Dear Progressive Reader,
This weekend we celebrate the birthday of our founder, Senator Robert M. “Fighting Bob” La Follette (June 14, 1855). La Follette started The Progressive (originally called La Follette’s Weekly) on January 9, 1909 in the midst of a long career of struggling for the rights of everyday working people and against the power of corporations over our democracy. La Follette’s strong stands against militarism and for freedom of speech echo in the pages of our magazine today.
And yet, “Fighting Bob” did not fight alone. Working alongside in all of his efforts and campaigns was his partner Belle Case La Follette, a noted feminist and anti-racist activist in her time. This week Nancy Unger, biographer of both La Follettes, wrote in The Washington Post, “La Follette was keenly aware that while she could not know what it was like to be African American confronting deeply entrenched racist structures, she could dig into the trenches and focus on action, advocacy, and activism, not mere expressions of solidarity.” The La Follettes, she continues, “were part of the small but determined biracial coalition striving to bring about the economic equality and full citizenship to African Americans that Reconstruction had intended — but failed — to achieve.” Her efforts, from more than a century ago, give us examples, Unger tells us, of “the kind of meaningful and persistent action modeled by Belle La Follette in exposing and attacking racism.”
"What's past is prologue," penned William Shakespeare in his 1611 drama The Tempest. Things that have happened before often lay the groundwork for today’s events. This is perhaps nowhere more exemplified than in the movements to tear down statues that celebrate racists and white supremacists. Across the United States, crowds have pulled down or damaged statues of Confederate generals, and more recently Christopher Columbus. A similar wave of statue removal is sweeping across Europe as the images of colonizers and slavers are toppled. Eddie Chambers, artist and art historian from Britain, reports, “What started in Minnesota has the potential to do more than address systemic problems in the United States; people on the other side of the Atlantic have taken these protests into remarkable, extraordinary, and wholly unforeseen directions.”
Monuments are coming down, and symbols and images are being called to account, but as Kevin Alexander Gray says in an interview this week, “[I]n learning how to effect change, you still have to go from protest to politics. . . . You have to have a focus and you have to be at the table in some fashion when the laws are being discussed, when change is being discussed.” Much of this move from “protest to politics” is taking place in a new vision of community as Sarah Jaffee explains, “Americans have just been reminded of what the state is capable of doing to them; they will be asking next what it is capable, if anything, of doing for them.” What we are seeing in this rise of mutual aid efforts and networks, she says, is a “movement [that] puts care into practice in real time; it demands that we create a society that affirms that human worth, that care, every day.”
And finally, this week historians Mari Jo and Paul Buhle review the new book by John Nichols on the historical role of Henry Wallace in pushing the Democratic Party to the left during the 1940s, and the lessons it offers for the 2020 electoral season. “It should serve to inspire Democrats,” they write, “to heed their history, during a parallel time of acute economic need, by going back to FDR, Henry Wallace, and the New Deal.”
Keep reading, and we will keep bringing you important articles on these and other issues of our time.
Sincerely,
Norman Stockwell
Publisher
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