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The United States Constitution is the supreme law in America. Anyone not subject to its jurisdiction is, by definition, not a citizen (14th Amendment). Progressives have sought to change the original Constitution over more than a century. They were successful in changing the states' selection of senators to popular election.

They passed Prohibition. They added direct taxation of income. Justices of the Supreme Court have considered international and Shariah law in their decisions making their oaths a lie.

Progressives have passed treaties which created a "right" to medical care, and invented a "right" to same-sex marriage. Health care law is constitutional as a tax.

At the same time, they obligated the United States to transfer a lot of its wealth to the rest of the world with the Bretton Woods agreements and the Marshall Plan. We pay at least 20 percent of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the United Nations and many other entities.

The head of the World Bank is American; the head of the IMF is French; and the U.N. has 15 "equal" members on the Security Council and about 190 members total. Our national sovereignty is diminished by these global entities which create "rights."

Climate agreements require the United States to clean up its act which it has done with the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Environmental Protection Agency, etc. and pay for the cleanup of developing nations like China.

As a scientist I can agree that climate change summer, fall, winter and spring is real. It is caused mainly by the sun and the obliquity of the ecliptic. Humans exhale carbon dioxide, but the effect on the global climate is not significant when compared with water vapor caused by the sun and ash clouds from erupting volcanoes.

Math models do not consider unpredictable things like volcanic eruptions even though the effect can be globally significant (see Krakatau, August 1883). Faux scientists make an error when they extrapolate a day in laboratory conditions to a billion years.

Blaming Hurricanes Katrina and Rita on global warming was easily proven false in 2006 when few hurricanes and no major hurricanes occurred. For a decade no hurricanes made landfall on Florida coasts. Still Sandy was blamed on global warming. Some scientists are hardcore. If global warming is the cause, then shouldn't every year get worse? True science is observable and testable. Big Bang and Evolution ideas are conjecture, not science.

Chuck Tatum

North Augusta

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Letter: Progressives are changing Constitution - Aiken Standard

YOUNG RADICALS: IN THE WAR FOR AMERICAN IDEALS By Jeremy McCarter Published by Random House, 400 pages, $30

Yesterday, I began my review of Jeremy McCarters new book Young Radicals and today I should like to conclude.

The lives of the young radicals are nothing if not fascinating. I kept wondering if there are young people today whose lives are so consumed with that rare combination of intellectual vigor and progressive optimism that the five protagonists display. Do people anymore start a theater troupe one summer, writing scripts and performing the plays, only to have one of their number show up one night with a friend, and the friend is a young Eugene O'Neill? But, that is what happened to Jack Reed one summer in Provincetown.

Reed and Walter Lippmann, friends at college, walk very different paths through the decade. Reed is flamboyant, the prince and the prankster of the Greenwich Village scene. When Reed takes up with a married woman, Freddy Lee (whose husband is a mutual friend of both Reed and Lippmann), Lippmann finds himself the recipient of a barrage of letters from Reeds last paramour, Mabel Dodge, pleading for his aid, as Reed had asked him to comfort Mabel when the news of his new love struck her. It is too much. McCarter writes: "Lippmann has plenty of affection for both of his friends, but the frivolity of Greenwich Village, and the people who play there, seem more and more ridiculous to him, more remote from his life. He has responsibilities; he has work to do; there is a war on. Like Prince Hal, he is ready to turn his back on Falstaff and all his pranks, and turn his gaze to the palace." This fine bit of prose is emblematic of the entire book which makes it such an easy read.

Randolph Bourne joins Lippmann at The New Republic as it starts in 1914 and the two become friends. He marvels at Lippmann's productivity and Lippmann is one of the first guests at Bournes summer home in Caldwell, New Jersey. But Bourne does not share his friends' ideas, especially about the nature of America society as dueling essays in 1916 demonstrate. As McCarter notes, "Watching Bourne and Lippmann address the same subject is a chance to trace the differences in their radicalism. In Lippmann's 'ideal of Americanism,' two concepts are pitted against each other. He wants America to be 'a union of people rather than a congeries of groups, provinces and racial stocks.' Bourne shares Lippmann's desire for a union of people, but the point of the trans-national ideal [that Bourne champions] is that people form that union while still belonging to different groups and feeling affinity with separate racial stocks." Bourne would complete his thesis by introducing Josiah Royce's concept of "Beloved Community."

Sunday marks the two-year anniversary of the publication of Laudato Si'. Explore Pope Francis' environmental encyclical with our complimentary readers' guide.

Alice Paul's life does not permit her the luxury of contemplating communities, beloved or otherwise. The suffragette is constantly looking for ways to force President Wilson to endorse a constitutional amendment extending the franchise to women nationwide. She disrupts a parade in Chicago. She and her colleagues protest outside the White House. When they are arrested and sent to jail, they start a hunger strike. Paul is unrelenting in her determination and, unlike the men in this story, she gets a large chunk of what she wants before it ends: Universal suffrage is enacted. Full equality for women, Paul's ultimate goal, like the socialistic or progressive goals of the other protagonists in this story, is something still beyond our societal grasp.

Max Eastman doesn't join The New Republic, he mocks it and "those mighty young bronze beasts who edit the New Republic." But like his less radical friends, Eastman must wrestle with how the war has forced a reexamination of basic assumptions and, curiously, like Lippmann, he does not surrender his ideals. "I do not believe a devastating war in Europe will stop the labor struggle," Eastman writes in The Masses. "I believe it will haste the day of its triumph. It will shake people together like dice in a box, and how they will fall out nobody knows. But they will fall out shaken; that everybody knows." I read those sentences and my mind went immediately to our own time in which President Donald Trump, not a "devastating war in Europe," will leave us all shaken although no one knows exactly how yet.

The most fascinating part of the book comes when the U.S. enters the World War in 1917. "The young radicals are about to face a whole new set of consequences from their decisions to pursue their ideals in the tumult of public life," writes McCarter. "They had made those choices against a backdrop of peace and relative stability. A world of abundant promise now seems a world of unknowable danger. The question is no longer Will you work to see your ideals realized? The new reality asks them How far will you go? How much risk can you handle? How much pain can you endure?"

Lippmann goes to work for President Wilson while Reed goes to St. Petersburg and gets swept up in the Russian Revolution. The old college chums find themselves both engaged in propaganda, McCarter notes. Eastman is charged under the Espionage laws, stands his ground at trial and is acquitted. Later in life, he will go on to write for Reader's Digest, that "squarest and least radical magazine in America." Bourne publicly breaks with his mentor, John Dewey, as well as the editorial stance of The New Republic. He writes some of the most powerful and trenchant critiques of war I have ever read. An example: After noting the claim that they are leaders made by the editors of The New Republic, and noting that those pushing for war all along had been the jingoists, the plutocrats and the conservatives, he writes: "Only in a world where irony is dead could an intellectual class enter war at the head of such illiberal cohorts in the avowed cause of world-liberalism."

I shall let the reader discover the rest of this fascinating tale, written both powerfully and carefully on every page, researched with exhaustion and written with panache. My only criticism would be directed not at the story itself but at McCarter's epilogue. The steady hand that wrote the book is lost as he contemplates the Women's March the day after the inauguration of President Trump. "American conditions feel so precarious as I'm writing this in early February 2017 that any prediction might seem foolish by the time you read it. It might seem foolish by the time I finish typing it. But the scale and the zeal of the Women's March suggests that we've entered a new phase in the history of American idealism." He should have listened to his caveats: It is so far quite foolish to think our country has entered a new phase of idealism. Where is the evidence?

All is forgiven, however, even in the epilogue, by McCarter's ability to craft beautiful sentences that contain poignant ideas. He concludes the book: "Whatever happens, we ought to be braced by the example of the young radicals; how they discovered their ideals, made a decision to fight for them, and went on fighting even when the battle turned against them. Their defeats were painful, but not final. Battles for ideals never are. Ruins stop being ruins when you build with them."

Now that this review is published, I shall call McCarter and pose him a particular question: There seems to be a complete absence of any religious tone or content in these five young radicals. Did that not hinder them in a culture where religious language and imagery is still so redolent? And, in our own day, is it still necessary to find at least some of the resources for cultural renewal and progressivism in religious idioms? McCarter does not address this question in his book, and I am glad he didn't: He sticks to the narrative and lets the protagonists tell their own story, which is why it is such an engaging read. (Letting the protagonists tell their own story without the author getting in the way is also a lot harder to do than it looks!) But, if he truly discerns in the Women's March a new progressivism, did the march organizers' decision to bar pro-life feminists from participating evidence a healthy or unhealthy strain in contemporary progressivism?

If this still young thinker and writer is wondering what to write next, I would propose he look at the nexus of religion and progressivism in the lives of other emblematic Americans. I would read that book too and I am confident I would delight in it as I did in this one. But that is all in the future. For now: Read this book! You wont be disappointed.

[Michael Sean Winters covers the nexus of religion and politics for NCR.]

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'Young Radicals' follows progressives' pursuit of ideals into World War I - National Catholic Reporter (blog)

Chokwe Antar Lumumba, a human-rights lawyer, won the mayoralty of Jackson, Mississippi, in June with 93 percent of the vote. (Illustration by Louisa Bertman)

With a clenched fist held high and the promise of amovement of the people, Chokwe Antar Lumumba asked the voters of Jackson, Mississippi, to elect him as their mayor in a race he pledged would lead to the transformation of a Deep South city in a deep-red state. Victory for his civil-rights-inspired, labor-backed campaign for economic and social justice would send shock waves around the world, said the 34-year-old human-rights lawyer as he vowed to make Jackson the most progressive city in the country.1

Too radical? Too bold? Not at all. Backed by a coalition that included veteran activists who fought segregation, along with newcomers who got their first taste of politics in Bernie Sanderss 2016 presidential campaign, Lumumba won 55 percent of the vote in a May Democratic primary that saw him oust the centrist incumbent mayor and sweep past several other senior political figures in Mississippis largest city. A month later, he secured a stunning 93 percent of the vote in a general election that drew one of the highest turnouts the city has seen in years.2

That victory renewed a radical experiment in community-guided governance and cooperative economics that his father, the veteran radical activist Chokwe Lumumba Sr., began during a brief mayoral term that ended with the senior Lumumbas untimely death just eight months after his own 2013 election as mayor. Governing magazine speculates that the younger Lumumbas tenure may offer striking evidence of a nationwide trend: strongly progressive policies being pushed in big cities, even in deep red states. Thats true. Unfortunately, Lumumbas June 6 win didnt get anything close to the media attention accorded a handful of special elections for US House seats in districts that are so solidly Republican that Donald Trump was comfortable plucking congressmen from them to fill out his cabinet.3

This is the frustrating part of Lumumbas shock waves around the world calculus: His election should have sent a shock wave. The same holds true for the election of progressives in local races from Cincinnati to St. Louis to South Fulton, Georgia, in a season of resistance that began with the Womens March on Washington and mass protests against President Trumps Muslim ban but has quickly moved to polling places across the country.4

The list of victories thus far on this years long calendar of contestsmayoral, City Council, state legislative, and even statewideis striking. Many of them are unprecedented, and most are linked by a growing recognition on the part of national progressive groups and local activists that the greatest resistance not just to Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan but to right-wing governors could well come from the cities and states where the day-to-day work of governing is done. Municipal resistance is crucial because these Republican governors often do the bidding of the Koch brothers and the corporate-sponsored American Legislative Exchange Council.5

Our nation will only change from the grassroots up. Dan Cantor, national director of the Working Families Party

Inspired not merely by their opposition to Trump but in many cases by the experience of the Sanders campaign, these next-generation progressive candidatesoften running with the backing of Our Revolution, the national group developed by Sanders backersshare a belief that effective opposition begins with saying no but never ends there. They recognize that an alternative vision can be proposed and put into practice in communities where taxes are levied, services are delivered, commitments to fight climate change are made, resolutions to establish sanctuary cities are adopted, and questions about poverty, privatization, and policing are addressed. Our nation will only change from the grassroots up, says Dan Cantor, national director of the Working Families Party, which backed Lumumba as well as the progressive winners of a hotly contested primary for Philadelphia district attorney, a statewide race for the top education post in Wisconsin, and a New York election that saw a Trump-backing GOP district pick a resistance-preaching union activist for an open legislative seat.6

Cantor is right to suggest that these victories make a powerful case that a new resistance-and-renewal politics is sending a signal to conservative Republicans and cautious Democrats alike about the ability of bold progressive populists to win in every part of the country. Thats why it is so worrisome that these electoral shock waves have been crashing against the wall of ignorance and indifference that surrounds a Trump-obsessed Washington media.7

Even before the 2016 elections, the national media were far too focused on Beltway intrigues. When the Trump-centric punditocracy hang on the 45th presidents every tweet, election results that cannot be tied directly to whats happening in Washington barely exist in their eyes. This is a damaging phenomenon: Even in an era of rapidly evolving social media, the validation that comes from traditional media coverage should not be underestimated. In the none-too-distant past, things changed because down-ballot races were closely monitored for evidence of the zeitgeist; the tangible signs of electoral progress for civil-rights campaigners in the late 1960s came initially in the form of election results for the mayoralties in places like Gary, Indiana, and Cleveland, and they inspired the next wave of campaigns in cities like Atlanta and New Orleans. City Council elections in Berkeley, Madison, and Ann Arbor in the early 1970s revealed the political potency of radical movements and lowered voting ages, just as Harvey Milks 1977 election to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors told us that LGBTQ Americans were transforming urban politics. And a remarkable series of election results in 1983, beginning with Harold Washingtons election as mayor of Chicago, signaled the rise of a rainbow coalition that would inspire not just the Reverend Jesse Jackson but a young community organizer named Barack Obama.8

Lumumbas big win in Jackson and similar breakthrough victories across the country are powerful indications of todays emerging resistance. His overwhelming primary victory occurred on the same day that progressive Cincinnati Councilwoman Yvette Simpson shocked even herself when her power of we campaign finished first (ahead of a conservative incumbent) in that citys mayoral primary. Annie Weinberg, electoral director of Democracy for America, which has waded into dozens of down-ballot contests, said the message is clear: In 2017, voters are ready to make cities everywhere into bastions of resistance to the Trump regime by electing bold progressive leaders who run on, and are committed to fighting for, racial and economic justice.9

Weinbergs point was confirmed on May 16, when Philadelphia Democrats nominated veteran civil-rights lawyer Lawrence Krasner for district attorney. Krasner, who had defended Occupy Philadelphia and Black Lives Matter protesters, beat a crowded field of contenders with a campaign that promised to make the City of Brotherly Love a model for criminal-justice reform. Along with victories last year by Cook County States Attorney Kim Foxx in Chicago and Orange-Osceola State Attorney Aramis Ayala in Orlando, Florida, Krasners win reflects the political appeal of new approaches to policingones first voiced by protesters on the streets of American cities, and that the Trump administration and too many politicians in both parties continue to callously dismiss. The headline of a Philadelphia Daily News column by Will Bunch announced: This wasnt just a primary victory. This was a revolution. The columnist saw in Krasners victory nothing less than the stirrings of a whole different kind of revolution from the city that gave America the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rightsa revolution aimed at finally undoing a draconian justice regime that had turned the Cradle of Liberty into a death-penalty capital and the poster child for mass incarceration.10

Many recent progressive victors were Bernie Sanders supporters or Sanders DNC delegates last year.

A similarly revolutionary result came in St. Louis on April 4, when Natalie Vowell won a citywide school-board seat with an intersectional campaign that focused not just on education policy but addressed the housing, employment, and criminal-justice issues that often determine whether students succeed. A Sanders delegate to the 2016 Democratic National Convention, Vowell promised to empower parents across the economic spectrum and stop equating poverty with apathy.11

Developing detailed platforms that recognize the links between local, state, and national issues has characterized these recent victories. Winning candidates have made opposing Trump a local issue, with commitments to defend immigrants and fill the void created by federal budget cuts; but they have also rejected the austerity, deregulation, privatization, and intolerance of statehouse Republicans. For example, Dylan Parker is a 28-year-old diesel mechanic and member of the Quad Cities chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. In 2016, Parker was a Sanders delegate; in early April of this year, he was elected to the City Council of Rock Island, Illinois, with a campaign that updated the sewer socialist municipal politics of the 1930s by focusing on providing universal high-speed Internet access and expanding Rock Islands publicly owned hydroelectric power plant. Two weeks later, another DSA member, khalid kamau (who lowercases his name in the Yoruba tradition that emphasizes community over the individual), was elected to the City Council of South Fulton, Georgia. A Black Lives Matter and Fight for $15 organizer and also a Sanders delegate, kamau campaigned on a bold economic and social-justice vision that seeks to make the newly incorporated community of South Fulton the largest progressive city in the South.12

In Scott Walkers Wisconsin, April voting saw Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers win a statewide nonpartisan race after being targeted by conservative backers of the school choice schemes favored by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. While his challenger embraced DeVos and called her selection a positive development for education, Evers challenged the Trump appointees promotion of taxpayer-subsidized parochial or private schools that are part of the choice program and said DeVos should be paying attention to public-school students. We need her to be an advocate for those kids, explained the teachers union ally, who calls for the increased funding of public education, especially for schools serving African-American, Latino, and rural students. Evers won 70 percent of the vote in a state that narrowly backed Trump last fall.13

While DC pundits have kept a reasonably close watch on congressional special elections in the districts won by Trumpand have seen signs of political movement some of the clearest signals are coming from special elections for seats in the state legislative chambers that will redraw congressional district lines after the 2020 Census. Progressive Democrats running in historically Republican districts in New Hampshire and New York won breakthrough victories in May. Republicans should absolutely be concerned: Two Republican canaries died in the coal mine yesterday, GOP political consultant William OReilly said after the results were announced. He explained that Trump voters and other Republicans simply didnt show up, and voters from the left did.14

THE STAKES ARE HIGHER NOW THAN EVER. GET THE NATION IN YOUR INBOX.

The New York special-election winner, elementary-school teacher and union activist Christine Pellegrino, described her victory as a thunderbolt of resistance. But it was also something else: Pellegrino, another 2016 Sanders delegate, wasnt the first choice of Democratic strategists and local party leaders. She gained the nomination with the help of the group Long Island Activists, which was born out of the Bernie Sanders movement, and she ran an edgy anticorruption campaign that recognized the mood among voters frustrated with both major parties. As observers hailed her victory in a district that gave Trump a 23-point edge last November, Pellegrino explained that her winning strategy wasnt all that complicated: A strong progressive agenda is the way forward.15

Pellegrino proved her point by taking 58 percent of the vote in one of the 710 legislative districts nationwide that have been identified by Ballotpedia as including all or part of the so-called Pivot Countiesthose that voted for Democrat Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 and then voted for Republican Donald Trump in 2016. As the website explains: 477 state house districts and 233 state senate districts intersected with these Pivot Counties. These [districts comprise] approximately 10 percent of all state legislative districts in the country.16

For progressives, figuring out where to win and how to winnot merely to resist, but to set the agendais about more than positioning. This is the essential first step in breaking the grip of a politics that imagines large parts of the country will always be red, and that says the only real fights are over an elusive middle ground where campaigns are fought with lots of money but little substance. The resistance-and-renewal politics thats now gathering momentum rejects such empty politics and embraces what Chokwe Antar Lumumba identifies as the struggle [that] does not cease: to give people the jobs and freedom they need to shape their own destinies. That makes every election in every community matter, because the point isnt merely to resist one bad president; as Lumumba reminds us, it is to change the order of the world.17

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A Progressive Electoral Wave Is Sweeping the Country - The Nation.

A liberal advocacy group spent a Saturday afternoon knocking on doors to get Howard County residents talking about politics.

Together We Will, a group founded in reaction to Donald Trump's election as president, held a door-to-door "listening campaign" June 10 in Owen Brown to ask residents what political issues mattered most to them. They began knocking on doors around Howard County in March and will continue through 2017, with the next outing in mid-July.

The canvassing effort, called Knock Every Door, draws from a national movement that advocates "deep canvassing," which requires in-depth conversations with voters. Canvassers gather data by asking respondents to rate their preferences on a scale, then getting them to describe those preferences in detail with follow-up questions.

Together We Will co-chair Becca Niburg said the effort is strictly a "listening campaign not an attempt for us to impose views or lecture people.

"Politics has become an exercise of people talking at each other," Niburg said. "Our goal with the campaign is to bridge the divide to truly listen to all points of view."

She said she hopes elected officials will use the data they collect to craft policies that respond to "what real people need."

"Everybody is kind of worried about the same things," said Niburg. "People just want their families to be safe and they want to have a job."

Other local liberal organizations including Red to Blue, Indivisible and Do The Most Good are also participating in the campaign, as is the Howard County Democratic Campaign Committee.

Niburg co-chairs the county's branch of Together We Will with its founder, Chiara D'Amore.

The Howard County chapter of Together We Will began as a chapter of Pantsuit Nation, a private Facebook group of Hillary Clinton supporters that emerged before the election. After Trump was elected, organizers across the country began working to "galvanize" reactions, and D'Amore decided to focus on local issues.

"Politics are highly local," D'Amore said. "I just wanted to do something at the county level where people could get to know each other."

She describes Together We Will as a "progressive solidarity network" whose priorities include fostering inclusive communities, protecting the environment, securing equal rights and amplifying other progressive voices.

The volunteer-driven Howard County group has more than 1,200 members on its private Facebook page, Niburg said. A smaller number, D'Amore said, come to in-person meetings regularly. About 70 percent are women, she estimated, but she said each volunteer has a different drive to show up.

"What I've found is that most people want to do something, they just don't know where to go or what to do," D'Amore said.

One of Together We Will's youngest volunteers is Niburg's daughter, Alyssa. The 8-year-old has helped in Knock Every Door events and said her favorite part is "that I get to hear other people's stories and compare them to some of mine."

One of Alyssa's biggest worries about the next four years is that "more children are gonna have less friends, because their friends are immigrants," she said. "If you go back far enough, everyone's an immigrant. Trump is an immigrant!"

Together We Will Howard County falls under the national group's umbrella, and is also a registered member of the movement Indivisible, recently in headlines for organizing protests at Republican town halls around the U.S. But both D'Amore and Niburg said that their group's focus is local and strictly non-partisan.

Howard County bills that the group has supported include CB-9, , the so-called "sanctuary bill," and CN-30, a bill to create a public finance system for political candidates, Niburg said.

For D'Amore, who said she saw Howard County and Columbia as a "progressive, forward-looking place to be," the presidential election, as well as the Republicans leading the state and county, signified a shift.

On June 10, five volunteers trudged from door to door in the stifling 88-degree heat, knocking on doors, asking residents of Owen Brown what mattered to them.

Armed with scripts and clipboards and sunscreen, the group divvied up neighborhoods and split into two groups. One group approached a quiet block of brick townhouses. It took 10 doors before the volunteers heard the sound of a latch opening.

Later, Hester remarked on the cultural and ethnic diversity of the neighborhood, noting that most people they talked to that day were non-native English speakers. Most residents they spoke to leaned liberal, and none were Republicans.

The first resident they spoke to, Ali Ali, said he approved of Trump despite being a registered Democrat. "He's not a typical politician," Ali said. "That's a good thing." Ali later said one of the most important issues to him was arts education, because "it makes people more tolerant."

Other residents saw Trump in a more negative light. Asked to rate his satisfaction with the president, on a scale of one to 10, Lolu Osoba let out a deep, booming laugh. "Zero," he shouted. "Russia select your president for you!"

Owen Brown resident Michael Ioffe also gave Trump a zero, and when asked to think of words to describe him joked: "Do you really want me to think about him?"

Originally from Nigeria, Osoba told the volunteers that he now votes in every election Hester gave him a fist bump. Ioffe, who came to the U.S. from the Soviet Union, also said he votes regularly. "I came from a country where that wasn't an option," he said.

Nearly every resident named healthcare as a primary issue facing the country; many also named education and the environment.

Though most had strong opinions about national politics, most were stumped when asked about state and local politicians.

One resident said Hogan had "done a lot of beautiful things," but when asked for specifics admitted he did not pay attention to state politics.

Most people, volunteer Jennifer Jones said, didn't like Trump, but were "okay" with Republicans Gov. Larry Hogan and County Executive Allan Kittleman.

Prunier Law, who said Saturday's canvassing event was her first with Knock Every Door, remarked that peoples' political opinions seemed overshadowed by their daily lives. She described asking one rushed resident if they were happy with the election. The resident responded, "Sure not. But I've got to feed my kids."

"I think it's really important that we feel the humanity of people," Prunier Law said.

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Progressives launch "listening campaign" in Howard County - Baltimore Sun

The second decade of the 20th century was a heady time for progressives. A Democrat with liberal leanings on most issues, Woodrow Wilson entered the White House. The labor movement was getting stronger, and the suffragettes were taking to the streets. In 1914, Herbert Croly launched The New Republic, which would serve as a flagship for liberalism for the rest of the century. Progressivism had the wind in its sails, and high ideals shaped the political and social landscape.

In 1917, the United States entered World War I, and the whole idea of progress seemed as dead as the millions in the trenches of Flanders. Yet some progressives did not abandon their hopes. They persisted.

In his new book, Young Radicals In the War for American Ideals, Jeremy McCarter looks at this persistent idealism in the lives of five progressives who "didn't surrender their ideals." They are: Walter Lippmann, John Reed, Max Eastman, Alice Paul and Randolph Bourne. "The only way to understand ideals and the people who fight for them is to watch the story on the individual scale, where you can register personal desires, personal choices, and personal consequences," McCarter writes. "The story has to be told in close-up, not panorama."

Full disclosure: I met McCarter when he was an intern at The New Republic more than 20 years ago, and we have remained friends. I have not communicated with him since I received a review copy of this book, as is my practice.

The story begins with Lippmann working for the socialist mayor of Schenectady, New York in 1912, but he quickly grows disillusioned with the tiny steps they manage to take. "The gap between hope and reality brings him quickly to a crisis: Can he condone this sham exercise in socialism, let alone continue to be a part of it? For the first time in his overachieving life, he finds himself in a predicament with no clear way out." He decides to quit and return to New York City, but his idealism is intact. "Their era is 'bursting with new ideas, new plans, and new hopes,' he [Lippmann] writes later that year. 'The world was never so young as it is today, so impatient of old and crusty things.'"

The sentences quoted above not only disclose a lot about Lippmann, and advance the narrative, they illustrate McCarter's gift as a writer: This entire book is fluid and incisive, detailed and universal.

Back in New York City, Lippmann quickly reconnects with a classmate of his from Harvard, Jack Reed. Reed wants to be a writer and enlists Lippmann in a project that results in a 20,000-word unpublishable essay about their time at Harvard and the radicalism they tried to bring to birth. A tour of familial duty back in Oregon when his father dies gives Reed the space he needs to apply his talents to greater effect, and upon returning to New York, he shares in manuscript form an epic poem he has written about life in Greenwich Village, "A Day in Bohemia." It begins to forge his reputation and create a sense of self-identity for the Village, and young people flock to his flat at 42 Washington Square. Here are some lines that give some flavor of the poem, and of the times:

Now with an easy caper of the mind We rectify the Errors of Mankind; Now with a sharpness of a keen-edged jest, Plunge a hot thunder-bolt in Mammon's breast; Impatient Youth, in fine creative rage, With both hands wrests the quenchless torch from Age, Not as the Dilettanti, who explain Why they have failed, -excuse, lament, complain, Condemn real artists to exalt themselves, And credit their misfortune to the elves;- But to Gods of Strength make Offertory,- And pit our young wits in the race for glory!

Some of the best parts of McCarter's book are the many, many quotes from the protagonists' writings, brimming with verve and idealism, at least as the story begins.

Another text that communicates the ambience of Greenwich Village in these years was the statement that ran on the front page of copies of The Masses:

This magazine is owned and published cooperatively by its editors. It has no dividends to pay, and nobody is trying to make money out of it. A revolutionary and not a reform magazine; a magazine with a sense of humor and no respect for the respectable; frank, arrogant, impertinent, searching for the true causes; a magazine directed against rigidity and dogma wherever it is found; printing what is too naked or true for a moneymaking press; a magazine whose final policy is to do as it pleases and conciliate nobody, not even its readers there is a field for this publication in America.

The statement came from the pen of Max Eastman, the editor, who could certainly attest to the fact that no one was making money off the publication. In the summer of 1912, he had received an envelope in the mail that enclosed a torn piece of paper which read "in its entirety" McCarter notes: "You are elected editor of The Masses. No pay." With a job offer like that, who could say no? Eastman would accept the position and go on to become one of the most committed and unflinching of the young radicals.

No one was more unflinching, however, than Alice Paul. In 1913, she had already spent time in a British prison for leading protests on behalf of women's suffrage, where she began a hunger strike and was force-fed. Returning to the U.S., she joined the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), which had been pursuing a strategy focused on winning suffrage at the state level. Paul leads a protest for women's suffrage down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington on the eve of President Wilson's inauguration. The protest turned into a fracas, garnering the publicity Paul knew it would. Fourteen days later, Paul is part of a delegation meeting with President Wilson. He is non-committal. Impatient with both Wilson and the more cautious leadership of the NAWSA, Paul founds the National Women's Party and would agitate for a federal amendment granting women the right to vote.

Randolph Bourne is the final young radical to whom the reader is introduced. The same year Paul is leading her protest in Washington, Bourne is getting ready to graduate from Columbia University. He had delayed college to earn money, and at 27 years old, he is nervous about his future. But Bourne's writing career has already kicked off with a bang: As a sophomore, he sent an essay to The Atlantic Monthly, and they not only published it, they kept publishing additional essays by him. He brings out a book of his essays in his senior year, Youth and Life, but he confesses to a friend that he was "never young, and has only partly lived." Deformed by a childhood illness, Bourne is a hunchback, and he writes of himself that he is "a man cruelly blasted by the powers that brought him into the world, in a way that makes him both impossible to be desired and yet cruel irony that wiseMontaigneknew about doubly endowed with desire."

I shall conclude this review tomorrow.

[Michael Sean Winters covers the nexus of religion and politics for NCR.]

Go here to read the rest:
'Young Radicals' chronicles last century's US progressives - National Catholic Reporter (blog)