‘Radicals’ revisited

The Thanksgiving playbook calls for the whole family,from Tea Partiers to Occupiers, to sit down for an all-American truce,lubricated by gravy and minimal meaningful conversation. Michigan StateUniversity law Professor Michael Lawrence has a radically differentfeast in mind.

In his new book, “Radicals in Their Own Time,” Lawrenceinvites five of the most cantankerous radicals in 400 years of Americanhistory to his table and limits them to the very subjects polite folksare told to avoid: politics and religion.

“It’s a lively crowd,” Lawrence said. “Without exception, they were all pretty ornery.”

Instead of politic Thomas Jefferson, we get impolitic Thomas Paine. Instead of conciliator Martin Luther King Jr.  orcompromiser Booker T. Washington, Lawrence gives us the uncompromisingW.E.B. DuBois. Instead of pious Susan B. Anthony, we get Anthony’sfiery right-hand woman in the struggle for women’s rights, ElizabethCady Stanton.

They all got hit hard and knew how to hit back. In 1895,Stanton eviscerated the Bible’s paternalistic take on women, fromAdam’s rib on down, in a controversial magnum opus, “The Woman’sBible.” Joining a nationwide wave of outrage, one clergyman called it“the work of women and the devil.”

“This is a grave mistake,” Stanton drolly argued in herintroduction to the second edition. “His Satanic Majesty was notinvited to join the Revising Committee, which consists of women alone.”

They sound like great company, but each of Lawrence’sfive subjects were banished from the table more often than they wereinvited. “I would have been hailed with approval if I had died at 50,”DuBois said in his 80s. “At 75 my death was practically requested.”

 The first toarrive at Lawrence’s feast is Roger Williams, founder of Providence,R.I., and an early proponent of religious tolerance and strictseparation of church and state. Williams denies the European powers’claims to land in the New World, unless they pay the Native Americansfairly for it. Try discussing that over Thanksgiving turkey.

Lawrence found religion to be a persistent hot spot that hasn’t cooled since Williams’ day. 

“What really got these five people into hot water was when they challenged the prevailing religious orthodoxy,” Lawrence said.  “Thatexplains a lot. To this day, any candidate for high office would be illserved by challenging Christian orthodoxy. It would be an immediatedisqualifier.”

Lawrence’s second subject, revolutionary firebrand andpamphleteer Thomas Paine, is a perfect case study. Paine fell fromrevered Founding Father to pariah when he published his witheringcritique of the Bible, “The Age of Reason,” containing the memorablecredo, “my own mind is my own church.” Six people came to his funeral.

“He was essentially disowned by his revolutionarycompatriots,” Lawrence said. “For decades he was reviled to the pointwhere Theodore Roosevelt called him ‘that dirty little atheist.’”

After “The Woman’s Bible,” Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s fateparalleled Paine’s. Her colleagues in the turn-of-the-century suffragestruggle, except Anthony, turned against her.

DuBois had little reverence for the church either. Hisantipathy to capitalism and sympathy for the Communist Soviet Unionwould make him an indigestible Thanksgiving guest in most Americanhouseholds today.

In case the reader gets too smug about Enlightenmentprinciples of reason, there’s always Lawrence’s fifth radical, AmericanIndian teacher and activist Vine DeLoria Jr.

In addition to fighting for a new legal framework inAmerica for tribal sovereignty, DeLoria challenged what he consideredto be the orthodoxy of materialistic science, especially Darwinism, inthe universities. Instead, he laid out a synthesis of Western science,American Indian belief systems, and Jungian psychology to explain theuniverse. 

DeLoria’s chapter brings the story full circle, echoingWilliams’s call for fair treatment of American Indians 400 yearsearlier.

As a constitutional law professor, Lawrence has duereverence for the nation’s founding documents, but he’s the first tocaution that they’re just “words on a page.”

“Soviet Russia had a fine constitution, for what good it did them,” he said.

The five radicals profiled in his book had failings, someof them spectacular, but Lawrence argues that it takes impolitic peopleto push the country closer to its ideal of equal justice under law.Elected leaders simply play it too safe.

Far from an alien idea, Lawrence argues, radicalism runsin our veins. “Americans love this,” he said. “Look at any holidaymoviegoing season.”

There’s something distinctly American about George Baileygoing up against money-grubbing Mr. Potter or Dr. Seuss’ Yertle theTurtle shaking the king’s throne with a belch.

“These are icons, they’re heroes, and we love thembecause they stand up to authority and demand equal justice,” Lawrencesaid. “What else is Dorothy doing when she pulls back the curtain andexposes the wizard?”

Michael Lawrence:

“Radicals in Their Own Time: 400 Years of Struggle for Liberty and Equal Justice in America”

7 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 1

Everybody Reads

2019 E. Michigan Ave., Lansing

(517) 346-9900