Elizabeth Warren: Having the Courage to Strive for Big Changes

Kevin Baker produced an extremely timely essay titled On Courage for the latest issue of Harper’s Magazine.  He expressed dismay at the process by which Democratic candidates for president were being evaluated in the so-called “debate” format.  It provided no time for actual debate, gave irrelevant candidates the opportunity to throw grenades at the front runners hoping to advance their own forlorn prospects to the detriment of the party and its eventual candidate.  Even those providing the questions seemed to be auditioning for some future gig.  Given all that, Baker was most disturbed that there was no process by which large, long-term issues could be discussed.

“Conspicuous by its absence is any sense of a bigger picture. How are we to remove the influence of money from a system in which members of Congress now routinely spend four or five hours a day making fund-­raising calls? Do we really need to maintain some eight hundred military bases, in eighty countries around the world? Never mind the costs and terms of this or that particular health-care plan; how is it that America doesn’t have a universal system of affordable care, as every other country in the developed world established decades ago?”

“Off the stage, the national media has been nearly as bad, mostly rushing to get the panicked reaction from Wall Street to all the frightening things Democrats are saying.”

Senator Warren held most interest for Baker because she seemed to be the one who actually struck fear in the high and the mighty.

“Billionaire Leon Cooperman—previously best known for his pompous 2011 open letter accusing President Obama of promoting ‘class warfare,’ and for shelling out nearly $5 million to settle an insider-trading suit from the S.E.C.—broke into tears on CNBC while contemplating Senator Elizabeth Warren’s plans for regulating Wall Street. ‘This is the fucking American dream she is shitting on,’ he later told Politico.”

“Steve Rattner, the financial adviser and New York Times opinion writer, agreed with Cooperman that ‘a Warren presidency is a terrifying prospect,’ to be entertained only ‘if you want to live in France.’ Rattner—a ‘lifelong Democrat’ who has spent the past forty years scooping up a great fortune while dancing merrily back and forth between major media outlets, the Street, and the White House (and, hey, ­whaddaya know, having to pay out millions to the S.E.C. for his own scandal, which involved kickbacks in exchange for gaining control over investing public pension funds)—­warned:

Left to her own devices, [Warren] would extend the reach and weight of the federal government far further into the economy than anything even President Franklin Roo­sevelt imagined.”

The economy, and the nation as a whole, worked rather well for decades after Roosevelt’s imagination was turned into action, at least until Republicans, assisted by weak-minded, and weak-willed Democrats set out to undo much of what had been accomplished.  So, being accused of having Rooseveltian ambitions and policy proposals should be a good thing for a Democratic candidate.  Instead, Warren is under constant attack from the financial high rollers who feel threatened, and the party mainstream who believe she has moved “too far to the left.”  How then does the Democratic Party elite believe one should counter a far, far right Republican Party—by moving right with them?

“Trying for a closer, saner look at the candidate who seems to frighten Big Money the most, I went to hear Warren speak at her September rally in New York’s Washington Square Park.”

Warren’s appearance was part of a series of visits to sites that provided landmarks in the nation’s struggle for economic justice.  The one Baker attended was focused on the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire.

“The Triangle fire killed 146 people—­almost all of them women or girls, many of them teenagers—in fewer than twenty minutes. They died when a blaze broke out in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, located on the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors of what was then the Asch Building, in Greenwich Village. They died because the factory’s owners had failed to provide any firefighting equipment. They died because most of the doors were locked at the Triangle, so that their handbags could be inspected before they left, lest they walk off with a few pennies’ worth of cloth. They died after rushing out to a fire escape that quickly collapsed beneath them. They died falling through a glass roof, impaled on an iron fence, tumbling down an empty elevator shaft. They died plunging through the firemen’s nets—and even through the sidewalk.”

“’The tragic story of the Triangle factory fire is a story about power,’ Warren told the thousands jammed into the park that night. ‘A story of what happens when the rich and the powerful take control of government and use it to increase their own profits while they stick it to working people’.”

Warren invoked the name of Frances Perkins, best known as labor secretary under Franklin Roosevelt, as a “persistent” woman who wanted, as Warren did, to make big things happen.  Baker provides this perspective.

“Perkins was born in 1880 to an old but un­moneyed New En­gland family. After graduating from Mount Holyoke, she set out into the world—living and working in some of the harshest slums in America, becoming a friend, protégé, and student of reformers ranging from Florence Kelley to Jane Addams, Upton Sinclair to Teddy Roosevelt.”

“She was visiting a friend in the Village when the Triangle fire broke out, and she rushed to the site in time to see the women plunging to their deaths.”

“’One by one, the people would fall off,’ she later recalled. ‘They had gone to the window for air, and they jumped. It’s that awful choice people talk of—what kind of choice to make?’”

“It was, she later said, ‘the day the New Deal began’—mostly because it was the day that Perkins decided to throw herself fully into what used to be called ‘practical politics.’ In New York, she brought change by allying herself with the new emerging leaders of the corrupt old machine, men such as Al Smith, Robert F. Wagner, and ‘Big Tim’ Sullivan.”

“Franklin Roosevelt named her New York State’s first industrial commissioner, then asked her to come to Washington as his labor secretary. Perkins said she would do it if she could do big things—much like Warren’s repeated calls for ‘big, structural change’.”

Perkins would be too far left for that era, but, nevertheless…

“In Washington, Perkins charted a course for the New Deal. She initiated, wrote, and lobbied for legislation that abolished child labor; guaranteed workers the right to join a union; and established a minimum wage, the forty-hour work­week, overtime laws, workers’ compensation, and aid to families with dependent children. She also wrote most of the Social Security Act, transforming life for the aged and disabled in America to this day.”

“She did some of her most courageous work in the field of human rights. During the Depression, she ceased federal cooperation with the Mexican Repatriation, in which state and local authorities deported hundreds of thousands of workers to Mexico, many of them U.S. citizens. She refused to deport Harry Bridges, the radical West Coast labor leader accused of being a Communist. She declined to intervene against striking workers—as the federal government so often had before—which allowed for major labor victories on the San Francisco waterfront and at the General Motors plant in Flint, Michigan. And almost alone in Washington, she recognized the threat that Adolf Hitler posed when he first came to ­power; she won a years-­long struggle with the State Department to let refugees stay in the United States, saving the lives of at least twelve thousand Jewish Germans and tens of thousands of other Europeans desperate for sanctuary.”

“For her efforts, Perkins’s enemies tried to impeach her. They floated a smear that she was really a secret Jewish Soviet agent named Matilda Watski—a charge Perkins was loath to deny, lest she appear anti-Semitic. ‘If I were a Jewess I would make no secret of it,’ she finally said in a public statement. ‘On the contrary, I would be proud to acknowledge it’.”

Baker was impressed by Warren’s performance that night, and by the moment it created.

“By the end of Warren’s speech there was a sense of excitement in the air, it seemed to me, at being connected to such a woman as Frances Perkins, and to a time when Americans did big, good things.”

Baker does not endorse Warren as the best candidate or his favorite candidate, but he does endorse her attitude.

“But I do think that the senator’s interest in connecting to the worthy struggles of the past…tells us where her heart lies, what her core values and principles are. I would also say that, whichever candidate you choose, choose her or him on the basis of the extent to which you can discern that core. Not on the fears of Steve Ratt­ner, or the tears and curses of Leon Cooperman, or anybody else who tells you the sky can still fall in a country that elected Donald Trump president.”

I, also, am not yet prepared to vote for Warren as the presidential candidate.  But, when your opponents treat every election as an existential threat to their hold on power, and never feel constrained by law, ethics, justice, or tradition—any means is justified by the end—one should look long and carefully at the candidate who has the courage to wave the biggest club in the face of the enemy.  And that is what Elizabeth Warren is doing.  May the force be with her!