A PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES HOWARD ZINN Introduction by Anthony Arnove Dedication To Noah, Georgia, Serena, Naushon, Will—and their generation Acclaim for Howard Zinn and A People’s History of the United States “[Howard Zinn] wrote to the people, for the people: ‘My intention is … to light a flame under the rest of us.’ And that is exactly what Howard Zinn did—in the dozens of books he wrote and edited, in the hundreds of speeches he gave, in his teaching and activism, and, later in life, in his role as the muse of history and politics for a new generation of freethinkers and organizers.” —The Nation “Zinn was best known, of course, as the author of A People’s History of the United States, which since its publication in 1980 has introduced millions of readers to his vision of the American past. Few historians manage to reach a broad nonacademic audience. Those who do generally write Nietzsche’s monumental history, works that celebrate great men (the founding fathers, Abraham Lincoln) or heroic events (the building of the Transcontinental Railroad, World War II). Zinn’s history was different. Through A People’s History and various spinoffs … Zinn’s public learned about ordinary Americans’ struggles for justice, equality, and power. I have long been struck by how many excellent students of history first had their passion for the past sparked by reading Howard Zinn.” —Eric Foner “He changed the conscience of a generation. It’s hard to imagine how many young people’s lives were touched by his work and his life. Both leave a permanent stamp on how history is understood and the conception of how a decent and honorable life should be lived.” —Noam Chomsky Acknowledgments To my two editors, for their incalculable help: Cynthia Merman of Harper & Row, and Roslyn Zinn. To Hugh Van Dusen, of HarperCollins, for wonderful help and support throughout the history of this book. To Rick Balkin, my tirelessly attentive agent and friend. To Akwesasne Notes, Mohawk Nation, for the passage from Ila Abernathy’s poem. To Dodd, Mead & Company, for the passage from “We Wear the Mask” from The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar. To Harper & Row, for “Incident” from On These I Stand by Countee Cullen. Copyright 1925 by Harper & Row Publishers, Inc.; renewed 1953 by Ida M. Cullen. To Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., for the passage from “I, Too” from Selected Poems of Langston Hughes. To The New Trail, 1953 School Yearbook of the Phoenix Indian School, Phoenix, Arizona, for the poem “It Is Not!” To Random House, Inc., for the passage from “Lenox Avenue Mural” from The Panther and the Lash: Poems of Our Time by Langston Hughes. To Esta Seaton, for her poem “Her Life,” which first appeared in The Ethnic American Woman by Edith Blicksilver, Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company, 1978. To Warner Bros., for the excerpt from “Brother Can You Spare a Dime?” Lyric by Jay Gomey, Music by E. Y. Harburg. © 1932 Warner Bros. Inc. Copyright Renewed. All Rights Reserved. Used By Permission. Contents Dedication Acknowledgments Introduction by Anthony Arnove 1. Columbus, the Indians, and Human Progress 2. Drawing the Color Line 3. Persons of Mean and Vile Condition 4. Tyranny Is Tyranny 5. A Kind of Revolution 6. The Intimately Oppressed 7. As Long as Grass Grows or Water Runs 8. We Take Nothing by Conquest, Thank God 9. Slavery Without Submission, Emancipation Without Freedom 10. The Other Civil War 11. Robber Barons and Rebels 12. The Empire and the People 13. The Socialist Challenge 14. War Is the Health of the State 15. Self-help in Hard Times 16. A People’s War? 17. “Or Does It Explode?” 18. The Impossible Victory: Vietnam 19. Surprises 20. The Seventies: Under Control? 21. Carter-Reagan-Bush: The Bipartisan Consensus 22. The Unreported Resistance 23. The Coming Revolt of the Guards 24. The Clinton Presidency 25. The 2000 Election and the “War on Terrorism” Afterword Bibliography Index P.S. Insights, Interviews & More … * About the author About the book Read on Also by Howard Zinn Credits Back Ads Copyright About the Publisher Introduction to the Thirty-Fifth Anniversary Edition of a People’s History of the United States Howard Zinn fundamentally changed the way millions of people think about history with A People’s History of the United States. He would be the first to say, however, that he didn’t do so alone. The book grew out of his awareness of the importance of social movements throughout US history, some of which he played an active role in during the 1960s and 1970s and beyond, namely the Civil Rights Movement, mass mobilizations to end the Vietnam War, as well as other antiwar movements, and the many movements for higher wages and workers’ rights and the rights of women, Latinos, Native Americans, gays and lesbians, and others. He was also quick to acknowledge the many people who informed his view of history: Woody Guthrie, whose songs about working people in the 1930s and 1940s opened up chapters of US history to him that his formal education had kept hidden; Philip S. Foner; Herbert Aptheker; Richard Hofstadter; Elizabeth Martínez; and other writers, editors, librarians, and historians who unearthed what he calls the “past’s fugitive moments of compassion rather than … its solid centuries of warfare.” But most of all, he acknowledged the people whose stories he weaves throughout this book: Eugene Debs, Fannie Lou Hamer, Frederick Douglass, Plough Jogger. Howard understood that he was writing to bring their voices and stories, their struggles and vision, to light, and inspire people to make change themselves. That is why he was so keen to publish a companion book to this volume, Voices of a People’s History of the United States, which compiles the speeches, letters, manifestos, and other documents of people’s history that he drew on to write A People’s History—and to also remind people that this history continues in new forms today. And it is why he wanted to make the documentary film The People Speak, with artists such as Bob Dylan, Kerry Washington, Viggo Mortensen, and Danny Glover—to bring these voices vividly to life. He understood that his own words in this book, as meaningful as they are, were less vital to the success of A People’s History than the words—and actions—of others he wove together into a narrative of US history told from below. Howard was uniquely skilled as a writer, as this book reveals. Millions of people have read this book—a remarkable achievement for any work of popular history—and passed along their dog-eared copies to friends, family, fellow soldiers, and coworkers because it opened up new horizons for them. Of those readers, many went on to become teachers as a result. Many more felt the book had changed their lives and sent them down new paths. I’m one of them. Reading this book—and later having the great luck to meet and work with Howard—radically changed me. It made me care about history as no other teacher or experience had done. And it led me to see history as something that we are all part of making together and to realize that how we understand our past informs not only how we see the present, with all its complexity, but also how we might imagine a different future. When A People’s History of the United States came out in 1980, its first print run was a few thousand hardcover copies, considered modest for HarperCollins. But it soon found an audience excited to read a book that provided such a comprehensive and artful bottom-up view of US history, in contrast to the still- dominant tropes of Great White Men (and the occasional exceptional others) who “made history,” an especially disempowering view. The civil rights leader Diane Nash, whom Howard knew through his work with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, recently commented on how hard it has been for our culture to embrace histories that feature the efforts of ordinary people whose names we may not even know or rarely learn from our textbooks. Discussing the critics of Ava DuVernay’s 2014 film Selma, who said it unfairly diminished the role of President Lyndon Baines Johnson in bringing about civil rights legislation (an argument with which Howard was extremely familiar), she responded: Lyndon Johnson was president. It was his job to enforce the law. He should not have waited until Jimmie Lee Jackson’s, James Reeb’s, and Viola Liuzzo’s lives were taken. He should not have waited until people were beaten and bloodied on Pettus Bridge before he enforced Negroes’ right to vote in the South. I appreciate LBJ’s enacting and signing the Voting Rights Act, but I wish he had been a self-starter when it came to our right to vote, so it would not have been necessary to go to the lengths that we did— organizing a mass movement and risking our safety—in order to get the vote. It was the courage, work, thoughtfulness, sacrifice, discipline, and determination of citizens of the United States that obtained our right to vote. Historically, inventions, musical innovations, and many more accomplishments and contributions developed by descendants of enslaved Africans in America have been misappropriated. We learn about presidents, battles, and dates. The impression too often perpetuated in history books and in popular culture is that you have to be a president, someone special, or White to have an important idea or to achieve major accomplishments. This is an idea that disempowers citizens and should not be propagated further. Like Nash, Howard’s experiences in the Civil Rights Movement gave him a different understanding of how history is made. It’s an understanding that informs every page of this book. When A People’s History of the United States first came out, Ronald Reagan was on the path to becoming the president. Culturally, the country was moving noticeably rightward. Movements that sought to roll back the gains of the Civil Rights Movement, women’s liberation movement, and other progressive changes of the 1960s and 1970s were gaining ground. Unions came under a sustained attack from which they have never recovered. In such an environment, this book could have been lost, published into obscurity. Why it wasn’t is worth considering. First of all, as with any publishing effort, there was some luck involved. The New York Times Book Review could have decided the book didn’t merit a review, as it so often does with books written from the standpoint of the left. Having decided to review it, the editors at the Times could have easily sent the book to be trashed by a figure of the newly aggressive right, as it so often does. Instead, they asked the highly regarded historian Eric Foner to review A People’s History of the United States. And while not without criticisms of the book, Foner gave it an extremely positive notice. His words from the March 2, 1980, New York Times Book Review are worth considering: [T]he 1970s witnessed an unprecedented redefinition of historical studies—a byproduct of the ferment of the 1960s—in which the distinctive experience of blacks, women, Indians, workers, and other neglected groups moved to the forefront of inquiry…. Howard Zinn is the first historian to attempt to survey all of American history from the perspective of the new scholarship. A distinguished scholar and the author of nine previous books, Professor Zinn is also a veteran of the civil-rights and antiwar movements, and is currently an embattled defender of academic freedom at Boston University. He is refreshingly candid in announcing his purpose. Too much history, he contends, is written “from the point of view of governments, conquerors, diplomats, leaders.” His People’s History, by way of contrast, sides with the losers, the downtrodden, the underdog. It is a book “disrespectful of governments and respectful of people’s movements of resistance.” ….