Revolutionaries
Martin Luther King Jr. waving from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on Aug. 28, 1963, at the culmination of the March on Washington
Photograph from AFP/Getty Images
che guevara
august 8, 1960 | Portrait by Bernard Safran
The 20th century, at least according to TIME co-founder Henry Luce, was the American century. The U.S. was the leviathan of the age, a political, economic and cultural juggernaut whose influence knew few bounds. In Luce’s view, the acts and legacy of the world’s looming hegemon were all imbued with a unique moral mandate: “the triumphal purpose of freedom,” as he put it. But far from the U.S. as well—on occasion, in spite of it—freedoms were won by peoples long oppressed; new nations emerged from the dust of empires; new voices spoke loudly where once there had been an overwhelming silence. On the eve of independence in 1947, India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, heralded his country’s arrival: “A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.”
Nehru’s words were meant for Indians but echoed across continents. Before World War II, the globe was painted in broad strokes with the colors of European empires. Barely two decades later, it was a checkerboard of liberated states. While Americans fretted over the Cold War, decolonization—what one British Prime Minister conceded was the “wind of change”—had blown through Asia and Africa. National consciousness was no longer just the fancy of the West. Land once hoarded by imperial aristocracies was being radically redistributed to peasant farmers. Prophets of high modernism, architects like Louis Kahn and Le Corbusier, were drafted in to construct soaring edifices of power as new parliaments, monuments, cities rose from the earth. The emancipated Third World was stepping into a bold new future of its own making.
At the helm of this change were figures like Nehru, charismatic leaders who achieved heroic status in the global imagination of the age. Some, like China’s Mao Zedong and Latin America’s Che Guevara, did so via the barrel of a gun. Others, like Mohandas Gandhi, inspired through sheer moral courage. They endured hardships, imprisonment, deprivation. Theirs were the faces that launched a thousand rebellions. Their struggles and triumphs made them living metaphors—sometimes for epoch-defining ideologies, sometimes as the myths upon which nations were built.
These revolutionaries were hardly cut from the same cloth, but they all drew in some way from the utopianism of Marx—a philosophical tool to take apart imperialism and capitalism, the orthodoxies of the early 20th century. Nehru, Indonesia’s Sukarno, Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah and Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser were all staunch socialists, suspicious of American enterprise and in favor of grand, galvanizing state projects. Even Nelson Mandela—the man who symbolized South Africa’s struggle against the barbarism of apartheid—would be labeled a communist terrorist by white opponents. Burning with the memory of a shared oppression, a phantasmal solidarity linked peoples from the Caribbean to Africa to Asia.
But then the hope of the future faded into the grinding reality of the present. Revolutionary leaders turned into hectoring autocrats; old status quos gave way to new ones that, at times, were no less unjust, corrupt or hypocritical. Nehru’s Third World moralism could not stave off wars with neighbors or lift the crushing poverty of his people. The bloated bureaucracies engendered by state socialism in both the developed and the developing worlds and the economic stagnation that came with it became an orthodoxy all of its own, leading to a new wave of politicians like the U.K.’s Margaret Thatcher intent on dismantling it—revolutions from the political right.
“You cannot fully appreciate the shape of the 20th century,” said Tony Judt, the late great historian, “if you did not once share its illusions.” He was thinking of European communists and Marxists, fellow travelers who couldn’t reconcile their idealism with the abuses and horrors of the Soviet Union. They had been blinded by their passions, but the disenchantment that was to follow carried a special wisdom. The same can be said of the enduring legacies of decolonization.
In the U.S.—Luce’s great haven of freedom—Martin Luther King Jr. found in India’s experience the promise of liberation and the courage to pursue civil rights. Movements for racial equality, feminism and gay rights drew inspiration and borrowed from the language of uprisings elsewhere. Americans, like hundreds of millions around the world, came to realize that freedom has no single moment of triumph. Rather, it exists only through a relentless, constant questioning of power. The arc of history may bend toward justice, and it is human action that bends it.
TIME charted this grand sweep of history, at times on the wrong side of it. Its Cold War–era prejudices made the magazine unduly wary of great statesmen it considered too friendly with Moscow if only through sympathies with communism. Consistent throughout its coverage, though, was a sense of the tidal movements shaping the 20th century and the titans who crested its waves. But this age of heroes may be at an end. TIME’s 2011 Person of the Year cover, the Protester, mapped a new phenomenon of global dissent, in which leaderless multitudes, knitted together by their ire and the Internet, paralyze cities and bring governments to heel. The revolution will be televised and blogged and tweeted, but the rebels are now masked, faceless.
Jawaharlal Nehru
August 24, 1942
Portrait by Boris Chaliapin
He ruled for 17 years as the first Prime Minister of an independent India but could not quell violence. His daughter Indira Gandhi and grandson Rajiv Gandhi both led the country but were assassinated.
During a National Week demonstration in 1932 his mother was beaten and left unconscious on the side of the road near her home in Allahabad. She was dead now, and so were his father and his wife Kamala, all helped along to funeral pyres on the banks of the Ganges by their work in India’s struggle for independence. There was cold fury in him at the Himalayan stupidity of Tory imperialists, and bitterness at the failure of the West he understood to meet the East, which at times still baffled him. Basically, said Nehru, the Indian crisis is the result of Europe’s and America’s concept of Asia. “What has astounded me,” said Idealist Nehru, “is the total inability of the English-speaking peoples to think of the new world-situation in terms of realism—realism being more than military realism. It is political, psychological, economic realism ... Their concept of us is that of a mass people fallen low, a backward people who must be lifted out from the depths by good works.”
Mohamed Ali Jinnah
April 22, 1946
Portrait by Boris Chaliapin
Fearing that Muslims would be powerless in a majority-Hindu India, he founded Pakistan as a Muslim homeland. However, partition led only to massacres and, in the years to come, spasms of war.
At a crucial meeting in March 1940 Jinnah first publicly plumped for Pakistan. A hundred thousand followers thronged into the shade of a huge pandal (big tent) in Lahore, where the League was meeting, overflowed into the scorching heat outside, heard Jinnah proclaim over the loudspeaker ... “The only course open to us all is to allow the major nations [of India] to separate to their homelands.” He warned that any democratic government in a unified India which gave Moslems a permanent minority “must lead to civil war and the raising of private armies.” An enthusiastic woman follower tore off her veil, came from behind the purdah screen, mounted the speakers’ platform. But Moslem revolutionary ardor was not ready to break with tradition; she was quietly escorted back to purdah by a uniformed guard.
When Gandhi led Congress into civil disobedience after the failure of the Cripps mission [to obtain his and Jinnah’s cooperation in the war effort] in 1942, Jinnah ordered his Moslems to take no part, promised a “state of benevolent neutrality” that would not hamper the British in fighting the Japanese.
Sukarno
December 23, 1946
Portrait by Boris Chaliapin
After World War II, Dutch rule over the archipelago that would become Indonesia was effectively at an end. The charismatic Sukarno (we used to spell it Soekarno) knit together a diverse republic.
Few men in the postwar world evoke the fanatic devotion of millions as does this 45-year-old child of luck and revolution. He is tall for an Indonesian (5 ft. 8 in.) and, by native standards, superlatively handsome. His Malay is self-consciously choice; in fact, he is so insistent on advancing the native speech that he is called Indonesia’s Webster (meaning Noah, not Daniel). He is quite an orator, too—TIME’s Jakarta correspondent cabled the following picture of Soekarno addressing an audience of 5,000 women:
“Mostly he spoke extemporaneously (65 minutes). Occasionally he slipped on horn-rimmed spectacles, read a note. I have never seen an orator who held an audience in the palm of his hand so easily and confidently. Soekarno would speak slowly, then at machine-gun pace. Some times he shook a finger at the audience, again he stood arms akimbo and bit off his words.”
Eva Peron
July 14, 1947
Portrait by Boris Chaliapin
Rising from actress to Argentina’s First Lady, Juan Peron’s wife was so beloved by the working class she championed that they campaigned to have her named a saint after her death at the age of 33.
With messianic fervor she encouraged the public to call her “Evita,” in a land where nicknames are restricted to the closest friends. While society ladies shuddered, huge, larger-than-life-sized pictures of the First Lady blossomed all over the country with the legend: “I prefer to be simply EVITA to being the wife of the President, if this EVITA is used to better conditions in the homes of my country.” On the radio other feminists were silenced to make Evita’s voice the louder ...
Devoted and well aware of his wife’s value as a press agent, Juancito gave her a free hand with her campaign for women’s suffrage, her labor reforms and her peripatetic philanthropies. An undistinguished glassblower who had succeeded Peron as Secretary of Labor was moved aside to give Eva office space.
She still has no official title, but every day, after breakfast with her husband at 7, she shows up in her office, to work from 9 to noon receiving delegations of workers and trade unionists, hearing hard-luck stories and doling out advice and aid. A battery of secretaries is always on hand to take notes and handle a voluminous correspondence.
Kwame Nkrumah
February 9, 1953
Portrait by Boris Chaliapin
In 1957, Ghana—once the Gold Coast—would transition to independence from Britain, and Nkrumah would be its first President. In 1966, however, he would be overthrown by the military.
Suddenly, like the Red Sea parting before the Israelites, the noisy crowd opened. Through a forest of waving palm branches, an open car bore a husky black man with fine-sculptured lips, melancholy eyes and a halo of frizzy black hair. The Right Honorable Kwame Nkrumah ... Bachelor of Divinity, Master of Arts, Doctor of Law and Prime Minister of the Gold Coast, waved a white handkerchief to his countrymen as they fought to touch the hem of his tunic. Then, as the band hit the groove, he jigged his broad shoulders in time to the whirling rhythm, and passed on, exalted. “You see,” cried a delirious Gold Coaster ... “He is one of us. A man of the people. Now that you have seen, you must understand: we can govern ourselves” ... The “we” are 4,500,000 tribesmen ... scattered across a rectangular patch of jungle, swamp and bushland that juts into the westward bulge of Africa ... [They] have been chosen by Imperial Britain to pioneer its boldest experiment in African home rule. In 1951 the British gave the Gold Coast its first democratic constitution; last year they designated as Prime Minister [Nkrumah] a histrionic radical who had once openly flirted with Communism ... Today, in the Gold Coast cabinet, only three of eleven members are British civil servants, and in Nkrumah’s words, they are cooperating in making themselves expendable.
Thurgood Marshall
September 19, 1955
Portrait by James Chapin
A dozen years after persuading the U.S. Supreme Court to desegregate public schools, he would become the first African-American Justice in the nation’s highest judicial body.
In 1943, a group of 100 N.A.A.C.P. leaders, mostly lawyers, met in Manhattan. Marshall recalls: “Like somebody at the meeting said, while it was true a lot of us might die without ever seeing the goal realized we were going to have to change directions if our children weren’t going to die as black bastards too. So we decided to make segregation itself our target.”
“Segregation itself” had long been a target of Negro spokesmen. But Thurgood Marshall is not primarily a Negro spokesman; he is a constitutional lawyer. The problem facing him and his colleagues was how to attack segregation itself on legal grounds. The weight of the precedents ran against them. Where would they find evidence to turn the balance?
The answer was peculiarly contemporary and peculiarly American. Just as U.S military staffs swim—and sometimes drown—in rivers of expert reports, just as U.S. business turns more and more to specialized organizers of facts, so Marshall & Co. mobilized a small army of psychologists, psychiatrists, sociologists and anthropologists to prove what every Negro among them believed to be obvious: that segregated education could not be “equal.”
Black children in Kansas getting off a school bus the year before the Supreme Court’s historic 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision
Photograph by Carl Iwasaki
Martin Luther King Jr.
February 18, 1957
Portrait by Boris Chaliapin
Adopting the techniques of Mohandas Gandhi, he helped lead the U.S. out of segregation and would be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, four years before he would be assassinated in Memphis.
Negro leaders look toward Montgomery, Ala., the cradle of the Confederacy, for advice and counsel on how to gain the desegregation that the U.S. Supreme Court has guaranteed them. The man whose word they seek is not a judge, or a lawyer, or a political strategist or a flaming orator. He is a scholarly, 28-year-old Negro Baptist minister, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who in little more than a year has risen from nowhere to become one of the nation’s remarkable leaders of men.
In Montgomery, Negroes are riding side by side with whites on integrated buses for the first time in history. They won this right by court order. But their presence is accepted, however reluctantly, by the majority of Montgomery’s white citizens because of Martin King and the way he conducted a year-long boycott of the transit system. In terms of concrete victories, this makes King a poor second to the brigade of lawyers who won the big case before the Supreme Court in 1954, and who are now fighting their way from court to court, writ to writ, seeking to build the legal framework for desegregation. But King’s leadership extends beyond any single battle.
Gamal Abdel Nasser
March 29, 1963
Portrait by Robert Vickrey
The army officer ousted and exiled King Farouk in 1952, then served as Egypt’s President and the undisputed leader of the Arab world for 14 years.
His picture, with its Pepsodent smile, is found in every corner of the Middle East, from Iraqi bazaars to the huts of royalist Yemeni tribesmen who still cling to Nasser’s picture even though they are fighting Nasser’s troops.
What Nasser has working for him is the deep desire of all Arabs to be united in a single Arab nation, and their conviction—grudging or enthusiastic—that Nasser represents the best hope of achieving it. This dream of unity harks back to the golden age of the 7th century when, spurred by the messianic Moslem religion handed down by Mohammed the Prophet, Arab warriors burst from their desert peninsula and conquered everything in sight. In less than 150 years, the Arabs swept victoriously north to Asia Minor and the walls of Byzantine Constantinople, south over Persia and Afghanistan to the heart of India, east through Central Asia to the borders of China, west over Egypt and Africa to Spain and southern France. It was an incredible empire—larger than any carved out by Alexander the Great or Imperial Rome.
It was also an empire that fell swiftly apart.
Cesar Chavez
July 4, 1969
Portrait by Manuel Gregorio Acosta
Out of San Jose, Calif., the labor leader organized migrant workers and turned eating grapes into a moral dilemma even as he faced political opposition from the American labor movement.
Edward and Ethel Kennedy, following the late Robert Kennedy’s example, have embraced Cesar Chavez as a brother. The so-called Beautiful People, from Peter, Paul and Mary to the Ford sisters, Anne Uzielli and Charlotte Niarchos, are helping to raise funds for the strikers. That support is one of the few issues that find Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, iconoclastic Writer Gloria Steinem, and liberal Senators Jacob Javits and George McGovern in total agreement. Ralph Abernathy lends black help to what is becoming the Brown Power movement.
The fact that it is a movement has magnified la huelga far beyond its economic and geographic confines. At stake are not only the interests of 384,100 agricultural workers in California but potentially those of more than 4,000,000 in the U.S. Such workers have never won collective bargaining rights, partially because they have not been highly motivated to organize and partially because their often itinerant lives have made them difficult to weld into a group that would have the clout of an industrial union. By trying to organize the grape pickers, Chavez hopes to inspire militancy among all farm laborers
Kate Millett
August 31, 1970
Portrait by Alice Neel
The feminist author and artist raised consciousness and roused society by publishing a book that claimed that the battle between the sexes was an uneven struggle for power.
Reading the book is like sitting with your testicles in a nutcracker,” says George Stade, assistant professor of English at Columbia University. He should know; the book was Kate’s Ph.D. thesis, and he was one of her advisers.
In a way, the book has made Millett the Mao Tse-tung of Women’s Liberation. That is the sort of description she and her sisters despise, for the movement rejects the notion of leaders and heroines as creations of the media—and mimicry of the ways that men use to organize their world. Despite the fact that it is essentially a polemic suspended awkwardly in academic traction, Sexual Politics so far has sold more than 15,000 copies and is in its fourth printing.
In her book, Millett defines politics as the “power-structured relationships” by which one group—in this case the male elite—governs others. Patriarchy is thus limned as the institutional foe. Labeling it as the “most pervasive ideology of our culture,” she argues that it provides our “fundamental concept of power.” Women are helpless, in other words, because men control the basic mechanisms of society.
Margaret Thatcher
February 16, 1981
Portrait by David Suter
The first female Prime Minister of the U.K., she and her Tory revolution scaled back the country’s welfare state, winning the love of conservatives and the unending enmity of social progressives.
Hard-edged and superconfident, Thatcher swept into office 21 months ago with a handsome 43-seat parliamentary majority from an electorate that had soured on the Labor government of James Callaghan and was fed up with Britain’s intractable unions in the bitter winter of 1979. Labor’s image as the only party capable of dealing with the powerful trade unions was sorely damaged when strikes and industrial strife spread across the country. Touting the “monetarist” theories of Milton Friedman, the conservative American economist, Thatcher won big with pledges to cut government spending, reduce income taxes, revitalize industry and create a new climate for business. With a survival-of-the-fittest philosophy, she warned that outdated, unprofitable industries would be allowed to die—but for the sake of new and vital ones. She promised Britons that she would get government off their backs and give them freedom to make their own choices. She called for a renewal of the British spirit she had known as a girl growing up over her father’s grocery store in her Lincolnshire birthplace of Grantham.
Nelson Mandela
May 9, 1994
Portrait by Janet Woolley
Emerging from 28 years of incarceration in 1990, he peacefully negotiated the end of apartheid in South Africa with F.W. de Klerk, whom he would succeed as President of South Africa.
His style derives from a hard-won discipline. Oliver Tambo, his former law partner and the longtime leader of the A.N.C. in exile who died last year, once described the youthful Mandela as “passionate, emotional, sensitive, quickly stung to bitterness and retaliation by insult and patronage.” Who can discern those characteristics in the controlled Nelson Mandela of today? He now prizes rationality, logic, compromise, and distrusts sentiment. Prison steeled him, and over the decades he came to see emotion not as an ally but as a demon to be shunned. How was the man who emerged from prison different from the one who went in? His reply: “I came out mature.” It is not simply that he harbors little bitterness in his heart; he knows that bitterness will not move him an inch closer to his goal.
If there has been a consistent criticism of Mandela over the years, it is that he is too willing to see the good in people. If this is a flaw, it is one he accepts because it grows out of his great strength, his generosity of heart toward his enemies. He defends himself by noting that thinking too well of people sometimes makes them behave better than they otherwise would. He believes in the essential goodness of the human heart, even though he has spent a lifetime suffering the wounds of heartless authorities.
Julian Assange
December 13, 2010
Photo-illustration by D.W. Pine
After the Australian computer programmer founded WikiLeaks, he set off a global firestorm of controversy by releasing myriad private and classified government and corporate documents.
For governments have been trying to keep their intentions secret since the Greeks left a horse stuffed with soldiers outside the gates of Troy, and they have been plagued by leaks of information for about as long. Some information really should be secret, and some leaks really do have consequences: the Civil War battle of Antietam might not have gone the way it did had Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s orders not been found wrapped around cigars by Union troops a few days before. But in the past few years, governments have designated so much information secret that you wonder whether they intend the time of day to be classified. The number of new secrets designated as such by the U.S. government has risen 75%, from 105,163 in 1996 to 183,224 in 2009, according to the U.S. Information Security Oversight Office. At the same time, the number of documents and other communications created using those secrets has skyrocketed nearly 10 times, from 5,685,462 in 1996 to 54,651,765 in 2009.
The Protester
December 26, 2011
Illustration by Shepard Fairey
The anonymous face of massive street dissent shook the world as the Arab Spring roiled the Middle East and the Occupy movement took on the world’s financial overlords.
It’s remarkable how much the protest vanguards share. Everywhere they are disproportionately young, middle class and educated. Almost all the protests this year began as independent affairs, without much encouragement from or endorsement by existing political parties or opposition bigwigs. All over the world, the protesters of 2011 share a belief that their countries’ political systems and economies have grown dysfunctional and corrupt—sham democracies rigged to favor the rich and powerful and prevent significant change. They are fervent small-d democrats. Two decades after the final failure and abandonment of communism, they believe they’re experiencing the failure of hell-bent megascaled crony hypercapitalism and pine for some third way, a new social contract.
During the bubble years, perhaps, there was enough money trickling down to keep them happyish, but now the unending financial crisis and economic stagnation make them feel like suckers. This year, instead of plugging in the headphones, entering an Internet-induced fugue state and quietly giving in to hopelessness, they used the Internet to find one another and take to the streets to insist on fairness and (in the Arab world) freedom.
Same-Sex Marriage
April 8, 2013
Photographs by Peter Hapak
About three months after this issue, the Supreme Court threw out a law that barred federal recognition of same-sex couples—joining the shift in popular opinion to supporting gay unions.
What’s most striking about this seismic social shift—as rapid and unpredictable as any turn in public opinion on record—is that it happened with very little planning ... For decades, prominent gay-rights activists dismissed the right to marry as a quixotic, even dangerous, cause and gave no support to the men and women at the grassroots who launched the uphill movement.
Changes in law and politics, medicine and demographics, popular culture and ivory-tower scholarship all added momentum to produce widespread changes of heart ...But then another seemingly separate strand of history was woven in: the AIDS epidemic ... This deadly scourge offered a painful education in the advantages of marriage. AIDS patients and their partners discovered that they weren’t covered by each other’s medical insurance, weren’t entitled to enter the doctors’ offices and hospital rooms of their loved ones, weren’t authorized to claim remains or plan funerals or inherit estates. Grieving survivors were barred from collecting Social Security and pension benefits. Marriage began to be seen as the portal to a wide array of privileges and protections. The bourgeois ideal of stable monogamy could be a lifesaver.