The Sojourner Truth Organization: Notes Toward a History

I’ve been a big Bruce Springsteen fan all my life, since I was in kindergarten and my oldest brother played Born to Run all the time.  As I’ve aged (not to say matured), I’ve come to appreciate the subtleties of Springsteen’s lyrics at least as much as the in-your-face simplicity of his music.  His attention to (white) working class experience reflects a set of political commitments that run deeper than just shilling for Kerry in 2004, and I have significantly more respect for him politically than I do for any other gazillionaire rock star Democratic Party cheerleader.

When I first met several former members of STO a decade ago, I quickly learned that a couple of them were huge Springsteen fans.  I discovered that they too were impressed both by his take on rock-n-roll, and by the tales of working class life that populated albums like Darkness on the Edge of Town and Nebraska.  (One of these members recently told me that the Kansas City branch of STO leafleted the local stop on the Born to Run tour in 1977 – when I was running around my parents’ house in pajamas listening to my brother’s new favorite record – although she was unable to locate the leaflet in question.)

So, as I’ve pursued my research, I often find myself pairing stories of STO with songs by Bruce Springsteen.  Songs like “Youngstown” are obvious enough parallels to the deindustrialization that plagued STO throughout its existence.  But there are others.  As one example, consider the lyrics to the song “The River:”

I come from down in the valley
where mister when you’re young
They bring you up to do like your daddy done
Me and Mary we met in high school
when she was just seventeen
We’d ride out of that valley down to where the fields were green

We’d go down to the river
And into the river we’d dive
Oh down to the river we’d ride

Then I got Mary pregnant
and man that was all she wrote
And for my nineteenth birthday I got a union card and a wedding coat
We went down to the courthouse
and the judge put it all to rest
No wedding day smiles no walk down the aisle
No flowers no wedding dress

That night we went down to the river
And into the river we’d dive
Oh down to the river we did ride

I got a job working construction for the Johnstown Company
But lately there ain’t been much work on account of the economy
Now all them things that seemed so important
Well mister they vanished right into the air
Now I just act like I don’t remember
Mary acts like she don’t care

But I remember us riding in my brother’s car
Her body tan and wet down at the reservoir
At night on them banks I’d lie awake
And pull her close just to feel each breath she’d take
Now those memories come back to haunt me
they haunt me like a curse
Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true
Or is it something worse
that sends me down to the river
though I know the river is dry
That sends me down to the river tonight
Down to the river
my baby and I
Oh down to the river we ride

On one level, this is a simple story of frustration and nostalgia, but on another level it is clearly a metaphor for the broad process of working class dislocation that was the result of deindustrialization in the seventies and eighties.  The dream of working class “success” was in tatters:  no longer did heavy industry provide a guaranteed job from youth to retirement, or even retirement benefits for those who had been raised to “do like your daddy done.”  Undoubtedly, lay-offs and plant closures led to any number of broken and dysfunctional marriages, but the relationship described in the song also reflects social realities of patriarchy and alienation under capitalism.

At the risk of reading too much into a single song, I will add one more layer of metaphor, this one obviously unintended by Springsteen.  In the interviews I have done as part of my research, I have frequently encountered a sense of nostalgic longing for the optimism of the past.  In some cases this nostalgia reflects a conscious awareness of the toll that deindustrialization had on STO’s early commitment to working class power at the point of production.  In others, the longing is simply for the open revolutionary horizons of the early seventies (or even, in some cases, the late seventies, at least as compared to the rightward shift of the eighties).  While most interviewees are still engaged politically, the nostalgic undercurrent I’ve encountered is perhaps typified by a preliminary question asked of me by one long-time member I approached for an interview:  “Do you still have hope?”  

My answer was an emphatic “yes,” but the question still haunts me, as I reflect on my own history of failed projects and lost optimism.  Another long time member said to me, “It took us [STO members] twenty years to burn out; you anarchists only took ten.”  True enough, at least for some of us, and for the time being.  But many of us keep heading back down to the river of activism, hoping that it doesn’t run dry.