IN AN AGE of mass communication, the iconography of protest is frequently visual: the self-immolation of Norman Morrison in protest against the Vietnam war, the student in Tiananmen Square standing heroic in front of the relentless tank, the people fancy-dressed as grim reapers in the grotesque slumber parties of a die-in. Silent, too, are the acts of marching, whether Jarrow or Aldermaston; silent the wilful self-starvation of Ghandi or Bobby Sands. But protest has also been articulate, and in Brian MacArthur's anthology a vivid and affecting portrait of struggles for change is compellingly achieved.
In a history of slow and often bloody emancipation – for protest has been most frequently against the terrorism or complacency of the State or the status quo – the success of speakers and writers can be judged by the extent to which it now amazes us that such struggles were ever necessary, and how unsettlingly recently. Nor did many of the words in this book come cheap, as MacArthur's pithy contextual introductions remind us; brutal force-feeding of suffragettes, hard labour for pacifists, detention and torture of dissidents, the economic and physical ruin of political undesirables, and assassinations of figures such as Luther King, Malcolm X and Steve Biko.
Some of the protests are speeches delivered in courtrooms. Some are parliamentary interventions that, as too rarely happens, seize a moment and turn a tide in history, such as Amery's Cromwellian disposal of Chamberlain, or Howe's of Thatcher, or achieve the plaudit of prescience much later (such as Churchill's assaults on our ill-preparedness for war in the Thirties).
Some are delivered at rallies, unifying the massing popular forces that, hearteningly, can still deliver change, whether in the thrilling revolutionary waves breaking across Eastern Europe in 1989 (Viktor Orban in Hungary, speaking for the students and capturing a country), or the quieter triumph of an idea whose time has unignorably arrived. Some are newspaper articles arguing a principle in the teeth of even their readers' opposition; it is startling to learn that in 1915 the Daily Mail was burned at the Stock Exchange after a brave editorial demanding more munitions for the soldiers at the front, or that Observer readers gave up the paper when it demanded that Eden resign for his military action over Suez.
Through page after page of passionate argument, anguished reportage, brutal philippic or rousing manifesto, one is frequently moved, and there are some splendid amusements too (such as Kenneth Tynan on the moribund theatre of the Fifties). It also becomes clear how slow change can be. Ida Wells protests against lynch mobs in 1900; many of her complaints echo way into the Sixties and beyond. Marie Stopes's appeals for sex education are still required in the Nineties.
The century MacArthur offers begins with the big themes; race, enfranchisement, pacifism, dictatorship, poverty, class; and gradually gives way to single issues, for instance neatly juxtaposing two pro- and anti-hunting protests and Earl Spencer's funeral oration for his sister, 'the most hunted person of the modern age'. The book suggests that we enter a new millennium with battles, including the big ones, still to be fought, but a history rich in role models to suggest that the fight is far from fruitless.