Howard
Zinn's book is excerpted from his million-selling, A People's
History of the United States (1978). Published just short of
century's end, 1983, he is careful to set the tone by including from
the earlier book his account of the great navigator Columbus'
arrival in the Americas, devastating for the natives who were
enslaved, slaughtered or ruthlessly exploited. Zinn chronicles the
malignant force as it sweeps across and occupies the “new”
continent, focusing on the United States. His sympathies obviously
lie with the People as they resist the rapacious rulers. There are
many discouraging defeats and you could describe the fewer successes
as making up what is admirable about the U.S. today. Power yields
nothing without a fight. Zinn remarks that... “in a world of
victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people not to be
on the side of the executioner.”
Theodore
Roosevelt, the soon to be president, is quoted in 1897, “I should
welcome almost any war, for I think the country needs one.” and,
the psychopathic, “...no triumph of peace is quite so great as the
supreme triumph of war.” Zinn describes the U.S. war with Spain as
not one of liberation, as the rhetoric would have it, but a
supplanting of a colonial power. President McKinley claims that we
must civilize and christianize the brown brothers, incapable of
governing themselves, overlooking that thanks to the Spanish
occupation most Filipinos were already catholic. In both cases, Cuba
and the Philippines, the pattern persists: support rebel groups
fighting the occupation then betray them, putting into place the same
collaborators used by the former power. In the case of the
Philippines that meant crushing the local resistance and allies with
a brutality dictators throughout history would understand.
Socialists,
at least the leadership, understood, claiming that in this war, as in
most, we will provide the corpses, they will reap the profits. From
selling rotten meat and guns to the military to dividing up the
spoils of local resources, the critics were shown to be correct.
Dictators and the Mafia soon owned Cuba, dictators and corporations
soon owned the Philippines. There was disagreement at home; Mark
Twain complained that the stars and bars should be replaced by the
skull and crossbones. One labor newspaper cried, ...thousands of
useful lives are sacrificed to the molach of greed, the blood tribute
paid by labor to capitalism... industrial accidents and murderous
thugs, whether police or national guard, brings forth no shout for
vengeance and reparations,... no popular uproar is heard but when
capital wants to invade another nation, out comes indignant rhetoric.
Then the fever and drumbeat of war can hardly be resisted. Socialism
is just a word to describe people of various economic opinions
organizing for justice but it is also a word demonized by the wealthy
in order to slap it on any movement opposing their rule.
Aside
from believing that expansion was necessary to solve the problem of
excess production (Guam and Hawaii were annexed around this time),
the wealthy class also sought to distract the populace from the
“socialist menace” then growing in popularity, thanks to extreme
conditions for workers, where long, difficult, dangerous hours were
required with no compensation for injuries, nor even death, on the
job, frequent occurrences. Unionization was growing also for the same
reasons. As today the debate among the rulers was whether to placate
or suppress the masses and how much of each. Movement strength became
such that the faction that thought, better to deal with a
conservative union than to face a militant one, came to
predominate. Theodore Roosevelt is portrayed as being an
anti-business trust-buster but in reality, according to Zinn, he was
of that faction. Private meetings with industrialists created the
policies aimed to defuse the socialist and militant union movement. A
compliant middle class was needed to buffer the rulers against “the
menace”. Back and forth over the years did the ruling class argue
over the size the middle class needed to be until most recently the
parsimonious faction seems to have gained the upper hand.
Zinn
provides a partial list of the 108 military actions taken by the
U.S. between 1798 and 1945, taken from a State Department document.
The 1823 Monroe Doctrine became the pseudo legal justification for
many of these expansionist incursions.
To
the rescue of the elite, under siege from the socialist/union menace,
comes World War I. Eugene Debs, socialist leader, and significant
presidential candidate, is jailed for speaking against the war, under
the 1917 Espionage Act, still in force. The Act specifically stated
that it in no way violated the first amendment but this doublespeak
was ignored by the courts. Ten million will die in an incredible orgy
of folly, all the time being mis-informed by the loyal free press.
French and English troops began to mutiny to such an extent that the
U.S., on flimsy pretext, ended its formal neutrality and joined the
slaughter. The Act and the war were used to decimate unions and
justice-seeking organizations. The peace was so vindictive that the
rise of a Hitler for a second act was almost guaranteed. This helped
bring the total killed in the 20th century to 100 million. But a lot
of money, as usual, was to be made.
It
might have been a different world had Franklin D. Roosevelt survived,
or his earlier progressive vice-president remained in place to take
the reins once Roosevelt died. These folks were of that faction, the
one that aimed to thwart socialism by softening capitalism but their
softening was, or would have been, significant. As it was, we got a
cold warrior, Harry Truman, brought to us by those with a harder,
more parsimonious view. But post-World War II. did involve widening
the middle class while at the same time demonizing the left. With
Reagan, slightly beyond the scope of Zinn's book but of the century,
came swift roll-back with a vengeance – out sourcing, union-busting
etc; Those coopted over the years were now set up and betrayed, the
unions whose leaders so enjoyed golfing with the owners even while
extracting worker benefits (but nothing too radical). The alienation
felt across the hapless work force was easily channeled onto
scapegoats or into the arms of demagogues or both, given that the
primary source of information for most of the population, the
mainstream media, were (are) owned by the 1%. The book is really
worth a read, containing a myriad of details, way beyond what I can
cover here, marking the century, indicting yes, but more importantly,
elucidating what any reform movement is up against.
