Rick Reinhard
At the Women’s March to Protest Family Separation and Family Detention, June 28. About 1,000 people rallied in Freedom Plaza on Pennsylvania Avenue before marching to the Department of Justice and the Senate Office Buildings, where nearly 600 people were arrested for refusing police orders to leave.
Journalist Jeff Biggers’s handy reader, Resistance: Reclaiming an American Tradition, was born of a question from his twelve-year-old son on June 1, 2017.
On that day, President Donald Trump, accompanied by a play-as-the-ship-goes-down string ensemble, announced that the United States was pulling out of the global Paris Agreement to mitigate climate change.
“I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris,” Trump blustered. Much as with his Muslim travel ban and his exhortations for a U.S.-Mexico border wall, the President drew a bright line between what is “American”—and thus worth protecting—and what is not.
Biggers’s son asked him afterward if there was any hope for action on climate change. The author of eight books, who has often reported on environmental battles, felt the urge to sermonize about the climate. But he wanted instead to offer a deeper and broader story, one that depicted an America defined by people and forces other than the President.
“His real question: Was there any hope for his future?” Biggers would write. “This book is my response.”
And so it is with a deep admiration of this worthy purpose that I admit some initial difficulty buying the argument Biggers makes in the very title of, and throughout, his book.
In five parts, the author traces a timeline of resistance and individual resisters, from American Indian orator and writer William Apess and turn-of-the-century lesbian labor activist Marie Equi, and the 1944 Supreme Court case of interned Japanese American Fred Korematsu, to modern examples like the Standing Rock standoff and the Black Lives Matter movement.
Reading these many fascinating and lesser-known chapters of history, I was nevertheless torn: Is resistance an American tradition? Or is resistance a rebellion against American tradition?
“This is what I believe,” Biggers tells me. “In dealing with the most challenging issues of every generation, resistance to duplicitous civil authority and its corporate enablers has defined our quintessential American story.”
The author, having covered social justice movements from the American Southwest, to the Heartland, to Appalachia and beyond, sees his most recent book as “a culmination of my work as a cultural historian of the resistance.”
‘The storyline of resistance . . . has expanded its meaning of presence and absence, reminding us who has been left in and out of this American story, who has provided its bedrock and blood, and who has been vanquished by its glory.’
“Resistance has put the backbone in democracy,” he adds. “Or rather, the resistance has given democracy a backbone.”
But still: America was built through the atrocities of slavery, oppression, genocide, and displacement, the legacies of which—mass incarceration, attacks on indigenous sovereignty, climate change—still shape in fundamental ways the daily lives of Americans from sea to shining sea.
Flashes of progress brought on by moments of resistance—Reconstruction, desegregation, blocked pipeline projects, international climate accords—are continually overwhelmed by these most horrific but foundational of American impulses.
Against such a backdrop, can we claim acts of resistance as essentially “American”?
Take, for example, the story of Ona Judge.
Judge was a “body servant” slave to President George Washington’s wife Martha, responsible for helping to dress and otherwise see to the personal needs of the First Lady. When Judge was twenty-three, she learned of Martha’s plans to bequeath her to the Washingtons’ granddaughter as a wedding present, and decided to escape.
She packed her bags and made arrangements, eventually landing in New Hampshire. Evading the first U.S. President’s numerous attempts at her capture, Judge remained defiant in her freedom.
“For I knew that if I went back to Virginia, I should never get my liberty,” Biggers quotes Judge.
The author then draws a line from Judge all the way to modern-day activist Bree Newsome, who climbed the South Carolina statehouse flagpole at dawn on June 27, 2015, to remove the Confederate flag.
“You see, I know my history and my heritage,” Newsome said in a statement at the time. “I refuse to be ruled by fear. How can America be free and be ruled by fear? How can anyone be?”
But are the courageous acts of these fearless women really part of America’s narrative? Or do they sit outside it, acting in direct opposition to powerful American symbols: the Confederate flag, still flown in official capacity today; and our first President, whose likeness remains engraved on our currency?
Certainly, for centuries, Ona Judge’s story remained obscured from the official record of American history. Only now, in this book and others, is it again seeing the light of day. Perhaps Newsome’s act of heroism, aided by social media saturation, will avoid that same fate.
Biggers, for his part, makes the case that Judge “did not just liberate herself; she disrobed the duplicity of a new nation founded on the principle of inalienable rights for all.”
Later, comparing Judge to Newsome, he adds: “Resistance . . . forces everyone to take part in the discussion of ‘truth’ and the still small possibility of ‘reconciliation’ from their own vantage points—albeit determined by a more honest narrative.”
The author’s conviction that resistance is part of the American story emerges not only from the examples he chooses to share, but also in the language that he uses. Several times throughout the text, Biggers consciously refers to African and African-descended slaves as “Americans”—though by any measure of the time, they were not considered as such.
As he writes of Judge, “As a teenager in Mount Vernon, she had numbered among one of hundreds of Americans enslaved by Washington and his wife on their plantation.”
Biggers highlights another example of this tension at the very outset of colonial America.
“In Jamestown, Virginia, the first permanent settlement founded by English merchants, Polish artisans rebelled in 1619 against their exclusion from voting in the first legislative assembly in the American colonies,” he writes. “The ‘Polonian’ immigrants, who had been recruited for their glass-blowing and craft skills, carried out the first labor strike in the colonies . . . within days [they] won enfranchisement and were ‘made as free as any inhabitant.’ ”
The author situates this tale right alongside that of the first twenty-odd slaves purchased by Jamestown residents. “Acts of running away, among other forms of resistance, became so frequent that the Virginia colonial government issued edicts that admitted a subversive number of planters and enslaved workers had ‘given them assistance and directions how to escape.’ ”
Here’s where resistance as either an American virtue or a rejection of it becomes tricky to untangle. In the case of the Polish artisans, their act of resistance sought greater inclusion in the American project. In the case of the Jamestown slaves, resistance was a means to remove themselves from it.
To his credit, and what makes this book an intellectually honest and valuable read, Biggers wrestles directly with these questions.
Perhaps it is unfair to ask that one book define what is and is not American.
“Resistance defies claims of a single American way,” he writes, “and reminds us that there are many American ways, often conflicting and sometimes deceiving.”
He acknowledges the hypocrisy of many figures in his book, even ones he largely praises—including Thomas Paine, author of Common Sense, co-instigator of the American Revolution, and coiner of the phrase “the United States of America.”
“Unlike the immortalized ‘founding fathers,’ Thomas Paine . . . never owned a slave and belonged to a defiant anti-slavery movement, but he too failed to envision African Americans, and Native Americans, as part of his American Revolution,” Biggers tells me. “As one of the most dangerous immigrants in our nation’s history, Paine believed the ‘new world hath been the asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty,’ but he limited his vision to European immigrants.”
Perhaps, I thought after reading, it is unfair to ask that one book define what is and is not American. Drawing such lines, as Trump did in his Paris Agreement announcement, can be dangerous.
“The storyline of resistance . . . has expanded its meaning of presence and absence, reminding us who has been left in and out of this American story, who has provided its bedrock and blood, and who has been vanquished by its glory,” Biggers writes. “Instead of being tablets of commandments in stone, this new American narrative has unfolded like a book opened at both ends, in a constant state of revisions over centuries; edited, grafted, rewritten, deleted, and recovered for its very contradictions and the paradox of a nation, real or imagined, still unfolding.”
This book posits that whether resistance is an inextricable part of America’s gradual evolution, or will yet spark its revolution and remaking (or perhaps, as is most likely, some combination of both), ultimately does not matter as much as our moral obligation to do it anyway.
At the very beginning of Resistance, Biggers recalls sitting in a jail cell in 1985, having been arrested at an anti-apartheid sit-in at the South African embassy in Washington, D.C. His cellmate, civil rights leader Reverend William Sloane Coffin, was his boss at the time at the famed Riverside Church in New York City.
“I told him our protests seemed futile, even hopeless,” Biggers writes. “He told me what he had learned sitting in jail in Alabama. ‘Hope resists,’ he said, shifting on the concrete bench. ‘Hopelessness adapts.’ ”
That’s the message that Biggers’s son has taken to heart. Just this week, the now-thirteen-year-old asked his local school board to make the transition from coal power to solar, says Biggers. “I’m happy that the resistance will soon be in his hands.”
Alexandra Tempus is associate editor of The Progressive.