Dreamers on the Rise
On how history rhymes, and songs make a difference
Singer-songwriter John Stewart (1939–2008) kept coming back to 1968, and that’s one reason I keep coming back to John Stewart: so do I.1 As a young man in his late 20s, Stewart was intensely involved in Robert Kennedy’s campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. He opened for RFK at rallies. He was devastated by Kennedy’s assassination.
Some of his songs deal with it directly. Others seem to refer to it between the lines if you know enough of his story. What sounds like a straightforward love song or song about a failed relationship may well be at the same time about the loss of a future that was dearly longed for and expected.
I was born 12 years after John Stewart. 1968 was the year of my political awakening. Whatever trajectory I was on before then — I’m not 100% sure what trajectory I was on, but since I was a teenage Arabist, it probably had something to do with the Middle East — began to change.
Early in the year, the Tet offensive in the Vietnam War shocked the large portion of the U.S. public that thought “we” were winning the war.
In late March, President Johnson announced he would not run for re-election
On April 4, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.
In the very early hours of June 5, Robert F. Kennedy was shot shortly after he’d been announced the winner of the California primary. He died the next day. I turned 17 two days later. It wasn’t lost on me, a teenage Arabist, that the killer was a Palestine-born Jordanian national or that June 5 was the first anniversary of the beginning of the Six-Day War.2
On August 20, Soviet and Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia.
Six days later, the Democratic convention opened in Chicago.
On November 5, the U.S. elected Richard Nixon president.3
Twelve years is half a generation. The 12 years between John Stewart and me made a big difference. For him, age 29, 1968 destroyed a dream. For me, age 17, it told me what to expect. Electoral politics, I concluded, wasn’t going to get us anywhere. In the fall of 1969, a college freshman in Washington, D.C., I threw myself into antiwar organizing.
Through the 1970s the U.S. seemed to be on an upward trajectory. Women and people of color and gay people (including those of us who were more than one of the above) were making progress. Attention was being paid to the fragility of the environment and how corporate interests, aided and abetted by we the people, were destroying it. At the end of the decade, the partial meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant underscored the potential drawbacks of nuclear power.
In the second half of the ’70s I found the lesbian community, and the Women in Print movement, and my own voice as a writer — in the midst of many others who were finding their voices and building communities.
We were, as John Stewart put it in what is probably my #1 favorite song of his, “dreamers on the rise.”
Oh, once we were dreamers on the rise
We were the sun
where the sun never shines
And we were gold
where the night bird only flies
Oh, that’s a long time, you know,
for that kind of wind to blow
A long time ago we were dreamers on the rise
John Stewart, "Dreamers on the Rise"Then, with the election of Ronald Reagan, it crashed. Not only was the upward trajectory stopped cold, the country started sliding backward, toward a past that never was. As the AIDS epidemic gathered momentum, it became clear that for the Reagan administration, epidemics were OK as long as people they didn’t like were the main victims. Dictatorships were OK as long as they were friendly to U.S. corporations.
The awful continued for decades with a few brief bright spots, but the über-rich got über-richer, the Supreme Court decided that corporations were people, then Trump got elected and the country took a deep dive into the abyss.
Down in the abyss, I became acquainted4 with the songs of John Stewart (and learned that he’d written at least one song that I’d known since high school — “Daydream Believer” — and others that I’d learned in the decades since, like “Never Goin’ Back (to Nashville Anymore),” but never associated with him. Now I’ve got more than a dozen favorite Stewart songs, starting with “Dreamers on the Rise,” “Hearts and Dreams on the Line,” “Roll Away the Stone,” “Cheyenne,” and “Queen of Hollywood High,” which has absolutely nothing to do with politics or history but is great to dance to.5
The fly in the ointment, the one song I actively disliked, was “I Remember America.” In startling contrast to “Dreamers on the Rise,” it seemed maudlin and nostalgic for a past that many of my generation fought hard to put behind us.
Then, while struggling to write this piece, I got it. The America I remember is the America of the 1970s, when we were “dreamers on the rise,” before it crashed in the 1980s — the America that’s fighting for its survival now. It’s not the America that Stewart lost and still longed for, but finally I understand some of the feeling behind the specifics, behind the song.
John Stewart died just before Barack Obama was elected and hope was in the air. He also missed the rise of Trump, which was probably a blessing. At the same time — well, I’m daring to believe that Kamala Harris and Tim Walz and all the people out there running for office are the dreamers we need in 2024, and they really are on the rise.
Well, you've gotta hold the line
have faith in the river,
look for a sign, any way you can go
For now is the time to stand and deliver
with the tears of the sun falling over the snow
John Stewart, "Tears of the Sun"NOTES
I knew of John Stewart while he was alive, having been a fan of the Kingston Trio in my teens. I commandeered my father’s copy of the Kingston Trio’s . . . from the Hungry I album, which was recorded before 1961, when Stewart replaced Dave Guard in the trio. I haven’t listened to it in many, many decades, but I can still sing the “Merry Minuet,” the trio’s tongue-in-cheek tribute to John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s secretary of state. But I didn’t really connect with Stewart’s songs till years after he passed.
Many years later, I copyedited Ray Boomhower’s Robert Kennedy and the 1968 Indiana Primary (Indiana University Press, 2008), which tells the story of how RFK addressed a mostly African American crowd in Indianapolis just as the news of King’s assassination was beginning to spread. Many credit his extemporaneous speech with helping Indianapolis become one of the few major U.S. cities that didn’t erupt in rage and grief after King’s death.
I just (re)learned that Election Day 1968 was November 5. So is Election Day 2024. Since the Democratic convention, I’ve been thinking (wishing? fantasizing?) that this is the year we finally put 1968 and the worst of what followed into the compost heap of history. The coincidence of dates gives me hope. We can do this.
I suspect that Barnes Newberry’s My Back Pages radio show is largely responsible. It’s streamed on station MVY-FM, which is based in my town of West Tisbury (HQ is next door to the West Tisbury post office) and heard all over the country.
These can all be found on YouTube. Google the title and add “Stewart” to your search. Several Stewart albums can be bought on iTunes, but not The Last Campaign, which is (you guessed it) about the RFK campaign. I ordered a copy of that on eBay. About “Tears of the Sun,” there are at least two recorded versions out there. This one, from the 1984–87 Secret Tapes, is meditative, even melancholy. The one on Wires from the Bunker is majestic, determined, even martial. (Wires was released in 2000, but most of it was recorded in the 1980s.)
I was waiting for the LAST CAMPAIGN CD to arrive and today it did. Just added the cover image.
Thanks for sharing…
I am always looking to expand my eclectic playlist.