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102 THE PRACTICE OF INNOVATION

liberals. It was the one way to obtain enough political strength to make
significant gains for American blacks. Jesse Jackson saw that the change
in perception that now divides American blacks from their old allies and
comrades-in-arms, white liberals, is an innovative opportunity to create
a totally different kind of black leadership, one based on vocal enmity
to the white liberals and even all-out attack on them. In the past, to have
sounded as anti-liberal, anti-union, and anti-Jewish as Jackson has done
would have been political suicide. Within a few short weeks in 1984, it
made Jackson the undisputed leader of the American black community.
4. American feminists today consider the 1930s and 1940s the
darkest of dark ages, with women denied any role in society.
Factually, nothing could be more absurd. The America of the 1930s
and 1940s was dominated by female stars of the first magnitude.
There was Eleanor Roosevelt, the first wife of an American President
to establish for herself a major role as a conscience, and as the voice
of principle and of compassion which no American male in our his-
tory has equaled. Her friend, Frances Perkins, was the first woman in
an American cabinet as Secretary of Labor, and the strongest, most
effective member of President Roosevelt’s cabinet altogether. Anna
Rosenberg was the first woman to become a senior executive of a
very big corporation as personnel vice-president of R. H. Macy, then
the country’s biggest retailer; and later on, during the Korean War,
she became Assistant Secretary of Defense for manpower and the
“boss” of the generals. There were any number of prominent and
strong women as university and college presidents, each a national
figure. The leading playwrights, Clare Booth Luce and Lillian
Heliman, were both women—and Clare Luce then became a major
political figure, a member of Congress from Connecticut, and ambas-
sador to Italy. The most publicized medical advance of the period was
the work of a woman. Helen Taussig developed the first successful
surgery of the living heart, the “blue baby” operation, which saved
countless children all over the world and ushered in the age of cardiac
surgery, leading directly to the heart transplant and the by-pass oper-
ation. And there was Marian Anderson, the black singer and the first
black to enter every American living room through the radio, touch-
ing the hearts and consciences of millions of Americans as no black
before her had done and none would do again until Martin Luther
King, Jr., a quarter century later. The list could be continued indefi-
nitely.
These were very proud women, conscious of their achievements,