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Bob Dylan at the March on Washington: Prophet of
the Bourgeoisie
Jeffrey Edward Green
To cite this article: Jeffrey Edward Green (2019) Bob Dylan at the March on Washington: Prophet
of the Bourgeoisie, Rock Music Studies, 6:2, 116-137, DOI: 10.1080/19401159.2018.1564965
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/19401159.2018.1564965
Published online: 14 Mar 2019.
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Bob Dylan at the March on Washington: Prophet of the
Bourgeoisie
Jeffrey Edward Green
Political Science Department, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA
ABSTRACT
Bob Dylan’sperformanceatthe1963MarchonWashingtonisoften
interpreted as reflective of the same kind of commitment to social
justice manifested by other leading participants at the March.
However, I argue that whereas other leading participants at the
March tended to organize their appeals around the expectation of
a “militant progressivism” full y commit te d to fighting injustice, Dylan’s
role at the March is distinct because it addresses the standpoint of the
“bourgeois progressive” who is only partially committed to rectifying
injustice. Rather than satirize or simply reject the bourgeois progres-
sive, Dylan calls for bourgeois self-awareness and, concomitantly, anti-
triumphalism.
KEYWORDS
Bob Dylan; March on
Washington; bourgeois /
bourgeoisie; liberal
democracy; justice; Martin
Luther King
In describing Bob Dylan in his role at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and
Freedom as a prophet of the bourgeoisie I do not mean to say that he is a defender of
capitalism over and against socialism or that he is a voice of reaction over and against
social progressivism, but rather that the three songs of his performed at the March
address much more the perspective of the bourgeois progressive (who is only partially
committed to rectifying injustice and whose relative privilege stems in part from the
persistence of injustice) than the perspective of the militant progressive (who is fully
committed to the fight against injustice) or the victim (who is primarily a sufferer of
injustice and who may or may not also be a militant). Social justice movements in
a liberal-democratic society, including and especially the American civil rights move-
ment, depend on bringing together all three constituencies (see King, “Trumpet of
Conscience” 640–47), but this does not mean that the ethical responsibilities are
identical for each. In particular, the bourgeois progressive is a singularly ambiguous
figure, at once a benefactor and opposer of unfairness and oppression – and, likewise, at
once taking some action to rectify social injustice but at the same time doing substan-
tially less than could or ought to be done. Dylan’s songs at the March address this figure
and help bring it to self-consciousness.
In defining the bourgeois progressive in terms of a partially complicit relationship to
injustice, I intend not to undermine a more traditional definition of the bourgeois as
a morally ambiguous socioeconomic category – i.e., as someone who, though formally
committed to free and equal citizenship, nonetheless lives off of capital while others
CONTACT Jeffrey Edward Green [email protected] University of Pennsylvania, 133 S. 36th Street, Room 338,
Philadelphia, PA 19104
ROCK MUSIC STUDIES
2019, VOL. 6, NO. 2, 116–137
https://doi.org/10.1080/19401159.2018.1564965
© 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
must rely entirely on their labor; employs the labor of others but does not necessarily
sell his or her own labor; holds an economic privilege that is either not fully merited or
unfairly allowed to generate extra-economic advantages (such as in political and
educational opportunity) within a liberal democracy; and thus, in general, is someone
who prospers within and from an insufficiently just liberal-democratic order
1
– but
rather to address this socioeconomic category in the moments of its political activism.
After all, critics of the bourgeois are too quick when they imagine that such individuals,
as such, have no interest in progressive politics.
2
It is truer to note, with Marx, that
bourgeois society is simultaneously progressive in its anti-feudal impact yet also pro-
foundly defective in its failure to bring about a more genuinely emancipatory condition
of freedom and equality for all. The bourgeois progressive embodies this double move-
ment at the characterological level, at once committed to eradicating injustice and yet at
the same time, due to the non-militancy of this commitment and the position of
comfort and privilege enjoyed within and from an insufficiently just liberal-
democratic society, complicit with injustice as well. Neither primarily a victim of an
unjust liberal-democratic order (but rather someone who has primarily prospered
within it), nor someone who is consistently demanding and persistent in seeking to
rectify injustice, the bourgeois progressive favors emancipatory change, but also values
his or her own individual security, comfort, and advantage in such a fashion that this
commitment to change is still watered-down and ambiguous.
One way to address the ambiguities of bourgeois progressivism is simply to reject the
bourgeois progressive as hypocritical or bankrupt in the name of the morally superior
perspective of the militant activist who is unambiguously committed to fighting against
the economic injustice, racism, and militarism that persists within liberal democracies.
Within the world of 1960s protest music, something like this approach is suggested in
Phil Ochs’s ironic 1966 song, “Love me, I’m a Liberal.” Dylan is a prophet of the
bourgeoisie, and not simply its critic, because what he most calls for – as I shall
demonstrate in analysis of his contribution to the March – is not the negation of the
bourgeois approach to social justice but honesty from the bourgeois about the nature of
their social activism and the liberal-democratic societies they inhabit.
In a context of gross and widespread injustice, mere honesty from the bourgeois
progressive might seem like too tepid of a goal, but for three different reasons
bringing the bourgeois progressive to a state of self-awareness is in fact meaningful.
First, insofar as we lack today Marx’s confidence in the ultimate transcendence of
bourgeois society – insofar as bourgeois culture, politics, and economics remain
hegemonic in the West – then the bourgeois progressive, willing to make only partial
efforts to achieve incremental social transformation, will continue to be, however
imperfect, a vital contributor to social change and, thus, someone whose self-
awareness matters. Second, the bourgeois are notoriously mendacious, in denial not
only about the divergence between mere juridical equality and a more genuine free
and equal citizenship but also about their own status as bourgeois. If Lukács is correct
that bourgeois denial and self-deception regarding their status as bourgeois is
a condition for the very functioning of bourgeois society (66), then honest self-
awareness would itself be a step, however modest, toward more emancipatory social
change. This leads to the third point: self-aware bourgeois progressives are better able
to participate in social justice movements. Even if they fail to do all they might to
ROCK MUSIC STUDIES 117
eradicate injustice, they can at least attain a more minimal standard of decency – the
decency of avoiding triumphal feelings of exultance too incongruous with the persis-
tence of unjust suffering in the world; the decency of remaining profoundly dissa-
tisfied in the face of the world and thus passively open to the changes being advocated
by the totally committed; the decency of not imagining any collective social move-
ment could absolve one’s personal responsibility to strengthen what remains within
one’s immediate surroundings; and, finally, the decency to admit that, in failing to
sufficiently execute this responsibility, one is not fully good. In other words, a self-
aware bourgeois progressive is more likely to defer to the moral leadership of the
more committed militant – to, in Dylan’s words, “get out of the new [road] if you
can’t lend your hand” (“The Times They Are A-Changin’,” Lyrics 91). In short,
bourgeois progressives who understand themselves as such do not let moments of
relative success – when some progress is achieved – turn into a triumphal compla-
cency about themselves, about the liberal-democratic order, or about some alleged
providential force working on the side of justice. Such ideas may be appropriate and
even necessary for militant progressives and victims of injustice, but they become
obnoxious, false, and counter-productive when voiced by bourgeois progressives.
It is because Dylan’s songs at the March cultivate this honesty and its concomitant
benefits that I describe him as a prophet of the bourgeoisie. The point is not simply that
Dylan represents the standpoint of a bourgeois progressive, both in his socioeconomic
status as a wealthy individual only haphazardly committed to fighting injustice and in
so many of his lyrics and public commentary which honestly admit his unwillingness to
devote himself fully to social activism.
3
Just as much, what I mean to emphasize is that
in his role at perhaps the single-most significant social justice event of his lifetime,
Dylan’s three songs contain as their primary political function not the call to militancy
and the total castigation of an unjust society, but the more modest though still deeply
relevant function of inculcating honest self-awareness from bourgeois progressives
about their own nature and that of the capitalist liberal-democratic regimes whose
values they, more than anyone else, embody.
Elsewhere, especially in the years immediately following the March, Dylan some-
times challenges protest movements and leftist politics themselves, announcing a kind
of turning away from the political in the name of individual self-reliance.
4
While this
gesture is itself marked by an uncommonly self-conscious and honest bourgeois
posture, since it admits itself to be abandoning a full-fledged social responsibility,
what is remarkable about Dylan’s contribution to the March on Washington is that it
suggests what a politically engaged bourgeois consciousness might look like when it is
disciplined by a self-awareness of the bourgeois’ own limited commitment to justice
and the parallel limitation of the liberal-democratic regime itself.
Dylan, King, and the Question of Hopefulness
Mary Travers, one of the singers of the group Peter, Paul, and Mary, who sang two songs at
the March on Washington, later reflected that in looking out at the approximately 250,000
people who attended the March, she had a moment of recognition: “Istartedtosing,and
Ihadanepiphany,lookingoutatthisquarterofamillionpeople...andItrulybelieveditwas
possible that human beings could join together to make a positive social change.” The song
118 J. E. GREEN
she was singing was Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Her fellow group member Paul
Stookey similarly reflected how listening to the words of the song they were playing before the
amassed crowd made vivid a sense of social and political achievement: “And then all of
asuddenthelyricsarecomingout,youknow,‘and how many years must people exist before
they can be free,’ and you’re thinking – Wow! This is it, this is the integration of everything we
sing and feel stron gly at th e moment” (Travers and Stookey).
Travers and Stookey thus interpret the March in a spirit of triumphal hopefulness.
Such hopefulness, and the triumph it represents, has at least three elements. On the level
of political mechanisms, Travers and Stookey’s reactions reflect both an abstract faith in
the capacity of collective action to make a positive difference in the world and a concrete
belief that the protest movement before their eyes was bringing about “positive social
change.” On the personal level, their reflections indicate that they consider themselves as
fully part of this solidaristic effort to achieve social justice. And with respect to the all-
important question of whether justice could ultimately be achieved in America, Travers
and Stookey signal that the March betokened for them the possibility of the full realiza-
tion of social justice (or “the integration of everything we sing and feel strongly about”), if
not in 1963 then at least in a future moment even more perfected by progressive
collective action. Hence, their exultant feelings of “epiphany” and “Wow! This is it.”
Such triumphal hopefulness fits easily within the usual way the March has been
celebrated. Martin Luther King Jr.’sgreatspeech,whichsitsattheepicenterofmost
accounts of the March, itself provided a message that was hopeful in the same three
ways sugg ested by Travers ’ and Stookey’sreactionstotheirownparticipation.
Praising the “marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community”
and the March i tself as being “the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of
our nation,” King’saddresscreditedthecivilrightsmovementasbringing“my
people” to a point where they “stand on the warm threshold which leads into the
palace of justice.” Although aware of a diversity of perspectives within the movement,
King in his speech presents himself as a leader with a total commitment to social
justice and addresses most directly listeners
with a similarly u nambiguous devotion
(“you [who] have come here out of excessive trials and tribulation. . .the veterans of
creative suffering”). And on the issue of the full realizability of justice, while not
denying the severity of the obstacles ahead, King did not waver in his faith in the
ultimate achievement of racial and economic justice for all Americans. Stating that
“now is the time to make real the promises of democracy,” King portrayed America as
acountrythat,thoughsick,couldovercomeinjusticeandfulfill its sta ted commit-
ment to liberty and equality of for all (“IHaveaDream” 217– 19).
Travers and Stookey, in singing “Blowin’ in the Wind” at the March on Washington,
felt themselves to be communicating the same hopeful message as King, but the words –
Dylan’s words – tell a different story. Indeed, what is remarkable about “Blowin’ in the
Wind,” in addition to two other songs Dylan himself sang at the March, is that it so
clearly resists and criticizes a spirit of triumphal hopefulness. King’s speech imagines
a realizable future, in which we can say, as in his address’ last lines, “Free at last! Free at
last! Thank God Almighty, we are Free at Last.” Dylan’s short song, by contrast, is full of
questions (nine to be exact), not answers – all having to do with the central question of
why it is that so many of us do not do the things we know to be just. And while a single,
ROCK MUSIC STUDIES 119
repeated answer is given to these questions, it is an answer that is no answer, the
enigmatic answer that “the answer is blowin’ in the wind.”
To frame the matter more precisely, “Blowin’ in the Wind” leaves untouched only the
first of the three elements of the triumphal hopefulness expressed by Travers and Stookey
in their reminiscences and expressed by King in his majestic speech: the idea that political
action could effect meaningful social change and that, specifically, black people in
America might overcome their oppression through a successful political movement.
Lyrics in the song – especially two of its questions – did after all harmonize with these
core aspirations and were experienced as such by participants at the March:
How many roads must a man walk down / Before you call him a man?
...
Yes, ’n’ how many years can some people exist /
Before they’re allowed to be free? (Lyrics 53)
But “Blowin’ in the Wind” refuses to let the possibility of a specificpoliticalsuccess
(the achievement of some civil rights for African-Americans) become the basis for the
other two elements of triumphal hopefulness: the good conscience of being self-
consciously solidaristic with a just cause and the faith that the full realization of justice
(free and equal citizenship for all) might itself be accomplished within a liberal
democracy.
With regard to the first of these critical gestures, Dylan raises the uncomfortable
question of just how much self-described activists and progressives fully desire the change
that they say they seek. Dylan’s song challenges his listeners to question how committed
they are to the cause of justice:
How many times must a man look up
Before he can see the sky?
Yes, ’n’ how many ears must one man have
Before he can hear people cry? (Lyrics 53)
Sung before amassed protestors, the polemical target of these lines is not merely
those who oppose justice and thus represent forces of reaction. These lines are all the
more forceful when they identify and interrogate what I am calling “bourgeois pro-
gressives,” that is those who support justice but do so inconstantly and so imperfectly.
King was himself all too aware that the movement he led brought together different
constituencies and that, specifically, the militancy he advocated and represented had to
cooperate, often unsuccessfully, with other, less steadfastly committed progressive com-
munities, such as white moderates, liberal politicians, church leaders (both black and
white), and some middle-class blacks. King defined the militant in terms of totality of
commitment –“To be militant merely means to be demanding and to be persistent”
(“Conversation” 661) – and he knew that not everyone sympathetic to the cause of social
justice would qualify as a militant. But part of King’s spirit of triumphal hopefulness is
that his message served to bridge the potential rift between the militant and the non-
militant and to avoid shaming non-militants for their failure to act and sacrifice
sufficiently.
5,
He did this, first of all, because his own totality of commitment – reflected
not just in his concrete activism, but the personal risks and sacrifices he endured (jailed
14 times by 1965, arrested 29 times in his life, stabbed once, his home bombed on three
120 J. E. GREEN
occasions, constantly harassed by death threats, and ultimately assassinated) – inspired
many others to become militants themselves (“Playboy Interview” 341).
6
He further
eroded the boundary between militant and non-militant in conceiving of non-violent
mass protest as a political vehicle that could bring together radical activists and more
ambivalent young people who, though critical of America, were still “struggling to adapt
[themselves] to the prevailing values of our society” (“Trumpet of Conscience” 642). And,
perhaps most of all, King softened the divide between militant and non-militant through
his frequent use of rhetoric that enabled non-militant listeners to feel themselves as fully
committed to the cause. His “I Have a Dream Speech” at the March, for instance, even as
it privileges the perspective of the militant, sometimes invites all of his listeners to
imagine that they might be militants too. That is, King does not always distinguish the
community of those physically assembled before the Lincoln Memorial (“we [who] stand
today” in Lincoln’s “symbolic shadow”) from the community of those totally committed
to social justice: “we [who] can never be satisfied” until, as the last lines of speech
conclude, “we are free at last.” In one passage in particular, King seems to invite all of
his listeners to conceive of themselves as militants:
With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With
this faith, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful
symphony of brotherhood. With this faith, we will be able to work together, to pray
together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together,
knowing that we will be free one day. (“I Have a Dream” 219).
In contrast, the probing questions of “Blowin’ in the Wind” expose and emphasize the
contrast between those who are militants and those who are not:
Yes, ’n’ how many times can a man turn his head
Pretending he just doesn’t see? (Lyrics 53)
Dylan’s song thus explores the limits of the progressive conscience – reminding us
that the situation of many progressives – specifically bourgeois ones – is that they are
not progressive all the time, that their moments of activism are complemented by other
periods, probably much more numerous, of compromise and comfort. The bourgeois
progressive represents not any kind of non-militancy (such as that of those who lack
any interest in fighting injustice or of those who, not obviously beneficiaries within an
unjust system, may lack the resources for such a fight) but rather refers to non-militants
who, as relatively prosperous and comfortable members within an insufficiently just
society, embody a non-militancy that is primarily the function of their haphazard and
imperfect commitment to causes they otherwise know to be just.
7
So far I have discussed one of the two ways “Blowin’ in the Wind” challenges a spirit
of triumphal hopefulness: its exposure of the figure of the bourgeois progressive who,
unlike the militant progressive, is not fully committed to the cause of justice. If we turn
to the second aspect of Dylan’s critical stance – his questions about whether justice, in
the full sense, is even possible – we find another way in which his message addresses the
bourgeois: not just exposing certain progressives as bourgeois (in their insufficient
concern for justice), but exposing the liberal-democratic regime, so often seen as
a morally perfect political ideal, as merely bourgeois (in its inescapable favoring of
the economically privileged) and also as having an enduring connection to violence.
ROCK MUSIC STUDIES 121
The song, for example, does not concern only implicit support for racial equality but
takes issue with violence. At least two of its questions speak to the quest for peace:
Yes, ’n’ how many times must the cannonballs fly
Before they’re forever banned?
...
Yes, ’n’ how many deaths will it take till he knows
That too many people have died? (Lyrics 53)
But is peace – the cessation of inter-state violence, killing, weaponry – a possibility?
Perhaps, on the basis of the declining incidence of war (Pinker 189–294), one can look
forward to the greater approximation of peace. But compared to overcoming legalized
racial discrimination within a particular society, peace is goal about which one can truly
doubt whether it can be achieved. And by extension, there are other commitments
which may themselves be constitutively out of reach: for example, the long-standing
liberal-democratic ambition that one’s socioeconomic status has no bearing on one’s
political voice or educational opportunities seems noble as an ideal to work towards,
but nonetheless also something that is not fully realizable so long as there are institu-
tions like private property and the family, as I have elsewhere argued (Green 43–61).
Dylan’s song, with its recurrent appeal to an “answer” that cannot be implemented but
remains in the wind, makes intimations of a justice that is not of this world – and in so
doing raises the possibility that living under conditions of less-than-full-justice is part of
the human experience itself.
The question of whether it is appropriate to have hope in the ultimate realizability of
justice in the world can be evaluated from two different perspectives: whether it is true
that justice someday can be achieved and whether, regardless of its truth, it is productive
or otherwise beneficial to think that it can be achieved. King’s hopefulness stemmed from
both sources. He not only evinced an earnest faith in the full realization of justice, whose
most memorable, but hardly sole, aspect was his often-expressed remark that the arc of
the moral universe tends toward justice (“Facing the Challenge” 141; “Christmas Sermon”
256). King also suggested that this optimistic metaphysical view enabled the militancy he
embodied and advocated and thus for this reason, too, independent of its truth, was
justified (“Where Do We Go?” 583–84). Dylan’s challenge to hopefulness itself operates
within these two dimensions, with his songs at the March both questioning whether
justice can ever be fully achieved and implicitly cautioning that, at least for bourgeois
non-militants, too much hope in the future might generate an inappropriate compla-
cency. King himself was not unaware of this potential latter problem, as he occasionally
recognized that hopefulness in the ultimate perfection of society might undermine
individual responsibility in the here and now (“Facing the Challenge” 141), but the fact
is that this concern was dwarfed by his primary focus on inspiring and maintaining
a spirit of militancy for which such hopefulness was, in his view, as practically necessary
as it was metaphysically true. But Dylan, who lacks this militancy, sings most poignantly
to those not altogether persistent or demanding in the fight against injustice and who
actually prosper in the face of injustice. To such people, it becomes important (in a way
lacking for the militant) to acknowledge the remoteness if not outright impossibility of
full justice as well as the ways in which even a much-reformed liberal-democratic society
that had overcome legalized racial discrimination would continue to unfairly advantage
122 J. E. GREEN
the rich and well-born and other privileged identities. The importance of such sober
reflections lies not only in their claim to truth (as they seem at least as persuasive as
King’s metaphysical optimism), but in their disciplining bourgeois progressives so that,
even if they fail to do all they might to eradicate injustice, they can at least attain a more
minimal standard of decency by not indulging in the undeserved self-celebration of
triumphal hopefulness.
Travers and Stookey, in singing Dylan’s words, felt themselves to be militants, when
in fact the message of the song they sung was to remind them that they were not
militants but only bourgeois progressives. If one cringes at all when one hears Travers
and Stookey, ultimately more entertainers than social activists, reflect on their epipha-
nies while performing at the March on Washington, it is because one recoils at their
triumphalism and how it signifies their misidentification of themselves and their role
within an unjust society.
The Dilemmas of Bourgeois Triumph
As I have indicated, in defining the bourgeois progressive in terms of a non-militant,
partially complicit relationship to injustice, my purpose is not to challenge a more
familiar socioeconomic definition of the bourgeois (as the holder of economic privilege
and unfair advantages within an insufficiently just liberal-democratic order), but rather
to examine the ethical situation of this socioeconomic category in the moments of its
political activism. Given this connection, there is relevance in considering what fre-
quently has been one of the sharpest criticisms of the bourgeois, socioeconomically
conceived: the bourgeois’ profound illusion about herself (her belief that she is not
a bourgeois) and her society (her belief that it instantiates free and equal citizenship).
As Lukács puts it, “The veil drawn over the nature of bourgeois society is indispensable
to the bourgeois itself” (66). Barthes goes even further, insisting on the incompatibility
of a bourgeois society ever using the name bourgeois in reference to itself: “The flight
from the name ‘bourgeois’ is not therefore an illusory, accidental, secondary, natural or
insignificant phenomenon: it is the bourgeois ideology itself, the process through which
the bourgeoisie transforms the reality of the world into an image of the world, History
into Nature. And this image has a remarkable feature: it is upside down. The status of
the bourgeois is particular, historical: man as represented by it is universal, eternal”
(141). Such criticisms are relevant not only in their suggestion that simply being aware
of oneself as a bourgeois would already be a consequential political act, but in their
emphasis that such self-consciousness likely proceeds by overcoming comforting, self-
congratulating illusions.
There are no doubt many potential illusions that might be unmasked within
a bourgeois society, but in the context I examine here – the bourgeois in her moments
of dedication to social justice – the illusion most clearly involved concerns the bour-
geois commitment to freedom. The bourgeois after all is, or always can be, a progressive
being who can work to make his surrounding world freer, healthier, and more vibrant.
Bourgeois society so often came into being in the overthrow of feudal societies that did
not recognize, even as bare principles, notions of freedom and equality. The anti-feudal,
liberal-democratic state, which is the bourgeois system of government par excellence,
affords basic liberties to its citizens, in a manner unprecedented in political history. As
ROCK MUSIC STUDIES 123
a progressive being, the bourgeois seeks to further the reach and meaning of these
liberties, opposing gross injustices like racial and gender discrimination, promoting
liberal democracy in areas of the world where it does not exist, and in her own liberal-
democratic society working to diminish the arbitrary impact of socioeconomic status on
civic opportunities and life prospects.
But bourgeois freedom is never complete. And the possibility of conflating the real
particular that is achieved with the imaginary universal that is not is thus always a risk
for the bourgeois. Ending gross oppression is not the same as introducing a robust
liberal-democratic order. Even a so-called well-ordered liberal-democratic state will not
be able to fully realize the conditions of free and equal citizenship (e.g., social class will
continue to impact politics and education) (see Green 43–61, 84–91). And furthermore,
there is a kind of freedom which exceeds the principles of free and equal citizenship –
not the freedom to compete for opportunities on fair terms, but the freedom from
having to compete at all: the freedom from obligatory work. Dylan often speaks of this
kind of freedom, which exists within but also beyond the institutions of bourgeois
liberal democracy, as when he indicts a category of persons who may be legal citizens in
a prosperous liberal-democracy but suffer from envy in the knowledge that they are not
fully free:
For them that must obey authority
That they do not respect in any degree
Who despise their jobs, their destinies
Speak jealously of them that are free
Cultivate their flowers to be
Nothing more than something
They invest in.
(“It’s Alright, Ma [I’m Only Bleeding],” Lyrics 177; also see 143, 369)
To live without labor is the ultimate form ofbourgeoiscomfort,evenifitremains,
for most bourgeo is, just an aspir ation orsomethingtheywillonlyverypartially
experience. Nonetheless that only a few will enjoy this freedom reminds us, along
with the other factors, that there is no straightforward or complete accomplishment of
freedom in the bourgeoi s liberal-de mocra tic world.
The bourgeois progressive, then, when she is honest, seeks freedom, but understands
that not everyone can be equally free. Yet it is precisely in moments of triumphant
transformation, when genuine success has been achieved, that the subtlety of the authentic
bourgeois standpoint becomes difficult to maintain. In such moments, the bourgeois who
supports a just cause is prone to forget that she is after all a bourgeois, not a universal being.
Much like Fukuyama, who on the eve of the West’s defeat of the inferior Communist
societies in Eastern Europe could falsely imagine liberal democracy as a perfect political
system representing nothing less than the end of history, so are all bourgeois, in their
successful support of just causes, at risk of going overboard and falling into a self-
satisfaction that is as obnoxious as it is undeserved. The bourgeois thus struggles about
the proper way to be triumphant. To deny bourgeois progressivism any expression of
satisfaction in its victories would be unfair to its achievements. But to exaggerate these
achievements is offensive not just in its bravado but in its fundamental dishonesty about the
profound limits to the kind of freedom that is possible within a bourgeois, liberal-
democratic order. Most of all, such exaggerations – such excessive and inappropriate self-
124 J. E. GREEN
regard – are counterproductive when they instill a new complacency that erodes further
progressive commitments. In our time, Žižek (2013)seems to have had his finger on this
concern when, in addressing protestors in Zuccotti Park in New York City at the Occupy
Wall Street Movement, his chief advice was, “Don’t fall in love with yourselves. . . . Carnivals
come cheap.”
One of the two songs Dylan himself performed at the March on Washington, “When the
Ship Comes In,” speaks insightfully to the issue of bourgeois triumph, for it concerns both
triumph and its limits. This was a fitting theme for the occasion since the March was both
an instrument in the pursuit of progress and a celebration of recent and anticipated
successes in the civil rights movement. In a sense, the very gathering was itself a success
since it manifested, in its peaceful magnitude, the growing potency of the commitment to
progressive change in the United States. King’s famous speech, after all, begins by referring
to the March as nothing less than “what will go down in history as the greatest demonstra-
tion for freedom in the history of our nation” (“IHaveaDream” 217).
That the central theme of the song is triumph – success and prosperity – is indicated by
the key idiomatic metaphor of a ship coming to harbor and, with it, the profitable
realization of a commercial venture. One need not be on the ship that comes in. The
merchant Antonio, in The Merchant of Venice, waits expectantly on shore for “my ships”
(Shakespeare, 1.3.177). And in the nineteenth century, the land-bound wives of sailors at
sea, who had purchased goods on credit from local tradesmen, promised to repay what they
owed when their “ships came in”–that is, when their husbands returned with money.
At the same time, Dylan also employs the metaphor in a secondary way, referring to the
ship of state that has overcome unjust enemies (and “the chains of the sea”)and,nowlanding
on shore, has the potential to start anew. Indeed, for the American context in which Dylan
was singing, such a ship was not merely metaphorical, but quite literal, since the country was
founded by European colonists who made the sea voyage over the Atlantic – sometimes with
commercial interests foremost in mind, other times in pursuit of a new and better world, and
perhaps usually with some mix of the two. One of the prophetic documents of the American
experience – John Winthrop’s “AModelofChristianCharity”–is supposed to have been
preached aboard the Arbella as it made its way from England to Salem in 1630, effectively
founding the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. After delineating the principles of justice
according to which the new colony should be organized, Winthrop’ssermonismostfamous
for its exhortation to his fellow Puritans to treat their nascent society as a beacon to the world:
“Fo r we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us”
(90
–91).
Dylan seems to repeat these words in the fifth verse of “When the Ship Comes In,”
which imagines the actual landing of the ship and the disembarkation:
Then the sands will roll
Out a carpet of gold
For your weary toes to be a-touchin’.
And the ship’s wise men
Will remind you once again
That the whole wide world is watchin.’ (Lyrics 100)
There are, then, two logics in the song: triumph and justice. How are they to be
related? The all-too-easy, self-congratulating linkage – which appeals to the bourgeois
ROCK MUSIC STUDIES 125
progressive when he is complacent and unreflective about his bourgeois nature – is to
think that the triumph is the construction of a just society. This was Winthrop’s
vision in his sermon, which outlines the way in which the new colony might abide by
the “two rules whereby we are to walk one towards another: Justice and Mercy” and
also abide by “the Law of Nature and the Law of Grace.” Winthrop calls on his fellow
colonists to embody the highest form of moral rectitude and follow the instruction of
the Hebrew prophet Micah:
Now the only way to avoid this shipwreck, and to provide for our posterity, is to follow the
counsel of Micah, to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God. For this end, we
must be knit together, in this work, as one man. We must entertain each other in brotherly
affection. We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of
others’ necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentle-
ness, patience and liberality. We must delight in each other; make others’ conditions our
own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our
eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body. (91)
Clearly, the America that was founded did not live up to Winthrop’s moral vision – and
Winthrop was also wrong that it needed to abide by this vision in order to survive at all
and “avoid shipwreck.” Even as an ideal, though, Winthrop’sconceptionofjusticeis
likely to be seen wanting, both in its theological aspect and in its too easy acceptance of
inequality. The address begins: “God Almighty in His most holy and wise providence,
hath so disposed of the condition of mankind, as in all times some must be rich, some
poor, some high and eminent in power and dignity; others mean and in submission” (90).
Winthrop could have attained something resembling bourgeois self-consciousness if he
had acknowledged this circumstance as a reason not to expect the nascent political
community to fully abide by the dictates of justice, but instead he still thinks a just and
pious republic is possible in spite of these profound socioeconomic divisions. The point,
though, is not to indict Winthrop per se, but any bourgeois society, grounded on private
property and the family, that fails to see how these institutions infect and inhibit the full
realization of political justice.
The subtlety of Dylan’ssong– which makes it an admirable expression of a bourgeois
progressivism that is honest to itself about its real triumphs but also real limits – is that it
does not collapse triumph and justice, but recognizes a triumph that is something less.
The ecstasy of beating back enemies (of overcoming some condition of gross oppression)
is not allowed to uncritically become the positive achievement of a full-fledged good
society. If there is a kind of moral purity, it is reserved for the negative and finite
experience of liberation, as distinguished from the ongoing and imperfect effort to achieve
concrete free and equal citizenship in a specific political community:
And the words that are used
For to get the ship confused
Will not be understood as they’re spoken.
For the chains of the sea
Will have busted in the night
And will be buried at the bottom of the ocean.
A song will lift
As the mainsail shifts
And the boat drifts on to the shoreline.
And the sun will respect
126 J. E. GREEN
Every face on the deck
The hour that the ship comes in. (Lyrics 100)
The greatest attainment of equal respect is afforded to the sailors still on board the
ship, before it has landed and the new society is begun. It is the equality of being partners
in a specificeffort at liberation, which as such is momentary and finite – a revolutionary
changing of the guard which is not itself instantiated in a new constitutional structure. It
is fitting, too, that the equality comes from a non-human source (the sun), suggesting that
when humans try themselves to be the source of each other’s mutual recognition there
will be problems and distortion. These two verses immediately precede the one I have
already cited and which, now in context, appears in an even more ambiguous hue:
Then the sands will roll
Out a carpet of gold
For your weary toes to be a-touchin’.
And the ship’s wise men
Will remind you once again
That the whole wide world is watchin’.(Lyrics 100)
As much as these lines speak to the responsibility of a people, in the condition of their
post-liberation, to make good on its promises and be a beacon for the rest of the world,
they also suggest that any particular constitutionalization of liberty into a governmental
and socioeconomic structure will be something less equal than the ephemeral experi-
ence of liberation itself. Both the image of a “carpet of gold ” and the figure of “wise
men” imply the return of socioeconomic inequality (goods to compete over on the basis
of a “merit” that may always have at least a somewhat dubious quality about it). This is
the only verse where the pronoun “you” is used, with the hypothetical listener directly
addressed, and it is significant that this “you” is not allowed to stand for everyone, but is
immediately distinguished from the “wise men” doing the reminding (and no doubt
leading, ruling, etc.).
The one place where the collective “we” is used without differentiation is the final two
verses, which emphasize not the new society thatwewillhavebuilt(forinfactthissociety
will divide us from ourselves) but the old society that we have come to collectively oppose:
Oh the foes will rise
With the sleep still in their eyes
And they’ll jerk from their beds and think they’re dreamin’.
But they’ll pinch themselves and squeal
And know that it’s for real
The hour when the ship comes in.
Then they’ll raise their hands
Sayin’ we’ll meet all your demands
But we’ll shout from the bow your days are numbered.
And like Pharoah’s tribe
They’ll be drownded in the tide
And like Goliath, they’ll be conquered. (Lyrics 101)
Whereas Winthrop draws o n the biblical legacy to incite his listeners to follow
aprophetofjustice– Micah – and become a fully good people, Dylan’sbiblical
references are to figures that achieve a monumental liberation but then go on to a life
ROCK MUSIC STUDIES 127
of ambiguity and tran sgression, whether the Israelites’ continual forgetting of God
and r egre ssion to idolatry in the years after their escape from bondage in Egypt or
David’sseductionofBathshebaandkillingofherhusbandUriahlaterinhislife
following his victory over Goliath.
That the triumph will be short-lasting is emphasized by the fact t hat the song
does not celebrate the ship coming in tout court, but the hour that the ship comes
in. This temporal constraint, which occurs in each of the four instances in which the
song’stitleissung,indicatesavictorythatconsistsonlyintheovercomingof
enemies and in the promise of newness itself (when “the morning will be break-
ing”). Nowhere is this c onstraint more starkly and o minously presented than in the
song’s first verse:
Oh the time will come up
When the winds will stop
And the breeze will cease to be breathin’.
Like the stillness in the wind
’Fore the hurricane begins
The hour when the ship comes in. (Lyrics 100)
If Winthrop’sprophecyishowtoavoidonceandforalltheshipwreckofpolitical
disorder and injustice, the victory Dylan foretells comes both after an oppressive
past that has been escaped and before afuture– when “the hurricane begin s”
8
– in
which, presumably, other disorders will reappear (perhaps of the kind Winthrop
himself identifies but does not problematize: “the condition of mankind [so that] in
all times some must be rich, some poor, some high and eminent in power and
dignity; others mean and in submission”). The point is not to see the earlier
injustice as fully equivalent with the later ones, but to recognize that progress
from worse to bet ter still leaves a lack – powerful elemen ts of in justice, unfairness,
and suffering that limit the progressive achievemen t being accomplished and thus
make any excessive triumphalization of it repugnant to bourgeois progressives in
moments of honesty and self-consciousness.
The Possibilities and Limits of Bourgeois Political Action
The other song Dylan performed at the March on Washington, “Only a Pawn in Their
Game,” was perhaps most topical for the occasion, since it was about the recent
assassination of Medgar Evers, a civil rights activist and field secretary for the
NAACP in Mississippi. On 12 June 1963, the morning after President Kennedy had
made a television address in which he described civil rights as “a moral issue” and
pledged support for new civil rights legislation (what would become the Civil Rights Act
of 1964), Evers was gunned down by Byron De La Beckwith, a member of the white
supremacist White Citizens’ Council and the Ku Klux Klan.
The surprising refrain of the song, which repeats four times, is that Beckwith “can’t
be blamed”–or similarly that “it ain’t him to blame”–because he is only “a pawn in
their game”: a patsy manipulated by richer and more powerful beneficiaries of a broader
social system that is economically and racially unjust. Crucial to Dylan’s approach is
that Beckwith is never named in the song. In redirecting moral outrage away from the
128 J. E. GREEN
killer himself and towards the institutional sources of racial hate, Dylan hardly absolves
Beckwith but rather condemns him in a different way: as someone who, in spite of the
seeming significance of his deed, does not even deserve to be remembered as an actor
because his motivations are so clearly manufactured by larger power interests that are at
odds with his own well-being. The crushing last verse concludes with Dylan prophesiz-
ing the anonymity Beckwith will suffer for being a mere tool of corrupt power:
Today, Medgar Evers was buried from the bullet he caught.
They lowered him down as a king.
But when the shadowy sun sets on the one
That fired the gun
He’ll see by his grave
On the stone that remains
Carved next to his name
His epitaph plain:
Only a pawn in their game. (Lyrics 98)
And so Dylan only further condemns Beckwith in claiming not to blame him. At the
same time, the dominant message of “Only a Pawn in Their Game” is the extension of
blame to forces and individuals whose complicity in the killing of Evers would be
concealed by a wrongly microscopic focus on the single person shooting the gun. Dylan
singles out Southern politicians:
A South politician preaches to the poor white man,
“You got more than the blacks, don’t complain.
You’re better than them, you been born with white skin,” they explain.
And the Negro’s name
Is used it is plain
For the politician’s gain
As he rises to fame
And the poor white remains
On the caboose of the train
But it ain’t him to blame
He’s only a pawn in their game. (Lyrics 97)
A racist culture does serve some economic interests beyond those at the top, but the
poor and impoverished – whose interests are not being served – are tricked and
manipulated, through indoctrination into racial hatred, so that they cannot perceive
the fact of their economic exploitation:
The deputy sheriffs, the soldiers, the governors get paid,
And the marshals and cops get the same,
But the poor white man’s used in the hands of them all like a tool.
He’s taught in his school
From the start by the rule
That the laws are with him
To protect his white skin
To keep up his hate
So he never thinks straight
’Bout the shape that he’sin
But it ain’t him to blame
He’s only a pawn in their game. (Lyrics 97)
ROCK MUSIC STUDIES 129
There are varying degrees of economic inequality in any society, of course. What
makes “the poor white man” so susceptible to perpetuating a system of racial hatred at
odds with an actual furthering of his economic and political interests is that he is not
merely poor, but often impoverished: destitute and disadvantaged to such a degree that
it damages his humanity and, in particular, his mind’s ability to think clearly for itself:
From the poverty shacks, he looks from the cracks to the tracks,
And the hoofbeats pound in his brain.
And he’s taught how to walk in a pack
Shoot in the back
With his fist in a clinch
To hang and to lynch
To hide ’neath the hood
To kill with no pain
Like a dog on a chain
He ain’t got no name
But it ain’t him to blame
He’s only a pawn in their game. (Lyrics 98)
As a descriptive matter, such reflections on the interpenetration of economic class and
racism are, of course, already familiar to historians who have long understood how racism
strengthened inter-class solidarity among American whites and, more recently, to contem-
porary scholars of intersectionality attuned tohowsystemsofdominationoftenmakeuseof
multiple categories (including race and class)toproducesocialhierarchies(seeHancock).
But “Only a Pawn in Their Game” is not merely a description. It carries within it the
unmistakable pathos of the desire for social change. After all, Dylan sang this song at
the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which he presumably supported –
and he sang it eight weeks earlier, on July 6, when he performed it at a civil rights
gathering in Greenwood, Mississippi, just three weeks following Evers’ assassination
(and 100 miles from Jackson, Mississippi where Evers was killed).
On the one hand, the political message of the song seems clear. If racial hate is
founded on economic injustice – poverty and the severe maldistribution of resources –
then these economic problems must be solved if a society can hope to overcome bigotry
in its social institutions. Such a message, however, was hardly particular to Dylan.
King’s speech at the March, even if it largely looks past the economic element of racial
liberation, once refers to “the Negro [who] lives on a lonely island of poverty in the
midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity” (“I Have a Dream” 217); and, of course,
poverty would become a primary focus for King in the last years of his life. Even more,
other leaders of the March, and civil rights activists more generally, insisted that civil
rights could not be achieved without economic justice (see Jones, “Radical History”). At
the conclusion of the March on Washington, Bayard Rustin, its deputy director, read
aloud eight demands that had emerged from the March’ s proceedings and that he –
along with nine other leaders – would deliver to President Kennedy. Rustin referred to
them as “the demands of this revolution.” Two of these demands pointed to economic
justice and the human dignity this would bring:
#6: We demand that every person in this nation, black or white, be given training and
work with dignity to defeat unemployment and automation.
130 J. E. GREEN
#7: We demand that there be an increase in the national minimum wage so that men may
live in dignity. (qtd. in Opie 120).
Slightly different versions of the March’s demands only served to emphasize how much
Rustin’s sixth demand required. According to an alternate list of 10 demands, the
seventh, repeating the key criterion of dignity, called for “a massive federal program
to train and place all unemployed workers – Negro and white – on meaningful and
dignified jobs at decent wages” (“March on Washington” 460).
If implicitly supporting the kind of economic justice demanded by the protestors,
Dylan’ssongmakesitsdistinct– and distinctly bourgeois – contribution in challenging
both the possibility of full-fledged economic justice and the robustness of his listeners’
commitment to fighting for it. Even as it makes clear how racial hate feeds off of economic
injustice, it describes economic injustice in terms that are not as readily solvable as Rustin
and other like-minded protestors suggest. If poverty is not just material but relative, how
can it be fully addressed – at least so long as there is private property and the family?
Whereas Rustin imagines a threshold level of material well-being past which all “men may
live in dignity,” Dylan’s metaphor of the “poor white [who] remains on the caboose of the
train” envisions social hierarchy – and the indignity and indignation generated by it – as
inescapable.
9
Further, as the Marchers realized, the economic policies they demanded were
“massive”–amounting to nothing less than the ambition “to defeat unemployment.” Has
any society achieved such a goal? Even those with ample provisions for the unemployed can
hardly be said to have placed all of their citizens in “meaningful and dignified jobs.” If racial
hate stems in part from an economic injustice that has never yet been – and might not ever
be – satisfactorily addressed, then making progressive change becomes something more
modest, imperfect, and always potentially frustrating and disappointing.
Of course, the problem is not just the world but the people in it. Not everyone – certainly
not all progressives – want to do the things that would need to happen in order to bring
about even the non-revolutionary but still massive changes to the economic system, such
that there would be greater economic equality, no destitution, and thus only relative (but
not absolute) poverty? I have labeled an incomplete, haphazard, partially complicit dedica-
tion to fighting injustice as a bourgeois, rather than militant, form of progressivism. If the
customary rhetoric of the March served to elide the figure of the bourgeois – either by
directing itself to militants or, what is almost the same thing, allowing bourgeois protestors
to imagine themselves as fully allied with militants – the force and originality of “Only
a Pawn in Their Game” consist, not just in its not naming Beckwith, but also in its not
naming a militant perspective with which the bourgeois listener might easily (and falsely)
identify. Consider how none of the four main characters in the song is someone with whom
the bourgeois listener, in the moment of her protest, could expect to be:
Pawns: People like Beckwith who are both oppressed by an unjust society and
themselves commit gross injustices to perpetuate the functioning of that
society.
Knights: Keeping with terms employed by white supremacist organizations like the
Ku Klux Klan and perhaps the White Citizens’ Council, both of which
Beckwith was a member, Beckwith might have understood himself as a -
“knight.”
10
Yet the force of Dylan’s song is to tell Beckwith, you think you’re
a knight, but you’re only a pawn.
ROCK MUSIC STUDIES 131
Kings: People like Medgar Evers who make the ultimate sacrifice for justice. At
Evers' funeral, Dylan says “They lowered him down as a king.” In so labeling
Evers, Dylan emphasizes the extraordinary quality of militancy and, thus, its
difference from more common forms of progressivism.
Them: That is, the “they” whose game it is: those who callously perpetuate an unjust
society.
Dylan thus describes the main players of the battle for social justice in America in
terms that exclude the bourgeois progressive. Most significantly, the bourgeois is not
aking,because,asbourgeois,shewillnotgoalltheway,willnotmaketheultimate
sacrifice, either in the sense of sacrificing her literal life for justice or more fi gur atively
in the sense of sacrificing the time, energy, and resour ces, in the manner of a militant,
which would be needed t o instill her with the sense that she is sufficiently contributing
to the fight against the racial and economic injustice in her midst. Of course, seen
differently, this non-identification of the bourgeois is itself an identification since the
bourgeois is precisely someone who oughtnotseehimselfasamajorplayerinthe
fight for social justice.
The authentic bourgeois force of “Only a Pawn in Their Game” can be seen in
comparison to a seemingly similar song Dylan wrote the year before in 1962, “The
Death of Emmett Till,” about the murder of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old African-
American teenager from Chicago, lynched in Mississippi in 1955 after allegedly flirting
with a white woman there. But in this case, Dylan quickly dismissed his song as
“bullshit” (qtd. in Marqusee 48). The last two stanzas are likely what Dylan found
problematic – and in any case represent a perspective of bourgeois progressivism that
has fallen into self-congratulatory illusion and self-deception:
If you can’t speak out against this kind of thing, a crime that’s so unjust,
Your eyes are filled with dead men’s dirt, your mind is filled with dust.
Your arms and legs they must be in shackles and chains, and your blood
it must refuse to flow,
For you let this human race fall down so God-awful low!
This song is just a reminder to remind your fellow man
That this kind of thing still lives today in that ghost-robed Ku Klux Klan.
But if all of us folks that thinks alike, if we gave all we could give,
We could make this great land of ours a greater place to live. (Lyrics 20)
Despite concerning the same topic of racial injustice as “Only a Pawn in Their Game,”
this song expresses an entirely different mindset, much more in keeping with the prevailing
mentality of the participants of the March on Washington in its failure to differentiate the
bourgeois and militant forms of progressivism. Yes, what happened to Till is an awful
crime. It need not happen. But Dylan locates himself here in an unambiguous place of
righteous indignation. Most of all, he holds out the solution: “But if all of us folks that thinks
alike, if we gave all we could give / We could make this great land of ours a greater place to
live.” However, giving all that one can is precisely what the bourgeois progressive does not
do. Situated in comparison to “The Death of Emmett Till,” one appreciates the freshness of
Dylan’s angle of analysis in “Only a Pawn in Their Game.” In addition to deftly criticizing
Beckwith without mentioning him and indicting the broader unjust socioeconomic system
Beckwith unwittingly serves, Dylan is no less shrewd in employing metaphors that locate
132 J. E. GREEN
bourgeois listeners as individuals who will not be doing all they can to stop injustice. Thus,
while the song might seem to denigrate only lower-class whites and thus preserve the clear
conscience of the prosperous white bourgeois – a trend not uncommon in American
culture
11
– in fact Dylan’s words are critical of both Beckwith (the white racist) and the
bourgeois listener (who is denied a position of moral righteousness in the song).
Historians report that when Dylan sang “Only a Pawn in Their Game” at the March on
Washington, it was greeted with a “tepid response” and “scattered applause” (Jones,
March 192). The usual interpretation of this reaction is that the audience did not fully
understand the song: that Dylan’s refrain that Beckwith “can’t be blamed” confused them,
since the broader critique of the society which produced Beckwith was too complex to
digest on first listen. What such an interpretation leaves out is that those who did under-
stand the song might themselves have been led to a muted response, not because they didn’t
appreciate its message, but because this message – in calling them out as bourgeois
individuals, ultimately preferring themselves to others, not fully engaged in the contestation
of the “game” of injustice – could not but elicit some element of discomfort.
In conclusion, I turn to what is the most mysterious line in “Only a Pawn in Their
Game,” the second line of the opening verse:
A bullet from the back of a bush took Medgar Evers’ blood,
A finger fired the trigger to his name.
A handle hid out in the dark
A hand set the spark
Two eyes took the aim
Behind a man’s brain
But he can’t be blamed
He’s only a pawn in their game. (Lyrics 97, emphasis added)
The phrasing is strange, as normally one would say that the trigger fires a gun, not that
a trigger is itself fired. Further, what would seem to be the meaning here – that Beckwith
shot and killed Evers’ name – makes no sense at all. In a song about who gets to have names,
it does not follow that Evers – the person who (unlike Beckwith) is being named,
remembered, and celebrated as a “king”–would have his own name destroyed. Thus,
I disagree with the usual interpretation of these lines.
12
Although the phrasing is syntacti-
cally awkward, a more fitting interpretation would be that Beckwith’s finger (his killing of
Evers) made Evers’ name into a trigger (a militant martyr who would inspire hundreds of
others to take action against racial injustice). That is, Beckwith’s folly is not simply that he
unwittingly served an oppressive social system of which he himself was a victim, but that he
did not even succeed in this regard: his evil act had the unintended consequence of making
Evers like a king and generating support to bring down Jim Crow.
But the bourgeois t oo is without a name, an ordinary – if prosperous and
comfortable – member of a mass society. Sometimes the bourgeois are “fired up”
by the trigger of Evers, King, and other heroes of militancy who have sacrificed
themselves for social justice, but other times they are uninspired and do not act.
Frederick Douglass understood well that, toachievejusticeinabourgeoissociety,“it
is not light that is needed, but fire ” (196). But if the bourgeois were always aflame,
he would no longer be bourgeois. The intermittent flicker is all that the bourgeois
progressive can muster.
ROCK MUSIC STUDIES 133
Who Is the Moral Leader of Our Nation?
At the Marc h on Washington, Martin Luther King was hailed as the “moral leader
of our nation.” But for t hose who are more bourgeois than revolutionary, more
haphazard in their activism than steadfast, then perhaps Dylan is no less deserving
of the title. The reason to take seriously the bourgeois form of progressivism is not
that it is better than the militant variant (for it is clearly worse), but that most of
the time it is the much more common approach to combating injustice, yet one
that remains h idden by various tendencies (triumphal hopefulne ss, a conflation of
liberation from oppression with the full-fledged achievement of free and equal
citizenship, and a too-easy identification with the militant) that threaten an
inappropriate complacency towards oneself and towards the nature of a liberal-
democratic society. Dylan combats the various forms of self-deception whereby the
bourgeois might escape, in the very moments of political activism, an honest self-
assessment.
Some criticized Dylan’s participation at the March for drawing attention away from
the real activists and leaders of the civil rights movement. The comedian Dick Gregory,
who had endured arrests and beatings as a result of his activism in the South, objected,
“What was a white boy like Bob Dylan there for? . . .To support the cause? Wonderful –
support the cause. March. Stand behind us – but not in front of us” (qtd. in Marqusee
13). While it is true that Dylan did take the stage, his message to privileged bourgeois
onlookers ultimately was not that different from Gregory’s.
Notes
1. On aspects of this socioeconomic definition of the bourgeois, see Heller (6).
2. Thus, I disagree with Berdyaev (11-26).
3. See, e.g., “I
can’t help it if I’m lucky” (“Idiot Wind,” Lyrics 367); “They say sing while you
slave [in collective efforts] and I just get bored,” (“Maggie’s Farm,” Lyrics 166); “I know
you’re dissatisfied with your position and your place / Don’t you understand it’s not my
problem” (“Positively 4th Street,” Lyrics 211). Similarly, Dylan was careful to differentiate
the comfort he enjoyed from the political persecution and other travails of the earlier
generation of folk singers whom he admired. His 1961 encomium to Woody Guthrie,
“Song to Woody,” for example, concludes with the admission: “The very last thing that I’d
want to do / Is to say I’ve been hittin’ some hard travelin’ too” (Lyrics 6). The temptation
to interpret Dylan as an anarchist, hostile to all organized political authority, should be
resisted because even Dylan ’s periods of aggressive withdrawal from political life often are
joined with his admission that someone, other than himself, ought to be taking up the
social responsibility he is disclaiming. Consider, in this regard, that in an unpublished
1965 audio interview for Playboy with Nat Hentoff, Dylan reiterates his general withdrawal
from ongoing social movements, but then adds of such political work that “ it definitely has
to be done,” acknowledging that “people are starving” and “lots of people are in bad
trouble” (minutes 12–13, 15–16). Consider, too, the reflection of Dylan’s father, Abe
Zimmerman,
in the Duluth News Tribune in 1963: “My son is a corporation and his
public image is strictly an act” (Eldot). Also relevant is the fact that some interpreters have
even found a conservative strain in Dylan’s politics (Webb 29-61).
4. Consider Dylan’s
controversial remarks at a 13 December 1963 address to the Emergency
Civil Liberties Committee: “There’s no black and white, left and right, to me anymore.
There’s only up and down, and down is very close to the ground. And I’m trying to go up
without thinking about anything trivial, such as politics” (qtd. in Drier).
134 J. E. GREEN
5. To be sure, sometimes King wondered whether the white moderate was an even greater
threat to the civil rights movement than outright racists, but this idea was overshadowed
by a much more dominant focus on unifying the moderate and militant, which I discuss in
the main text.
6. On his inspiration of others to be militants, consider King’s
account of meeting young
black students, including “stylishly dressed young girls,” who say: “Dr. King, I am ready to
die if I must” (“Time for Freedom” 161).
7. It should be noted that in emphasizing the material comfort and economic privilege
definitive
of the bourgeois, I do not mean to reduce the bourgeois identity to a strictly
economic category, since the bourgeois’ economic privilege might stem from extra-
economic sources, such as race and gender. Within the mid-twentieth century American
context of the March, for example, it was not uncommon to link the bourgeois also with
a white racial privilege stemming from Jim Crow and legalized discrimination. As one
musical example of this phenomenon, consider Lead Belly’s 1937 song, “Bourgeois Blues,”
which includes the lines, “Well, me and my wife we were standing upstairs / We heard the
white man say ‘I don’t want no niggers up there’ / Lord, in a bourgeois town / Uhm,
bourgeois town.” This mixing of the economic and the racial was reflected in the agenda of
the civil rights movement itself, with the economic dimension receiving only greater
attention over the course of the 1960s as King and other civil rights leaders increasingly
emphasized the need to combat poverty and address the plight of poor people everywhere.
Thus, just as the militant progressive represented by King is demanding and persistent in
seeking an end to both racial discrimination and economic injustice, so the bourgeois
progressive illuminated by Dylan – who lacks this totality of commitment – is ethically
ambiguous as the holder of unfair advantages stemming from an unjust economic order
and legalized racism. Because the bourgeois progressive is defined in part as someone who
has primarily prospered within an insufficiently just liberal democracy, it is unlikely that
many blacks in the 1960s could rightly be called bourgeois. How much that situation has
changed today is a question that, though vital, exceeds my analysis, which is interested in
exploring the idea of the bourgeois progressive as such rather than to define its particular
constituency at a specific moment in political time.
8. The occurrence of wind imagery in both “Blowin’ in
the Wind” and “When the Ship
Comes In” is a striking similarity in two of the three Dylan songs performed at the March.
Read together, the suggestion might be that a social justice movement, even when
successful, is unlikely to prevent both the “hurricanes” of future challenges and the
enduring sense that society will have responded inadequately to meet them.
9. On the inevitable inability of any liberal democracy to fully respect the dignity of its
citizens,
and the indignation this generates, see Green (1-7, 61-66).
10. The documentary about Beckwith and his son is called The
Last White Knight (2012).
11. On the tendency of wealthier whites to stigmatize “white
trash” and thereby deny their
own racism, see Love (125-54).
12. See, for example, Karlin who interprets the lines as: “[Evers’]
killing is represented as an
attack on his name” (23).
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Nancy Ameen for her expert research assistance. Earlier versions of this article were
presented at Washington University in St. Louis, Georgetown University, and ITAM in Mexico
City. I am grateful to the students and faculty at these venues for their feedback. I also thank
David Beal at Special Rider Music for permission to quote from the following Bob Dylan songs:
“Blowin' in the Wind” © 1962 by Warner Bros. Inc., renewed 1990 by Special Rider Music;
“When the Ship Comes In” © 1963, 1964 by Warner Bros. Inc., renewed 1991, 1992 by Special
ROCK MUSIC STUDIES 135
Rider Music; “Only a Pawn in Their Game” © 1963, 1964 by Warner Bros. Inc., renewed 1991,
1992 by Special Rider Music; “The Times They Are A-Changin'” © 1963, 1964 by Warner Bros.
Inc., renewed 1991, 1992 by Special Rider Music; “The Death of Emmett Till,” © 1963, 1968 by
Warner Bros. Inc., renewed 1991, 1996 by Special Rider Music; “It's Alright Ma (I'm Only
Bleeding)” © 1965 by Warner Bros. Inc., renewed 1993 by Special Rider Music; “Maggie's Farm”
© 1965 by Warner Bros. Inc., renewed 1993 by Special Rider Music; “Positively 4th Street” ©
1965 by Warner Bros. Inc., renewed 1993 by Special Rider Music; and “Idiot Wind” © 1974 by
Ram's Horn Music, renewed 2002 by Ram’s Horn Music.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Jeffrey Edward Green is Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania, working
in the field of political theory. He is the author of two books: The Shadow of Unfairness:
A Plebeian Theory of Liberal Democracy (Oxford, 2016), which was named a CHOICE
Outstanding Academic Title—and The Eyes of the People: Democracy in an Age of
Spectatorship (Oxford, 2010), which was awarded the First Book Prize in political theory from
the American Political Science Association and is the topic of a German-language edited volume,
Okulare Demokratie (Transcript, 2017). Green is also the Director of the Andrea Mitchell Center
for the Study of Democracy at Penn.
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