★★★★★ 5
“This country is not in good condition.” Calvin Coolidge, 1931. (p. 387).
Apart from his unique view of American history and of his treatment of many of the landmark events of that history, Howard Zinn gives us any number of interesting and noteworthy observations in the course of this 700-page text. I beg your indulgence while we look at just a few….
On p. 73, “(t)o say that the Declaration of Independence, even by its own language, was limited to life, liberty and happiness for white males is not to denounce the makers and signers of the Declaration for holding the ideas expected of privileged males of the eighteenth century. Reformers and radicals, looking discontentedly at history, are often accused of expecting too much from a past political epoch – and sometimes they do. But the point of noting those outside the arc of human rights in the Declaration is not, centuries late and pointlessly, to lay impossible moral burdens on that time. It is to try to understand the way in which the Declaration functioned to mobilize certain groups of Americans, ignoring others. Surely, inspirational language to create a secure consensus is still used, in our time, to cover up serious conflicts of interest in that consensus, and to cover up, also, the omission of large parts of the human race.”
And then, on p. 96: “(t)he problem of democracy in the post-Revolutionary society was not, however, the Constitutional limitations on voting. It lay deeper, beyond the Constitution, in the division of society into rich and poor. For if some people had great wealth and great influence; if they had the land, the money, the newspapers, the church, the educational system – how could voting, however broad, cut into such power? There was still another problem: wasn’t it the nature of representative government, even when most broadly based, to be conservative, to prevent tumultuous change?”
For the answer to that last question, we can, of course, always turn to the pleasantly incendiary words of no less than Thomas Jefferson, which Mr. Zinn naturally and deftly does: “‘I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing…. It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government…. God forbid that we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion…. The Tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.’”
One can only imagine how Jefferson would’ve reacted to the following open letter penned by Ralph Waldo Emerson to President Van Buren in 1838 as the still young nation hung its head in shame for the Trail of Tears it had just blazed: “(t)he soul of man, the justice, the mercy that is the heart’s heart in all men, from Maine to Georgia, does abhor this business…a crime is projected that confounds our understanding by its magnitude, a crime that really deprives us as well as the Cherokees of a country for how could we call the conspiracy that should crush these poor Indians our government, or the land that was cursed by their parting and dying imprecations our country any more? You, sir, will bring down that renowned chair in which you sit into infamy if your seal is set to this instrument of perfidy; and the name of this nation, hitherto the sweet omen of religion and liberty, will stink to the world” (p. 147).
Was the very noble Van Buren at all distressed by the death of thousands of Cherokee Indians along this Trail of Tears when, at the end of the same year, he spoke to Congress? “It affords sincere pleasure to apprise the Congress of the entire removal of the Cherokee Nation of Indians to their new homes west of the Mississippi. The measures authorized by Congress at its last session have had the happiest effects” (p. 148). (Emphasis is mine.)
And if you think that all of the wars the U. S. participated in right up to Vietnam were “good” wars (as I did until now), consider what we have in the way of a diary entry from a certain Colonel Hitchcock: “I have said from the first that the United States are the aggressors…. We have not one particle of right to be here…. It looks as if the government sent a small force on purpose to bring on a war, so as to have a pretext for taking California and as much of this country as it chooses, for, whatever becomes of this army, there is no doubt of a war between the United States and Mexico…. My heart is not in this business … but, as a military man, I am bound to execute orders” (p. 151).
As I’ve already said, Zinn has a singular way of characterizing some of history’s more significant events. As yet another example, I give you the following from p. 171 (on the first page of Chapter 9, titled “Slavery without Submission, Emancipation without Freedom”: “…it was Abraham Lincoln who freed the slaves, not John Brown. In 1859, John Brown was hanged, with federal complicity, for attempting to do by small-scale violence what Lincoln would do by large-scale violence several years later – end slavery.”
And lest there still be any doubt about Abraham Lincoln’s position on American blacks and the issue of slavery, Zinn gives us these two very telltale quotes:
“I will say, then, that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races; that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people….
And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race” (p. 188).
Moreover, and in direct response to the Editor of the New York Tribune, Horace Greeley, we find this (on p. 191): “Dear Sir: … I have not meant to leave any one in doubt…. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or destroy Slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could do it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that. What I do about Slavery and the colored race, I do because it helps to save this Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union…. I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty, and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men, everywhere, could be free. Yours, A. Lincoln.”
But history (and human “progress”) moves on – and so, we have this: “(i)n 1877, (the year, according to David Burbank, in his book REIGN OF THE RABBLE, ‘no American city has come so close to being ruled by a workers’ soviet, as we would now call it, as St. Louis, Missouri’ – p. 250), the same year blacks learned they did not have enough strength to make real the promise of equality in the Civil War, working people learned they were not united enough, not powerful enough, to defeat the combination of private capital and government power” (p. 251).
And Zinn then opens Chapter 11 (“Robber Barons and Rebels”) with this: “(i)n the year 1877, the signals were given for the rest of the century: the black would be put back; the strikes of white workers would not be tolerated; the industrial and political elites of North and South would take hold of the country and organize the greatest march of economic growth in human history. They would do it with the aid of, and at the expense of, black labor, white labor, Chinese labor, European immigrant labor, female labor, rewarding them differently by race, sex, national origin, and social class, in such a way as to create separate levels of oppression – a skillful terracing to stabilize the pyramid of wealth” (p. 253).
For those who think the “Occupy Wall Street” movement of the new millennium was a singular invention of the millennial generation, you might want to consider what Mary Ellen Lease, of the newly formed People’s Party, had to tell those assembled at that party’s first convention in 1890 in Topeka, KS: “Wall Street owns the country. It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street and for Wall Street…. Our laws are the output of a system which clothes rascals in robes and honesty in rags…. The politicians said we suffered from overproduction. Overproduction, when 10,000 little children … starve to death every year in the U. S. and over 100,000 shop girls in New York are forced to sell their virtue for bread….
“There are thirty men in the United States whose aggregate wealth is over one and one-half billion dollars. There are half a million looking for work…. We want money, land and transportation. We want the abolition of the National Banks, and we want the power to make loans direct from the government. We want the accursed foreclosure system wiped out…. We will stand by our homes and stay by our firesides by force if necessary, and we will not pay our debts to the loan-shark companies until the Government pays its debts to us.
“The people are at bay, let the bloodhounds of money who have dogged us thus far beware” (p. 288).
For those (like me until now) who’ve always thought only the best of Teddy Roosevelt, the following two direct quotes – not to mention William James’s rejoinder – might be a bit of a news-breaker: “(i)n strict confidence…I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one” (p. 297). And in his address to the Naval War College, he has this to say: “(a)ll the great masterful races have been fighting races…. No triumph of peace is quite so great as the supreme triumph of war” (p. 300). Thankfully – and from James – comes the sobering suggestion that he (Roosevelt) “gushes over war as the ideal condition of human society, for the manly strenuousness which it involves, and treats peace as a condition of blubberlike and swollen ignobility, fit only for huckstering weaklings, dwelling in gray twilight and heedless of the higher life…” (p. 300).
For those who think Obama’s recent initiative at a rapprochement with Cuba bodes well for that impoverished Caribbean island, you might want to consider what another historian, Philip Foner, writes about the last time (towards the end of the nineteenth century) this country took a keen interest in Old Havana: “(e)ven before the Spanish flag was down in Cuba, U. S. business interests set out to make their influence felt. Merchants, real estate agents, stock speculators, reckless adventurers, and promoters of all kinds of get-rich schemes flocked to Cuba by the thousands. Seven syndicates battled each other for control of the franchises for the Havana Street Railway, which were finally won by Percival Farquhar, representing the Wall Street interests of New York. Thus, simultaneously with the military occupation began … commercial occupation” (p. 310).
But it gets even better on the other side of the planet, and the same William James who pronounced upon the clearly bellicose character of Teddy Roosevelt has the last word on American behavior in the Pacific: “God dam* the U. S. for its vile conduct in the Philippine Isles” (p. 315).
And on that same subject, consider what none other than Mark Twain has to say: “(w)e have pacified some thousands of the islanders and buried them; destroyed their fields; burned their villages, and turned their widows and orphans out-of-doors; furnished heartbreak by exile to some dozens of disagreeable patriots; subjugated the remaining ten millions by Benevolent Assimilation, which is the pious new name of the musket; we have acquired property in the three hundred concubines and other slaves of our business partner, the Sultan of Sulu, and hoisted our protecting flag over that sway.
“And so, by these Providences of God – and the phrase is the government’s, not mine – we are a World Power” (p. 316).
Where, by the way, was all of this war-mongering and industrial development at breakneck speed headed? Zinn’s choice of a quote from Sinclair Lewis’s BABBITT couldn’t be more appropriate: “(i)t was the best of nationally advertised and quantitatively produced alarm-clocks, with all modern attachments, including cathedral chime, intermittent alarm, and a phosphorescent dial. Babbitt was proud of being awakened by such a rich device. Socially it was almost as creditable as buying expensive cord tires.
“He sulkily admitted now that there was no more escape, but he lay and detested the grind of the real-estate business, and disliked his family, and disliked himself for disliking them” (pp. 383-384).
Two more brief quotes from Howard Zinn himself, and then I’ll conclude. On p. 636, “(w)e may, in the coming years, be in a race for the mobilization of middle-class discontent.” And almost immediately following, on p. 637, “(c)apitalism has always been a failure for the lower classes. It is now beginning to fail for the middle classes.”
I suggested, at the beginning of this review, that Howard Zinn had a “unique view of American history.” That suggestion was in no sense ironic or tongue-in-cheek. After a couple of weeks and 700+ pages, I can only say that this is some of the most valuable reading time I’ve ever spent.
I’m humbled – and yes, also somewhat ashamed – that I’ve discovered this historian and his work at the very ripe old age of 64. I obviously wish it could’ve been sooner. But as it was not, the next best thing I could do was give my copy of A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES, still slightly warm to the touch, to my daughter on the occasion of her 21st birthday.
God willing, she’ll grow up better informed than I – at the very least, about the country whose passport she carries.
RRB
06/08/15
Brooklyn, NY
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Reviewed in the United States on June 9, 2015
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