Class in the United States

Can the elites be ever trusted to act for the common good? The sanctions engineered by the United States in Yugoslavia raises important questions. Defenders of the faith take recourse to history. George Washington fought oppression when he led the American Revolution; Abraham Lincoln freed slaves during the Civil War; Franklin Roosevelt doled out the New Deal to help the poor. The case for American benevolence is clear.

Howard Zinn, however, begs to differ, and goes on to refute every such argument. The American Revolution enriched revolutionary leaders as they usurped lands owned by fleeing Loyalists. "Finding itself possessed of enormous wealth," Zinn argues, the country "could create the richest ruling class in history, and still have enough for the middle class to act as a buffer between the rich and the dispossessed."

Lincoln made clear his motivation for issuing the Emancipation Proclamation freeing the slaves, "My paramount object in this struggle [of the Civil War] is to save the Union and not either to save or destroy Slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it... what I do about Slavery and the coloured race, I do because it helps to save this Union... I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty, and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men, everywhere, could be free."

Roosevelt's reforms, on the other hand, "had to meet two pressing needs: to reorganise capitalism in such a way to overcome the crisis and stabilise the system, also, to head off the alarming growth of spontaneous rebellion in the early years of the Roosevelt administration." But then, his concessions to labour were selective and he chose to opt for business when labour was weak.

 

Columbus and the United States

Christopher Columbus's acts of genocide are well known today, courtesy the relentless work of historians, activists and indigenous peoples. The lessons of history, however, may not have been learnt, feels Zinn. More than 250,000 indigenous people of Haiti died during his morbid quest for gold and slaves. Today there might be no more new continents to conquer, but the slaughter of native people continues.

Following a vote for independence at the end of August, under the thin guise of paramilitary groups that General Wiranto dubiously claimed were out of his "control", the US-backed Indonesian army killed thousands of East Timorese. By destroying much of the tiny country's infrastructure, the military created huge food shortages, condemning many more to death by starvation. The message is loud and clear: provinces such as Aceh who opt for secession will incur an equally terrible cost. No alternative to Indonesian domination under the shadow of the world's only remaining superpower can be permitted. What is at stake is a labour system where children make shoes for the likes of Nike, and keeping control over oil reserves which could instead be used to create a wealthy Timorese society. It was Columbus was tried to create his own form of slavery. Wiranto, under the patronage of the United States, is doing just that.

 

The World Wars

The prevalent school of thought is that the United States won the two wars because the causes were "unquestionably noble" and because all Americans supported the effort. The United States, we are told, entered the world wars to protect freedom and democracy and save the world from totalitarianism.

Howard Zinn debunks these theories. He says there was much opposition to the First World War, before and during American involvement. Most of those who died in the war were the working class and the poor, and the US motives for entering the war had more to do with business and the desire to remain on the good books of its trading partners.

"The advanced capitalist countries of Europe were fighting over boundaries, colonies, spheres of influence; they were competing for Alsace-Lorraine, the Balkans, Africa, the Middle East," Zinn writes, in explaining the Allies' motives for undertaking the effort in the first place. And the United States eventually joined them out of similar calculations.

When the war broke out between the Germans and the Allies in 1914, the United States was mired in a deep recession. War production lifted the American economy out of its doldrums, and indelibly tied the United States to the British. "America became bound up with the allies in a fateful union of war and prosperity," states historian Richard Hofstadter, quoted in Zinn's book.

And while some of the prosperity trickled down to the masses in the form of jobs and wages, most of the gains settled in just a few hands. "With World War I, England became more and more a market for American goods and for loans at interest. J.P. Morgan and Company acted as agents for the Allies. When, in 1915, Wilson lifted the ban on private bank loans to the Allies, Morgan could now begin lending money in such great amounts as to both make great profit and tie American finance closely to the interest of a British victory in the war against Germany."

Sensing these sectarian motivations, Americans did not immediately rally around their government's poorly-reasoned battle cry. Six weeks after the declaration of war and President Woodrow Wilson's call for 1 million American volunteers, only 73,000 had signed up. Congress quickly voted to institute the draft, and the government hired veteran news reporter George Creel to propagandise for the war. Creel set up the Committee on Public Information, and organised a corps of 75,000 speakers to deliver 750,000 pro-war speeches in 5,000 cities and towns across America.

Many Americans still did not want to buy in. Ninety of the first 100 draftees in New York tried to claim exemption. Opposition to the war and the draft spurred well-attended protests and town hall meetings all over the nation. In the end, 65,000 men declared themselves conscientious objectors and refused to fight. A total of more than 330,000 men were declared draft evaders by the end of the war.

While the primary motivations for US involvement in the war had to do with economics and world trade, it also provided a convenient opportunity for the government to quash the insurgent American Socialist movement that had been gaining large numbers in every part of the country. Ten Socialists were elected to the New York state legislature in 1917, and the Socialist vote for mayor of New York City topped 22 percent. The Socialist vote in major cities like Chicago and Buffalo topped 30 per cent in 1917, a ten-fold increase in just two years.

In response to popular unrest, the Espionage Act was passed and signed in June of 1917. A broadly drawn law, it was used to silence those who spoke out against the war and to imprison Socialist leaders who were involved in anti-war activities. About 900 people went to prison under the Espionage Act during WWI. Among them were Eugene Debs and Big Bill Haywood, sentenced to 10 and 20 years in prison, respectively.

Ten million men died on the battlefields in the First World War, and another 20 million people died from the starvation and disease brought on by the war. Writes Zinn, "And no one since that day has been able to show that the war brought on any gain for humanity that would be worth one human life."

Was World War II fought to benefit the common person, to save the world from totalitarianism, anti-Semitism, racism and subjugation? That's the predominant view of the War. But Howard Zinn says such an explanation would be inconsistent with United States and world history heretofore. Not only would it be inconsistent with US history; it would be in direct contradiction of the United States' conduct before, during and immediately after World War II.

Those who say the Second World War was a "people's war" make their claims on the grounds that the war was immensely popular among the American people and unanimously supported, that it was waged to save Jewish people from extermination and to save the world from fascism and totalitarianism. Eighteen million Americans served in the war, 10 million overseas. Twenty-five million American workers bought war bonds during financial hard times to support the war effort. Zinn grants that there was less resistance to WWII than there was to WWI in terms of organised protest and intellectual opposition. Still, there were 43,000 conscientious objectors out of the 10 million American men drafted, and 350,000 draft evaders.

But whether or not the war was a "people's war" is not resolved by how many supported it or opposed it. Rather, the issue is whether or not the war truly advanced democratic, egalitarian, and socially just causes. As Zinn puts it: "Would the behaviour of the United States during the war - in military action abroad, in treatment of minorities at home - be in keeping with a 'people's war'? Would the country's wartime policies respect the rights of ordinary people everywhere to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? And would postwar America, in its policies at home and overseas, exemplify the values for which the war was supposed to have been fought?"

The revulsion that most Americans had for fascism and Nazism, combined with the blindness that war fervour encourages, prevented most people from asking these kinds of questions during the war. If they had, then it is very likely they would have looked at the United States' record of international relations up to that point and concluded that the war was being fought for reasons other than those stated by the US government. There is every historical reason to think the motivation was not to stop the persecution of the Jews, or to save democracy from totalitarianism, or to save innocent countries from invasion and takeover. Zinn finds the idea that the United States entered the war to defend the principles of national independence and non-aggression most laughable:

"For the United States to step forward as a defender of helpless countries matched its image in American high school history textbooks, but not its record in world affairs. It had instigated a war with Mexico and taken half of that country. It had pretended to help Cuba win freedom from Spain, and then planted itself in Cuba with a military base, investments, and rights of intervention. It had seized Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam, and fought a brutal war to subjugate the Filipinos. It had 'opened' Japan to its trade with gunboats and threats. It had declared an Open Door Policy in China as a means of assuring that the United States would have opportunities equal to other imperial powers in exploiting China. It had sent troops to Peking with other nations, to assert Western supremacy in China, and kept them there for over thirty years.

"While demanding an Open Door in China, it had insisted (with the Monroe Doctrine and many military interventions) on a Closed Door in Latin America-that is, closed to everyone but the United States. It had engineered a revolution against Columbia and created the 'independent' state of Panama in order to build and control the Canal. It sent five thousand marines to Nicaragua in 1926 to counter a revolution, and kept a force there for seven years. It intervened in the Dominican Republic for the fourth time in 1916 and kept troops there for eight years. It intervened for the second time in Haiti in 1915 and kept troops there for nineteen years. Between 1900 and 1933, the United States intervened in Cuba four times, in Nicaragua twice, in Panama six times, in Guatemala once, in Honduras seven times. By 1924 the finances of half of the twenty Latin American states were being directed to some extent by the United States. By 1935, over half of U.S. steel and cotton exports were being sold in Latin America."

The United States did little during Italy's attack on Ethiopia, Germany's invasions of Poland, Austria and Czechoslovakia, and Japan's attack on China, and did not enter the war until it had been attacked on its own shores in the Japanese assault on Pearl Harbor.

Likewise, Zinn says the American record when it comes to race relations and its treatment of racial minorities makes it unlikely that its entrance to the war was motivated by concern for the Jewish people of Europe or a rejection of Hitler's idea of white Nordic supremacy over "inferior" races. Indeed, during World War II, the U.S. troops were segregated by race, with black soldiers routinely granted inferior provisions and less desirable duties. At home, blacks were still discriminated against in the workplace despite the great need for wartime production, and were subjected to Jim Crow laws. The Red Cross, with government approval, irrationally separated black wartime blood donations from white donations, proving that the U.S. agreed with at least some part of Hitler's notion of inherent difference between the races.

Meanwhile, in 1942 the United States military rounded up Japanese Americans on the West Coast, forcibly removed them from their homes, and kept them in concentration camps until the end of the war. More than 110,000 men, women and children were imprisoned simply for their race, including even Japanese children who had been born in the United States.

Zinn says the U.S. motivation for entering the war had more to do with its economic interests and its plan for military and financial world supremacy for the second half of the 20th Century, goals that it had largely achieved by the end of WWII. Even the provocation that signalled The event precipitating America's entry in the war--the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor - was not the unprovoked attack it has been made out to be. Following the War's conclusion, Radhabinod Pal, a judge at the Tokyo War Crimes Trial, dissented from the verdicts and argued that the U.S. had provoked Japan through embargoes of oil and iron, which threatened Japan's existence.

"War rejuvenated American capitalism," Zinn writes, quoting historian Lawrence Wittner. Corporate profits rose from $6.4 billion in 1940 to $10.8 billion in 1944 largely on the strength of war production. Military contracts put large amounts of tax dollars in the hands of private corporations, giving rise to a corporate business culture that after the war called upon the United States to maintain a permanent war economy. In 1941 alone, for example, three-fourths of all the military contracts were handled by 56 corporations. Of the $1 billion the U.S. government spent on war production that year, 40 per cent went to just 10 firms. Wages increased during and after the war, but did not come close to matching the increases in corporate profits. Profits grew 600 per cent in the textile industry from 1940 to 1946, but wages grew only 36 percent.

The war allowed the government and industrial leaders to defend the inequities and the elitist restructuring of the U.S. economy on patriotic grounds. It also left the United States as the lone nuclear superpower in the coming Cold War, as construction of the post-World-War-II alliances and empires began before the war even ended.

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