“Generous hope is embedded in the national landscape, waiting to be remembered.” (from A Great Amnesia). While we wait out the final days of the Bush Administration, it is good to be reminded of times in our social history when we were bold and generous. To stir our imaginations, Marilynne Robinson recalls the Second Great Awakening -- a time of big ideas and social experiments spanning the years before, during and just after the Civil War. It was a time when abolitionists, poets, reformers and revivalists believed in a young nation's ability to rise to greater standards of justice and freedom. Among the reformers were egalitarian educators who held the simple yet transformative idea that higher learning and intellectual achievement should be available to everyone, not just the privileged few. From the Northeast to the Prairie, these reformers built institutions of higher learning where farmers, factory workers, women and African Americans worked and studied together, creating social arrangements that embodied what Robinson calls ‘equality without condescension.’

A kind of amnesia set in after Reconstruction. During this period, monopoly capitalism took hold, creating gross inequalities and distorting the role of government. In the realm of ideas, social Darwinism offered convenient explanations for inequality, turning immigrants and African American workers into handy scapegoats, and putting women back in their place. It was a time when well-organized corporate and elite forces resisted regulation and eschewed social responsibility. The results sound hauntingly familiar: unsafe products, diminished social welfare, dangerous working conditions, farm failures, corrupt government, concentrated wealth, a series of financial crises and an economic panic.

A spark from the Second Great Awakening remained, though. Networks of farmers and workers brought about another era of populist and progressive ideas. In time, populist-progressive reforms would be discarded again, only to be revived and extended as part of the New Deal in the 1930s.

Even in a time of amnesia, the progress made during periods of mass political engagement are not completely undone. Every period of great change has been supported and sustained by social movement organizations. Without our movements, periods of awakening are short-lived. Social change organizations and networks are places where we can again experiment with more equitable and democratic social arrangements.

Hard as it is for our 21st century minds to grasp, the revivalists and reformers of 1835 may have known more about day-to-day democracy and equality than we do today. Like the reformers of the Second Awakening, who believed in the eloquence, sensitivity and leadership potential of farmers and workers, we can aim for equality without condescension.

-- Sandra Hinson