The Hard Work of Persuasion
Micah Sifry’s newsletter, The Connector: A newsletter on democracy, organizing, movements and tech, mentioned the book. Here is an excerpt — but please go subscribe to his newsletter:
Over the weekend, I finished reading an advance copy of The Hard Work of Hope, a political memoir written by Michael Ansara that is coming out July 15. The book covers three major periods in Ansara’s life in and around the Boston area as an activist and organizer—his years as a very young and early member of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; his years at Harvard University where he led its burgeoning SDS chapter through many protest waves, including the massive Harvard Strike of 1969, and then saw the New Left disintegrate in paranoia, sectarian infighting and exhaustion; and then his years helping build and then lead Massachusetts Fair Share, the first of a generation of community organizing groups that eventually formed Citizen Action in 1980 and fought, often successfully, to organize working-class people and neighborhoods around progressive populist issues like fighting utility rate hikes and unequal property taxes.
It's not my intention here to write a formal review of Ansara’s book, which deserves to be placed alongside other thoughtful and engrossing memoirs of “the long 1960s” as well as the community organizing waves that followed. Someone far more versed in the intricacies of the New Left’s battles over how to end the Vietnam War would be in a better position to judge if Ansara’s version of events is fair to all concerned, or if he’s glossing over things with the benefit of more than 50 years of hindsight. Writing in Jacobin, labor journalist Steve Early praises the book for the lessons it conveys about how SDS cracked up in the late 1960s, but also savages Ansara’s later role in a mid-1990s Teamsters union scandal that, he says, triggered the collapse of Citizen Action, and raises questions about Ansara’s second career as a political consultant and telemarketer—topics that get scarce mention in The Hard Work of Hope.
Those are arguments for another day. Instead, I want to flag something else that jumped out at me as I read of Ansara’s time organizing against the Vietnam War with SDS and later organizing for community empowerment with Mass Fair Share: he and his colleagues spent endless hours working to persuade non-believers to join them. Listen, for example how he explains organizing across colleges in New England in advance of SDS's first national March against the war in Vietnam which took place April 17, 1965…. [read more on Micah Sifry’s newsletter]
