The Missing Voices

When I decided, in the late 1970s, to write APeople's History of the United States, I had been teaching history fortwenty years. Half of that time I was involved in the civil rights movement inthe South, when I was teaching at Spelman College, a black women's college inAtlanta, Georgia. And then there were ten years of activity against the war inVietnam. Those experiences were not a recipe for neutrality in the teaching andwriting of history.

But my partisanship was undoubtedly shaped even earlier by my upbringing in afamily of working-class immigrants in New York, by my three years as a shipyardworker, starting at the age of eighteen, and then by my experience as an AirForce bombardier in World War II, flying out of England and bombing targets invarious parts of Europe, including the Atlantic coast of France.

After the war I went to college under the GI Bill of Rights. That was a pieceof wartime legislation that enabled millions of veterans to go to collegewithout paying any tuition, and so allowed the sons of working-class familieswho ordinarily would never be able to afford it to get a college education. Ireceived my doctorate in history at Columbia University, but my own experiencemade me aware that the history I learned in the university omitted crucialelements in the history of the country.

From the start of my teaching and writing, I had no illusions about"objectivity," if that meant avoiding a point of view. I knew that ahistorian (or a journalist, or anyone telling a story) was forced to choose,from an infinite number of facts, what to present, what to omit. And thatdecision inevitably would reflect, whether consciously or not, the interests ofthe historian.

There is an insistence, among certain educators and politicians in the UnitedStates, that students must learn facts. I am reminded of the character inCharles Dickens's book Hard Times, Gradgrind, who admonishes a youngerteacher: "Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothingbut Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life."

But there is no such thing as a pure fact, innocent of interpretation. Behindevery fact presented to the world -- by a teacher, a writer, anyone -- is ajudgment. The judgment that has been made is that this fact is important, andthat other facts are not important and so they are omitted from thepresentation.

There were themes of profound importance to me that I found missing in theorthodox histories that dominated American culture. The consequence of theseomissions has been not simply to give a distorted view of the past but, moreimportantly, to mislead us all about the present.

For instance, there is the issue of class. The dominant culture in the UnitedStates -- in education, among politicians, in the media -- pretends that we livein a classless society with one common interest. The Preamble to the UnitedStates Constitution, which declares that "we the people" wrote thisdocument, is a great deception. The Constitution was written in 1787 byfifty-five rich white men -- slave owners, bondholders, merchants -- whoestablished a strong central government that would serve their class interests.

That use of government for class purposes, to serve the needs of the wealthyand powerful, has continued throughout American history, down to the presentday. It is disguised by language that suggests all of us, rich and poor andmiddle class, have a common interest.

Thus, the state of the nation is described in universal terms. When thepresident declares happily that "our economy is sound," he will notacknowledge that it is not sound for forty or fifty million people who arestruggling to survive, although it may be moderately sound for many in themiddle class, and extremely sound for the richest 1% of the nation who own 40%of the nation's wealth.

Class interest has always been obscured behind an all-encompassing veilcalled "the national interest."

My own war experience, and the history of all those military interventions inwhich the United States was engaged, made me skeptical when I heard people inhigh political office invoke "the national interest" or "nationalsecurity" to justify their policies. It was with such justifications thatHarry Truman initiated a "police action" in Korea that killed severalmillion people, that Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon carried out a war inSoutheast Asia in which perhaps three million people died, that Ronald Reaganinvaded Grenada, that the elder Bush attacked Panama and then Iraq, and thatBill Clinton bombed Iraq again and again.

The claim made in spring of 2003 by the new Bush that invading and bombingIraq was in the national interest was particularly absurd, and could only beaccepted by people in the United States because of a blanket of lies spreadacross the country by the government and the major organs of public information-- lies about "weapons of mass destruction," lies about Iraq'sconnections with Al Qaeda.

When I decided to write A People's History of the United States, Idecided I wanted to tell the story of the nation's wars not through the eyes ofthe generals and the political leaders but from the viewpoints of theworking-class youngsters who became GIs, or the parents or wives who receivedthe black-bordered telegrams.

I wanted to tell the story of the nation's wars from the viewpoint of theenemy: the viewpoint of the Mexicans who were invaded in the Mexican War, theCubans whose country was taken over by the United States in 1898, the Filipinoswho suffered a devastating aggressive war at the beginning of the twentiethcentury, with perhaps 600,000 people dead as a result of the determination ofthe U.S. government to conquer the Philippines.

What struck me as I began to study history, and what I wanted to convey in myown writing of history, was how nationalist fervor -- inculcated from childhoodby pledges of allegiance, national anthems, waving flags, and militaristicrhetoric -- permeated the educational systems of all countries, including ourown.

I wondered how the foreign policies of the United States would look if wewiped out the national boundaries of the world, at least in our minds, andthought of children everywhere as our own. Then we could never drop an atomicbomb on Hiroshima, or napalm on Vietnam, or cluster bombs on Afghanistan orIraq, because wars, especially in our time, are always wars against children.

The Spoken Word as a Political Act

When I began to write "people's history," I was influenced by myown experience, living in a black community in the South with my family,teaching at a black women's college, and becoming involved in the movementagainst racial segregation. I became aware of how badly twisted was the teachingand writing of history by its submersion of nonwhite people. Yes, NativeAmericans were there in the history, but quickly gone. Black people were visibleas slaves, then supposedly free, but invisible. It was a white man's history.

From elementary school to graduate school, I was given no suggestion that thelanding of Christopher Columbus in the New World initiated a genocide in whichthe indigenous population of Hispaniola was annihilated. Or that this was thefirst stage of what was presented as a benign expansion of the new nation, butwhich involved the violent expulsion of Native Americans, accompanied byunspeakable atrocities, from every square mile of the continent, until there wasnothing to do but herd them into reservations.

Every American schoolchild learns about the Boston Massacre, which precededthe Revolutionary War against England. Five colonists were killed by Britishtroops in 1770. But how many schoolchildren learned about the massacre of sixhundred men, women, and children of the Pequot tribe in New England in 1637? Orthe massacre, in the midst of the Civil War, of hundreds of Native Americanfamilies at Sand Creek, Colorado, by U.S. soldiers?

Nowhere in my history education did I learn about the massacres of blackpeople that took place again and again, amid the silence of a nationalgovernment pledged by the Constitution to protect equal rights for all. Forinstance, in 1917 there occurred in East St. Louis one of the many "raceriots" that took place in what our white-oriented history books called the"Progressive Era." White workers, angered by an influx of blackworkers, killed perhaps two hundred people, provoking an angry article by theAfrican-American writer W. E. B. Du Bois, "The Massacre of East St.Louis," and causing the performing artist Josephine Baker to say: "Thevery idea of America makes me shake and tremble and gives me nightmares."

I wanted, in writing people's history, to awaken a great consciousness ofclass conflict, racial injustice, sexual inequality, and national arrogance.

But I also wanted to bring into the light the hidden resistance of the peopleagainst the power of the establishment: the refusal of Native Americans tosimply die and disappear; the rebellion of black people in the anti-slaverymovement and in the more recent movement against racial segregation; the strikescarried out by working people to improve their lives.

When I began work, five years ago, on what would become a companion volume tomy People's History, Voicesof a People's History of the United States, I wanted the voices of struggle,mostly absent in our history books, to be given the place they deserve. I wantedlabor history, which has been the battleground, decade after decade, centuryafter century, of an ongoing fight for human dignity, to come to the fore. And Iwanted my readers to experience how at key moments in our history some of thebravest and most effective political acts were the sounds of the human voiceitself. When John Brown proclaimed at his trial that his insurrection was"not wrong, but right," when Fannie Lou Hamer testified in 1964 aboutthe dangers to blacks who tried to register to vote, when during the first GulfWar, in 1991, Alex Molnar defied the president on behalf of his son and of allof us, their words influenced and inspired so many people. They were not justwords but actions.

To omit or to minimize these voices of resistance is to create the idea thatpower only rests with those who have the guns, who possess the wealth, who ownthe newspapers and the television stations. I want to point out that people whoseem to have no power, whether working people, people of color, or women -- oncethey organize and protest and create movements -- have a voice no government cansuppress.

America's Missing Voices

Readers of my book A People's History of the United States almostalways point to the wealth of quoted material in it -- the words of fugitiveslaves, Native Americans, farmers and factory workers, dissenters and dissidentsof all kinds. These readers are struck, I must reluctantly admit, more by thewords of the people I quote than by my own running commentary on the history ofthe nation.

I can't say I blame them. Any historian would have difficulty matching theeloquence of the Native American leader Powhatan, pleading with the whitesettler in the year 1607: "Why will you take by force what you may havequietly by love?"

Or the black scientist Benjamin Banneker, writing to Thomas Jefferson:"I apprehend you will readily embrace every opportunity, to eradicate thattrain of absurd and false ideas and opinions which so generally prevails withrespect to us, and that your Sentiments are concurrent with mine, which are thatone universal Father hath given being to us all, and that he hath not only madeus all of one flesh, but that he hath also without partiality afforded us allthe Same Sensations and [endowed] us all with the same faculties."

Or Sarah Grimké, a white Southern woman and abolitionist, writing: "Iask no favors for my sex. . . . All I ask of our brethren, is that they willtake their feet from off our necks, and permit us to stand upright on thatground which God designed us to occupy."

Or Henry David Thoreau, protesting the Mexican War, writing on civildisobedience: "A common and natural result of an undue respect for law is,that you may see a file of soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, privates,powder-monkeys, and all, marching in admirable order over hill and dale to thewars, against their wills, ay, against their common sense and consciences, whichmakes it very steep marching indeed, and produces a palpitation of theheart."

Or Jermain Wesley Loguen, escaped slave, speaking in Syracuse on the FugitiveSlave Law of 1850: "I received my freedom from Heaven and with it came thecommand to defend my title to it. . . . I don't respect this law -- I don't fearit -- I won't obey it! It outlaws me, and I outlaw it."

Or the populist orator Mary Elizabeth Lease of Kansas: "Wall Street ownsthe country. It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and forthe people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for WallStreet."

Or Emma Goldman, speaking to the jury at her trial for opposing World War I:"Verily poor as we are in democracy, how can we give of it to the world? .. . [A] democracy conceived in the military servitude of the masses, in theireconomic enslavement, and nurtured in their tears and blood, is not democracy atall."

Or Mississippi sharecropper Fannie Lou Hamer, testifying in 1964 about thedangers to blacks who tried to register to vote: "[T]he plantation ownercame, and said, 'Fannie Lou. . . . If you don't go down and withdraw yourregistration, you will have to leave . . . because we are not ready for that inMississippi.' And I addressed him and told him and said, 'I didn't try toregister for you. I tried to register for myself.'"

Or the young black people in McComb, Mississippi, who, learning of aclassmate killed in Vietnam, distributed a leaflet: "No Mississippi Negroesshould be fighting in Vietnam for the White Man's freedom, until all the NegroPeople are free in Mississippi."

Or the poet Adrienne Rich, writing in the 1970s: "I know of no woman --virgin, mother, lesbian, married, celibate -- whether she earns her keep as ahousewife, a cocktail waitress, or a scanner of brain waves -- for whom the bodyis not a fundamental problem: its clouded meanings, its fertility, its desire,its so-called frigidity, its bloody speech, its silences, its changes andmutilations, its rapes and ripenings."

Or Alex Molnar, whose twenty-one-year-old son was a Marine in the PersianGulf, writing an angry letter to the first President Bush: "Where were you,Mr. President, when Iraq was killing its own people with poison gas? . . . Iintend to support my son and his fellow soldiers by doing everything I can tooppose any offensive American military action in the Persian Gulf."

Or Orlando and Phyllis Rodriguez, opposing the idea of retaliation aftertheir son was killed in the Twin Towers: "Our son Greg is among the manymissing from the World Trade Center attack. Since we first heard the news, wehave shared moments of grief, comfort, hope, despair, fond memories with hiswife, the two families, our friends and neighbors, his loving colleagues atCantor Fitzgerald/ESpeed, and all the grieving families that daily meet at thePierre Hotel. We see our hurt and anger reflected among everybody we meet. Wecannot pay attention to the daily flow of news about this disaster. But we readenough of the news to sense that our government is heading in the direction ofviolent revenge, with the prospect of sons, daughters, parents, friends indistant lands dying, suffering, and nursing further grievances against us. It isnot the way to go. It will not avenge our son's death. Not in our son'sname."

What is common to all these voices is that they have mostly been shut out ofthe orthodox histories, the major media, the standard textbooks, the controlledculture. The result of having our history dominated by presidents and generalsand other "important" people is to create a passive citizenry, notknowing its own powers, always waiting for some savior on high -- God or thenext president -- to bring peace and justice.

History, looked at under the surface, in the streets and on the farms, in GIbarracks and trailer camps, in factories and offices, tells a different story.Whenever injustices have been remedied, wars halted, women and blacks and NativeAmericans given their due, it has been because "unimportant" peoplespoke up, organized, protested, and brought democracy alive.

Howard Zinn is the author with Anthony Arnove of the just published Voicesof a People's History of the United States (Seven Stories Press) and of theinternational best-selling APeople's History of the United States. This piece is adapted from theintroduction to the new Voices volume. Copyright C2004 Howard Zinn. By permission of Seven Stories Press. Courtesy, TomDispatch.Com