Acceptance of America's Future

The following is Moyers acceptance speech for the Lifetime Leadership Award given at the Take Back America conference last week.

Thank you for this award and for this occasion. I don't deserve either, but as George Burns said, I have arthritis and I don't deserve that, either.

Tomorrow is my 69th birthday and I cannot imagine a better present than this award or a better party than your company.

Fifty three years ago tomorrow, on my l6th birthday, I went to work for the daily newspaper in the small East Texas town where I grew up. It was a good place to be a cub reporter -- small enough to navigate but big enough to keep me busy and learning something every day. I soon had a stroke of luck. Some of the old timers were on vacation or out sick and I got assigned to cover what came to be known as the Housewives' Rebellion. Fifteen women in my home town decided not to pay the social security withholding tax for their domestic workers. They argued that social security was unconstitutional, that imposing it was taxation without representation, and that -- here's my favorite part -- "requiring us to collect (the tax) is no different from requiring us to collect the garbage." They hired themselves a lawyer -- none other than Martin Dies, the former congressman best known, or worst known, for his work as head of the House Committee on Un-American Activities in the 30s and 40s. He was no more effective at defending rebellious women than he had been protecting against communist subversives, and eventually the women wound up holding their noses and paying the tax.

The stories I wrote for my local paper were picked up and moved on the Associated Press wire. One day, the managing editor called me over and pointed to the AP ticker beside his desk. Moving across the wire was a notice citing one Bill Moyers and the paper for the reporting we had done on the "Rebellion."

That hooked me, and in one way or another -- after a detour through seminary and then into politics and government for a spell -- I've been covering the class war ever since. Those women in Marshall, Texas were its advance guard. They were not bad people. They were regulars at church, their children were my friends, many of them were active in community affairs, their husbands were pillars of the business and professional class in town. They were respectable and upstanding citizens all. So it took me awhile to figure out what had brought on that spasm of reactionary rebellion. It came to me one day, much later. They simply couldn't see beyond their own prerogatives. Fiercely loyal to their families, to their clubs, charities and congregations -- fiercely loyal, in other words, to their own kind -- they narrowly defined membership in democracy to include only people like them. The women who washed and ironed their laundry, wiped their children's bottoms, made their husband's beds, and cooked their family meals -- these women, too, would grow old and frail, sick and decrepit, lose their husbands and face the ravages of time alone, with nothing to show from their years of labor but the crease in their brow and the knots on their knuckles; so be it; even on the distaff side of laissez faire, security was personal, not social, and what injustice existed this side of heaven would no doubt be redeemed beyond the Pearly Gates. God would surely be just to the poor once they got past Judgment Day.

In one way or another, this is the oldest story in America: the struggle to determine whether "we, the people" is a spiritual idea embedded in a political reality -- one nation, indivisible -- or merely a charade masquerading as piety and manipulated by the powerful and privileged to sustain their own way of life at the expense of others.

Let me make it clear that I don't harbor any idealized notion of politics and democracy; I worked for Lyndon Johnson, remember? Nor do I romanticize "the people." You should read my mail -- or listen to the vitriol virtually spat at my answering machine. I understand what the politician meant who said of the Texas House of Representatives, "If you think these guys are bad, you should see their constituents."