67 pages • 2 hours read
Sharon McMahonThe Small and the Mighty: Twelve Unsung Americans Who Changed the Course of History, From the Founding to the Civil Rights Movement
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Importance of Forgotten Figures in Shaping History
The Small and the Mighty is a collection of stories about people who changed the course of American history despite lacking the institutional power that many better-known historical figures enjoyed. McMahon presents a number of stories about Americans who worked through great adversity to create lasting change, even if they were later forgotten by history. She argues that the United States was brought into being by people who worked to overcome inequality and injustice and that Americans today have the responsibility of making sure the nation continues to embody its founding principles of justice, peace, goodness, and freedom.
McMahon opens The Small and the Mighty with a story about Gouverneur Morris, a largely forgotten Founding Father who was responsible for penning “some of the most consequential words in world history”: the Preamble of the United States Constitution, which begins, “We the people, in order to form a more perfect union” and goes on to articulate justice, peace, goodness, and freedom as the new country’s founding principles (6). McMahon emphasizes the personal challenges and character flaws that stood in the way of Morris’s political career. He was disabled and used a wooden prosthetic leg, and his serial philandering damaged his reputation. For McMahon, what is most important about Morris is that he was “flawed and complicated”—a person, not a mythic hero. Though he is outshone by the great “suns” of history like Alexander Hamilton, he was one of the few delegates at the Constitutional Convention who opposed slavery, and his Preamble to the Constitution remains among the best-known American political documents.
McMahon views American history overall as a long march toward ever-greater equality and social justice marked by temporary periods of backlash, and she argues that this march has been led not by the powerful but by people who faced oppression themselves. In the fight for women’s suffrage, for example, women like Inez Milholland led marches and made headlines, while other women behind the scenes worked for years to challenge gender stereotypes and lay the groundwork for a national suffrage movement. In creating an education system for Black children following the Civil War, northern philanthropists like Anna Thomas Jeanes and Julius Rosenwald gave millions of dollars to construct schools in rural African American communities. However, these communities also raised their own money, dollar by dollar, and teachers like Virginia Randolph worked tirelessly to bring children to their schools. These contributions are no less valuable. McMahon argues that everyone must contribute to making change; there is a unique role for everyone to play, even or especially for “the small and the mighty” (280).
Hope and Resilience in the Face of Adversity
The Small and the Mighty emphasizes the virtues of tenacity and resilience. No matter what adversity they face or how impossible their goals seem, McMahon’s forgotten Americans never give up hope. Some work their entire lives and never see the fruits of their labor realized. McMahon argues that this tenacity and refusal to give up hope is the definitive factor in their success.
In the first part of the book, McMahon tells the story of Clara Brown, an enslaved woman who was separated from her daughter when she was a child. Clara worked hard her whole life, finally gained her freedom when she was over 50 years old, and moved to Colorado, where she built a business from scratch and constantly impressed those she met with “her kindness and her tenacity” (36). All along, Clara never gave up the hope of finding her daughter, and before her death, they were finally reunited. Faced with enslavement, the loss of her family, and her country’s insistence that was “not a citizen,” Clara continually chose to hope that life could be better.
Similarly, Virginia Randolph never gave up on her goal of bringing education to Black children in rural Virginia, even though she faced staunch resistance both from white racists who opposed any education for Black people and from Black people who disagreed with Virginia’s educational model. When the school she had built with her own money burned to the ground, Virginia grieved but then got straight back to work, asking herself what “the next needed thing” was and doing that (46). McMahon uses Virginia’s story to highlight the importance of perseverance: Even when she had to start from scratch, Virginia did not give up.
These stories of resilience and determination occur throughout the book. One of Virginia’s fellow Jeanes teachers, Mildred Williams, commented on the obstacles she faced by saying, “Progress is usually born out of struggle” (163). McMahon argues that “struggle doesn’t always mean progress” (163); sometimes, the missing ingredient is hope. She writes that “progress doesn’t arrive unbidden”; it is “birthed” and “labored for,” and everyone has a part to play (164). Hope drives action, and in order to play their part, individuals must hold onto hope and the belief that their work matters. She wants the stories she shares in The Small and the Mighty to help “orient our spirits toward hope” and inspire us to stand up when our own time to act comes (279).
History as a Continuum of Progress
In The Small and the Mighty, McMahon describes the various ways that mainstream historical narratives gloss over the less flattering parts of US history, seeking a unified and optimistic story of the nation. McMahon argues instead for an embrace of ambiguity in studying history; more than one thing can be true at the same time, and making room for multiple perspectives can help us better understand the complex realities of the modern world.
Despite her emphasis on complexity and ambiguity, McMahon does advocate a teleological view of history—presenting US history as a continuous movement toward the goal of equality and justice. In McMahon’s teleology, studying history can give us context for how far we have come, even if there is still a long and difficult road ahead of us. McMahon argues that the United States has, “[w]ith astonishing regularity” (12), stayed true to the aspirational ideals outlined in the Constitution. There have been certain lapses, but even during these times, individual Americans carried the hope of the United States forward, and the overall trajectory is one of progress. There is, then, a certain duality to the story of the United States, which “has been the land of the free while simultaneously sanctioning oppression” (12). Although social media and news outlets try to convince us that the United States is “the worst it’s ever been” (33), McMahon insists that this is false. After all, no one has recently “been beaten half to death on the floor of the Senate over the topic of whether it’s cool to enslave people” like Senator Charles Sumner was in 1856 (33).
The stories that McMahon tells show that every step along this continuum of progress met resistance and backlash from entrenched interests. The violent, nearly all-male mob that attacked Inez Millholland’s march in Washington, DC, is a visual symbol of this universal problem. All forward movement is imperfect. The suffrage movement, for example, “intentionally exclud[ed]” Black women in hopes of winning the right to vote for white women. Northern philanthropists like Julius Rosenwald and educators like Samuel Armstrong used derogatory language to talk about African Americans even as they worked to bring more opportunities to Black communities. No one advocated for equality or school desegregation as they built schools in rural Black communities across the South. Often, these facts are hidden away to avoid recognizing the more painful parts of our collective past. However, “[f]acts don’t require our personal approval for them to be facts” (256), and “learning about the real, true, beautiful, infuriating, horrific, meaningful history of the United States” helps us better understand the trajectory of progress and see our own opportunity to carry forth our collective mission of justice, peace, goodness, and freedom (269).
