Seven of the Most Dangerous Ideas in American History

A few of the many truths in Howard Zinn’s book “A People’s History of the United States” that your standard history textbooks might ignore.

In American high school history classes, we focus on common themes that our teachers tell us make up the American experience of history. It starts from the beginning, with Columbus and the Spanish, or the English colonies and the Pilgrims. We’re conditioned to think about exploring new lands, seeking religious and economic freedom, celebrating Thanksgiving, throwing teas in harbors and creating more perfect unions in a sweaty Philadelphia hall. All of this to create a land with a “manifest destiny,” engaged in a “great experiment” to build a creed based around Enlightenment ideas of liberty, opportunity and inclusion. Howard Zinn’s book A People’s History of the United States wouldn’t argue that those Enlightenment ideas are entirely absent or misplaced, but they’re hardly the full story. I tackled the book at the beginning of 2021 and you can read my review of it here. Here are a few of the many themes Zinn emphasizes that your standard history textbook won’t.

Source: A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn. HarperCollins, 1980, 675 pages

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1. Primitive Accumulation

When Europe encountered the Americas, European colonial powers (Spain, France, England, Portugal and so on) were in the middle of transitioning from feudalism to capitalism, a process known as primitive accumulation.  Peasants were being transformed into wage laborers.  Kings and Queens were looking for new sources of gold, silver and other sources of wealth, the land & riches on which they would base their empires.  The “explorers” – or more accurately, conquerors – sent out from Europe were attempting to meet an insatiable demand for the products of the New World.  They saw human life as yet another product that could be put to productive use in the Old one.    Gold and silver of the New World, stolen and shipped to Spain and elsewhere, were used by the rulers of that country to hire mercenaries and line their coffers.  It did not benefit the poor, largely peasant classes, instead fueling war and crippling inflation.  The effort to colonize the Americas was not about discovery or adventure, or new beginnings, so much as it was about the same old story: powerful men and women seeking more power, and the value they imbued into the shiny metals mined from the ground.

2. Indigenous Genocide

The Americas were home to hundreds of distinct cultures, with their own art and legends, systems of architecture and engineering.  Cultures like the Moundbuilders built trading networks across civilizations, stretching from the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Lakes and centering on massive cities like Cahokia.  Leagues like the Iroquois created alliances and intricate governing structures that united groups in common cause.  The Iroquois, in particular, proved that cultures with communal property relations (we share everything) and matrilineal structures (we trace our descent through women, and they share power with or lead men) could be successful, in stark contrast to what had been customary in Europe.  

Columbus didn’t encounter a blank slate.  He and those that followed him stumbled upon rich and varied cultures on a dense continent, with wildly different and, dare I say, often better ideas about property, power, family and community relations, and the relationship of man to its environment.    Many native lifestyles were more successful at getting resources from the land, more efficient in labor, and left more time for leisure.  Many settlers deserted European colonies to join them.  

So much of this was destroyed by the European colonial powers, and often deliberately.  Most had no interest in sharing the land they’d “discovered”, seeing it as theirs to claim and conquer.  This didn’t end with the Spanish conquest of the Maya, Aztec, Inca and more.  It didn’t end with the English colonization of Jamestown and Massachusetts Bay, or the settling of the other American colonies, or the expansion of the westward frontier, or the expulsion of the Cherokee, or the wars against the Cree, the Blackhawks, the Lakota and others. 

The intentional effort to destroy these cultures, prevent or end their prosperity, claim their land, tear down their governing structures and autonomy, steal and kill their populations constituted genocide, the attempt to destroy a culture in whole or in part.  We must be honest about it.  

3. The Centrality and Brutality of Slavery

The history of slavery in the Americas is virtually as old as the history of Europeans in the Americas.  The Spanish enslaved natives immediately, and African slaves were brought to the continent shortly thereafter.   England’s Virginia colony needed farm labor in order to survive – after its first couple of years it had already suffered near extinction due to famines so severe, they’d dug up corpses to use as food.  And after all, those English weren’t going to work their farms themselves, were they?  The English imported black African slaves.  In the process, their culture, heritage, language, customs, families and histories were all but erased by their captors.  They were treated with brutality and as property to be bought and sold – a condition known as chattel slavery.  

Some conservative commentators will make apologies for this practice by claiming that “the Africans enslaved their own and sold them to us”.  This is an oversimplification, not least because it assumes all Africans are essentially the same and that the cultural distinctions between those doing the enslaving and the enslaved did not matter.  They’re all “Africans” to the abusers of this argument.  Furthermore, they treat all forms of servitude as equal. Zinn points out that slavery existed in Africa prior to European colonialism, but it was more akin to what we’d consider serfdom today (itself a brutal and unfair system) and as a result, it doesn’t really compare to chattel slavery.  Slaves in these African contexts could own property, get married, and even become official parts of their owners’ families and gain social status in a way that would be impossible for American chattel slaves.

As slavery became ubiquitous, so did acts of resistance among the slave population.  Escape attempts were incredibly common.  Strategies such as work stoppages, production sabotage and slowdowns were also used by slaves to express their displeasure and seek redress of their grievances.  Organized rebellion was less frequent, though it did happen.  Zinn cites historian Herbert Aptheker and a book I’m planning to read in the future called American Negro Slave Revolts, in which Aptheker asserts over 250 recorded instances of at least ten slaves joining in a revolt.  

That’s a story I wasn’t told in school: in the version I received as a white boy in Pennsylvania, slave revolts were rare, and pretty much limited to Nat Turner’s rebellion (where his murder of slaveowning families is emphasized, as if to suggest that maybe we were all safer with black men enslaved) and John Brown’s attempted revolution at Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia.

4. Poor Whites and Blacks Joining Forces

One of the greatest threats to the wealthy English and later American settlers, other than slave rebellions, was the threat of poor whites and poor blacks joining forces against the wealthy that oppressed them.  Keep in mind that indentured servitude was a thing at this time as well, and many whites were brought over from Europe on such contracts, “bound to service for a term of years.”  Even free whites were often poor and exploited.  Zinn writes,

“there is evidence that where whites and blacks found themselves with common problems, common work, common enemy in their master, they behaved toward one another as equals.”     

A People’s History of the United States

Because the threat of collaboration between these groups, and a subsequent rebellion, grew so much in the colonial period, lawmakers and property owners took steps to differentiate the two groups.  They bribed white indentured servants with social status, the promise of material goods upon ending their service term, and instituted laws that gave them definitive privileges over slaves.  This helped cement the loyalty of poor whites to the established order.  As long as they played along, they would not be at the bottom of the social and economic hierarchy; black slaves would.   

The threat represented by the potential alliance of poor whites and enslaved or poor blacks would show up again and again in American history.  In the 1870s during Reconstruction, wealthy Southerners persecuted the emerging Populist party that was making inroads in uniting these groups, and helping them see their common interest in opposing wealthy landowners.   In the labor battles of workers against factory owners and railroad barons into the 20th century, capitalists worked to heighten divisions between blacks and whites so they could not form a united front.  Black strikebreakers were employed by business owners when their factory workers went on strike, creating resentment and hostility that also worked toward the purposes of the wealthy.  Arguably, southern efforts to deny black agricultural workers the benefits of the New Deal in the 1930s, and the “Southern strategy” begun in the 1960s to gain white southern votes for the Republican party by promoting racist policies under the cover of “law and order” slogans in the post Civil Rights era, were all part of this tack as well.  Zinn argues the overarching goal of these moves was to prevent the emergence of an alliance between the working classes across the color line.