Skip to content

We Own the Future

Metadata

  • Author: Kate Aronoff
  • ASIN: B086CG9XTF
  • ISBN: 1620975211
  • Reference: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B086CG9XTF
  • Kindle link

Highlights

Organizers built grassroots organizations that pushed for reforms such as women’s equality, civil rights, workers’ rights, environmental justice, and peace. Politicians used election campaigns to educate the public and, if they won, push for changes that translated radical ideas into legislation. Artists and thinkers—novelists, painters, poets, theologians, journalists, actors, playwrights, academics, and singers—used their talents to inspire people to dream, hope, and struggle for social justice, often under difficult circumstances. — location: 264 ^ref-6375

Bellamy intended the line “One nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all” to express a more collective and egalitarian vision of America. — location: 368 ^ref-16923

“America the Beautiful” were written in 1893 by Katharine Lee Bates, — location: 370 ^ref-63131

To his alarm, Debs learned that capital was not interested in bargaining and compromise. — location: 384 ^ref-59779

described socialism as the fulfillment of shared American ideals — location: 397 ^ref-20022

As the leader of the Socialist Party, he challenged his members and white unionists alike to shed their racist prejudices, in part because capitalists would be able to pit black and white workers against each other, weakening both. — location: 407 ^ref-4084

That year, about twelve hundred Socialist Party members held public office in 340 cities, including the mayors of Milwaukee, Buffalo, and Minneapolis. — location: 411 ^ref-8946

while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” — location: 419 ^ref-17003

In Milwaukee, where Socialists led the city government for several decades, this attention to good management and infrastructure earned them the label “sewer socialists.” — location: 441 ^ref-7485

Milwaukee voters kept electing Socialist mayors, with one brief interruption, until 1960. — location: 451 ^ref-23560

He introduced the first bill in Congress to provide old-age pensions—an idea that was eventually adopted in 1935 when President Franklin Roosevelt created Social Security. — location: 461 ^ref-8258

London sponsored bills that had no chance to pass but later became pillars of the New Deal: — location: 465 ^ref-41532

FDR’s progressive advisers, including his wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Harry Hopkins, who ran the New Deal’s jobs programs, urged the president to endorse Sinclair, but his more conservative aides feared that Sinclair was too radical and would hurt the Democrats’ — location: 527 ^ref-2235

The combination of the Red Scare and postwar prosperity limited socialism’s appeal. — location: 578 ^ref-21523

The Power Elite, an indictment of America’s corporate class), — location: 641 ^ref-32530

Thomas, the lifelong pacifist and Socialist, as stalwart a foe of the Vietnam folly as anyone, raised the moral stakes by proclaiming, “I don’t like the sight of young people burning the flag of my country, the country I love. A symbol? If they want an appropriate symbol, they should be washing the flag, not burning it.” — location: 650 ^ref-29939

Harrington’s stint as a government adviser lasted about a month. — location: 692 ^ref-35530

“You must recognize that the social vision to which you are committing yourself will never be fulfilled in your lifetime.” In the meantime, though, socialists, radicals, progressives, and liberals had to fight today for what he called the “left wing of the possible.” — location: 695 ^ref-47107

Unmasking the Hidden Power of Cities, — location: 794 ^ref-45782

America’s political economy is one of racial capitalism, not simply capitalism. — location: 854 ^ref-49488

issues of race are the “miner’s canary,” warning of conditions in American democracy and the economy that pose a threat to us all. — location: 868 ^ref-19821

Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an executive order banning racial discrimination in defense plants. He took that step only after socialist A. Philip Randolph, aided by his young protégé Bayard Rustin, threatened to organize a mass march on Washington of one hundred thousand African Americans. — location: 910 ^ref-13560

A progressive economic agenda must explicitly acknowledge the inextricable link between our criminal justice system and economic inequality. — location: 1022 ^ref-54711

without a strong labor movement there cannot be a strong democracy. — location: 1067 ^ref-19243

when hiring and promotions are more rules-based, as in unionized and public sectors, rather than subject to personal discretion, legal protections can blunt the role of institutional or individual racial and gender bias. — location: 1071 ^ref-42249