[[link removed]]

‘HARD WORK OF HOPE’: A MEMOIR OF THE NEW LEFT, ANTIWAR MOVEMENT,
AND WORKING CLASS POLITICS  
[[link removed]]


 

Roger Bybee
August 25, 2025
Foreign Policy in Focus
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ While not providing a clear antidote to Trumpism, Michael
Ansara’s “Hard Work” still delivers indispensable insights into
activism from the 1960s to today. _

, Antiwar demonstrators protest the Vietnam in New York, 1970.
(Shutterstock)

 

Michael Ansara’s _The Hard Work of Hope_ is an extraordinary memoir,
presenting the political and personal reflections of a dedicated
organizer over many decades.

From his early teens, Ansara played crucial roles, from civil rights
advocacy to anti-war and student activism, and most notably, leading a
major effort by the New Left to develop into innovative and lasting
organizations outside campus walls.

_Hard Work_ brings together razor-sharp analyses of these causes and,
crucially, the current crisis represented by Trump’s second election
in 2024. It offers a compelling, page-turning overview of the
kaleidoscopic transformations of the 1960s and beyond as the New Left
— with Ansara often playing a critical role — reached out to
broader audiences, especially the working class.

The book reveals Ansara’s paradoxical gifts as an organizer: both a
pulsing, burning drive for radical change in America and an endless
patience to listen to and persuade people who are initially opposed to
him or feel too powerless to act.

WE ALLOWED “MILITANCY TO REPLACE STRATEGY”

Ansara, the son of a Syrian-Lebanese father and a non-practicing
Jewish mother, grew up in difficult financial conditions. His
Harvard-educated father, fired from the federal government in 1947 for
his leftist politics, toiled as a cab driver and his mother, also
left-leaning, working as a tutor in their home in Brookline,
Massachusetts.

He experienced a life-changing experience at eight when a temporary
joint disorder paralyzed him, leaving him alone with his books. The
well-read young Michael Ansara emerged feeling full of knowledge and a
fearlessness in taking on authority, including resistance to the
“civil defense” drills of the 1950s, when children were compelled
to cower beneath their desks.

The horrors and hypocrisy of racism and the nuclear arms race
powerfully struck a chord with young Ansara. One day at age 13, Ansara
found himself literally wandering into an anti-segregation picket line
in Boston. His fast-growing, fearless commitment and hard work for the
cause rapidly came to generate faith among his Black elders in the
movement.

Later, Ansara studied at Harvard as a scholarship recipient. With a
deepening understanding of power in America, Ansara was magnetically
drawn to Students for a Democratic Society and the New Left. The vivid
horrors of the Vietnam War soon consumed his energies. He became such
a well-known, audacious figure in the movement that he was suddenly
called upon to grill Secretary of State Robert McNamara about Vietnam
in an extraordinary confrontation on the roof of a car, halted in its
tracks by massive crowds of students in Cambridge.

The next few years were a non-stop whirlwind of activity for Ansara,
characteristic of the breathlessly paced 1960s, as he tirelessly
organized students and the broader anti-war movement.

Ansara recounts the wave of shocks in 1968, which saw the
assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy,
massive Black street rebellions exploding in dozens of cities, the
Columbia student strike, and an ongoing stream of anti-war protests,
including the violent “police riot” at the Democratic National
Convention in Chicago.

With Democratic presidential nominee Hubert Humphrey largely operating
under the powerful thumb of war-fixated President Lyndon Johnson,
Ansara and many anti-war young people abstained from voting, and
Richard Nixon won by less than 1 percent.

Ansara now concludes that urging abstention was a major mistake, as
Humphrey likely would have been far more receptive to anti-war
pressures than Nixon. (Only years later would we learn that, prior to
the election, Nixon and Henry Kissinger “secretly committed
treason,” as Ansara puts it, persuading South Vietnamese negotiators
to back off from a treaty that was in the works to end the war in late
1968.)

Ansara recounts how the cascading events of the late 1960s and early
1970s took place against a backdrop of a splintering New Left. The
anti-war movement fought indefatigably but was unable to stop the
ever-escalating Vietnam War. “We had a ‘minority mindset’,”
Ansara ruefully recalls.

“We allowed our embrace of militancy to replace strategy,” Ansara
reflects. He was at the eye of the storm as that embrace intensified,
and became Number One on the list of “subversive” targets
maintained by Boston area police agencies — and among the top 100
targets nationally. These dubious honors earned him brutal beatings by
police officers. A group of Boston detectives, when finding Ansara
alone, amused themselves by pressing their loaded revolvers against
his head.

Meanwhile, as the war at home escalated, the lack of strong
organizational leadership mirrored the lack of strategy, Ansara
recounts. He painfully watched as factionalism tore the vital SDS
organization apart in 1969, splitting it into warring factions.

By May 1970, there was no SDS to provide coordination and leadership
when the U.S. invaded Cambodia and National Guard forces killed
students at Kent State in Ohio and Jackson State in Mississippi,
igniting an estimated 900 student strikes across the nation.

“MY ROAD TO DAMASCUS RAN THROUGH LOWELL”

Ansara recalls his anti-war work as increasingly migrating toward
working-class communities in the Boston area. But honing this strategy
required learning some difficult truths.

Immersing themselves in working-class and poor neighborhoods, Ansara
and his colleagues came to grips with the shattering, all-encompassing
changes brought on by deindustrialization. “We recognized the
beginning of a profound process that has indeed played out over the
last 40 years,” he writes. “A large segment of the population,
especially those who had no college education, faced new challenges;
their incomes stagnated and then declined, their social world
collapsing_.”_

A particularly revelatory moment occurred with an anti-war
demonstration planned for the deindustrializing, textile-centered city
of Lowell.  Ansara vividly recalls the setting: “Lowell was a
hollow shell of the vibrant mill town that brought the industrial
revolution to America… The massive brick buildings, beautiful and
mighty, stood vacant, stripped of the machinery that had been moved to
the American South before continuing on to Central America and
Asia.”

Against that background, Ansara and his anti-war colleagues were
hoping for a warm reception in Lowell. But instead of encountering
working-class people infuriated with corporate CEOs offloading their
jobs and disgusted with a war that used their sons as cannon fodder,
the anti-war protesters and other organizers immediately found
themselves under ferocious attack.

It was a violent pro-war riot waged by local working-class people. The
onslaught against the protesters was so ferocious that, ironically,
Ansara and his wife were forced to find refuge in the Lowell police
station.

But as tempers of the rioters settled down, Ansara engaged with the
hostile young people clustered around the police-station entrance. He
found that they were actually anti-war, but resentful of the
protesters as outsiders. “There are the occasional epiphanies,
moments of clarity sometimes revealing truths that should have been
blindingly obvious,” Ansara declares. “My road to Damascus ran
through Lowell.”

It would take some years for Ansara to fully comprehend the
implications of that moment in Lowell. But once the lessons were
absorbed, Ansara recounts, he and others envisioned an organizing
model that recognized the centrality of working people in social
change; that would build on the common ground they shared with working
people across Massachusetts.

These concepts, sharpened by experiments in organizing on varied
issues, took shape in the Mass Fair Share organization. Mass Fair
Share was founded on the faith that blue-collar people “could be
organized to see the sources of their problems as rooted in the
growing inequality of wealth and power and could be organized to band
together with people of different races and ethnicities who have
experienced the same inequality,” as Ansara explains.

The Mass Fair Share model survives to this day. Ansara contributed to
building a national “Citizen Action” movement that has spawned
similar new movements in many states. In recent years, Ansara has
served as a consultant on issue and electoral campaigns, and has
volunteered for a number of non-profit organizations. He is now
retired and writing poetry.

THE CENTRAL QUESTION TODAY

For all its value, _The Hard Work of Hope_ cannot fully answer the
central question of present-day American politics. How has Donald
Trump, benefactor of billionaires, managed to snatch the populist
banner away from forces on the left, to displace progressive populism
based on the common interests of the working-class majority?

While not providing a clear antidote to Trumpism, _Hard Work_ still
delivers an indispensable set of sharp insights into activism, from
the 1960s to today’s often stupefying environment.

Michael Ansara, with his fine book, keeps hope alive.

_Roger Bybee is a Milwaukee-based freelance writer and progressive
journalist._

_Foreign Policy in Focus (FPIF) is a “Think Tank Without Walls”
connecting the research and action of scholars, advocates, and
activists seeking to make the United States a more responsible global
partner. It is a project of the Institute for Policy Studies._

_FPIF provides timely analysis of U.S. foreign policy and
international affairs and recommends policy alternatives on a broad
range of global issues — from war and peace to trade and from
climate to public health. From its launch as a print journal in 1996
to its digital presence today, FPIF has served as a unique resource
for progressive foreign policy perspectives for decades._

 

* Anti-Vietnam War movement
[[link removed]]
* New Left
[[link removed]]
* Mass Fair Share
[[link removed]]
* citizen action
[[link removed]]
* organizing strategy
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]