Most attempts at revolution fizzle out. People talk about radical change for a bit, their talk eventually fades, and everyone moves on. But in rare cases this same kind of casual chitchat will gradually snowball over many years until it suddenly bursts onto the scene as full-on incitement against the status quo. It’s rare but it happens.
The U.S. saw this phenomenon play out when it separated sex from marriage and saw it again when it gave credit cards to women. Both of these notions were initially rejected as subversive but went on to quietly gain momentum behind closed doors until tactical breakthroughs swooped in to cement them as the defaults for our culture. The wide availability of birth control enabled permissive extramarital sex and 1974’s ECOA legislation enabled credit for women.
What follows are three lesser-known examples of the gradual, then sudden revolutionary forces that sometimes shape the history of the United States.
Dance Dance, Revolution
One quite literal example of gradual, then sudden revolution in the U.S. started in 1959 when a local radio station in Vancouver, WA looped a single pop song for 24 hours straight as a promotional gimmick. Teenage Bill of Rights was a spoken-word tune that clocked in at just under two minutes and featured a loud, Bopper-esque singer asking a chorus of teenagers, Should we start a revolution? And the teenagers yelling back yeah!-yeah! in response.
As a song TBoR is pretty forgettable but as a cultural touchstone it’s remarkable because 1959 is super early for a pop artist to be singing about teenage revolt against the adult order. Eisenhower was president then, Alaska and Hawaii were being admitted as states, and we were selecting our first-ever astronauts. Revolution was decidedly not in the air at this time but here was this seemingly innocent novelty song hinting that perhaps American youth were beginning to agitate. As it turns out the song was onto something, no one knew it yet, and it would take six years before 1967 proved its prescience.
Those intervening years of pop music, from 1960 to 1966, had nothing to say on the topic of inciting revolution. 1962’s The Revo-Lution, produced by The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson, was released as an answer record to The Loco-Motion and was thoroughly uncontroversial since it pointed to a rotation of the hips instead of a rebellion of the mind. Three years after that song was released, Sonny Bono continued the fake-out by managing to be even less controversial with The Revolution Kind, which goes out of its way to say that, hey, this long hair is just for looks and what is actually cool is the status quo. Viva la conformidad!
The band that finally brought explicit talk of revolution back into pop music was not The Beatles as one might suppose but a band called Tomorrow, who released their song Revolution in September 1967*:
Flower children spreading love - a that's a startYou can tell those with a heart...Be careful what you say police on the phoneHave your own little revolution...Have your own little revolution now!Revolution now!
In 1967 summer officially ended on September 23, so the “Summer of Love” had only just happened. Some musicologists contend Tomorrow’s Revolution song went on to inspire John Lennon’s Revolution 1 and Revolution 9. The snowball had grown large and was now visible for all to see.
Seven years is a relatively long time chronologically but the semantic distance between should we start a revolution? and you say you want a revolution? is pretty short (The Beatles’ Revolution track was released in August of 1968.) It took awhile but suddenly a sizable number of young people began to scream yes to both questions, even though the ever-introspective Lennon was not necessarily fully bought in. And the rest is history.
Bogle’s Folly
The next example starts in 1960, when economists Edward Renshaw and Paul Feldstein published a short paper in the Financial Analysts Journal called The Case for an Unmanaged Investment Company. Their idea was heresy stated politely: most mutual fund managers fail to beat the market average, so why not sell a fund that simply holds the average? 1960 is super early for this. The fund industry ran on star managers and fat sales loads. It went nowhere, except that it provoked one rebuttal. Months later the same journal ran The Case for Mutual Fund Management, a defense of the stock pickers written under the pen name John B. Armstrong. Armstrong’s real name was John Bogle.
The intervening years belonged to academics. Sharpe and Fama built the theory, Wells Fargo quietly ran the first indexed account for Samsonite’s pension in 1971, and in 1974 Paul Samuelson published Challenge to Judgment, daring somebody, anybody, to launch an index fund for ordinary investors. The dare landed on the man who had written the case against it. Bogle launched the First Index Investment Trust in August 1976. Underwriters hoped to raise $150 million but raised just $11.3 million. Wall Street called it Bogle’s folly, rival brokers passed out posters declaring index funds un-American, and Fidelity’s chairman said investors would never settle for merely average returns.
Then came four decades of the quiet snowball, and the tactical breakthrough that cemented the new status quo. The Pension Protection Act of 2006 blessed auto-enrollment and made index-heavy target-date funds the standard destination for every untouched 401(k) paycheck. Millions of workers became indexers without ever deciding to and in August 2019 Morningstar reported that assets in U.S. index equity funds had passed assets in actively managed ones.
Fifty-nine years is a long time chronologically, but the semantic distance between the case for an unmanaged investment company and passive is now the default is basically zero. Renshaw asked the question, Bogle argued no, and then Bogle spent the rest of his life proving himself wrong. Revolution can indeed be (very) gradual, then sudden, and sometimes its fiercest early opponent is the one who ends up leading the charge.
You say you want a real solution?
One last revolution is also financial in nature and is still in its gradual phase. This one concerns how businesses get paid.
In 1952 the drafters of the Uniform Commercial Code finished Article 9, and as states adopted it over the next two decades, unpaid invoices quietly became legal collateral, meaning any business owed money was technically holding a fundable asset. But there was no way to verify an invoice beyond the paperwork the issuer handed over, so for seventy years the cash on offer came from firms taking their discount and calling your customers, joined in the late 1990s by merchant cash advances running to triple digit interest rates by trying and mostly failing to project your future revenue.
But the revolutionary pieces thankfully keep quietly assembling. Bank data got a verification layer when Plaid showed up in 2013, and Latin America went further and gave the invoice itself a verification layer. Chile made the invoice a transferable, enforceable title in 2004, Colombia's tax authority launched its RADIAN registry in 2021, and Brazil's central bank ordered card receivables into registries that same June.
But the U.S. and its $2.4 trillion receivables finance market are currently still stuck with borrower-submitted PDFs and once-a-year field exams. Recently we all got the bill when First Brands left billions lent against invoices that were fake, double-pledged, or nonexistent, so today’s funders understandably price every unverified invoice like it might be fraudulent. Businesses foot that premium for frauds they had nothing to do with.
Which brings us happily to the sudden part. It’s coming. We’re starting to certify invoices inside the customers’ systems of record, independent of the businesses selling to them, and re-certify them every day until they’re paid. Funders are beginning to underwrite did this creditworthy customer actually approve this bill? instead of is this business good for it? Article 9 made the invoice collateral back in 1952, certification is finally making it checkable, and before long, cheap and ready working capital for the businesses that do the work will feel as status quo as the index fund. Gradual, then sudden.
U.S. law is even arriving on cue this time. The UCC's new Article 12, drafted in 2022 and adopted state by state since, with New York signing on this past December, lets a receivable held as an electronic record under control be bought and sold with clean title, the way a check always could and an invoice never really could. Seventy-four years after Article 9 made the invoice collateral, Article 12 makes the certified invoice something you can actually trade, which is about as sudden as commercial law gets.
* One could argue Phil Ochs’ Ringing of Revolution came before this, in 1966, but that’s folk music, not to be confused with popular music.