Our story.

AuthorMoyers, Bill
PositionCover Story

Fifty-three years ago, on my sixteenth birthday, I went to work for the daily newspaper in the small East Texas town where I grew up. It was a good place to be a cub reporter--small enough to navigate but big enough to keep me busy and learning something every day. I soon had a stroke of luck. Some of the old timers were on vacation or out sick and I got assigned to cover what came to be known as the Housewives' Rebellion. Fifteen women in my hometown decided not to pay the Social Security withholding tax for their domestic workers. They argued that Social Security was unconstitutional, that imposing it was taxation without representation, and that--here's my favorite part--"requiring us to collect the tax is no different from requiring us to collect the garbage."

The stories I wrote for my local paper were picked up and moved on the Associated Press wire. One day, the managing editor called me over and pointed to the AP ticker beside his desk. Moving across the wire was a notice citing one Bill Moyers and the paper for the reporting we had done on the "Rebellion."

That booked me, and in one way or another--after a detour through seminary and then into politics and government for a spell--I've been covering the class war ever since. Those women in Marshall, Texas, were its advance guard. They were not bad people. They were regulars at church, their children were my friends, many of them were active in community affairs, their husbands were pillars of the business and professional class in town. They were respectable and upstanding citizens all. So it took me a while to figure out what had brought on that spasm of reactionary rebellion. It came to me one day, much later. They simply couldn't see beyond their own prerogatives. Fiercely loyal to their families, to their clubs, charities, and congregations--fiercely loyal, in other words, to their own kind--they narrowly defined membership in democracy to include only people like them. The women who washed and ironed their laundry, wiped their children's bottoms, made their husband's beds, and cooked their family meals--these women, too, would grow old and frail, sick and decrepit, lose their husbands and face the ravages of time alone, with nothing to show from their years of labor but the crease in their brow and the knots on their knuckles. Even on the distaff side of laissez faire, security was personal, not social, and what injustice existed this side of heaven would no doubt be redeemed beyond the Pearly Gates.

In one way or another, this is the oldest story in America: the struggle to determine whether "we, the people" is a spiritual idea embedded in a political reality--one nation, indivisible--or merely a charade masquerading as piety and manipulated by the powerful and privileged to sustain their own way of life at the expense of others.

I should make it clear that I don't harbor any idealized notion of politics and democracy; I worked for Lyndon Johnson, remember? Nor do I romanticize "the people." You should read my mail--or listen to the vitriol virtually spat at my answering machine. I understand what the politician meant who said of the Texas House of Representatives, "If you think these guys are bad, you should see their constituents."

But there is nothing idealized or romantic about the difference between a society whose arrangements roughly serve all its citizens and one whose institutions have been converted into a stupendous fraud. That difference can be the difference between democracy and oligarchy.

You are the heirs of one of the country's great traditions--the progressive movement that started late in the nineteenth century and remade the American experience piece by piece until it peaked in the last third of the twentieth century. Its aim was to keep blood pumping through the veins of democracy when others were ready to call in the mortician.

Step back with me to the curtain raiser, the founding convention of the People's Party--better known as the Populists--in 1892. Mainly cotton and wheat farmers from the recently reconstructed South and the newly settled Great Plains, they had come on hard, hard times, driven to the wall by falling prices for their crops on one hand and racking interest rates, freight charges, and supply costs on the other. All this in the midst of a booming industrial America. They were angry, and their platform--issued deliberately on the Fourth of July--pulled no punches. "We...

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