What Unites Us Read online

  We see disenfranchisement occurring not only with how people are allowed to vote, but also for whom. Gerrymandering isn’t just a recent phenomenon, though; the word was coined in 1812 when Massachusetts governor Elbridge Gerry went to such egregious lengths to redraw the state senate districts in his party’s favor that one district took on the shape of a salamander. More recently, gerrymandering has been taken to a new extreme, and neither of the major political parties is entirely blameless. Aided by powerful computer data analysis, it is now possible to draw district lines in such a way as to swing considerably the balance of state legislative and congressional delegations. Gerrymandering is now often used to stifle minority representation by congregating voters in districts to lessen their overall political power, and some of the fiercest court battles on voting are taking place in this arena.

  Even beyond the legal hurdles to voting, a shrinking and polarized electorate damages our democracy. We need elected officials who represent wide swaths of the population, not narrow gerrymandered silos. Our republic relies on a marketplace of ideas, but creating safe seats for both Republicans and Democrats removes the very competition for votes that is at the heart of our democracy. It lessens enthusiasm and civic engagement, which leads to apathy. One can actively suppress votes or make voting seem meaningless. They are two paths to the same destination. Our voting participation is far below the levels of a healthy democracy, and this should worry all of us who care about the United States. We need to be creative in finding new ways to get more people to vote. Instead we seem to be going backward.

  In that neighborhood precinct meeting many decades ago, I saw democracy as an activity and a civic duty. I saw the same thing in the determination of Medgar Evers and his followers. Of course, casting a ballot is just one of our civic duties, but a vital one. It is an act of speech, a demand that your voice be heard, that you are included in the republic. Lessening this bond of citizenship, either forcibly or through indifference, makes us less free and less resilient as a nation. I hope we can continue and regain our footing on a path of greater enfranchisement. The coherence of our national destiny depends on it.

  Dissent

  It takes a special brand of courage to forge a path against a marching crowd. We may live in a democracy of majority rule, but one of our most important founding ideals was to confer legal protection on those unafraid to buck popular sentiment with contrarian voices. Dissent can sometimes be uncomfortable, but it is vital in a democracy. Our nation would never have thrived without the determination of those who were fearless in their beliefs, even when those beliefs were severely out of step with the popular mood and those in power. And in moments like the present, when our government has become erratic and threatens our constitutional principles, dissent is doubly necessary to resist a slide into greater autocracy.

  I grew up in a segregated and bigoted world in dire need of dissenting voices. My parents, teachers, friends, and acquaintances mostly accepted the status quo without question, and I have come to learn that most people, in most times, tend to follow the herd. That is why our First Amendment is so important. Free speech must be protected so that we can hear from those who challenge our beliefs. And a free and independent press is essential for bringing dissenting opinions to the national conversation.

  My first inklings of the importance of dissent came during the anti-communist witch hunts of the early 1950s, epitomized by the reign of terror under Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy. But Houston and East Texas had already been a hotbed for such activity; before McCarthy, there was Martin Dies Jr., a local congressman who chaired the House Un-American Activities Committee before and during World War II. He was a classic demagogue who railed against a federal government riddled with “hundreds of left-wingers and radicals who do not believe in our system of private enterprise.” It was a tragic preamble to the much larger destruction to come.

  When the anti-communist fervor reached its apex in the United States in the decade after the war, the crackdown hit Houston particularly hard, as documented in Don Carleton’s book Red Scare. The city had a very active chapter of the Minute Women of the U.S.A., a national group of middle- and upper-class women dedicated to ferreting out supposed “un-Americans” in government and education. And it was in the schools where the most significant battle lines in town were drawn. In 1952, the Minute Women and other like-minded groups put forward a slate of ardent anti-communists for the school board, setting up a showdown with moderates on the ballot. It was one of the biggest local news stories of the year.

  In the end, some candidates from each group were elected, which suggests that there were many in Houston who refused to be swept up in the mania. But the Minute Women, working in close association with many of the city’s male power structure, did wreak tremendous damage on individual lives. They forced out teachers and administrators who they felt were communists, as well as those they deemed not fervent enough in their anti-communism. Their biggest success was the takedown of the deputy superintendent, Dr. George Ebey, on trumped-up charges of being a communist sympathizer—a development of such significance it was covered by Time magazine.

  After college and a short stint in the Marines, I got a brief tryout to work at the Houston Chronicle in 1954 under the editorship of Martin Emmet Walter, a strident anti-communist. Walter had a merciless eye—and fierce tongue—for any reporter who even subtly deviated from his strict conservative orthodoxy. The Chronicle’s editorial page was a soapbox for some of the vilest propaganda of the day.

  I didn’t last long at the newspaper (too poor at spelling, for one thing), but the Chronicle moved me over to the radio station the paper owned, and we started doing daily reports from the city desk in the paper’s newsroom. It was there that I got a wonderful mentor in an editor named Dan Cobb, the first dissenter I ever got to know. He understood well, and would verbalize, the dangers of the age. He had no tolerance for the malignancy of the Red Scare, but he also knew that Walter, as editor, could hold the newsroom in a perpetual state of panic. Every day I would watch Cobb make the rounds of the reporter desks with the demeanor of a village priest or rabbi. He would provide quiet but encouraging counsel. “I know you are worried, but we have to outlast this,” he would say in hushed tones. “We must work within the confines of the possible; it is our job to report the news as straight as we can.”

  One evening I was reporting live on the radio from the newspaper’s city desk on a round of contentious school board elections when some results came in that were bad for a slate of anti-communist candidates on the ballot. I made some mention of it on the air, not knowing that Walter was behind me. He grabbed my microphone and yelled into it, “This young man doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” He stormed off, leaving me shaken and distraught. Cobb came over immediately to steady my young nerves, reminding me that as a reporter it was my job to tell it as I saw it.

  There were many reporters at the Chronicle who were horrified by the editorial direction the paper had taken, and they each had a decision to make: Should they quit in defiance, or try to stay and do the best they could? Cobb knew that if he pushed too far, he and his reporters would likely be fired and replaced by those not afraid to toe the company line. It is that age-old dilemma: Do you stay and try to change the church from within, or leave the church? Cobb and the others decided to stay and push back in subtle ways. Oftentimes Walter would want a straight news story rewritten to give it his preferred slant, but Cobb would go ahead and publish the original, claiming he was on deadline and couldn’t incorporate the new copy. It was a subtle form of dissent, but it was effective.

  The drama playing out at the Chronicle paled in comparison to the dangers posed to the nation at large. Over the course of just a few years, thousands of lives were broken by lost jobs and shattered reputations. Some of the victims were famous, like those on the Hollywood Blacklist. Most, however, were everyday people: teachers, public officials, and those working in the private sector. It is now widely understoo
d that it was the persecutors who were “un-American,” not the persecuted. But too much of the country had looked the other way until the fever broke.

  One of the lessons of the Red Scare is that the long arc of history often validates the dissenters, and a particularly striking example of this is the Vietnam War. Today it is largely acknowledged to have been a tragic mistake, but when I first went to cover the war in 1965 – 66, the conflict and the anti-communist impulses that fueled it were still largely popular across the political spectrum, but especially with politicians in Washington. The Pentagon was painting a rosy picture of the state of the conflict, but by the mid-1960s the folly of Vietnam was apparent to many of the young men who were ordered to fight and die in that distant jungle hell. And those of us who went out to cover the combat saw it too.

  There were some dissenting voices on Vietnam from the beginning, but they tended to be on the far end of the political left. Mark Hatfield, a moderate Republican governor from Oregon, was a notable exception. In 1966, he was the only governor to vote “no” on support of the war at the annual conference of governors, and in the fall of that year, Hatfield rode his antiwar stance to the Senate. He defeated the pro-war incumbent, Democrat Robert Duncan, who had dramatically claimed that the stakes were “whether Americans will die in the buffalo grass of Vietnam or the rye grass of Oregon.” With backing from the voters of Oregon, Hatfield turned dissent into political victory. That is how our system of democracy is supposed to work.

  Another dissenter of note was Minnesota senator Eugene McCarthy, who broke with President Lyndon Johnson, a fellow Democrat, over the war. McCarthy was a source of mine in Washington—not a secret source, but a good one. He was iconoclastic and scholarly—not your typical senator. I knew that McCarthy’s dread about Vietnam weighed heavily on him, but I was still surprised when he announced that he would challenge President Johnson for the 1968 Democratic nomination. “I am concerned that the administration seems to have set no limit to the price which it is willing to pay for a military victory,” he explained. McCarthy became a pariah in his own party, and few felt his quixotic candidacy would have much effect.

  After the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong launched the Tet Offensive in January of 1968, popular opinion further shifted against the war. This was especially true among the Democratic electorate, and McCarthy’s candidacy galvanized the antiwar vote. When McCarthy came close to defeating Johnson in the New Hampshire primary, New York senator Bobby Kennedy jumped into the race, and President Johnson announced: “I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president.” McCarthy’s dissent had helped shape the course of history.

  With what we now know about Vietnam, it may be tempting to retroactively portray the war critics as travelers on a path of inevitability. But that was not how it felt back then. Dissent is most controversial during wartime because it is cast as unpatriotic and dangerous to the national cause. But that is precisely the time when a democracy should be asking itself difficult and uncomfortable questions.

  In January 1968, five thousand antiwar protesters—mostly women—gathered in Washington under the banner of the Jeannette Rankin Brigade in honor of the eighty-seven-year-old woman walking proudly in the front row of the procession. Rankin, a fierce critic of the Vietnam War, had a long history of political activism. In 1916, she had become the first woman ever elected to Congress, a Republican representative from Montana, confidently stating, “I may be the first woman member of Congress, but I won’t be the last.”

  Rankin was an avowed pacifist, and in 1917, she was one of only fifty representatives (and six senators) to vote against American entry into World War I. “I felt . . . the first time the first woman had a chance to say no to war, she should say it,” she explained. Rankin served one term, losing a race for Senate in 1918. But she was reelected to the House in 1940, just in time for another fateful vote. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Rankin followed her pacifist conscience again and cast the sole vote against declaring war. “As a woman,” she said, “I can’t go to war, and I refuse to send anyone else.” This act of dissent was so unpopular that it ended her political career. I disagree strongly with Rankin’s vote on war with Japan. But I also feel that we are a better and stronger nation for having such voices. The role of dissent is to force all of us to question our dogmas and biases. It is to stretch the spectrum of discourse.

  In the same vein, on April 4, 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. took the pulpit at Riverside Church in New York for one of the most consequential and controversial speeches of his career. It was entitled “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,” and most Americans weren’t ready for the message he would deliver. Instead of the optimism of “I Have a Dream,” there was a weariness verging on pessimism. “The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit,” King said. “. . . We as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values.” King preached about money going for bombs instead of to the needy, about the uneven burden of military service between the rich and the poor, and about the institutionalization of violence at the heart of all wars. King described the plight of the Vietcong and argued that the world would see us as occupiers. In perhaps his most controversial statement, he equated the use of napalm by the U.S. military with the tactics of Nazi Germany. “What do they think as we test out our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe?”

  I was not in the pews that evening, but I remember reading the press coverage and feeling a deep ache in my heart. The thought occurred that perhaps King had gone too far. He might have gotten a standing ovation from his antiwar audience, but the larger response to the speech was highly negative. The New York Times ran an editorial entitled “Dr. King’s Error” that suggested, in an observation echoed by many commentators and even some of King’s allies, that the civil rights leader should have kept his focus on racial justice instead of war.

  But King saw these causes as inextricably linked. A few days after the speech, he was captured on an FBI surveillance tape in a heated debate with his friend Stanley Levison. Levison worried the speech was a disaster that played into the hands of their critics. King was resolute in response. “I figure I was politically unwise but morally wise. I think I have a role to play which may be unpopular.” That quote is as elegant a definition of dissent as you are likely to find.

  In all the sanitized reimaginings of King’s legacy, the Riverside Church speech is too often forgotten. That is a mistake because it captures both the complexities of the times and of a man who was one of the great dissenters in American history. King had exhorted his audience “to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism” to “a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history.” I like the phrases “smooth patriotism” and “firm dissent” because fighting for justice is rarely smooth and dissent requires steely resolve.

  What is perhaps most striking about the Riverside Church speech, and something I think too often misunderstood about King, is his strong belief that communism was not the answer. For while he was highly critical of the United States, he told his audience, “We must not engage in a negative anti-communism, but rather in a positive thrust for democracy, realizing that our greatest defense against communism is to take offensive action in behalf of justice.” One of the more remarkable interchanges I had in an interview with Fidel Castro was when the Cuban communist firebrand expressed his complete bafflement as to why King and other civil rights leaders in the United States had not embraced communism, as so many other protest and revolutionary groups around the world had. I think the answer lies in the nature of principled dissent. We have a long history in the United States of marginalized voices eventually convincing majorities through the strength of their ideas. Our democratic machinery provides fertile soil where seeds of change can grow. Few knew that better than King.

 
; While some dissenters are famous, most act on much smaller stages. But that does not mean their actions are any less courageous. To stand up and say something isn’t right takes guts, no matter who you are, but it is especially true for those who have traditionally been more vulnerable members of society. Recently, there has been a growing awareness of harassment in the workplace, particularly the kind inflicted by powerful men on less powerful women. As a young reporter, I knew of famous senators who were “girdle snappers” on the congressional elevators, and while such brazen behavior wouldn’t be tolerated today, we still see how companies, organizations, universities, the military, and others too often have looked the other way on actions that aren’t only repulsive but also illegal. Whatever progress we have made is because many brave women, and some brave men, have stepped forward with stories that they insisted the rest of us hear.

  Dissenters are not always right. They are certainly not all people one would admire, and sometimes their motives are complicated or unknowable. Do we consider Edward Snowden, the former CIA employee who leaked sensitive secrets about surveillance programs from the U.S. government, to be a dissenter? Some see him as a hero and others see him as a traitor. His reasons for his actions remain opaque, despite his multiple public statements. I find it difficult to understand why he assumed that he single-handedly had enough wisdom to decide to release highly sensitive government secrets, but you cannot deny the effect he had. American policy has changed profoundly. I do not know how history will judge Snowden, but it is a good reminder of how dissent can look up close and in real time. It is messy. It is controversial. But it often is consequential.

  The United States was born from perhaps one of the most radical lines of dissenting speech in human history, the idea that the citizens of a land should live by the consent of the governed and not the whims of a monarch. Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower famously paid homage to this history in a 1954 speech during the height of the Red Scare: “Here in America we are descended in blood and in spirit from revolutionaries and rebels—men and women who dared to dissent from accepted doctrine. As their heirs, may we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion.” Unfortunately, we have seen in our history too many cases where “honest dissent” was confused with “disloyal subversion,” but one place where dissent is actively fostered is in the law. This is especially true at the Supreme Court, where many of the most famous dissents have pointed the way for the future direction of the country.