Your grandmother taught me to read when I was only four. She also taught me to write, by which I mean not simply organizing a set of sentences into a series of paragraphs, but organizing them as a means of investigation. When I was in trouble at school (which was quite often) she would make me write about it. The writing had to answer a series of questions: Why did I feel the need to talk at the same time as my teacher? Why did I not believe that my teacher was entitled to respect? How would I want someone to behave while I was talking? What would I do the next time I felt the urge to talk to my friends during a lesson? I have given you these same assignments. I gave them to you not because I thought they would curb your behavior - they certainly did not curb mine - but because these were the earliest acts of interrogation, of drawing myself into consciousness. Your grandmother was not teaching me how to behave in class. She was teaching me how to ruthlessly interrogate the subject that elicited the most sympathy and rationalizing - myself. Here was the lesson: I was not an innocent. My impulses were not filled with unfailing virtue. And feeling that I was as human as anyone, this must be true for other humans. If I was not innocent, then they were not innocent. Could this mix of motivation also affect the stories they tell? The cities they built? The country they claimed as given to them by God?

You must struggle to truly remember this past in all its nuance, error, and humanity. You must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice. The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance - no matter how improved - as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children.

Again, one of the things I most want you to take from this book is a deep skepticism about any judgmental “worthiness hierarchy” that favors a singular measure of what to make of a life. There is absolutely no legitimate way to judge Alice Paul’s life as better than Lucy Burn’s life, or vice versa. They are different. Different people, different encodings, different priorities, different temperaments, different choices, but both lived out fire-filled lives.

Fog of Youth

While some of the people in our study found a clear path quite early, others had a somewhat foggy phase in their teens and 20s. Even someone as clear and resolute as Alice Paul (once she found herself committed to the fight for suffrage) had a somewhat fog-filled wandering phase in her youth. In college at Swarthmore, she majored in biological sciences, a field she never seriously pursued after graduation. After college, she went to New York to do social work related to labour issues and study at the New York School of Philanthropy. After living in New York for a year or so, she entered graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania, thinking she might pursue and academic/teaching career. She then completed a master’s degree. There is some discrepancy in the sources as to whether her master’s was in sociology or political inquiry, but either way she embarked on a vector quite divergent from biology! She then travelled abroad, first in Germany, then on to England, where she studied at the London School of Economics. Biology, social work, economics . . . where was young Alice Paul going? What was all this wandering and exploration adding up to?

Paul took her first steps toward fighting for suffrage in England, when she joined protests organized by the militant suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst, which led to her meeting Lucy Burns in jail, joining a hunger strike, and being force-fed. But even then, Alice Paul had not fully emerged from the fog of youth. Upon her return to the United States, she pinged back to an academic path, completing a PhD in economics. Was she going to become a professor of economics or a teacher or a practicing economist or a social worker or a writer, or . . . what exactly?

At age 28, she took a big step when she helped architect a suffrage parade the day before Woodrow Wilson’s first presidential inauguration, a seminal moment that revealed her encodings for quiet, fearless leadership and a penchant for crafting spectacles of protest. She also began to show what would be one of her most distinctive leadership encodings: strategic insight. Paul had an impressive ability to see with piercing clarity the grand strategies that would lead to victory. In particular, she saw that the best strategy lay in pursuit of a constitutional amendment, rather than seeking suffrage state by state, and she co-founded with Lucy Burns the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage dedicated to that strategy.