Book Time #20: Rage
Days of Rage: America's Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence, Bryan Burrough
The Strike That Changed New York: Blacks, Whites and the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Crisis, Jerald Podair
The refrain “America has never been more divided than it is today” has been repeated so many times you could be forgiven for taking it as fact. Perhaps it is. But these two books, and many others about the 1960s and 70s besides, present something of a counterpoint.
It wasn’t terribly long ago domestic terror organizations were routinely bombing Manhattan office buildings, Berkeley courthouses, and hijacking commercial airliners. “It was every day. Buildings getting bombed, policemen getting killed,” a former FBI agent says in Days of Rage. “It was commonplace."
It also wasn’t so long ago New York City’s schools shut down for weeks because one school district in southern Brooklyn was seized by neighborhood activists, sparking a citywide referendum on race. The supporters of the renegade district thought they were waging a righteous fight against the white power structure. To the teachers union and its supporters of ethnic whites, the renegade district was nothing more than a bunch of radical thugs. There was violence, apocalyptic rhetoric, discussion of forthcoming race war.
Days of Rage is the more approachable narrative nonfiction work, and it’s a fine work at that. The Strike That Changed New York is another puzzle piece in the grand jigsaw that helps explain how we got to this time and this place.
“Virtually every city in the nation had its own version of Ocean Hill-Brownsville during these years,” Podair said, referring to the Brooklyn district with the renegade school board, “a moment when blacks and whites realized, whether in the course of a busing crisis, an outbreak of urban unrest, a police brutality dispute, or a racially freighted electoral contest, that they lived in different worlds.” The closer one looks at those individual conflicts, the less it appears they were ever resolved.
Our divide is no longer strictly along racial lines. But the divides persist. There’s a great deal that has shocked and surprised me over the last decade, but that Americans live in different worlds and continue to fight over the nature of reality is not one of them.
I have no desire to reject any fears you may have that we are living in scary times. But I read all these history books—and write all these newsletters—to remind myself that most times are scary. So we will do what generations have done before us. We will live with this fear, and with each other, the best we can.
Links to My Work
I have received some requests to use this newsletter to link to my journalism work, so I will start doing that from time to time. Here are some highlights from recent months:
How Uber and Lyft Used a Loophole to Deny NYC Drivers Millions in Pay
The Commercial Real Estate Crash Is Battering Even the Safest Bonds
Is NYC's Congestion Pricing Working? Fewer Private Cars Are On the Road (For Now)
I used gift links so hopefully you can circumvent the paywall, but I don’t know if there’s a limit to how many people can click on them.
Happy reading. See you next month.