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and corporate power, in the states, in the nation, could use its money to still get what it wanted." The Alliances were not getting real power, but they were spreading new ideas and a new spirit. Now, as a political party, they became the People's party (or Populist party), and met in convention in 1890 in Topeka, Kansas. The great Populist orator from that state, Mary Ellen Lease, told an enthusiastic crowd: Wall Street owns the country. I..
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Howard Zinn |
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From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we breed two classes--paupers and millionaires....
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Howard Zinn |
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February led to excited calls for war in the press, the monthly journal of the International Association of Machinists agreed it was a terrible disaster, but it noted that the deaths of workers in industrial accidents drew no such national clamor. It pointed to the Lattimer Massacre of September 10, 1897, during a coal strike in Pennsylvania. Miners marching on a highway to the Lattimer mine--Austrians, Hungarians, Italians, Germans--who ha..
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Howard Zinn |
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last
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Howard Zinn |
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That April, the Senate had adopted the Thirteenth Amendment, declaring an end to slavery, and in January 1865, the House of Representatives followed.
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Howard Zinn |
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But I was open to anything my students wanted to do, refusing to accept the idea that a teacher should confine his teaching to the classroom when so much was at stake outside it.
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Howard Zinn |
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It was borrowed time anyway--the whole upper tenth of a nation living with the insouciance of a grand duc and the casualness of chorus girls.
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Howard Zinn |
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We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal , that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
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happiness
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Howard Zinn |
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It seemed a fitting way to end my teaching career. I had always insisted that a good education was a synthesis of book learning and involvement in social action, that each enriched the other.
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Howard Zinn |
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more militant. Frederick Douglass spoke in 1857: 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 ligh..
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colonial office under England. When the Declaration of Independence was read, with all its flaming radical language, from the town hall balcony in Boston, it was read by Thomas Crafts, a member of the Loyal Nine group, conservatives who had opposed militant action against the British. Four days after the reading, the Boston Committee of Correspondence ordered the townsmen to show up on the Common for a military draft. The rich, it turned ou..
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Howard Zinn |
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The Albany police chief, after one of the mass arrests, was taking the names of prisoners lined up before his desk. He looked up and saw a Negro boy about nine years old. "What's your name?" The boy looked straight at him and said: "Freedom, Freedom."
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Howard Zinn |
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In 1900 there were 500,000 women office workers--in 1870 there had been 19,000. Women were switchboard operators, store workers, nurses. Half a million were teachers. The teachers formed a Teachers League that fought against the automatic firing of women who became pregnant. The following "Rules for Female Teachers" were posted by the school board of one town in Massachusetts: Do not get married. Do not leave town at any time without permis..
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Howard Zinn |
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Walk the good road, my daughter, and the buffalo herds wide and dark as cloud shadows moving over the prairie will follow you. . . . Be dutiful, respectful, gentle and modest, my daughter. And proud walking. If the pride and the virtue of the women are lost, the spring will come but the buffalo trails will turn to grass. Be strong, with the warm, strong heart of the earth. No people goes down until their women are weak and dishonored.
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Howard Zinn |
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relations and marriage. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, whose writing emphasized the crucial question of economic equality between the sexes, wrote a poem called "The Socialist and the Suffragist," ending with: "A lifted world lifts women up," The Socialist explained. "You cannot lift the world at all While half of it is kept so small," the Suffragist maintained. The world awoke, and tartly spoke: "Your work is all the same; Work together or work..
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Howard Zinn |
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No harm shall come to any business interest as the result of administrative policy so long as I am President
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Howard Zinn |
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If God had intended us to vote, he would have given us candidates
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Howard Zinn |
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It was the new politics of ambiguity--speaking for the lower and middle classes to get their support in times of rapid growth and potential turmoil. The two-party system came into its own in this time. To give people a choice between two different parties and allow them, in a period of rebellion, to choose the slightly more democratic one was an ingenious mode of control. Like so much in the American system, it was not devilishly contrived ..
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Howard Zinn |
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In short, Beard said, the rich must, in their own interest, either control the government directly or control the laws by which government operates.
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rich
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Howard Zinn |
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The stock market crash of 1929, which marked the beginning of the Great Depression of the United States, came directly from wild speculation which collapsed and brought the whole economy down with it. But, as John Galbraith says in his study of that event (The Great Crash), behind that speculation was the fact that "the economy was fundamentally unsound." He points to very unhealthy corporate and banking structures, an unsound foreign trade..
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Howard Zinn |
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The members of a trades union should be taught . . . that the labor movement means more, infinitely more, than a paltry increase in wages and the strike necessary to secure it; that while it engages to do all that possibly can be done to better the working conditions of its members, its higher object is to overthrow the capitalist system of private ownership of the tools of labor, abolish wage-slavery and achieve the freedom of the whole wo..
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Howard Zinn |
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Socialism moved out of the small circles of city immigrants--Jewish and German socialists speaking their own languages--and became American. The strongest Socialist state organization was in Oklahoma, which in 1914 had twelve thousand dues-paying members (more than New York State), and elected over a hundred Socialists to local office, including six to the Oklahoma state legislature. There were fifty-five weekly Socialist newspapers in Okla..
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Howard Zinn |
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Murder has been plotted and is about to be executed in the name and under the forms of law.... It is a foul plot; a damnable conspiracy; a hellish outrage.... If they attempt to murder Moyer, Haywood and their brothers, a million revolutionists, at least, will meet them with guns.... Capitalist courts never have done, and never will do, anything for the working class.... A special revolutionary convention of the proletariat ... would be in ..
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Howard Zinn |
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It is the great challenge of our time: How to achieve justice, with struggle, but without war.
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Howard Zinn |