Ruth Conniff
In our current tortured political moment, it is clarifying to read about the political upheaval that preceded the Progressive Era. It reminds us that the fundamental struggles in American history, seeking equality, justice, and community, have been going on for a very long time.
Jack Kelly’s gripping book, The Edge of Anarchy: The Railroad Barons, the Gilded Age, and the Greatest Labor Uprising in America (St. Martin’s Press), recounts the Pullman strike that paralyzed the country in 1894. It made an icon of labor leader Eugene Debs and, Kelly writes, was “the last time workers seriously imagined overturning the industrial order and establishing a more equitable society.”
Kelly’s novelesque portraits of Debs and railroad baron George Pullman, the two men on opposite sides of this epic battle, give the story the texture of tragedy. Debs’s immense energy, his incredible optimism, and the gains made by the bedraggled, oppressed, starving workers he led, should shame anyone out of feeling discouraged and overwhelmed about inequality and corrupt corporate power today.
Federal troops mowed down unarmed strikers and bystanders in Chicago and Hammond, Indiana, to the outrage of local officials. President Grover Cleveland effectively declared martial law.
Pullman, who paid his workers starvation wages and charged them exorbitant rents to live in his company town, refused to meet with the union, maintaining there was “nothing to arbitrate.” Even when the strike was broken and the workers left destitute, the massively wealthy Pullman, like a real-life Ebenezer Scrooge, refused to help the starving families who remained in his company town.
Debs, who was arrested for leading the strike, fought all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court to test “whether men can be sent to jail for organizing against capital.” The court ruled that they could.
Perhaps the most interesting part of Kelly’s story is the sheer tenacity of working people who rose up against the moneyed elites who controlled their jobs, their living conditions, and the whole rigged system of government and the courts.
He tells of the Butte teamsters who, seeking to prod the federal government to restore its silver purchases to reopen the mines, seized a train and took off on a wild ride through the mountains. When they arrived in Billings, the locals greeted them as heroes, and when a federal agent who followed in hot pursuit fired his gun, killing a tinsmith who happened to be nearby, “the enraged crowd took the rifles from the deputies’ hands.”
The Edge of Anarchy is not just about the Pullman strike. It is also a story about the basic struggle over American ideals that is still ongoing today.
Ruth Conniff is editor-at-large for The Progressive.
Mike Ervin
Crippled: Austerity and the Demonization of Disabled People (Verso Books), by Frances Ryan, reads like a horror story—made even scarier by the fact that it’s nonfiction.
Ryan, who is disabled and writes a column for The Guardian, explores the draconian austerity policies imposed on disabled people in the United Kingdom—policies that the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities declared in a 2016 report involved “grave or systematic violations” of the rights of disabled people relying on the British social safety net for support.
“Over the course of a decade,” Ryan writes, “people with disabilities, chronic illness, and mental health problems have been routinely driven into destitution, pushed from the workplace, and stripped of the right to live in their own homes.”
Consider Pete, a thirty-year-old wheelchair user with cerebral palsy, who lived independently in a flat he owned, with the support of assistants, for eight years. By 2016, that support was reduced so drastically that he had to go into a nursing home.
Or David, fifty-four, who despite being disabled by anxiety and panic attacks was suddenly deemed “fit for work” and the disability income that supported him for nearly a decade was cut off. He killed himself by walking into the sea.
British conservatives, Ryan notes, “repeatedly argued that even while disability benefits were being cut, the ‘truly disabled’ would be protected.” This is remarkably similar to the rhetoric employed by American conservatives, as they hack away at safety-net programs meant to benefit the disabled.
“We are not kicking anybody off of any program who really needs it,” claimed current White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney in 2017, while trying, as director of the Office of Management and Budget, to justify a Trump budget proposal to cut $31.4 billion from the Social Security Disability Insurance program over ten years.
The suspicion that some disabled folks are making out like bandits has been used in recent Republican scorched-earth safety-
net attacks, such as the imposition of work requirements on Medicaid recipients. Ryan may have meant Crippled as a warning. But some U.S. politicians will likely see it as a blueprint.
“Despite decades of progress,” Ryan notes, “the intricate threads that make up disabled people’s safety net are always vulnerable to those in power who wish to cut them away. As successive generations, it is up to each of us to remake the case for state support for disabled people as a fundamental right.”
Mike Ervin is a columnist for The Progressive.
Jules Gibbs
Dear beleaguered reader: Have you fallen out of love with the world? Do you require another language to tame the rancor and vitriol of our national discourse? Another tongue with which to speak of something more subtly human? An alphabet of the soul, a lexicon of the spirit? Let me prescribe some good medicine.
Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (Penguin Press) is a long poem that reads like a memoir, written as a letter to the author’s mother. The book is lush, and should be read in the savoring way, a song of an immigrant’s experience coming from Vietnam to the United States. Vuong’s prose is deeply lyrical, as stunning as his first book of poems, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, that met with critical acclaim in 2016. Vuong sings his way through vast pain, and somehow manages to produce a narrative that is indeed quite gorgeous, stunning, and restorative.
Tracy K. Smith, who recently served as U.S. Poet Laureate, gives us a new collection, Wade in the Water (Graywolf Press), which draws on such documents of national interest as the testimony of African Americans who served in the Civil War, producing an honest engagement with the wounds that shape us and the possibility of transformation.
Likewise, Jericho Brown’s third volume of poetry, The Tradition (Copper Canyon Press), employs Greek mythology to de- and re-mythologize all manner of historical subjects—from slavery, to state-sanctioned violence, to HIV, to formations of masculinity—and casts a soul spell on them.
I also recommend Reginald Dwayne Betts’s third volume of poetry, Felon (W. W. Norton), in which he writes about his years in prison, while seeing incarceration as a criminalization of poverty and continuation of slavery. In some sense, Betts is dialoguing with his incarcerated self, which makes it such an honest and compelling read. He enters boldly and expertly into the complexity of the prison-industrial complex—what it means for black men, in particular, but also for victims, families, communities, and our collective soul.
Jules Gibbs, a poet and professor of literature at Syracuse University, is poetry editor for The Progressive.
Maeve Higgins
say nothing keefe
Patrick Radden Keefe’s brilliant and tragic book, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland (Doubleday), recounts his investigation into the abduction of Jean McConville, a thirty-eight-year-old mother of ten, who was dragged from her Belfast home in 1972. It was widely known that she was taken and murdered by the Irish Republican Army (her remains were found in 2003) but, as the book title suggests, few would speak of it.
Having grown up in Ireland, I knew the outline of the McConville story, but there was so much I didn’t know, including the identity of the killer. Keefe does discover who it was, but it would be a disservice to call this book a “whodunnit.” It’s a meticulously detailed look at who suffers in a civil war, and what it takes to survive such horror. A timely reminder, too, of how far the country has come, how fragile we still are, and what a Brexit-inspired hard border in Northern Ireland could drag us back to.
Staying in Ireland, I also commend New to the Parish: Stories of Love, War and Adventure from Ireland’s Immigrants (New Island Books) by Irish Times journalist Sorcha Pollak. People do not leave one life behind and start another unless they must. Migration is perhaps the biggest story of our time, and the phenomenon contains many smaller stories, personal ones, all of them worth knowing.
New to the Parish
In Ireland, we’re used to dealing with people leaving, as millions did during the worst years of Irish history, but what about people arriving? Pollak answers that question in this humane depiction of what Ireland is really like for immigrants. This is a calm and clear-eyed portrait of a country grappling with its own identity through the lens of migration. Its real life immigration stories are told beautifully by the people who’ve lived them.
This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). He argues that immigration could and should be a form of reparations, to make up for the harm the United States and other countries have caused. This is a controversial solution, but if the alternative is a continuation of immigration policy based on white supremacy, colonialism, and inequality, I think it’s perfectly sensible.
Maeve Higgins is a regular columnist for The Progressive.
Mrill Ingram
One gets the feeling that, in the company of author Barry Lopez, one might get a little bit cold. It’s hard to imagine snuggling up for warmth, as he sits for hours, letting vast landscapes unfold before him.
In Desert Notes, published in 1976, River Notes in 1979, Arctic Dreams in 1986, and now the long-awaited, 500-page Horizon in 2019, Lopez presents far-away places like few other writers. He engages the full round of human faculties to take the “measure” of each place—a painter’s sense of color and perspective, a hunter’s alertness to sound and movement, a musician’s sensitivity to sound—interwoven with a powerful grasp of history and science. After a while, you feel like you are viewing a layered landscape painting that looks entirely different viewed close up than from a distance.
In Horizon (Knopf), Lopez revisits six previously explored destinations. He watches a storm gather over the Pacific off the Oregon coast, glassing long-tailed ducks on Canada’s Skraeling Island in the Arctic, and gets oriented in the “porcelain white” of the Transantarctic Mountains. Meanwhile, we are offered a sympathetic take on the explorer James Cook, and given an intimate glimpse of archaeologists grasping for details of the prehistoric Arctic Thule people.
Lopez has dedicated his life to gaining knowledge about the Earth from its extremes, “only someone taking notes and making drawings on the edge of minor and major mysteries,” as he puts it. But in Horizon, he’s viewing the world from a lower point in his personal arc. At the dawn of the Anthropocene, he is looking back at his voyages to the remote, and also facing its disappearance. Is he disabled by the brutal truth of humans’ devastating, inescapable impacts? It’s a terrifying thought.
But Lopez’s aim is to engage a reader “intent on discovering a trajectory,” a meaningful story “when it has become an attractive option to lose faith.” He makes connections in a disorderly world, with his patient sifting of evidence and inspiring engagement of senses. It’s not a reassuring squeeze around the shoulders, but in the end, there’s a comfort here.
With Lopez as a guide, we glimpse something bigger than the current moment, a world reassuring in its intricacy and unknowability, as much as its vulnerability. It’s a journey worth risking a little cold weather for.
Mrill Ingram is online media editor for The Progressive.
Bill Lueders
The two most important books I read in 2019 were written by vital voices in the fight against climate change. Bill Mc-
Kibben’s Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? (Henry Holt) is a clarion call for humankind to seize its last chance to prevent wholesale catastrophe—from both an angry planet and genetically engineered babies, an emerging threat he weaves into his narrative.
On Fire
Naomi Klein’s On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal (Simon & Schuster), meanwhile, is a collection of essays from the last several years with a powerful opening essay that focuses largely on Swedish teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg, whose fierce advocacy gives “validation to the raw terror so many of us have been suppressing and compartmentalizing about what it means to be alive amid the sixth great extinction.”
McKibben and Klein each envision a future that, while inevitably ravaged by climate change, is oriented toward sound science, sane policy, and a more equitable economy.
What makes us biased against people of other races? Jennifer L. Eberhardt, a psychology professor at Stanford University, has researched that question in courtrooms, boardrooms, and on the streets, while devising solutions. But what makes Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do (Viking) a great book are her personal stories, like being at Target with her five-month-old son and having a little white girl loudly exclaim to her mom, “Guess what I saw? A brown baby!” Eberhardt, who finds this funny, is deflated by the mother’s mortified reaction. Does this have to be so hard?
And then there is the insightful The Broken Road: George Wallace and a Daughter’s Journey to Reconciliation (Bloomsbury), by Peggy Wallace Kennedy, an insider’s look at the infamous Southern segregationist that is critical but not unforgiving. Any country in which George Wallace’s daughter could in 2009 walk hand-in-hand with Representative John Lewis on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, where Lewis was beaten on Governor Wallace’s watch more than four decades earlier, is not destined to remain bound to its worst impulses.
Kendi
And that is the promise of Ibram X. Kendi’s wonderful How to Be an Anti-Racist (One World), which challenges us to confront, along with Kendi, the racism in our hearts. It’s a very different book but a perfect compliment to Stamped from the Beginning, his deeply historical 2016 work. Whereas Stamped was about the problem, Anti-Racist is about the solution. “To be an anti-racist is a radical choice,” he argues, “requiring a radical reorientation of our consciousness.”
Bill Lueders is editor of The Progressive.
John Nichols
Donald Trump is incapable of writing a serious book. And none of the Democrats who are currently bidding for the presidency have produced anything akin to a necessary book, in the tradition of the short text that John F. Kennedy wrote on the eve of his 1960 run, A Nation of Immigrants. Kennedy kept coming back to that book during his presidency, reflecting on it in speeches, referencing its arguments for the liberalization of immigration laws, and revising it for republication as he prepared for the 1964 re-election run in which he proposed to stitch together a divided country.
I thought a lot about Kennedy’s book as I read Senator Jeff Merkley’s America Is Better Than This: Trump’s War Against Migrant Families (Twelve Books). Merkley, a Democrat from Oregon, pondered making a 2020 run but decided against doing so. That’s too bad, because he has written an essential statement about our troubling times.
Merkley knows the immigration issue well. In 2018, he traveled to the U.S.-Mexican border and played a critical role in exposing, and challenging, the administration’s child separation policies. Merkley’s book traces issues to their roots, with a savvy recognition of how U.S. policies worsened conditions in Latin America and caused desperate families to flee their homelands and head north. It blasts Trump and his aides for their lies and cruelty. And it calls out Merkley’s fellow Senators, using uncommonly (though certainly not inappropriately) blunt language.
What makes America Is Better Than This such a vital book is its righteousness. Merkley comes at this debate with the moral clarity that Trump’s immoral approach to immigration demands.
Jeff Merkley writes in the way I wish a President would speak.
“The horror of child separation is not some evil perpetrated in a vicious civil war or a national campaign of genocide by a dictator in some far-off land,” he writes. “It is here, in America. It is perpetrated by our government, with our resources, on our land.”
Merkley notes that Trump’s war on immigrants “includes child separation, cages, family internment camps, border blockades, and a network of child prisons on American soil that as of December 2018 held 15,000 migrant children. . . . Even if some people refuse to believe it—even if it sounds too shocking to be true—we need to confront the reality of what Donald Trump and his administration have done in the name of the American people. No one else will fix this. This responsibility is ours. We in America must be the ones to shine a light on it, and put an end to it.”
Jeff Merkley writes in the way I wish a President would speak.
John Nichols is a longtime contributor to The Progressive.
Ed Rampell
In early twentieth-century Russia, Leon Trotsky theorized about “Permanent Revolution.” More than 100 years later, another revolutionary, exiled in Moscow, has given us an account of how he shook the world in his Permanent Record (Metropolitan Books).
The title of über-whistleblower Edward Snowden’s memoir is derived from his theory that the surveillance state is permanently recording everyone globally through the use of digital technology, thus “creat[ing] a perfect memory” of what they do and say. And this was all being done without anybody’s consent or knowledge—until Snowden, an ex-CIA/NSA operative, blew the whistle on the intelligence community’s warrantless bulk collection of ordinary citizens’ communications.
Born in 1983 as the brave new cyber-world began, Snowden eloquently recounts growing up a computer geek in North Carolina and the Beltway (ironically near the NSA’s headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland). The son of a court clerk and Coast Guard engineer, Snowden traces his ancestry to the Mayflower and Revolutionary War patriots; his grandfather is Rear Admiral Edward Barrett.
Descended from men who “fought in every war in my country’s history,” Snowden enlisted in the army following the attacks of 9/11, but was waylaid by a basic training injury and ended up using his cyber skills working for the intelligence community. There, he developed a “growing sense of unease” as he realized that the NSA’s mission had changed from “targeted” intelligence gathering to the “bulk collection . . . of communications” of unsuspecting individuals not accused of any crimes.
Snowden documented evidence of this “mass surveillance” to prove that the United States had become “an eternal law-enforcement agency” that “flouted the Fourth Amendment” and “reduced [us] to . . . children, who’d be forced to live the rest of our lives under omniscient parental supervision.” The tech-savvy Snowden leaked these state secrets to journalists in Hong Kong in 2013.
Permanent Record reveals details about living in exile in Moscow, where Snowden wed partner Lindsay Mills (a chapter includes her diary excerpts). Like Winston Smith, the hero of George Orwell’s 1984, Snowden dared to take on Big Brother, and we are all the wiser for it.
Ed Rampell, a Los Angeles-based reviewer and film historian, is The Progressive’s “Man in Hollywood.”
Norman Stockwell
In hearings before the U.S. Senate in February 1973, journalist Victor Navasky was quoted as saying that nonfiction writers deserve the same Constitutional protections as news reporters because, in reality, they are “simply slow journalists.” Taking the analogy further, I think biographers are simply “narrow historians”—giving readers a better understanding of a time and a place through the lens of one or perhaps a few people’s lives.
The Fire Upon Us
The Fire Is upon Us: James Baldwin, William F. Buckley Jr., and the Debate over Race in America (Princeton University Press) by Nicholas Buccola is a classic example of that dynamic, with regard to the racial divide in twentieth-century America. The book zeroes in on Baldwin and Buckley in the years leading up to their debate at the Cambridge Union in England on February 18, 1965.
Exhaustively researched with eighty-two pages of notes and bibliography plus an appendix containing the full transcript of the BBC-recorded debate, this book captures a historical event as well as its larger context. “I didn’t enjoy debating the racial issue,” Buckley told reporters afterwards in the hall. “It’s so emotionally overloaded.” Just a few days later, Malcolm X was assassinated during a talk in Harlem’s Audubon Ballroom.
Poisoner
Stephen Kinzer’s Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control (Henry Holt), gives an unflinching glimpse into the life of the chemist and CIA operative who fed LSD to unsuspecting study participants (as chronicled in the recent Errol Morris film, Wormwood), plotted ways to murder Cuba’s Fidel Castro with a poisoned diving suit and botulism-tainted cigars, and developed the techniques of “enhanced interrogation” that would later be used in the “war on terror” in prisons like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.
Despite his sinister side, Gottlieb, who died in 1999, lived on an ecological, solar-powered farmstead, raising goats and chickens. “History and morality loom like threatening clouds over any attempt to assess Sidney Gottlieb’s life,” writes Kinzer. “Judging him requires a deep dive into the human mind and the human soul.”
Garvey
Finally, Rob Zaleski’s Ed Garvey Unvarnished: Lessons from a Visionary Progressive (University of Wisconsin Press) is a portrait of the legendary Wisconsin political activist, based on a series of interviews that began in February 2011, just after Wisconsin’s newly elected Governor Scott Walker proposed legislation to strip public employee unions of their collective bargaining rights. Garvey’s status as modern-day “Fighting Bob” La Follette is affirmed in the interviews that make up this small volume.
Norman Stockwell is publisher of The Progressive.
Alexandra Tempus
As a writer, I’ve asserted my Midwestern roots in story after story, in these pages and others, for years now. It wasn’t until I moved to New York City that I realized how essential it is to unearth the twisted complexities of a place often blanketed as “Middle America.”
Representing my heartland home is an ache that’s only grown sharper since the 2016 election, years in which it’s earned a new simplifying label: “Trump Country.” Hence my work at The Progressive, a political and intellectual product that’s proudly based in Madison, Wisconsin.
But there are often little deviations among roots, ones you can maybe only see when you start digging them up. Which is why reading fellow Wisconsinite Krista Eastman’s debut book of essays that question the very idea of belonging to a place, The Painted Forest (West Virginia University Press), has been such sweet, radical relief.
Throughout, the author’s concentrated, poetic language punctures the idea that anyone is unequivocally “from here,” as she puts it. She sheepishly calls up the old familiar, perhaps flimsy, touchstones—Buick-sized cheese wheels, people called salt-of-the-earth—that we cheeseheads use to justify ourselves.
“Holding the desperate power of the one who can define, she who is from here and so appoints herself, doesn’t preclude the possibility of hypocritical reversals, when suddenly the insider can also invent any number of convenient lies, tall tales extolling seemingly regional virtues,” Eastman writes.
Because the themes of place and belonging are central to my work, reading The Painted Forest felt necessary. “Really, what claim do I have?” I asked my grandmother, who grew up in Iowa and returned there after many years on the coast. She recalled how Virginia neighbors would correct her pronunciation of her own home state. “It’s o-HI-o,” they’d say. Jaded by this ignorance, my grandmother waved away any questions. “I know my place,” she told me. “Even if I don’t know all the facts about it.”
Representing my heartland home is an ache that’s only grown sharper since the 2016 election, years in which it’s earned a new simplifying label: “Trump Country.”
One might argue that moving away from her homeland was what gave my grandmother the confidence to claim it. That certainly was the case for me. And it’s a point Eastman importantly—and beautifully—makes in her collection.
“Another way to share your home is to leave it with due care,” she writes, “To pack a bag with some food, blankets, and a compass, use the bathroom one last time. To announce what everyone gathered long ago, that your affiliations, though deeply felt, are like the land itself: cultivated, contested, grown from contradiction and tilled by circumstance, by the muscle of the people you knew, by the beating hearts of those who sought and then succeeded in feeding you.”
Alexandra Tempus is associate editor of The Progressive.
Dave Zirin
If there were two areas of study I never thought I’d gravitate toward, it would be federal housing policy and the bête noire of my high school years, biology. So it comes as a surprise, even to me, that my two favorite books of 2019 center on those subjects.
Race for Profit
The first is Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership (University of North Carolina Press) by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, and the second is Testosterone: An Unauthorized Biography (Harvard University Press) by Rebecca M. Jordan-Young and Katrina Karkazis. Both books take hard-to-grasp topics and bring them to life.
Race for Profit explores how mortgage programs created in the 1960s, ostensibly to help black city residents become homebuyers, actually ended up causing segregation and ushering in a terrible new period of exploitation. As Taylor puts it, “Racial exclusion gave way to predatory inclusion.” Bankers and loan sharks issued loans and then sought foreclosure. The program’s failure opened the door to claims that black people were unfit for home ownership, which perversely led to even more deregulation and opportunities for subprime lenders to exploit communities of the poor.
Taylor not only explains dense housing policy but tells the very human stories of those who were affected. This book, the product of ten years of research, shines on every page.
Likewise, Testosterone turns our assumptions upside down. We are taught that testosterone is responsible for aggression, sexual potency, strength, and even non physical attributes like competitiveness and business success. Jordan-Young and Karkazis expose these assumptions as absurd and examine how biased research produced quack science about testosterone that persists to this day. Testosterone is a brave act of truth telling, invaluable to people attempting to deconstruct the politics of gender difference.
Sixth
I had some difficulty coming up with my favorite sports book from 2019, and in the end I kept
The Sixth Man (Blue Rider Press) by Andre Iguodala (written with Carvell Wallace). Iguodala was the first man off the bench for the Golden State Warriors team that won three NBA titles in five years and set an NBA record for wins in a season while capturing the imagination of the basketball populi with their unselfish play. For many, Andre Iguodala was the glue that held this remarkable team together on the court. In this book, he shows he was the glue off the court as well.
Dave Zirin is The Progressive’s sports columnist.