sinclair (1878-1968) (8 of 51)
A Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Sinclair wrote ninety books, most of which were novels that exposed social injustice or studies of powerful institutions (including religion, the press and oil companies). His 1906 novel The Jungle, which vividly described awful conditions in the meatpacking industry, caused a public uproar that led to passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act. In 1934, in the depths of the Depression, he left the Socialist Party and won the Democratic nomination for governor of California on a platform to “end poverty in California.” The state’s powerful agricultural, oil and media industries mounted an expensive negative campaign to attack Sinclair and help elect his Republican opponent. Sinclair lost, but his campaign mobilized millions of voters, helped push FDR to the left and changed California politics for the next several decades.
From The Nation's Archives:
My Private Utopia, by Upton Sinclair.
Further Reading:
The Jungle by Upton Sinclair.
Radical Innocent: Upton Sinclair by Anthony Arthur.
Upton Sinclair and the Other American Century by Kevin Mattson.
Margaret Sanger (1879-1966) (9 of 51)
Sanger worked as a nurse among poor women on New York City’s Lower East Side and became an advocate for women’s health. In 1912 she gave up nursing and dedicated herself to the distribution of information about birth control (a term she’s credited with inventing), risking imprisonment for violating the Comstock Act, which forbade distribution of birth control devices or information. She wrote articles on health for the Socialist Party paper The Call and wrote several books, including What Every Girl Should Know (1916) and What Every Mother Should Know (1916). In 1921 she founded the American Birth Control League, which eventually became Planned Parenthood. In 1916 she set up the first birth control clinic in the United States, and the following year she was arrested for “creating a public nuisance.” Her activism helped change public opinion and led to changes in laws giving doctors the right to give birth control advice (and later, birth control devices) to patients.
From The Nation's Archives:
The Pope’s Position on Birth Control by Margaret Sanger.
Further Reading:
What Every Girl Should Know and What Every Mother Should Know by Margaret Sanger.
Birth Control In America: The Career of Margaret Sanger by David M. Kennedy.
Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America by Ellen Chesler.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) (10 of 51)
Gilman was a pathbreaking feminist, humanist and socialist, whose lectures and writing challenged the dominant ideas about women’s role in society and helped shape the movement for women’s suffrage and rights. After attending her first suffrage convention in 1886, she began writing a column on suffrage for The People. She addressed the 1896 conference of the National American Woman Suffrage Association in Washington and testified for suffrage before Congress. She called women “subcitizens” and their disenfranchisement “arbitrary, unjust, unwise.” Her semiautobiographical short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892) described a woman who suffers a mental breakdown resulting from a “rest cure”-prescribed by her physician husband-of complete long-term isolation in her bedroom. In many books, including Women and Economics (1898), The Home (1903), Human Work (1904) and The Man-Made World (1911), she argued that women would be equal to men only when they were economically independent, and she encouraged women to work outside the home and for men and women to share house-work. She believed that housekeeping, cooking and childcare should be professionalized. Girls and boys, she thought, should be raised with the same clothes, toys and expectations. Gilman’s efforts complemented the activism of feminists like Alice Stokes Paul (1885-1977), who organized pickets, parades and hunger strikes to win passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920.
From The Nation's Archives:
Birth Control, Religion and the Unfit by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
Further Reading:
Women and Economics and Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Biography by Cynthia J. Davis.
Roger Baldwin (1884-1981) (11 of 51)
A pacifist and social activist, Baldwin was a founder, in 1917, of the American Civil Liberties Union (originally the National Civil Liberties Bureau), created to defend the rights of antiwar conscientious objectors, and served as its executive director until 1950. Under his leadership the ACLU litigated many landmark cases, including the Scopes Trial, the Sacco and Vanzetti murder trial and the challenge to the ban on James Joyce’s Ulysses.
From The Nation's Archive:
Editorial on General Douglas MacArthur by Roger Baldwin.
Further Reading:
Liberty Under the Soviets and A New Slavery: Forced Labor, the Communist Betrayal of Human Rights by Roger Baldwin.
Roger Nash Baldwin and the American Civil Liberties Union by Robert C. Cotrell.
Frances Perkins (1880-1965) (12 of 51)
Perkins was labor secretary for the first twelve years of Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency and the first woman to hold a cabinet post. Within FDR’s inner circle she advocated for Social Security, the minimum wage, workers’ right to unionize and other New Deal economic reforms. Inspired by Jacob Riis’s exposé of New York’s slums, How the Other Half Lives, and by reformer Florence Kelley, she joined the settlement house movement and worked for the New York Consumers’ League, lobbying the state legislature to limit the workweek for women and children to fifty-four hours. She marched in suffrage parades and gave street-corner speeches in favor of women’s suffrage. She joined the Socialist Party but soon switched to the Democratic Party. In 1918 New York Governor Al Smith appointed her to the state’s Industrial Commission, and in 1929 Governor Franklin Roosevelt appointed her the state’s industrial commissioner. She expanded factory investigations, reduced the workweek for women to forty-eight hours and championed minimum wage and unemployment insurance laws, all ideas she took to Washington when she joined FDR’s cabinet.
From The Nation's Archives:
Rise of a Labor Leader by Frances Perkins.
Further Reading:
Social Insurance for the US, a radio address by Frances Perkins.
The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life and Legacy of Frances Perkins by Kirstin Downey.
John L. Lewis (1880-1969) (13 of 51)
Joining his father as a miner at 16, Lewis became active in the United Mine Workers of America, working his way up to president, a post he held from 1920 to 1960. Under Lewis the UMWA committed money and staff to organizing drives in the rubber, auto and steel industries, helping to create a national wave of industrial unionism. In 1938 Lewis was elected president of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) at its founding convention and became a major public face of the nation’s growing and increasingly militant labor movement. In 1948 the UMWA won a historic agreement with coal companies establishing medical and pension benefits for miners, financed in part by a royalty on every ton of coal mined.
From The Nation's Archives:
An Inter-Union Labor Struggle by John L. Lewis.
Further Reading:
Labor and the Nation by John L. Lewis.
John L. Lewis: A Biography by Melvyn Dubofsky and Warren Van Tine.
Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962) (14 of 51)
Roosevelt was born to privilege but became one of the most visible social activists of her generation. She used her prominence as first lady to advocate for reform, giving visibility to movements for workers’ rights, women’s rights and civil rights and pushing FDR and his advisers to support progressive legislation. She held press conferences and voiced her opinions in radio broadcasts and a regular newspaper col-umn. She visited coal mines, slums and schools to draw attention to the plight of the disadvantaged and to lobby for reform laws. Her resignation from the Daughters of the American Revolution-to protest its ban on black singer Marian Anderson performing at Constitution Hall-made a controversial and powerful statement for racial justice. In 1948, as a delegate to the United Nations, she helped draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which affirmed equality for all people regardless of race, creed or color.
From The Nation's Archives:
Fear is the Enemy by Eleanor Roosevelt.
Further Reading:
The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt.
Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume I: 1884-1933 by Blanche Wiesen Cook.
Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume II: The Defining Years, 1933-1938 by Blanche Wiesen Cook.
Norman Thomas (1884-1968) (15 of 51)
Thomas was America’s most visible socialist from the 1930s through the ’50s. Ordained a Presbyterian minister in 1911, he became a crusader for the “social gospel” as the leader of several churches and head of a settlement house in Harlem. His pacifism and opposition to World War I led him to join the Socialist Party. After writing about reform issues for Christian publications, he joined The Nation as associate editor. In 1922 he became co-director of the League for Industrial Democracy and was a founder of the National Civil Liberties Bureau. He ran for governor, mayor, State Senate and City Council on the Socialist Party ticket. Starting in 1928 he ran for president six times, gaining a public voice as an articulate national “conscience” and spokesman for democratic socialism. Thomas was one of the few public figures to oppose the internment of Japanese-Americans. He helped start the racially integrated Southern Farmers Tenants Union, campaigned for labor rights, birth control and allowing Jewish victims of Nazism to enter the United States. At his eightieth birthday celebration, in 1964, he received plaudits from Martin Luther King Jr., Chief Justice Earl Warren and Vice President-elect Hubert Humphrey. An early critic of the Vietnam War, he gave a famous antiwar speech in 1968, proclaiming, “I come to cleanse the American flag, not burn it.”
From The Nation's Archives:
The Pacifist's Dilemma by Norman Thomas.
Further Reading:
Is Conscience A Crime? and Socialism Re-examined by Norman Thomas.
Norman Thomas: The Last Idealist by W.A. Swanberg.
A.J. Muste (1885-1967) (16 of 51)
Like Norman Thomas, Muste graduated from Union Theological Seminary. He began his career as a Dutch Reformed Church minister but soon became a Quaker as well as a leading pacifist, antiwar activist, socialist and union organizer. In the early 1920s he led Brookwood Labor College, a training center for union activists, and during the 1930s he led several key sit-downs. From 1940 to 1953 he headed the religious pacifist organization Fellowship of Reconciliation and helped found the Congress on Racial Equality, a militant civil rights group that pioneered the use of civil disobedience and trained many movement activists. In the 1960s he led delegations of pacifists and religious leaders to Saigon and Hanoi to try to end the war in Vietnam.
From The Nation's Archives:
Workers’ Education in the United States by A.J. Muste.
Further Reading:
The Essays of A.J. Muste.
Abraham Went Out: A Biography of A.J. Muste by Jo Ann Robinson.
Sidney Hillman (1887-1946) (17 of 51)
An immigrant from Lithuania, garment worker in Chicago and lifelong socialist, Hillman led successful strikes and organizing drives, became a union leader and served as president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers from 1914 to 1946. By 1920 the union had contracts with 85 percent of the nation’s garment manufacturers (representing some 177,000 workers) and had reduced the workweek to forty-four hours. In the 1920s Hillman’s ACWA pioneered “social unionism,” including union-sponsored co-op housing, unemployment insurance for union members and a bank to make loans to members and businesses with union contracts. One of the founders, in 1935, of the CIO (and later its vice president), Hillman became an influential adviser to FDR and Senator Robert Wagner, helping draft laws for workers’ rights. As chair of the CIO’s first political action committee in 1943, he mobilized union voters in election campaigns across the country, which became the model for building an electoral organization among union members.
From The Nation's Archives:
Correspondence: RAIC Declares a Dividend by Sidney Hillman.
Further Reading:
Reconstruction of Russia and Task of Labor by Sidney Hillman.
Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor by Steve Fraser.
Henry Wallace (1888-1965) (18 of 51)
As FDR’s agriculture secretary (1933-40) and then vice president (1940-44), Wallace played a central role in pushing for progressive New Deal initiatives, especially policies to help struggling farmers. Wallace was a crusading publisher of Wallaces' Farmer magazine and an Iowa farmer who pioneered the use of high-yield strains of corn. Wallace became increasingly radical and outspoken, and FDR dumped him as vice president in 1944. After serving as editor of The New Republic, he made an unsuccessful run for president in 1948 on the Progressive Party ticket, opposing racial segregation, the cold war and Truman’s tepid support for unions. Wallace was abandoned by many liberals who thought his platform was too radical and who worried that his campaign would take enough votes away from Truman to turn the White House over to the Republicans. He garnered less than 2 percent of the popular vote.
From The Nation's Archives:
How to Elect a Progressive Congress by Henry Wallace.
Further Reading:
The Price of Free World Victory, a speech by Henry Wallace.
American Dreamer: A Life of Henry A. Wallace by John C. Culver and John Hyde.
A. Philip Randolph (1889-1979) (19 of 51)
Randolph founded the first African-American labor union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, in the 1920s. A leading socialist writer, orator and civil rights pioneer, he built bridges between the civil rights and labor movements. He edited the Socialist newspaper The Messenger. In an early editorial, Randolph wrote: “The history of the labor movement in America proves that the employing classes recognize no race lines. They will exploit a White man as readily as a Black man... They will exploit any race or class in order to make profits. The combination of Black and White workers will be a powerful lesson to the capitalists of the solidarity of labor.” Randolph helped bring African-Americans into the labor movement while also criticizing union leaders for excluding blacks. In 1941, as the country was gearing up for war, Randolph threatened to organize a march on Washington to protest blacks’ exclusion from well-paid defense industry jobs. The strategy worked. In June 1941 FDR signed an executive order that called for an end to discrimination in defense plant jobs, America’s first “fair employment practices” reform. Randolph led the 1963 March on Washington, in which more than 250,000 Americans joined together under the slogan “Jobs and Freedom.”
Further Reading:
Excerpts from Randolph's keynote address to the Policy Conference of the March on Washington Movement in Detroit, Michigan, September 26, 1942.
A. Philip Randolph: A Biographical Portrait by Jervis Anderson.
Walter Reuther (1907-70) (20 of 51)
Reuther rose from the factory floor to help build the United Auto Workers into a major force in the auto industry, the labor movement and the left wing of the Democratic Party. He helped shape the modern labor movement, which created the first mass middle class. He led the 1937 sit-down at the General Motors factory in Flint, Michigan, a major turning point in labor history. After World War II he pushed for a large-scale conversion of the nation’s industrial might to promote peace and full employment. In 1946 he led a 116-day strike against GM, calling for a 30 percent wage increase without an increase in the retail price of cars and challenged GM to “open its books.” In 1948 GM agreed to a historic contract tying wage raises to the general cost-of-living and productivity increases. During his term as UAW president from 1946 until his death in 1970, the union grew to more than 1.5 million members and negotiated model grievance procedures, safety and health provisions, pensions, health benefits and “supplemental unemployment benefits” that lifted union members into the middle class and helped cushion the hardships of economic booms and busts. In the 1960s he led the labor movement’s support for civil rights, was an early opponent of the Vietnam War and an ally of Cesar Chavez’s effort to organize migrant farmworkers. Reuther became president of the CIO in 1952 and helped negotiate the 1955 merger of the AFL and CIO.
From The Nation's Archives:
Postscript to Collier’s World War III by Walter Reuther.
Further Reading:
Labor Day Address by Walter Reuther.
Walter Reuther: The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit by Nelson Lichtenstein.
Paul Robeson (1898-1976) (21 of 51)
Robeson was perhaps the most all-around talented American of the twentieth century. He was an internationally renowned concert singer, actor, college football star and professional athlete, writer, linguist (he sang in twenty-five languages), scholar, orator, lawyer and activist in the civil rights, union and peace movements. Though he was one of the century’s most famous figures, his name was virtually erased from memory by government persecution during the McCarthy era. The son of a runaway slave, Robeson won a four-year academic scholarship to Rutgers, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and graduated as valedictorian. Despite violence and racism from teammates, he won fifteen varsity letters in sports (baseball, football, basketball and track) and was twice named to the All-American Football Team. He attended Columbia Law School, then took a job with a law firm but quit when a white secretary refused to take dictation from him. He never practiced law again. In London, Robeson earned international acclaim for his lead role in Othello (1944). He starred in many plays and musicals and made eleven films, many with political themes. He promoted African independence, labor unions, friendship between the United States and the Soviet Union, African-American culture, civil liberties and Jewish refugees fleeing Hitler’s Germany. In 1945 he headed an organization that challenged Truman to support an antilynching law. Because of his political views, his performances were constantly harassed. In the late 1940s he was blacklisted. Most of his concerts were canceled, and his passport was revoked in 1950.
Further Reading:
Paul Robeson Speaks: Writings, Speeches, Interviews, 1918-1974.
Paul Robeson: A Biography by Martin B. Duberman.
Saul Alinsky (1909-72) (22 of 51)
Alinsky is known as the founder of modern community organizing. He taught Americans, especially the urban poor and working class, how to organize to improve conditions in their communities. Trained as a criminologist at the University of Chicago, he realized that criminal behavior was a symptom of poverty and powerlessness. In 1939, to improve living conditions in a Chicago slum near the stockyards, he created the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council, an “organization of organizations” comprising unions, youth groups, small businesses, block clubs and the Catholic Church. It engaged in pickets, strikes and boycotts to improve neighborhood conditions. His Industrial Areas Foundation trained organizers (including Cesar Chavez) and built grassroots groups in different cities, challenging local political bosses and corporations. He codified his organizing ideas in two books-Reveille for Radicals (1946) and Rules for Radicals (1971)-which influenced several generations of progressive movements and activists.
Further Reading:
Reveille for Radicals and Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky.
Let Them Call Me Rebel: Saul Alinsky: His Life and Legacy by Sanford D. Horwitt.
Woody Guthrie (1912-67) (23 of 51)
Guthrie, the legendary songwriter and folk singer, is best known for “This Land Is Your Land,” considered America’s alternative national anthem. He traveled from his native Oklahoma across the nation, writing songs about migrant workers, union struggles, government public works projects and the country’s natural beauty, including “I Ain’t Got No Home,” “Tom Joad,” “So Long It’s Been Good to Know Yuh,” “Roll on Columbia,” “Pastures of Plenty,” “Grand Coulee Dam” and “Deportee.” As a member of the Almanac Singers, Guthrie wrote and performed protest songs on behalf of unions and radical organizations. Many of his songs are still recorded by other artists and have influenced generations of performers, including Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Bruce Springsteen.
Further Reading:
This Land Is Your Land by Woody Guthrie.
Ramblin' Man: The Life and Times of Woody Guthrie by Ed Cray.
Woody Guthrie: A Life by Joe Klein.
Earl Warren (1891-1974) (24 of 51)
Warren, chief justice from 1953 to 1969, took the Supreme Court in an unprecedented liberal direction. With the help of progressive justices William O. Douglass and William J. Brennan, the Warren Court dramatically expanded civil rights and civil liberties. The Republican Warren used his considerable political skills to guarantee that the 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education was unanimous. In another landmark case, Gideon v. Wainwright (1963), the Warren Court ruled that courts are required to provide attorneys for defendants in criminal cases who cannot afford their own lawyers. In New York Times Co. v. Sullivan (1964), the Court significantly expanded free speech by requiring proof of “actual malice” in libel suits against public figures. The 1965 Griswold v. Connecticut decision established the right to privacy and laid the groundwork for Roe v. Wade (1973). In Miranda v. Arizona (1966), the Court ruled that detained criminal suspects, prior to police questioning, must be informed of their constitutional right to an attorney and against self-incrimination. After serving as Alameda County district attorney, Warren was elected California’s attorney general in 1938 and four years later was elected governor, serving until 1953. In that post he approved the rounding up of Japanese-Americans into detention camps. In 1948 he was the Republican Party’s unsuccessful vice presidential candidate on a ticket with Thomas Dewey. When Eisenhower nominated Warren to the Supreme Court, he thought he was appointing a conservative jurist and later reportedly said that it was the “biggest damn fool mistake” he’d ever made.
Further Reading:
Brown v. Board of Education Ruling, 1954.
Justice for All: Earl Warren and the Nation He Made by Jim Newton.
Chief Justice: A Biography of Earl Warren by Ed Cray.
Ella Baker (1903-86) (25 of 51)
After graduating from North Carolina’s Shaw University in 1927 as valedictorian, Baker began a lifelong career as a social activist. She served as a mentor to several generations of civil rights activists without drawing much attention to herself. In 1940 she became an organizer for the NAACP, traveling to many small towns and big cities across the South and developing a network of activists. In 1957 Baker moved to Atlanta to help Martin Luther King Jr. organize the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), running a voter registration campaign. After black college students organized a sit-in at the Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, on February 1, 1960, Baker left the SCLC to help the students spread the sit-in movement. That April she helped them create the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) at a conference at her alma mater.
Further Reading:
Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision by Barbara Ransby.