American Rebels

During much of the 1960s I kept an anti-war poster on my wall that featured a quotation from Albert Camus that read, "I would like to be able to love my country, and justice too." Some of my own defining experiences took place on those occasions where I felt most free to love justice and my country at the same time-when I planted myself in a tradition that stretches from Jefferson and Tom Paine through Lincoln, Whitman, Thoreau, to the founders of the labor unions, to Eugene Debs, to the early blues singers, to Woody Guthrie and John Steinbeck, to Eleanor Roosevelt and Martin Luther King.

I still remember singing "We Shall Overcome" in Brown's Chapel in Selma, Alabama, in February of 1965. Dr. King was in the pulpit, his arms linked with Andrew Young and John Lewis. The rally was for the right to vote, which was soon to be secured by the Voting Rights Act of 1965, after thousands had gone to jail for non-violent civil disobedience.

I remember riding in an open car with Robert Kennedy as he campaigned for president through Watts and East LA. At each stop in the Mexican-American neighborhoods, a Mariachi band greeted him with a Mexican-styled "This Land is Your Land," which was his campaign theme song. From the vantage point of the trunk of his car, I could see, with piercing clarity, the hope shining in the eyes of all these blacks and Latinos, who would give him 90 percent of their votes on the day he was assassinated.

Even during the 1960s when I felt the most depressed and alienated by America's racism and military interventionism, I was still able to find aspects of America where I felt at home. Baseball, and later basketball, became my nationalism. There was always an alternative America I could pledge allegiance to the America of the Bill of Rights, sports, blues, jazz, art, unions, writers, and social protest. This identification with part of our history and part of our culture kept me sane; I never became anti-American.

I loved my country because it had produced Walt Whitman, Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali, Norman Mailer, RFK, Miles Davis, George McGovern, Willie Mays, Herman Melville, Bessie Smith, Sandy Koufax, Cesar Chavez, Janis Joplin, Larry Bird, Lenny Bruce, Sam Cooke, Fiorello LaGuardia, Walter Reuther, Roberto Clemente, Murray Kempton, and above all Dr. King. I was able to convince myself that they represented an alternative conception of this country, that they were just as legitimate and American as burglars of the flag including Nixon, Kissinger, George Wallace, Henry Ford, John D. Rockfeller, General Custer, Jimmy Swaggert, Jerry Falwell, J. Edgar Hoover, Joe McCarthy, and Spiro Agnew.

My America is Jimi Hendrix playing his solo, electric guitar version of the National Anthem, to close the music festival at Woodstock. My America is Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech on that hot August afternoon in 1963, when he seemed to be secretly channeling Scripture, the Constitution, and Abraham Lincoln. And he was preceded to the podium that day by Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Mahalia Jackson, a Whitmanesque trifecta of table setters.

America is Bruce Springsteen singing "Youngstown" and "Philadelphia" with their echoes of Woody and Steinbeck. It is Dylan singing of answers blowing in the wind, and "Blind Willie McTell," and sounding a little like the ghost of Son House. It is Hank Williams singing (and writing) "I Saw the Light," and "Alone and Foresaken." And it is Robert Johnson singing (and writing) "Terraplane Blues," and "Love in Vain." Whenever I hear Dylan, Bruce, Johnson, and Hank, I can hear America singing.

America is Studs Terkel talking about Chicago, Pete Hamill writing about New York, Faulkner writing about Mississippi, Ellison and Baldwin writing about Harlem. It is Jacob Riis and Walker Evans photographing the destitute, and Ansel Adams shooting the natural beauty of the American west. America is books by Rachael Carson, Jane Jacobs, Ralph Nader, and Michael Harrington that changed the national consciousness and consensus about the environment, cities, automobiles, and poverty. We are a democracy that can be changed for the better by books and the free flow of information.

They all follow in a native tradition of an alternative America. On July 4 I will honor and remember them and the bravery of rebels past, present, and hopefully future.

Jack Newfield, a veteran New York political reporter and senior fellow at the Nation Institute, is the editor of the forthcoming "American Rebels" from Nation Books and the winner of the 2003 American Book Award for "The Full Rudy: The Man, The Myth, The Mania."

The above is the introduction from the forthcoming July 21 "American Rebels" issue of The Nation. Other "rebels" profiled include Bob Moses by Tom Hayden, Bella Abzug by Patricia Bosworth, Benjamin Mays by Roger Wilkins, Woody Guthrie by Steve Earle, Margaret Sanger by Ellen Chessler, Paul Wellstone by Joe Conason, Dorothy Day by Wayne Barrett, Walt Whitman by Richard Gambino, Miles Davis by Lucious Shephard, and I.F. Stone by Nation publisher Victor Navasky.

The mention of Ansel Adams brought to mind a recent purchase. I was at a garage sale, and the gentleman had been a long-standing Scouter. There were a bunch of old Boy's Lifes on sale. I passed on most of them, but snapped up the one that had printed in it a photo essay by Ansel Adams of Philmont. There are a number of full- and double-page prints, and this is from when BL was in the large format (like the old LIFE magazine).

I think that almost everyone he mentions is a sports figure, academic, entertainer, politician, or political activist. <sarcasm>Yeah, he lives in the real America</sarcasm>

This book is lefties, homosexuals, and corrupt journalists on parade. As much as I like the music of Woody Guthrie, I am not blind to the fact that he was an organizer for the Workers of the World, a communist union. I.F. Stone, though frequently a good journalist, never recounted his leftist past. Joe Conason, one of the writers, is below pond scum as a "journalist."

This guy's "alternative America" did exist once. Like an anti-Brigadoon, it existed for one bright and bloody century. It was called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. I praise the value of real rebels like Tom Paine, Ben Franklin and the like. I spit on this guy's idea of rebellion.

Did I miss anything?

Congressman Billybob

Sonny boy, you think and analyze from the standpoint of superficial songs, slogans and images while never looking beneath the surface of things. Your analysis is based upon your stream of immediate subjective emotional reactions, often to other people's emotional reactions. That is the basis of your life. It can be so because you are able to involve yourself in such a life without concrete responsibility for feeding yourself or producing anything.

Try running a concrete productive business producing critical necessities to sustain society. Try running a farm where if you must work or go hungry. It's a lot different than riding with RFK and listening to Miles Davis.

In short, you are a coddled punk playing at life and trivial amusements.

I felt most free to love justice and my country at the same time-when I planted myself in a tradition that ...

Included every anti-American left-wing radical I could think of.

The author is an enthusiastic tribalist, nothing more. His view of "rebellion" is dependent on kindness and support from the society which it holds in open contempt. This is the rebellion of adolescence, and were it to get what it ostensibly wants it would be the first one to cry about the injustice of it all.

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