Herbert
H. Haines
March, 2007
“Bridge units” sound like something that would be
studied
by a mechanical engineer, not a sociologist. But
the
bridge
units that Herb Haines is interested in aren’t parts of
structures spanning rivers or canyons.
They’re parts
of social movements like antiwar campaigns, right-to-life crusades, and
the movements to reform drug policy reform and abolish capital
punishment. And they may have a lot to do with
whether
those movement succeed or fail.
“Most people my age remember a group called Vietnam Veterans
Against the War, which played an important part in ending American
military involvement in Southeast Asia. Before V.V.A.W., many
Americans were reluctant to identify with the peace movement, because
they associated it with long-haired hippies and student
radicals.
But suddenly there were large numbers of combat veterans back from
Vietnam, actual soldiers who had fought in that war, saying it was
wrong and that the U.S. should get out. Even though these
vets
usually dressed and wore their hair in the countercultural style of the
time, their combat experience gave them credibility that other
protesters – people like me – didn’t
have.
V.V.A.W. was able to link the peace movement with the respected image
of the soldier, and to counteract and contradict many of the criticisms
hurled against the protesters. This is precisely what
movement
bridge units are all about. They can change the chemistry of
a
movement either by undermining the negative stereotypes that opponents
of the ‘host movement’ use to discredit it or by
bridging
opposing sides of an issue.”
In his current work, Haines is interviewing members of bridge units in
three current social movements: law enforcement officials who oppose
the war on drugs, murder victims’ families who work to
abolish
the death penalty, and self-described feminists who oppose
abortion. Like the antiwar veterans of the 1960s and 70s,
they
bring an important new dimension to their host movements and
often change the political dynamics of the issues they
address.
On the other hand, they are often treated as traitors by other cops,
feminists or, in the case of murder victims’ families, even
by
some of their own relatives. They face intense pressure to
keep
silent, and sometimes they coexist awkwardly with other activists who
come from different backgrounds.
Haines’ research on movement bridge units draws upon nearly
twenty-five years of experience studying American social
movements. Even though it involves complicated
theoretical
models known mostly to specialists, each of the earlier studies that
led him to investigate these groups was inspired by his classroom
conversations with undergraduate students. “For
me,”
he says, “the classroom has always been sort of a nursery of
research ideas. Students constantly make me think about new
things, or to think about old topics in new ways.”
For example, the hypothesis for his doctoral dissertation came to him
while teaching an introductory sociology course during his graduate
school days at the University of Kansas. In learning about
race
relations, some of his students were having difficulty understanding
why it took so long for African-Americans to achieve certain basic
freedoms like the right to vote or to eat lunch at a restaurant of
their own choosing. Reminding them that ideas we now take for
granted were once considered quite radical, Haines began thinking about
how public acceptance of such ideas might be accelerated when even more
extreme goals or movement tactics come along. Maybe, new
“radical flanks” make yesterday’s
radicals seem tame
by comparison, and thus more reasonable. In his dissertation,
he
devised ways to show that this was an important factor in the
trajectories of the civil rights and black power movements in the 1950s
and 1960s. The dissertation was named best of the year by
K.U.,
and was ultimately published by the University of Tennessee Press and
named an outstanding book by Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of
Human Rights in the United States. Haines’ concept
of
“radical flank effects” soon became a staple in the
theoretical literature on social movements.
Similarly, the idea to write a book about the anti-death penalty
movement (Against Capital Punishment , Oxford University Press, 1996,
1999), was also born in the classroom. This time it happened
at
Cortland, in Haines’ Sociology of Violence course, and it
allowed
him to combine his twin interests in social movements and crime
policy. With the second of his three National Science
Foundation
grants, he spent two years interviewing key opponents of capital
punishment from coast to coast and analyzing thousands of pages of
documents at the headquarters of Amnesty International, the American
Civil Liberties Union, and the National Coalition to Abolish the Death
Penalty. Among the people he came to know were the founders
of
Murder Victims’ Families for Reconciliation, who were just
beginning to build one of the movement bridge units that are the focus
of his current efforts. Against Capital Punishment has been
well-received by scholars and activists in both the U.S. and
Europe. His thoughts on the death penalty have been sought by
the
Los Angeles Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Congressional Quarterly
Researcher and other publications, and he has been invited to speak on
the subject at conferences across New York and in Washington, DC.
A few years later, the magical teaching-research connection struck
again. Haines was intrigued by his criminology
students’
fascination with drug legalization proposals, and he realized that the
growing drug policy reform movement had been virtually ignored by
social scientists up to that point. The National Science
Foundation provided funding again, and he was back in the field with
tape recorder and notebook in hand, meeting with activists and
officials at conferences, board meetings, and organizational
headquarters in New York, Washington, and
elsewhere.
Again, the timing was fortunate; another bridge unit happened to be in
the
formation stages, a group called “Law Enforcement Against
Prohibition” that consists mostly of retired police,
prosecutors
and judges who have concluded that current anti-drug strategies much be
changed.
“The type of research that I do is very time- and
labor-intensive. It requires building relationships based on
trust, and it involves qualitative data that are voluminous and
somewhat difficult to get. And in designing my projects,
I’ve tended to bite off every bit as much as I can
chew. If
I’d had more sense, I probably would have done studies with
titles like ‘Civil Rights Groups in Jackson County,
Missouri,’ or ‘The Battle over the Death Penalty in
New
York, 1976 - 1995.’ But no, I’ve had the
habit of
focusing my attention at the national level. I’ve
been
happy with the results, but sometimes I wonder if I have latent
masochistic tendencies of some sort.”
One reason that Haines is happy with the results is that his work has
usually come full circle from its origins in the classroom, to the
field, then back to the classroom in the form of new courses.
“Many of my students may not care that much that
I’ve
gotten fairly large (by social science standards) NSF grants to do
studies of the politics of the death penalty or drug control or that
I’m ‘the radical flank effects
guy.’ But they
do care that I offer full-semester courses on capital punishment and
drug control, and they find those courses to be really
interesting. Once a freshman sociology major asked me why
it’s so important for professors to do
research. My
response to him was ‘Take my Social Movements course next
semester – I can show you better than I can tell
you!’”