One of the strange and wonderful things about history is how the same basic facts can take on an entirely different meaning depending on when you happen to be examining them. As a case in point, Jeremy McCarter began writing his new book Young Radicals, the story of five activists who spent most of the 1910s advocating and often agitating for dramatic social change, back in 2011, in the middle of the hope-and-change Obama era. He finished last fall. On the morning of November 9, he realized that he would have to rewrite his entire introduction to reflect the outcome of the presidential election.
And then, back in 2017, a strange thing happened. The day after Trump was inaugurated, millions of people joined in women’s marches all over the world. (This drew comparisons to the 1913 women’s march on Washington organized by Alice Paul, another of McCarter’s young radicals.) A week later, thousands of Americans went to their local airports to protest the travel ban. For McCarter, it seemed like Bourne, who died in the 1918 flu epidemic at the young age of 32, was reaching across the century and tapping us all on the shoulder to let us know how to resist.
“It was important to me that the complexity of their lives will resonate with people in different ways,” he says. “I’m interested to see, as the country gets more volatile, what aspects of their lives are going to seem more relevant. It feels more and more like 1917 by the day. In 1917, an era of great hope and progress ended abruptly when the U.S. went to war, and the costs of dissent and idealism skyrocketed. There was government propaganda, censorship, semiofficial law enforcement locking people up, the [1919] red scare. There is a latent repressive capacity in the American public. Given a chance, it will express itself.”
