Civil Disobedience: An American Tradition. By Lewis Perry. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2013. xv + 407. $35.00 cloth.

Abstract

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Civil Disobedience: An American Tradition . By Lewis Perry . New Haven, Conn. : Yale University Press , 2013. xv + 407. $35.00 cloth.Book Reviews and NotesThis impressively comprehensive survey traces the practice and theory of disobedience the United States from the eighteenth century to the present. Violating the law in the name of higher morality is, according to Perry, a distinctive American that flourished every age and achieved special prominence the decades before the Civil War and the 1960s (1). Perry moves deftly from abolition to Occupy, from campaigns against Indian removal to Operation Rescue, touching en route on women's rights, temperance, pacifism, labor organizing, and other impulses for social transformation.Several thematic arguments give shape to Perry's chronological narrative. The first is encapsulated the subtitle: gently resisting the transnational tendencies of other American studies scholars, Perry insists on the American provenance of disobedience. This approach to social change appeals to democracy-loving Americans because it is civil as well as disobedient. It allows the activist to affirm the general validity of democratic institutions even while violating specific unjust laws. Perry's stress on the Americanness of disobedience helps him underscore its character as tradition that is continuous over time. Too much emphasis on the Gandhian character of rights, for example, would obscure its homegrown reliance on abolitionist precedents. On the other hand, Perry's approach obscures the profoundly cosmopolitan sensibilities of most disobedients. In the abolitionist era, Henry David Thoreau read the sacred texts of India, William Lloyd Garrison declared that our country is the world, and William Wells Brown began resisting Jim Crow segregation after experiencing integration England. Their twentieth-century successors filled their homes with icons of Mohandas Gandhi, Oscar Romero, and Nelson Mandela. Few imagined that the United States was the only arena for their activism.A second guiding theme is the religious origin of disobedience. Though many activists claim the Boston Tea Party as inspiration, Perry suggests that it was less influential than the refusal of eighteenth-century Baptists to pay church taxes. Shortly before abolitionists began using disobedience on large scale, group of protestant missionaries to the Cherokee accepted imprisonment rather than comply with the Jacksonian policy of Indian removal. I found these stories to be the most exciting part of the book, but they raise questions. If eighteenth-century Baptists New England are part of the story, why not sixteenth-century Anabaptists Switzerland? And if the Baptist campaign against state religion launched the tradition, why were Baptists proportionately under-represented subsequent disobedience campaigns, while establishmentarian Congregationalists and Unitarians were over-represented? (The even more over-represented Quakers might offer clue, since they had both an anti-establishmentarian theology and heritage of quasi-establishment Pennsylvania.)Perry's training as an intellectual historian informs third theme. He is fascinated with the theory underlying disobedience, and repeatedly skewers activists for seeking to circumscribe it within narrow definition. Civil disobedience, he insists, has never been restricted to pacifists. …