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Michael Ansara’s The Hard Work of Hope is an extraordinary memoir, presenting the political and personal reflections of a dedicated organizer over many decades.

From his early teens, Ansara played crucial roles, from civil rights advocacy to anti-war and student activism, and most notably, leading a major effort by the New Left to develop into innovative and lasting organizations outside campus walls.

Hard Work brings together razor-sharp analyses of these causes and, crucially, the current crisis represented by Trump’s second election in 2024. It offers a compelling, page-turning overview of the kaleidoscopic transformations of the 1960s and beyond as the New Left — with Ansara often playing a critical role — reached out to broader audiences, especially the working class.

The book reveals Ansara’s paradoxical gifts as an organizer: both a pulsing, burning drive for radical change in America and an endless patience to listen to and persuade people who are initially opposed to him or feel too powerless to act.

We Allowed “Militancy to Replace Strategy”

Ansara, the son of a Syrian-Lebanese father and a non-practicing Jewish mother, grew up in difficult financial conditions. His Harvard-educated father, fired from the federal government in 1947 for his leftist politics, toiled as a cab driver and his mother, also left-leaning, working as a tutor in their home in Brookline, Massachusetts.

He experienced a life-changing experience at eight when a temporary joint disorder paralyzed him, leaving him alone with his books. The well-read young Michael Ansara emerged feeling full of knowledge and a fearlessness in taking on authority, including resistance to the “civil defense” drills of the 1950s, when children were compelled to cower beneath their desks.

The horrors and hypocrisy of racism and the nuclear arms race powerfully struck a chord with young Ansara. One day at age 13, Ansara found himself literally wandering into an anti-segregation picket line in Boston. His fast-growing, fearless commitment and hard work for the cause rapidly came to generate faith among his Black elders in the movement.

Later, Ansara studied at Harvard as a scholarship recipient. With a deepening understanding of power in America, Ansara was magnetically drawn to Students for a Democratic Society and the New Left. The vivid horrors of the Vietnam War soon consumed his energies. He became such a well-known, audacious figure in the movement that he was suddenly called upon to grill Secretary of State Robert McNamara about Vietnam in an extraordinary confrontation on the roof of a car, halted in its tracks by massive crowds of students in Cambridge.

The next few years were a non-stop whirlwind of activity for Ansara, characteristic of the breathlessly paced 1960s, as he tirelessly organized students and the broader anti-war movement.

Ansara recounts the wave of shocks in 1968, which saw the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, massive Black street rebellions exploding in dozens of cities, the Columbia student strike, and an ongoing stream of anti-war protests, including the violent “police riot” at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

With Democratic presidential nominee Hubert Humphrey largely operating under the powerful thumb of war-fixated President Lyndon Johnson, Ansara and many anti-war young people abstained from voting, and Richard Nixon won by less than 1 percent.

Ansara now concludes that urging abstention was a major mistake, as Humphrey likely would have been far more receptive to anti-war pressures than Nixon. (Only years later would we learn that, prior to the election, Nixon and Henry Kissinger “secretly committed treason,” as Ansara puts it, persuading South Vietnamese negotiators to back off from a treaty that was in the works to end the war in late 1968.)

Ansara recounts how the cascading events of the late 1960s and early 1970s took place against a backdrop of a splintering New Left. The anti-war movement fought indefatigably but was unable to stop the ever-escalating Vietnam War. “We had a ‘minority mindset’,” Ansara ruefully recalls.

“We allowed our embrace of militancy to replace strategy,” Ansara reflects. He was at the eye of the storm as that embrace intensified, and became Number One on the list of “subversive” targets maintained by Boston area police agencies — and among the top 100 targets nationally. These dubious honors earned him brutal beatings by police officers. A group of Boston detectives, when finding Ansara alone, amused themselves by pressing their loaded revolvers against his head.

Meanwhile, as the war at home escalated, the lack of strong organizational leadership mirrored the lack of strategy, Ansara recounts. He painfully watched as factionalism tore the vital SDS organization apart in 1969, splitting it into warring factions.

By May 1970, there was no SDS to provide coordination and leadership when the U.S. invaded Cambodia and National Guard forces killed students at Kent State in Ohio and Jackson State in Mississippi, igniting an estimated 900 student strikes across the nation.

“My Road to Damascus Ran Through Lowell”

Ansara recalls his anti-war work as increasingly migrating toward working-class communities in the Boston area. But honing this strategy required learning some difficult truths.

Immersing themselves in working-class and poor neighborhoods, Ansara and his colleagues came to grips with the shattering, all-encompassing changes brought on by deindustrialization. “We recognized the beginning of a profound process that has indeed played out over the last 40 years,” he writes. “A large segment of the population, especially those who had no college education, faced new challenges; their incomes stagnated and then declined, their social world collapsing.”

A particularly revelatory moment occurred with an anti-war demonstration planned for the deindustrializing, textile-centered city of Lowell.  Ansara vividly recalls the setting: “Lowell was a hollow shell of the vibrant mill town that brought the industrial revolution to America… The massive brick buildings, beautiful and mighty, stood vacant, stripped of the machinery that had been moved to the American South before continuing on to Central America and Asia.”

Against that background, Ansara and his anti-war colleagues were hoping for a warm reception in Lowell. But instead of encountering working-class people infuriated with corporate CEOs offloading their jobs and disgusted with a war that used their sons as cannon fodder, the anti-war protesters and other organizers immediately found themselves under ferocious attack.

It was a violent pro-war riot waged by local working-class people. The onslaught against the protesters was so ferocious that, ironically, Ansara and his wife were forced to find refuge in the Lowell police station.

But as tempers of the rioters settled down, Ansara engaged with the hostile young people clustered around the police-station entrance. He found that they were actually anti-war, but resentful of the protesters as outsiders. “There are the occasional epiphanies, moments of clarity sometimes revealing truths that should have been blindingly obvious,” Ansara declares. “My road to Damascus ran through Lowell.”

It would take some years for Ansara to fully comprehend the implications of that moment in Lowell. But once the lessons were absorbed, Ansara recounts, he and others envisioned an organizing model that recognized the centrality of working people in social change; that would build on the common ground they shared with working people across Massachusetts.

These concepts, sharpened by experiments in organizing on varied issues, took shape in the Mass Fair Share organization. Mass Fair Share was founded on the faith that blue-collar people “could be organized to see the sources of their problems as rooted in the growing inequality of wealth and power and could be organized to band together with people of different races and ethnicities who have experienced the same inequality,” as Ansara explains.

The Mass Fair Share model survives to this day. Ansara contributed to building a national “Citizen Action” movement that has spawned similar new movements in many states. In recent years, Ansara has served as a consultant on issue and electoral campaigns, and has volunteered for a number of non-profit organizations. He is now retired and writing poetry.

The Central Question Today

For all its value, The Hard Work of Hope cannot fully answer the central question of present-day American politics. How has Donald Trump, benefactor of billionaires, managed to snatch the populist banner away from forces on the left, to displace progressive populism based on the common interests of the working-class majority?

While not providing a clear antidote to Trumpism, Hard Work still delivers an indispensable set of sharp insights into activism, from the 1960s to today’s often stupefying environment.

Michael Ansara, with his fine book, keeps hope alive.