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CAUTIONARY TALES FROM THE NEW LEFT  
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Steve Early
July 2, 2025
Jacobin
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_ In a new memoir, New Left leader Michael Ansara wants to impart
lessons from his own time as a campus activist to today’s
protesters. But his later role in a corruption scandal that set back
Teamsters reform for decades offers its own cautionary less _

Michael Ansara in Boston, Massachusetts, on March 14, 1979. , Barbara
Alper / Getty Images

 

Review of _The Hard Work of Hope: A Memoir_ by Michael Ansara
(Cornell University Press, 2025)

Campus opposition to the Israeli military assault on Gaza, since the
fall of 2023, has been quite triggering for veterans of student
organizing against the Vietnam War in the 1960s. In progressive media
outlets, now old “New Leftists” have mainly weighed in with
welcome expressions of support,
[[link removed]] tempered
with cautionary notes about political mistakes, excesses, and “bad
choices [[link removed]]” that might
be better avoided this time around.

 

Early on, there were some Bronx cheers from “elders” who were much
farther left six decades ago (and perhaps regretting it now). Writing
in the
[[link removed]]_ Nation_
[[link removed]],
one such alumnus of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a retired
academic from upstate New York, quit Democratic Socialists of America
(DSA) over a downstate chapter’s “willing to embrace the most
extreme positions on the Palestinian question — up to and including
denying Israel’s right to continued existence.” In contrast, a
well-known former SDS leader
[[link removed]] at
Columbia University praised present-day protesters at his alma mater
“for their moral clarity and courage.” He also warned them about
“the mistake of answering police violence with anger, fighting them
and calling them pigs,” which, in 1968, “blurred the line between
nonviolence (the occupation of buildings) and violence (our slogans
and rhetoric), thereby undercutting our moral position.”

Seventy-eight-year-old Michael Ansara, a leading member of this
generational cohort, has gone further in offering 276 pages worth of
advice to college students today. In his recently released
memoir, _The Hard Work of Hope_, Ansara asks timely questions like,
“How does a movement build support when large parts of the country
are opposed to its goals? How do you connect with people who disagree
with you? How do you build organizations that unite across racial
lines?”

His discussion of these organizing challenges also draws on his
formative experience as a Boston-area civil rights activist in high
school and his postcollege role in the formation of Massachusetts Fair
Share, a pioneering economic justice organization. Ansara argues,
persuasively, that the lessons of student struggles against the
Vietnam War are still relevant today, particularly the experience of
building a New Left that migrated from campuses to blue-collar
communities and workplaces.

His book is less forthcoming [[link removed]] about
the challenges and contradictions of “successfully owning and
operating two businesses” that served other employers, progressive
nonprofits, and political candidates. Ansara’s business decisions at
the helm of one of those firms almost landed him in jail in the late
1990s and did major damage to several progressive organizing projects.

Green Pastures of Harvard

Ansara’s activism began at age thirteen, when he balked at
participating in a Cold War–era civil defense drill at his public
school in Brookline, Massachusetts. This led to his campaigning for
nuclear disarmament and then racial justice as a supporter of the
Southern civil rights movement.

As a teenager, he worked on several independent political initiatives,
including a race for the US Senate by peace candidate H. Stuart
Hughes, a Harvard professor who did not fare well against a young
Democrat with White House connections named Ted Kennedy. Ansara also
supported a long-shot campaign by civil rights advocate Noel Day, the
first black candidate for Congress from Massachusetts, who also ran as
an independent against House speaker John McCormack.

Ansara’s business decisions, at the helm of one of those firms,
almost landed him in jail in the late 1990s and did major damage to
several progressive organizing projects.

In 1964, the author crossed the Charles River and, as a scholarship
student, started raising hell in what Bob Dylan called, at the time,
“the green pastures of Harvard University
[[link removed]].
[[link removed]]”
[[link removed]] The
next few years were a blur of late-night debates, marches and rallies,
student strikes, and street battles over the Vietnam War.

Harvard and nearby Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) were
the twin towers of war and imperialism in the Boston area. When you
had Defense Secretary Robert McNamara
[[link removed]], Dow
Chemical
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supplied his department with napalm for dropping on Vietnam), and
the s
[[link removed]]hah
of Iran
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visiting your campus — plus the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps
[[link removed]] (ROTC)
as a permanent presence — there was no shortage of targets of
opportunity for SDS supporters, who were in turn arrested and
brutalized by local cops and/or disciplined by university
administrators.

Not far from Harvard Square, MIT was also viewed by angry students as
an integral part of “the war machine,” due to its “$100 million
a year in Pentagon research and development funds, making it the tenth
largest Defense Department R&D contractor in the country.”

Ansara helped create a coalition of students from twenty-five
Boston-area colleges and universities, plus local high schools, which
faced court injunctions and police violence when it mobilized
thousands of students in an attempt to shut down MIT’s military
research facilities.

One revealing reflection by Ansara, as a key local leader of this
“massive youth insurrection,” relates to his relationship with the
rank and file:

In SDS, the confusion over leadership inhibited our effectiveness,
allowing young arrogant men like me to lead without being accountable.
. . . Leadership structures and a culture that promotes the
intentional development of new leaders are important for any insurgent
democratic movement. It is especially important for student groups
where every four years, older leaders cycle out and every year new
people cycle in.

Postgrad Turn to the Working Class

_Hard Work_ also addresses the still-relevant question: What do
student radicals do after they graduate and need to find a job in
which they can remain politically active? In the Boston area, some
former SDS members went to work in big industrial shops like the
unionized shipyard in Quincy, Massachusetts, the General Motors plant
[[link removed]] in
Framingham, the GE Works in Lynn
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and even a Raytheon missile plant (which is still turning out
union-label products for the Pentagon).

 

In parallel fashion, Ansara and other New Left veterans created a
dynamic, fast-growing network of Bay State groups, called Fair Share,
that organized workers and their families around non-workplace issues
in some of the same blue-collar cities and others like Chelsea,
Revere, Lowell, Worcester, and Fall River. The author writes that Fair
Share tackled issues including taxes, energy and insurance costs,
toxic waste sites, plant closings, telephone company rates and
policies, red-lining and other unjust bank practices, youth jobs, and
“an endless stream of neighborhood issues.” Among the group’s
victories, large and small, were “rate hikes stopped, rebates and
tax abatements in the millions sent to working and low-income families
. . . stop lights won. Parks cleaned up. Abandoned buildings fixed
up.”

By 1979, Ansara claims, “brilliant campaigns and systematic work
built a statewide organization with greater name recognition and
support than any organization or politician at that time in
Massachusetts” (which probably would have been news to my old Bay
State congressman, US House speaker Tip O’Neill, and a soon-to-be
presidential candidate named Ted Kennedy). Still, over 110,000
families — 10 percent of the households in the state, including my
own — were Fair Share members, paying dues of at least $15 per year
and receiving its statewide newspaper.

On any given day, at Fair Share’s peak, there was a local membership
meeting somewhere in Massachusetts with ten to five hundred people in
attendance.

On any given day, at Fair Share’s peak, there was, according to the
author, a local membership meeting somewhere in Massachusetts with ten
to five hundred people in attendance. Door-to-door canvassing was
nonstop; Fair Share leaders, staff, and members were able to raise
$3,000,000 a year to support their model community organizing work.

Unfortunately, “Fair Share grew faster than my ability to manage
it,” Ansara writes. And it was “too dependent on staff.” Due to
the absence of spending controls and a sudden loss of federally funded
Fair Share jobs, the group developed cash-flow problems, a deficit of
$1.2 million, mounting bank debt, and IRS back taxes or penalties it
struggled to pay.

Ansara was forced to lay himself off, suddenly close Fair Share
offices, and furlough two-thirds of its staff. The group continued for
several more years and many of its former organizers later became
progressive lawyers, academics, union reps, environmental campaigners,
or elected public officials. But Fair Share’s “financial crash
started a downward spiral that could not be reversed.”

A Second Career

After Fair Share’s debt-driven collapse, Ansara “stumbled into”
a second career as a political consultant, with a focus on voter
registration. It was a choice seemingly driven by his post-’60s
regrets about failing to develop a strategy for change that
“included both disruptive protest and effective electoral action.”

Despite Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis’s past neoliberal
resistance to property tax reform sought by Fair Share, Ansara worked
on his 1988 presidential campaign. He also continued to do organizer
trainings and became a highly paid specialist in nonprofit
fundraising. One major client of the telemarketing business he created
was Working Assets Long Distance (WALD) — which later became CREDO
Mobile [[link removed]] — a reseller of
phone service actually provided by anti-union firms like Sprint and
MCI.

Instead of looking for the union label, customers of AT&T, one of the
largest unionized private sector employers in the country, were urged
to sign up for the more “socially responsible” WALD instead
because it pledged to donate 1 percent of its gross revenues to an
array of progressive nonprofits. Thanks to call center support
provided by the Ansara-owned Share Group, and a big direct-mail
campaign targeting readers of the_ Nation_,_ Mother Jones_, and
the _Utne Reader_, WALD grew its customer base from 50,000 to 320,000
during the 1990s. And millions of dollars did indeed flow to
nonprofits like Planned Parenthood, the American Civil Liberties
Union, and other “liberal social and political causes
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But later in H_ard Work_, we learn that this savvy businessman,
employing hundreds of workers in multiple telemarketing centers,
suddenly became a babe in the woods of union politics. In 1996, Ansara
discloses, he “unknowingly, participate in a conspiracy of money
laundering, misuse of union dues, fraud, and extortion of union
contractors” as “part of a headline-producing scandal
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the campaign of the reform president of the Teamsters Union,” Ron
Carey, who Ansara doesn’t even identify by name.

Ansara admits that he “was guilty of multiple felonies” and his
“negligence was indefensible.” So he decided to take “full
responsibility” and plead guilty to a single felony count (as did
two other Democratic Party consultants involved in the costly and
messy affair). Their cooperation with federal prosecutors helped all
avoid jail time, but Ansara paid more than $700,000 in fines and
restitution
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another guilty party
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to do until a lien was placed on his ski condo in Aspen many years
later).

Midlife Crisis?

Akey figure in the plot was then Teamsters political director Bill
Hamilton, a past business associate of Ansara’s. Hamilton contested
the federal charges against him, was convicted of fraud, conspiracy,
embezzlement, and perjury and sentenced to three years in jail. After
leading 185,000 workers to a major strike victory over United Parcel
Service (UPS) in 1997, Teamsters president Carey was indicted on a
single perjury count related to the scandal. But jurors believed his
assertions, then and before, that he had no knowledge of any misuse of
union funds to aid his reelection.

 

Ansara describes this critical episode in his post-organizing career
as a “midlife crisis,” albeit a “profound” one. It was, in
fact, much more than that, as former UPS driver and Teamsters activist
Ken Reiman documents in _Ron Carey and the Teamsters_
[[link removed]]_,_ a
well-researched account of Carey’s tragic rise and fall. Despite his
acquittal, Carey was forced to step down as Teamsters president and
banned from further union involvement, including participating in a
rerun election in 1999.

In 1996, Ansara discloses, he ‘unknowingly, participate in a
conspiracy of money laundering, misuse of union dues, fraud, and
extortion of union contractors’ as ‘part of a headline-producing
scandal around the campaign of the reform president of the Teamsters
Union.’

The then twenty-year-old reform caucus Teamsters for a Democratic
Union (TDU), which helped elect Carey twice, was unable to prevent
old-guard candidate James P. Hoffa — son of longtime, mob-connected
Teamsters leader Jimmy Hoffa —  from becoming Carey’s successor
for the next twenty-three years. The reputation and moral authority of
TDU and the Carey administration as anti-corruption campaigners took a
serious, short-term beating, and Teamsters reform at the national
level was set back for an entire generation.

As _In These Times_
[[link removed]] and other
progressive media outlets reported, the scandal known as “Teamster
donorgate” nearly derailed the career of recently elected American
Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO)
treasurer Rich Trumka. When questioned before a federal grand jury,
Trumka invoked the Fifth Amendment
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violation of the federation’s own constitution) rather than explain
how his office became improperly entangled in Carey’s reelection
effort.

In a sad echo of Fair Share’s sudden demise fifteen years earlier,
Ansara’s misbehavior triggered the collapse of Citizen Action
[[link removed]],
a national network of groups “working on the same issues” that the
author had helped launch. Citizen Action was led by Ira Arlook, an old
Tufts University SDS comrade, who ended up in personal legal jeopardy
because of his ill-advised role in the Teamsters’ election-related
donor swapping. Claiming two million members at the time, Citizen
Action was forced to lay off twenty staffers and close its doors in
Washington, DC, when its wealthy donors fled.

The author’s own multistate call center operation took a major hit
when a key client, the Democratic National Committee, severed ties
with him [[link removed]]. He
was then forced to sell Share Group to others, who continued to
operate it (and hired Jackson Lewis
[[link removed]],
the notorious union-busting law firm, to handle its labor
negotiations).

Even Barbara Arnold, Ansara’s second wife, became deeply embroiled
in the criminal investigation. She was recruited by him to make large
prohibited donation
[[link removed]]s to
Carey’s 1996 reelection campaign (listing her occupation as
“student”); the Share Group billed the Teamsters for nearly
$100,000 worth of services it did not perform to pay back Arnold.

Third or Fourth Act

Within a decade, the author had, nevertheless, bounced back in the
same business. Unlike Share — which, to its credit, dealt with my
union, the Communications Workers of America (CWA), as well as the
International Longshore and Warehouse Union and the United Auto
Workers — his new venture, called UpSource, operated on a nonunion
basis. According to the author, the firm never opposed unionization at
its locations in Canada, Oklahoma, and Massachusetts. And as reported
by a New Bedford newspaper
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Ansara did strive “to offer good wages and benefits rather than
follow the trend toward call center ‘sweatshops.’”

Telemarketing is clearly a tough business to be socially responsible
in, even for a former ’60s radical. (On that point, see ex-Teamster
Boots Riley’s satirical 2018 film, _Sorry to Bother You_
[[link removed]]).
Since leaving the industry, the author of _Hard Work of Hope_ has
reinvented himself, again, as a published poet and now memoirist.

Ken Paff, a founder of TDU, told me, ‘Ansara’s role in taking down
a great union leader set back my life’s work for many years.’

On his new author website [[link removed]], Ansara is
getting rave reviews from old colleagues like Midwest Academy founder
Heather Booth (whose late husband, Paul, was an early SDS mentor of
the author and, as a top American Federation of State, County and
Municipal Employees (AFSCME) official, tried to help Carey get
reelected in a similarly unhelpful fashion in 1996).
Former _Dissent_ editor Michael Kazin, a historian of the American
left (who is outed in Ansara’s book as a former Weatherman
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the author as “one of his generation’s most effective community
organizers.”

Other 1960s radicals, whose decades of labor activism or community
organizing suffered major blows due to the author’s misbehavior,
tend to be less forgiving. As Ken Paff, a founder of TDU, told me,
“Ansara’s role in taking down a great union leader set back my
life’s work for many years.” A former Citizen Action national
board member (and retired CWA leader in New Jersey) remains similarly
incensed thirty years later.

Crimson Courage

Younger readers of _Hard Work_ will nevertheless find much useful
advice for the current roller-coaster ride of antiwar campaigning on
campus. One thing to avoid, Ansara argues, is a modern-day version of
the sectarian anti-imperialism of groups like the Progressive Labor
Party, which developed a late ’60s following at Harvard. This Maoist
group proved to be more of a hindrance than help in building a massive
1969 strike by thousands of Harvard students of all political stripes.
That shutdown resulted in the creation of an African American studies
program and the abolition of military officer training on campus for
the next forty-two years.

Last year, Harvard students joined a Gaza protest movement that
overlapped with a critical national election cycle. As Ansara notes,
there was, in 1968, similar political tension between antiwar
demonstrators and a Democratic contender for the presidency who (like
Kamala Harris last year) refused to support peace initiatives for fear
of alienating a lame-duck White House boss. But since January 20 of
this year, Harvard Square, the scene of so many past student battles
against university complicity with the military, has become ground
zero for Trump’s attacks on the Ivies.

Suddenly, one observer notes
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“everyone loves Harvard” because “the enemy of my enemy is my
friend.” According to an undergraduate student leader
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pride is at an all-time high.” Past graduates like
journalist Matthew Yglesias
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who previously opposed giving any money to this “rich and famous
university” — are now “fighting fascism” by donating to a
Harvard-created defense fund.
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On graduation day last month, Harvard president Alan Garber
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thunderous applause from a crowd of 30,000, despite “silencing
dissent, prosecuting protest, and abandoning academic freedom,”
according to one _Harvard Crimson_
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argues that Garber has “already actualized many Trump Administration
wishes for the University.”

Last year, Garber was booed by graduating seniors for denying diplomas
to thirteen protesters of the Gaza genocide facing disciplinary
action. At this year’s commencement, among the supportive alumni
handing out self-congratulatory “Crimson Courage” stickers
was Mark Dyen
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class of 1970, who helped cofound Mass Fair Share after quitting the
Weatherman faction of SDS and “coming back to political sanity,”
as Ansara puts it.

Dyen, who later founded a renewable energy company, told the _New
York Times_ that he was coming to the aid of his embattled alma mater
because “Harvard stood up for itself, for us, for higher education,
and democracy.” That was not a message that would have resonated
with Dyen’s earlier self, or Ansara’s, in the same venue
fifty-five years ago — when political friends and enemies seemed
easier to sort out.

AN EARLIER VERSION OF THIS ARTICLE APPEARED IN _CONVERGENCE
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_STEVE EARLY has been a DSA member for forty-two years, active in the
Communications Workers of America even longer, and authored a book
called Refinery Town: Big Oil, Big Money, and the Making of an
American City, which profiled Jovanka Beckles and other leaders of the
Richmond Progressive Alliance._

_JACOBIN is a leading voice of the American left, offering socialist
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