The Penguin Book of Twentieth Century Protest, edited by Brian MacArthur Viking, 440pp, £20 in UK
The protester is often better remembered than the protest - which is as good a reason as any for such a collection as this, 289 expressions of protest, anger, dissent and remonstrance, both spoken and written, delivered during the current century. And no better man to do the collection than Brian MacArthur, whose previous books include The Penguin Book of Historic Speeches and The Penguin Book of Twentieth-Century Speeches.
"Protest," writes MacArthur, "is the stuff of everyday life .. . the engine of democracy." In exposition of the former, we are all protesters, raising our timid, individual voices in dissent against taxes, politicians, queues, traffic jams, the weather, even. But these are hardly the stuff of notable protest, even if uttered by a Garret FitzGerald or a Charlie Haughey.
We must look, therefore, for more serious subjects if protest is to be regarded as "the engine of democracy", moving bigger pistons and mightier wheels. Such subjects are here in plenty, from Ida B. Wells's argument against the lynching of blacks in 1900, through Alex Comfort's 1958 plea to "Ban the Bomb", to Tony Benn's eloquent speech in the British House of Commons in 1998 on "War as a computer game".
In between there are Keir Hardy, Sylvia Pankhurst, Aneurin Bevan, Andre Gide, Jomo Kenyatta, George Orwell, Che Guevara, Nelson Mandela, Germaine Greer, Paul Foot, Edward Said - more men than women, you will notice, but then democracy implies that a protest for one should mean a protest for all. Women are well served, however, by the likes of Emily Hobhouse (on British concentration camps in South Africa), Beatrice Webb (on the workhouse), Isabel Brown (on the bombing of Durango during the Spanish Civil War), Margaret Chase Smith (on McCarthyism) and Bernadette Devlin (giving her maiden speech in the House of Commons in 1969).
There are, in fact, several "Irish" protests in the collection: the Proclamation of the Irish Republic in 1916; a denunciation of the Black and Tans and Lloyd George from the Nation, a British liberal journal in 1920; Paul Foot's book review about the Birmingham Six - and, not unexpectedly, The Irish Times's leading article of 1974 in which "the bigots of Belfast" were criticised after the fall of the power-sharing Executive.
Here too are G.B. Shaw in vituperative mood about women at the opera (hardly a vital democratic matter, admittedly) and the text of the Solemn Covenant of 1912 in opposition to Home Rule. Not here, however, is a protest which I feel should have been included - that which de Valera made on radio in reply to Mr Churchill's mean-spirited attack on "Eire" and its neutrality in May, 1945.
But, as the editor makes clear, "only a small number of the hundreds of thousands of protests made during the turmoil of the twentieth century are chronicled in this anthology". Any editor's choice will, of course, be personal and eclectic and the number of protests is determined by the size of the book. MacArthur set himself a guiding principle which was to select only successful protests (whether for good or ill) about what he terms "profound issues". This may explain the inclusion of Adolf Hitler, with extracts from his speech at his 1924 trial and from Mein Kampf, but hardly justifies the aforementioned Mr Shaw's letter to the Times about women's hats at the opera.
Apart from this latter wavering of principles on the part of Mr MacArthur - and another wobble with the inclusion of Colin Welch's 1960 essay attacking Enid Blyton's Noddy ("this witless, spiritless, snivelling, sneaking doll") - he manages to adhere faithfully to his objective and include only serious subjects. John Arlott's explanation of his refusal to broadcast commentaries on the BBC on the cricket matches involving the South African team in 1970 merits inclusion because its background lay in the controversy about apartheid.
None of the protests will tax the endurance of even the laziest reader. Few of them are longer than four pages (Gandhi's 1922 court statement on non-violence is probably the lengthiest) while the shortest is the one-liner carried by a Negro in an anti-Vietnam War march on the Pentagon in 1967: "No Vietnamese Ever Called Me a Nigger". Obviously someone was bearing in mind Emerson's admonition that "sometimes a scream is better than a thesis".
Here, then, is a Pandora's box of protests, a collection that has an expression of dissent about most of the ills of our fallible times, a collection that gives the lie to John Osborne's Jimmy Porter in Look Back in Anger when he raged that there were no good, brave causes left in 1956. He was not to know that Fidel Castro, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and many other protesters were still to come, to change the world with their oratory and their anger.
This fine anthology captures all the anger and anxiety, doubt and dissent of most of the great issues of the 20th Century.
