A few weeks ago, at the dedication of the Martin Luther King Jr. national memorial, President Obama stated boldly that MLK would have approved of the Occupy Wall Street Movement. Indeed, he would have! Other cherished ghosts of America’s radical past are also smiling down on those who are protesting monopoly, plutocracy, greed, austerity, unemployment, and the do-nothing attitude of many conservative pundits and politicians: Eugene Debs, Mother Jones, Lucy Parsons, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Joe Hill, John Reed, Walter Reuther, A. Philip Randolph, Hubert Harrison, Rosa Parks, Henry Demarest Lloyd, Doris Stevens, César Chávez, Victor Berger, Ben Fletcher, Emma Goldman, Bayard Rustin, Norman Thomas, Michael Harrington, Helen Keller, Ella Baker, Dolores Huerta, Thomas Paine, Benjamin Spock, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Don West, Big Bill Haywood, etc, etc, etc…

And yes, Clarence Darrow, too! Darrow would have relished the chance to speak before the masses. He would have cheered them on, praising their willingness to stand up against these modern Robber Barons whose rapaciousness rivals that of the Gilded Age’s fat cats. And, he would have urged them to project their movement into the political process because voting still matters as do the policies and actions of our politicians. He might have even urged them to think about a third party. As he once said at a gathering of Populists in 1894, “Today the privileged institutions of America, fattened by unjust laws and conditions, boastfully proclaim that monopoly is king, but I think I hear a voice rising loud, and louder from the common people, a voice which says in thunder tones, not monopoly but the People are king, and that these people, emancipated and aroused, will one day claim their own.” Perhaps that day is near.