I just finished
A People's History of the United States (first saw it in Roosh's book reviews).
The book has a tremendous left-leaning slant. The author makes no point of hiding it. It was hard to get completely absorbed into this book because I couldn’t help but be reminded that Zinn is going out of his way to show a different side of history. In the World War 2 section of the book, he mentions several times that many Americans did not want to go to war even though patriotic fervor was high. He writes that the U.S. did not join the war effort because of Germany’s concentration camps but because it benefited the interests of the wealthy. I thought to myself “is he implying that the U.S. should not have joined the war?” Even the most liberal of people I’ve met would not argue that we should not have fought in World War 2. I took each following chapter with a grain of salt. I think when the first version of this book was written in 1980, it was novel and interesting to see a history book written that was critical of Columbus, American conquest, and the Establishment. Today we’re used to it. Though the book has a liberal point of view, Zinn is critical of Democrats as well as Republicans; mostly for not being liberal enough for his tastes. It was an interesting read, and at times one really does wonder if America is as horrible as Zinn portrays it. I think I will read
A Patriot's History of the United States next to get a different perspective and see how it compares.
It was passages like this that reminded how the author clearly had an agenda:
[September 11th] was an unprecedented assault against enormous symbols of American wealth and power, undertaken by 19 men from the Middle East. They were willing to die in order to deliver a deadly blow against what they clearly saw as their enemy, a superpower that had thought itself invincible.
Here are some facts I learned from the book. I was familiar with some of them but this book made them clearer. There is obviously much more to the book, these are just the parts I marked when I happened to have a pen nearby.
-More than half the colonists who came to the North American shores in the colonial period came as servants.
-The constitution was a compromise between slaveholding interests of the South and moneyed interests of the North. For the purpose of uniting the thirteen states into one great market for commerce, the northern delegates wanted laws regulating interstate commerce, and urged that such laws require only a majority of Congress to pass. The South agreed to this, in return for allowing the trade in slaves to continue for twenty years before being outlawed.
-The slaveholders…suspected that non-slaveholders would encourage slave disobedience and even rebellion, not so much out of sympathy for the blacks as out of hatred for the rich planters and resentment of their own poverty. White men sometimes were linked to slave insurrectionary plots, and each such incident rekindled fears. This helps explain the stern police measures against whites who fraternized with blacks.
-In 1877 the Supreme Court approved state laws regulating the prices charged to farmers for the use of grain elevators. The grain elevator company argued that it was a person being deprived of property, which violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s declaration (originally passed to protect black rights) “nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.” The Supreme Court ruled that grain elevators were not private property but vested with “public interest” so it could be regulated. After the decision the American Bar Association, organized by lawyers, began a campaign to reverse the decision. Eventually the Supreme Court accepted the argument that corporations were “persons” and their money was protected by due process of the Fourteenth Amendment. Between 1890 and 1910, nineteen Fourteenth Amendment cases dealt with blacks, 288 dealt with corporations.
-Many of the wealthy in America donated to colleges and some, including Cornelius Vanderbilt, Ezra Cornell, James Duke, and Leland Stanford created colleges in their own names. The author claims these educational institutions were to train middlemen in the U.S. (doctors, teachers, lawyers, administrators, technicians) to learn the American system and serve as a buffer against trouble.
-The year 1886 became known as “the year of the great uprising of labor.” There were over 1,600 strikes, involving 500,000 workers. Strikers were arrested, beaten, and killed by police and national guardsmen on dozens of occasions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many of the strikes were for things we now take for granted like an 8 hour work day and having Sundays off.
-In 1917 a Socialist named Charles Schenk was arrested in Philadelphia for printing and distributing leaflets that denounced the draft law and the war. Schenk was found guilty of violating the Espionage Act and was sentenced to six months in jail. He appealed, arguing that the Espionage Act violated the First Amendment. The Supreme Court decision against his appeal was written by Oliver Wendell Holmes, He wrote: “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic…The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.”
-One statistic showing the effects of the Great Depression: The Ford Motor Company employed 128,000 people in the spring of 1929. By August of 1931 it employed only 37,000.
-Twelve American navy fliers were in a Hiroshima city jail during the bombing, a fact that the U.S. government has never officially acknowledged.
-MLK was a chief target of the FBI. The Bureau tapped his private phone conversations, sent him fake letters, threatened him, blackmailed him, and even suggested once that he commit suicide. (I’d always heard this, but never actually knew for sure until this book).
-During the presidential campaign in June of 1972, five burglars, carrying wiretapping and photo equipment, were caught in the act of breaking into the offices of the Democratic National Committee, in the Watergate apartment complex of Washington, D.C. This lead to more information including bribery, more burglary, promises by Nixon of giving the caught burglars clemency and cash for keeping quiet, the head of the FBI turning over records of the Watergate burglary to Nixon’s legal assistant and ordering him not to discuss Watergate with the Senate Judiciary committee, a witness telling the Senate Committee that Nixon had tapes of all personal and phone conversations at the White House, and much more.
-According to Forbes magazine, the 400 richest families owned $92 billion in 1982, by 1995 they owned $480 billion.
-President Clinton asked his Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders to resign after she suggested masturbation be taught in sex education (Clinton knows his way around sex and education).
-By the end of the Clinton Administration, the U.S. had more of its population in prison per capita- two million people- than any other country in the world with the possible exception of China.
