Books•Surmountable

Remembering Todd Gitlin

February 25, 2022 by briangruber No Comments

I was greatly saddened to read of Todd Gitlin’s recent passing. I interviewed Dr. Gitlin in his Columbia University office for Surmountable, co-authored with Adam Monier Edwards, in 2019. It was a memorable experience and an advanced education in the art of effective activism and citizen engagement in a liberal democracy.

Gitlin will have missed the current Russian incursion into Ukraine but his counsel for protestors and activists remains potent and relevant. He and I shared intense opposition to U.S. military incursions like Vietnam and Iraq — then and now — and as such had no hesitation condemning imperialist behavior by Russia or any malevoTodd Gitlinlent player on the world stage.

Here, in tribute to a great American, are excepts from the book.

Gitlin’s office is a stone’s throw from Columbia University’s Low Library administration building and Hamilton Hall, both occupied by student protesters in 1968. He is serving as professor and as chairman of the Ph.D. program of Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, considered one of the world’s preeminent academies of the craft. Gitlin is a prolific author, having penned eighteen books, and is both a public thinker on the matter of protest and public assembly, and, from an early age, a front-line activist, having served as third president of Students for a Democratic Society in 1963–1964. He organized the SDS march on Washington in March 1965.

Were the freedoms codified in the Bill of Rights revolutionary ideas in their time?

“They were absolutely revolutionary,” according to Dr. Todd Gitlin, professor and Ph.D. program chair at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. “And before the American Revolution, before the overthrow of the crown, a number of the colonies adopted guarantees of the freedoms.”

The American colonies derive most of their constitutional and legal systems from England, including the selective freedoms granted to white male landowners. Most of the original colonies include a declaration of fundamental rights and liberties in their constitutions.

“When you ask people what’s in the First Amendment, they’ve heard of freedom of speech, of the press, of freedom of religion,” Gitlin says. “They don’t know the right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the government for redress of grievances.” Gitlin, author of numerous books on the history and dynamics of protest, refers to his emphasis of the issue in Occupy Nation. “There is so little jurisprudence, there’s so little even legal discussion either in the courts or among the law schools about this phenomenon of the right to assemble, it’s really quite extraordinary. I mean, it’s like it there’s an actual collective forgetting.”

The idea of petition comes from the Magna Carta, a charter of rights agreed to by King John of England in 1215. Heavy burdens in blood and treasure were imposed on barons to fund foreign wars and they revolted, capturing London and forcing the king to negotiate at Runnymede. The most famous clause, still codified in English law, gave “free men” the right to justice and a fair trial, though most citizens were unfree peasants, chattel lorded over by landowners.

“I don’t think there’s anything in the Magna Carta about assembly,” points out Gitlin. “There is about petition. The law professor Ronald Krotoszynski, of the University of Alabama, wrote a smart, important piece about petition; the nobles, and eventually the commoners, had a right to actually go and deliver the petition to the king. It’s a face-to-face operation.”

“When cities hosting political conventions started sequestering demonstrations like in Boston — a compound was set up far away from the (2004 Democratic National Convention) arena — he stated that should be held unconstitutional, that defies the spirit of petition. Petition is like serving you with papers. And if you put me in a cage a mile away, that won’t pass muster. A very interesting notion. And we don’t have much conversation about this.”

For Gitlin’s full interview and that of other thought leaders and activists across four continents, read Surmountable: How Citizens from Selma to Seoul Changed the World.

Assessing Impact

When asked for an assessment of impact of Columbia University’s highly publicized stretch of building takeovers, student demands, and police intrusions in 1968, Professor Gitlin changes the subject.

“I’m going to dance to the side of your question. What is a protest? What is it we’re talking about? Is a protest a picket line or a sit-in; or is a protest an element in a long-running campaign whose scope outreaches the immediate goal or the immediate professed goal, or what some people who organize the event think is the professed goal, but then enlarges and rolls into something else? It all depends on the time-frame we’re asking about.

“So, was the Montgomery Bus Boycott a success? Rosa Parks got arrested on the day after. I don’t know what she felt. But some people probably understood that this was a moment in a campaign, and others might have felt like, ‘God, they just did it again. They threw the black lady off the bus,’ and so on.

“It wasn’t clear for more than a year that the bus boycott would succeed in costing the bus company so much money that they would end up caving in, and even when that was achieved, can we say that the campaign was a success? Yes, one bus line was integrated. Others had been quietly integrated without anybody really noticing around the South. But we think of that as a benchmark, because it takes its place within this whole sway of activity that we call the ‘civil rights movement.’

“If you go around and you find people who were at this or that demonstration, and you ask them, ‘What do you make of it after this time?’ it’s going to depend a lot on who you’re asking. Are you asking somebody who was in it for the duration, or somebody who just came in, went to an event, came to a certain conclusion about it, and then went away? You’re going to get very different takes on the experience. That’s the first element. It’s sort of elementary.

“Let’s think about the movement against university investment and other investments in South Africa in the ’80s, which I was involved in as a faculty member at Berkeley and as an alumnus at Harvard. There was a lot of clamor, a lot of activity for a year or two, depending; it was a national movement. Did it accomplish the goal of getting university and some other funds to divest from South Africa investments? Partially.

“Did it end apartheid? No. Did it contribute to a process, which did undermine apartheid and help end it? Yes.

“You can actually trace a trajectory, which starts on a modest scale on a campus like this one or Berkeley, and then it snowballs. That’s a very typical kind of protest that you could say, yes, it does succeed, but not in the first instance. That is to say, it’s rare that somebody protests something, and then the next day, a change is made.

“Part of what you will find is that your sense of the meaning of the event or events is contingent on your sense of the time span. Are you playing a long game? How impatient are you? So, most protests, in the short run, fail.

There were massive protests against the 2003 Iraq War. There was and is a widely held belief that money has so saturated American politics that elected officials pay more attention to their funders than to their constituents. Thus, Bush and Cheney went ahead and did what they were going to do. Why were those protests ineffective?

“I think that analysis is very shallow,” argues Gitlin. “As you suggested in the second part of your question, Bush was going to go to war. Everything was riding on it. His balls were riding on it. His daddy was riding on it. His ‘weak in the knees’ after September 11 was riding on it. I can’t imagine a scenario that would have truncated that war or even nipped it in the bud.

“All wars are political situations, and had a different administration been in power, had there been wiser judgments on the part of many politicians, then the war, which was unnecessary and stupid from the beginning, as well as sinful, would not have materialized, but there was no way that war was going to be blocked.”

Gitlin has a handy answer when queried what he would say to a young activist — his full-length book on the subject, Letters to a Young Activist, perhaps a political homage to the Rainer Maria Rilke classic Letters to a Young Poet. Gitlin has loads of copies lining an upper shelf of his office and, in a dangerous act of generosity, stands on the verboten upper step of a small ladder to fetch one. Apparently, the professor had some choice words for former presidential candidate Ralph Nader, which were not well received. So, Nader, finding the book on remainder, buys a thousand copies and ships them to the author as a sort of spite purchase. Gitlin takes a moment to sign a copy with the inscription, “In the ecstatic search for decency.”

The book’s conclusion neatly tracks the author’s reflections on the Vietnam War.[i]

Each challenge is unique and each is identical — to do what’s possible by finding out what’s possible and, in the process, overcome what seemed possible.

Some borrowed wisdom.

From Samuel Beckett in Worstward Ho: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

From a civil rights song: “Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on.”

You can order Surmountable: How Citizens from Selma to Seoul Changed the World here.

Subscribe to co-author Adam Monier Edwards’ innovative Surmountable project newsletter by visiting https://www.surmountable.co/. Yes, that’s .co. The initiative tackles citizen engagement on issues ranging from affordable housing to zero waste.

For information on Brian Gruber’s five published books, go here.

[i] Gitlin, Todd. Letters to a Young Activist (Art of Mentoring) (p. 170). Basic Books.

Reading time: 8 min

Books•Surmountable

My Article in YouTango on the History of Women’s Protest Movements

March 16, 2021 by briangruber No Comments

YouTango, a popular website focused on women’s issues and interests, solicited and published my article on Ashli Babbitt and the history of women’s protest movements. Here is an excerpt, with the full article available here.

The images of Ashli Babbitt’s violent death shocked the nation. Owner of a San Diego pool supply company, she led a crowd of rioters to the Speaker’s Lobby of the United States Capitol on January 6, in snow boots, sporting a Trump flag as a cape. She was shot dead by a Capitol police officer as she tried to intervene in the congressional validation of the 2020 presidential election.

The crowd of protesters, invited to D.C. and directed to the Capitol by the President of the United States, was heavily male, adding a poignant, unsettling dimension to the scene. A suburban businesswoman, traveling from California to the people’s House, shot by a government agent during an act of political expression.

What to make of Ms. Babbitt? Women have been in the vanguard of social and political change since the country’s founding. Was Babbitt a model of political protest, laying her body on the line for truth, justice, and the American Way? And how, after all, do we choose our battles, ensure that we achieve what we pursue, and evaluate success?

FOR MORE, click here.

Reading time: 1 min

Books•Surmountable

New Article on the January 6 Insurrection Attempt Published in International Policy Digest

February 27, 2021 by briangruber No Comments

The International Policy Digest published my article on the January 6 insurrection attempt at the United States Capitol, along with a solid dollop of promotion of the “Surmountable” book. Here is an excerpt with a link to the full article.

How Americans Surrendered the Mantle of Artful Peaceful Protest

FEBRUARY 27, 2021

We Americans, a hubristic lot, imagine we are exceptional at most everything. Even our name is a conceit, one nation in the Americas, and nah, we are the real Americans.

There is certainly a huge dallop of delusion in the notion of America as a beacon of human rights, civil liberties, peace and freedom, leaders of the free world, standard-bearers of democracy, guardians of the rule of law, and the separation of powers. Still, as I travel the world, I am continually impressed by the deep and abiding admiration this country commands, large, radioactive warts notwithstanding. Especially the two-fifths of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution that guarantee that Congress shall make no law abridging the “right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” Peaceably.

On the 6th of January – already that date bursts with meaning and imagery – the utter failure of Americans to grasp its own traditions came home to roost. “Patriots” violently intruded on the lynchpins of constitutional freedoms. The five dozen court rulings, the validated elections of the 50 states, the establishment by state and federal election officials that there was no evidence of fraud, were all repudiated and scorned in an orchestrated attack on the Congress, with murderous intent, cheered on by the President of the United States.

These conservative standard-bearers, who never saw a protest they didn’t disdain – Black Lives Matters, women’s rights, climate change – bastardized the notion of protest into, “We take what’s ours.” Ours being predominantly white, male, and Christianist.

I recently traveled around the United States – and four continents – to visit activists and thought leaders who witnessed or analyzed 13 iconic political protests, from Selma, Standing Rock, Occupy, and the Bonus Army, to Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution, Ukraine’s Euromaidan, and South Korea’s Candlelight Revolution. What struck me repeatedly was the fresh, passionate convictions of overseas protesters, religiously nonviolent, and vividly aware of the U.S. tradition of people’s governance, as a contrast to the declining understanding at home of the need to protect and nurture our political traditions. Our history of native genocide, slavery, and endless military misadventures aside, they struck me as more appreciative of American civil society than Americans.

In the printed chronicle of that trip, Surmountable, co-written with Adam Monier Edwards, we document a litany of absurd gaps in citizen education.

To read the entire article, go here.

Reading time: 2 min

Books•Surmountable

Surmountable Pre-Publication Book Out to Reviewers

December 16, 2020 by briangruber No Comments

Due to publishing and publicity timeline adjustments, the Surmountable book launch date has been adjusted to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday on January 18 and President’s Day on February 15. Pre-order on Amazon and other online book retailers will be available in early January.

Stay tuned for more details on the launch and early reviews.

Reading time: 1 min

Books•Surmountable

My Howl Performance Plus an Interview with City Lights Bookstore’s Elaine Katzenberger

September 27, 2019 by briangruber No Comments

Mark Phinney’s epic weeklong Koh Phangan Man event, the second in a series, concluded this week. One of the joys of living on the island is the presence of numerous artists, entrepreneurs, and idealists innovating new modes of living, entertaining, and transforming.

With the talented Gabrielle Leon providing the background tunes, Liz Griffin and I performed the entire 3,000 word poem Howl as part of a playful sunset poetry happening we organized, “Filthy Sunset.” I also read Love’s Victim from Ovid’s “Amores.”

Earlier this year, I visited City Lights Bookstore, the scene of the legal battle to publish Howl six decades ago, and talked to the store’s manager Elaine Katzenberger about that unique fight for First Amendment free speech protections. Here are excerpts from that interview, parts of which will be used in my upcoming book on the art and alchemy of successful political protests.

There is a museum at the intersection of Broadway and Columbus in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborh0od dedicated to the beats. It’s worth visiting but for my money the sacred epicenter of the social movements that shook the youth of a nation for decades is across at the street at City Lights bookstore. Any bookstore is magic, the holder of promised secrets and a slice of the grand history of human knowledge. City Lights, with its mythic origins and tumultuous past is one of a tiny subset of literary shops that holds something more, something sacred. I walk in and a mother stands at a respectful distance while her pre-teen boy engages the cashier in a line of questioning. Do you have this book, where can I find books on that subject, mom knowing some of the answers but choosing to allow the experience of discovery.

I met the manager of City Lights bookstore (and publishing house) some years back when I video recorded and livestreamed some of their author events for FORA.tv. Elaine Katzenberger is, as you might imagine, a thoughtful and interesting woman, two attributes required to choreograph the visitor experience and keep it relevant as one of America’s important bookstores. On this weekday morning, the place was packed buzzing with visitors, the out-of-town tourists, the loyal locals, and no doubt one or two devotees of the faith, the never-ending pursuit of that one new book that will crack open the universe in some new way.

Gruber: Why is City Lights such a quintessential part of San Francisco’s civic life?

Katzenberger: Well, I don’t really think of it as belonging to San Francisco because people who don’t live here come for the same reasons that you do and that I was originally drawn here. San Francisco was the place Lawrence birthed City Lights, but it has transcended that, it’s more of a world location and it holds something that people need. It also may sound a bit abstract or metaphysically corny…

Gruber: Keep it coming.

Katzenberger: It has to do with ideals, feelings of integrity; there are a lot of interpretations that have been layered over the founding stories. Some visitors are just tourists, and some are clearly making a pilgrimage, but everybody is looking for the same thing on some level.

Gruber: And what is that?

Katzenberger: People would use different words – it’s a large stew – but it’s that creativity trumps capitalism, and that the human spirit is somehow communicating with other human spirits in this way that is authentic, and not subject to the rules that the rest of the economy is playing by. Maybe that’s why San Franciscans who have lived here a long time want to claim it, because the city used to talk about itself that way, it was an illusion, but a lot of people came to San Francisco for the same reason that people come now to City Lights.

Gruber: Lawrence is about to have a big (100^th) birthday. Can you articulate what was the ethos at that time, the ethos of the beats that motivated Lawrence to publish Howlin 1956? What was happening then, particularly in the context of how that might be relevant now?

Katzenberger: Lawrence always talks about how, first and foremost, he wanted to publish it because he identified it as groundbreaking poetry, he thought that Ginsberg was doing something that no one had done, and that had to do with poetics as (much as) anything else. And then, in terms of the content, the way in which the poem decries capitalism and militarism, that is what the counterculture in the 1960s was trying to talk about, rebellion against conformism, against the celebration of what capitalism was supposed to bring to quote, unquote average Americans. It meant reaching for freedom outside of that, somehow captured in this poem, which was especially exciting to him (Ferlinghetti). It was also the shared declamatory nature of it, very much talking about making poetry some form of actual communication, and that was part of what the beats were about, poetry as speech, poetry as a way of actually getting the message across.

Gruber: A key focus for the store is books on progressive politics. What does it mean to be progressive?

Katzenberger: Another big question. Something to do with putting the social contract with other human beings and other life forms on the planet before profit and power.

Gruber: One of the premises of the ’56 trial was that Ginsberg and, by extension, Ferlinghetti, were subversive. Do you think that the acts of protests of Ferlinghetti and the beat poets and the kind of literary explorations that City Lights does are patriotic, are aligned with what the founders had in mind in terms of how citizens need to be engaged politically?

Katzenberger: Obviously. If you want to be able to participate in a democracy, you need to be able to not only be informed, but to form opinions based on critical thinking, all of those things are part of civic life and a healthy democracy.

Gruber: When a visitor walks out of your store, what do you hope they leave with, in addition to a large handful of books? What’s the experience?

Katzenberger: I hope they feel validated in being part of a community of interesting, thoughtful, sensitive human beings. That’s what books have always given me. That’s what I hope that books give other people too.

Reading time: 5 min

Surmountable

Greta Thunberg is a Tool of Outside Agitators and Other Boilerplate Myths

September 24, 2019 by briangruber No Comments

In my visits to scenes of historic protests for the Surmountable book project, there are certain themes that are near universal when political and media institutions resistant to change seek to affect public opinion.

The activists are tools of outside agitators.

They have ulterior motives.

They have personal flaws to be exposed and attacked.

There is a problem (racism, pollution, social injustice) but be patient, now is not the time to act.

Protests such as strikes or missing school days are rude and disruptive, thus unacceptable.

These objections are, in most, cases, nonsense, and attempt to obfuscate important messages and block action on public issues.

Have a listen.

Reading time: 1 min

Books•Surmountable

The Travel Phase of the Surmountable Book Project Is Now Complete

May 10, 2019 by briangruber No Comments

The ‘discovery’ phase of Surmountable, a two month jaunt through scenes of historic protests plus interviews with activists, academics, journalists, people on the street, thinkers, trouble makers, and witnesses is done. I arrived in Bangkok 2am from South Korea, after the final international leg of the trip that took me to Berlin, Kiev, Paris, Tunis, and Seoul.

The final itinerary traveled, four continents, 20 destinations, two months.

Now for the writing.

We have a wealth of raw material. Public thinkers like AEI’s Norm Ornstein, C-SPAN’s Brian Lamb, Adbusters/ Occupy Wall Street’s Kalle Lasn, Columbia University’s Todd Gitlin, historian Stephen Schlesinger. Journalists and authors. Front line activists who put their bodies on the line like Standing Rock’s LaDonna Brave Bull Allard who gave her land and was a leading figure in the Dakota Access Pipeline protests, Kiev ‘squad’ veterans like Anna Kovalenko who led an all-woman group to physically resist attacks by secret police and militia, Tasnim of Tunis who shed the veil to take to the streets and launch the end of long-time dictator Ben Ali and the beginning of the Arab Spring.

It’s a privilege to gather these stories and be in the process of remarkable women and men, sometimes via choreographed interviews, sometimes via odd moments of serendipity as when I wandered into a Tunisian protest from the front door of my hotel into a weekly communist rally honoring the death of a martyred civil society activist.

Adam Edwards and I go into projects like this with certain foundational ideas and the outline of an editorial structure, but with open minds and a fierce desire to explore what is true, what is just, and how citizens might live the American founders’ vision of an active engaged public.

We intend to publish this year. I will be publishing photos and interview excerpts in the coming weeks. Here are a few memorable images from the trip.

LaDonna Brave Bull Allard after picking me up at the Bismarck, North Dakota airport and driving me 90 minutes to the Standing Rock reservation. I had asked how to get to her and where to stay, to which she responded, "Brian, you just don't get it, do you, we're in the middle of nowhere." So she came and got me and put me up next door to her at the Water Protectors House. After two hours of conversation, and a home cooked meal by activists living in the house, she came by at 11pm with her new great granddaughter. "Direct descendent of Sitting Bull." We toured the tribal council, the pipeline and protest sites, the local college and Sitting Bull museum, the tribal casino, and her ancestors' burial grounds. — LaDonna Brave Bull Allard after picking me up at the Bismarck, North Dakota airport and driving me 90 minutes to the Standing Rock reservation. I had asked how to get to her and where to stay, to which she responded, “Brian, you just don’t get it, do you, we’re in the middle of nowhere.” So she came and got me and put me up next door to her at the Water Protectors House. After two hours of conversation, and a home cooked meal by activists living in the house, she came by at 11pm with her new great granddaughter. “Direct descendent of Sitting Bull.” We toured the tribal council, the pipeline and protest sites, the local college and Sitting Bull museum, the tribal casino, and her ancestors’ burial grounds.

I told Pastor Leon Ross of the Weeping Willow Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama that I had beers with four white fellows at the base of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma the night before, and they said things were fine with race relations relations back in the day. He scoffed, "Sure for them they were. We were sick and tired and of being sick and tired." He worked in the Montgomery Improvement Association along with Dr Martin Luther King, Jr., pivotal in the bus boycott started by Rosa Parks. — I told Pastor Leon Ross of the Weeping Willow Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama that I had beers with four white fellows at the base of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma the night before, and they said things were fine with race relations relations back in the day. He scoffed, “Sure for them they were. We were sick and tired and of being sick and tired.” He worked in the Montgomery Improvement Association along with Dr Martin Luther King, Jr., pivotal in the bus boycott started by Rosa Parks.

The Alley of the Heavenly Hundred Heroes, in the square where Ukraine's Maidan Revolution took place. Over 100 protestors were killed as the protests grew in scope and intensity. I walked the scenes of the clashes and the moving, detailed exhibits on the streets honoring the dead and commemorating the events. — The Alley of the Heavenly Hundred Heroes, in the square where Ukraine’s Maidan Revolution took place. Over 100 protestors were killed as the protests grew in scope and intensity. I walked the scenes of the clashes and the moving, detailed exhibits on the streets honoring the dead and commemorating the events.

Tasnm and the Martyr. She walked me to the train like the mother of three she is, insisting on carrying my backpack, and warning me not to talk to strangers. We attended two protests that day, a second in front of the Central Bank as it was anti-imperialism day and students marched through the streets pushing past heavily armed police trying to stop them.

The palace at the far end of Gwanghwamun Square in central Seoul where Koreans gathered every Saturday, first in the hundreds, then thousands, then hundreds of thousands until the president was impeached, turned out of office, and imprisoned with a 26 year term.

Reading time: 3 min

Books•Surmountable

The Surmountable Tour Begins

March 11, 2019 by briangruber No Comments

As so it begins. I begin my interviews of practitioners of the art of protest from Selma to Seoul tomorrow for the Surmountable book project. Thanks to my co-writer Adam Edwards and to our 80+ Kickstarter funders for supporting my travel to 4 continents over the next two months. My first interview will be at the iconic City Lights bookstore in North Beach, San Francisco, Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s shop on the corner of Broadway and Columbus which shocked the literary world with its publication of Alan Ginsberg’s “Howl.” I will talk to the shop’s executive director and publisher Elaine Katzenberger then on to tech writers and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. What would you ask her??