President Franklin D. Roosevelt gets credit for ending alcohol prohibition. In fact, he had virtually nothing to do with it. The popular demand had reached such a crescendo that he just endorsed the inevitable shortly before taking office
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Elected leaders seldom are the generators of change. (Winston Churchill perhaps being a notable exception.) Rather they react to ideas initiated by academics and to societal forces stirred and organized by political activists. Politicians only rush to be at the head of the parade when the public, arm in arm, is already marching down the road. Skilful politicians often encourage this.
A case in point is Jacob Birnbaum, proclaimed “Champion of Soviet Jews” in his New York Times obituary.
As the Times reported, “Just as the civil rights movement began with students challenging segregation at lunch counters, the movement to free Soviet Jews began with students demonstrating at the Soviet Mission to the United Nations.”
“ ‘Jacob was the first to start the struggle,’ said Natan Sharansky, the former Soviet dissident and Israeli politician, who announced the death. ‘This brought hundreds of thousands of Jews out to join him in the great struggle for Soviet Jewry, which made modern Exodus real.’ ”
“The grass-roots movement Mr. Birnbaum started contributed to legislation that eventually helped liberalize Moscow’s emigration policies. President Ronald Reagan personally pressed the Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev on the issue.
“And ultimately, more than 1.5 million Soviet Jews were allowed to move to Israel and elsewhere.”
However, there is an element of sadness in the obituary. When 250,000 people gathered at a rally in Washington, D. C., “ ‘Birnbaum was relegated to a seat at the back of the dais, forgotten amid the celebrities and politicians who lined up to speak,’ Gal Beckerman wrote in The Jewish Daily Forward this month. ‘He was bitter and would remain so until the end of his life.’ ”
Birnbaum apparently did not understand that political activists are not there for the honoring; that goes to the politicians. Sitting at the back of the dais, watching the multitude gathering, and recognizing how this was bringing about the goals of the movement he started, Birnbaum should have been deriving great satisfaction.
Incidentally, not being honored is a lot better than being shot!
So true. The roots of change are always deeper than the flowers that bloom.
In fact, while the Times writes: “Just as the civil rights movement began with students challenging segregation at lunch counters. . . ” – in fact that challenge to segregation began many decades before the lunch counter sit-ins, Rosa Park, MLK and Malcolm X (and so many others).
Those who risked, and many who lost their lives, in the pre-history of the Civil Rights Movement made their work and their success possible. Those pre-history activists are widely unknown, it is a much more difficult phase of transformation — much easier to join in when it is a mass movement.
K. Z.