EARLY IN THE afternoon on April 18, 2001, forty-eight members of Harvard’s student-labor solidarity group made their way into Massachusetts Hall, the campus building that houses the office of the university president. After securing a conference room, the foyer, one office, a bathroom, and the hallway outside, the students sat down and announced that they would not leave the building until the campus’s janitors, security guards, and dining hall workers were paid at least $10.25 an hour. It was the start of the Harvard Living Wage Sit-In.1
Over the previous two-and-a-half years, students had conducted extensive research into the local cost of living and the rates paid to campus workers by various subcontractors. They had canvassed dorms and passed petitions. They coordinated with campus unions, and they held countless one-on-one meetings with university staff, faculty, and alumni. They held public speak-outs and private delegations. All of this activity was designed to pressure university president Neil Rudenstine and the members of the Harvard Corporation to address the exploitation of service workers at the world’s richest university. At the end of 2000, the same year in which Harvard announced that its endowment had exceeded $19 billion, there were roughly a thousand campus employees, predominantly immigrants and people of color, earning less than $10 per hour. Some made scarcely more than the state’s minimum wage of $6.75, an hourly rate that left a parent with one child living below the poverty line.2
The contrast between Harvard’s immense wealth and the daily difficulties faced by its lowest-paid employees made for a jarring juxtaposition. Carol-Ann Malatesta, a forty-year-old custodian, told her story for an oral history written by one of the sit-in participants. “The work itself sucks, alright?” Malatesta said. “It’s very tiring, and it’s hard work. But you just clean it all up, hold your nose, and you think to yourself, ‘I got three kids, I love my kids, I love my kids. I want the kids to be happy.’
“Financially I’m OK now,” Malatesta continued. “I was able to move out of the projects, but, you know, after paying taxes and daycare and car insurance, that’s when you start going to food pantries and soup kitchens at night and you start trash-picking for clothes and toys and furniture. . . . I mean, my kids don’t really think they’re poor. When we go to a soup kitchen, they think they’re going to a restaurant. What the hell? It’s free food. . . . Waste not, want not.”3
Frank Morley, a sixty-year-old janitor, spoke about the stress of holding down two jobs: “I work at Harvard until 4:00 pm,” he said. “I get on the train, grab a cup of coffee, throw down a donut. Get off the train and walk twenty minutes from the station to my second job—the Supermarket. It doesn’t pay a heck of a lot . . . but it helps, so I do bagging and stocking shelves until 10:30 pm. . . . Usually I’m so tired, I hit the pillow and bang, I’m out. But you ever been so tired, you can’t go to sleep? That happens sometimes too, and it just drives me nuts. Anyway, I’m up again by four.
“I don’t need to be a 50K man . . . all anybody’s talking about is a living,” Morley concluded. “How does Harvard justify paying a person $8.50 an hour with the kind of money they have? They should be damn well ashamed of themselves.”4
Harvard’s administration was unmoved. Although stories like Malatesta’s and Morley’s lent moral urgency to the campaign, the students’ efforts had been met with bureaucratic stonewalling. Previously, the university formed an Ad-Hoc Committee on Employment Policies, made up of administrators and professors close to the president’s office. Committee members talked among themselves for a year about the university’s role as an employer, only to reject the idea of a living wage standard out of hand. By starting their sit-in, the product of more than two months of planning, the students sought to put an end to such intransigence.5
At first, the response on campus was modest. Student organizers recruited supporters to attend daily rallies in Harvard Yard, and members of unions representing campus employees also turned out. Initially, the people who showed up for rallies tended to be those already involved in the union or in progressive student groups. Yet over the next several days, the sit-in slowly began to gain traction.
On the occupation’s third day, Senator Ted Kennedy made an unexpected visit to express his support, shaking hands with the students through the windows of Massachusetts Hall. Top officials of the national AFL-CIO also endorsed the campaign during the first week. Finally, even while one team of activists continued to hold the administrative building, organizers outside decided to escalate by setting up a tent city on the carefully manicured grounds of Harvard Yard. Not only did this move make the occupation dramatically more visible but it also annoyed administrators protective of the campus’s immaculate landscaping. Soon, the makeshift camp swelled to include more than a hundred tents, occupied not only by students but also members of the surrounding community.
A strange shift began to take place.
Before long, it became clear that the action was generating a level of energy far beyond anything the campus student-labor organization was typically capable of producing. “We tried hard to organize and plan very carefully for the sit-in,” says Amy Offner, who was a senior at the time and one of the campaign’s leaders. “But by a week in, the whole operation had become so vast that what any one person could know about was only a small fraction of the activity going on.”6
The campaign started to break into the national media. In the two years leading up to the sit-ins, the students had diligently cultivated contacts in the local and national press. As the sit-in commenced, they worked these contacts relentlessly. When their action began gaining momentum, the effort paid off in a big way. By its second week, the campaign was receiving mention on the evening news broadcasts of major networks. University officials were adamant that they would not yield to student demands, yet they were hesitant to expel the sit-in by force. Tension mounted, and the press took note. Images of activists hanging banners out the windows of the building from which the president had been exiled spread widely. New York Times columnist Bob Herbert devoted several columns to championing the sit-in, writing, “However this plays out, the protesters have provided a great service by insisting that we no longer avert our eyes to the continuing assault on the living standards of working men and women, even at a great institution like Harvard.”7
Prior to the sit-in, the campaign had done insistent outreach to other student groups to get them to endorse the demand of a living wage. Now the dynamic was different. Students who previously thought little about the wages of service workers were actively talking about the subject, and a sizable number wanted to help the campaign. When campus groups had meetings, the sit-in was a top item for discussion, regardless of whether the campaign had requested to be on their agendas. One leader from Harvard’s Black Student Association got his group to do a teach-in on race and poverty outside of the Massachusetts Hall occupation. “He did it on his own,” says Offner. “He was going to do it whether we were good at reaching out to him or not.”
Eventually, the sit-in was covered on every major network and by every prominent paper throughout the country. “We got more press during the sit-in than during the two years cumulatively,” says Offner. The general counsel for Harvard, who was on vacation in Asia when the sit-in started and had not been informed of developments, reportedly learned about what was happening on campus when she saw the sit-in featured in a news segment on TV at the Tokyo airport.
Suddenly, associating with the campaign became fashionable, and people wanted to go on record advancing the cause. Supportive professors convinced nearly four hundred of their fellow faculty members to sign on to a full-page ad that ran in the Boston Globe endorsing the living wage. In theatrical fashion, several professors also opted to give lectures directly outside the windows of Massachusetts Hall to show their support.
While the student activists were aware in advance that campus unions could not be seen as being legally responsible for the sit-in, workers adopted the campaign as their own. Dining hall servers delivered pizzas to the occupiers, security guards gave testimonials before news cameras, and janitors held independent marches that blocked traffic in Harvard Square. Some three hundred food service workers, who were in the midst of contract negotiations with the university, took a strike authorization vote and then marched into the Yard for a noisy rally alongside the sit-in, their vote raising the specter that administrators might soon be facing a full-blown labor crisis on campus.
With the sit-in entering its third week, around a hundred Harvard alumni planned and executed a one-day solidarity sit-in at New York City’s Harvard Club. Graduate students hung banners in the Yard expressing solidarity from various branches of the university, with slogans such as “Law Students Support a Living Wage”; from the education school, “Teachers for a Living Wage”; and, perhaps most memorably, from the Divinity School: “God Supports a Living Wage.”8
By this time, the encampment outside Massachusetts Hall had taken on a life of its own. “Harvard Yard has mutated from a staid pastoral setting into a massive tent city of supporters so densely populated that there is a waiting list to sleep out,” wrote Ben McKean, a junior who was one of the activists inside the administrative building. Increasingly, Tent City was being referred to as its own geographical destination. Before the sit-in was over, the residents of this makeshift metropolis held a mayoral election, and the camp was receiving deliveries from the US Postal Service. At one point, someone decided to host a barbecue in Harvard Yard for the occupation. “It was the craziest thing. To this day, I still have no idea how it was organized,” Offner recalls. “A state senator showed up with veggies.”9
Prior to the sit-in, student-labor activists on campus were accustomed to having perhaps twenty-five attendees at their meetings. “On bad weeks, it was more like 10 to 15 core people,” says Offner. In contrast, by the time the sit-in had gained momentum, hundreds of people were actively participating, and the movement was calling rallies that could attract as many as two thousand.
By the third week, President Rudenstine, who had previously declared that he would resign before backing down, was looking for a way to save face. The administration was deep into negotiations with the students, who were being represented pro bono by top lawyers from the AFL-CIO. After twenty-one days, they announced a settlement.
The occupiers emerged from Massachusetts Hall into the sunlight of Harvard Yard to the cheers of a crowd of campus workers, fellow students, and community supporters. The campaign had accepted a symbolic victory: among its main terms, their agreement with the administration stipulated a moratorium on outsourcing and the formation of a committee—one with genuine union and student representation—to recommend new wage and benefit policies. There was no guarantee that this would produce a living wage. But the deal worked. Within a year, negotiations resulted in contracts that guaranteed even the lowest-paid service workers on campus around $11.00 an hour. When colleges resumed classes the following fall, at least forty new living wage campaigns launched on campuses across the country.10
“I don’t think I got any sleep for three weeks,” Offner recalls, reflecting on the sit-in. “I don’t think any of the organizers did.” But, in a way, it was expected that the core members behind the campaign, those who had built up the organizational structure of the student-labor group, would be working nonstop. More surprising, she says, were the people who came out of the woodwork and threw themselves into the mobilization. “By two weeks in, what was amazing—it was miraculous, honestly—was to see people who hadn’t really been that involved in the campaign, or hadn’t been involved at all before, weren’t getting any sleep either,” she says. “They were spending all of their time doing something like organizing Tent City. It was incredible.”11
Every so often, we witness a period of intensive protest that seems to defy the accepted rules of politics: where previously apathy had reigned, outbreaks of dissent begin popping up everywhere. Organizers see their rallies packed with newcomers who come from far outside their regular network of supporters. Rather than having to painstakingly work to activate individual supporters, movement veterans are startled to see people motivating themselves to take action. Mainstream analysts, even more taken by surprise, describe something akin to spontaneous combustion. And those in power find that their previously accepted rationalizations for injustice are put under newly intensive scrutiny.
It was during one such moment of peak activity—amid the wave of interest in the civil rights struggle that swelled after the 1961 Freedom Rides—that Saul Alinsky took an excited, middle-of-the-night phone call from protégé Nicholas von Hoffman. After their event with several Freedom Riders at Chicago’s Saint Cyril’s Church was packed beyond capacity, these two organizers agreed on the need to temporarily set aside their normal structure-based methodologies in order to tap into the energy of that extraordinary time. They dubbed the unusual state a “moment of the whirlwind.”12
It was an apt phrase. Although moments of the whirlwind happen across many different social movements, they are rarely reflected upon seriously—or even given a name. Yet, just in the new millennium, we have already seen whirlwinds materialize on a variety of scales. The Harvard Living Wage Sit-In electrified a campus, setting off a rash of defiance and public engagement within a single university community. The protests known as the 2011 Wisconsin Uprising centered on a state capital, Madison, but drew support from citizens throughout the state who were outraged by their conservative governor’s attempts to destroy public sector unions. Occupy Wall Street created a whirlwind at the national level, with encampments springing up from coast to coast, and some forming in other countries as well. Finally, the Arab Spring, which swept through the Middle East, was a whirlwind of global significance, reminiscent of the Revolutions of 1989 in the former Soviet bloc.
The defining attribute of a moment of the whirlwind is that it involves a dramatic public event or series of events that sets off a flurry of activity, and that this activity quickly spreads beyond the institutional control of any one organization. It inspires a rash of decentralized action, drawing in people previously unconnected to established movement groups.
Individual academics have recognized these atypical states. Political scientist Aristide Zolberg describes them as “moments of madness”—periods of political exuberance when “human beings living in modern societies believe that ‘all is possible.’” Most long-time participants in social movements have experienced at least one such moment. Indeed, it is not uncommon to learn that they were first recruited into political activism during such an outbreak. When asked, they will typically recall with wonder the mysterious and invigorating atmosphere that existed at the time.13
And yet, moments of the whirlwind remain conspicuously understudied. They do not feature in most models for creating change, and because of this they are more likely treated as freak outliers than as regular characteristics of successful social movement campaigns.
For their part, conventional political analysts contend that outbreaks of mass disruption are the product of broad historical forces. They suggest that no one could consciously engineer such upheavals. Most organizing traditions do little to counter this belief. As theorists of unharnessed disruption, Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward consistently emphasize the historical contingency of mass mobilizations, and seldom do they suggest methods through which outbreaks might be intentionally provoked. Participants themselves absorb this bias. When unstructured mass protests erupt, many new demonstrators regard their movement’s sudden rise as a uniquely fated uprising—an occurrence without precedent or predictable shape. “Finally, the people have awakened,” they think.14
Meanwhile, organizers in structure-based lineages of community and labor organizing see these outbreaks as too sporadic and unpredictable to be relied upon. As a consequence, they do not seek to understand whirlwind moments or to determine how they might be strategically incorporated into their work.
Momentum-driven organizing puts forth several propositions that challenge such attitudes. Those immersed in the study of how unarmed uprisings work contend, first, that moments of the whirlwind are not as rare as they might seem; second, that there is an art to harnessing them when they occur spontaneously; and third, that activists willing to embrace a strategy of nonviolent escalation can sometimes set off historic upheavals of their own.
If we do not want to be perpetually blindsided by outbreaks of heightened political activity, a first step is recognizing that these are not odd flukes. Rather, they are common, and they play an important role in the ups and downs of social movements.
For activist, educator, and author Bill Moyer, understanding the fluctuations typical in the cycles of movement campaigns became a life’s work. Moyer was born in 1933 and grew up in northeast Philadelphia, the son of a TV repairman. As a child, he aspired to one day become a Presbyterian missionary in Africa. But a troublemaking spirit got in the way: as he told it, “In March 1959 I was voted out of the Presbyterian Church because I invited a Catholic and a Jew to talk to the youth group.”15
The expulsion led him into the arms of the Quakers. At the time, Moyer was just three years out of Penn State, working as a management systems engineer and searching for more meaning in his life. Through one of Philadelphia’s active Quaker meetings, Moyer came in contact with a vibrant circle of socially engaged peers, and he was tutored by an elder couple in theories of nonviolence. These encounters altered the course of his career. “I had no idea that it was the start of ‘the Sixties,’” Moyer later wrote, “and never suspected that I was beginning my new profession as a full-time activist.”16
In the 1960s, Moyer would take a job with the American Friends Service Committee in Chicago, helping to convince Martin Luther King Jr. to launch an open housing campaign in the city. Moyer then worked on King’s last drive, the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign in Washington, DC. In the decade that followed, he spent his energies protesting the Vietnam War, supporting the American Indian Movement at Wounded Knee, and promoting the newly emerging movement against nuclear power.
Even as the study of civil resistance was taking shape as an academic field, Moyer contributed to the development of an American lineage of strategic nonviolence. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, members of his community—the Philadelphia-based Movement for a New Society—served as active participants in feminist, gay rights, antiapartheid, and Central American solidarity movements, often taking on responsibility for training newer activists. They developed a distinctive strain of nonviolent direct action in the United States, one whose norms and tactics would run through the major environmental, global justice, and antiwar mobilizations of 1990s and 2000s.
As he increasingly began training other activists, Moyer saw a gap. “How-to-do-it models and manuals provide step-by-step guidelines for most human activity, from baking a cake and playing tennis to having a relationship and winning a war,” he wrote in 1987. Within the world of activism, however, such material was harder to come by.17
There was writing about movements produced by academic theorists, but it tended to be dry and removed. As Moyer put it, although useful information could be found in these theories, “most do not help us understand the ebb and flow of living, breathing social movements as they grow and change over time.” Among activists on the ground, Alinsky’s followers had created training manuals for their specific brand of community organizing. Likewise, materials drawing from Gandhi and King were available for instructing people in how to create individual nonviolent confrontations. But Moyer believed that there was a lack of models that looked at the long arc of protest movements, accounting for the highs and lows experienced by participants.18
To address this problem, Moyer created a model charting the stages through which successful movements progress—a framework he called the Movement Action Plan (MAP). It was initially printed in 1986 in the movement journal Dandelion, with twelve thousand newsprint copies of the model distributed through grassroots channels. It became an underground hit. Moyer’s blueprint was passed hand to hand, translated into other languages, and shared at trainings for well over a decade before taking its final form in the 2001 book Doing Democracy, published shortly before Moyer’s death.19
During their earliest stages, the model observed, social movements tend to keep a low profile. As a campaign launches, activists attempt to demonstrate that a genuine problem exists and to prove that the use of formal channels has failed to address it. They engage in the type of research, educational work, outreach, and petitioning that the Harvard students had undertaken prior to their Living Wage Sit-In. At this point, the movement’s active supporters are few in number, and its organizers have yet to win over substantial swaths of the public.
But Moyer noted that this could change rapidly, due to what he called “trigger events.” Moyer described a trigger event as a “highly publicized, shocking incident” that “dramatically reveals a critical social problem to the public in a vivid way.” The incident could be any number of things: a natural disaster or a political scandal; a journalistic exposé or an act of war. Such events, Moyer argued, are an essential part of the cycle of every social movement. “Overnight, a previously unrecognized social problem becomes a social issue everyone is talking about,” he explained. By thrusting activists into the public spotlight, trigger events create vital opportunities for rallying mass participation and sharply increasing support for a cause.20
Examples of triggers abound. A significant one for Moyer was the partial meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant on March 28, 1979. The accident transformed nuclear safety from a niche concern into a hot-button issue. Just days later, a previously planned antinuclear rally in San Francisco that ordinarily might have attracted a few hundred participants instead pulled a crowd of twenty-five thousand. Within six weeks, Moyer writes, “Demonstrations across the country culminated when 125,000 protesters marched to the nation’s Capitol on May 6, 1979.”21
There have been countless trigger events since then, including prominent ones in recent years. The Bush administration’s clear intention to launch an invasion of Iraq at the start of 2003 was a trigger event that spurred antiwar mobilization. Protest actions included the largest coordinated demonstration in world history on February 15 of that year, which involved as many as twelve million people across nearly eight hundred different cities around the globe. These mass marches were accompanied by acts of nonviolent militancy: after the Iraq War officially started on March 19, 2003, a week of actions in San Francisco effectively shut down the city’s financial district, with 1,025 people being arrested on just the first day. Later protests there blocked major intersections, disrupted military recruitment centers, and attempted to occupy the iconic San Francisco Bay Bridge.22
For the immigrant rights movement, a critical trigger event occurred a few years later. In mid-December 2005, conservative Republicans in the House of Representatives pushed through the Sensenbrenner Bill, a draconian measure that, among other provisions, would have criminalized people providing food and basic services to undocumented immigrants. In the months that followed, the prospect that such legislation would be passed by the Senate and signed into law ignited a series of massive protests in immigrant communities throughout the nation.23
In 2014 and 2015, police killings of African American men, including Michael Brown in Missouri, Eric Garner in New York City, and Freddie Gray in Baltimore, set off successive waves of demonstrations, propelling the #BlackLivesMatter movement to national prominence.
Moyer’s account of what happens in the wake of such an incident is prescient: “The trigger event starkly reveals to the general public for the first time that a serious social problem exists and that deliberate policies and practices of the powerholders cause and perpetuate the problem,” he explained. “The event instills a profound sense of moral outrage within a majority of the general citizenry. Consequently, the public responds with great passion . . . and is ready to hear more information from the movement.”24
During these times, new participants are inspired to join in their first demonstrations, and groups that had previously been building slowly find themselves amid a tempest, surrounded by a rush of urgent activity.
Trigger events sometimes happen spontaneously, and often they come as a surprise. After all, no one had expected that Three Mile Island would start to melt down when it did. But not every trigger event is so random or accidental—and some are more complicated than they at first appear.
In 1955, a young African American woman boarded a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama. It was getting late, and she was returning home after a long day. She paid her fare and sat down in an empty seat. Gradually, as the bus made stops along its route, it began to fill up. Eventually, the bus’s driver asked the woman to give up her seat: she was black, and a white passenger had been left standing. Weary from the day, and even more so from the indignity of being treated as a second-class citizen, she refused to move to the back of the bus. The driver pulled over. Within minutes, police arrived on the scene, and they dragged the black woman off to jail in handcuffs. “All I remember,” she said when recalling that day decades later, “is that I was not going to walk off the bus voluntarily.25
“I just couldn’t move,” she added. “History had me glued to the seat.”
The woman’s name was Claudette Colvin. She has been largely forgotten by history. Nine months later, an almost identical action took place, and the results were very different. Rosa Parks, a well-respected figure in Montgomery’s African American community and secretary of the local NAACP, also refused to move to the back of the bus. Her defiance sparked a historic bus boycott, spawned national debate about segregation in America’s Deep South, and went down as one of the last century’s great acts of individual resistance.
The reality is that, in segregated Montgomery, many local blacks had indignantly declined to give up their seats on the city’s buses over the years. In most cases, they were unceremoniously fined, and their punishment simply added to the generalized anger of a community forced to live under Jim Crow. By the time of Colvin’s arrest, local civil rights groups had been looking for a test case that they might turn into a focal point of struggle. However, for a variety of reasons—including the fact that Colvin had been charged with assaulting an officer and that she was just fifteen years old—they decided to pass on her case. When Parks was arrested, on the other hand, civil rights leaders judged her an ideal figure to unite the community behind.
This is not a unique example. A trigger event that has spectacular impact in one specific time and place may have little consequence in another. On December 17, 2010, twenty-six-year-old Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi took the extreme step of dousing himself in gasoline and lighting himself on fire to protest government harassment. His suicide incited widespread anger and indignation, leading to a rebellion that overthrew the nation’s ruling regime and set off the Arab Spring. Yet when forty-three-year-old businessman Yacoub Ould Dahoud took similarly drastic action in Saudi Arabia the next month, his agonizing sacrifice produced no comparable effect in his country. In fact, there have been many self-immolations both before and after Bouazizi’s in various parts of the world. The majority of these have passed with little notice, as was the case with Charles Moore, a seventy-nine-year-old Methodist minister who lit himself on fire seventy miles outside of Dallas, Texas, in late June 2014 to protest racism and homophobia within his denomination.26
In truth, potential trigger events happen all the time. However, only a small minority of them generate moments of the whirlwind. Oil spills, school shootings, and financial crises take place with distressing regularity. Likewise, investigators are constantly uncovering episodes of outrageous corruption in business and government. Most of these incidents pass briefly through the news cycle or go unnoticed entirely. People might shake their heads in horror, disgust, or exasperation. But then they move on. Usually, nothing much happens.
So, what determines whether a trigger sets off a feeble pop or a thunderous explosion?
Mainstream political experts focus on the social, economic, and geopolitical circumstances surrounding a given event. When mass uprisings burst forth, commentators tend to describe them as the product of historic conditions rather than the decisions of citizens themselves: the moment was ripe, they argue. Given the nature of the times, something like this was bound to happen.
Analysts in the field of civil resistance present a different view. They do not deny the importance that economic and political factors have in creating the context for social unrest. But they emphasize the interplay of such conditions with the skills of social movement participants. They hold up the agency of activists, as reflected in their strategic choices and practical execution.27
Years after the fact, historians have the luxury of looking back on an uprising and identifying the structural forces and historical peculiarities that might have contributed to a successful effort or that might have sunk an unsuccessful one. Activists on the ground, in contrast, never have the benefit of hindsight, and they must make the most of whatever conditions they encounter. As Hardy Merriman, a scholar and trainer in nonviolent conflict, writes, “Agency and skills make a difference, and in some cases have enabled movements to overcome, circumvent, or transform adverse conditions.”28
In other words, it sometimes happens that the time is ripe only because people have deliberately endeavored to make it so.
Arguably, as in the case of Rosa Parks, the most common difference between a trigger event that fizzles and one that produces a moment of the whirlwind is the presence of a movement that decides to take action. Having an organized group of people consciously choose to rally around an incident can be decisive, especially if the group uses it as a rationale for robust escalation. Their actions turn short-lived public outcry into the kind of sustained agitation that shakes the political system. Moyer noted that more than a dozen years before Three Mile Island, a similar nuclear malfunction occurred at Detroit’s Fermi reactor. It passed with little notice, and the Atomic Energy Commission succeeded in suppressing critical details about the potentially disastrous accident, in large part because there was no movement organizing around the issue that was prepared to respond.29
Ultimately, neither skills nor conditions are enough on their own. The two work in tandem. At any given time, history might offer up a trigger event that provokes widespread disquiet and sends people into the streets. But it takes dogged escalation on the part of activists to keep the issue at the fore of discussion, to create protest actions involving greater numbers of participants, and to repeatedly reinforce a sense of public urgency.
Chance offers up possibilities for revolt; movements make whirlwinds.
Of course, seizing an opportunity when it happens to come along is one thing. Engineering a viral uprising from scratch is another. It is in navigating this latter challenge that momentum-driven organizing reaches the peak of its ambition.
In a cycle of nonviolent conflict, sacrifice and disruption can make for small, effective actions; they provide an entry point. Escalation can turn isolated protests into a campaign of building tension; it provides a means of continuation. A moment of the whirlwind, although rarely achieved, sees social movements in their most expansive and dynamic state; it is the climax.
Birmingham and the Salt March created textbook moments of peak activity. But these were not triggered by something that happened randomly. On the contrary, acts of disobedience themselves served as trigger events, dramatizing injustices and sparking much larger explosions of defiance. The same was true of the Freedom Rides that took Alinsky and von Hoffman by surprise. And it has been true of outbreaks such as Occupy Wall Street and the Harvard Living Wage Sit-In.
This is where skill comes in. Momentum-driven organizing is based on the principle not only that organizers can hone their talents for guiding and harnessing disruptive outbreaks that are provoked by external events but also that they can develop instincts for how to make their own sparks. By studying how movements themselves set off revolts, they can get better at pulling the trigger.
Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. were experts in the politics of the unusual. In contrast to conventional politicians, and even to many of the organizers they worked with, they carefully cultivated techniques for creating periods of crisis and rupture. In his 1968 book Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, King describes civil rights organizations using militant nonviolence as “specialists in agitation and dramatic projects,” creating “explosive events” that “attracted massive sympathy and support.” He self-critically notes that these events were no substitute for building institutional structures that could sustain the fight for the long haul. Still, the uprisings he helped create in places such as Birmingham and Selma became defining pinnacles in the push for civil rights.30
Project C produced a classic rupture, bringing a marked influx of new participants into civil rights activism and spawning a wide array of copycat protests. “A score of Birminghams followed the first,” explains organizer James Farmer. By some counts, upward of a thousand demonstrations took place over the summer of 1963, resulting in some twenty thousand arrests. The initial campaign, which had been carefully crafted, gave rise to a rush of decentralized action. Historian Adam Fairclough argues, “The surge of nonviolent protest which swept the South after Birmingham was largely unplanned, uncoordinated, and unforeseen.” This is not to say that individual protests were unorganized: beyond the Southern Christian Leadership Conference itself, groups such as Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and local civil rights organizations all adopted Birmingham as a model. Even the normally staid NAACP endorsed direct action in the summer of 1963. But the viral spread of defiance went beyond the membership lists or institutional structures that any civil rights groups had previously established, inspiring remarkable sacrifice even from people not previously active.31
Decades before, Gandhi had likewise articulated how nonviolent conflict could be consciously used to provoke social crises. Krishnalal Shridharani’s 1939 treatise on Gandhi’s campaigns, entitled War Without Violence, notes that unarmed uprisings have more in common with war than with routine interest group politics. “Underlying . . . both violence and non-violence,” Shridharani writes, “is the basic assumption that certain radical social changes cannot be brought about save by mass action capable of precipitating an emotional crisis, and that the humdrum everyday existence of human life needs shaking up in order that man may arrive at fateful decisions.”32
Issues of grave injustice, he continues, “must be successfully and sufficiently dramatized in order to arouse mass interest and mass enthusiasm preparatory to reaching a crucial decision. This requires not merely an intense consciousness of the issues involved, but also an emotional crisis in the life of the community.”33
In 1930, when the Indian National Congress selected Gandhi as the strategist in charge of crafting its direct action challenge to the British Raj, the group’s leaders did not do so because they were his spiritual disciples. In fact, many of them distrusted Gandhi’s otherworldly faith in the power of redemptive suffering. Nevertheless, they took the risk of choosing him for a simple reason: he had gained a hard-won reputation for being able to create moments of the whirlwind.
Trigger events are real. But whether they come from external sources or from movements themselves, they are only a beginning. When an uprising truly gains momentum, it is never the result of just one incident. Rather, it is the product of multiple, compounding crises, many of which are the result of deliberate effort. Effective movements create a feedback loop: building from an initial starting point, they use disruptive actions and political jiu-jitsu to make fresh headlines, prompt a reaction from authorities, and attract ever-greater numbers of participants to join in larger and more widely distributed actions.
Seen in this way, the moment of the whirlwind is the end point of escalation. Organizers ratcheting up tension through nonviolent conflict have no guarantee of reaching this state of peak enthusiasm. But they at least have a method for attempting it. And sometimes they succeed beyond their wildest imagination.
None of the student organizers at Harvard would have ever dreamed that their campaign would prompt such a wide range of activity. But their determined escalation—taking Massachusetts Hall, spreading the occupation into Harvard Yard, putting out a call for wider support—allowed for a potent storm to gather.
For student activists, the occupation of administrative buildings has proven to be an effective trigger on many campuses. In the spring of 1999, two years before the Harvard Living Wage Sit-In, antisweatshop campaigners at schools including Duke, Michigan, Arizona, and the University of North Carolina held sit-ins. Their example helped make the next few years periods of rare unrest. In 2000, activists at Johns Hopkins and Wesleyan occupied buildings in support of a living wage for campus workers, creating a template for escalation at Harvard. The Massachusetts Hall takeover, in turn, moved more young dissidents to act.34
In a broader context, organizers using civil resistance have sometimes been able to find other triggers that are unusually reliable. They have successfully anticipated opportunities by planning around coming events that they know will be focal points for media attention.
The global justice movement of the late 1990s and early 2000s faced a daunting challenge when it came to moving public opinion around its cause: issues of injustice in the global economy could feel too diffuse and far-removed to capture much attention. But high-profile trade summits created an opening. Major news organizations already sent reporters to cover these events, and the presence of world leaders created a hook for discussion. Plans for wide-scale direct action turned these international summits into predictable trigger events. In this way, the ministerial meetings of the World Trade Organization in Seattle; the gatherings of International Monetary Fund and World Bank officials in Prague and Washington, DC; negotiating sessions for the Free Trade Area of the Americas in Quebec City, Miami, and Mar del Plata, Argentina; and the gatherings of G8 ministers in Cologne, Germany, and Genoa, Italy, all served as flashpoints of highly publicized dissent.
In Serbia, activists adopted the technique of using an electoral contest as a trigger event. Knowing that the falsification of a vote count can serve as a powerful spark for mass defiance, they centered their strategy on prodding Milosevic to hold elections. This approach has since become a cornerstone of civil resistance campaigns working under repressive regimes. Dictators “assume that in the event they do not win the election, they can steal it,” writes author Tina Rosenberg. “But this often fails.” Even electoral contests that are supposed to be nothing more than rubber-stamp ratifications of a regime’s power can turn into incendiary opportunities. “Elections provide a sharp focus for opposition organizing,” Rosenberg explains. “They wake up the citizenry to the question of who runs the country.”35
This creates a fortuitous situation: knowing that an alarm clock is set for Election Day, organizers can quietly prepare for escalation. A trigger awaits them.
Organizers who take a momentum-driven approach to creating change emphasize moments of the whirlwind because they recognize their peculiar power. And this is a fundamental way in which the organizing model differs from structure-based traditions.
Many Alinskyite community-organizing groups see themselves as specialists in confrontational action. Indeed, they might regularly deploy tactics such as sending busloads of inner-city residents to picket directly outside a slumlord’s suburban house or filling the lobby of City Hall with hundreds of people to challenge the mayor. But in their drive to “build organizations, not movements,” they limit the scope of their confrontations. They do not seek to escalate to the point of creating a public crisis and spurring activity outside their institutional framework. In the words of longtime Industrial Areas Foundation director Ed Chambers, they push for “incremental success over months and sometimes years,” not peaks of activity that appear abruptly and cannot be sustained.36
The transactional gains of structure-based organizing produce genuine benefits in people’s lives. Slow and steady efforts can pay tangible dividends. And yet, because they are generally suspicious of the sudden energy created by trigger events, organizers in this tradition miss opportunities to tap the vast potential of whirlwinds.
For momentum-driven mobilizations, in contrast, peak moments are critical. In Moyer’s model, movements can work for a long time in their early stages to cultivate support and still see only modest gains. But after a triggering incident precipitates a crisis, campaigns can make major leaps forward. “The extensive media coverage of the trigger event and the movement’s dramatic nonviolent demonstrations not only makes the public aware of the social problem,” he writes, “but also conveys the social movement’s position for the first time.” As a result, public opinion on the issue moves like it never has before.37
For Patrick Reinsborough and Doyle Canning of the Center for Story-based Strategy, “Dramatic crisis situations can challenge underlying assumptions and redefine the conventional wisdom.” Major trigger events, ranging from the start of the Iraq War to the flooding of New Orleans, “inevitably disrupt the dominant culture’s mental maps and can trigger mass psychic breaks: moments when status quo stories no longer hold true.” These times are crucial for reorienting public opinion. “Psychic breaks,” Reinsborough and Canning write, “open new political space and can provide powerful opportunities for new stories to take root in popular consciousness.”38
Consistent with a transformative approach to creating change, the impact of these shifts is not always evident immediately—at least in terms of producing instrumental gains. Aristide Zolberg writes, “Stepped-up participation is like a flood tide which loosens up much of the soil but leaves alluvial deposits in its wake.” Although it is not yet a time for harvest, the ground has become newly fertile.39
Moyer suggests that the goal of movements experiencing a whirlwind is “to create a public platform from which the movement can educate the general public.” But, counterintuitively, he contends, “It is not a goal or expectation to get the powerholders to change their minds, policies, or behavior at this stage.” That change comes later.40
To his credit, Saul Alinsky saw the period of unrest that had been created by the Freedom Rides as an opportunity. He recognized it as time to put aside the organizing model he had done so much to champion and instead to experiment, at least for a short while, with a different mode of confrontation. Von Hoffman had suggested, “We are no longer organizing but guiding a social movement,” and Alinsky agreed. Trade unionists and community organizers who have been inspired by recent mobilizations such as Occupy and #BlackLivesMatter, and who have thrown themselves into supporting these uprisings, have expressed similar openness and daring.
Recognizing an exceptional moment, they have been willing to leap into the storm.
If whirlwinds represent a climax, what comes next can only be a letdown.
Alinsky said that dramatic confrontations staged by movements will typically produce “a flare-up” that cuts quickly “back to darkness.” Piven and Cloward acknowledge that disruptive uprising “erupts, flowers, and withers, all in a moment.”41
By using the techniques of civil resistance, momentum-driven organizing seeks to address this problem, at least in part. Working to consciously guide and amplify mass protest, it aims to create repeated cycles of uprising. Over the course of a cycle, movements experience periods of peak escalation, absorb their energy through mass training and decentralized structures, then continue to build toward future trigger events. When the process is successful, it results in campaigns of nonviolent confrontation more lasting and powerful than typical eruptions of mass protest.
Nonetheless, emotional ups and downs are unavoidable. With all mass protests, surges of extraordinary participation are followed by fallow stretches. In the down times, activists’ numbers dwindle and advocates struggle to draw any attention at all to their work. During these lulls, those who have tasted the euphoria of a peak moment often feel discouraged and pessimistic.
One of the strengths of Bill Moyer’s work is its attentiveness to the psychological challenges faced by people struggling to push a cause forward. Moyer was proud when trainers using his materials reported that participants would nearly gasp in recognition when the MAP explained patterns that they had thought were unique to their own experience. Moyer referred to these as “Aha!” moments, and his goal was to create as many of them as possible.
For those encountering Moyer’s work for the first time, the biggest “Aha” usually does not come with description of the trigger events and take-off periods that characterize a movement’s most exhilarating moments. Instead, the most profound recognition comes with the discussion of what follows: according to Moyer, after a whirlwind’s flurry of activity dies down, movements predictably experience what he calls the “Perception of Failure.”
Moyer sometimes shared the story of when he first presented his model of movement cycles. In February 1978, he was scheduled to give a presentation at a strategy conference to forty-five organizers from the antinuclear group known as the Clamshell Alliance. This group had conducted the landmark series of direct action protests against the Seabrook power plant in New England. At its peak, the previous spring, the alliance carried out an occupation of Seabrook in which 1,414 people were arrested and spent up to twelve days in jail. As Moyer wrote, “During those two weeks, nuclear energy became a worldwide public issue as the mass media spotlight focused on the activists locked in armories throughout New Hampshire.”42
They had generated a model whirlwind: in the wake of the Clamshell actions, hundreds of new grassroots groups formed around the country. The Seabrook protest inspired further occupations in places such as the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant in California. Moreover, the organization’s methods—its affinity groups, spokescouncils, consensus process, and focus on militant, nonviolent blockades—would ultimately become an influential template for direct action in the United States.
Because of all they had accomplished, Moyer expected that the group at the conference would be upbeat and celebratory. Instead, he encountered the opposite. “I was shocked when the Clamshell activists arrived with heads bowed, dispirited and depressed, saying their efforts had been in vain,” Moyer wrote. Because protests had died down and they had failed to reach their short-term transactional goal—stopping construction on the specific plant they had targeted—they felt defeated.43
In his presentation, a sketchy version of what would become his MAP model, Moyer scrambled to demonstrate how the activists had made considerable gains. By galvanizing national opposition to the industry, the movement had already reversed the near-universal acceptance of nuclear power that prevailed during the 1960s and early 1970s. Activists were well on their way to establishing majority support for their position—and seeing tangible changes as a result.
Moyer believed that the framework he presented helped the activists better understand their predicament and plan for future stages of activity. Whether or not this is the case, anti–nuclear power campaigns ultimately achieved a resounding victory. By making the safety, cost, and ecological impact of nuclear power into concerns shared by a majority of Americans, they created a situation in which orders for new nuclear power plants ceased. The government was compelled to abandon its goal of having a thousand facilities in operation by the end of the century. And the number of working plants was set on a path of steady decline—a path on which it continues to this day.
By making the “perception of failure” a part of his model, Moyer highlighted a contradiction that was not confined to one group of antinuclear activists. After a whirlwind spike in activity subsides, movement participants commonly feel dejected—even though it is at precisely this time that they are poised to secure their most significant gains. With the excitement of the peak moment behind them, many people “burn out or drop out because of the exhaustion caused by overwork and long meetings.” Moreover, the mainstream media reinforces an air of negativity by reporting that, because protests have dropped off, the movement is dead and has accomplished nothing. All of this, Moyer wrote, combines to create “a self-fulfilling prophecy that prevents or limits [movement] success.”44
By identifying the perception of failure as a normal part of social movement cycles, Moyer hoped to blunt its negative force. He argued that activists who look to history will see that they are not alone in experiencing letdown—and that past movements which were able to overcome despondency ended up seeing many of their once-distant demands realized. As campaigners move to later phases that involve institutionalizing their gains and capitalizing on the increased public support they have accumulated, they begin reaping what they have sown.
Because feelings of failure within movements are so seldom acknowledged in other sources, let alone considered thoughtfully, Moyer’s discussion of the perception of failure has been widely referenced. Progressives have used it in the aftermath of Occupy Wall Street, while, in 2014, none other than far-right guru and ex–Fox News titan Glenn Beck considered Moyer’s observations in some detail in contemplating the future prospects of the Tea Party.45
But, we might ask, are perceptions of failure necessarily irrational and misguided? How does one determine when pessimism is misplaced?
Moyer’s analysis is consistent with a transformative vision, and it recalls the way in which same-sex marriage was won. Movements succeed when they win over ever-greater levels of public support for their cause and undermine the pillars of support: “Over the years . . . the weight of massive public opposition, along with the defection of many elites, takes its toll,” Moyer argues.
If, in desperation, activists become ever more insular and isolated from the wider public, then feelings of failure are warranted. But a movement that is building popular support need not worry if its initial moment in the spotlight passes and the fickle news media turns its attention elsewhere. Instead, its active supporters can ready themselves to ignite fresh waves of protest when the opportunities arise. “The long-term impact of social movements,” Moyer contends, “is more important than their immediate material success.”46
Moyer’s work serves as an important reminder that the whirlwind is a critical peak moment of struggle, but it is not the only phase. Prior to the Harvard sit-in, there had been a long campaign by students to raise awareness of the living wage issue. As in Birmingham, activists carefully laid the groundwork for escalation, and they meticulously planned their initial act of civil resistance. Moreover, their work was not completed at the end of the sit-in. When the students left Massachusetts Hall, they had not accomplished much in concrete terms: again like the Birmingham movement, they won minor concessions and a framework for future negotiations. It took a year of intensive organizing after the sit-in before campus workers saw significant transactional gains.
But the Living Wage Sit-In produced a psychic break in the life of the campus. After the whirlwind, the campaign negotiated in an entirely new context. As Offner writes, for a time the sit-in “changed the power relations at Harvard, giving workers, students, and the neighboring community a degree of collective power that could actually match that of the administration and the Harvard Corporation.” Past university task forces had made wage decisions with scarcely any input from the people who actually worked as custodians and dining hall servers at the university. Now, conservative critics charged that the voices of these workers were overrepresented in committee hearings. One economics professor complained, “Anyone who speaks publicly against the Living Wage risks being demonized.”47
It would be more accurate, defenders of the campaign countered, simply to say that those who believed that the world’s richest university could not afford to pay more than poverty wages were losing. In the words of participant Ben McKean, the sit-in had served to demonstrate the “consensus of an entire community.” And that consensus won out.48
Bill Moyer believed that “social movements involve a long-term struggle between the movement and the powerholders for the hearts, minds, and support of the majority of the population.” Yet there is a paradox inherent in this belief: While protesters aim to generate popular support, protests themselves can be very unpopular.49
Contrary to the campaign-trail pledges of mainstream politicians, who constantly vow to bring the country together, grassroots campaigners serious about compelling change often find that the route forward involves courting controversy. Ironically, the people with some of the keenest insights into the dynamics of divisiveness are those perceived as peaceniks—the planners of nonviolent revolt.
Their message? Togetherness can be overrated. And sometimes it pays to be a “divider.”