On June 4, 2003, Bill Moyers gave a major speech at the Take Back America Conference in Washington DC, titled “This is Your Story – The Progressive Story of America. Pass It On.” The conference was sponsored by the Campaign for America’s Future. Just 20 days later, on June 24, 2003, Richard Grossman published a scathing critique of Moyers’ speech, in an essay he titled, “Who Were the Populists? A Few Thoughts On Bill Moyers’ Speech, ‘This is Your Story — The Progressive Story of America. Pass It On.'” Here is an excerpt from Grossman’s essay and a link to the full text.
I cannot do justice here to the false assumptions, half-truths, distortions and manipulations upon which Moyers’ speech is constructed. Adrienne Rich has written that we cannot understand ourselves unless we understand the assumptions in which we are all “drenched.” Can it be any different for a nation?
Moyers devotes only a few lines to the Constitution and the Founding Fathers — saying nothing about what these Fathers designed the nation’s plan of governance to be, to do. He does declare that “for all the rhetoric about `life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,’ it took a civil war to free the slaves and another hundred years to invest their freedom with meaning. Women only gained the right to vote in my mother’s time. New ages don’t arrive overnight, or without `blood, sweat and tears.’ You know this.”
All true. But Moyers does not explain why it has been extraordinarily difficult for the majority to bring about changes in fundamental rights; why it has been difficult for the majority to govern.
This is because people organizing for rights, seeking to define the nation’s money, work and commerce, seeking to build institutions and mechanisms of governance, and trying to have a real say in deciding war and peace, always ran smack into the minority controlling the law of the land . . . into a minority directing the armed might of the nation.
This is the governing system the Founders’ Constitution put in place.
People organizing to stop war, close the School of the Americas, redefine the CIA, save forest ecosystems, curb factory farms, resist corporate toxic poisoning, regulate corporate activities in elections and legislatures, etc., find the “law of the land” arrayed against them. They find the “law of the land” supporting corporate privilege while repressing people organizing to stop corporate assaults and denials of rights.
Moyers’ history tells us that the “norm” for sane and logical societal change — for shifting the force of government and law from the oppressors to the oppressed — is generations and generations of struggle. Don’t worry about the structure of governance — keep doing what you’ve been doing. No need to rethink history or law — do more of the same . . . just try harder.
And by lumping Populism with Progressivism, by extolling the Progressive Era’s legacy of regulatory and administrative law, he joins countless 20th century leaders and historians in denying the Populist Movement. What they all work so hard to deny, alas, is the largest democratic mass movement in US history, a massing devoted to building upon the trampled ideals of the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence.
Populists were farmers, workers and like-minded intellectuals challenging usurpations galore declared lawful by men of property. Populists had no interest in regulating destructive and rights-denying corporate behaviors. Daring to trust their own experiences with banking, railroad, grain, land, insurance, and manufacturing magnates (and their corporations), they had no illusions that permitting and disclosure — the basis of “progressive” regulation — would fix a corporate state.
“Heretics in a land of true believers and recent converts,” Populists had seen “the coming society and they did not like it.”
Their goal was to end special privilege, make all institutions democratic, render all corporate entities subordinate, replace competition with cooperation. They came to understand that for the American people to own and control not only their own labor but also the money system and all necessaries of life, they would have to gain authority over the mechanisms of governance.
To do this, they realized they would have to change the country’s minority rule Constitution. MORE…