OUR ACCOUNTS OF HEROIC social movements tend to begin at the moment of insurgency, when the cameras show up. The years of bitter, lonely, and seemingly futile struggle get the Ken Burns treatment less often. Even of the heroic age of SNCC in Mississippi, the historian Charles Payne writes, “Field reports are filled with stories of spending day after day dragging from house to house without a single positive response to show for it. Most people were simply afraid and confused but reluctant to admit it.” One organizer reported in 1962 that for every hundred people they spoke to, ten agreed to register to vote, three showed up, “and those three were frightened away from the courthouse by the sheriff.” This is not the epic narrative we are taught. But it is the marrow of movement work.

Here’s another story. In the wake of the First Red Scare of 1919–20, the unions were ruined. Their militants were arrested, blacklisted, and deported. Labor’s most prominent political leader, Eugene Debs, was imprisoned for political crime — opposing the war — only a few years after receiving 6 percent of the vote in a presidential election; he ran for President in 1920 from his Georgia cell. The coal miners of West Virginia were gunned down and bombed from the air in 1921. For those who kept the faith in the factories, mills, and mines, fifteen years of ostracism followed. They had no hint that a moment was coming like the 1930s, when small cells of old believers across the country led millions of workers — many of whom had spent years shunning them — to victory.

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The organic integration of the working-class social world is gone. To remember, and keep remembering, now happens only on purpose. Memory looks like an office, with file cabinets and framed pictures from past victories. It smells like printer ink and sounds like bitter narratives of defeat often repeated, with lessons learned. It costs money to keep, and it takes sustained and uninterrupted time to accumulate. To remember and renew is itself an act of defiance: each dollar in dues money, each hour spent in some interminable meeting, passes the tradition on, despite constant efforts to extinguish it.

Just because a political project is difficult, in other words, doesn’t necessarily mean you’re doing it wrong. It could just be that it’s hard — that the opposition is fearsome and you haven’t cracked it yet. Some kinds of success are bought with a dozen or a hundred failures. The key is to be there for the next round, and to know a chance when you see it.