Most Americans seem to have a bit of revolution in their hearts. And even though our country was born of revolution, the heart is generally where it stays.
We are lucky to live in a nation where mobs don't shut down airports or take over television stations. But there may be cause for worry when people become too docile.
When the government of Iceland bankrupted that nation, there was a revolt. In China, migrant peasants forced to leave the cities because of rising unemployment are battling police. Greece recently experienced eight days of riots and demonstrations in more than a dozen cities. The turmoil later spread to France, Spain, Denmark and Italy.
But in the United States, where more than 500,000 lost their jobs in November, there is calm.
An exception was a spunky group of workers in Chicago who were told their plant would close in three days. They were informed there would be no severance pay or earned vacation pay. So the 240 laid-off employees at Republic Windows & Doors held a six-day sit-in.
Their act of defiance got them their severance and vacation pay, plus two months' health coverage. More important, perhaps, they showed that every one of us has at least a little power.
The early revolutionary leaders in America knew this. That's why they sought support from bands of artisans and workers. When the time was right, these were the people who would get terribly drunk, storm the mansion of the Tory governor, sack the place, and send him running into the woods.
Helping to firm up this alliance of the elite and the common were new ideas: that all men were created equal, with God-given rights. The artisans and workers saw something in this for them. They agreed to fight in a poorly paid, poorly equipped army. And they won.
Afterward, those in power had to persuade the mobs to go back to their farms and jobs and let the elite run things again. In A Leap in the Dark, historian John Ferling wrote that James Madison drafted our Constitution not to facilitate democracy, but to make it very difficult. America, after all, was still a place where a certain type of man took his hat off in the presence of another type of man.
Even so, common people, newly empowered by the Revolution, tried challenging their leaders by forming lobby groups called Democratic Societies. If the societies decided a new tax shouldn't be paid, many would listen. The societies were roundly denounced as self-created - a foul term of the times that Ferling equates with the more modern red or pinko.
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