|
e1667e8
|
I could only think one troubling thought: the police, the state, did the bidding of the holders of great wealth. How much freedom of speech and freedom of assembly you had depended on what class you were in.
|
|
police
zinn
|
Howard Zinn |
|
78c2f5b
|
In the Mexican War, a skirmish between Mexican and American troops on the Texas-Mexico border led President Polk to state that "American blood has been shed on American soil," and to ask Congress for war. Actually, the encounter took place in disputed territory, and Polk's diary shows that he wanted an excuse for war so the United States could take from Mexico what the United States coveted, California and the whole Southwest."
|
|
|
Howard Zinn |
|
c5ba919
|
The leaders of early Boston were gentlemen of considerable wealth who, in association with the clergy, eagerly sought to preserve in America the social arrangements of the Mother Country.
|
|
|
Howard Zinn |
|
9899ff5
|
That contract law was intended to discriminate against working people and for business is shown by Horwitz in the following example of the early nineteenth century: the courts said that if a worker signed a contract to work for a year, and left before the year was up, he was not entitled to any wages, even for the time he had worked. But the courts at the same time said that if a building business broke a contract, it was entitled to be pai..
|
|
|
Howard Zinn |
|
12f5cc6
|
traveled in those days with a cheap tape recorder. (I had written to my alma mater, Columbia University, which had an oral history project, suggesting that they take time off from interviewing ex-generals and ex-secretaries of state and send someone south to record the history being made every day by obscure people. One of the nation's richest universities wrote back saying something like, "An excellent idea. We don't really have the resour..
|
|
|
Howard Zinn |
|
c257119
|
No new social class came to power through the door of the American revolution. The men who engineered the revolt were largely members of the colonial ruling class.
|
|
|
Howard Zinn |
|
ef856d3
|
For Indians there has never been a clear line between prose and poetry. When an Indian studying in New Mexico was praised for his poetry he said, "In my tribe we have no poets. Everyone talks in poetry." There"
|
|
|
Howard Zinn |
|
8e515dc
|
The expulsion of Spain from Cuba (a worthwhile venture) so that the U.S. could take control of Cuba (an unworthy venture) was preceded by a dubious story, never proven, that the Spaniards had exploded the U.S. battleship Maine in Havana harbor. Our seizure of the Philippines (from the Filipinos) was preceded by a manufactured "incident" between Filipino and U.S. troops. The German sinking of the passenger ship Lusitania in World War I was o..
|
|
|
Howard Zinn |
|
8fcbc6b
|
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 t..
|
|
|
Howard Zinn |
|
13e3b25
|
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 t..
|
|
|
Howard Zinn |
|
d1f04fe
|
The American Anti-Slavery Society, on the other hand, said the war was "waged solely for the detestable and horrible purpose of extending and perpetuating American slavery throughout the vast territory of Mexico." A twenty-seven-year-old Boston poet and abolitionist, James Russell Lowell, began writing satirical poems in the Boston Courier (they were later collected as the Biglow Papers). In them, a New England farmer, Hosea Biglow, spoke, ..
|
|
|
Howard Zinn |
|
bf51d7a
|
More important, there was a very painful thought in my head: those young Communists on the block were right! The state and its police were not neutral referees in a society of contending interests. They were on the side of the rich and powerful. Free speech? Try it and the police will be there with their horses, their clubs, their guns, to stop you.
|
|
|
Howard Zinn |
|
0f152a2
|
In spite of such preconceptions about blackness, in spite of special subordination of blacks in the Americas in the seventeenth century, 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. As one scholar of slavery, Kenneth Stampp, has put it, Negro and white servants of the seventeenth century were "remarkably unconcerned..
|
|
|
Howard Zinn |
|
9021930
|
Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reforms. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of struggle. . . . If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful r..
|
|
|
Howard Zinn |
|
868bea3
|
The Fourteenth Amendment repudiated the prewar Dred Scott decision by declaring that "all persons born or naturalized in the United States" were citizens. It also seemed to make a powerful statement for racial equality, severely limiting "states' rights": No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or proper..
|
|
|
Howard Zinn |
|
fb4f1ba
|
The philosophy of the Declaration, that government is set up by the people to secure their life, liberty, and happiness, and is to be overthrown when it no longer does that, is often traced to the ideas of John Locke, in his Second Treatise on Government. That was published in England in 1689, when the English were rebelling against tyrannical kings and setting up parliamentary government. The Declaration, like Locke's Second Treatise, talk..
|
|
|
Howard Zinn |
|
8c17a09
|
What was close at hand, visible, was that Communists were the leaders in organizing working people all over the country. They were the most daring, risking arrest and beatings to organize auto workers in Detroit, steel workers in Pittsburgh, textile workers in North Carolina, fur and leather workers in New York, longshoremen on the West Coast.
|
|
|
Howard Zinn |
|
ca1a0b8
|
Perhaps the most important thing I learned was about democracy, that democracy is not our government, our constitution, our legal structure. Too often they are enemies of democracy. Certainly this was the experience of African-Americans in this country for two hundred years. With the government failing to enforce the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, black men, women, and children decided to do that on their own. They..
|
|
|
Howard Zinn |
|
4bf8c1f
|
The removal of the Indians was explained by Lewis Cass--Secretary of War, governor of the Michigan territory, minister to France, presidential candidate: A principle of progressive improvement seems almost inherent in human nature. . . . We are all striving in the career of life to acquire riches of honor, or power, or some other object, whose possession is to realize the day dreams of our imaginations; and the aggregate of these efforts co..
|
|
|
Howard Zinn |
|
c55f5e1
|
What the [Clinton/Lewinsky scandal] showed was that a matter of personal behavior could crowd out of the public's attention far more serious matters, indeed matters of life and death. The House of Representatives would impeach the president on matters of sexual behavior, but it would not impeach him for endangering the lives of children by welfare reform, or for violating international law in bombing other countries (Iran, Afghanistan, Suda..
|
|
war
|
Howard Zinn |
|
9445c74
|
We are here plunged in politics funnier than words can express. Very great issues are involved.... But the amusing thing is that no one talks about real interests. By common consent they agree to let these alone. We are afraid to discuss them. Instead of this the press is engaged in a most amusing dispute whether Mr. Cleveland had an illegitimate child and did or did not live with more than one mistress.
|
|
|
Howard Zinn |
|
85a9746
|
My image of "a Communist" was not a Soviet bureaucrat but my friend Leon's father, a cabdriver who came home from work bruised and bloody one day, beaten up by his employer's goons (yes, that word was soon part of my vocabulary) for trying to organize his fellow cabdrivers into a union."
|
|
|
Howard Zinn |
|
8d1c177
|
Harriet Hanson was an eleven-year-old girl working in the mill. She later recalled: I worked in a lower room where I had heard the proposed strike fully, if not vehemently, discussed. I had been an ardent listener to what was said against this attempt at "oppression" on the part of the corporation, and naturally I took sides with the strikers. When the day came on which the girls were to turn out, those in the upper rooms started first, and..
|
|
mil
strike
|
Howard Zinn |
|
1beb6d4
|
It launched one worker, Eugene Debs, into a lifetime of activism for labor unions and socialism. Debs was arrested for supporting the strike. Two years later he wrote: The issue is Socialism versus Capitalism. I am for Socialism because I am for humanity. We have been cursed with the reign of gold long enough. Money constitutes no proper basis for civilization. The time has come to regenerate [renew] society--we are on the eve of a universa..
|
|
|
Howard Zinn |
|
12d9cf9
|
Behind the English invasion of North America, behind their massacre of Indians, their deception, their brutality, was that special powerful drive born in civilizations based on private property. It was a morally ambiguous drive; the need for space, for land, was a real human need. But in conditions of scarcity, in a barbarous epoch of history ruled by competition, this human need was transformed into
|
|
|
Howard Zinn |
|
3dc2d0e
|
Then Gregory lowered his voice, suddenly serious. "But it looks like we got to do it the hard way, and stay down here, and educate them."
|
|
|
Howard Zinn |
|
8cb7ca5
|
There were moments of racial unity. Lawrence Goodwyn found in east Texas an unusual coalition of black and white public officials: it had begun during Reconstruction and continued into the Populist period. The state government was in the control of white Democrats, but in Grimes County, blacks won local offices and sent legislators to the state capital. The district clerk was a black man; there were black deputy sheriffs and a black school ..
|
|
|
Howard Zinn |
|
d91bd12
|
Columbus was one of the great heroes of world history, to be admired for his daring feat of imagination and courage. In my account, I acknowledged that he was an intrepid sailor, but also pointed out (based on his own journal and the reports of many eyewitnesses) that he was vicious in his treatment of the gentle Arawak Indians who greeted his arrival in this hemisphere. He enslaved them, tortured them, murdered them--all in the pursuit of ..
|
|
|
Howard Zinn |
|
82dc93a
|
The American Revolution is sometimes said to have brought about the separation of church and state. The northern states made such declarations, but after 1776 they adopted taxes that forced everyone to support Christian teachings. William G. McLoughlin, quoting Supreme Court Justice David Brewer in 1892 that "this is a Christian nation," says of the separation of church and state in the Revolution that it "was neither conceived of nor carri..
|
|
|
Howard Zinn |
|
203fa25
|
There is the past and its continuing horrors: violence, war, prejudices against those who are different, outrageous monopolization of the good earth's wealth by a few, political power in the hands of liars and murderers, the building of prisons instead of schools, the poisoning of the press and the entire culture by money. It is easy to become discouraged observing this, especially since this is what the press and television insist that we ..
|
|
|
Howard Zinn |
|
8b74227
|
At Lowell, a Female Labor Reform Association put out a series of "Factory Tracts." The first was entitled "Factory Life as It Is By an Operative" and spoke of the textile mill women as "nothing more nor less than slaves in every sense of the word! Slaves, to a system of labor which requires them to toil from five until seven o'clock, with one hour only to attend to the wants of nature--slaves to the will and requirements of the 'powers that..
|
|
|
Howard Zinn |
|
06d1825
|
Very soon after the Fourteenth Amendment became law, the Supreme Court began to demolish it as a protection for blacks, and to develop it as a protection for corporations.
|
|
|
Howard Zinn |
|
df014da
|
Middle-class women, barred from higher education, began to monopolize the profession of primary-school teaching. As teachers, they read more, communicated more, and education itself became subversive of old ways of thinking. They began to write for magazines and newspapers, and started some ladies' publications. Literacy among women doubled between 1780 and 1840. Women became health reformers. They formed movements against double standards ..
|
|
|
Howard Zinn |
|
7c73e50
|
Now, with the British out of the way, the Americans could begin the inexorable process of pushing the Indians off their lands, killing them if they resisted. In short, as Francis Jennings puts it, the white Americans were fighting against British imperial control in the East, and for their own imperialism in the West. Before
|
|
|
Howard Zinn |
|
359ae68
|
Women struggled to enter the all-male professional schools. Dr. Harriot Hunt, a woman physician who began to practice in 1835, was twice refused admission to Harvard Medical School. But she carried on her practice, mostly among women and children. She believed strongly in diet, exercise, hygiene, and mental health. She organized a Ladies Physiological Society in 1843 where she gave monthly talks. She remained single, defying convention here..
|
|
|
Howard Zinn |
|
e928d1a
|
In America, too, the reality behind the words of the Declaration of Independence (issued in the same year as Adam Smith's capitalist manifesto, The Wealth of Nations) was that a rising class of important people needed to enlist on their side enough Americans to defeat England, without disturbing too much the relations of wealth and power that had developed over 150 years of colonial history. Indeed, 69 percent of the signers of the Declarat..
|
|
|
Howard Zinn |
|
ecd1b51
|
The very poor could not be counted on to support the government. They were like the slaves and Indians--invisible most of the time, but frightening to the elite if they started an uprising. Other citizens, though, might support the system. Farmers who owned their land, better-paid laborers, and urban office workers were paid just enough, and flattered just enough, that in a crisis they would be loyal to the system and the upper classes that..
|
|
|
Howard Zinn |
|
38b32ea
|
Congress, in the twenties, put an end to the dangerous, turbulent flood of immigrants (14 million between 1900 and 1920) by passing laws setting immigration quotas: the quotas favored Anglo-Saxons, kept out black and yellow people, limited severely the coming of Latins, Slavs, Jews. No African country could send more than 100 people; 100 was the limit for China, for Bulgaria, for Palestine; 34,007 could come from England or Northern Ireland..
|
|
|
Howard Zinn |
|
6eccdfd
|
Frances Wright was a writer, founder of a utopian community, immigrant from Scotland in 1824, a fighter for the emancipation of slaves, for birth control and sexual freedom. She wanted free public education for all children over two years of age in state-supported boarding schools. She expressed in America what the utopian socialist Charles Fourier had said in France, that the progress of civilization depended on the progress of women. In h..
|
|
|
Howard Zinn |
|
854d996
|
In late April of 1971, several thousand antiwar veterans converged on Washington, to camp out, to lobby. As one of them said, "It's the first time in this country's history that the men who fought a war have come to Washington to demand its halt while the war is still going on." In the final event of the veterans' Washington encampment, a thousand of them, many in wheelchairs or on crutches, tossed their medals over a fence that the police ..
|
|
|
Howard Zinn |
|
f842060
|
A New York banker toasted the Supreme Court in 1895: "I give you, gentlemen, the Supreme Court of the United States--guardian of the dollar, defender of private property, enemy of spoliation, sheet anchor of the Republic."
|
|
|
Howard Zinn |
|
71b4751
|
It had long been true, and prisoners knew this better than anyone, that the poorer you were the more likely you were to end up in jail. This was not just because the poor committed more crimes. In fact, they did. The rich did not have to commit crimes to get what they wanted; the laws were on their side. But when the rich did commit crimes, they often were not prosecuted, and if they were they could get out on bail, hire clever lawyers, get..
|
|
|
Howard Zinn |
|
9b4b35b
|
English law was summarized in a document of 1632 entitled "The Lawes Resolutions of Womens Rights": In this consolidation which we call wedlock is a locking together. It is true, that man and wife are one person, but understand in what manner. When a small brooke or little river incorporateth with Rhodanus, Humber, or the Thames, the poor rivulet looseth her name. . . . A woman as soon as she is married, is called covert . . . that is, "vei..
|
|
|
Howard Zinn |
|
6b610d5
|
It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. . . . Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice. A common and natural result of an undue respect for law is, that you may see a file of soldiers . . . marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their common sense and..
|
|
|
Howard Zinn |