Lessons learned from the struggle

Author and historian Adam Hochschild has been party to more than his share of social agitation.

While a student at Harvard, Hochschild spent the 1962 summer break working for an anti-apartheid newspaper in South Africa, then came home to enlist in the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements. Those fights drew him to journalism and, in 1974, led him to join some like-minded friends in launching Mother Jones, an investigative magazine for political progressives.

So Hochschild, 62, has been around the protest block. Still, it came as a surprise to him a few years ago to find the roots of modern political action in the ornately penned minutes of 18th century British anti-slavery meetings. It was all there. Grass-roots organizing. Political posters. Campaign pins. Speakers bureaus and hired poets trumpeting the cause from street corners, pubs and coffee shops -- the ancestral op-ed piece, he says.

Darwinian rules applied -- only the fittest ideas survived.

“Reading the minutes, it’s not as though they sat down and brainstormed, ‘What are the new techniques we can do?’ ” Hochschild says, sitting in a sun-dappled kitchen window alcove of his home overlooking the Castro District. “But they were very alert to when someone had stumbled onto one of these techniques and it worked; they saw it.”

Hochschild’s new book, “Bury the Chains,” offers a history of the British abolitionists, a commendable crew of zealots who over a half-century persuaded the world’s then-dominant superpower to sacrifice economic self-interest for the freedom of people halfway around the world.

At least that’s the way conventional history treats the story -- the reality, as Hochschild writes, was much more convoluted, and with more shadows.

But his book also argues -- as did Hochschild during a Los Angeles Public Library talk this week -- that the British abolitionists launched the world’s first mass social protest movement. It was, Hochschild believes, a watershed moment in civil progress.

“It was the first time a large number of people became outraged, and stayed outraged for many years, over someone else’s rights,” Hochschild writes. “And most startling of all, the rights of people of another color, on another continent.”

“Bury the Chains” is Hochschild’s sixth book, and each has touched at least obliquely on human rights issues, from his 1986 “Half the Way Home: A Memoir of a Father and Son,” about his own awakening to the world, to 1994’s “The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin,” to his award-winning “King Leopold’s Ghost” in 1998, which detailed the brutal roots of Belgian Congo and the millions who died there beginning in the 1880s.

The books also reveal the core of Hochschild’s interests. History is defined by big events like wars and cataclysms, colonial expansions and such broad conditions as slavery. Hochschild tries to block out the glare from those supernovas to find smaller flashes of the human experience -- the ambitions of Belgium’s King Leopold, the Russian people surviving a murderous government, individual morality.

“I like writing about these things for the same reasons that writers for a very long time have liked writing about good and evil,” Hochschild says. “I find so much human drama in the stories like this one about the anti-slavery movement. To me, it’s much more exciting than writing about World War II or the American Civil War, where you can also have a sense of there are good guys and bad guys and the good guys win. But it’s a story that’s been told so many times.”

A native New Yorker, Hochschild landed in San Francisco in 1964 “in pursuit of my then-fiancee, now wife,” Berkeley sociologist and author Arlie Hochschild, “for what we thought would be just a year or two until we moved back to the East Coast, which of course was the center of the world.”

They decided to stick around.

A Harvard grad and former Fulbright scholar, Adam Hochschild has the look and tone of an East Coast academic, with a shock of white hair over a medium build, a slightly craggy face and a penchant for comfortable small-plaid shirts. He speaks evenly, in conversant paragraphs, with an engaging tone that would seem at home across the bay at Berkeley, where Hochschild is a part-time lecturer in the graduate school of journalism.

The arrangement feeds several of Hochschild’s interests -- talking about the creative process of writing, discussing journalism and delving into Berkeley’s extensive library, one of the largest collections in the world. Access to the library, which has extensive holdings from Georgian England, allowed Hochschild to research his book on British history while making only two overseas trips.

He intended to write a biography of British evangelist John Newton, a former slave-ship captain who was reputed to have written the hymn “Amazing Grace” after having a mid-ocean epiphany, turning his slave-laden ship back to Africa and leaving the trade.

Hochschild discovered that Newton actually quit for health reasons and continued to make money from slave investments even after becoming a clergyman. Newton didn’t write “Amazing Grace” until 18 years after he left the sea, and publicly renounced slavery only when it became a popular position in England -- making him a classic bandwagon-jumper.

“When I found out all this I was kind of discouraged,” Hochschild says. But another aside saved the project. Hochschild had stumbled across a reference to someone he had not heard of before -- Thomas Clarkson -- who had visited Newton and talked him into lending his name to the cause.

“Then I began to think, ‘Well, maybe the movement was the story, and who is this guy Thomas Clarkson?’ who turns out to be my central character,” Hochschild says. “So after several months of barking up the wrong tree, I finally got the story in focus.”

Clarkson, as it turns out, was the spark that lighted the fire. As a student at Cambridge University in 1785, he won a Latin essay contest by writing about slavery -- an issue he had not contemplated before. With his prize and degree in hand, he set off on horseback for London. But with the contest excitement over, the weight of his research settled heavily on him. Stopping by a river, Clarkson was overwhelmed.

“I sat down disconsolate on the turf by the roadside and held my horse,” Clarkson wrote in his memoirs decades later. “Here a thought came into my mind, that if the contents of the Essay were true, it was time some person should see these calamities to their end.”

The movement would consume Clarkson for the next 50 years.

Abolitionists were already active in England, particularly among the Quakers. But Clarkson became their organizer. The abolitionists saw themselves as living under a higher code, answering to God first and earthly laws second, much like current activists fighting abortion or, to a lesser extent, the death penalty. And they fashioned tools still used by protest and social-reform movements of all stripes.

From an initial May 22, 1787, meeting of a dozen abolitionists in a print shop in what is now London’s financial district, the movement hired Clarkson as its first full-time organizer. Over the next few years he traveled 35,000 miles within England building the network of local committees.

Once the structure was in place, they circulated petitions as a virtual show of hands in a society in which few people could vote. They sought coalitions with abolitionists in revolutionary France and the young United States. They designed posters, pamphlets and speeches to argue the inhumanity of stealing Africans from their homes to work in chains for the sake of English sugar. And in a tactic that Cesar Chavez would embrace nearly 200 years later in trying to organize California’s farm workers, they arranged a consumer boycott of sugar, the main product of West Indies slave estates.

Still, it took the victims themselves, in the form of bloody Caribbean revolts that cost the lives of some 45,000 British soldiers, to convince a recalcitrant House of Lords that England’s best interests lay in ending the slave trade.

“The British were whipped, essentially, by the rebel slaves in Haiti ... and they only just barely suppressed a revolt in Jamaica in 1831-32,” Hochschild says. “Neither of those got much attention from British historians.”

The final vote by the House of Lords, many of whose members had large stakes in slave-based businesses -- wasn’t an act of enlightenment, no matter how self-congratulatory the spin of the day, Hochschild says. The vote was a matter of political expediency. The financial and human costs became more than English society was willing to spend.

But the spark for all that followed was that small gathering in a print shop of a dozen individual voices -- a success that emboldens social movements today.

“It was a very small group that accomplished something very huge,” Hochschild says.

“Seeing what they succeeded in doing gives me enormous hope.”