In today’s popular imagination, New England Transcendentalists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller are known primarily as canonical literary figures, or in Thoreau’s case as a proto-hippie recluse who lived in the woods by Walden Pond and wrote a book about it. But these writers were engaged with some of the most pressing issues of their day, from abolition and anti-imperialism to civil disobedience.
It was Thoreau himself who coined the phrase “civil disobedience,” in an 1849 essay of the same name in which he argues for the morality of refusing to pay taxes to an unjust government. He spent a night in Concord’s jail for his refusal to pay the poll tax, which he felt was supporting slavery and the Mexican War, but was bailed out by a friend, and spent the next day leading a spirited “huckleberry party” through the woods around town, where “the State was nowhere to be seen.” [1]
Although less inclined to direct action than his younger colleague, Emerson was a strident critic of contemporary society, exposing the many contradictions and injustices on which it was built. In his lecture “The Transcendentalist,” first delivered in January 1842 at the Masonic Temple in Boston (see image above), Emerson sets out a strong dichotomy between contemporary material culture and idealist thought, praising solitude, independence, and “thoughts and principles not marketable or perishable.” [2]
In one passage particularly relevant to today’s financial crisis, Emerson chooses as his protagonist a banker building a mass of logic and buttoned-down reputation on a base of pure chaos:
“The sturdy capitalist, no matter how deep and square on blocks of Quincy granite he lays the foundations of his banking-house or Exchange, must set it, at last, not on a cube corresponding to the angles of his structure, but on a mass of unknown materials and solidity, red-hot or white-hot, perhaps at the core, which rounds off to an almost perfect sphericity, and lies floating in soft air, and goes spinning away, dragging bank and banker with it at a rate of thousands of miles the hour, he knows not whither, — a bit of bullet, now glimmering, now darkling through a small cubic space on the edge of an unimaginable pit of emptiness […] ask him why he believes that an uniform experience will continue uniform, or on what grounds he founds his faith in his figures, and he will perceive that his mental fabric is built up on just as strange and quaking foundations as his proud edifice of stone.” [3]
Americans of Emerson’s day were no strangers to crisis. In some ways, they were more prepared for the underlying uncertainty and risk behind financial markets than people today, accustomed to steadily rising stocks and home values, with minor blips along the way.
In fact, only five years before, the Panic of 1837 ended a period of speculation and inflation with a devastating reckoning, in which banks in New York City refused to honor paper currency, leading to widespread bank failure and record high unemployment. Part of the cause lay in President Andrew Jackson’s decision to withdraw government funds from the Second Bank of the United States (a precursor to the Federal Reserve), but the public primarily blamed the Panic on incoming President Martin Van Buren, who came into office on the cusp of the disaster and was unable to reverse it during his four years in office. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
[1] From Thoreau’s “Resistance to Civil Government” or, “Civil Disobedience:”http://sniggle.net/Experiment/index5.php?entry=rtcg#p33
[2] From Emerson’s “The Transcendentalist,” quoted at: http://www.emersoncentral.com/transcendentalist.htm
[3] Ibid.
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons
On the left: Birmingham police hit children with a fire hose on May 3, 1963, during the civil rights “Children’s Crusade.” Photograph by Charles Moore.
On the right: Portland police use pepper spray on an Occupy Portland protester on November 17, 2011. Photograph by Randy Rasmussen.
The year is 1968.
Communist Czechoslovakia has just elected the relatively liberal Alexander Dubcek, who seeks to establish ”socialism with a human face.” During what became known as Prague Spring, Dubcek starts to loosen restrictions on speech, media, and travel.
Meanwhile, the Northern Vietnamese’s Tet offensive stuns America. The My Lai Massacre follows in March. The next month, President Lyndon B. Johnson announces that he wouldn’t seek another term. Robert Kennedy puts in a bid as the Democratic nominee. On April 4th, Martin Luther King is shot.
Riots erupted across the country — in Louisville, Kansas, Chicago, Baltimore, and DC. You know how computer speakers seize up several seconds before a cell phone rings? That’s what the air was like four months into 1968. The unrest was palpable. Nineteen days after the assassination of King, students united to protest Columbia University’s support of the Vietnam War and its [ongoing] colonization of Harlem. The students decided to occupy:
On April 23, 1968, several hundred students gathered at the sundial on the Columbia campus to protest the war and the gym led by the Student Afro-American Society (SAS) and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Some went to Morningside Park, where they tore down a fence around the gymnasium construction site and battled with police. Then they and other protesters marched into Hamilton Hall, Columbia’s main undergraduate classroom building, occupied its lobby, and prevented the dean of the college from leaving his office. By morning, African American students continued to occupy Hamilton, while other Columbia and Barnard students, mostly white, took over President Grayson Kirk’s office in Low Library. Soon student protesters took over three other buildings—Fayerweather, Mathematics, and Avery.
For six days, while demonstrations for and against the occupation roiled the campus, faculty members attempted to mediate. But to no avail. The stumbling block: a demand for amnesty for the protesters that the administration was unwilling to accept. In the early morning hours of April 30, Kirk summoned the New York City police, who entered the occupied buildings, beat many of the demonstrators, as well as bystanders and faculty members, and arrested more than 700. The building occupation was over, but the outrage was just starting to build. Thousands of students and faculty, many radicalized by the police action, went on strike, effectively shutting down the university for the rest of the semester.
The gym was never built in Morningside Park, and Columbia’s weapons research contract was terminated. But the implications of the 1968 occupation and strike went far beyond those two demands. In the wake of Columbia’s protest, campuses around the country exploded. And students took to the streets in cities around the world, from Paris and Prague to Tokyo and Mexico City. The social framework—institutions that excluded minorities, political parties that disenfranchised voters, a government that waged an unpopular war—seemed to be coming apart. Hopes were soon dashed. Before the year was out, Kennedy was assassinated, Prague Spring was crushed by Soviet tanks, the Chicago police violently beat protesters at the Democratic Convention, and Richard Nixon was elected President.
Let me just repeat one bit: Thousands of students and faculty, many radicalized by the police action, went on strike—
Thank you, Oakland Police Department.
Police versus protestors in downtown Oakland, during the anti-Vietnam “Stop the Draft Week.” October 20, 1967. Photograph by Bill Crouch. Courtesy of the Oakland Museum of California.
With police brutality at Occupy Oakland all over the news, it’s worth remembering that Oakland has a rich history of protest. On October 20, 1967, four thousand people marched through the streets, blocking Army buses, clashing with police. This was the biggest demonstration against the Vietnam War up to that point. At a sit-in at the Oakland Army Induction Center, even Joan Baez got arrested. Then, as now, police violence turned the streets into a warzone. In the 1960s, however, the Oakland mayor didn’t have a Facebook page where people could leave thousands of angry comments.
The 1979 occupation of Wall Street marked the 50th anniversary of the crash.
[Posters for contemporary stagings of the play in Mexico]
What are the ethics involved in killing an oppressive leader? This is a particularly pressing issue in the Arab world today, but philosophers and writers have struggled with the question for centuries. Lope de Vega’s 1619 play Fuenteovejuna is a classic of Spanish Golden Age theatre devoted to this problem, chronicling a violent populist uprising against a brutal tyrant.
Based on a real historical episode, the play centers on the fate of corrupt Commander Guzman of the crusading Order of Calatrava, who in 1476 is waging a war of succession against Spain’s “Catholic Monarchs,” Fernando and Isabel of Castile and Aragon. As the play begins, the Commander is planning the conquest of Ciudad Real, along Castile’s southern border near the Order’s headquarters. While preparing the attack, he stops in the mountain town of Fuenteovejuna. While there, the Commander and his men take a liking to several local women, rape one of them and attempt to take another, who makes it back to town badly beaten.
In retaliation, a group of the townsmen find and kill the Commander. After his death, Fernando and Isabel send a magistrate to the town to determine who is responsible. In the most memorable exchange of the play, the villagers meet his questions with a unified response:
“Who killed the Commander? Fuenteovejuna, Señor. Who is Fuenteovejuna? The whole town, Señor.” [1]
Even after the magistrate tortures men, women, and children, their answer remains the same. “Fuenteovejuna did it” is their refrain to the magistrate, and no single guilty party is ever found. This simple response is one of the most quoted in Spanish literature.
The play remains popular throughout the Spanish-speaking world and beyond, and its strong theme of standing up to injustice lends itself to constant reinterpretation. Over the years the play has been viewed “as a fervent cry for monarchy, for democracy, for socialism, even for communism.” [2] Contemporary Mexican stagings of Fuenteovejuna (see posters above) have drawn parallels between the arbitrary violence shown by the Commander and the mounting death tallies of the war between Mexican drug cartels. A 2010 New York University production, put on in collaboration with a Chilean acting school, called the play’s message “a clarion call for revolution against human rights abuse in many parts of the world.” [3]
But by glorifying the villagers for their courage against tyranny, the subtleties of the original can be obscured. Frustrating easy political interpretations, the play ends with Fernando and Isabel pardoning the villagers for their actions, on their way to the conquest of Granada from the Moors and sponsorship of Columbus’ voyage to the New World (all in 1492). This “reyes ex machina” conclusion may be a letdown to modern readers, but there is no real indication that the villagers saw themselves as participating in a radical political experiment. They just wanted a brutal local dictator replaced by benevolent monarchs, and they achieved their goals through brute force and deception.
Time will tell if the movements of the Arab Spring fall into a similar pattern of reprisal and conformity. Reading Fuenteovejuna today, it’s hard not to think of Muammar Gaddhafi’s bloodied and mutilated body, the anonymous mob of his assassins, and the motives which drove them to take their revenge on him. The comparison is not lost on the Spanish; one newspaper titled a recent story about Gaddhafi’s death: “¿Quién mató al Comendador?” [4]
Sources:
[1] In Spanish: “¿Quién mató al Comendador? Fuenteovejuna, Señor. ¿Quién es Fuenteovejuna? Todo el pueblo, Señor.” Full Spanish text available here: http://mgarci.aas.duke.edu/cibertextos/VEGA-LD/FUENTEOVEJUNA/
[2] “The Politics of Lope’s Fuenteovejuna,” William R. Blue, Hispanic Review, Vol. 59, No. 3 (Summer, 1991)
[3] http://www.smarttix.com/show.aspx?showcode=FUE1
[4] http://www.lavozdigital.es/cadiz/v/20111022/mundo/quien-mato-comendador-20111022.html
Image credits: http://sanginescultura.wordpress.com/2011/08/09/festival-teatro-aureo-en-guanajuato/ and http://www.enkidumagazine.com/art/2011/010611/a_0106_008_fuenteovejuna_juliana_faesler_rescate_de_la_conciencia.htm
On March 15th, 1848, the people of Hungary initiated a campaign to buck the reins of Austrian rule. The story goes that local poet Sándor Petőfi was instrumental in sparking the revolution, reciting his ‘National Poem’ and leading the crowds that day in Budapest as they took to the streets to reclaim their homeland. His role in inspiring the revolution earned him a spot among Hungary’s most celebrated national heroes, and eventually landed his visage on—of all places—one of the country’s banknotes. Petőfi provides a lasting example of the power of lyrical art in a rank-and-file political movement, especially when performed by those rare figures capable of rousing genuine national pride.
Nemzeti dal - National Poem
…
The sword shines brighter than the chain,
Decorates better the arm,
And we still wore chains!
Return now, our old sword!
By the God of the Hungarians
We vow,
We vow, that we will be slaves
No longer!
The Magyar name will be great again,
Worthy of its old, great honor;
Which the centuries smeared on it,
We will wash away the shame!
By the God of the Hungarians
We vow,
We vow, that we will be slaves
No longer!
Where our grave mounds lie,
Our grandchildren will kneel,
And with blessing prayer,
Recite our sainted names.
By the God of the Hungarians
We vow,
We vow, that we will be slaves
No longer!
(translation excerpt via Wikipedia)
Americans and British soldiers clash at the base of New York’s liberty pole. Courtesy of the NYPL Digital Gallery.
In the spring of 1766, a slender monument rose over the rooftops of Manhattan. It stood half a mile from Wall Street, on the current site of City Hall Park. Americans called it a liberty pole: a very public reminder of their resistance to British taxation, and their demand to be treated as citizens not serfs. They built it directly in front of the royal barracks, as a defiant gesture to those sneering soldiers who habitually assaulted their fellow citizens and whose hated presence in their city they financed from their own pocket. It became a meeting place for a new group called the Sons of Liberty, and the site of tense standoffs and skirmishes with British troops.
That summer, the soldiers cut the liberty pole down. The next day, the Americans built another. A month later, the soldiers destroyed it. The Americans raised a third; the soldiers razed it. A crowd of two thousand gathered to help hoist the fourth pole, shielding its base with metal plates. British soldiers tried to blow it up with gunpowder. When that failed, they chopped it down. For the fifth and final liberty pole, the Americans tied a pair of ship’s masts together. At the top they put a weathervane inscribed with a single word: “liberty.” It was still standing six years later, when the Revolution broke out.
In 1981 Richard Serra’s minimalist sculpture Titled Arc was installed in Foley Square and 8 years of public outrage and legal rigamarole later, the 72-ton piece was disassembled and packed away in a Brooklyn warehouse.
The General Services Administration provided the funds for this piece, and appointed the National Endowment for the Arts to select the work and the artist. They chose Serra and paid him $175,000, just enough to cover the materials, construction, and installation.
The selection was very much in keeping with the modernist tradition of the Kennedy-era cultural programs. During that time, artists like Serra left galleries to create big public sculptures that challenged traditional, patriotic civic monuments. They preferred to be working on the streets.
But when society became more conservative in the mid-70s and 80s, modern federal art, as Columbia Professor Casey Blake argues in his brilliant essay “The Modernist Moment in Federal Public Art,” was seen as leftist politicization of a public space. Chosen by boards of elites—or so the right said—these works became very visible targets for those wishing to attack the liberal state.
But criticism also came from progressives, and the term Plop Art was liberally applied to works like Serra’s which appeared to come into being without consideration of local context or culture. Two months after its completion, over 1,300 federal employees, many of whom needed to travel across the square regularly for their work, signed a petition against Titled Arc. For critics from the right and left, Blake says, the real problem was a supposed lack of respect for the local setting and for the public’s use of the space. What critics wanted was public debate—a General Assembly, so to speak—so that the community itself could play a part in commissioning its own public art.
But look at that arc! How lovely and stern and ultimately cold and confrontational it is. It stood in front of the US and NY County Courthouses, where so many of the Occupy Wall Street marches have taken place. Could there have been a firmer symbol of the bar between bank/state and the 99%? Sure, had there been some GAs back then, maybe we would have heard from the disgruntled employees. A judge might’ve walked up to the human mic and complained that this arc cut him off from Federal Square, further cramped him in an already hostile and dehumanizing neoclassicism snow globe. In this square the 99% may very well be federal employees. But I sure do wish we could reassemble it and plop it back into place! Seems to me like it would make a sturdy bulletin board for the General Assembly.
On January 11, 1944, in his last State of the Union address, FDR proposed a “second Bill of Rights.” The first had “proved inadequate,” he said. So he laid out a new solution:
We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. “Necessitous men are not free men.” People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.
In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all regardless of station, race, or creed.
Among these are:
The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the Nation;
The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;
The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;
The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;
The right of every family to a decent home;
The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;
The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;
The right to a good education.
