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    A People's History of the United States
    A People's History of the United States
    A People's History of the United States
    Ebook1,201 pages21 hours

    A People's History of the United States

    By Howard Zinn

    4/5

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    THE CLASSIC NATIONAL BESTSELLER

    "A wonderful, splendid book—a book that should be read by every American, student or otherwise, who wants to understand his country, its true history, and its hope for the future." –Howard Fast

    Historian Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States chronicles American history from the bottom up, throwing out the official narrative taught in schools—with its emphasis on great men in high places—to focus on the street, the home, and the workplace.

    Known for its lively, clear prose as well as its scholarly research, it is the only volume to tell America's story from the point of view of—and in the words of—America's women, factory workers, African-Americans, Native Americans, the working poor, and immigrant laborers. As Zinn shows, many of our country's greatest battles—the fights for a fair wage, an eight-hour workday, child-labor laws, health and safety standards, universal suffrage, women's rights, racial equality—were carried out at the grassroots level, against bloody resistance.

    Covering Christopher Columbus's arrival through President Clinton's first term, A People's History of the United States features insightful analysis of the most important events in our history. This edition also includes an introduction by Anthony Arnove, who wrote, directed, and produced The People Speak with Zinn and who coauthored, with Zinn, Voices of a People’s History of the United States.

    Editor's Note

    Insightful classic…

    Howard Zinn’s iconic alternative history reveals the story of America you didn’t learn in school, from the perspective of the men and women usually left out of textbooks.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateNov 17, 2015
    ISBN9780062466679
    Author

    Howard Zinn

    Howard Zinn (1922–2010) was a historian, playwright, and social activist. In addition to A People’s History of the United States, which has sold more than two million copies, he is the author of numerous books including The People Speak, Passionate Declarations, and the autobiography, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train.

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    Reviews for A People's History of the United States

    4/5

    143 ratings81 reviews

    What our readers think

    Readers find this title to be a very important book that covers the untold stories of people's struggles, injustice, and heroes of our country's conflicted past. Zinn is a riveting writer who speaks from the heart and has a narrative style that's easy to read and compelling to continue. However, some reviewers criticize the book for being biased, inaccurate, and leftist propaganda.

    What did you think?

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    • 4/5
      Zinn looks at American History through the struggles of the underdog, the poor, Native American and the undesirables. While I do not necessarily agree with all Zinn's assertions I do believe that this is a must read. History usually looks at the winners and sugar coats the issues that do not fit the desired narrative. Zinn challenges the usual US history lesson and looks at little known rebellions that speak about the struggle of this nation.
    • 5/5
      Most interesting, attention grabbing historical work that I've ever read. Spot on in parts, biased in parts but a very interesting read as a counter balance to the victors who write history. This one will definitely make you think.
    • 5/5
      Hands down, must read, if you're not bothered by poking and prodding your national consciousness.
    • 5/5
      Excellent overall history of the united states told through the viewpoint of the average citizen. Zinn debunks lots of myths of our national heros and gives a full accounting of what they actually did vice what who are brainwashed into believing they did. A must read for any one interested in an honest accounting of how this country started and what it is actually based on. This book will change your life.
    • 5/5
      In light of Mr. Zinn's passing, everyone should read this book. Mr. Zinn spent his life researching the dark side of American history, bringing it into the mainstream and informing others of his knowledge.
    • 5/5
      Many thought-provoking passages, especially where the history presented intersected with the history I learned more thoroughly in school (I'm still a little vague on the general goings-on in the US between 1900 and 1919). Over-all the information and presentation are well put together, with the bias of the work unapologetic but acknowledged, which is more than I can say for a lot of the histories that Zinn wrote this work in argument to.
    • 4/5
      NOT the standard version of American history you learned it school. Instead, Zinn does just what he says, and presents U.S. history from the viewpoint of ordinary, non-famous, people -- mostly of them poor. On top of this, Zinn imposes his own (very strong) viewpoint: from the left, the w-a-a-y left. At times, this can drive a more middle of the road reader into talking back (no, Howard, modern capitalism is not entirely a plot). It is, however, an invigorating antidote to the standard view of American history.
    • 5/5
      This book should be required reading for anyone in high school. And again in college. And again in graduate school. And again at any entry level job. You get the point.This book highlights the untold story behind history. As they say, history is written by the winners. This is the story of the losers. Read it. Soak it in. And realize that there are many more losers in history than winners. Then decide which group you're a part of....you'll never be the same again after reading this book.
    • 4/5
      good. depressing, but a very interesting read.
    • 4/5
      I've felt kind of remiss in not tackling Zinn's famous work until now, it being the most popular (and populist) introduction to left-leaning history. (Indeed, I've heard it referred to in some circles as "Babby's First Dissident History".) Like most books you come to know first by reputation, actually reading the damn thing has been striking, both for how it meets my expectations, and how it doesn't.

      For one, Zinn openly sets out his project from the beginning: to understand the oppression in the past as a way to prevent it in the future. If traditional history is "written by the winners" (as the quip goes), Zinn's job is to channel the losers. He hits up most of the major events in US history, but doesn't really feel bound to telling a continuous narrative in most cases. Instead, the book serves as a sort of marginalia to the mythic past, a course-correction for our self-knowledge as an American people.

      One of the problems with Zinn's scope is the pace precludes much attempts at historiography. We're shown dissenting accounts, troublesome facts without any attempt at examining whether most modern-day historians actually concur with the analysis presented. As said before, he clearly states his biases and overall project in the very first chapter. However, the reader needs to synthesize his story with the larger narratives at play—a more difficult task than he seems to admit.

      And the disposition of those larger narratives is something that Zinn can be kind of squirrely about. To hear his first chapter, you'd think that the history books whitewash, or at least minimize, the atrocities and casual inhumanities of the past. But once you get into actual scholarship, at least in my experience, that tendency disappears. Zinn even implicitly admits as much, when he marshals both other historians and contemporary accounts to supply evidence for his claims. Charles Beard, who he makes into an underdog by saying he received a "denunciatory editorial in The New York Times", was actually a major influence in the field. Indeed, his economic interpretation of the American Revolution held sway for decades before being more recently (think '70s) replaced by a renewed appreciation for the ideology and ideas also at work.

      Exacerbating matters is Zinn's clear pop-history approach to the subjects; he forgoes formal citations (footnotes and endnotes alike), instead throwing together a bibliography at the end of the book. Enjoy that Douglass quote and want to see whether the context strengthens or weakens it? Too bad! The scope also keeps him from complicating the story too much, or even treating some subjects in-depth. For example, the gay rights movement gets only three paragraphs in the entire 700-page book.

      I know it sounds like I'm being 100% critical of the book, but there were good chunks of the book that I found pretty enthralling. The rise of workers' rights movements is something Zinn's clearly passionate about, and it comes across in his writing. (It doesn't hurt that their rise serves as welcome emotional relief after 10 chapters of horrible depravity.) I can recognize that the book probably isn't for me, as I've read about most of the material before. But as most people's introduction to left-leaning history, especially as taught in some high schools such as my own, I'm really sensitive to worries that it might fuck up the process and unnecessarily turn people away.

      To strengthen Zinn's case, we might instead revise his project slightly: to prevent the political misuse of history. As much as I hold Lies my Teacher Told Me at a skeptical distance—it seems like an even more pop version of dissident history—examining historical events from the perspective of textbooks might be more instructive in understanding how ideology is propagated through studying history. It may be that our impulse to protect children from the horrors of the past is actually ensuring that they'll be perpetuated.

      Perhaps the most political use of history is in using the Founding Fathers as props to support such and such modern day policies. Zinn points out several times that he isn't trying to villify such historical figures, mindful that they swam—many upstream—in the currents of institutional racism, sexism, classism, and the like. Yet all too often, he crosses that line and condemns them directly and forcefully for their hypocrisy. Indeed, part of his project is in showing a second path, by pointing out those individuals who were able to see the bigger picture at the time, and spoke uncomfortable truths to those in power.

      So we're back at the central problem: how do we reconcile Zinn's account with the complexities of the full picture? Is there a way to recognize the tremendous steps those figures took towards a better future, even with their fatal flaws? Can there be an American Exceptionalism (or even a national identity!) that doesn't celebrate genocide, imperialism, slavery, racism, sexism, economic oppression? On this question, Zinn remains silent.
    • 3/5
      This is a history book from the other side's point of view. The other side being Indians, blacks, women, the poor and the incarcerated. This is no flag waving Team USA history book. Zinn gives voice to the Americans who have traditionally been silenced by either corporations, the media or the government itself. Unflinching and not flattering, readers will surley look at their government much more skeptically.
    • 4/5
      (this review was originally written for bookslut)

      Howard Zinn readily admits that his A People's History of the United States is a biased work. What is unique about his telling of history is the direction of the bias. This is a history biased in favor of the workers (mostly female) who died when a factory collapsed, and against the owners who knew the construction was faulty and did nothing. It is biased in favor of the Indians who rebelled, and against the Spaniards who slaughtered them for not bringing them enough gold. This is a history that does not gloss over the faults of presidents, just because a few good things happened while they were on watch. This is a history that gives credit to the people who organized, the petitions that were sent, and the sit-ins that were held.

      There are a few points in the book where even I, whose often knee-jerk progressive/liberalism makes my fathers teeth grind, felt that the book was *too* biased. That the expectations Zinn appeared to have were entirely unreasonable for the time periods he was talking about. Upon reflection, these points only served to make clear just how biased our objective history textbooks really are. Columbus exterminating an entire culture was just a misunderstanding. Right. Just like all the Native Americans were savages and all the slaves were resigned to their lot. Zinn provides numerous and clear counter-examples to those historical claims that I have always doubted told the true story. But what is less comfortable, is the laying bare of the weaknesses of the men I would like to like. Adams, Jefferson, Lincoln, Roosevelt. Men whom I may still choose to like, but with eyes less clouded than before.

      Of course in 655 pages, it is difficult to cover comprehensively everything that happened in this country from when Columbus first set foot on some of the nearby islands to the present. One of my favorite things about this book is that it offers so much direction in the way of further reading. When many of the chapters left me thirsty for more, I didn't even have to turn to the extremely thorough bibliography in the back, many books which informed the times and which were inspired by the times were discussed in the text. Zinn's work is not an ending place. One cannot read this book and know everything there is to know about the history that was not taught to you in school. This book is a starting place. An opening door to a new way of thinking. To the realization that ordinary people have changed the history of this country time and time again. And perhaps you can too.
    • 4/5
      A very important work in understand in American History. Though not perfect, the author creates a new narrative in weaving together various historic events. That new narrative at times seems a bit too focused on good-ordinary-people versus bad-political-elite, but worth a read nonetheless. A heavy reliance on secondary sources though, to the point where certain chapters feel like no more than a summary of various journals and other books.
    • 5/5
      I want to make sure my son knows this book well.
    • 2/5
      Zinn's narrative history of the United States is blatantly biased, and he says so in his final chapter and his afterword in this Twentieth Anniversary Edition (which was updated to include the end of the Cold War and talk about some of the Clinton presidency). Zinn is a Marxist and this interpretation suffuses the book. Every poor person is put upon by the system, every baddie is a capitalist pig-dog. There are no really redeeming characteristics about the United States of America in this bleak, propagandistic account. America is so bad, one must wonder—and Zinn never gets close to answering this—why would anyone want to ever come to this capitalist hell hole? Why would colonial settlers, like indentured servants, ever want to come? Why would the Western European poor ever want to come? Why would African slaves ever want to demand their rights here, why don't they all want to go to Africa? Why would the "huddled masses yearning to breathe free," the "wretched refuse of your teeming shore" ever want to leave Eastern and Southern Europe in the late 1800s and early 1900s and come? Why would folks migrate to the burgeoning cities of the Gilded Age? Why would Latinos ever want to come? There has to be SOMETHING that America offers that makes it a magnet to the world? If you read Zinn's book, where capitalism is a con, where the Constitution is a covenant of falsity, where the Declaration of Independence is a joke, you wonder if there is anything good about America. This is its failing. He does highlight lots of folks that are underrepresented in most history books and in most museums, but he misinterprets their plight, their dreams, and their views of America. Communists are never wrong: not the Soviets, not anarcho-socialist bombers, not union thugs, never. Zinn's sins of scholarship, form poor paraphrasing to poor sourcing to false quoting to misinformed reasoning, has been ably covered by many authors, like Oscar Handlin and Sam Wineburg (political liberals) to Mary Grabar (a political conservative). Please read those for a thorough recounting of Zinn's problems. Read Paul Johnson's A History of the American People for a warts-and-all corrective to Zinn's bleak, dystopian, Marxian vision of America.
    • 3/5
      A Rorschach test, indeed. What do you think about Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States? What do you assume about anyone who would read it?

      Many have attempted to ban it. Many think of it as “anti-American.”

      Zinn is as “anti-American” as the Preacher in Ecclesiastes is depressing and anti-life. Sure, if you’ve bought into certain narratives, and cannot countenance bursting those particular bubbles, that’s a conclusion to draw.

      And, indeed, the standard story of what you were taught in school is highly criticized in this book. The author starts with an unflinching look at exactly what Columbus and his ilk did to the Indigenous people of America. Throughout is a story of well-heeled class interests preserving themselves at the expense of everyone else, and only as much ground given as necessary to keep the whole system from turning on itself. There’s nothing innocent about the United States portrayed in these pages. Its constant failure is on display for all to see.

      Everyone who talks about Zinn will say he has his agenda. And he does; he’s very open about it. For that matter, every history has an agenda, because it is an attempt at creating a narrative on the basis of a series of facts, and what one decides to emphasize and what one correspondingly neglects betrays some kind of bias or angle.

      If anything, the problem with this work is with Zinn’s naivete and blind spots: he is a Builder who really wants to lionize and consider special the culture of resistance in the 1960s, and he is willing to throw any other attempt at reform under the bus in so doing.

      While Zinn confesses the failure of modern communist endeavors because of their priority on party over people, he maintains a Marxist conceit about “A People’s History,” as if the history of agitation and organization against moneyed interests and corporations is “the People’s History”. It would be better titled “The Resister’s History of the United States,” because that’s the tenor of the book.

      There’s a lot of things in the history with which to grapple. You learn quite quickly how police today are far nicer to citizens and others than they were in the past. This does not mean police today are nice; it means what was done by police in action against citizens and others in the 19th and early 20th centuries were abominable. Zinn is probably not wrong in how he characterizes the Constitution as enshrining sufficient federal power to advance the interests of the wealthy and the merchants. He’s also probably not entirely wrong that whatever the government has given to assist labor or the less than advantaged is done with a view to maintaining societal stability: just enough is given so that the people don’t rise up in sufficient revolt to overthrow the system.

      You’d thus think he would be hard on corporations and those who advanced their interests, and you would not be wrong. He is not a fan of Nixon or Reagan. But it would seem most of his invective comes against those in the Democratic party. He conflates Carter with Reagan and Bush as perpetuating a militaristic, pro-corporate administration. He has no love for Bill Clinton. These are all betrayers of the leftist cause.

      Thus, this history is probably more offensive to moderate to centrist leftists than anyone on the right. For Zinn it has always been not enough and never for the right reasons. The diminishment of the efforts of Progressivism in the beginning of the 20th century is notable. Likewise his attempts at casting FDR and the New Deal down from the way it was exalted by many on the left.

      This attempt at re-framing what was done in the 1900s and 1930s-40s would be more tolerable if similar skepticism was maintained about what happened from the 1960s onward. Yes, the forms of resistance he talked about are real enough, but none of them were as significant as he would like to imagine. He has a naive confidence in polling about what Americans say they want, trusting their general desires even though the moment said general desires get translated into substantive policy they lose support. People are more invested in the status quo than Zinn would care to imagine.

      And the fruit of everything 1960s was not nearly as transformative as Zinn would postulate. The work as written clearly had an arc which was to end with 1992 and the 500th anniversary of Columbus, and discussions of Clinton and the early War on Terror were added later. Zinn died in 2010 and so there would be no real grappling with the 2008 economic crisis and its fallout, with the Obama phenomenon and then Trumpism. Zinn never delves into the “dark side” of populism, the Huey Longs or those like Trump who will emphasize populist themes even though all he does is to the advantage of those with wealth like himself. From the perspective of 2024 it’s hard to maintain the naive confidence that all the resisting Zinn talked about in the second half of the twentieth century really lead to as much transformation as he would have liked to see. And that which was accomplished he takes for granted or again sublimates under the premise that it was only granted to keep things from getting out of hand.

      And thus, in the end, this history of the United States really does not give enough credit to many of the changes which have been made, nor to the aspirations of the nation, even recognizing how the reality has always fallen far short of those aspirations. Much of what is in this history are facts, things which actually happened, and they do need to be grappled with in terms of our legacy. The United States is not the force of good we would like to imagine it to be, but should that mean we should just give into the cynicism and not appeal to the better angels of our nature?

      The ways Zinn worked to try to change things, apparently, did not work well enough for him or us. What he would like to imagine seems more remote than it was when he was writing. His methods thus did not get us to that imagined better place. Maybe there was more to the reform movements than he would like to give credit; maybe the post-war generation didn’t have all the answers the way they imagined they did. And as the Boomer generation has demonstrated, the only thing worse than idealism is frustrated idealism gone reactionary.
    • 5/5
      This book by Howard Zinn is a masterpiece. He writes in Chapter 23 that most histories are over respectful of our leaders and dismissive of the common person. This book sets the record straight and, he does so in elegant prose.

      It is easy to read the book and criticize the USA but no country will have a stellar record.

      If you are not American, you may get lost in some of the detail. Once you read the Kindle edition of the book, buy the paperback edition. It is worth the investment in time and money.
    • 5/5
      Great book that focuses on how everyday people shaped our nation. It's a great addition to most history books that focus on major historical players. Both types of history books are important in order to have a more realistic view of our history.
    • 4/5
      In this conversational, meandering (but not in bad way) lecture, Zinn often speaks about what he didn't know, what he didn't learn, why certain points of view were eliminated from the history books and the value of seeing events from the the point of view of the loser. Topics include: westward expansion, Mother Jones, war, and shifts in views on big government.
    • 5/5
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    • 5/5
      Took me more than 3 years, but I finally finished this book. There are sections that are fascinating and sections that were boring to me, but I plowed through them all. Considering the scope Zinn was going for, this book is magnificent. Going into it understanding the viewpoint he was going for, I thought he did a great job overall and I was about to take a long list of titles for further reading in the areas that interested me.
    • 5/5
      This was good. "The Coming Revolt of the Guards" near the end of the book was weirdly prescient of the Occupy movement, to the point where Zinn uses all the 99%/1% rhetoric of OWS years before OWS was a thing. My favorite chapters were on early 20th century labor movements, which were really exhilarating and informative and a joy to read all at once.
    • 5/5
      Why isn't this book taught in high school history classes? I might of gone to class more often!
    • 5/5
      My review of the book after finishing it Sept. 19, 2019I was a high school English teacher for more than 40 years. During much of that time, I heard about Zinn’s book from social studies teachers I knew both at my school and at other high schools. I began to notice that the best of these teachers, those with highest student evaluations, the most professional awards, and those who taught the most advanced courses, all used The People’s History of the United States. While teaching, I really didn’t have time to devote to a 700-page book outside my own teaching area, but I vowed that when I retired, Zinn would be on my reading list. That time is now, and I just finished the book. One thing that led me to Zinn, aside from the endorsement from teachers I respected, was that the governor of my state at the time, Mitch Daniels, attacked the Zinn book and vowed that “it not be used anywhere in Indiana.” Of course, this was a ridiculous mandate to the state’s public school teachers, and the book was then and continues to be used in many schools in Indiana. In fact, it might even be used in the university where Daniels now serves as president, Purdue. So the attacks on Zinn by primarily conservative politicians is an attack on intellectual curiosity (something Daniels was never known for while serving in and out of government). The book exposes many issues, including the influence of big business on our country’s policies, that should have been taught in our public schools for generations. Now, because of Zinn and because of a cadre of progressive, intellectual, free thinking high school and college history teachers, students, not only in Indiana, but across the country, are getting “the rest of the story.”
    • 5/5
      Fucking Phenomenal a must read for every American. This book will change your worldview for the better!
    • 5/5
      This a very important book and should be included in the US History curriculum of every American student. Covers the untold stories of people's struggles, injustice, and heroes of our country's conflicted past. Zinn is a riveting writer who speaks from the heart and has a narrative style that's easy to read and compelling to continue.
    • 3/5
      Zinn has an axe to grind: that from Columbus' "discovery" of the New World through contemporary times, native peoples, women, poor whites, African-Americans, immigrants, have all suffered at the hands of rich and powerful white men. The book provides a service by examining commonly held beliefs and holding them to factual examinations. In just one example, Abraham Lincoln is seen as being personally anti-slavery, but politically neutral. Freeing Southern slaves was not his primary goal; keeping the Union together was, and Zinn intimates that if the Confederacy would have been open to compromise than Lincoln would not have issued the Emancipation Proclamation. However, in addition to unique perspectives, the reader is subject to a great deal of overkill, and a feeling of redundancy. The author makes his point--and then continues to drive his perspective in overwhelming documentation. It's a reductionist view of American history, and even if you essentially agree with the author's thesis, by the end of the book a reader feels fatigue rather than exhileration. Also, there's no perspective; are all nations as monomaniacal as Zinn paints the U.S.? If this country is as bad as Zinn asserts, why is there still a clamor by people the world over to gain entry? Very valuable but not enjoyable: from the genocide of the "great explorers" through the imperialism of the late 19th century, through military interventions in the 20th century, and on to the cowardice and economic self-interest of politicians--from the Founding Fathers to todays hacks--it's not a pretty picture.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      Read this book! Invaluable insight into what Zinn calls"the most ingenious system of control" that is the US political system. Two criticisms: First, Zinn can be overly wordy. Second, Zinn is overly optimistic about the possibilities for change. He argues revolt must come from bottom up. But he seems to ignore the fact that the cultural values of the people are not necessarily imposed, but genuinely reflect the values and beliefs of most USers.
    • 5/5
      I admire Zinn for having the courage, as an historian, to allow his work to reflect the changes he experienced in moral perspective after serving in World War II. He has given interviews in which he discusses the difference between killing from a remote distance and then seeing the brutality and suffering that is war. His work, and A People's History is a great example, tries to help us understand a similar problem in perspective: the difference between history writ large, the hagiographies of "great men," and the history of important voices and movements that have been omitted and for the most part dismissed.
    • 3/5
      Obviously the author has an agenda and a slant but he makes them extremely explicit, and of course all history has to be written from some perspective or another. Sometimes the way isolated facts are dropped completely out of context one gets the impression that he's trying to get away with something but in the sections dealing with subjects I've read in more depth about elsewhere I spotted a lot of material that supports his agenda that he omitted, simply because there isn't enough space for everything. Ultimately it's kind of scattershot and undisciplined, but unavoidably so given the scope Zinn sets out to address. I personally would have preferred reading something with a tighter focus and more depth but as it is pretty much everyone who picks this book up will come away having learned at least something. I personally was pretty surprised by the level of direct physical violence involved in 19th century strikes and strike-breaking... apparently back then people were willing to pick up guns and shoot it out with the National Guard. That is some serious shit and makes modern labor look even weaker than I already thought it did.

    Book preview

    A People's History of the United States - Howard Zinn

    The cover of a book titled “A People’s History of the United States: With a new introduction by Anthony Arnove” authored by Howard Zinn is shown. The book is presented as the classic national bestseller. An endorsement message by Eric Foner, New York Times Book review reads, “Historians may well view it as a step toward a coherent new version of American history.”

    A PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

    HOWARD ZINN

    Introduction by Anthony Arnove

    A photo shows the paperback imprint of Harper Perennial Modern Classics with the logo of an oval with a white circle on it.

    Dedication

    To Noah, Georgia, Serena, Naushon, Will—and their generation

    Contents

    Cover

    Title Page

    Dedication

    Introduction by Anthony Arnove

      1. Columbus, the Indians, and Human Progress

      2. Drawing the Color Line

      3. Persons of Mean and Vile Condition

      4. Tyranny Is Tyranny

      5. A Kind of Revolution

      6. The Intimately Oppressed

      7. As Long as Grass Grows or Water Runs

      8. We Take Nothing by Conquest, Thank God

      9. Slavery Without Submission, Emancipation Without Freedom

    10. The Other Civil War

    11. Robber Barons and Rebels

    12. The Empire and the People

    13. The Socialist Challenge

    14. War Is the Health of the State

    15. Self-help in Hard Times

    16. A People’s War?

    17. Or Does It Explode?

    18. The Impossible Victory: Vietnam

    19. Surprises

    20. The Seventies: Under Control?

    21. Carter-Reagan-Bush: The Bipartisan Consensus

    22. The Unreported Resistance

    23. The Coming Revolt of the Guards

    24. The Clinton Presidency

    25. The 2000 Election and the War on Terrorism

    Afterword

    Acknowledgments

    Bibliography

    Index

    P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*

    About the Author

    About the Book

    Read On

    Acclaim for Howard Zinn and A People’s History of the United States

    Also by Howard Zinn

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    Copyright

    About the Publisher

    Introduction to the Thirty-Fifth Anniversary Edition of a People’s History of the United States

    Howard Zinn fundamentally changed the way millions of people think about history with A People’s History of the United States. He would be the first to say, however, that he didn’t do so alone. The book grew out of his awareness of the importance of social movements throughout US history, some of which he played an active role in during the 1960s and 1970s and beyond, namely the Civil Rights Movement, mass mobilizations to end the Vietnam War, as well as other antiwar movements, and the many movements for higher wages and workers’ rights and the rights of women, Latinos, Native Americans, gays and lesbians, and others. He was also quick to acknowledge the many people who informed his view of history: Woody Guthrie, whose songs about working people in the 1930s and 1940s opened up chapters of US history to him that his formal education had kept hidden; Philip S. Foner; Herbert Aptheker; Richard Hofstadter; Elizabeth Martínez; and other writers, editors, librarians, and historians who unearthed what he calls the past’s fugitive moments of compassion rather than . . . its solid centuries of warfare. But most of all, he acknowledged the people whose stories he weaves throughout this book: Eugene Debs, Fannie Lou Hamer, Frederick Douglass, Plough Jogger. Howard understood that he was writing to bring their voices and stories, their struggles and vision, to light, and inspire people to make change themselves. That is why he was so keen to publish a companion book to this volume, Voices of a People’s History of the United States, which compiles the speeches, letters, manifestos, and other documents of people’s history that he drew on to write A People’s History—and to also remind people that this history continues in new forms today. And it is why he wanted to make the documentary film The People Speak, with artists such as Bob Dylan, Kerry Washington, Viggo Mortensen, and Danny Glover—to bring these voices vividly to life. He understood that his own words in this book, as meaningful as they are, were less vital to the success of A People’s History than the words—and actions—of others he wove together into a narrative of US history told from below.

    Howard was uniquely skilled as a writer, as this book reveals. Millions of people have read this book—a remarkable achievement for any work of popular history—and passed along their dog-eared copies to friends, family, fellow soldiers, and coworkers because it opened up new horizons for them. Of those readers, many went on to become teachers as a result. Many more felt the book had changed their lives and sent them down new paths. I’m one of them. Reading this book—and later having the great luck to meet and work with Howard—radically changed me. It made me care about history as no other teacher or experience had done. And it led me to see history as something that we are all part of making together and to realize that how we understand our past informs not only how we see the present, with all its complexity, but also how we might imagine a different future.

    When A People’s History of the United States came out in 1980, its first print run was a few thousand hardcover copies, considered modest for HarperCollins. But it soon found an audience excited to read a book that provided such a comprehensive and artful bottom-up view of US history, in contrast to the still-dominant tropes of Great White Men (and the occasional exceptional others) who made history, an especially disempowering view. The civil rights leader Diane Nash, whom Howard knew through his work with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, recently commented on how hard it has been for our culture to embrace histories that feature the efforts of ordinary people whose names we may not even know or rarely learn from our textbooks. Discussing the critics of Ava DuVernay’s 2014 film Selma, who said it unfairly diminished the role of President Lyndon Baines Johnson in bringing about civil rights legislation (an argument with which Howard was extremely familiar), she responded:

    Lyndon Johnson was president. It was his job to enforce the law. He should not have waited until Jimmie Lee Jackson’s, James Reeb’s, and Viola Liuzzo’s lives were taken. He should not have waited until people were beaten and bloodied on Pettus Bridge before he enforced Negroes’ right to vote in the South. I appreciate LBJ’s enacting and signing the Voting Rights Act, but I wish he had been a self-starter when it came to our right to vote, so it would not have been necessary to go to the lengths that we did—organizing a mass movement and risking our safety—in order to get the vote. It was the courage, work, thoughtfulness, sacrifice, discipline, and determination of citizens of the United States that obtained our right to vote.

    Historically, inventions, musical innovations, and many more accomplishments and contributions developed by descendants of enslaved Africans in America have been misappropriated. We learn about presidents, battles, and dates. The impression too often perpetuated in history books and in popular culture is that you have to be a president, someone special, or White to have an important idea or to achieve major accomplishments. This is an idea that disempowers citizens and should not be propagated further.

    Like Nash, Howard’s experiences in the Civil Rights Movement gave him a different understanding of how history is made. It’s an understanding that informs every page of this book.

    When A People’s History of the United States first came out, Ronald Reagan was on the path to becoming the president. Culturally, the country was moving noticeably rightward. Movements that sought to roll back the gains of the Civil Rights Movement, women’s liberation movement, and other progressive changes of the 1960s and 1970s were gaining ground. Unions came under a sustained attack from which they have never recovered. In such an environment, this book could have been lost, published into obscurity. Why it wasn’t is worth considering. First of all, as with any publishing effort, there was some luck involved. The New York Times Book Review could have decided the book didn’t merit a review, as it so often does with books written from the standpoint of the left. Having decided to review it, the editors at the Times could have easily sent the book to be trashed by a figure of the newly aggressive right, as it so often does. Instead, they asked the highly regarded historian Eric Foner to review A People’s History of the United States. And while not without criticisms of the book, Foner gave it an extremely positive notice. His words from the March 2, 1980, New York Times Book Review are worth considering:

    [T]he 1970s witnessed an unprecedented redefinition of historical studies—a byproduct of the ferment of the 1960s—in which the distinctive experience of blacks, women, Indians, workers, and other neglected groups moved to the forefront of inquiry. . . .

    Howard Zinn is the first historian to attempt to survey all of American history from the perspective of the new scholarship. A distinguished scholar and the author of nine previous books, Professor Zinn is also a veteran of the civil-rights and antiwar movements, and is currently an embattled defender of academic freedom at Boston University. He is refreshingly candid in announcing his purpose. Too much history, he contends, is written from the point of view of governments, conquerors, diplomats, leaders. His People’s History, by way of contrast, sides with the losers, the downtrodden, the underdog. It is a book disrespectful of governments and respectful of people’s movements of resistance.. . . .

    Professor Zinn writes with an enthusiasm rarely encountered in the leaden prose of academic history. And his text is studded with telling quotations from labor leaders, war resisters, and fugitive slaves. There are vivid descriptions of events that are usually ignored.

    However, Foner felt the book’s salutary emphasis on ‘the enormous capacity of apparently helpless people to resist’ is tempered by an underlying frustration at the meager results produced by this history of resistance. He continues:

    The stirring protests, strikes, and rebellions never appear to accomplish anything. Uprisings are either crushed, deflected, or co-opted. Apparent victories, such as the emancipation of the slaves, simply serve the interests of businessmen; incremental gains, such as those of the 1930s, merely stabilize the system. Why such movements often fail to achieve their goals is never adequately explained.

    Foner’s view that the book reflects a deeply pessimistic vision of the American experience was, in the end, not shared by many other readers—who saw in the book a more affirmative—in fact, inspirational—story. Indeed, Howard is someone who consistently looked for the unrealized possibilities of history, one of the reasons this book has been considered so dangerous by so many figures of the establishment—whether in the academy or the halls of power. Howard was interested in historical potential—the what-might-have-been, the unrealized visions, the expanded horizons of protest—as much as he was in detailing forms of oppression. And a careful reading of this book will reveal, I believe, a deep appreciation of the human capacity to resist oppression, to collectively make history, to achieve ends those undertaking their protest perhaps never imagined possible and often did not live to see realized in their lifetime (even while recognizing that such gains can prove fragile and can never be taken for granted). For Howard, also, there was a joy in the effort itself. He had an appreciation of the bonds of solidarity, mutual affection, and creative expression that participation in social movements produced. The idea that people make history and can alter its course, that institutions have human origins and can be changed by humans, is truly subversive—and is a central reason this book has drawn the ire of so many censors and would-be censors. As Howard wrote at the end of his play Marx in Soho, Remember, to be radical is simply to grasp the root of the problem. And the root is us.

    Among the first champions of A People’s History of the United States were the thousands of students who had been part of Howard’s classes at Spelman College and Boston University, and many others who heard him speak on their college campuses and at antiwar rallies, and ordered it immediately for themselves and in some cases for courses they were teaching. The movements of the 1960s and early 1970s had also nurtured a new generation of receptive readers, many of whom were moving into roles as educators in high schools and on college campuses. Howard’s classes were so popular that Boston University sought to limit participation in them. (Howard famously battled with the neoconservative president of the university, John Silber, coming close to losing his job on a few occasions, but in the end he came out on top.) Comically, one university administrator responded to his appeal for more teaching assistants for his huge introductory class by saying Howard could have more TAs if he would agree to decrease the class size. Instead, Howard enlisted student volunteers who would take his class one year for credit and then return the next year to lead sections.

    In a matter of weeks after the release of A People’s History, HarperCollins found, unexpectedly, that it had sold out of the first hardcover edition. Then an interesting turn of history occurred. Howard’s editor, Hugh Van Dusen, went to the hardcover division sales manager to push for a quick reprint and was rebuffed. The previous projections for the book were inauspicious. Perhaps there would be returns. A paperback would eventually come out in a future catalog. But Van Dusen fought for an accelerated paperback release, so, much earlier than planned, the book was available in an affordable popular edition. The book continued to catch on—and became, as no one predicted, a cultural touchstone and publishing phenomenon: a book that each year sold more copies than the year before (the opposite of the traditional trajectory). As of 2015, A People’s History of the United States has sold more than 2.6 million copies in North America and been translated into more than twenty languages. Rarely does a month pass that I don’t see someone engrossed in the book on the New York City subway system.

    One of the readers of those early copies of A People’s History was a young Matt Damon, whose mother, Nancy Carlsson-Paige, was a friend and movement ally of Howard’s in Boston. Matt would famously go on to write, with Ben Affleck, a scene in the Oscar-winning film Good Will Hunting in which the self-educated working-class math genius he plays calls A People’s History a book that will knock you on your ass. That moment opened up new audiences for Howard and his work, and his ideas—and A People’s History—entered into popular culture. Another reader was the cartoonist Matt Groening, who drew a copy of the book into an episode of his television series The Simpsons. Later, HBO’s acclaimed series The Sopranos constructed a storyline around Howard’s critical view of Christopher Columbus. The episode opens with a close-up of Anthony Soprano Jr. reading a hardcover edition of the book.

    But it is really due to the many teachers heroically trying to encourage critical thinking among their students that this book continues to find new readers. This is not without its risks in this era of high-stakes testing and scapegoating teachers, while seeking to dismantle their unions and impose patriotic views of history. In 2014, in Colorado, students and teachers—some holding signs quoting Howard—walked out in protest when a local school board sought to ensure its Advanced Placement (AP) history courses promote citizenship, patriotism, essentials and benefits of the free-market system, respect for authority, and respect for individual rights and that they did not encourage or condone civil disorder, social strife, or disregard of the law (an interesting challenge if you want to teach, for example, the American Revolution or the history of abolitionism). In Oklahoma, in February 2015, members of the Common Education Committee voted to ban all AP US history courses because they focus on what is bad about America.

    In the state where I grew up, Indiana, then governor Mitch Daniels (now the president of Purdue University) sent e-mails just days after Howard’s death in January 2010 openly celebrating his passing and seeking to ensure that no Indiana teachers were using A People’s History. This terrible anti-American academic finally passed away, Daniels wrote. "The obits and commentaries mentioned that his book A People’s History of the United States is ‘the textbook of choice in high schools and colleges around the country.’ It is a truly execrable, antifactual piece of disinformation that misstates American history on every page. Can someone assure me that it is not in use anywhere in Indiana? If it is, how do we get rid of it before any more young people are force-fed a totally false version of our history?" It is clear why Daniels and his allies felt threatened by Howard’s approach to history and his politics, and why someone who is seeking to dismantle present-day unions would not have wanted people studying the vital role they have played in protecting the rights of working people—or other examples of popular struggles challenging authority.

    Despite these attacks, and even at the risk of losing one’s job, people have continued to assign Howard’s book alongside the assigned textbook, share their personal copies, photocopy sections for students, and read aloud passages of A People’s History. In addition to drawing on the book, growing numbers of teachers across the United States use curricula and resources from organizations such as Voices of a People’s History of the United States, the Zinn Education Project, Rethinking Schools, and Teaching for Change to bring a people’s history to life in the classroom.

    None of this is to say that Howard does not have his more serious critics, including those on the left. Howard had no issue with that. In encouraging critical thinking, he hoped people would apply the same independent mindset to his own views. That is why he opens A People’s History of the United States by stating his point of view very directly:

    [I]n that inevitable taking of sides which comes from selection and emphasis in history, I prefer to try to tell the story of the discovery of America from the viewpoint of the Arawaks, of the Constitution from the standpoint of the slaves, of Andrew Jackson as seen by the Cherokees, of the Civil War as seen by the New York Irish, of the Mexican war as seen by the deserting soldiers of Scott’s army, of the rise of industrialism as seen by the young women in the Lowell textile mills, of the Spanish-American War as seen by the Cubans, the conquest of the Philippines as seen by black soldiers on Luzon, the Gilded Age as seen by southern farmers, the First World War as seen by socialists, the Second World War as seen by pacifists, the New Deal as seen by blacks in Harlem, the postwar American empire as seen by peons in Latin America. And so on, to the limited extent that any one person, however he or she strains, can see history from the standpoint of others.

    Howard believed in laying his cards on the table. He did not hide behind the historian’s easily available stance of distant, expert objectivity. He had a point of view and was happy to be challenged and engage in dialogue about it.

    There are some readers who wished he had included footnotes in this volume. Howard felt that missed the point of the book—which was to write an accessible and popular history. He wanted to welcome his readers, not intimidate them or scare them off, especially in a book that, at more than six hundred pages, is already daunting to embark on for the first time. Other historians found fault with Howard’s departure from the narrow confines of academia. (Howard was more comfortable on a picket line than at a session of the Organization of American Historians, he’d be the first to admit.) More to the point, some readers have longed for more women’s voices. Some have taken issue with his emphasis on spontaneity in history. My own feeling is that Howard’s prediction in chapter twenty-four about The Coming Revolt of the Guards—the intellectuals, the homeowners, the taxpayers, the skilled workers, the professionals, the servants of government who make up the middle classes—was overly optimistic (as he himself later acknowledged)—yet at the same time he was remarkably prescient in writing about what he calls the 99 percent versus the 1 percent years before the Occupy movement popularized these terms. (Interestingly, others claimed credit for this slogan—or were given credit for it—ignoring Howard’s much earlier use of the terms in this book.)

    But such optimism was vital to Howard’s politics and personality. It is what led him to undertake so ambitious a project as A People’s History of the United States in the first place (an outcome that he frequently said would never have been possible without the encouragement of his wife, Roslyn Zinn). It is what brought him and his family to teach at Spelman College and become, unexpectedly, participants in the Civil Rights Movement. It is what led him to write three plays (Emma, Daughter of Venus, and Marx in Soho), in addition to his many other important works of history. Fundamentally, Howard had a confidence in people’s ability to work together and change their circumstances. In a recent essay, the science-fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin speaks of the honest, uncompromising search for a realistic hope and a chance to transcend the paralyzing hierarchies of gender, race, class, nation, a chance to find a radical cure for the radical evil of our social system. Howard Zinn believed in taking that chance—and holding out that hope. But he did so because he was grounded in all the examples from our past—the abolitionist movement, the women’s suffrage movement, the struggle for the right to organize unions and to work an eight-hour day—when people proved that causes that at one point seemed unrealistic and hopeless proved otherwise and in so doing provided what the Welsh socialist and cultural theorist Raymond Williams called resources of hope.

    In a way, the success of A People’s History of the United States is an embodiment of Howard’s wager on optimism. A People’s History provided sustenance to a progressive countercurrent that developed from the early 1980s and grew as teachers, organizers, and the next generation of students developed new political initiatives and movements. (Howard dedicated our book Voices of a People’s History of the United States to the rebel voices of the coming generation.) At every step of that journey, Howard was there to fight alongside them. Throughout, in his many lectures, interviews, and speeches to antiwar protests, from the smallest gatherings to rallies of tens of thousands, he reminded us of the history of social change in this country, and kept coming back to his core ideas: that change comes from below; that progress comes only from people resisting and organizing—workers going on strike; consumers boycotting; soldiers refusing to fight, saying no to injustice and war; that we cannot rely on elected officials or leaders but instead have to rely on our individual and collective actions; that change never happens in a straight line but always has ups and downs, twists and turns; and that there are no guarantees in history.

    But Howard added a distinctive element to these arguments by embodying the understanding that the shared experience of working alongside others for political change is the most rewarding, fulfilling, and meaningful life one can live. The sense of solidarity he had with people in struggle, the sense of joy he had in life, was infectious. He communicated to everyone around him that they mattered, that they were an active part of making history. In an article on the labor organizer and socialist Eugene Debs that Howard wrote in the 1990s, he said, We are always in need of radicals who are also lovable, adding that we need to learn from Debs a determination to hold up before a troubled public those ideas that are both bold and inviting—the more bold, the more inviting. When the actor David Strathairn read those lines at a celebration of Howard’s life and work in California soon after his passing, it was clear to all of us in the audience that those words described Howard as much as they did Debs. Howard’s ideas were bold, inviting, inspiring.

    There are, from time to time, people who can crystallize the aims or goals of a movement in an especially compelling way, who can rally greater numbers of people to take a particular action and, in the case of Howard, make a lifelong commitment to activism. But such people cannot substitute for a movement. Debs, who understood this problem well, once put it this way: I am no Moses to lead you out of the wilderness . . . because if I could lead you out, someone else could lead you in again. That was the spirit of Howard: think for yourself, act for yourself, challenge and question authority. But do it with others. As he wrote in Marx in Soho, If you are going to break the law, do it with two thousand people . . . and Mozart.

    In looking at Howard’s lifetime of work, and his remarkable example, he has something else to teach us that is very important. As urgent as the present moment is, we need to build and strategize for the long-term, and have the patience to weather the setbacks and challenges that are coming. The kind of change we want, systemic change, will not happen overnight.

    Howard achieved much in his lifetime. But as the continued impact of this book attests, his legacy continues. It continues in new scholarship, such as An Indigenous People’s History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and A People’s History of Sports by Dave Zirin, the album Let England Shake by P. J. Harvey, people’s libraries and Zinn lectures at Occupy encampments, and in movements for labor rights, among so many other examples. It continues in classrooms where people are discussing and debating Howard’s approach to history. It continues on the demonstrations where people hold placards with Howard’s powerful words on war and social change. And it continues, now, with you.

    Anthony Arnove wrote, directed, and produced The People Speak with Howard Zinn. He is the editor of several books, including Voices of a People’s History of the United States, which Arnove coedited with Zinn and was released in an updated tenth-anniversary edition in 2014; Howard Zinn Speaks; The Essential Chomsky; a book of interviews with Zinn (Terrorism and War); and Iraq Under Siege; and is the author of Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal. He was a producer of the Academy Award–nominated documentary Dirty Wars and is on the editorial board of Haymarket Books and International Socialist Review.

    1

    Columbus, the Indians, and Human Progress

    Arawak men and women, naked, tawny, and full of wonder, emerged from their villages onto the island’s beaches and swam out to get a closer look at the strange big boat. When Columbus and his sailors came ashore, carrying swords, speaking oddly, the Arawaks ran to greet them, brought them food, water, gifts. He later wrote of this in his log:

    They . . . brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks’ bells. They willingly traded everything they owned. . . . They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features. . . . They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane. . . . They would make fine servants. . . . With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.

    These Arawaks of the Bahama Islands were much like Indians on the mainland, who were remarkable (European observers were to say again and again) for their hospitality, their belief in sharing. These traits did not stand out in the Europe of the Renaissance, dominated as it was by the religion of popes, the government of kings, the frenzy for money that marked Western civilization and its first messenger to the Americas, Christopher Columbus.

    Columbus wrote:

    As soon as I arrived in the Indies, on the first Island which I found, I took some of the natives by force in order that they might learn and might give me information of whatever there is in these parts.

    The information that Columbus wanted most was: Where is the gold? He had persuaded the king and queen of Spain to finance an expedition to the lands, the wealth, he expected would be on the other side of the Atlantic—the Indies and Asia, gold and spices. For, like other informed people of his time, he knew the world was round and he could sail west in order to get to the Far East.

    Spain was recently unified, one of the new modern nation-states, like France, England, and Portugal. Its population, mostly poor peasants, worked for the nobility, who were 2 percent of the population and owned 95 percent of the land. Spain had tied itself to the Catholic Church, expelled all the Jews, driven out the Moors. Like other states of the modern world, Spain sought gold, which was becoming the new mark of wealth, more useful than land because it could buy anything.

    There was gold in Asia, it was thought, and certainly silks and spices, for Marco Polo and others had brought back marvelous things from their overland expeditions centuries before. Now that the Turks had conquered Constantinople and the eastern Mediterranean, and controlled the land routes to Asia, a sea route was needed. Portuguese sailors were working their way around the southern tip of Africa. Spain decided to gamble on a long sail across an unknown ocean.

    In return for bringing back gold and spices, they promised Columbus 10 percent of the profits, governorship over new-found lands, and the fame that would go with a new title: Admiral of the Ocean Sea. He was a merchant’s clerk from the Italian city of Genoa, part-time weaver (the son of a skilled weaver), and expert sailor. He set out with three sailing ships, the largest of which was the Santa Maria, perhaps 100 feet long, and thirty-nine crew members.

    Columbus would never have made it to Asia, which was thousands of miles farther away than he had calculated, imagining a smaller world. He would have been doomed by that great expanse of sea. But he was lucky. One-fourth of the way there he came upon an unknown, uncharted land that lay between Europe and Asia—the Americas. It was early October 1492, and thirty-three days since he and his crew had left the Canary Islands, off the Atlantic coast of Africa. Now they saw branches and sticks floating in the water. They saw flocks of birds. These were signs of land. Then, on October 12, a sailor called Rodrigo saw the early morning moon shining on white sands, and cried out. It was an island in the Bahamas, the Caribbean sea. The first man to sight land was supposed to get a yearly pension of 10,000 maravedis for life, but Rodrigo never got it. Columbus claimed he had seen a light the evening before. He got the reward.

    So, approaching land, they were met by the Arawak Indians, who swam out to greet them. The Arawaks lived in village communes, had a developed agriculture of corn, yams, cassava. They could spin and weave, but they had no horses or work animals. They had no iron, but they wore tiny gold ornaments in their ears.

    This was to have enormous consequences: it led Columbus to take some of them aboard ship as prisoners because he insisted that they guide him to the source of the gold. He then sailed to what is now Cuba, then to Hispaniola (the island which today consists of Haiti and the Dominican Republic). There, bits of visible gold in the rivers, and a gold mask presented to Columbus by a local Indian chief, led to wild visions of gold fields.

    On Hispaniola, out of timbers from the Santa Maria, which had run aground, Columbus built a fort, the first European military base in the Western Hemisphere. He called it Navidad (Christmas) and left thirty-nine crewmembers there, with instructions to find and store the gold. He took more Indian prisoners and put them aboard his two remaining ships. At one part of the island he got into a fight with Indians who refused to trade as many bows and arrows as he and his men wanted. Two were run through with swords and bled to death. Then the Nina and the Pinta set sail for the Azores and Spain. When the weather turned cold, the Indian prisoners began to die.

    Columbus’s report to the Court in Madrid was extravagant. He insisted he had reached Asia (it was Cuba) and an island off the coast of China (Hispaniola). His descriptions were part fact, part fiction:

    Hispaniola is a miracle. Mountains and hills, plains and pastures, are both fertile and beautiful . . . the harbors are unbelievably good and there are many wide rivers of which the majority contain gold. . . . There are many spices, and great mines of gold and other metals. . . .

    The Indians, Columbus reported, are so naïve and so free with their possessions that no one who has not witnessed them would believe it. When you ask for something they have, they never say no. To the contrary, they offer to share with anyone. . . . He concluded his report by asking for a little help from their Majesties, and in return he would bring them from his next voyage as much gold as they need . . . and as many slaves as they ask. He was full of religious talk: Thus the eternal God, our Lord, gives victory to those who follow His way over apparent impossibilities.

    Because of Columbus’s exaggerated report and promises, his second expedition was given seventeen ships and more than twelve hundred men. The aim was clear: slaves and gold. They went from island to island in the Caribbean, taking Indians as captives. But as word spread of the Europeans’ intent they found more and more empty villages. On Haiti, they found that the sailors left behind at Fort Navidad had been killed in a battle with the Indians, after they had roamed the island in gangs looking for gold, taking women and children as slaves for sex and labor.

    Now, from his base on Haiti, Columbus sent expedition after expedition into the interior. They found no gold fields, but had to fill up the ships returning to Spain with some kind of dividend. In the year 1495, they went on a great slave raid, rounded up fifteen hundred Arawak men, women, and children, put them in pens guarded by Spaniards and dogs, then picked the five hundred best specimens to load onto ships. Of those five hundred, two hundred died en route. The rest arrived alive in Spain and were put up for sale by the archdeacon of the town, who reported that, although the slaves were naked as the day they were born, they showed no more embarrassment than animals. Columbus later wrote: Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold.

    But too many of the slaves died in captivity. And so Columbus, desperate to pay back dividends to those who had invested, had to make good his promise to fill the ships with gold. In the province of Cicao on Haiti, where he and his men imagined huge gold fields to exist, they ordered all persons fourteen years or older to collect a certain quantity of gold every three months. When they brought it, they were given copper tokens to hang around their necks. Indians found without a copper token had their hands cut off and bled to death.

    The Indians had been given an impossible task. The only gold around was bits of dust garnered from the streams. So they fled, were hunted down with dogs, and were killed.

    Trying to put together an army of resistance, the Arawaks faced Spaniards who had armor, muskets, swords, horses. When the Spaniards took prisoners they hanged them or burned them to death. Among the Arawaks, mass suicides began, with cassava poison. Infants were killed to save them from the Spaniards. In two years, through murder, mutilation, or suicide, half of the 250,000 Indians on Haiti were dead.

    When it became clear that there was no gold left, the Indians were taken as slave labor on huge estates, known later as encomiendas. They were worked at a ferocious pace, and died by the thousands. By the year 1515, there were perhaps fifty thousand Indians left. By 1550, there were five hundred. A report of the year 1650 shows none of the original Arawaks or their descendants left on the island.

    The chief source—and, on many matters the only source—of information about what happened on the islands after Columbus came is Bartolomé de las Casas, who, as a young priest, participated in the conquest of Cuba. For a time he owned a plantation on which Indian slaves worked, but he gave that up and became a vehement critic of Spanish cruelty. Las Casas transcribed Columbus’s journal and, in his fifties, began a multivolume History of the Indies. In it, he describes the Indians. They are agile, he says, and can swim long distances, especially the women. They are not completely peaceful, because they do battle from time to time with other tribes, but their casualties seem small, and they fight when they are individually moved to do so because of some grievance, not on the orders of captains or kings.

    Women in Indian society were treated so well as to startle the Spaniards. Las Casas describes sex relations:

    Marriage laws are non-existent: men and women alike choose their mates and leave them as they please, without offense, jealousy or anger. They multiply in great abundance; pregnant women work to the last minute and give birth almost painlessly; up the next day, they bathe in the river and are as clean and healthy as before giving birth. If they tire of their men, they give themselves abortions with herbs that force stillbirths, covering their shameful parts with leaves or cotton cloth; although on the whole, Indian men and women look upon total nakedness with as much casualness as we look upon a man’s head or at his hands.

    The Indians, Las Casas says, have no religion, at least no temples. They live in

    large communal bell-shaped buildings, housing up to 600 people at one time . . . made of very strong wood and roofed with palm leaves. . . . They prize bird feathers of various colors, beads made of fishbones, and green and white stones with which they adorn their ears and lips, but they put no value on gold and other precious things. They lack all manner of commerce, neither buying nor selling, and rely exclusively on their natural environment for maintenance. They are extremely generous with their possessions and by the same token covet the possessions of their friends and expect the same degree of liberality. . . .

    In Book Two of his History of the Indies, Las Casas (who at first urged replacing Indians by black slaves, thinking they were stronger and would survive, but later relented when he saw the effects on blacks) tells about the treatment of the Indians by the Spaniards. It is a unique account and deserves to be quoted at length:

    Endless testimonies . . . prove the mild and pacific temperament of the natives. . . . But our work was to exasperate, ravage, kill, mangle and destroy; small wonder, then, if they tried to kill one of us now and then. . . . The admiral, it is true, was blind as those who came after him, and he was so anxious to please the King that he committed irreparable crimes against the Indians. . . .

    Las Casas tells how the Spaniards grew more conceited every day and after a while refused to walk any distance. They rode the backs of Indians if they were in a hurry or were carried on hammocks by Indians running in relays. In this case they also had Indians carry large leaves to shade them from the sun and others to fan them with goose wings.

    Total control led to total cruelty. The Spaniards thought nothing of knifing Indians by tens and twenties and of cutting slices off them to test the sharpness of their blades. Las Casas tells how two of these so-called Christians met two Indian boys one day, each carrying a parrot; they took the parrots and for fun beheaded the boys.

    The Indians’ attempts to defend themselves failed. And when they ran off into the hills they were found and killed. So, Las Casas reports, they suffered and died in the mines and other labors in desperate silence, knowing not a soul in the world to whom they could turn for help. He describes their work in the mines:

    . . . mountains are stripped from top to bottom and bottom to top a thousand times; they dig, split rocks, move stones, and carry dirt on their backs to wash it in the rivers, while those who wash gold stay in the water all the time with their backs bent so constantly it breaks them; and when water invades the mines, the most arduous task of all is to dry the mines by scooping up pansful of water and throwing it up outside. . . .

    After each six or eight months’ work in the mines, which was the time required of each crew to dig enough gold for melting, up to a third of the men died.

    While the men were sent many miles away to the mines, the wives remained to work the soil, forced into the excruciating job of digging and making thousands of hills for cassava plants.

    Thus husbands and wives were together only once every eight or ten months and when they met they were so exhausted and depressed on both sides . . . they ceased to procreate. As for the newly born, they died early because their mothers, overworked and famished, had no milk to nurse them, and for this reason, while I was in Cuba, 7000 children died in three months. Some mothers even drowned their babies from sheer desperation. . . . In this way, husbands died in the mines, wives died at work, and children died from lack of milk . . . and in a short time this land which was so great, so powerful and fertile . . . was depopulated. . . . My eyes have seen these acts so foreign to human nature, and now I tremble as I write. . . .

    When he arrived on Hispaniola in 1508, Las Casas says, there were 60,000 people living on this island, including the Indians; so that from 1494 to 1508, over three million people had perished from war, slavery, and the mines. Who in future generations will believe this? I myself writing it as a knowledgeable eyewitness can hardly believe it. . . .

    Thus began the history, five hundred years ago, of the European invasion of the Indian settlements in the Americas. That beginning, when you read Las Casas—even if his figures are exaggerations (were there 3 million Indians to begin with, as he says, or less than a million, as some historians have calculated, or 8 million as others now believe?)—is conquest, slavery, death. When we read the history books given to children in the United States, it all starts with heroic adventure—there is no bloodshed—and Columbus Day is a celebration.

    Past the elementary and high schools, there are only occasional hints of something else. Samuel Eliot Morison, the Harvard historian, was the most distinguished writer on Columbus, the author of a multivolume biography, and was himself a sailor who retraced Columbus’s route across the Atlantic. In his popular book Christopher Columbus, Mariner, written in 1954, he tells about the enslavement and the killing: The cruel policy initiated by Columbus and pursued by his successors resulted in complete genocide.

    That is on one page, buried halfway into the telling of a grand romance.

    In the book’s last paragraph, Morison sums up his view of Columbus:

    He had his faults and his defects, but they were largely the defects of the qualities that made him great—his indomitable will, his superb faith in God and in his own mission as the Christ-bearer to lands beyond the seas, his stubborn persistence despite neglect, poverty and discouragement. But there was no flaw, no dark side to the most outstanding and essential of all his qualities—his seamanship.

    One can lie outright about the past. Or one can omit facts which might lead to unacceptable conclusions. Morison does neither. He refuses to lie about Columbus. He does not omit the story of mass murder; indeed he describes it with the harshest word one can use: genocide.

    But he does something else—he mentions the truth quickly and goes on to other things more important to him. Outright lying or quiet omission takes the risk of discovery which, when made, might arouse the reader to rebel against the writer. To state the facts, however, and then to bury them in a mass of other information is to say to the reader with a certain infectious calm: yes, mass murder took place, but it’s not that important—it should weigh very little in our final judgments; it should affect very little what we do in the world.

    It is not that the historian can avoid emphasis of some facts and not of others. This is as natural to him as to the mapmaker, who, in order to produce a usable drawing for practical purposes, must first flatten and distort the shape of the earth, then choose out of the bewildering mass of geographic information those things needed for the purpose of this or that particular map.

    My argument cannot be against selection, simplification, emphasis, which are inevitable for both cartographers and historians. But the mapmaker’s distortion is a technical necessity for a common purpose shared by all people who need maps. The historian’s distortion is more than technical, it is ideological; it is released into a world of contending interests, where any chosen emphasis supports (whether the historian means to or not) some kind of interest, whether economic or political or racial or national or sexual.

    Furthermore, this ideological interest is not openly expressed in the way a mapmaker’s technical interest is obvious (This is a Mercator projection for long-range navigation—for short-range, you’d better use a different projection). No, it is presented as if all readers of history had a common interest which historians serve to the best of their ability. This is not intentional deception; the historian has been trained in a society in which education and knowledge are put forward as technical problems of excellence and not as tools for contending social classes, races, nations.

    To emphasize the heroism of Columbus and his successors as navigators and discoverers, and to deemphasize their genocide, is not a technical necessity but an ideological choice. It serves—unwittingly—to justify what was done.

    My point is not that we must, in telling history, accuse, judge, condemn Columbus in absentia. It is too late for that; it would be a useless scholarly exercise in morality. But the easy acceptance of atrocities as a deplorable but necessary price to pay for progress (Hiroshima and Vietnam, to save Western civilization; Kronstadt and Hungary, to save socialism; nuclear proliferation, to save us all)—that is still with us. One reason these atrocities are still with us is that we have learned to bury them in a mass of other facts, as radioactive wastes are buried in containers in the earth. We have learned to give them exactly the same proportion of attention that teachers and writers often give them in the most respectable of classrooms and textbooks. This learned sense of moral proportion, coming from the apparent objectivity of the scholar, is accepted more easily than when it comes from politicians at press conferences. It is therefore more deadly.

    The treatment of heroes (Columbus) and their victims (the Arawaks)—the quiet acceptance of conquest and murder in the name of progress—is only one aspect of a certain approach to history, in which the past is told from the point of view of governments, conquerors, diplomats, leaders. It is as if they, like Columbus, deserve universal acceptance, as if they—the Founding Fathers, Jackson, Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt, Kennedy, the leading members of Congress, the famous Justices of the Supreme Court—represent the nation as a whole. The pretense is that there really is such a thing as the United States, subject to occasional conflicts and quarrels, but fundamentally a community of people with common interests. It is as if there really is a national interest represented in the Constitution, in territorial expansion, in the laws passed by Congress, the decisions of the courts, the development of capitalism, the culture of education and the mass media.

    History is the memory of states, wrote Henry Kissinger in his first book, A World Restored, in which he proceeded to tell the history of nineteenth-century Europe from the viewpoint of the leaders of Austria and England, ignoring the millions who suffered from those statesmen’s policies. From his standpoint, the peace that Europe had before the French Revolution was restored by the diplomacy of a few national leaders. But for factory workers in England, farmers in France, colored people in Asia and Africa, women and children everywhere except in the upper classes, it was a world of conquest, violence, hunger, exploitation—a world not restored but disintegrated.

    My viewpoint, in telling the history of the United States, is different: that we must not accept the memory of states as our own. Nations are not communities and never have been. The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals fierce conflicts of interest (sometimes exploding, most often repressed) between conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex. And in such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners.

    Thus, in that inevitable taking of sides which comes from selection and emphasis in history, I prefer to try to tell the story of the discovery of America from the viewpoint of the Arawaks, of the Constitution from the standpoint of the slaves, of Andrew Jackson as seen by the Cherokees, of the Civil War as seen by the New York Irish, of the Mexican war as seen by the deserting soldiers of Scott’s army, of the rise of industrialism as seen by the young women in the Lowell textile mills, of the Spanish-American war as seen by the Cubans, the conquest of the Philippines as seen by black soldiers on Luzon, the Gilded Age as seen by southern farmers, the First World War as seen by socialists, the Second World War as seen by pacifists, the New Deal as seen by blacks in Harlem, the postwar American empire as seen by peons in Latin America. And so on, to the limited extent that any one person, however he or she strains, can see history from the standpoint of others.

    My point is not to grieve for the victims and denounce the executioners. Those tears, that anger, cast into the past, deplete our moral energy for the present. And the lines are not always clear. In the long run, the oppressor is also a victim. In the short run (and so far, human history has consisted only of short runs), the victims, themselves desperate and tainted with the culture that oppresses them, turn on other victims.

    Still, understanding the complexities, this book will be skeptical of governments and their attempts, through politics and culture, to ensnare ordinary people in a giant web of nationhood pretending to a common interest. I will try not to overlook the cruelties that victims inflict on one another as they are jammed together in the boxcars of the system. I don’t want to romanticize them. But I do remember (in rough paraphrase) a statement I once read: The cry of the poor is not always just, but if you don’t listen to it, you will never know what justice is.

    I don’t want to invent victories for people’s movements. But to think that history-writing must aim simply to recapitulate the failures that dominate the past is to make historians collaborators in an endless cycle of defeat. If history is to be creative, to anticipate a possible future without denying the past, it should, I believe, emphasize new possibilities by disclosing those hidden episodes of the past when, even if in brief flashes, people showed their ability to resist, to join together, occasionally to win. I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past’s fugitive moments of compassion rather than in its solid centuries of warfare.

    That, being as blunt as I can, is my approach to the history of the United States. The reader may as well know that before going on.

    What Columbus did to the Arawaks of the Bahamas, Cortés did to the Aztecs of Mexico, Pizarro to the Incas of Peru, and the English settlers of Virginia and Massachusetts to the Powhatans and the Pequots.

    The Aztec civilization of Mexico came out of the heritage of Mayan, Zapotec, and Toltec cultures. It built enormous constructions from stone tools and human labor, developed a writing system and a priesthood. It also engaged in (let us not overlook this) the ritual killing of thousands of people as sacrifices to the gods. The cruelty of the Aztecs, however, did not erase a certain innocence, and when a Spanish armada appeared at Vera Cruz, and a bearded white man came ashore, with strange beasts (horses), clad in iron, it was thought that he was the legendary Aztec man-god who had died three hundred years before, with the promise to return—the mysterious Quetzalcoatl. And so they welcomed him, with munificent hospitality.

    That was Hernando Cortés, come from Spain with an expedition financed by merchants and landowners and blessed by the deputies of God, with one obsessive goal: to find gold. In the mind of Montezuma, the king of the Aztecs, there must have been a certain doubt about whether Cortés was indeed Quetzalcoatl, because he sent a hundred runners to Cortés, bearing enormous treasures, gold and silver wrought into objects of fantastic beauty, but at the same time begging him to go back. (The painter Dürer a few years later described what he saw just arrived in Spain from that expedition—a sun of gold, a moon of silver, worth a fortune.)

    Cortés then began his march of death from town to town, using deception, turning Aztec against Aztec, killing with the kind of deliberateness that accompanies a strategy—to paralyze the will of the population by a sudden frightful deed. And so, in Cholulu, he invited the headmen of the Cholula nation to the square. And when they came, with thousands of unarmed retainers, Cortés’s small army of Spaniards, posted around the square with cannon, armed with crossbows, mounted on horses, massacred them, down to the last man. Then they looted the city and moved on. When their cavalcade of murder was over they were in Mexico City, Montezuma was dead, and the Aztec civilization, shattered, was in the hands of the Spaniards.

    All this is told in the Spaniards’ own accounts.

    In Peru, that other Spanish conquistador Pizarro, used the same tactics, and for the same reasons—the frenzy in the early capitalist states of Europe for gold, for slaves, for products of the soil, to pay the bondholders and stockholders of the expeditions, to finance the monarchical bureaucracies rising in Western Europe, to spur the growth of the new money economy rising out of feudalism, to participate in what Karl Marx would later call the primitive accumulation of capital. These were the violent beginnings of an intricate system of technology, business, politics, and culture that would dominate the world for the next five centuries.

    In the North American English colonies, the pattern was set early, as Columbus had set it in the islands of the Bahamas. In 1585, before there was any permanent English settlement in Virginia, Richard Grenville landed there with seven ships. The Indians he met were hospitable, but when one of them stole a small silver cup, Grenville sacked and burned the whole Indian village.

    Jamestown itself was set up inside the territory of an Indian confederacy, led by the chief, Powhatan. Powhatan watched the English settle on his people’s land, but did not attack, maintaining a posture of coolness. When the English were going through their starving time in the winter of 1610, some of them ran off to join the Indians, where they would at least be fed. When the summer came, the governor of the colony sent a messenger to ask Powhatan to return the runaways, whereupon Powhatan, according to the English account, replied with noe other than prowde and disdaynefull Answers. Some soldiers were therefore sent out to take Revendge. They fell upon an Indian settlement, killed fifteen or sixteen Indians, burned the houses, cut down the corn growing around the village, took the queen of the tribe and her children into boats, then ended up throwing the children overboard and shoteinge owtt their Braynes in the water. The queen was later taken off and stabbed to death.

    Twelve years later, the Indians, alarmed as the English settlements kept growing in numbers, apparently decided to try to wipe them out for good. They went on a rampage and massacred 347 men, women, and children. From then on it was total war.

    Not able to enslave the Indians, and not able to live with them, the English decided to exterminate them. Edmund Morgan writes, in his history of early Virginia, American Slavery, American Freedom:

    Since the Indians were better woodsmen than the English and virtually impossible to track down, the method was to feign peaceful intentions, let them settle down and plant their corn wherever they chose, and then, just before harvest, fall upon them, killing as many as possible and burning the corn. . . . Within two or three years of the massacre the English had avenged the deaths of that day many times over.

    In that first year of the white man in Virginia, 1607, Powhatan had addressed a plea to John Smith that turned out prophetic. How authentic it is may be in doubt, but it is so much like so many Indian statements that it may be taken as, if not the rough letter of that first plea, the exact spirit of it:

    I have seen two generations of my people die. . . . I know the difference between peace and war better than any man in my country. I am now grown old, and must die soon; my authority must descend to my brothers, Opitchapan, Opechancanough and Catatough—then to my two sisters, and then to my two daughters. I wish them to know as much as I do, and that your love to them may be like mine to you. Why will you take by force what you may have quietly by love? Why will you destroy us who supply you with food? What can you get by war? We can hide our provisions and run into the woods; then you will starve for wronging your friends. Why are you jealous of us? We are unarmed, and willing to give you what you ask, if you come in a friendly manner, and not so simple as not to know that it is much better to eat good meat, sleep comfortably, live quietly with my wives and children, laugh and be merry with the English, and trade for their copper and hatchets, than to run away from them, and to lie cold in the woods, feed on acorns, roots and such trash, and be so hunted that I can neither eat nor sleep. In these wars, my men must sit up watching, and if a twig break, they all cry out Here comes Captain Smith! So I must

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