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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Now, the second of our two oral history segments today, protests have been in the news this year around the war between Israel and Hamas as we all know, but protests are nothing new, of course. A new book takes a look back at a big one in its 25th anniversary year. It was the week-long protest in Seattle in 1999 against the World Trade Organization against globalization of the economy, which the Clinton administration had been fostering for its six years in office to that point.

Decent wages for American jobs were in their sites, so was exploitation of cheap labor in developing countries, also environmental concerns. The author, DW Gibson, writes that he was 21 years old at the time and only vaguely remembers hearing about Seattle and that it's been pretty much lost to history for people who grew up after him, but that protest set the template for so many protests and the police response to this day. Oh, by the way, unlike many protests he tells us, it succeeded in its goals. Let's find out why he thinks so.

DW Gibson is the author now of One Week to Change the World: An Oral History of the 1999 WTO Protests. His previous books include the award-winning The Edge Becomes the Center: An Oral History of Gentrification in the 21st Century, 14 Miles: Building the Border Wall, he wrote that during the Trump presidency, and Not Working: People Talk About Losing a Job and Finding Their Way in Today’s Changing Economy. He has also worked here for WNYC as co-host of the podcast about gentrification from a few years ago called There Goes the Neighborhood. Hi, DW, welcome back to WNYC.

DW Gibson: Thanks for having me, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Let's do a little 101 first. What was the World Trade Organization meeting that was scheduled to take place during the week of November 30th, 1999? What was supposed to happen there?

DW Gibson: At this point, WTO is just a few years old. It's really trying to find its footing as an international organization that's trying to set the rules for international trade and enforce those rules. They hoped in Seattle to come together and reach an agreement for binding rules around trade and what was happening all around the world led by the Global South, people in communities, small towns, counties, states, countries, recognizing that the WTO could write the rules for trade and enforce them, then it would override their democracy.

If a community says, "We don't want to have goods in our community that are made with child labor," or "We don't want to have goods that hurt the environment," the WTO is trying to establish, "No, you can't do that. That's illegal. That's a trade barrier." There was this tension between the rise of globalization under the Clinton administration and democracy, people standing up for themselves and saying they wanted to make sure that they had a seat at the table and deciding how all of this would go down.

Brian Lehrer: Economic globalization was proceeding in many ways on many fronts in many countries at that time. Who got the idea to make that particular meeting in Seattle, the scene of big protests, and why?

DW Gibson: There had been some other big successful protests in other parts of the world against similar organizations, IMF, International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank, and there have been protests against the WTO in its inception. As I said, many leaders, organizers, Zapatistas in Mexico, Korean farmers, French farmers, Indian activists are looking to beat back seed patenting that was big at the time. These are leaders all around the world joining this effort that had already been swelling by the time we got to Seattle.

When the WTO announced it would be meeting in Seattle and announced the ambition it had to really grow its power, that's when you see all this energy swelling in 1999. Organizing and training for this protest began months and months in advance, booking hotel rooms, making sure people had a place to stay. We're talking about 50,000 people from all around the world converging on this city. The equivalent would've been about 775,000 people converging on Columbia a few weeks ago, right? It's a massive, massive gathering in terms of the size of Seattle and how many people were descending on this city.

Brian Lehrer: Before we get into the protest tactics and the police tactics that seem to have set precedents for both groups to this day, you do write that this protest achieved its goal. You write, "How often do protestors articulate and achieve a clear tactical objective?" What goal or what objective was that?

DW Gibson: I think this is a really important point because something that Noam Chomsky says in the book is that on the left, particularly in the US, we never have a sort of enduring tradition. It's always starting over from one generation of organizers to the next. Tabula rasa, right? Usually, young people saying, "What can we try? Let's try this. Let's try that." There's rarely transference of tactics and strategies and tools, so I think that's one of the reasons it's important to look at Seattle.

They had one very clear objective that they articulated for months in advance. It was to shut down the meetings peacefully, nonviolently, so that they could not reach this new expansive agreement. They achieved that goal. They made a plan for blocking all of the intersections that led to the convention center. They divided the city's map up into 13 pie wedges, if you will.

They assigned small groups of protestors, put them in charge of each pie wedge, and said, "Hey, look, these are the two intersections. These are the three intersections you need to block." They all worked in concert to make that happen. They blocked 13 intersections and they did not allow the meetings to happen successfully throughout the week. The first day was completely canceled.

The rest of the week never really got back on track. The WTO had to leave town without the agreement they wanted, didn't even have so much as a joint press release. In that sense, I wonder how many protests of this scale in the last 50 years in the context of US have articulated the goal and reached that goal. It's pretty remarkable what they accomplished that week.

Brian Lehrer: In the larger scheme of things, it didn't stop globalization of the economy, right?

DW Gibson: Not at all. I think this is where you see that Chomsky point on the back end of all of the activity because I think two things really stopped this moment from becoming an enduring movement, if you will. One of them was 9/11 after the success in Seattle in late '99, 2000. Lots of energy swelling. A lot of the labor leaders that were there, they were a little bit more hesitant about the civil disobedience tactics, the direct-action tactics. They were coming around on those planning new protest against the WTO, but then 9/11 happens. All of the energy gets redirected into anti-war efforts.

It wasn't just 9/11. The other element was this element I mentioned earlier about this transference of tactic views and lessons learned, mistakes made from one generation of organizers to the next. I think that's where the organizers I spoke to expressed regret. They certainly had so much pride and understood what they accomplished that week. In the long run in terms of talking to organizers about what they had accomplished and how they had accomplished, that's where the moment failed to become a movement.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, the book is an oral history of the 1999 Seattle globalization protesters and the protests, including protesters, police, and others. I wonder if anybody listening right now wants to add your own piece of oral history. Anyone out there right now who happens to have taken part in those protests, the week of November 30th, 1999? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or anyone who has protested since about anything and feel like you were influenced by Seattle or anyone else with a question or comment or story to tell? 212-433-WNYC, call or text, 212-433-9692 for DW Gibson, author of One Week to Change the World: An Oral History of the 1999 WTO Protests.

Just to linger for a second on the point we were just discussing, how do you look back or how do some of the people involved who you quote in the book and their oral histories look back on the ultimate success or failure of the protest if globalization has happened in, more or less, the way the leaders were planning for it anyway? The book is called One Week to Change the World. Did they change the World or just change things about that meeting that week with respect to globalization itself?

DW Gibson: I think there are two truths at once. I think globalization has absolutely continued and kept a pace if not accelerated in the last 25 years, particularly in terms of corporate governance, corporate power, corporate say in this process. Again, let's remember. Lots of people in Seattle. It wasn't necessarily about being anti-globalization. It was about being pro-democracy. It was about, "We want a seat at the table. We want civil society. We want nonprofit organizations. We want citizens to have a say in the process."

Really, it was large corporations and government officials that were making the decisions. Bringing this discussion to the kitchen table, if you will, making people aware of the WTO, and the WTO has, in fact, been very weakened over the last 25 years for various reasons. That's one part of the element, but yet globalization has continued. This fight against it, I think, has become more common. We can see threads from Seattle taking us to occupy movement. We can see threads of Seattle taking us to Bernie Sanders' rise as a national figure and these conversations endure.

Brian Lehrer: Not just Bernie Sanders because I want to read a quote from the book from the legendary linguistics professor and critic of capitalism, who you've already mentioned, Noam Chomsky. This is not about the protests but about globalization itself. Chomsky says, "One thing this leads to is a correct sense that we can't trust the institutions and that can go in two directions. One can open the door to demagogues of the Trump variety saying, 'Follow me. I'll take care of you on to fascism.' The other way it could lead to is let's get organized and act, do something constructive to overcome this." Then he says, "There's a little of each now. Too much of the first, unfortunately. Seattle certainly opened the door to that." DW, was Chomsky saying the Seattle protestors from the left opened the door in a way to Donald Trump's MAGA movement on the right?

DW Gibson: I think what happened is the left lost its critique of globalism. The right somehow succeeded at labeling the Democratic Party as globalists and unconcerned with these issues. I think there are real critiques there in terms of a continuation of-- Look at the outcome of Occupy Wall Street and the lack of any kind of criminal prosecution of any bankers that were responsible for what had happened to American society. I think that the loss of the critique of globalism on the left is part of what goes into that comment there. That's something for the left to take a hard look at.

The other part of that, what Chomsky said there, and I think that is the part that gives me some hope, is when you hit rock bottom as it were in terms of democracy and its health, there's the capacity to bring together a big-tent coalition. One of the most amazing things about Seattle was you had Pat Buchanan there, but you also had Sherrod Brown and Tom Hayden from Chicago '68 there. You had a left-right coalition that almost seems unthinkable today with purity test and everyone wanting to make sure that as activists and organizers, we're all on the exact same page on all issues.

I think everyone in Seattle understood that if we don't defend democracy, then whatever policy debates we want to have, whatever fights we want to have, and believe you me, there were plenty of disagreements between the 50,000 people that were there, they understood that if they didn't defend democracy, they couldn't even have those policy debates. I think we find ourselves in a similar situation today. I think that second part of Chomsky's quote, I think it gives me a little bit of hope because that ingredient is there, that capacity to recognize the exigent nature of where we are in terms of defending democracy.

Brian Lehrer: Here is Brian in Philadelphia who says he was there in Seattle in 1999. Brian, you're on WNYC. Thank you for calling in.

Brian: Thank you so much, Brian. This is my first time. Been a long time since 2011 when I moved to Manhattan. Now, I'm here in Philly. Yes, I've been all over the country. In 1999, I participated. I was at the Seattle Central Community College then, was in my mid-20s, late bloomer. I saw and experienced. I became activated, activized. I became an activist then and there. [laughs] I saw both the police, the first time I'd ever seen the police in riot gear. Also, on the other side, the flip side of that, also the first time I saw my fellow Noam Chomsky-style anarchists ripping Nike logos out of central Seattle and doing violent tactics.

Lastly, I just wanted to say, I wish back then that what I've woken up to now is the cult of Noam Chomsky had informed me about Noam Chomsky's repeated decades of denying genocides from Pol Pot to the Bosnian genocide, to Rwanda. By the way, I hope the author and everyone listening knows because Noam Chomsky is now nearing his end. I hope everyone remembers that Chomsky has called Trump a great statesman regarding Trump's position on Putin's genocidal assault on Ukraine and has been an apologist for many very evil regimes for decades.

Brian Lehrer: Very interesting, Brian. Thank you very much. It's really a separate conversation, the legacy of Noam Chomsky, and whether he's defended foreign leaders who are evil abroad in his interest in critiquing capitalism and United States imperialism. I don't know if you want to say anything about that, DW, or if there's anything reflected on whatever controversy over Noam Chomsky's legacy there is in the book.

DW Gibson: No. Certainly, there isn't. Chomsky is one of nearly 70 voices in the book and there are so many activists who have been organizing for decades. They were there in Seattle and they're still organizing. Those voices, every bit is valuable. This book is really about a 360-degree view of the events of that week. Chomsky is just one small piece of that. I think you're right to just distinguish between that conversation and the conversation here about Seattle. I think the caller's first comment about the violence there is definitely worth responding to because I think it's an important point he made. 50,000 people in Seattle.

There were about 50 people by everyone's count. I talked to law enforcement, city officials, organizers, about 50 people. They called themselves the black bloc. They put on masks and they smashed windows and they took that approach. That was in direct opposition to the 50,000 people that were there. I think this is a story about the media. There's two things happened at once. 50 people decided to smash some windows. When that happened, that became the story. It was no longer globalization and how farmers are affected or sweatshops or the environment or all these major issues, but it became about 50 people smashing windows.

It didn't become about the 50,000 people who were not doing that, or let's even say the several dozen who linked arms and surrounded Nike towns so that further damage couldn't be done to it, or let's say the next day when protestors came out with dust pens and brooms and bags and swept up some of the mess alongside small business owners. Those are harder stories for newspapers to tell in an image or to tell quickly. Those things were happening too. There's something here about the media and its capacity to tell two stories at once that I think is pretty important.

Brian Lehrer: I just want to say for the record that I'm not familiar enough with Noam Chomsky's history to know if the caller was accurate in that very serious accusation that Chomsky denied or supported in any way, the genocide or Pol Pot or any of the other things the caller mentioned. Maybe he did. Maybe he didn't. We have to leave that unresolved for right now because I'll just say those are serious accusations and I don't know the answer. Paloma in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hello, Paloma.

Paloma: Hi, Brian. I grew up in Seattle and I was six years old in 1999. I remember my mom really, really wanting to go after the protests and my father actually telling her that she couldn't, which I didn't really think much of at the time. In retrospect, both my parents are very politically committed and very invested in direct action. I think it's pretty striking to think about now, the fact that it was such an unusual situation at the time in terms of the police response that my father, who was very committed to the politics of what was going on, would actually prohibit my mother from going.

Brian Lehrer: He was worried about her physical safety because of the police as opposed to the protestors?

Paloma: I think it was, at a certain point, hard to distinguish what was what. This is a little bit of a tangent. In 2020, a lot of protests that were happening around George Floyd in Seattle when there was an enforced curfew and all this stuff and there was a lot of incitement by police at those protests, I think, that as the chaos was unfolding with the WTO stuff as it was happening, it was hard to understand what was coming from where.

Brian Lehrer: Paloma, thank you so much for that memory. Wow, memory as a six-year-old of her parents discussing whether or not her mom should go to the Seattle 1999 protest. I want to give you an opportunity to talk more about the way they changed protesting, which is one of the biggest takeaways from the book. Leaderless protests, certain kinds of disruption, the call-and-response vocalization by the crowd, which we certainly heard again this year in the Gaza-related protest, use of the internet as an organizing tool when the internet was still pretty new. Want to talk about one of those or any others?

DW Gibson: Yes, I think this is why this is just such a great story. There are lessons to learn in applications to today. My goodness, it's just an amazing story of organizing and all the tools they used as you just enumerated. I think the big-picture thing to highlight and it traces back to a comment I made earlier about building a big-tent coalition, they had what they called an inside-outside strategy.

You have to remember, 50,000 people, you've got a spectrum. You've got DC, politically power-based, big nonprofits like Ralph Nader's Public Citizen involved. Sierra Club, big labor unions, AFL-CIO, Teamsters were there, steelworkers. Then you've got really small unofficial collectives, individual players, small environmental groups of Pacific Northwest that are really resistant to hierarchical structures.

How do you get these two camps to work out? It's inside, outside game. The idea was there's room for everybody at the table. Some of the protestors want to turn over the table, so to speak, and some of the protestors want a seat at the table. The protestors who want a seat at the table, these big DC-based NGOs, they got passes to the ministerial. They went into meetings and they tried to monkey-wrench the meetings.

That was their word, "monkey wrench," to influence how those discussions were going as much as they could in the halls or between meetings or wherever they could find space to engage delegates. That's going on in the inside. While on the outside, you've got people putting their bodies on the line in the street with lock boxes and big marching bands and all kinds of tactics. You've got those two things going on and they're feeding each other.

I think that's such a great example of how these disparate parts, these different approaches to organizing can work together. Yes, it's the first time you see the call-and-response, the people's microphone. A lot of people think this came from Occupy, but it came out of necessity outside of the county jail on the fourth day of the protest when 600 people had been arrested. There were more people outside the jail trying to get them out of there. I think the internet, as you said, it was a really big aspect of this.

It was the beginning of the internet. The beginning of the internet as an organizing tool. I think that it was harnessed in a way that it isn't today. What I mean by that is it was viewed as a tool, not a panacea. One of the organizers I talked to, he said, "I think Twitter might have destroyed organizing," because you can arrange 2,000 events in one day at the same time. What you lose is the interpersonal connection and the trust that people build by being in the same place at the same time.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting.

DW Gibson: It's important to point out that in Seattle, they had a place called the Convergence Space. It was a big warehouse they had rented. They did training sessions there about how to peacefully be arrested, how to resist police brutality. It was a place to get food and find a place to sleep. A big warehouse called the Convergence Center. That idea needs to be paired, I think, in a modern context with all the tools that are available to us now through social media.

Brian Lehrer: Before you go, on the other side of the barricades, your book tells us the Seattle protest also changed policing. I want to play a clip from a video history piece about the Seattle protests that The Wall Street Journal did a few years ago. The voice we'll hear is of Norm Stamper, who was the police chief in Seattle at the time. We'll hear a little of the narrator of the video in between, too short, but important clips of Stamper.

Norm Stamper: We had 50,000, 60,000 people on the streets of Seattle. It was a city at the time of 530,000 with about 900 available police officers.

Narrator: He says he now regrets how he directed his officers to handle the demonstrations.

Norm Stamper: I made the biggest mistake of my career by authorizing the use of chemical agents against non-violent, non-threatening protestors.

Brian Lehrer: Wow, Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper, who resigned afterwards because of his role in the police response to the 1999 World Trade Organization protests, looking back with open regret in that clip. As we're about to finish up with DW Gibson, author now of One Week to Change the World: An Oral History of the 1999 WTO Protests. DW, what kind of policing was Norm Stamper referring to there that he came to regret and do we see it at protests to this day?

DW Gibson: We do. This is the first time in Seattle in the US context, we see riot gear for police, modern riot gear the way we see it very commonly nowadays in all protests. I think Norm Stamper is one of the most important figures in this book because as chief of police for the Seattle Police Department, he really abdicated his role. He disappeared that week. I had a really moving confession from him in the book, where he spoke very eloquently about the fact that he shouldn't have ever become a cop.

He shouldn't have ever become a police officer. His heart was with the protestors. He really believed in their cause. He came to realize that through this experience. He unleashed this monologue, if you will, that I have in the book that's utterly moving. He was the one who thought that way. There were other layers of law enforcement, the sheriff's office, state patrol, FBI, Secret Service because Clinton's coming to town. They had a very different view.

In the end, Norm Stamper and the mayor of Seattle, Paul Schell, who's now deceased, their desire to give protestors space to do their thing and to let the ministerial happen, it didn't succeed obviously. The other law enforcement moved in with much stronger hands to handle things. That's when they really unleashed the pepper spray and the tear gas. The important fact is they ran out of tear gas and pepper spray on the second day. The FBI had to fly some in by jet overnight from Colorado.

That shows you the force with which the police responded. It was mainly due to the fact that they had underestimated what happened. They hadn't necessarily planned as they should and they were caught flat-footed. That never puts law enforcement in a good position to respond. In fact, they completely overresponded. What happened after Seattle is that those officers then went around the country and indeed around the world and advised other police departments on their response on lessons learned.

I think lessons learned is a good thing, but tactics is a dangerous thing. Then, unfortunately, we've seen the tactics that were employed in Seattle continue to be employed with more riot-gear police at the forefront of protesting. More armored vehicles at the forefront of protesting, not as backup or a third or fourth option, but out of the gate. I think that's alarming. I think it's important to realize that the law enforcement there is to protect and serve. That includes the power structures that are holding the ire of the protestors.

Brian Lehrer: DW Gibson's new book is One Week to Change the World: An Oral History of the 1999 WTO Protests. Thank you so much for talking about it with us.

DW Gibson: Thanks for having me, Brian.

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