Civic Engagement

Are the stakes high enough yet?

I subbed for my favorite AP U.S. History teacher a couple of weeks ago, before the new administration was sworn in. The prompt for the students was “To what extent did the U.S. return to “normalcy” in the 1920s” referring to the campaign speeches of Presidential candidate, Warren G. Harding, in which he called for a return to pre-war deregulation, civic engagement, and isolationism. I knew it was prophetic, but even Harding would have shuddered at the devastation the current administration is wreaking on regulation, the social safety net, and U.S. foreign relations.

In that pre-inauguration class, we talked about the decade leading up to the 1920 election. Obviously, WWI dominated the public consciousness from 1914-1918, with the Spanish Flu outbreak even more deadly in its wake. The soldiers who did return from the war came back to jobs filled by immigrants and Black citizens, which further inflamed the racial tensions that had been building to explosive levels out of the Jim Crow laws of the post-Civil War era, and culminated in the Race Riots in Chicago during the Red Summer of 1919. Parallels to our recent history of COVID, Black Lives Matter protests, and the hatred focused toward immigrants are obvious and clear.

Warren Harding’s return to normalcy campaign probably sounded good to people exhausted by war, sickness, death, and unrest. Isolationism suited the families who had lost loved ones to the war, and now that the government contracts of the war machine were done, deregulation might help get business back up and running. Harding’s call for civic engagement is an interesting one though, with civic engagement defined as Individuals and communities working alone or together to protect public values and promote the quality of the community, because even by that definition, civic engagement in 1919 was high: women were marching for the 19^th Amendment to the Constitution, which passed in 1920, making the Harding election the first presidential election in which U.S. women were allowed to vote, and in which, presumably, they voted for him.

But what, really, did Harding mean by ‘civic engagement?’ It certainly wasn’t protest marches and rallies, especially the ones run by and for women, whose traditional roles in our society filled all the vacancies left behind by capitalism.

Harding and his cronies (his cabinet members were actually the worst example of cronyism, and their ineptitude is one of the few things Harding was famous for) wanted all those women who had stepped into job vacancies left by soldiers, and taken to the streets to protest for their rights to go back home, raise children, take care of their parents, manage their households, and do all the unpaid jobs that made society as they knew it possible.

But that society had been fundamentally changed by war, by women in the workplace, by cheap cars and mortgages, and by the very isolationism that Harding was trying to promote which contributed to the stock market crash and the Great Depression. The Middletown Studies - an anthropological look at American society in the 1920s - found that at least 70 percent of the population of any town or small city belonged to the working class, but because labor unions had been seen as anti-capitalist and forced out, unemployment was considered an individual problem, not a systemic one to be addressed by the community. Meanwhile, the city’s business class was its most powerful class, the more skilled legal minds tended to work in the private sector rather than the public one, and voter turnout, even with the new influx of women, was down. Homelessness was considered a problem for the Salvation Army or the churches rather than the city, new technologies like radio kept families entertained at home rather than at community events, and while segregation still existed, the largest divide among people was class rather than race.

And now, 100 years later, we’ve come full circle, except that this president and his cronies aren’t just drinking and gambling upstairs at the White House while they set things in motion for another Great Depression. They’re systematically shredding the safety net of government. The 14^th Amendment, Equal rights, and even human rights are being illegally attacked with immoral and reprehensible executive orders designed to dehumanize and terrorize U.S. citizens. An unelected billionaire crony and his hackers have broken into our Treasury payment systems, SBA Loans, and Federal Student Aid, and nearly 1600 January 6^th insurrectionists were given clemency and released back into the wild. Every day brings a fresh wave of horrors, tariffs, threats, and dangers, and I can barely lift my head from my desk, much less look out at the view. In this climate of engineered fear and uncertainty, of layoffs and illegal orders, it’s hard to imagine four more weeks, much less four more years of such dangerous chaos.

And yet, inside all the uncertainty, the doom-scrolling, the sheer exhaustion, there’s never been a time we needed civic engagement more than now. Community is how we’ll stand up, it’s how we’ll fight, and it’s how we’ll recharge. Community – acknowledging the value of each and every one of us – is why we’ll resist, why we’ll demand, and why we’ll engage.

Our challenge, should we choose to accept it, each other, and us, is to civically engage. Our challenge is to stand together, to hold hands, and not let go of even one person whose rights are being stripped away. It’s not us and them, it’s us and us and us. It’s seniors and their social security checks, it’s students and their financial aid, it’s trans kids and their healthcare, it’s parents and their rights, doctors and their oaths, hospitals and their obligations, immigrants and their birthright, the T and the QIA and the LGB. It’s librarians and their readers, Educators and their students, our country and the world. It’s time to stand together and engage like our freedom depends on it.