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.
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5. The Constitutional System Was Built By and For the Wealthy
America’s “founders” had plenty of rebellions and discontent to worry about from the poor, the enslaved, the natives and even their own servants and tenants. Colonial America was dominated by wealthy planters, landowners and merchants, and social mobility was very low. Even most indentured servants, upon gaining their freedom, were still poor. They often found themselves with little choice but to go from being a servant to a tenant of the same landowners they once served. As you might remember, enslaved black Americans, once freed after the Civil War, often found themselves forced in a similar bargain to become sharecroppers.
That’s pretty clearly an improvement over servitude, or certainly chattel slavery, but it’s hardly what I’d call freedom or equity. But the economic and political systems of the colonies worked to enforce and codify this system. Interesting fact – English philosopher John Locke actually wrote the first constitution for the Carolina colony, and per Zinn, entrenched the power of landowning barons in the constitution itself. The author asserts that the town meetings that New England is historically famous for, as examples of “direct democracy”, were usually controlled in reality by wealthy merchants in the town. The gap between rich and poor rose pretty drastically then, as it does now – and then, as it does now, it carried the threat of unrest and even revolt.
Zinn’s thesis of the American Revolution is that elite English colonists in the 1770s saw value in declaring independence primarily to gain control over land, profits and political power from favorites of the British Empire. In the process, they could hold back a number of potential rebellions and create a consensus of popular support for the rule of a new, privileged leadership.
Photo Courtesy of John Bakator on Unsplash.
Zinn further states that this motive and associated acts did not form “a conscious conspiracy, but an accumulation of tactical responses.” Often the elites saw that the problems of the poor or landless genuinely needed to be addressed for practical, moral and ideological reasons. Some elites – James Otis, Sam Adams, etc., called for middle classes and even workers to gain the ability to participate in political affairs, speaking to broad Enlightenment ideals. He does imply, however, that the elites repeatedly using this tactic helped to defuse or prevent many potential revolts.
This is a fascinating thesis to me. It’s clear that some of this was done, although I don’t think it is completely incompatible with other understandings of the Revolution, such as an honest-enough expression of Enlightenment-era ideas of “liberty” as revolutionaries of the time understood it. More on this later, because I have my gripes with Zinn as well.
He’s got a lot of support for one thing though – the guys mostly in charge of executing the American Revolution were rich. Zinn writes, “George Washington was the richest man in America. John Hancock was a prosperous Boston merchant. Benjamin Franklin was a wealthy printer. And so on”, since this sort of story was common among the members of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. And it proves the old adage that decisions are made by those who show up. The interests of slaveholders, moneylenders, land speculators, manufacturers and bondholders were represented in the Constitutional Convention because they were in the room. Women, slaves, servants, and property-less men were not.
Some of these men did genuinely have ideas about popular representation (Paine among them), but Zinn argues they hedged their bets in big ways and when they compromised, they did it to protect the wealthy. The Senate, per James Madison, was “necessary as a defense to the people against their own temporary errors and delusions”. And who would protect them by serving in the Senate? The elites that state legislatures appointed, of course. In broad terms, Zinn sees compromises like a bicameral legislature, the ⅗ compromise that counted enslaved black Americans as 60% of a person in the census, and the equal weight of states in the Senate as compromises between merchant money in the North and a wealthy slave-holding class in the South.
This doesn’t mean everything about the Enlightenment ideas of liberty, freedom, self-governance and such was disingenuous. A few of these guys even had visions of equality that remotely approached what some of us would recognize today (although vanishingly few, the more you qualify it). But plenty of the actions that built this country were done as tactical moves to preserve the wealth of a ruling class. Even the ones that didn’t have class motivations may have had major class consequences, and this needs to be stressed in any full telling of our history.
6. Imperialism as the Motivation for Our Wars
Defeating the British in the Revolutionary War, and holding them off to a stalemate in 1812, allowed American settlers to more easily push Native Americans off their traditional lands west of the original thirteen colonies. In other words, American imperialism rushed to fill the void left by British imperialism. And for Native Americans, the American variety was far more encompassing, brutal, and complete.
A People’s History of the United States details how supposed American heroes like Andrew Jackson were actually virulent imperialists, in particular against Native Americans. Jackson led a war against the Creek Indians and made way for white settlement on their lands, then led the betrayal of America’s Cherokee allies, who worked overtime to adopt European customs of farming, property ownership, livestock raising, and printing presses.
America’s imperial ambitions also extended to Mexico. When I was in school, we were told that the Mexican-American War started when Texas, which had won its independence from Mexico fair and square and shortly thereafter was admitted to the US, had a border dispute with Mexico, and that the matter of the border had been up to debate at that time. I had to learn from a music teacher, playing ABBA’s 70’s pop song “Fernando” which he thought was about the Mexican-American War (it isn’t), that the US had deliberately provoked the war by sending forces south of the disputed border (the Nueces River) and used Mexico’s retaliation as a pretense for a war of expansion. It may not be in the Swedish pop song, which is apparently about the Mexican Revolution of 1910 instead, but this interpretation is supported by diaries and other documents written by soldiers, diplomats and politicians from the period. My music teacher wasn’t exactly right about the song, but he certainly had a point about our history.
Famous Americans like Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, Horace Greeley, Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln all vigorously opposed the war as one of aggression and empire against Mexico. So did many workers and poor immigrants in the US. Zinn describes the struggle as “a war of the American elite against the Mexican elite, each side exhorting, using, killing its own population as well as the other.”
Our imperial ambitions led to the Spanish-American War as well in 1898, where we seized Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Guam and more based on false pretenses. When we let Cuba have its independence, we reserved the right to intervene in its affairs at will. In the Philippines, we brutally put down an independence movement, leading to a guerilla war that killed thousands of American troops and hundreds of thousands of Filipino soldiers and civilians who had no need of our interference. Zinn alludes to intervention after intervention, coup after coup in Latin America, Asia and elsewhere over the next century.
If Zinn gives us anything positive along with this knowledge of America’s wars of empire, it’s two-fold; I knew which parts of the world I wanted to learn more about, and I learned that America’s imperial moves were often vigorously opposed by some elements of society – often workers, immigrants and the poor who would be sent to fight in these “adventures”.
7. The Labor Movement Was a War, and the US Army Was on the Wrong Side
In the history classes I attended growing up, we talked about the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. In fact I remember a grainy, VHS dramatization of it – women in work dresses banging on locked doors, desperate to escape the flames. We heard about this in a unit about what we call the Gilded Age. We’re told about increasing industrialization, more and more people making their way to cities and working in factories, more and more people discovering that this new life meant poverty and a lack of safety.
I heard stories about what happened after the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire and other workplace tragedies, and often they ended with “there was a public outcry and eventually this or that changed for the better.” We got more safety precautions in industrial plants. We hired inspectors for our food and water. Some nice bosses realized they could get better workers with higher wages, so we got ‘em. Maybe, if the teacher is earnest or the curriculum is half-honest, it points out that protests and demonstrations helped raise public consciousness and place pressure on politicians and business owners to change. They tend to emphasize the idea that nonviolent public pressure works, and that accepted civic means of advocating for change can be effective. What they don’t emphasize is how often that nonviolent protest was met with state or corporate violence at the other end, and what these parts of our history really looked like.
Public Domain Illustration, Courtesy of Library of Congress.
Because of this, A People’s History of the United States is a huge corrective. Zinn plants us in the middle of revolts and rebellions early in the book, but by the time of the Gilded Age, that rebellious impulse and imperative takes the form of the labor strike. As American capitalism hit wave after wave of recession and depression caused by banking crises, and the “robber barons” of the time took the opportunity to exploit their competitor’s misfortunes and gain market share, rank-and-file workers saw their already bleak fortunes sour further. Corporate owners treated them as expendable and reduced their pay accordingly. The pressure points of the industrializing economy, like the railroads, were the prime battlefields of a revolt against corporate power.
Zinn focuses on workers’ strikes and the government and corporate responses to them. Companies hired thugs, private police, or even got the assistance of the national guard or army to bust the heads of those who dared to strike, even if they were nonviolent from the get-go. Sometimes these private gangs or national guard units would mutiny against their bosses, and either join the people demonstrating, dissolve into crowds or make way for home. Other times, they brutally attacked strikers with live ammunition. Not just light arms, either. These units used machine guns, artillery and even aerial bombs to stop labor strikes. Hundreds, if not thousands died in strikes that devolved into genuine and often sustained gun battles. In many instances, it was war. In some instances, the labor movement armed itself in turn and could hold their own against these onslaughts of troops and Pinkertons. In a precious few instances, the strikes and labor revolts of the 1800s and 1900s held the potential, like the rebellions of old, to incite genuine revolution against the elites. Sometimes they won meaningful concessions from their employers. Other times, they were literally ground into the dust and into the grave.
None of it was set in stone. At critical moments over and over again in our history, the potential for drastic change existed – for upheaval and revolution, for transformational ideas and the rebuilding of souls. Zinn’s book, despite some flaws in analysis, shows the potential of each of these nexus events, and demands attention to the people who stood against history’s oppressors – sometimes pushing back, and sometimes succeeding.
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