January 24, 2025 Hello , We have more power than we think we do. The MAGA party has political, economic and law enforcement power. But we have the power of solidarity. If we use it. I'm old enough to remember Lech Wałęsa founding his trade union Solidarity in 1980 at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk in Poland. Poland became the first Soviet bloc country where people organized against their fascist government and opened the road to democracy. It wasn't easy, Lech Wałęsa was arrested. The government declared martial law and democracy wasn't established in Poland for more than ten years. But Lech started from zero. We've got a head start on MAGA if we get in the race. The new president has not locked down his support and across the country people are already organized to resist. But not as many people as we need. Today's heroine here to inspire you is Rachel Weaver Kreider, an organizer in the
American student protest movement in the 1930s. When Rachel's movement fell apart around her, she took notes.
How People Lose their Power
Rachel Weaver stood wide-eyed and all ears watching her father notarize papers to certify that her religion was pacifist. She was eight years old when the U.S. entered WWII and young men started coming to her father for help. Sam Weaver counseled draft-age men of the Amish and Mennonite faiths in LaGrange County, Indiana and helped them apply as conscientious objectors to war. She thought her father must be important; so many people came for his help! Later, she understood much more clearly what her father was doing. While attending graduate school in 1934, at Ohio State,
the university kicked out seven Mennonite students for refusing to participate in the Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC).
Rachel Weaver, junior at Goshen College
1929-1930 That fall, Rachel joined a group of students meeting with the university president to protest the ROTC
requirement for all freshman and sophomore male students. "I told the president that if our boys are true to the four hundred years of history behind them they will not bear arms and are therefore barred from a state institution, [that is] a rather unjust discrimination against a law-abiding tax-paying people like the Mennonites of Ohio." In a letter to a mentor, Rachel's used less formal language. "Military propaganda is exceptionally strong here and there are big fat army men all over the place." The War Department allocated funding and staff to colleges and universities in the early 1920s for Reserve Officers' Training Corps. By the early 1930s, roughly two-thirds of public higher education campuses
offered military training. ROTC sparked controversy in a student population already chafing for change. Motivated by the poverty of the Great Depression, the 1930's
student movement organized around a broad agenda for national reform, calling for federal education funding, academic freedom, job programs for youth, the right to collective bargaining and an end to racial segregation and discrimination.
At its peak, 1936-1939, some 500,000 youth, about half of the America's
college students at the time, mobilized each spring, walking out of class to demonstrate for peace. American students worried about rising fascism around the
world. They'd grown up in a time of widespread disillusionment with WWI and their anti-war agenda brought together diverse groups. Communists, socialists, isolationist Republicans, and pacifist religious communities found common ground.
Students in the 1930s experienced the erosion of democracy that we're seeing now. The Sedition Act of 1918, which the President Trump is threatening to bring back, restricted freedom of speech and assembly. People who voiced anti-war opinions were branded unpatriotic and disloyal. American industry reaped profit by manufacturing and supplying weapons and ammunition for the trench warfare in Europe and students feared corporate greed would influence a rush to war. Rachel got involved in April 1935, when religious pacifists and leftist student groups gathered to plan the second nationwide student "strike" against war. At Ohio State, a communist speaker hijacked the program and harangued the religious groups, interventionists and capitalists. "I never saw so little sense shown," Rachel said. It distressed her that the Pacifist Club, left-wing political groups and religious organizations like the YMCA had trouble working together, even though they were after the same ends. Rachel wrote a strongly-worded letter to the YMCA leaders November 29, 1934, urging them to reconsider their decision. "We never needed union more," she wrote. "I am sure there is a way to rise above our divisions if we will, and we will if we mean what we say." But the factions could not put their differences aside and United Front Committee at Ohio State failed. Rachel's experience foreshadowed the division that later that decade broke apart the national student movement. The organization was not strong enough to
withstand the labeling and scapegoating when people afraid of communist revolution banded together with corporations to oppose their goals and critique their power. Fascists fear solidarity of the people because they can't win against it.
Solidarity Sunflowers, Roger Peet, https://justseeds.org/graphic/solidarity-sunflowers/ Solidarity is an awareness of shared interests, objectives, standards, and sympathies creating a psychological sense of unity. Solidarity does not reject individuals and sees individuals as the basis of society. This means 1) we need to be aware of our shared interests and 2) we be united in our goal and still have our differences. To win against a fascist regime we must move beyond
awareness and difference to action. Even a small action makes a difference, like reaching out to let someone know they can depend on you when trouble comes. Next week,
I'll tell you about the action I'm taking with Showing up for Racial Justice (SURJ). If you like my story today, please share this email with
others.
Sources https://mla.bethelks.edu/ml-archive/2002dec/juhnke_kreider.php#N_4_
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