The Hard Work of Hope, with Michael Ansara (episode 336)

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Jake intro-outro:
[0:04] Welcome to Hub History, where we go far beyond the freedom trail to share our favorite stories from the history of Boston, the Hub of the Universe.

Introduction to The Hard Work of Hope

Jake intro-outro:
[0:13] This is episode 336, The Hard Work of Hope, with Michael Ansara. Hi, I’m Jake. I’m taking another break from our ongoing series about Boston during the first year the American Revolution, to talk about a different revolutionary era. In just a few moments, I’m going to be joined by Michael N. Sarah, who’s the author of a new volume of memoir called The Hard Work of Hope. The Hard Work of Hope is a personal story, but it’s also a history of Boston in the 1960s, and especially of anti-war activism at Harvard and organizing among the New Left political movement during the Vietnam era. Michael went from a middle-class childhood in Brookline to the playground of the elites at Harvard, just at the moment in history when the civil rights movement entered mainstream consciousness and as the U.S. Government dramatically escalated the war in Vietnam. Michael remembers the chaos and fear of those times, but also the patriotism and the optimism of youth that drove so many of his contemporaries. He remembers the relentless organizing it took to shape that youthful optimism into a political movement that had the potential to change the world, though that potential may not have been fully realized.

Jake intro-outro:
[1:33] In our conversation, he looks back on hard-won lessons learned and grapples with the question of how today’s organizers might save a democracy that’s teetering on the brink of total collapse.

Gratitude for Supporters

Jake intro-outro:
[1:44] But before we talk to Michael Ansara about 60s activism, the Vietnam War, and lessons for today, I just want to pause and say thank you to everyone who supports Hub History on Patreon. Your ongoing support means that we can cover expenses. Expenses like keeping hubhistory.com registered, updated, and secured. Tweaking our recordings to make our guests and me sound as good as possible. Hosting our audio files with a reliable and experienced partner. And backing up our files to make sure that we’re covered in case of an emergency. By signing up to contribute $2, $5, or even $20 or more each month, your support means that I can go on making hubhistory. To everybody who already supports the show, thank you. And if you’re not yet supporting the show and you’d like to start, it’s easy. Just go to patreon.com slash hubhistory or visit hubhistory.com and click on the support us link. And thanks again to all our new and returning sponsors.

Meet Michael Ansara

Jake intro-outro:
[2:47] I’m joined now by Michael Ansara. Michael’s probably best known as one of the key leaders of Students for a Democratic Society at Harvard and as an outspoken anti-war leader during the Vietnam years. He was also a reporter for Ramparts and the founder of an underground paper called The Old Mole. He operated a grocery co-op in Dorchester, and he was one of the founders of the Mass Fair Share movement that campaigned for tax relief, utility rate caps, and other economic justice issues in the Bay State. Today, he’s a published poet and one of the founders of Mass Poetry, and he’s a proud father and grandfather. I found Michael to be incredibly warm and easy to talk to, which, as an interviewer, I appreciated.

Jake intro-outro:
[3:31] I also just want to say that the book goes in a lot of directions that I don’t follow in this conversation. I mostly talk to Michael about things that happen locally, from his upbringing in Brookline, to his years as a campus radical in Cambridge, to organizing in Dorchester. Our already long conversation might have gone on forever if I had asked Michael about his time writing for a radical newspaper in San Francisco during the Summer of Love, or the investigation he conducted of secret CIA funding at Harvard, or even his eventual arrest as in, unwitting, he says, participant in a money laundering scheme. I also more or less ignore the sections of his book describing his father’s long illness and his long romance with, marriage to, and ultimate divorce from his wife, Amy. I talked to Michael the day before Boston’s preliminary election, so we were both feeling quite political.

Activism in the 1960s

Jake intro-outro:
[4:26] Michael Ansara, welcome to the show.

Michael Ansara:
[4:28] Well, thank you so much for having me. I’m delighted to be here.

Jake:
[4:32] So we’re here today to talk about your memoir, a new volume of memoir that’s out that is titled The Hard Work of Hope, which focuses on your life and work in the 1960s, mostly with the anti-war movement, but also other sort of new left movements of the era. Before we get into your specific experiences, how do you think the world that you and my parents and that broader generation grew up in or were born into, how did that shape the values, the activism that you found in your young adulthood?

Michael Ansara:
[5:10] Profoundly. We grew up in a period of enormous optimism. We were born after the Second World War where America had been victorious. The economy was booming. There was a liberal political consensus, bipartisan consensus. For example, I think a lot about what it was like when I went to college in 1964 and people going to college or coming out of college today. We were a huge demographic bulge. And so, enormous attention was paid to us. You know, the market sensed a great opportunity. And so, youth culture became a thing and young people became a thing. But also, when we went to college, we didn’t have to worry about massive crushing college debts.

Michael Ansara:
[5:59] I went to Harvard. I had a scholarship. I had jobs. But I emerged from four, three and a half years at Harvard with well less than

Optimism and Activism

Michael Ansara:
[6:07] $2,500 of debt for an Ivy League education. We didn’t have to worry about could we rent an apartment? Did we need to have three or four roommates to be able to afford an apartment? We didn’t have to worry about whether we could eventually buy a house. We worried about what kind of job we would get, but not whether we would get a job. It was, could we find a meaningful job? And so it was a profoundly different time. And my political activism really came from a profound love of the country and a belief in sort of American exceptionalism. It sounds foolish now, but when I was a youngster, I thought Americans were the tallest, most athletic, and most generous, and most democratic people in the world. And I was very proud to be one of them.

Jake:
[7:01] Much of the book is framed around your time at Harvard, but that’s not where you fell into activism. Awesome. You described your first exposure to the civil rights movement as happening in Coolidge Corner, which I think for a lot of our listeners is a very familiar landmark. I’m going to ask you to recall what that moment was like. But before I do, what was Coolidge Corner like back in the late 50s or early 60s when this happened?

Michael Ansara:
[7:28] Well, so I lived in Brookline Village, and we could walk up Harvard Street to Coolidge Corner, which had tons of shops. And, you know, there was an SS Pierce that was there. And then there were a few national chains, and Woolworths was one of them. I was walking by and saw a small number of young people picketing the Woolworths store. And I stopped and asked.

Michael Ansara:
[7:56] What were they doing? And they explained to me that they were picketing it because students, black students in North Carolina, were sitting in at a lunch counter, couldn’t be served a cup of coffee, were not allowed to sit at a whites-only lunch counter.

Michael Ansara:
[8:11] And, you know, that just struck me as completely un-American and wrong. And so I stepped into that picket line.

First Exposure to Civil Rights

Michael Ansara:
[8:19] And it is not hyperbole to say that changed my life. I stepped into the movement, as we called it, and found a purpose, found a passion, found a home as a 13-year-old who, up to that point, sort of believed that I was born into the wrong century, wrong body, wrong place, wrong family. You know, adolescent despair that I think is common to many of us. And the movement, the civil rights movement, was the antidote to adolescent despair. It gave me purpose, meaning for the first time I felt I was part of something much larger than myself. And then I was incredibly lucky because I fell in with a group of black organizers in Boston who were just remarkable and were incredibly generous to me. I have no idea why they accepted this 14, 15-year-old pimple-faced white boy and brought me into their midst, but they did. And through them, I learned organizing and really found purpose.

Jake:
[9:34] You mentioned Byron Rushing and Joyce and Mel King in the book, but it seems like you were working most closely with some other folks in the movement. Who were your early mentors?

Michael Ansara:
[9:48] Some you will know and many you won’t. So one of them was Sarah Ann Shaw, who went on to a career as a journalist and a reporter. But in those days, she was a young organizer with the Northern Student Movement. But the people who really shaped me the most were Noel Day and Reverend Jim Breeden.

Michael Ansara:
[10:08] Noel Day was the social worker at St. Mark’s Church, and Reverend Breeden was a young Episcopal priest assigned to Boston. And they formed the organizations that really shaped me. The first was the Boston Action Group. And the Boston Action Group was determined to use economic power. I mean, we have to go back to Boston in 1962. In 1962, you could not find, there was not a single law firm that had a black senior partner. There was not a single bank, and in those days there were many more banks, that had a senior black executive. The construction workers were shut out of the building trades unions, and in general there was rampant economic discrimination and segregation. So, Noel and Jim decided to use the power of black people’s money to force a change. And they ended up, first we surveyed, we literally went door-to-door in Roxbury and Dorchester in the South End and compiled a list of what people bought. And then we researched it and found that Continental Baking Company, which made the ubiquitous white bread Wonder Bread that everybody bought.

Michael Ansara:
[11:36] Had a factory in the middle of Roxbury and refused to hire any black workers for anything other than the most menial of janitorial jobs.

Michael Ansara:
[11:48] And so we again went door to door and built a series of black captains,

Organizing for Change

Michael Ansara:
[11:54] went into all of the African-American churches, and launched a boycott of Wonder Bread. And it took weeks, and it took organizing, and it took pressure, but eventually we won. And the Continental Baking Company agreed. I can’t remember the exact number. The number was seven or eight good-paying jobs. And, you know, that was an experience for me that was eye-opening, what people could do and that you could loosen the grip of racism. What happened then immediately after that is just the threat of boycotts had banks and others hiring senior black executives for the first time and really beginning to break down the job market segregation.

Jake:
[12:38] Even today, it’s easy for a white person in Boston to imagine that racism is a problem that occurs elsewhere. And I have to imagine that in the early 60s, it was doubly so.

Michael Ansara:
[12:50] One of the things that’s become common myth is that the country, including the North, responded positively to the Southern Civil Rights Movement and that everybody was behind it. Well, that’s not true. You remember the 1963 March on Washington, the I Have a Dream speech by Martin Luther King? You would think that the whole country embraced that speech and embraced that moment. Over 70% when polled said the march should never happen and they didn’t support it. And then you think, you know, in Boston, we’re very proud of our liberal affluent suburbs.

Jake:
[13:30] We’ve been riding the coattails of the abolitionists for 150 years now.

Michael Ansara:
[13:34] Right. So, there was an amazing fight about fair housing in Lexington, Massachusetts. Right. Mississippi, Lexington, Massachusetts, where most of the town opposed fair housing and didn’t want to have black people moving into Lexington. And, you know, Boston in the 60s was a highly segregated town, and greater Boston to this day remains highly segregated. And no one has really addressed the history in which black families were prevented from owning homes. And we know nationwide after the Second World War, there was a huge effort to have the GI Bill and all the benefits that went with that and to build new housing in the suburbs. And black people were systematically kept out of those programs and refused the same support that their peers were getting. And that’s part of the reason that there’s this huge wealth gap today in Boston and Massachusetts, where black families do not have the wealth that their counterparts have.

Jake:
[14:48] My dad’s side of the family is from Mississippi and Louisiana. And when I was very young, somebody on that side of the family told me in cruder terms than I’ll repeat. But essentially, up there in the north, you all are always screaming about equality, but you don’t want black people for neighbors. Down here, black people can live wherever they want. They just can’t get uppity.

Michael Ansara:
[15:09] Right.

Jake:
[15:11] But yeah, I’m struggling. So in 62, 63, if I’m doing my math right, you must have been about 15 or so years old.

Michael Ansara:
[15:22] So I was born in 1947, January 1947. So your math is right.

The Move to Harvard

Michael Ansara:
[15:27] I was very young and got completely swept up into the civil rights movement and lived for it. And going into the spring of 1964, I knew that I wanted to go to Mississippi that summer as part of Freedom Summer. Unfortunately, even though I’d made plans, and one of my best friends at the time, Ron Carver from Winthrop, he and I were going to go together. He did go, but unfortunately for me, my family’s dire financial situation prevented me. I had to go work.

Jake:
[16:02] Were you painting houses at that time, or is that a little later?

Michael Ansara:
[16:04] I was painting houses. And then Noel Day came to me and said, I’m going to run an independent campaign against the Speaker of the House, John McCormick. We’re not going to win, but we’re going to use it to propel organizing. And we’d like you to be our one paid organizer. So I had both the housing painting crew going and my first paid organizer job. So even though I didn’t get to Mississippi, it was still a great summer.

Jake:
[16:32] Well, it is a big jump, both in culture and probably social class and status to go from that childhood to the Harvard campus, which I think is also happening the same summer, the next summer after you missed out on Freedom Summer.

Michael Ansara:
[16:50] 1964, yeah. No, that summer, I was preparing to go to Harvard and, you know, it was a jump.

Jake:
[16:58] How did you end up getting, even realizing that you could apply to go to Harvard, much less getting accepted to Harvard?

Michael Ansara:
[17:05] When I was in the ninth grade, I was in Brookline High School, which I think at the time was considered an excellent high school. But I just was having none of it. I found by chance a school that had been started two or three years prior in Back Bay on the corner of Commonwealth and Dartmouth streets. Wright’s two townhouses had been joined together and opened up to form the Commonwealth School. I applied. The application consisted of write three essays, choose out of these topics, the three topics, and write an essay. I wrote one essay explaining them that their choice of topics was deeply flawed and, again, incredibly arrogant. And they loved it and took me. Now, I do have to say that my father, Syrian Lebanese, son of immigrants, born in Lowell, had also gone to Harvard. But I would not have had a chance of going to Harvard if it wasn’t for the Commonwealth School. They completely pushed me and recommended me, and there’s just no question in

Life at Harvard

Michael Ansara:
[18:12] my mind I would not have been accepted except for Commonwealth. And so, in the fall of 1964, I started Harvard University along with so many others.

Jake:
[18:22] Well, we’re going to talk a lot about your political career at Harvard, but what was different from your life before in Brookline when you moved to Harvard Square, just a few blocks away down Harvard F?

Michael Ansara:
[18:34] I felt like I was moving into another universe, you know, even though my family was not that far away, I felt totally liberated. And so I worked in two jobs. I had the wash dishes in the freshman dining hall, and I sold peanuts and popcorn at sporting events, particularly the football events, and then kept my painting business on the side as well, house painting business on the side. It was really interesting for me to be at an elite school again where I threw myself immediately into organizing Students for a Democratic Society and being, you know, pretty prominent as a campus radical. I made lots of friends, including one, Bill Weld.

Jake:
[19:22] I read that name in the book. It seemed like an unlikely friendship.

Michael Ansara:
[19:26] Well, it was. And, you know, it was just brief. He was a couple of years older than me, and he used to get grief from all his clubby friends about, you know, having lunch with me. And he was then the most apolitical person I’d met. We never talked politics, ever. But I really went to Harvard with the belief, just intuitive, that we could build a large student movement. And I fell in love, you know, with the new left. I really wanted a new left.

Jake:
[19:59] I barely know the term New Left. Can you tell a little bit about what that symbolized, how you were drawn to that movement, and why you landed at the SDS instead of

The New Left Movement

Jake:
[20:09] some of the other organizations that were being founded around the same time?

Michael Ansara:
[20:13] Through my civil rights activity, and then there was an independent campaign for the U.S. Senate that a Harvard professor, a fairly neurotic Harvard professor, H. Stuart Hughes, ran on a very progressive liberal platform of support for civil rights and disarmament and so on. And through that, I had met a group of young intellectuals who were absolutely brilliant, and they were the New England branch of something called Students for a Democratic Society. They would meet every Thursday at Cronin’s Bar and Grill in Harvard Square, and I would go sneak in and sit literally at their feet. They’d be drinking beer, and I would just be drinking up their ideas. And the New Left was a reaction both to the liberal consensus at the time, but the New Left was also a reaction to what we called the Old Left, the socialist parties, the communist parties, that in our view had been profoundly corrupted.

Michael Ansara:
[21:25] Both by their allegiance to foreign governments and totalitarianism, And their failure to be truly small d democratic. And we wanted a new left that was a sharp break from that tradition. We wanted a left that was rooted in American experience. That was rooted in American language and American values and that would talk about expanding democracy, not a state-controlled system.

Michael Ansara:
[22:02] And we had a very, again, American optimism about what was possible. In 1964, the New Left was what I was setting out to build, And its leading proponent was a small organization, Students for a Democratic Society. But unlike others, the Student Peace Union, for example, or specific civil rights organizations, SDS had a multi-issue approach. It really viewed things systemically, and that really appealed to me. And it had these brilliant intellectuals. And so, my self-sense was we had great ideas, but now we needed people like me to figure out how to make them real and how to organize a base. And so, I just sort of defined myself as I’m the organizer and not only at Harvard, but also became one of two new regional organizers for SDS in New England.

Jake:
[23:03] And before long, a representative, I think it’s the National Council, whatever the national leadership of the SDS was. Am I reading this right? At 17?

Michael Ansara:
[23:13] At 17, yes. So, at 17, I was an advanced standing sophomore at Harvard. I had three jobs, paying jobs. I was reorganizing the SDS chapter and building it at Harvard. And I was a regional organizer and starting to be a national leader of SDS, and madly pursuing my high school sweetheart who was in Providence, Rhode Island and who I hoped and eventually did marry.

Daily Life as an Organizer

Michael Ansara:
[23:47] So it was a full life. I look back on it and I’m exhausted.

Jake:
[23:54] Well, what did the SDS portion, Not so much the painting or the selling peanuts portion of the day, but what did the day in the life of a 17-year-old organizer or leader of Students for a Democratic Society consist of? What was the work at that time?

Michael Ansara:
[24:12] Recruiting people to join SDS, not just at Harvard, but also at other schools. So I would travel by bus to Holy Cross and Worcester. And then a lot of times it was just talking with people about the vision we had for a changed America. We started with the project being build a new left, build a multi-issue student movement. But history wasn’t kind to that project. In the December 1964 National Council of SDS, we made the dramatic and rather bold decision to call for a national march in Washington in April to oppose the war in Vietnam.

Jake:
[24:58] I was really surprised to read about that because I very much envision the anti-war movement as something that’s happening in 68, 69, 70. And in April of 1965, the escalation was so recent, I didn’t really think there was an anti-war movement at that point.

Michael Ansara:
[25:15] Well, there was a very tiny one, and we brought much of it to Washington, 20 or 25,000 people. But what that did is it made SDS the leading organization, the spearhead, if you will, of the nascent anti-war movement. And so then what we were doing was trying to convince students that it was important to act against the war. And we did that, and it’s important to note, we didn’t do it by yelling at them, and we didn’t do it by going and saying, hey, I’m Michael Ansara, I want to tell you why you should be against the war. I would go and I’d say, hey, I’m Michael Ansara, I’m from SDS.

Michael Ansara:
[25:53] How are you doing? What are you thinking about? What are you worried about? And have long conversations about life, our lives, and our hopes and our fears. And then what are we going to do about being citizens, young men, young women, growing up in a country that is prosecuting an unjust and illegal war? And what’s our responsibility in the face of that? And, you know, it was recent enough, the Second World War was recent enough that we would think a lot about the good Germans. Where were the good Germans? Who early on had stopped Hitler? Who had opposed Hitler?

Early Protests Against the War

Michael Ansara:
[26:38] And the history books didn’t include a lot of good Germans. There were a few, but not a lot. And so we would talk a lot about we don’t want to be the missing good Germans.

Jake:
[26:48] Part of the problem was a lot of the good Germans got executed pretty early on.

Michael Ansara:
[26:51] Yes, pretty early on.

Jake:
[26:53] One of the ways you’re asking these young people to get involved was through the first – or one of the first, at least, big anti-war protests in Boston, which happened in October of 65. And it was a march – at least your portion of the march was from the Harvard campus to the Parkman bandstand on the Common. Maybe there were other routes from other colleges. But tell us a little bit about that. You’re taking your activism from the campus to the street. How did Boston receive that?

Michael Ansara:
[27:25] Not well. We got about 400 of us, which was the goal that we had set. And we marched down Mass Avenue through Central Square.

Michael Ansara:
[27:35] Over the bridge. And as we were marching down Mass Avenue, people would come out to see us, and they were not cheering us on. They were yelling at us. They were occasionally throwing things. As we got into Central Square, men, both young and old, would come out of the bars and be incensed that anyone could be questioning the president, anyone could be not supporting our boys. And there would be occasional fights that would break out, that the police would break up and protect us. And then when we got to the, over the Mass Ave Bridge, people from Boston College and Boston University joined in with us, and then people from Northeastern joined in with us. And, you know, we probably had 1,000, 1,200, 1,400 kids at the Parkman bandstand, but there was a fairly vocal counter-demonstration, some of it by older folks, conservatives, some of it by something called the Young Americans for Freedom. They were yelling and screaming, and then that attracted some people from the combat zone not that far away, and we could not hold the rally at the Parkman bandstand. It got broken up pretty quickly, and we all went home. And, you know, we went home with mixed feelings. I mean, one was that we didn’t get to hold our rally.

Michael Ansara:
[29:02] But at the same time, we felt like, okay, our job right now is to carve out room for dissent. And we’ve just established that there are at least some people in the country that are opposed to the war. And we can build on that. And every time we had a march, every time we had a demonstration, In a sense, we drew a line, are you with us or aren’t you? And for a long time, the vast majority wasn’t with us, but it allowed us to have a conversation. I can’t tell you how many conversations started with, why are you doing that? What’s wrong with you? Or, you know, I might think that there was a problem in Vietnam, but your reaction to it is way too strong. But that got us into a conversation about the war. And if we could have a conversation about the war, most of the time we could persuade people. It took more than one conversation.

Engaging with the Community

Michael Ansara:
[30:01] It took patience. It took listening. It took connecting. But over time, and the actual facts of the war brought around more and more young people to oppose it.

Jake:
[30:15] Along with the march to Parkman bandstand and the criticism that some people gave, you also described a situation where you or maybe a small group were trying to engage with some of the folks who worked around New Market Square, around the grocery businesses, the meatpacking plants around New Market Square. It sounds like in that case, you barely got away unscathed. Can you just describe that?

Michael Ansara:
[30:41] Barely. So, after a couple of years, I was very concerned and remained very concerned that the anti-war movement not be restricted to the campuses. And the packing house workers were historically very progressive union, an interracial union with some left leadership. And so I thought a natural place to try and engage people whose sons were fighting in Vietnam was to go to the New Market Packinghouse District and try and reach out to workers there. What I didn’t understand was not only was there a huge gap between working class folks and us on the issue of the war in general, but that the preponderance of workers in the Newmarket Square in the mid-1960s were immigrants, recent immigrants from Eastern Europe, who had fled the Red Army as it marched into what was considered the captive nations of Eastern Europe. And so, they were really vehemently anti-communist and vehemently supporting the war. So.

Michael Ansara:
[31:55] Picture the scene. We’re going in. There are all these guys who are moving the carcasses of beef and hogs, and they’re wearing their white aprons smeared with blood, and they’ve got meat hooks and cleavers and knives in their belts. And here’s our little young, earnest band of students from Harvard coming to enlighten them about the war. They did not take it well, and the scene got more and more ugly. And luckily for us, two, saved again by African Americans, two black shop stewards came in and basically prevented any damage being done and hustled us out and told us in no uncertain terms that we were not to come back. And, you know, it was a very, very sobering experience.

Jake:
[32:46] Well, to what degree did the negative reactions that your actions got so early on, to what degree did that change how you approached people? I know you were just starting to say that it always took more than one conversation, that it wasn’t lecturing, it was a conversation to win people over. Was some of that approach shaped by those early, very negative, the pushback you got early on?

Michael Ansara:
[33:11] And it also made us more determined. We felt the full weight of the war on our shoulders, that there was no one else that was going to stop it. You know, our political leaders weren’t going to stop it. Newspaper editorial boards all editorialized against us. From 1964 to 1968, it was a pretty lonely path that we were walking down, where we felt over and over again that.

Michael Ansara:
[33:44] Desperate. We’re a small prophetic minority. What can we do to become more? How can we get more people? But also, we’d wake up in the morning thinking, you know, we’ve got to be better. We’ve got to do something because if we’re not better, more people will die. But it also just made us more determined. I mean, we knew that we had to work harder. We had to find more ways. We had to go from creating room for dissent, and then we had to grow to really shattering the unity of the country around the war. The irony is that we did that in the wake of the Tet Offensive in particular. The unity of the country around the war had been totally shattered.

The Shift in Strategy

Michael Ansara:
[34:35] A majority of the country had turned against the war. They may not have loved us, but they were against the war. And it was at that point that we needed to change our tactics and needed to stop being a prophetic minority, stop being a divisive force, but seek to unify the country around a different path. And we weren’t up for it.

Jake:
[35:02] I think a lot of us of sort of this younger generation were conditioned to think that anti-war activity or opposition to the war was driven very much by sort of personal preservation, that people personally didn’t want to be drafted and thus they came into the anti-war movement. How much was that connection between concern about the draft and the movement real and how much of that was sort of ex post facto?

The Role of the Draft

Michael Ansara:
[35:30] So there’s no question that the draft played a role. If you were a young man in 1965, 66, 67, particularly after student deferments were done in, you faced a good chance of being drafted and being sent to Vietnam. And so that weighed on your mind. I don’t think, however, that the draft was the primary motivator. And, you know, one of the things I’ll point to is there were just enormous numbers of women in the anti-war movement. They weren’t going to be drafted. And so, I think the opposition to the war was largely because of the war itself, but it got expanded and made more urgent by the draft. I think some historians write about it as if, had there been no draft, there would have been no anti-war movement. I think that’s completely wrong.

Jake:
[36:23] 1967 and going into 1968 was kind of a tipping point. And you had been away from Boston. And then when you moved back and started to be involved with protests here in Boston again, it sounds like you were no longer the minority. You didn’t have these angry counter-protesters sort of overwhelming these tiny anti-war marches. What do you think had changed in the brief time you were gone from Boston?

Michael Ansara:
[36:49] Well, I was only gone that summer of 67. But what had changed in the country was the combination of the facts of the war and that it was clear that the Johnson administration had been lying about it. The casualties were mounting. The expense was mounting. And we had done our work to first just plant seeds of doubt. And then to really broaden that so that there was a large movement. And, you know, by 67, key black leaders like Martin Luther King had come out against the war.

Michael Ansara:
[37:28] Religious leadership had come out against the war. We had done in 1967 something called Vietnam Summer, modeled on Mississippi Freedom Summer, where we had 700 paid staff and 20,000 volunteers working in communities across the country. Canvassing, knocking on doors, holding community teach-ins, referendum, and spreading the anti-war movement. So that by the end of 1967, the country had serious doubts.

Changes in Boston’s Sentiment

Michael Ansara:
[38:02] I mean, there’s just a huge opposition to the war that was spreading. Again, even if people didn’t love the anti-war movement, they no longer believed that the war was necessary, just, and that we were winning it. And then that was shattered in a profound way by the Tet Offensive in January of 1968, which brought in one of the wildest years. I used to think that the absolute craziest year of my life was 1968.

Michael Ansara:
[38:35] Unfortunately, now I think 2025 is replacing it.

Michael Ansara:
[38:40] But 1968 was a crazy year. It started with the Tet Offensive, and our generals had said that the opposition in Vietnam was on its heels and had been defeated. And then suddenly in every major city in South Vietnam, there was an uprising and there were ferocious battles, even in the American embassy in Saigon itself. In the town of Hue, city of Hue. It went on for weeks and weeks, vicious, bloody, beyond belief. And that inaugurated a completely wild year. Not only did you have what was happening in Vietnam, but you had student uprisings that were of a scale that had not been seen before. The German students marched and were battling with tens of thousands of police. Then the French students went out, and not only did the French students go out through every college, university, and high school, but then there was an actual general strike in France, And, you know, millions of workers joined them to go on strike. There was the Prague Spring where the Czechoslovakian Communist Party decided that they wanted to try socialism with a human face and try a little more democracy. There was the occupation of halls in Columbia and the ferocious police attack on students. And then, of course, there was the assassination of Martin Luther King.

Michael Ansara:
[40:09] Riots across America, National Guard in all the cities, and then the assassination of Bobby Kennedy. And so every day, every week, the unexpected and impossible seemed to happen. Then, of course, there was the Democratic Convention and the police riots at the Democratic Convention. And then Soviet tanks rolled into Prague. Mexican students demonstrated and were shot down. And so, the year went bloody and amazing, month after month, week after week.

The Tumultuous Year of 1968

Jake:
[40:44] It was a busy year for you personally as well. You were protesting your own Harvard commencement in 1968.

Michael Ansara:
[40:52] Yes, it was. I couldn’t get in because I was protesting. They locked us out. But it was just about the most tone deaf thing you could do. So Harvard decided that they would give an honorary degree to the Shah of Iran, the Shah of Shahs. And we were very close with some Iranian students in exile, and they had told us stories of dissident students in Iran being taken into the secret police, the Savak headquarters, and at the highest floor when the interrogation was done, they just threw them out of the window. And so the idea that this modernizing dictator would get an honorary degree in the early summer of 1968 was preposterous. And so we protested and I was locked out of the commencement.

Jake:
[41:44] You managed to get yourself locked out of your own commencement, and then pretty soon thereafter, you make the big move from Harvard Square to Central Square. By big move, I mean a few blocks down Mass Ave. I have a couple of questions about that. First of all, just what was Central Square like in those days? And you paint a few scenes that happened at the old Brookline lunch in Central Square. So if you could tell us a little bit about both what Central Square looked like overall and then what the Brookline lunch was.

Michael Ansara:
[42:16] Central Square was the antithesis to Harvard Square. So Harvard Square was booming youth culture, boutiques, hippie paraphernalia everywhere, music being played, and Central Square was the down-and-out blue-collar center of Cambridge at that point. And it had a lot of empty storefronts and a lot of empty old offices, you know, first-floor offices that had been doing light manufacturing before, and all that was gone. The Brookline Lunch was still a thriving place on Brookline Street, and it had been the haunt of local residents and also a lot of police and firemen liked to eat there. And it became one of our central places because across the street, we took an old office space and turned it into the headquarters of the old mole, our underground newspaper. Let me just paint a bit.

Jake:
[43:17] So, for listeners who don’t have a mental map of Cambridge pulled up, Brookline Street is where now the Middle East is on the corner of Brookline and Mass Ave. So, somewhere on the street behind the Middle East Club was the offices of the Old Mole.

Michael Ansara:
[43:31] The Old Mole. So, it was literally that block. It was the middle of that block behind where the Middle East is now.

Jake:
[43:37] Really? So, they kind of titi the bears or whatever…, T.T. to the Bears doesn’t exist anymore, whatever’s in there now, kind of that spot.

Michael Ansara:
[43:44] That spot.

Jake:
[43:45] That’s fascinating. So what was the old mole?

Michael Ansara:
[43:48] So the old mole was our attempt to create a newspaper that would be the movement’s newspaper. We took seriously the Mencken quote that, you know, the only freedom of the press is for those who own them. And we wanted to have our own newspaper and to communicate what was going on in the world, but also to communicate what all the various pieces of the movement were doing. And up to the women’s movement had burst into prominence then, and there was a strong women’s collective that was at the Old Mole and published early feminist articles. It also became a center for our organizing activity. And high school students would come and we’d help them lay out their own high school newsletters to be against the war. Various student groups, for instance, a group of nursing students came and they

The Old Mole Newspaper

Michael Ansara:
[44:46] would lay out their literature. So, it became a hub for activities. And we would produce about 10,000 newspapers, and we had a network of street sellers who would be on every corner, not just in Cambridge, but also in Boston, selling the old mole. Get your old mole for 25 cents.

Jake:
[45:04] You are obviously at this time deeply political. You’re a political leader by any measure. I was shocked to read that you and it sounds like many people in your cohort decided not to vote in 1968 and to push others not to vote. Can you talk a little bit about why, for somebody who was so politically concerned, that seemed like the best choice at the time? And I know you have some different opinions in hindsight.

Michael Ansara:
[45:36] In 1968, we had a simplistic view, summed up in the following ways. The lesser of two evils is still evil. The system is corrupt. Elections are corrupt. And we won’t participate. The choice was between Humphrey and Nixon. Humphrey, who had been a really astounding liberal leader in the late 40s and 50s, one of the first senators to really take up the cause of civil rights, by 1968 had become a worn out, tired hack. He refused to break decisively with the war and so had sort of this on-again, off-again, tepid position that inspired no one. He was a representative of the status quo, and we would be damned if we would vote for him.

The 1968 Election Perspective

Michael Ansara:
[46:29] In retrospect, I don’t think we were wrong about Humphrey. I think Humphrey was a sad, tired hack. What we were wrong about was the damage that Richard Nixon could do.

Jake:
[46:40] There’s a line, you say, we are wrong in our assessment of whether it matters if a corporate centrist liberal is elected over an insecure, unstable right-wing candidate who doesn’t respect the Constitution. And it sounds like it’s ripped directly from the pages of 2016 or 2024.

Michael Ansara:
[46:59] Sadly. And, you know, I think also, I mean, this goes to the heart of strategy. And strategy is absolutely essential if you’re going to be effective at building movements for political or social change. And we were not strategic. And we couldn’t hold in our minds the twin imperative of the need for massive protests and the need to organize and win at the ballot box. These are not opposed to each other. They are, in fact, quite complementary. And one of the good things about the organizers of today and the organizations of today is that they’re not, by and large, making our mistake. It was a tragedy because the election between Humphrey and Nixon was even closer than the last election in 24.

Michael Ansara:
[47:51] And the voting age was 21, so many of our followers would have been too young. But I was 21. I didn’t register. I didn’t vote. Instead, I organized protests under the banner, vote with your feet, vote in the street. The result is that Nixon squeaked out a win, started, you know, he used the Southern strategy and started the Republican Party down the path of being the party of white grievance and eventually being the party of Donald Trump. Could history have been different? Maybe. Maybe. And could we have made the difference? I think we could have. I mean, again, it’s always tricky when you get into counterfactual musings. But I think we could have. I think a more mature leadership, myself included, could have turned that election, could have made it possible for Humphrey to win. And then I think we would have had a significant ability to pressure Humphrey to move in more progressive ways, to end the war faster. And we would have saved the lives of probably a million to two million Southeast stations, which unfortunately we didn’t do.

The ROTC Controversy

Jake:
[49:08] It sounds like after 1968, at least for a while, you had a lot of local concerns again. And one of them was a largely symbolic fight over the role of the ROTC, the Reserve Officers Training Corps at Harvard. Can you describe what the dispute there was and how you ended up in the middle of it after you had already graduated and left Harvard and, like we said, moved down the block to Central Square?

Michael Ansara:
[49:37] One of our strategies was to seek to ensure that our colleges and universities were not supporting the war in any way. And one of the most obvious ways that the university supported the war was it, had scholarships for the Reserve Officer Training Corps, basically producing officers other than those who went to the military academies. And our demand was that that program should be shut down. There should be no ROTC at Harvard or MIT or Northeastern or any of the other colleges, but that the scholarships should be saved so that the kids who were in those programs got their scholarships.

Michael Ansara:
[50:25] The Harvard SDS chapter had been working very assiduously in a campaign to end ROTC. I was not involved with that because, as you remember, I graduated in 68. Not only did I graduate, but I was so glad to get out of Harvard. And I was preoccupied with the problem that I had felt acutely for years, the division between the families and communities that were paying the highest price for the war, blue-collar and low-income families, and the anti-war movement itself. And so I started a project to, in addition to the Old Mole, we recruited teams of activists to move to blue-collar communities, Lynn, Worcester, Lowell, New Bedford, Fall River, Dorchester and the.

Michael Ansara:
[51:16] Focus on organizing state and community colleges, which at that point were being flooded by returning Vietnam vets, a significant number of whom did not support the war. And so we were organizing those Vietnam vets to oppose the war and then asking them to take us back into their blue-collar communities. And that’s what I was focused on. And when I got a call from my friends at Harvard. Harvard SDS at that point was riven into two factions. One was the self-described Maoist Progressive Labor Party, in which they proclaimed that they were organizing a worker-student alliance. I never noticed any workers in the worker-student alliance, but that was what they proclaimed. And the other group was the New Left Caucus, which were all my old friends.

The Fight Against Judge Troy

Michael Ansara:
[52:09] By the way, The Progressive Labor Party detested me. I was literally an enemy of the people, a misleader, and an abomination.

Jake:
[52:19] There’s a scene you describe in the book where an old, at least acquaintance, if not friend, was passing out flyers, describing you as a CIA plant or agent. Yes.

Michael Ansara:
[52:29] I’m a good friend. Broke my heart. And it was just a kind of craziness that many really good kids fell into. They wanted somehow to make sense of this incredibly complicated, urgent, desperate situation. And they, just the way some people find religion, they found the Maoist Progressive Labor Party. The other group was the New Left Caucus, which were made up of all my friends. And they said, we’re having a big, big meeting, and we really would like you to come. People still look up to you. I said, I don’t want to come.

Michael Ansara:
[53:07] I’m done with Harvard, and they prevailed. And so I came to the meeting. Luckily, I didn’t have to say anything. The Progressive Labor Party people were agitating and working for a vote at that meeting to occupy a building. And the new left caucus people were arguing not against occupying a building, but continuing to build support for it and to continue negotiations with the university. And so they wanted what was the equivalent of a strike vote, give the executive committee the authorization to take a building when and if we need to. And so there was a furious fight and eventually the new left people won. And I went home thinking, okay, all done. Go back to what I was doing. And the next morning, I get a call that the Progressive Labor Party people have seized University Hall, and would I please come? And at that point, the New Left people faced a really difficult choice.

Michael Ansara:
[54:09] Even though they hadn’t been enthusiastic about the timing of taking, occupying University Hall, they knew that if they just left it to the Progressive Labor Party, it would be a disaster. And so they were rounding up people and swelling the ranks of the people in University Hall. And they wanted me in, and I went in and, you know, did what I normally do, except we did one additional thing, which is we closed off the offices of the top deans. And so, University Hall was the center for the deans.

Michael Ansara:
[54:45] We went through their files. It was interesting, by the way. We learned we were originally sending out a grad student was going to go and

The Aftermath of the Vietnam War

Michael Ansara:
[54:52] get a power drill so that we could drill out the locks. They were all locked. And then we found this wonderful thing, which is a metal bookend. You know, one of those simple….

Jake:
[55:00] Just like the L-shaped.

Michael Ansara:
[55:01] Metal book.

Jake:
[55:03] Right.

Michael Ansara:
[55:03] It turned on its side and whacked into the lock sprung them. And so soon we were busily whacking away and opening the files where we found, not unexpectedly, the university said it had no contracts with the CIA, and it did, and they were in the files. The university said it had no ongoing contracts with the Defense Department, and they did. They were in the files. And we also found correspondence between the deans and Pusey, the president of Harvard, talking about how they were lying to the faculty and were going to lie to the faculty. Well, if there’s one thing that the faculty of Harvard can’t stand, it’s to be lied to by the administration. So that was explosive. So we smuggled these documents out and the old mole produced a strike special. I think it was called reading the mail of the ruling class or something like that. And we publicized all these documents that we’d stolen. And I really believe that if the university administration had just let us sit in that building, not much would have happened.

Michael Ansara:
[56:11] Overwhelming majority of students at Harvard absolutely opposed the war, but they didn’t really support seizing the building. Out of the 16,000 university students, probably 1,500 supported being in that building. And so if they just let us stew, but in their infinite wisdom, the Harvard administration had done a study of the Columbia uprising the year before. I don’t know who they paid to do this study, but the conclusion of the study was the Columbia administration had waited too long to send in the police. And so Harvard’s strategy for dealing with the occupation of one of its buildings was that night, call on the police, and early the next morning, send them in. We knew what was going to happen if they came in. We knew it was not going to be pleasant. It was not going to be, okay, we’re gently removing students from university hall.

Michael Ansara:
[57:10] And the police that came in had bitter resentments against us, bitter resentments against Harvard, you know, the elitist students. And so they wailed on us, and then they wailed on everybody else they could find in Harvard Yard. And Harvard Yard’s surrounded by the freshman dorm. So freshmen came out to see this incredible spectacle of police beating young white people. And then that spread, and so other people came. And that spectacle of the police violence just made everybody unified and fed up with the Harvard administration and launched a massive and profoundly effective student strike that shut down the university that involved 10,000, 12,000 students going into Harvard Stadium to vote for our demands, which now included the black students’ demands for an African-American studies department, treat the community better, and ROTC. And, of course, the amazing thing is there’s somewhere out on the Internet, where if you’re actually looking for it, there’s a recording of Hugh Calkins, the spokesperson for the Harvard Corporation.

Michael Ansara:
[58:25] At the end of the strike, announcing the agreement to end the strike, in which he says, basically, yes, we will end ROTC, we will keep the scholarships for kids, yes, we will create an African, I mean, yes, we give in. Because it was Harvard, all the Harvard faculty and all the Harvard students think it was exceptional. It was actually just part of this massive wave all across America, spurred on by the war of young people rising up in revolt. And it was part of a global phenomena, again, sparked over and over again by the American war in Vietnam of young people in revolt across the world.

Jake:
[59:14] Not that long after the Harvard strike winds down or is successful, your draft number comes up, And you have a chance to take that protest into a very closed door sort of protest. And I’ll preface this by saying that my dad always said that he had dodged the draft before he even knew that the Vietnam War existed. He was called in for his draft physical in 64 or 65, before the war really dominated TV every night. And he said that he failed his physical because of an issue that could have been corrected with a very minor surgery. And the board there told him, okay, here’s your paperwork, go have this operation, report back here when it’s done, and you’re drafted. But he didn’t have the surgery, he never reported back, and they never followed up. So, he thought that maybe they had just lost his paperwork, and that’s how he ended up not going off to Vietnam. Can you describe the day when you were called to the Southwest Army?

Michael Ansara:
[1:00:08] Really important context here, which is I had developed a very serious joint illness as a child. And so I knew that there was no way I was going to be drafted. So that’s important context because unlike others who were reporting, I had the safety of knowing I would legitimately fail my physical. The physicals were being done in the South Boston Army Base, which had been set up to be a huge processing center for draftees taking their physicals and processing. Being ready for induction. And I, of course, my draft board was back in Coolidge Corner in Brookline. And so I had to go report there and get on a bus that took us down to the South Boston Army Base. And everybody was despondent, but I brought leaflets. Knowing your rights, how you can file for conscientious objector status, how you can insist on various rights. And we’re ushered off the bus into a long line of young men, and everybody’s miserable, everybody’s unhappy, everybody’s nervous, everybody’s anxious, everybody’s stressed beyond belief. And they start us walking into the army base, and I start passing out my leaflets.

Michael Ansara:
[1:01:35] And a sergeant, Sergeant Brown, African-American, absolutely meticulously dressed, I mean, just meticulous, comes over and says that I can’t do that. And I explained to him that the Constitution allows me to do it and I’m not yet in the army and this is public space and I’m allowed to do it. And he is furious. And so he gets two MPs and says, take him to the front of every line and get him out of here as quickly as you can.

Michael Ansara:
[1:02:08] While everybody else is standing in long, long lines, I’m being whisked to the front of the lines and people are going, well, what are you doing? And I explain, I’m passing out leaflets. Here, take some. Maybe they’ll whisk you to the front of the line, too. So a number of kids start passing out leaflets as well. And that provokes Sergeant Brown to bring down the colonel. And the colonel says, I can’t be passing out leaflets. And I explain to him, I can. And he says, you know, I’m here trying to dodge the draft. And I, again, remembering that I know I’ll fail my physical, I say, no, absolutely not, sir. I am here to serve my country. I am here to take the physical. But you can’t have us lose our right of freedom of speech. It’s enshrined in the Constitution. And then he starts to argue with me and starts to say, you just don’t understand about Vietnam. And we get into a classic argument in which he’s literally, towards the end of it, yelling that if we don’t fight them in Vietnam, we’re going to fight them in the Philippines. We’re going to be fighting them on Beacon Hill, for Christ’s sake. And I’m being calm and he’s yelling and then he looks around and realizes that the whole place has come to a stop, including, I might add.

Michael Ansara:
[1:03:25] Really humorously, if it wasn’t so tragic for these young men, a line of young men with their pants down around their ankles about to bend over the doctors and nurses with their surgical gloves on. Everybody has stopped to look and listen to this argument, at which point the colonel turns to Sergeant Brown and says, get him off my base. And turns to me and says, get out of here, never come back. I think I still have my 1A draft card. The army never got back to me, like your father. Though I think in my case, it was more specific.

Jake:
[1:04:04] More deliberate, maybe.

Michael Ansara:
[1:04:06] And I walked back to, from the South Boston Army base to South Station and hopped on the Red Line with very, very mixed feelings. You know, one of the burdens that we had is we weren’t going, but other people were, other boys were, and we weren’t able to stop them going and stop them dying.

Jake:
[1:04:34] Around this same time it sounds like the center of gravity in your life started to really shift from cambridge to dorchester and you moved close to fields corner in 1969 or 1970 and started to get familiar with your new neighborhood and ronan park in dorchester is worlds away from harvard Square or Coolidge Corner or even Central Square. What sort of impression did your new neighborhood make on you after you made that move?

Michael Ansara:
[1:05:04] I loved it. I came to Ronan Park because our strategy of working at state and community colleges would work. And we’d met a brilliant young man, Seamus Glenn, at the new UMass Boston, who came from Saban Hill in Dorchester, and was saying to me, listen, I know a bunch of people, a bunch of kids who are having a lot of problems with the police, and I think they’d like to talk to you. So, we began working with them and building an organization in Dorchester, and I had a very sort of bifurcated life for the next four or five years. So, on the one hand, I was living in Dorchester, working in Dorchester, and also working with this network of activists and organizers in other blue-collar communities. And then on the other hand, I was continuing to organize large protests and sit-ins against the war. So I was sort of balancing these two things. But I loved Dorchester. When we first started to work there, we were working primarily with young folks.

Michael Ansara:
[1:06:15] And they didn’t want to become their parents. They didn’t want the life that was being offered to them. They were part of this global youth revolt. In their case, it sort of started more with music and drugs than it did with politics, but we were able to get them interested in politics. And those politics included dealing with the police who were determined to chase them off of every corner, chase them out of the park. But then that led us to this interesting situation that I had known nothing about before going to Dorchester.

Michael Ansara:
[1:06:54] Dorchester has a district court in Codman Square. And its chief justice was Jerome Troy, totally venal and corrupt judge, one of the most corrupt in Massachusetts. He had, I didn’t know this at the time, but he had bought his judgeship for $25,000 through Sonny McDonough. And he ruled his court as if he was a monarch. He’d come in every day and he’d go through the various shops in Codman Square, say the bakery, and he would just take whatever he wanted to take. He wouldn’t buy it, he would just take it. And he was known for sentencing people to probation, where the terms of probation was working on one of his houses.

Michael Ansara:
[1:07:43] He was also well known for when women on welfare came before him, demanding that they identify where the father of their children were and swear out a bench warrant for non-support, even if that wasn’t true. And he would say to the welfare women, you either do this or I’m finding you in contempt of court and putting you in the cells. It was also well known that if you were in big trouble, you could work with one of two bail bondsmen and pay cash and you would get found not guilty. And everybody thought of him as all powerful.

Michael Ansara:
[1:08:26] And the kids that we were working with, kids, they were in their early 20s, decided that we should take on Judge Troy.

Michael Ansara:
[1:08:35] And this seemed like craziness to most people in Dorchester. He was so powerful. But we did. And we organized a petition campaign, got 10,000 signatures, created an organization called The People First, TPF, and had a storefront on Meeting House Hill, an old vacant storefront. We had a food co-op in it, and we had large numbers of people dropping by.

Michael Ansara:
[1:09:03] And out of that storefront, we organized the campaign to get rid of Judge Troy. And it turned out that in those days, the only way you could get rid of a judge was to have the legislature impeach him. And there was no way that was going to happen. All the legislators were friends of Jerry Troy. The court system had no way to get rid of him.

Michael Ansara:
[1:09:26] The chief justice wanted to get rid of Jerry Troy, but didn’t know how. And then we discovered, working with the Boston legal aid lawyers, that we had another route, which is to get him disbarred, and that if we could get him disbarred, we could get him off the bench. And so that’s what we did. And it culminated in a trial in front of the Bar Association with big-time lawyers slugging it out and us winning and Judge Troy being disbarred and off the bench. And it was actually a brilliant campaign. The problem was we still had so much of the baggage of our student movement days that we were still of the, we have no leaders here. We have no structure. We hadn’t figured out how to build lasting organizations. So even though we beat Troy and did good things, the organization that we started was unsustainable and slowly crumpled.

Jake:
[1:10:39] In the book, you use a phrase, the long 60s. And for you, it seems like the 60s, in a way, lasted into the early 80s.

The End of the Vietnam War

Jake:
[1:10:48] But there has to be, at least somewhat, a demarcation with the actual end of the Vietnam War. After having invested so much of yourself, your energy, your activism, your life into opposing the war, how did you find out that the war was ending?

Michael Ansara:
[1:11:03] You know, it was 1975. I continued to do anti-war work even while I was doing the community organizing. Looking back, after 10 years of effort, it really wasn’t until the eighth year that I seriously engaged the simple question, how does the war actually end? Not what are our demands, but how does it end? And we ended up on the mundane task of getting Congress to cut off funding for it. And that’s what actually precipitated the end of the war. And so it came, and I was like everybody else. I was watching it on television, the helicopters flying from the roof of the embassy, you know, people holding on, and then them pushing the helicopters off of the aircraft carriers because there wasn’t room. I felt overwhelming sadness, just grief, such waste for nothing, for absolutely nothing. Vietnam, the war in Vietnam, took such a heavy toll, I mean, first and foremost, on the Vietnamese, the Cambodians, and Laotians. Over three million dead, countless maimed, homeless people.

Reflections on the 60s

Michael Ansara:
[1:12:14] But it also took a huge toll on this country. It killed any hope of a new left. By, you know, the late 60s, so much of the most active new left folks had decided that the country was irredeemable and spun into craziness. The progressive labor party Maoists or the weathermen who are just so bizarre, SDS flew apart, shattered the Democratic coalition, which we’re still seeing in the years of Trump. So much of the time, I felt like we had not done enough. We had not ended it soon enough.

Jake:
[1:12:53] I think a lot of people remember the 60s. A lot of people who were alive through the 60s, unlike me, remember the 60s through the lens of like a love-in in Golden Gate Park. And it sounds like your experience of the 60s was pretty different from that. When you look back with 50 years or more of hindsight, do you miss it?

Michael Ansara:
[1:13:18] Yes and no. What I miss is that overwhelming sense of being part of something much larger than myself. And the real jolt of feeling like I was engaged in at least trying to make history. Those are very powerful things, and I do miss them. But there’s a lot I don’t miss. I don’t miss waking up every morning feeling like, if I’m not good enough, more people will die. I certainly don’t miss being stopped by Detective Scalise or other detectives in Boston, Scalise in Cambridge, being thrown up against the wall and having a gun put to my head and him saying, one of these nights, I’m going to blow your brains out. I don’t miss that, and I don’t miss that sense of desperate inadequacy.

Jake:
[1:14:21] Did it feel optimistic? I ask that because I’ve been to a lot of protests in the past year and in the past decade since Donald Trump started to dominate our political landscape. And it usually feels pointless because we know the person they’re aimed at doesn’t have a sense of shame, at least not around this, it seems like. If you were protesting LBJ or Nixon, was there a sense of optimism? Or in the moment, did you have the sense that you could impact policy?

Optimism and Activism Today

Michael Ansara:
[1:14:53] In the civil rights work that I did, there was incredible optimism and hope. And then in the first years of the anti-war movement, I would say there was optimism and hope. But in the later years, no. In the later years, there was desperation and anger and bitterness. I thought today’s demonstrations actually were in many ways more hopeful. I thought the No Kings demonstration this past spring, I loved the fact that it was almost joyful and certainly patriotic. And festooned with American flags. Symbols matter, and I wish we had marched under American flags only. And I think the point of demonstrations today, like demonstrations in the past, are not really aimed at Trump. He doesn’t care about popular opinion. He doesn’t care about laws. They’re aimed at other Americans. It’s really important because we need to understand that a majority of Americans are, in fact, opposed to what Trump is doing. We need to build an opposition that is powerful. What I worry about today is not the demonstrations. We need those. We need to keep them up. We need to keep them larger. It is the fact that most of what’s happening is mobilizing, not organizing.

Michael Ansara:
[1:16:18] And what we need to build political power is to build deeply entrenched organizations that include tens of millions of Americans in opposition to this threat to our democracy. That’s the only way that things get sustained is if people are in groups, if people are in teams, if people are organized. And we can’t know what Trump is going to do. There’s simply no way. We know that he will try to put his thumb on the scale in the 26 elections, midterms? We know that, but what’s happening with redistricting? Will he, National Guard into urban centers of blue voting? And will they refuse to seat the duly elected? We can’t know. All we can know is that we’re in for another three and a half year struggle in which we have to build political power and that we have to fight in every institution. So I’ve been active helping something called Crimson Courage, which is an alumni organization of Harvard alums. It took some of us a little practice before the mirror to be able to say, we went to Alumni Day and Commencement Day to say, we’re here to support the courageous stand of the Harvard administration. We had to sort of work on that a little bit. But, you know, it’s important.

Jake:
[1:17:43] Suppress the rising gorge when those words came out.

Michael Ansara:
[1:17:45] But it’s critical that we support Harvard and other higher education institutions. It’s critical that people who are in science and research are holding town halls and going to public libraries and explaining what is being hurt and organizing their fellow workers. It’s critical that veterans are organizing each other to deal with the cuts in VA, healthcare, on and on. And we have to fight across all of these institutions and all aspects. But as we fight, we have to build organization.

The Future of Resistance Movements

Michael Ansara:
[1:18:21] And that starts in small ways, and it grows. So it starts with people building a team of five people. And so when they go to the next No Kings Day on October 18th, they bring five more. And so it’s now 10 instead of five. So I think things are desperate. I think things are urgent. But I think we can get through it, but we can only get through it if we organize and build political power to defend democracy.

Jake:
[1:18:55] When I go to No Kings or when I stood out in front of my local Tesla dealership or whatever the form of demonstration or protest today, I don’t see a lot of young people. In so much of your book, and it sounds like all the social movements of the 60s, youth was stressed as such a primary factor in making those groups work. But when I go to a protest today, I see a lot of people who are sort of my age, Gen X or older millennials, they come with their little kids. I see a lot of folks who are your age or my parents’ age who have done all this before a generation ago, but I don’t see Gen Z. What does it mean for the future of resistance movements if we’ve lost the young?

Michael Ansara:
[1:19:39] We haven’t. We haven’t. Let’s just do a comparison. So when I went to Harvard, the economy was booming. I didn’t come out of Harvard with student debt. I had a job. I had scholarship. I came out with maybe $2,500 worth of debt, nothing. I knew I could get an apartment, and I didn’t need four or five roommates to get an apartment. And I knew eventually that I would be able to buy a house.

Michael Ansara:
[1:20:10] And my peers didn’t worry about jobs. Now, I didn’t worry about jobs because I wanted to be a full-time organizer. But my peers, the only worry they had was not would they get a job, but would they get a meaningful job? And they knew they could get a job that would support them and the family. So young people today face the opposite. They’re crushing student debt. The economy is totally uneven. They can’t afford even an apartment, let alone buying a house. And they’ve lived through the Great Recession of 2008. And they’ve lived through Trump, and they’ve lived through the gerontocracy of the Democratic Party, and they’re desperate for an opportunity that seems meaningful. Mamdami in New York. Great candidate, great message, affordability, good social media, but here’s what people don’t talk about. 50,000 young volunteers, 50,000, who knocked on more than 1.2 million doors and turned the electorate in New York for the first time. In the history of New York’s elections, They’ve never had an electorate the way they did in this primary, where 50% of the electorate was under 45.

Michael Ansara:
[1:21:36] Never happened before. And it happened because of those young people. Now, again, great candidate, great message, but organizing. I don’t want to tell young people what to do. And I imagine that they will find a way to do their activism that is different from the way that I did mine. But I am absolutely confident that over the next couple of years, you’re going to see young people organizing and becoming activists. Young people are going to fight for their future. I’m convinced of it. And when they fight for their future, they’re fighting for the country’s future. And every indication I have, every poll that I’ve looked at says, yes, there is a certain segment of unhappy, miserable young men who have gone to the right. But overwhelmingly, those under 30 have very progressive views. So one of the untold stories of the 24 election is that 17 million people who voted for Biden in 2020 didn’t cast a ballot in 24. Just didn’t cast a ballot. There’s been a recent set of polls of those folks. They skew young. They’re under 40.

Michael Ansara:
[1:22:52] They were intentional. They saw Harris and Biden as defenders of a flawed status quo, and they wanted change, but they couldn’t bring themselves to vote for Trump. They knew that he was not the change they wanted. So those folks will get into this fight, particularly if we see a new generation of leaders who are young and speak to the young and to their concerns. And I have a great deal of faith that the young people will actually save the country.

Conclusion and Farewell

Jake:
[1:23:24] Well, I am more than happy to go out on an optimistic note. It feels like there aren’t always a lot of reasons for optimism these days, so I’ll take it where I can get it. The book, dear listener, is The Hard Work of Hope, a memoir. And Michael Ansara, I just want to say thank you so much for being so generous with your time. We will have an affiliate link to purchase the book in the show notes this week. But if our listeners want to find out more about you and your work, or if they want to find out about upcoming book events or talks you might be giving, where should they look to find those things?

Michael Ansara:
[1:23:56] I’ve got a website. It’s easy to remember, michaelandsarah.org. And it’s got all the upcoming events. It’s got reviews. It’s got the ability to buy the book directly from there. Thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure talking with you, and I’ve really enjoyed it.

Jake:
[1:24:16] Absolutely. Thank you.

Jake intro-outro:
[1:24:19] To learn more about Michael Ansara and his book, The Hard Work of Hope, check out this week’s show notes at hubhistory.com slash 336.

Jake intro-outro:
[1:24:29] We’ll have a link to michaelandsarah.com, where you can learn more about Michael and keep up with all his upcoming talks and events, including the next one that’s happening on Wednesday, the 24th of September at Broadside Books in Northampton. I’ll also have a link to buy the book, The Hard Work of Hope, from bookshop.org. Where your purchase supports authors, independent bookstores, and I’ll get a small cut if you use my link. If you’d like to get in touch with me, you can email podcast at hubhistory.com. You can find my profiles on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram by searching for Hub History, and you can find me on Mastodon by searching for at hubhistory at better dot Boston. Lately, the only place where I’m actively engaging with social media is Blue Sky, and over there, just search for hubhistory.com. If you’ve managed to unplug from the toxic social media machine, just go to hubhistory.com and click on the Contact Us link. While you’re on the site, hit the Subscribe link and be sure that you never miss an episode. If you subscribe on Apple Podcasts, please consider writing us a brief review. If you do, drop me a line and I’ll send you a Hub History sticker as a token of appreciation. That’s all for now. Stay safe out there, listeners.