Harvard had almost no Jewish faculty when I got there about- When my wife and I were looking for a house in the suburbs,
we were told by realtors that “we wouldn’t be happy” in certain
areas we liked. Blacks were of course treated far worse.
The 1890s—the “Gay Nineties”—weren’t so gay for the workers
in western Pennsylvania. They lived under a brutal tyranny
instituted by the great pacifist Andrew Carnegie and the troops he
called out in Homestead (and elsewhere).
It wasn’t until the 1930s, forty years later, that people were
even willing to talk about what happened. People who grew up
around there tell me that their parents (or grandparents) were afraid
to talk about it to the end of their lives.
In 1919 or so, almost thirty years after Homestead, there was a
steel strike in western Pennsylvania. [The union activist] Mother
Jones [1830–1930], who was then about 90, came to give a talk.
Before she could speak, the police dragged her off and threw her
into jail. That’s pretty rough.
In the 1920s—the “Roaring Twenties”—business control seemed
total, and the means used to achieve it could hardly “proceed in
anything remotely resembling a democracy,” as political scientist
Thomas Ferguson pointed out. He was referring to state repression,
violence, destruction of unions and harsh management controls.
Yale labor historian David Montgomery, extensively reviewing
the same period, wrote that modern America was “created over its
workers’ protests [with] fierce struggle [in a] most undemocratic
America.” The 1920s aren’t very long ago.
In the early 1960s, the South was a terror state; it’s not at all like
that now. The beginnings of some kind of commitment to decent
medical care for the entire population only go back to the 1960s.
Concern for environmental protection doesn’t really begin until the
1970s.
Right now we’re trying to defend a minimal healthcare system;
thirty years ago there wasn’t a minimal healthcare system to defend.
That’s progress.
All those changes took place because of constant, dedicated
struggle, which is hard and can look very depressing for long
periods. Of course you can always find ways in which these new
attitudes have been distorted and turned into techniques of
oppression, careerism, self-aggrandizement and so on. But the
overall change is toward greater humanity.