SEVEN SOCIAL MOVEMENTS THAT CHANGED AMERICA

The impact of collective activism.

Bancroft Prize–winning historian Gordon considers critical changes in American life through an examination of seven movements that arose from the 1890s through the 1970s. These examples of “large-scale, participatory activism” include the settlement house movement of the 1890s; the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and fascist groups in the 1920s; campaigns for old-age pensions and unemployment relief in the 1930s; the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-56, which began the Civil Rights movement; the United Farm Workers movement of the 1960s; and women’s consciousness raising in the 1970s. Besides profiling movement leaders, Gordon pays close attention to what she calls their “followership,” individuals not usually identified as leaders but who developed and promoted strategies and tactics that enabled movements to succeed. Her well-populated history contains familiar figures (Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Cesar Chavez) but mostly surprises. In recounting the growth of settlement houses, for example, which burgeoned to 74 residences by 1897, Gordon’s well-known history of Hull-House in Chicago, founded by Jane Addams and supported by wealthy white women, is complemented by the history of Phillis Wheatley Home in Cleveland, founded by Jane Edna Hunter, the daughter of a formerly enslaved mother, to serve migrant Black women. In the 1930s, two movements arose to address economic distress: the Townsend movement, launched by a feisty retired California physician, Dr. Francis Townsend, which resulted in the passage of the Social Security Act of 1935 and identified old age as “a political identity,” and a struggling campaign for unemployment relief, which “engendered hopefulness and a sense of efficacy,” despite facing many obstacles. Whether they effect lasting change, social movements generate camaraderie, solidarity, and the shared conviction that “risks are worth taking.”

A timely, stirring history.