Activist New York: A History of People, Protest, and Politics by Steven H. Jaffe

Reviewed by: Activist New York: A History of People, Protest, and Politics by Steven H. Jaffe Peter Eisenstadt (bio) Activist New York: A History of People, Protest, and Politics By Steven H. Jaffe. Foreword by Eric Foner. New York: New York University Press, 2018. 304 pages, illustrations (some color), 8" x 10." $40.00 cloth. In Activist New York: A History of People, Protest, and Politics, Steve Jaffe makes the case for a continuous history of activism in New York City politics, starting with Quakers petitioning Peter Stuyvesant and concluding, as of now, with the four hundred thousand pussy-hatted participants in the Woman's March protesting the inauguration of the current president of the United States. Activist New York is a product of a permanent exhibit on display at the Museum of the City of New York's Puffin Foundation for Social Activism, though the exhibit, which opened in 2012, preceded its companion volume by six years. The volume is a thoughtful and well-illustrated account of radicals, reformers, protesters, and malcontents, arranged in sixteen chronologically arranged short chapters, with shorter inserts on other movements within the chapters. Some of the subjects covered in this book include labor militants, anarchists from Emma Goldman to Occupy Wall Street, gay and lesbian liberationists, suffragists, abolitionists, Latino militants, Communists, the New Negro in interwar Harlem, John Peter Zenger printing potentially libelous newspapers attacking colonial governor William Cosby, Orson Welles producing the radical musical The Cradle Will Rock, and builders of low-income housing in Brooklyn and the Bronx in the 1970s and 1980s. Any book of this sort has to make choices on what to include within its space limitations, and Activist New York generally succeeds in providing a good mix of topics both expected and somewhat surprising. I particularly liked the two Latino chapters (one on José Martí and the Cuban independence movement, another on the Young Lords), and the chapter on Johnny Ray Youngblood, Louis Gigante, and housing reform. Still there were some surprising omissions. Labor activism drops out of the book after the early twentieth century. Educational reform, probably the most pervasive form of civic activism in New York City, receives little space in the book. Why a chapter on Cuban nationalism and so little on Irish nationalism or Zionism? What about temperance and other Protestant-inspired reformers like Charles Parkhurst? And though Jaffe does mention that not all activists were left of center, a chapter devoted to recent right-wing activism, such as the anti-integrationist Parents and Taxpayers organization, or antiabortion activists, employing the street demonstration tactics of their left-of-center counterparts, could have been a useful counterpoint to the bulk of the book. For all the topics Jaffee chose to write about, his accounts are excellent, to the point, based on the best current scholarship, lively, and illuminating. A few quibbles. The heading [End Page 154] "Socialist Legacies: Housing Cooperatives and the Amalgamated Bank" neglects the key role played by Jewish anarchists, especially Abraham Kazan, in the building of the Amalgamated Houses, and subsequently in the United Housing Foundation (headed by Kazan), the developer of both Rochdale Village and Co-op City. I would have liked a little more nuance in the account of anti-Communism in the 1950s, which is largely reduced to a fight between the Communist Party, USA, and various McCarthyite reactionaries, with not enough attention paid to liberal non- and anti-Communists, who often were progressive activists in their own right. For all the accomplishments of Activist New York, in the end one is left wondering if the category of activism is too ambiguous and amorphous to contain all these protest movements under a single conceptual rubric. Jaffe acknowledges the slipperiness of the term and offers a definition: "Activism is what happens when ordinary people mobilize in hope of shaping their society's future through collective public action" (12). I would add that activism, as the term is currently understood, usually involves a higher level of politics, a devotion to a specific cause, rather than, say rallying for a political candidate or a labor dispute. The term activist first entered the political vocabulary during World War I, referring to persons in...