Seven Social Movements that Changed America

SEVEN SOCIAL MOVEMENTS THAT CHANGED AMERICA by Linda Gordon is a penetrating look at events and happenings during the twentieth century. Gordon, an author and historian who has won numerous prizes for her biography of Dorthea Lange, reflects on several movements that still reverberate today. For example, one is the early work on old age pensions, eventually included in the Social Security Act of 1935, and highlighting the elderly as an activist political force. Other chapters discuss the efforts to unionize farm workers, promote civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s, and the subsequent women’s liberation movement. A more distressing example is the influence of the Ku Klux Klan (developed even further in Gordon’s 2017 text The Second Coming of the KKK) – and echoed, sadly, in the “very fine people on both sides” comments about the white nationalists protesting in Charlottesville. Gordon writes, “I am telling these stories [the seven social movements] in a way designed to reveal their commonalities as well as their distinctiveness.” Her tone is rather academic, and she argues that “‘followers’ often exerted vital but less often-recognized leadership.” Whether she is exploring early settlement houses and the fight against poverty, or efforts to establish job programs in the 1930s, her text offers researchers and scholars a thoughtful analysis and many details of value. At least a fourth of the book lists references and footnotes.