How Social Movements (Sometimes) Matter

David S. Meyer

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780745696881
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política

People protest to try to change the world, because they think they can help change the world, and sometimes they do. But not by themselves, and generally not just how and when they want.

This incisive book explains how groups of ordinary individuals can affect the world, what makes it possible when it works, and why it sometimes doesn't go to plan. Digging into previous scholarship on social movements, David S. Meyer looks at the origins of social movements, how they contrast with revolutionary campaigns, and assesses the periodic influence of activists on politics, policy, culture, and the way people live their lives. He concludes by stressing the narratives about political change that activists construct and the power that lies in these stories.

With sharp insight and a wealth of intriguing cases, this book offers a fuller understanding of the politics and potential payoffs of protest politics.?

CHAPTER 1
Why Movements Emerge and How They Work

Contemporary visitors to Boston can tour the Boston Tea Party Ships and Museum, and follow a guided tour of “the event that started a Revolution”¹ through a museum of the revolution, educated and entertained by actors who recreate heroic figures from America’s War of Independence. The tour ends with visitors mounting the deck of a replica of a colonial-era ship, throwing crates of tea over the side. Because the tour is pedagogical, rather than political, the crates, secured by ropes, don’t quite reach the waters of Boston Harbor. The boxes can be quickly retrieved so that the next visitor can enjoy the revolutionary experience.

The event holds an iconic place in American history. In the winter of 1773, colonists opposed to a selectively administered tax on tea – and British rule more generally – assembled by the harbor to stage a political protest. In the midst of his rally speech, rebel organizer Sam Adams signaled his supporters to act. Perhaps a hundred men who came prepared, costumed as Indians, screamed as they boarded the ships and began to throw tea over the side; they were joined by another hundred or so volunteers who had come to watch, but were inspired by the moment. More than 1,000 others watched, cheering the protesters on. Even in the drama of the moment, protesters were careful not to hurt anyone, nor to damage the ships (Griswold 1972).

The Boston Tea Party affected more than the next morning’s breakfast. Outraged and threatened, local police arrested and punished a few of the vandals they could find. And in London, Parliament instituted a series of “Coercive Acts,” intended to punish the colonists, particularly in Massachusetts. Among other insults, Parliament shut down the Boston Harbor, until the colony could pay for the tea in the sea, imposed direct British rule on the colony, and provided for the quartering of British soldiers in Massachusetts. Patriots called the response “The Intolerable Acts.”

In the short run, the Tea Party looked like a bad idea. Colonists had long opposed taxes on tea, and had found a way around them, buying untaxed smuggled tea, some of it shipped by John Hancock, who was already a major political figure in Massachusetts. The tea that ended up in the harbor, which was to be sold by the East India Company, would actually have been sold at discount, even cheaper than the smuggled tea. The tax break offered by the Crown represented Britain’s attempt to boost the company’s failing fortunes. The protest, which destroyed their goods, didn’t help. Meanwhile, tea smugglers, whose businesses were threatened by the cheaper official tea, were among those supporting the Tea Party.

Over a slightly extended time frame, however, the Tea Party further polarized politics in the colonies, increasing pressure on people to take sides. Opposition to the Intolerable Acts created additional protests over the next year, and resistance led to the first Continental Congress, held in Philadelphia the following year. That Congress petitioned King George III to end the Intolerable Acts, declared a boycott of British goods, and scheduled a second Constitutional Congress – just in case the Crown didn’t respond to the petition. It didn’t. Resistance grew in the colonies, and armed conflict between the British military erupted in the Battles of Lexington and Concord in the Spring of 1775. Shortly thereafter, the second Constitutional Congress convened, and that Congress eventually endorsed the Declaration of Independence and began to muster an armed resistance. Meanwhile, Thomas Paine (2019) published Common Sense in 1776, a series of pamphlets codifying and justifying the case for an independence movement. In this frame, the Tea Party was critical in setting into motion the events that culminated in American independence (Maier 1972).

So, we can tell a relatively coherent story in which the Tea Party was a catalyst for all that followed, including increased repression and provocation from the British, intensified organizing among the colonists both politically and militarily, and the cultivation of a liberal democratic ideology that supported an independence movement. But history didn’t begin on that December night in Boston Harbor. The circumstances that give rise to dramatic protest events, and to social movements more generally, also contribute to the broader process of social change.

We might start by acknowledging that European colonization of the United States began more than 150 years before the Boston Tea Party, and the immigrants were mostly people who were unhappy with their lives under British rule. Generations grew up in America, with British governance only a distant force in the background most of the time. The colonists built local governments and businesses, and conducted their own commerce and conflicts with each other and with the Indigenous people already occupying the continent.

The conflicts that led to the Tea Party can be traced back nearly a decade before that dramatic confrontation. In seeking to finance both current wars and debt from previous wars, King George and Parliament sought to extract as much value from their colonies as possible, imposing taxes on virtually anything that might generate revenue, starting with sugar, then adding glass, lead, paints, and paper. Britain imposed taxes on printed materials and imports generally. It also sought to exercise greater control over governance in the colonies, and maintained a large military presence in the New World. Parliament demanded that the colonists build barracks for the British soldiers and, failing that, to house them in stables, inns, and ale houses and, ultimately, in any vacant space. Parliament also held the colonists responsible for providing the funds to feed and support the British troops.

An organized resistance preceded the Tea Party. Virtually every provocation from Parliament generated a response. Political activists like Samuel Adams produced pamphlets and letters arguing that Parliament could not impose taxes on the colonies without their input. The arguments and letters circulated around the colonies, deepening the ties among the colonists, while building sympathy for the cause of independence. Britain responded with increased force; its efforts to squeeze the colonies all met with resistance, leading to the revocation of some laws, but also intensified conflict. In 1770, protest against the quartering of troops in Boston led to armed confrontation in the streets. In response to the colonists’ harassment of soldiers, British soldiers opened fire on a crowd, resulting in the death of five colonists. There was a level of conflict, often violent and disruptive, that preceded and followed the more theatrical Tea Party, but the better choreographed event has an iconic place in narratives of American history that often edit out more violent events (Schiff 2020).

The point is that a decade of disruption preceded the Tea Party and the Revolution; speeches and pamphlets, intensified by long discussions in parliaments and taverns, occupied a far larger part of the process of building support than the drama of a costumed attack on commerce – even though the Tea Party makes a better story in a history book. Over the period of growing resistance, support for British governance faded in the colonies, a response to both organizing in America and repeated incursions by the British. Efforts to deepen the ties among the colonies, which traced back at least 20 years before the Tea Party, gradually found greater support, as British policy gave the colonists a common enemy. To make sense of the growth of the independence movement and the Tea Party in particular, we need to understand the context in which it developed.

I don’t mean here to provide a comprehensive account of the American Revolution; rather, I want to use this movement to point out the necessity of putting any movement effort in a broader historical and political context. From the example of the Tea Party, we can identify factors that are critical to the emergence, organization, and impact of any significant social movement.

We want to recognize that most people don’t protest most of the time. Although a few committed organizers are virtually always trying to recruit others to their causes, most people think about their personal commitments and aspirations far more than they attend to larger issues of social change. Movements grow and gain the potential of influence when they engage large numbers of people who would otherwise be consumed with work, family and friends, and the pressures and possibilities of everyday life. Protest and political engagement come with some cost, and we have to pay attention to the circumstances under which people will take on the extra work of trying to change their world, rather than just live in it. Most people add social movement participation to their agendas only when they think that something’s wrong, it’s fixable, and that protest might matter.

Social Movements, Events, and Political Context

The world outside a movement is critical to how much that movement can grow, and we can think about that world as offering a set of political opportunities (McAdam 1982; Meyer 2004; Tarrow 2011; Tilly 1978). Potential participants in a social movement look at the world around them when they decide how to respond to an invitation to act. They need to believe that a cause is actionable, and that it’s possible – or safe enough – to join with others (Gamson and Meyer 1996). No matter how good an organizer is, what’s going on in the rest of the world makes it easier or harder to sell his or her message.

Back to the American Revolution: Separated from colonial rule by the Atlantic Ocean, colonists enjoyed the space to do more than a little self-governance. Over time, they built wealth, organizations, and identities that were not exactly “British.” When England began to impose greater restrictions on the colonists’ business and autonomy, it created shared grievances in America, and those grievances contributed to the development of a distinct American identity. Colonists aggrieved by new taxes or restrictions on participation in governance initially tried to resist them; essentially, the first efforts were conservative ones, trying to keep things as they were. When this proved increasingly difficult, support for independence grew as the most viable alternative.

Political opportunities also include the means available to try to advance one’s political interests, and vary for different racial, professional, and class groups, over time, and across different contexts (Bracey 2015). Most people are unlikely to protest if they think they can get what they want by employing more modest means that entail less cost and less risk. Advocates experiment with different ways of getting what they want: writing letters, making speeches, organizing demonstrations, staging theatrical acts of vandalism, and ultimately, in this case, taking up arms and going to war. In the case of the American independence cause, there’s an interaction between social movements and the authorities they challenge – as is always the case in protest movements. When Britain punished the colonists and excluded them from normal institutional politics, it could have crushed the cause altogether; instead, it drove them to war as the best available alternative.

Some of the most educated and affluent people in the colonies were already familiar with philosophical arguments against monarchy, and the beginnings of a liberal philosophy of limited government (Wills 1978), but then, as now, relatively few people find the time to work their way through books of philosophy. As the cause of independence grew, however, Patriots developed ways to translate and promote their ideas to a broader public. A free press circulated work from advocates of independence. Most notably, Thomas Paine, newly arrived in America in 1774, promoted ideas of independence and human rights as “Common Sense” in 1776. The coincidence of the right text with a critical time produced a national bestseller, and gave the Patriots a script to justify their organizing efforts.

Ultimately, the colonists won a war of independence, but the ideas and the organizations inspired citizens of the new nation to demand more. Even as the revolution moved the locus of governance from London to colony capitals, the United States allowed slavery, the continued expansion to Indian territories, and some states did little of consequence to advance the interests of most of their citizens. Farmers in western Massachusetts, seized with the revolutionary spirit, in 1786 armed themselves and occupied a courthouse to protest the difficulties they had in paying debt owed to creditors who mostly controlled the legislature. Shays’ Rebellion helped provoke the Constitutional convention, which strengthened the federal government and made it even more difficult for farmers to get credit on the terms they wanted (Richards 2002). The Constitution also left some supporters of the revolution disappointed or angry. Farmers on the western edge of the early United States, accustomed to distilling their surplus grain for personal use and for sale, resisted a federal tax on domestically produced spirits. Beginning in 1791, recalling the principle of fighting “taxation without representation,” the Whiskey Rebellion included tax evasion, mass meetings and demonstrations, and physical assaults on tax collectors (Slaughter 1986). President Washington led a militia of 13,000 men to put down the rebellion, buttressing the new republic at the expense of the vision of many of those who fought for it.

Telescoping out from the Boston Tea Party, we encounter the complications in making an assessment of the influence of social movements. Even a simple reading of the event must situate it in a larger independence movement that, over a period of years, produced a war and a new nation. Even then, evaluating that movement as a success means neglecting the lofty aspirations and concrete expectations of many of those who turned out for the effort. For these reasons, the Tea Party provides a good way to start examining how social movements matter. The Tea Party and the larger American Revolution of which it was a part was a distinct series of events, whose outcomes were defined by context and contingency. Nonetheless, we can use it to establish and define concepts that will be helpful in understanding a wide range of other campaigns in a broad variety of contexts.

Elements of Political Protest

“Social movement” is something of a catch-all term, designating organized and sustained challenges to some kind of authority. Movements are comprised of groups and individuals who share some common aims, but also differ on issues of ultimate goals, as well as the best ways to achieve them. Movements include ideas and actions, which generally play out both in mainstream politics and outside the mainstream. A movement links discrete events, like demonstrations, meetings, and speeches, over an extended period of time. Using movements, organizers aspire to change both the world outside them and the ways in which participants live their lives (Meyer 2014). Inherently unstable, movements can grow into revolutionary campaigns, where insurgents seek to control territory and displace a governing regime. They may also develop into more routine political organizations and practices, in which organizers make accommodations with authorities and pursue their interests in less disruptive ways.

A grievance is a source of dissatisfaction that activists view to be actionable. Unpleasant cold temperatures on a winter’s day may be frustrating, but people don’t see collective action as a route to redress. Individuals can bundle up, go inside, or just shiver. In contrast, growing belief that a practice or policy could be fixed leads people to unite with others and take purposeful action. The grievance can be one that potential recruits already know, but don’t view as either wrong ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Dedication Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Why Movements Emerge and How They Work
• 2 Protest, Revolution, and Regime Change
• 3 Protest and Policy
• 4 Protest, Organizations, and Institutionalization
• 5 Protest Movements, Culture, and Participants
• 6 Claiming Credit
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement