Please Add Your Liberal Heroes to this List

It would be constructive to remember our liberal leaders of the past and present by listing them here... I am damn Proud to be a Liberal and so should all others. We are in great company....!

Here are just a few of mine:

George Washington
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Paine
Martin Luther King Jr.


...please add more. Show our DU visitors who they are really up against! Tell them who is who.... they may not even know.

Jim Webb and Andrew Hurst! Great Americans who are running for Senate and Congress.

Saved America and saved the world

Sen. Eugene McCarthy

If you didn't grow up working 16-hour days in a dangerous factory, you probably have this man to thank. Thanks Al Smith!!! :loveya:

I watched a special on PBS regarding Al Smith. I believe it was PBS, but I may be mistaken... thanks for the post.

eom

Stern being the reporter who exposed Duke Cunningham.

No one rages quite like him.

A perfect combination of humility and strength in a feisty package.

Robert Kennedy, Adlai Stephenson, Al Gore, John Kerry.

but I liked Robert best.

...Rep. Pete DeFazio, Rep. Jan Schiakovski, Dennis Kucinich and otehr Congressional Progressives.

Edward R. Murrow
Keith Olbermann
Bill Moyers
Al Franken
Michael Moore
Molly Ivins
Maureen Dowd

my ancestors

Chuck Schumer during the impeachment, Boxer, RFK when he ran for president, Joe Stiglitz's work during Clinton administration...

.

A shout out to those with voices who carry far and speak the truth.

Margaret Sanger 1879-1966. American birth control activist.

Frederick Douglass, Dmitri Shostokovich, Desmond Tutu, Sojourner Truth, Richard Wright, Che Guevarra, Jesus (I'm not a Christian), Emiliano Zapata, Susan B. Anthony, Mikhail Gorbachev...just off the top of my head.

He ended the Cold War, not that fool Reagan, and it took incredible courage for him to do so.

Despite his failure to secure a truly democratic society and prevent it's fall to the rightwingers, he fought and defeated the forces of authoritarianism with little bloodshed. A great man.

...holding back the tanks.
he was a statesman for the age.
pleased to recall he got a better welcome than George Bush I -- by a huge margin -- when he visited the Twin Cities.
he went from Mpls. to the gov. mansion in st. paul and there were thousands along the route, including some protesters. When he saw a group of Russian Jews demanding better emmigration rights he STOPPED his MOTORCADE, got out and went and spent a few minutes talking with them. he evidently promised to look at their concerns.
the protesters were absolutely stunned. they NEVER expected that Gorbachev would speak to them.
The only people more stunned were Gorbachev's KGB entourage, who also had no idea that he would get out ot the limo. They were completely whacked out having Gorbachev in a crowd!
it was great fun!

Thanks! Those are great people you posted, just off the "top of your head".

Molly Ivins

Helen Thomas

Women who speak truth to power

Susan B. Anthony, Mark Twain, Audrey Lourde, Michael Moore, Richard the Lionheart, Jesus Christ, and Clarence Darrow are a good start.

my hero is William Beveridge, the reformer who, in the 1940s, drew up the plan that led to the setting up of Britain's Welfare State.

More loosely defined (and some of these would regard the term 'liberal' as too centrist for them):


Clement Attlee, the postwar Labour Prime Minister whose government set up the Welfare State

Nye Bevan, his Health Minister who specifically introduced the NHS

The Pankhursts, Emily Davison, and all who fought to give women the vote

The Chartists of the 19th century, who fought to turn our country into a true democracy

Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu - two of my greatest modern heroes

Martin Luther King

FDR

All who fought against slavery



And many activists whose names are not recorded in history - including my local heroes, the Oxford schoolchildren who were among the first to take to the streets against the war in 2003, putting our 'Labour' government to shame.

:yourock:

Che, Chomsky, and MLK.

Eugene Debs.

He challenged the Establishment and ran for President from inside a jail cell.

(He got something like 900,000 votes too, I think.)



And some women heroes for the list:

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn - Original Wobbly, co-founder of the ACLU and noted Labor organizer.

Helen Keller (yes...THAT one.) Outspoken Socialist, humanist, advocate and Wobbly. (Funny how we never learned that in school, eh?)

Mary Harris Jones, a.k.a "Mother" Jones - Labor organizer.


:patriot:

Don't forget Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton!

I'll add

Rachel Carson

Harriet Tubman

Eleanor Roosevelt

a self described "constitutional fundamentalist".

-85% Jimmy

assassination was remarkable, and he became not only a true leader, but a very rare leader who really listens to people from a soft heart.

As I understand it, he was so distraught after his brother's death, that today he would be drowned in happy pills. He worked through the grief process so honestly and completely that he came out of it with a real empathy for others.

Hence, his committment to poor folk. He was LEADING this country in real values, rather than following polls.

What a country we would have now if he had lived!!

A true champion of poor folk, with the strength and wisdom to create change.

I know all three are now demonized, but all were radical liberals WHO ACTUALLY TRIED TO REFORM THIS COUNTRY and for they efforts were the most attacked Americans of their time.

Thadeus Stevens, radical Republican, leader of the House team on the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson. Father of the 14th Amendment. While not the author of Pennsylvania Public Schools, was the critical person to make sure Public Schools were preserved in Pennsylvania (And that was in the 1840s). Anti-Slavery advocate, When his iron Mill was destroyed during the CiviL War his first thought was NOT the lost of the Mill, but what would happen to his workers now that he had no employment for them (And found employment for his workers). Founder of the Freeman's Bureau on the ground you could not just Free the slaves and do nothing else, you have to help them become full active citizen of the US. Lived with an Afro-American "Housekeeper" and refused to deny she was his wife.

http://www3.gettysburg.edu/~rhetrick/stevens.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thaddeus_Stevens


William Jennings Bryan is today mostly remembered for the Scopes Monkey Trial (Where his legal argument was that the tax payers had the right to determined what is being taught in Tax payer supported Schools and if the majority of tax payers OPPOSE something being taught they can FORBID that from being taught). This brought together Bryan's basic belief that the Theory of Evolution was leading to a dog eat dog world which he had opposed all of his life.

"Legacy Bryan's contributions to American political and social history far exceed most presidents. For example, Bryan is credited with early championing of the following: (1) graduated income tax (16th Amendment), (2) direct election of U.S. senators (17th Amendment), (3) women's suffrage (19th Amendment), (4) workmen's compensation, (5) minimum wage, (6) eight-hour workday, (7) Federal Trade Commission, (8) Federal Farm Loan Act, (9) government regulation of telephone/telegraph and food safety, (10) Department of Health, (11) Department of Labor, and (12) Department of Education.

Many of Bryan's efforts in 1900 focused on campaign finance reform and curbing abuses of business trusts and monopolies....Bryan played a important role helping President Teddy Roosevelt rein in business abuses and corruption.

Bryan also supported prohibition (after seeing the problem Alcohol does to families of Alcoholics). Thus his opposition to Evolution and his support for Prohibition came out of his liberal background. He did not foresee all of the problem prohibition would cause (and no one did for previous efforts at prohibition had been local and evaded by crossing state lines, with federal Prohibition larger scale bootlegging was necessary which lead to the expansion of Organized Crime in the 1920s). Like many politicians who did good, had to work with people and compromise with them (Thus his lack of position on Segregation). The best quote about Jennings was from a Republican in the mid 1930s (paraphrased) "The New Deal is Bryanism without Bryan".

http://www.agribusinesscouncil.org/bryan.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Jennings_Bryan

And finally Lyndon Baines Johnson, who pushed through the Civil Rights Acts of the 1964, and the main supporter of the Great Society Program, LBJ is often attacked for Vietnam, but in many ways he was forced into Vietnam by the GOP (To prevent the GOP from using "Who lost Vietnam" just like the GOP had used "Who Lost China" throughout the 1950s and early 1960s):

Who but a liberal could have pushed the following acts through Congress:
* The Civil Rights Act of 1964
* The Equal Opportunity Act of 1964
* The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965
* The Medicare Act of 1965
* The Immigration Act of 1965 (Which dropped the European preference of early Immigration law)
* The Voting Rights Act of 1965

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyndon_Johnson
http://www.lbjlib.utexas.edu/johnson/archives.hom/biographys.hom/lbj_bio.asp

Mill's On Liberty and The Subjugation of Women are obvious choices (although he did advocate free market economics). Markham's 1899 poem, below, caused a sensation around the world, and was a seminal influence in the creation of the early progressive movement.

The Man with the Hoe


BOWED by the weight of centuries he leans
Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground,
The emptiness of ages in his face,
And on his back the burden of the world.
Who made him dead to rapture and despair,
A thing that grieves not, and that never hopes,
Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox?
Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw?
Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow?
Whose breath blew out the light within this brain?

Is this the Thing the Lord God made and gave
To have dominion over sea and land;
To trace the stars and search the heavens for power;
To feel the passion of eternity?
Is this the dream He dreamed who shaped the suns
And marked their ways upon the ancient deep?
Down all the caverns of Hell to their last gulf
There is no shape more terrible than this--
More tounged with censure of the world's blind greed--
More filled with signs and portents for the soul--
More packed with danger to the universe.

What gulfs between him and the seraphim!
Slave of the wheel of labor, what to him
Are Plato and swing of the Pleiades?
What the long reaches of the peaks of song,
The rift of dawn, the reddening of the rose?
Through this dread shape the suffering ages look;
Time's tragedy is in that aching stoop;
Through this dread shape humanity betrayed,
Plundered, profaned, and disinherited,
Cries protest to the Judges of the World,
A protest that is also prophecy.

O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,
Is this the handiwork you give to God,
This monstrous thing distorted and soul-quenched?
How will you ever straighten up this shape;
Touch it again with immortality;
Give back the upward looking and the light;
Rebuild in it the music and the dream;
Make right the immemorial infamies,
Perfidious wrongs, immedicable woes?

O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,
How will the Future reckon with this man?
How answer his brute question in that hour
When whirlwinds of rebellion shake all shores?
How will it be with kingdoms and with kings--
With those who shaped him to the thing he is--
When this dumb terror shall rise to judge the world,
After the silence of the centuries?

Edwin Markham

I have no objections to the other names on your list but George was NEVER a liberal. Either him or John Hancock was the richest man in the colonies at the time of the Revolution (Hancock lost money during the Revolution but stayed a rich man, George Seems to have his wealth increased during the Revolution, through he took in Continentals long after other had stop accepting them). HE had slaves but only freed his personnel ones (as opposed the his field hands) and even then when they had basically paid him off for their costs (And when the price of Slaves were at the lowest, the 1790s, Slaves prices would increase after the invention of the Cotton Gin in the 1790s).

Why did Washington back the Revolution in 1775? Because the intolerable Acts had basically took all of land he had purchased from Virginia and gave it to Quebec (It is now Western Pennsylvania, but became Pennsylvania only after Pennsylvania agreed to recognize Virginia land grants in the area Washington owned land). Washington invested heavy in Western Expansion, in fact one of the reason for his debacle at Fort Necessity, was his decs ion to build a road in the directions NOT of Pittsburgh but area where he had land grants on, tyeing up his men from actually building an adequate Fort.

As to Washington's Library, in it you will rarely find a book on law or Government, but you will find books on every get rich book known at that time period (What do you expect for the man who turned his guide over to the French to Be shoot at Fort Necessity, and then SOLD him a suit to be shoot and buried in).

No as a whole Washington was like Ronald Reagan, Washington looked good and had a military bearing, but do not look to him for intellectual discussion. Even when Washington was in the Continental Congress Washington is noted for his lack of speeches (And Benjamin Franklin knew of this weakness so when it came time for the Constitutional Convention, it was Ben who nominated Washington to be PResident of the Convention, a job Washington could perform without showing his intellectual weakness, and Ben could fully participate in the debates on the floor of the Convention).

As a whole, Washington was a Conservative, not a neo-con like we have now, but a true Conservative of the Burke Tradition, willing to change things that need to be changed, but as a whole staying with how things are.

not the famed "wooden teeth" but the teeth from slaves. Is that true? That has always bugged me. And you are right, he was no where near a liberal leaning.

Washington from an early age up to the firm instructions in his Last Will and Testament that "all the Slaves which I hold in own right, shall receive their free" and his provisions for the continued support of any slaves too old or infirm at the time of his death to support themselves.

http://www.thelockeinstitute.org/journals/luminary_v2_n1_p2.html">more

Southern Apologist often like ot point out that many Southern were the first to want to abolish Slavery, but most such activity was in the 1790s when do to the economic situation in the US (One of FOUR Great Depressions in US History, the 1830s, and 1870s and the 1930s are the others) slavery was becoming uneconomical. This all changed with the Cotton Gin, and slavery BOOMED afterward (The Cotton Gin was invented and then adopted throughout the South in the late 1790s, but the real effect did not start till after 1800 AND South of Virginia where cotton could be grown).

Sorry, George Washington died during the last period in time where it looked like the South on its own would get rid of Slavery (Slavery had been shown to be an "Internal Security Hazard" during the Revolution, this fact combined with the decline in the price of slaves in the 1790s lead to the movement to abolish slavery, a movement killed by the Cotton Gin). Furthermore his plantation was to far NORTH to raise Cotton (Which is Roughly the North Carolina-Virginia Border). A further factor is that most of his slaves were technically his wife's property and while he had full use of them during his lifetime, they return to her on his death. Thus his statement as to his slaves have to be taken with the same grain of salt as his statement about NOT taking a slavery while Commanding the US Army during the Revolution. All he asked for was an expense account, which he did NOT present to Congress till the Army was dissolved. Congress choked at the price but paid up (Washington not only padded the Account he did a lot of self-dealing i.e. for example putting on his account the cost of tents he purchased from himself).

As to his statements using the word "Liberal", that word at that time also included Free Trade and no government control of business (Thus Liberal Economics is what most conservative and neo-Conservatives support today, while Liberal tend to what more Government Control to protect consumers and labor).

In fact Ronald Reagan was more to the left of George, one of the Joke about Ronald Reagan was if he saw someone with a shirt he would give that person the shirt of his own back. If Reagan saw someone without a pair of pants he would give that person the pants he was wearings, and then in his underwear sign into laws taking away the ability of those poor person from paying for their own clothes. George would NEVER give someone his clothes, he would sell it to them but NEVER give it away. George through NOTHING of buying the Land grants from his soldiers (Paying just a Nickel on the Dollar) when do to economic hardship they had to sell instead of moving to the land themselves (This is how George was able to get to buy so much land in Western PEnnsylvania). George thought of NOTHING of driving off Squatters off his property without paying them for the "Improvements" they had made to the land (As required by Virginia law of the time period, "Improvements" meant cleaning the land for farming). NO George was no liberal as that term is used today.

The problem he had a gum disease that cause him to lose his teeth early in life. Most of his false teeth seems to have been made from animal's teeth (as was the custom of the time period) made to fit his month.

"As Mankind becomes more liberal, they will be more apt to allow that all those who conduct themselves as worthy members of the community are equally entitled to the protections of civil government. I hope ever to see America among the foremost nations of justice and liberality."

-- George Washington

Ronnie Dugger
Jim Hightower
Sissy Farenthold

Just to name a few...

Along with Molly Ivins and Ann Richards (God Bless Her), my 3 favorite Texans.

My avatar...

With audio of Tommy:

http://archives.cbc.ca/IDD-1-73-851/politics_economy/tommy_douglas/

and

http://www.cbc.ca/greatest/top_ten/nominee/douglas-tommy.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Douglas

http://www.weyburnreview.com/tommydouglas/welcome.html

http://www.tommydouglas.ca/

The man is staggeringly eloquent and a passionate liberal. Far more liberal than Bill Clinton (although I admire him, too). Clinton unjustly eclipsed Cuomo as gifted public speaker. They are both good, but Cuomo is in a class by himself.




Also:

Jimmy Carter
Every unnamed, unsung hero who worked "waystations" along the Underground Railroad.