PART II

“They Rebelled”: The Long Nineteenth Century

If you look at the history of the Lowell mills and the strikes that periodically racked the mill towns of Massachusetts, what do they teach you about the industrial revolution?

One of the things they do is to make you aware that the industrial revolution started before the Civil War.

The general impression is that up to the Civil War we were simply an agrarian society, and after the Civil War we became an industrial society. But industry came to New England in the 1820s. It came as soon as the power loom was invented and they could weave cotton to cloth mechanically. Then the textile mills grew in towns like Lowell and Lawrence, and places in Rhode Island.

Their workers were mostly girls. Girls would go into these mills at the age of twelve, and many of them would die by the age of twenty-five; they were working very, very hard. They were working long hours—twelve, fourteen, sixteen hours a day, six or seven days a week. They were getting up in the dark and going home in the dark, getting a half hour for lunch. They were struggling just to stay alive.

They had come to the mill because they had families back on the farm. These were farm girls coming into the city because it was becoming a cash economy. Money was entering the lives of these people, and now these girls were going to bring in some money.

Of course, they were going to bring very little money into the house, because they were getting something like 35¢ a day. It was these conditions that caused these girls, young women, to rebel. They formed associations. They put out a newspaper. And yes, starting in the 1820s and 1830s, they began going on strike. That alarmed not only the mill owners, but also some of the newspapers, which reported that these girls were holding meetings and, you know, this was not the proper thing for girls to do. They should know better and take their dutiful place in the industrial world.

But some wonderful literature came out of that struggle. One of these girls, Harriet Robinson, later recalled her first strike. She told how she talked to the other girls on her floor about the fact that elsewhere, in other mills, the girls would be going on strike, because they were fed up with how little they were getting and how hard they were working and the terrible conditions. And breathing in cotton fibers—you can imagine what that does to the lungs.

She was asking, “Will you go out on strike? Will you walk out?” The phrase used was “turn out.” “Will you turn out?” And then when the moment came when the workers at other mills were turning out, she looked at her fellow workers and asked, “Well, are we going?”

Nobody moved.

Then she said, “Well, I’m going to move.” And she did. And then the rest followed.

Later she said, “You know, I still look back on that as one of the great moments of my life.”

The mill owners certainly began this process thinking that a working population of women was going to be more pliable, more easily dominated and controlled than a working population of men. But didn’t they also respond with a certain paternalism to the desires of the women? There were choral societies, the newspaper you mention, sewing circles, schools begun inside the mill working units. Were these initiatives an attempt to make these women’s lives more bearable so that they wouldn’t rebel?

It is true that the owners tried to create a kind of social life for the girls outside the factory, even though they had very little time to engage in any of these things. But they tried. They did try to make it more palatable for them.

This has been a constant issue in the world of the factory. Does it come from a cynical attempt to keep people in line? Is there a grain of humanity in the owners that says, “Oh, we ought to do something for these people”?

There is a long tradition, into the twentieth century, of people like Henry Ford, thinking that he’ll try to make life on the assembly line a little better. But it’s never enough for workers, and certainly not for these young girls. No, it wasn’t enough, and that is why they rebelled.

Do we see here the roots of what would later become the suffrage movement in a mass sense? Do we see here roots of women’s consciousness as a political force?

Well, this was a period in which women came into the political conflicts of the day. While we can’t find a specific organic connection between the strikes at the Lowell mills and the rise of women activists in the antislavery movement and in the feminist movement, there was a very close connection among women coming out as abolitionists and then coming out for the equality of women. In fact, you might say it became easier for women to begin to demand rights for themselves after they had established a kind of dignity for themselves by joining the abolitionist movement.

They were not totally welcomed in the antislavery movement. That is, these men who were opposed to slavery had still not begun to recognize the rights of women. So when there was an antislavery congress in London, the women had to sit in the balcony. But that inspired them, when they came back to the United States, to say, “No, we are not going to put up with this,” and then they began to organize on their own.

That was the root of the women’s movement—at the Seneca Falls Convention, where the women drew up a declaration of rights by rewriting the Declaration of Independence to include women. “All men and women are created equal.” Then they listed, as the Declaration of Independence had listed the grievances against the king of England, their grievances against men.

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What was Gabriel’s Rebellion, and where does this fall in the long line of slave revolts?

Gabriel is the first name of Gabriel Prosser, but there is a preference to call it Gabriel’s Rebellion, because Prosser was the slave owner’s name. It came in the early 1800s with a thousand black people trying to ignite a larger rebellion. It failed, as all U.S. slave rebellions did before the Civil War. But they at least were a manifestation of the refusal of slaves to accept their condition. Slave rebellions go back to the seventeenth century, almost as soon as slavery was introduced into the colonies, with the first black people coming to Jamestown in 1619.

The most important one was Nat Turner’s Rebellion of 1831, in Virginia, a very powerful, organized attempt on the part of thousands of black people to take over plantations, to invade plantation territory. It was violent—they killed owners, and they went on a rampage. They were put down, and a number of them, including Nat Turner, were executed.

The rebellion was a kind of signal to the South that this might happen again, and on a larger scale. It made the South determined to put down any sign of rebellion, and to make sure, for instance, that abolitionist literature was not spread in the South.

The 1830s saw the beginning of an abolitionist movement in the country, starting in New England. William Lloyd Garrison put out his abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator, and Frederick Douglass, a former slave, put out his own newspaper, The North Star. Abolitionist and antislavery tracts began to spread throughout the country, but the South was determined not to let this sentiment spread.

It’s interesting that you mentioned that all of them failed. They were put down, often in very purposely cruel and public ways, to demonstrate the cost of this kind of rebellion. If they were all put down, in short periods of time the ringleaders caught and rounded up, with people telling on each other in court proceedings, why were these revolts so threatening to the South? If whites had all the power, all the guns, all the state power, all the bloodhounds, why were the slave revolts able to send an electric jolt into the population of the South?

Rebellions always suggest to the people in power a possibility that one day they might succeed. We are very often surprised at the extent of force that is employed by people in authority against signs of rebellion, when we see how these rebellions fail. But people in power seem to have a kind of foresight. That is, they understand that tiny acts of protest can easily turn into larger acts of protest. And the idea of the people in power is to stifle them with such overwhelming power as to discourage future rebellion.

It happens in our time. You have seven people on a picket line, and they look around, and there are fifty policemen in riot gear who’ve been sent out to deal with them. They wonder, What are they afraid of? What are they worried about?

And I think the answer is that, yes, the people in power may have a clearer idea than the people on the picket line of what the possibilities are for small acts of protest to turn into large acts of rebellion. In fact, they’re right, for the history of social movements is a history of small groups of people starting out apparently powerless, easily controlled, easily put down, and yet they rise again. And again and again they become larger and larger, and before you know it, you have a movement. An important movement.

The suppression of slave revolts in the South had to be done and had to be done decisively, yet it did not resolve the situation. The resentment of people against their condition may be kept under control for a while, and the people who are being oppressed may then themselves hold back, even appear to be content with their condition. But under the surface they’re brimming with indignation—and waiting for the moment. Of course, for slaves the moment came when the Civil War gave them an opportunity finally to run away, to escape from the plantations.

Going back to the period before the Civil War, apart from these sudden eruptions, these spasms of violence in slave uprisings, did black resistance take more day-today, everyday forms?

Yes, I think that is important to recognize, because if you look only at the rebellions, which were sporadic and you might say occasional, you might conclude that most slaves just accepted their situation. There were many, many forms of slave resistance that were not as dramatic as rebellion. There was feigning illness and not doing their work the way they were supposed to. But probably the biggest form of slave resistance was running away.

That’s what the Underground Railroad was about. There were huge numbers of slaves who wanted to run away but didn’t have the capacity to do it. Harriet Tubman and other people went south to help slaves run away, to give them the possibility of doing that.

The high point of slave resistance before the Civil War came when slaves ran away and then had to deal with the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. The Fugitive Slave Act gave the federal government the responsibility of returning slaves to their masters. Federal officials would get twice as much money if a slave was sent back to slavery than if he or she was declared free. In response, abolitionists organized themselves into what they called vigilante groups, which has a different connotation than what we think of today as vigilantes.

The idea of vigilante groups was that they would be vigilant—on the lookout for escaped slaves. If these escapees were apprehended by the federal government, then these abolitionist groups would rescue them.

A number of very dramatic rescues took place in the 1850s. Abolitionists, white and black, would break into police stations and courthouses to rescue slaves, then send them on their way to Canada.

By the 1850s, after twenty years of antislavery agitation, there had been a change of opinion in the North about slavery. When juries were faced with the problem of acquitting or convicting those white and black people who had helped slaves to escape, who had violated the Fugitive Slave Act, who had broken into courthouses and so on, often these juries voted to acquit them.

William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Frederick Douglass, and others started out being the objects of ridicule and anger by their white neighbors in the North, but things changed. By the 1850s, important people in the North were speaking out against slavery.

Amid this ferment of jailbreaks and runaways, there was a serious reconsideration and reexamination of slavery going on. People began to question whether it made economic sense for the South to continue to retain slavery as an institution. Looking back from the twenty-first century, did slavery make a big economic impact in the South? Did it make sense for the South? Did it help the economy of the nation as a whole?

Well, we have to consider that cotton had become a very, very important commodity—not just for the South, which grew it, but also for the North, which turned it into cloth, as well as the merchants who exported and sold it. The South and its economy were important to the nation.

There were now 4 million black slaves, and you can measure the growth of slavery along with the growth of cotton growing in the South. Slavery became absolutely essential to the plantation system in the South. Now, there has been argument among historians as to whether the economics of slavery made sense, whether the Southern slave owners would have been better off with free labor. It’s possible that the South would have been better off freeing the slaves under the conditions that developed after the Civil War—black people “free” but still half enslaved.

The question is whether that would have been the rational thing for slave owners to do, and thus avoid civil war. But I think there is always a psychological element that enters into it. Whether slavery was profitable or not didn’t matter, because the psychology of a slave-owning aristocracy was such that the life of plantation owners was built around a slave plantation.

Slavery gave them wealth and a life of great privilege and superiority in which they could enjoy all the finer things. They didn’t want to disrupt it. I think that psychological factor, that cultural factor, may have been as important as economic considerations in the retention of slavery.

A nineteenth-century writer named George Fitzhugh wrote a bestseller called Cannibals All that suggests that the workers of the new factories of the North were every bit as much enslaved as people tied to the land and picking cotton, black people in the South. That caused a sensation. Was it common among workers on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line to see parallels in their condition?

George Fitzhugh’s argument was very compelling. It was a sophisticated and clever defense of slavery, saying, “You know, it’s not simply that we have slaves and you have free people. We just have different forms of slavery.” In a limited sense, you might say that Fitzhugh was a Marxist before there were Marxists, in that he saw the worker of the North, the proletariat of the North, as a slave to the industrial giants of the North. And he pointed to the hypocrisy of the North, which was railing against slavery while maintaining wage slavery. Although we don’t know how many people or what percentage of people in the North and South, there were some who responded to this argument.

You point out in your book that one thousand families in the South controlled about the same amount of wealth as the other almost seven hundred thousand families who were counted in the 1850 census. Why did the white working class go to war to defend, to preserve that system?

Of course, you might ask that question in any war, because in any war it’s the working people who go to war on behalf of a system that doesn’t offer any great promise of living a better life. But it’s certainly true that the South was an extreme example of this.

I suppose one answer is that it seems it’s not that hard to persuade young people to go to war if you can present them with a cause—if you can show them that they’re fighting for a principle, for a way of life. If you can locate an enemy for them to hate. And it wasn’t hard to hate the North, which had, you might say, precipitated this war, by refusing to accept the secession of the Southern states and which looked upon the South as uncivilized because it had slavery. In other words, a working class can be propagandized into a war that is against its interests, and that certainly took place in the South.

Then, of course, there is also the race question and the fact that white people could be told that, if they didn’t fight this war, black people would rise up and take over the South—that they were fighting to maintain the position of white supremacy over these 4 million black people.

But then you have to understand that all of this did not work well after a while. That is, white soldiers in the Confederacy, especially as the bloodiness of that war became extreme, especially as the war went on and on and men were dying on the battlefield in huge numbers—these young white kids began to question the war.

Huge desertions began to take place from the Confederate Army. This is a story that is not very well known. In the minds of most Americans who go to school and study the Civil War, the Confederacy appears as a kind of solid, loyal block.

But it wasn’t.

There were desertions of the soldiers, and then there were rebellions of the soldiers’ families back home. There were women in Georgia whose husbands were fighting—some of whose husbands had died—and by 1863 and 1864 these women were rioting against the slave owners, pointing out that the plantation owners were growing cotton instead of food. Cotton was profitable; food was not. They were starving while their men were giving their lives.

So there was a lot of disloyalty in the Confederacy. Conscription had to be introduced; they had to draft people into the army.

War had changed a lot during the nineteenth century. We were now in a time when armies stayed in the field the whole year round. That was a big departure from the days when people used to go home and plant and harvest, and then fight. Taking an agrarian population away from their farms for the entire year almost guaranteed there was going to be hunger and privation in the South.

Yes. And of course the Civil War also introduced new, deadlier weapons. Six hundred thousand men died in the battles of the Civil War—in a population of about 30 or 35 million people. That would be equivalent today to 4 or 5 million dead in a war. There were grisly scenes on the battlefield, and you know they didn’t have the medical facilities that we have today when so many people are wounded but stay alive. Huge numbers of amputations took place right there in the field without anesthetics. It’s not surprising that there was rebellion in the Confederacy.

Class conflict in the Civil War is too often unrecognized in the histories of the period, which very often dwell on the battles, and which present the Civil War as “the North versus the South.” Well, it was not just the North versus the South. It was also the North versus the North and the South versus the South. It was the rich against the poor. It was the draft rioters, not just in New York but also in other cities, noting that the rich were getting out of serving by paying $300.

By the way, the same thing was true in the South. The rich could get out of conscription by paying sums of money.

One of the turning points in the Civil War, by common agreement, is the entry of freedmen and runaway slaves into the ranks of the Union Army. How did that change the war?

Close to two hundred thousand ex-slaves fought in the Civil War. They had not been welcome at first, but the Northern army became desperate for men as the war went on. In the view of many historians—certainly the great black historian W.E.B. DuBois made this point, that black soldiers made a crucial difference in the victory of the North over the South. Besides their contributions to the army, they made a crucial difference in bringing about a change in the Northern political structure’s willingness to change the Constitution, to adopt the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. They were an important force in the country now, not just militarily but also politically.

But weren’t we also sort of trapped in a paradoxical situation, where there was rising resentment toward black people because there was perception of the war as being fought for them, and over them, at the same time as there were forces inside the policy-making apparatus, the opinion-making apparatus of the United States, that didn’t want black soldiers to enter the Union ranks?

That’s right. That’s why it took a while before they were allowed to enter. But military desperation drove the government to enlist them. Then they came back from the military, as has often been true in America’s wars, demanding their rights, demanding change. And I think that this had an effect on Congress, and on the North in general, although the North remained racist.

You talk about the change in the character of the war due to the fact that black people were fighting for their own freedom, with ensuing changes in popular opinion in the North, but didn’t this also send an electric charge through the people of the South, that black people were now fighting in the army? This was not an unnoticed development.

Certainly. It was frightening to Southerners that black people who had been slaves were now fighting against them. When black prisoners were taken by the Confederate Army, they were very often shot.

So they were not treated as soldiers.

No, because the idea of them being treated as ordinary soldiers was repugnant to the people in the Southern armies.

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Let’s jump ahead to the end of the war and the creation of the Freedmen’s Bureau. As you noted, there was some growing sentiment that, now that the war was over, there should be some addressing of black aspiration.

The Freedmen’s Bureau was created to help black people in the transition from slavery to freedom. And for a while it offered promise, but ultimately it was unsuccessful because it could not give the freed slaves what they really needed, which was land of their own. The Freedmen’s Bureau could give them schools, could bring educators down into the South, but black people were trapped economically—trapped very often on the plantations where they had been slaves. Because they did not have land of their own, in order to survive they had to go back to work for the plantation owner as tenant farmers.

They were held in semi-slavery. The Southern states adopted Black Codes, as they were called, which restricted the lives of these tenant farmers almost in the way that slavery had restricted them.

Didn’t the divisions in the North all during the Civil War manifest themselves now with the Freedmen’s Bureau? Some of the people running that and related bureaus had just been in uniform fighting against the South, and some of them were seized by a zeal to remake the country with a new dispensation under which black people could be free.

How did they lose? What happened? Was there a shift—a sudden shift underneath their feet that made it impossible to move on with land redistribution, that made it impossible legally to continue giving farms and land to black farmers?

Well, the most important thing that happened was a brief period of entry into political life by black people. Protected by federal troops in the South, who had been sent to enforce the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, for several years, black people were actually voted into state legislatures—and in South Carolina, there actually was a black majority in the state’s House of Representatives.

There was a really quite remarkable period of what was called Radical Reconstruction. But it was not useful to the political leaders of the North, they realized after a while, to give all this political power to black people—and at the expense of their relationships with the old planter class of the South.

They wanted a national economic system. They wanted railroads both North and South. They wanted banks in the North to be able to have relations with Southern plantation owners. Those economic ties became more important to them than doing something for the ex-slaves.

It was that recognition of the common economic interest of the Northern elite with the Southern elite that led to the removal of federal troops from the South. In a sense, they were saying to the white South, “Okay now, we’re giving the South back to you, and the fate of black people now rests in your hands.”

In the early parts of the war, Lincoln insisted this was not a war to free the slaves but to save the Union, but clearly by the later stages of the war, ending slavery had become part of the North’s program by common consent. Are you saying that, once the war was over and Reconstruction was being reconsidered, the economic interests trumped these other political concerns, and human rights concerns?

Yes. I think the economic interests were paramount. After all, human rights concerns in general have not been primary for the people who run the economic system, the social system. Human rights are recognized only when they are useful.

For that brief period after the Civil War, when it was useful for the political leaders of the North to give the vote to black people and therefore give the North political control, that was fine. You might say the voting rights of black people were useful in electing a Republican president. Grant was elected by the margin of black voters in the South after the Civil War. But that interest faded, and the economic interest that we’re talking about became paramount.

There was a very close election in 1876, and the Democrats won the popular vote, but there was a dispute about electoral votes in a number of states. Even though the Democratic candidate, Samuel Tilden, had won two hundred thousand more votes and should have been president by popular vote, the disputed electoral votes prevented that outcome.

A kind of arrangement was made, a compromise. The Republicans and the Democrats said, “Okay, we’ll let Hayes—the Republican, with fewer votes—become president, but in return Hayes will remove the federal troops from the South.”

This was the turning point, the signal that the black person was no longer useful to Northern economic and political interests. There then began, from the 1870s on into the twentieth century, the worst possible period for black people in the South after the Civil War.

So in your view, leaving the black people of the South to their fate completes a process that takes them from slavery without submission to emancipation without freedom?

Yes, exactly. You have moments in that period that dramatized the change.

I’m thinking of the year 1868, when a black minister named Henry Turner, who had been elected to the Georgia legislature with the support of black Georgians, faced expulsion under the threat of violence. His very eloquent speech in reply has been recorded in history.

One of the things that happened during Reconstruction is that black people, once removed from slavery, got a glimpse of their possibilities. We saw it earlier in Frederick Douglass and now we see it in Henry Turner. He speaks to the South as he says, “I am not going to let you take away my manhood.” But of course they expelled him. Many years later, in the 1960s during the Vietnam War, the Georgia legislature expelled Julian Bond because he spoke out against the Vietnam War.

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Is there a thread, almost a DNA relationship, that ties together runaway slaves and striking Lowell mill girls and Southern bread rioters and skedaddling Confederate soldiers and workers in the Freedmen’s Bureau—that ties them together in a history of nineteenth-century America?

I think the thing that ties them together is the persistent refusal of people to stay in a state of subjection. In spite of the enormous power of slave owners, of mill owners, of the government, the insistence of apparently powerless people that they will not accept their condition is a current that runs through American history. And it’s too often unrecognized, as we tell American history from the standpoint of the people in power, the presidents and the congressmen and the Supreme Court and the industrialists and the so-called important people in society.

I think it’s important to pull all of that together and recognize it, because if we don’t, we’re losing the possibility of inspiring ourselves to join in whatever movement and resistance there is in our time.

When I read your book, the Civil War ends up being sort of a massive exclamation point stuck into the middle of the nineteenth century. But I don’t know whether to conclude that it’s a cataclysm that sets a lot of things free and into motion, or whether it’s the beginning of a reconsolidation by the powerful people in society whom you were just talking about.

I think the Civil War is both. It’s a consolidation of power, the joining of the North and South in saving a political system, and the beginning of that long period of bipartisanship in which Democrats and Republicans, even though they rival one another for political power, will fundamentally act to maintain the control of the society by the wealthy and the privileged.

It’s also the opening up of the country to economic forces that are now going to leap ahead. We also now see the consolidation of power by the white man over Indian territory. More land was taken from the Indians during the Civil War than in any other comparable time in American history.

But it’s also a period in which the seeds are planted for a kind of protest and organization. The nineteenth century is a time when the labor movement of the North arises, when you are going to see violent strikes against the industrial system, and the struggle for the eight-hour day. In other words, class conflict becomes more intense as the upper class consolidates its power, and the workers in the factories and the farmers in the fields decide that they must organize to do something about their own lives.

If we look at the years right after the Civil War, it seems that there was a lot of idealism injected into American politics. There were the post–Civil War amendments to the Constitution. The work of the Freedmen’s Bureau and other voluntary and government-sponsored efforts to resettle former slaves. What happened to all that idealism?

The idealism that brought forth the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments collapsed under the weight of political and economic interests. The idealism was sustained in part by realism and necessity and political advantage, which the leaders of Northern society had gained from the temporary alliance with black people. But when they recognized that their fortunes would be better off in alliance with the old white South, then that idealism dissipated.

And yet the idealism of the ex-slaves, and the idealism of those people in the North who cared about racial inequality, that idealism did not disappear. But it was submerged by military and economic power, and by the atmosphere created by the new industrial society.

You might say that the idealists were overwhelmed by the march of the nation toward becoming an economic giant. It took a little while before people began to rebel against this enormous economic power that was developing in the North—the railroads and the banks and the oil industry and the mining industry.

After the Civil War, the economy took off. There was a huge market, and new technological developments brought huge economic growth. It took a while before workers in this new industrial economy were able to gather enough strength to rebel against it.

Now, you give a lot of credit to the abolitionists of the earlier part of the century for creating some of the social consciousness that helped usher in that Civil War period. Many of the same personalities are involved in this immediate postwar period. Many of the same structures that abolitionists started earlier in the century led to schools and industrial and vocational institutions throughout the South, and so on. How come they could play such a big role earlier in the century but just couldn’t make their presence felt in the 1860s and 1870s?

In the 1860s and 1870s, they had, you might say, a false sense of victory. The technical ending of slavery, the apparent granting of racial equality with the Fourteenth Amendment, and the Fifteenth Amendment giving black people the right to vote all created what I think was a false sense of security for reformist and radical groups in the United States.

A common feature of reform movements is that they become intoxicated with victory and then realize that following through on that victory is not going to take place so long as power still remains in the hands of people who held that power earlier.

It took a while to realize that the wave of reform—the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments—is going to remain superficial, that those amendments were on the books but were not going to be enforced. The government had the power but wouldn’t do it.

There is a certain similarity between the situation there and the situation in the Second Reconstruction, the period of the 1960s when the black movement rose in the South and won victories on the national field. They won the Civil Rights Act of 1964; they won Supreme Court decisions; they won the legal end of segregation. But it turned out that these were insufficient. They didn’t speak to the ultimate condition of black people. They didn’t change their economic situation. Ultimately, in both periods, it was economic power that determined whether the political reform would have real meaning in the lives of these people who were in a subordinate position.

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Let’s turn to the rise of populism and agrarian radicalism later in the century. Who were these radicals out on the farm, and what was their complaint?

We very rarely think of farmers as radicals, but farmers can be radicalized by their condition, by the situation they find themselves in. As the country grew, and as the railroads became more and more monopolized in the hands of a small number of people, individual farmers found themselves powerless before the very wealthy, who controlled what happened to the grain once it came out of the fields and went into the granaries, into the warehouses, and was shipped by railroad to consumers. They found that they were paying high prices for the new farm machinery that was now being used. They had no control over these prices. The federal government was not exercising any control over the power of manufacturers to demand high prices. The farmers had to pay high prices for things that were in the hands of monopolies, and these monopolies could charge high prices without fear of competition. Growers didn’t have the power to demand higher prices for their farm products, so they found themselves in very, very difficult economic circumstances in this squeeze.

They realized that as individuals they had no power against powerful economic forces, the railroads and banks that controlled their loans. The only way they could change their situation was to combine, to organize, to do as farmers what workers starting in the 1860s and 1870s had already begun to do—to form labor unions and go on strike.

So the farmers in the 1870s and 1880s began to organize. They formed granges and farmers alliances. They became a political power in various states, and soon the farmers alliances in the North and South decided that they would form a national political party. They formed what was called the People’s Party, which is now known as the Populist Movement.

The People’s Party began running candidates for office on the state level, and they elected many candidates to state legislatures in the early 1890s. The Populist Movement became one of the great social movements of American history.

The populists didn’t just hold national conventions and put up candidates. They became a cultural force. They distributed thousands of newspapers and gave lectures all over the South. They brought farmers together in a way that they had never been brought together before. And they did something else. For a while, they were able to bring black and white farmers together, unified, to try to get legislation to protect them against the great combines, trusts, and monopolies of that time.

You’re talking about a largely unregulated set of industries but also a time when money was tied to the value of gold and silver. It seemed that a set of rules made up for manufacturers and bankers wasn’t working so well for people who lived on credit, as farmers did. How did issue of gold and hard money versus paper money, one of the great controversies of the late nineteenth century, land on the shoulders of the individual farmer? What difference did it make to somebody farming wheat in the Great Plains whether or not the American currency was tied to gold and silver?

When money is scarce because it’s tied to the gold standard, then people who are debtors, people who owe money, have less and less chance to pay back and to take care of the debts that they have. The constriction of the money supply hurts them.

Farmers want inflation. Inflation is a bad word to consumers, but to people who are in debt, inflation means that money is more available for them to pay off their debts.

This goes back to the period right after the American Revolution, when farmers in the colonies were demanding the issuance of paper money not tied to the gold standard. The counterpart of paper money in the nineteenth century was silver—more plentiful than gold. If silver were used as a standard, the farmers thought, they’d be able to pay off their debts. That’s why the Populist Party became the party of silver versus the party of gold.

That’s why they ran candidates on a platform of “free silver.” Although the farmers themselves did not understand the niceties of finance, they gathered around what seemed like a good slogan: Free Silver. It became the campaign of the Populist Movement when in 1896 it supported Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, who ran on the program of free silver.

It’s funny, because you could go to national political conventions now and listen to every speech, all day, and not hear anybody mention money, the cost of money, or the basis for money, and yet to be a farmer in the 1880s or 1890s was to be very closely attuned to the status of money.

It is generally not to the advantage of political leaders to have people think too hard about money.

Even today, the working people who are hurt by the tax system, for instance, don’t understand the complexities of the tax system. This is to the advantage of those people who promulgate the tax system. The mysteries around money have always served to, I think, diminish the power of working people. It was an unusual moment in the nineteenth century when farmers became conscious of the money situation.

This was also an unusual moment because, for a couple of decades, there was a successful class-based movement that occasionally sought to be also a biracial movement. Why did it eventually fail?

The Populist Movement and the People’s Party failed because it poured its energy into politics, into national political campaigns. It allowed itself to be absorbed by the Democratic Party by supporting the candidacy of William Jennings Bryan in 1896. When Bryan lost, the People’s Party collapsed. I think the funneling of a movement’s energy into the political forum, into the electoral system, diverts that energy from direct action, from struggles in the field. It diverts workers from strikes. I’m just theorizing, because when things like this happen in history, cause and effect are very complex.

Indeed you refer to it as “drowning in a sea of democratic politics,” but wasn’t that a legitimate strategy? Wouldn’t you need members of Congress, governors, members of the Senate, in order to bring the kind of systemic change that would have relieved the burden on the farmers that the coinage problem created?

It is very helpful for movements to have people in political office who will bring about new legislation helpful to the poor, helpful to the farmer, helpful to the worker. However, when that is done at the expense of other forms of struggle, when that depletes the energy of a movement by concentrating it in a sphere where it can immediately be dissipated by a loss, like a loss in an election, then it leaves a movement helpless.

I think that suggests that a very complex and sophisticated strategy is required for social movements, one in which politics and electoral campaigns become part of the struggle but don’t dominate it. Because when people engaged in social movements become dependent on political campaigns, they sacrifice something very important. They delude themselves into thinking that passing legislation will change their condition. It will take more than that.

At the same time as the People’s Party and agrarian organizations were rising, so too was the industrial labor movement, with workers rising up against the conditions of their employment. But this time, in the late nineteenth century, those organizations and those uprisings are better organized, more sustained, and yes, more violent. Why then? Why did it happen at that point in American history?

The rise of the labor movement after the Civil War was directly due to the new conditions in the industrial system, and to the terrible conditions that existed in the mines. Industrialization brought about factory work, which was unregulated. It brought the mining industry into prominence, with no safety precautions in the mines. You have this enormous economic growth, and in the course of it the conditions of workers become intensely difficult. This starts even with the building of the transcontinental railroad in the 1860s, with immigrant workers, Chinese and Irish workers working very long hours under very difficult conditions, and dying by the thousands as a result of these conditions.

The industrial system was becoming, you might say, more cruel. Working conditions were inhumane in the mines, steel mills, oil refineries, factories, and the meat-packing industry. The demands of the new economy fostered a desire for more and more profit, and in order to profit, you have to get workers who work harder and longer, whose wages are kept as low as possible. Safety costs money. So you get terrible conditions in the mines, in Carnegie’s steel mills, in Rockefeller’s oil refineries, and in factories throughout the country.

But workers in the mines, factories, and railroads began to talk to one another, and they began to organize unions. After the Civil War, you began to see national unions. The Knights of Labor became a national union, and it’s indicative of the problems they faced that the Knights was a secret organization, because the employers don’t want workers to organize. Any sign of organization was going to be met with the firing of workers, so people had to organize secretly—until they became strong enough so they could organize overtly and threaten the employer with a strike if anybody was fired for joining the union.

The strike of 1877 was one of the most violent labor strikes in American history, affecting railroads all over the East Coast. A hundred people were killed in clashes between strikers and the military and police.

Then in the 1880s and 1890s, you began to get more strikes. In the early 1890s, the American Federation of Labor was formed, and you began to get more and more worker organizations. There were more strikes, notably of dock workers in New Orleans and steelworkers in Pennsylvania, and then came the great Pullman strike.

The Pullman Palace Car Company prided itself on these beautiful train cars that the wealthy could ride in, but the people who made those cars were not getting enough money to live on. When they went out on strike, something unusual happened. They called upon railroad workers all over the country to join them, not just other Pullman workers. The American Railway Union, headed by Eugene Debs, decided to organize a national boycott of the railroads, and so you had a national railroad strike in 1894.

The strike was eventually broken, as most strikes are broken, by a combination of military force and judicial edict. The courts said, “You must not make any more speeches calling on people to strike or supporting the strike,” and when Eugene Debs continued to support the strikers, well, they said he was violating an injunction, and so he went to prison.

* * *

One of the best-known organizers of that time was Mother Jones. Who was she? How did she get her start at a time when women were not known to be political actors on the national stage?

Mary Jones was her name. She grew up in the Midwest and worked as a domestic in menial jobs, developing a class consciousness that soon brought her into the mine workers union.

In her seventies (and I guess this was one of the reasons she was called Mother, because she was old enough to be the mother of almost everybody who was working), she was organizing miners in West Virginia, and then Colorado. She was so colorful and so dramatic, and she looked like a schoolteacher, wearing her bonnet over her white hair.

She was a fiery speaker. She did very dramatic things, like bringing the children of striking miners in Pennsylvania on a march to New York, to Theodore Roosevelt’s house, to demand an end to child labor. They were carrying signs saying WE WANT TIME TO PLAY.

Mother Jones came to Colorado in 1913, when the coal miners of Colorado went out on strike against the Rockefeller-owned mines of southern Colorado. Her coming galvanized the miners. She showed up at the Miners Convention in Trinidad, Colorado, when they were deciding whether to strike, and she gave a rousing speech. They went out on strike.

She was jailed many times. Nothing daunted her. She was brought into courts and she would defy the judge. She inspired miners and other workers all over the country.

Once organized workers realized that companies and governments were willing to use force, willing to kill them to stop strikes, to end disruptions in service on the railroads, was there a change in tactics?

Workers saw from the beginning that force would be employed against them. I don’t know if there was a change in tactics throughout the labor movement, but I would say that certain parts of the labor movement decided that they had to meet force with force. There were the Molly Maguires of Pennsylvania. There were workers who turned to force under certain conditions.

The National Guard, paid by Rockefeller, attacked the large tent colony in which striking miners were living, at Ludlow, Colorado. They burned the tents to the ground and machine-gunned the tents, and in one of the tents they found the burned bodies of eleven children and two women. Those victims suddenly brought the strike into national attention, and that incident became known as the Ludlow Massacre. Woody Guthrie wrote a song about it called “The Ludlow Massacre.”

That action galvanized the miners into violence. They had not been violent up to that point, but now this was too much, the attack on the Ludlow tent colony. An enormous funeral parade took place in Trinidad, a town that’s the center of the mining district, with the coffins of these eleven children and two women, as well as seven other people who had died at the hands of the National Guard. There was this odd juxtaposition—the solemn procession behind these coffins and then the workers leaving the procession and going into certain houses and taking rifles that had been stored there, and then going on a violent rampage through the mining district, blowing up mines and killing mine guards.

This was a spontaneous violent reaction, and I suppose what I am saying is that, while the labor movement as a whole has not engaged in violence as a general tactic, there have been individual times, instances, when certain parts of the labor movement had been willing to use violence. The IWW [Industrial Workers of the World], a radical labor union in the early twentieth century, was not as restrained as the American Federation of Labor. They believed in fighting back. They believed in sabotage, destroying property if necessary, as a tactic to combat the power of the employer. But I think it is fair to say that, in general, the labor movement was nonviolent.

* * *

The roughly twenty-five years from the Haymarket battle in Chicago to the election of Woodrow Wilson is often called the Progressive Period or the Progressive Era. Does it deserve the name, and are there things from that time that endure?

From the Haymarket Affair in 1886 to the election of Woodrow Wilson in 1912—to call those years the Progressive Period is a terrible commentary on the way we see history.

For one thing, that was the period of the greatest number of lynchings of black people in American history. An African American historian named Rayford Logan wrote a book about that period. He called it The Nadir, the low point in the history of race in the United States. So that is one way of looking at the Progressive Period.

Another thing that casts doubt on the name “Progressive Period” is that this was also a period of very intense labor struggles and very intense exploitation of labor. Immigrants were coming into the country and going to work in the mines and mills and factories. They were crowding into cities festering with disease and bad water. Lots of children were dying in the winter of cold and pneumonia. Hardly a progressive period.

It was called the Progressive Period for the same reason we very often give unlikely names to other historical periods. Because in the early twentieth century, some reform laws were passed by Congress—including the Federal Reserve Act, the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Amendments to the Constitution, the graduated income tax, and direct election of the Senate. You could point to certain progressive pieces of legislation, but the conditions of workers in factories, the conditions of people living in the slums of the cities—these did not warrant calling this the Progressive Period.

Now, sure, some things happened during that period that would give you some sense of the possibilities of change, some sense that people could react to their situation. I’m thinking now of the labor movement. I’m thinking of the rise of the Socialist Party. I’m thinking of the rise of the IWW. And of course it was at this time, in 1909, that the NAACP was formed.

The Socialist Party, the IWW, and the NAACP are indicators that, in one of the worst periods of American history, black people and working people did not simply take their situation passively. They rebelled.

The same period was also one of the great high tides of American immigration. August Spies, one of those charged in the Haymarket bombings, Emma Goldman, Samuel Gompers, John Lewis, Joe Hill, and a little later Marcus Garvey—they’re all immigrants. Many of them are American radicals, labor organizers. They’re movement leaders. But they also came to these shores from other places in the world. Not just a coincidence, is it?

No, it’s not a coincidence, because people who were forced out of other places in the world, or left voluntarily because they didn’t like what they were living through in those places, came to this country hoping that they would find a society that welcomed them. Instead, they found conditions as horrendous as conditions back in Europe.

Now, there were some immigrants who simply went back. One of the untold stories of American immigration is the percentage of immigrants who went back to their own countries after experiencing what was supposed to be the glories of American society.

But some of those who stayed became rebels against this society. You mention the name of August Spies, an anarchist, a radical, from Germany. Like other immigrants, he came to the United States hoping to find a better society, a more welcoming society, but instead he found exploitation of labor here, and the rule of the rich. He joined with other anarchists in Chicago in the 1880s, and they were quite a militant group.

Spies was one of the eight anarchist leaders who were rounded up in 1886 at the time of the Haymarket Affair. The Haymarket Affair is the name given to an event that occurred in early May 1886, when working people gathered in Haymarket Square in Chicago to protest the police killing of strikers that had taken place a few days before, during a demonstration for the eight-hour day.

This gathering of people at the Haymarket, which was addressed by anarchist leaders and other people, was attacked by the police although they were doing nothing but speaking. They were doing nothing violent. A great squadron of police marched onto the scene and attacked them. As the police advanced on the protesters, a bomb was thrown into the midst of the police, killing seven of them.

The reaction of Chicago’s political leadership and police was to immediately go out and arrest eight anarchists, none of whom could be found to have anything to do with the bomb. The idea was that whoever threw the bomb was probably incited by these anarchists, who called in no uncertain terms for meeting violence with violence.

Most of the eight anarchist leaders were foreign-born, with the exception of Albert Parsons, who was an important leader of the anarchist and labor movement in Chicago, and who actually had fought in the Civil War on the side of the Confederacy. He was a Southerner, but somehow he became radicalized as a labor leader and anarchist.

These eight men were sentenced to death, and in fact four of them were executed, including Parsons and August Spies. The execution of these four resounded very powerfully among class-conscious working people throughout the country.

You can find a kind of current that runs from one event to another, and from one event to another person’s consciousness. I’m thinking of Emma Goldman, who was to become an outrageous figure in early twentieth-century history, an anarchist feminist. Emma Goldman was a teenager working in a factory in Rochester, New York, when she learned of the execution of the four anarchists in Haymarket. She was not an anarchist. She was just a worker who was very intelligent and very keenly conscious of the terrible conditions under which working people lived.

The Haymarket Affair sparked something in her. It provoked her to leave her family and leave her job in Rochester to go to New York and meet with a little group of anarchists, and then to become a speaker, an organizer, a remarkable figure. She spoke out for garment workers in New York, against the terrible factory conditions, and for birth control and the rights of women. She was jailed many, many times. She remains today one of the relatively unknown figures in American history and yet to me is a very heroic figure. I went all through graduate school studying American history, and the name of Emma Goldman was never mentioned. As happens so often, you have to leave the classroom and go to the library.

So from that radicalizing experience of hearing about the Haymarket martyrs, Emma Goldman embarked on a long public career.

Yes, if the word career applies to a radical agitator and organizer. Emma Goldman went on from being angered by the execution of the anarchists in Chicago to become a very important figure in the history of American radicalism.

She gave a fiery speech during the economic crisis of 1893 in Union Square, speaking to a huge number of people. People were starving at that time, and one third of the working population was unemployed. In effect, she said, “Don’t bother petitioning, don’t bother trying to get laws passed. We need something right away. If your kids need food, go into the stores and take it.”

That is what anarchists believed in. They believed in direct action. They didn’t believe in petitions and lobbying, or voting and waiting for the right person to be voted into office to do the right thing. They believed in immediately acting against the source of the problem.

Emma Goldman went to prison many times. For that speech in Union Square, she was sentenced to two years in Blackwell’s Island. In 1892, she’d become involved in a plot to assassinate Henry Clay Frick.

Frick was manager of Carnegie Steel Company plants in Pittsburgh. There was a strike in Pittsburgh, and striking workers were gunned down. A little group of anarchists, including Emma Goldman, decided that, to show that the working class did not have to take their own victimization calmly, as a symbolic act, they would assassinate Henry Clay Frick.

Alexander Berkman was Emma Goldman’s companion and lover for a while, and one of those New York anarchists. He went to Pittsburgh to kill Frick. He was a good anarchist but a very poor shot. He failed and was sent to prison for a long time.

But Emma Goldman went on. She was so notorious that when President McKinley was assassinated in 1901, they immediately started looking for Emma Goldman, thinking that whoever assassinated McKinley, he had been provoked by somebody like her.

She played an important role in those early years of the twentieth century, but finally in World War I she reached the end of her activity when she was imprisoned for speaking out against the war. She and Alexander Berkman were both sent to prison, and when they got out, they were deported from the United States back to where they had been born, in Russia. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover himself went to the dock to make sure that they were put on the boat and sent out of the country.

Are these movements—the socialist movement, anarchism—are they American things, or are they kind of world hybrids? Rebels, radicals of various stripes had been pouring into the United States—the Sons of Ireland [Young Ireland], after their failed uprising on the island of Ireland, the refugees from the revolutions of 1848, Paris Communards, Giuseppe Garibaldi, José Martí, Leon Trotsky even—all were coming to the New World. Did they leave an influence that makes this not, strictly speaking, a totally American thing?

Well, certainly not a totally American thing. But also not a totally foreign thing.

It’s easy to put down these radical movements by saying these are just foreign agitators. The idea of maintaining control by ascribing opposition to foreign influence goes back to the period right after the American Revolution, when the Alien and Sedition Acts were passed and when revolutionary attitudes were ascribed to Irishmen who had just come back from Ireland, where they had been agitating for Irish independence from England, and to Frenchmen who were refugees from the French Revolution. So this was an old story.

It’s true that August Spies and Samuel Fielden and other members of the Haymarket group were from Europe. On the other hand, there was Parsons, who was a native-born American. There were foreign-born anarchists and also native-born anarchists. It has always been a mixture of native-born and foreign-born bound together in a common cause.

In the early days of the American labor movement, one of the tried and true ways to break strikes, to bust up organizing efforts, was to use either black people or immigrant scabs as strikebreakers. Why was that such an effective tactic?

It was effective for a couple of reasons. One, these immigrants were desperate for work, and black people were in the lowest economic strata. So if you offered them a wage higher than they’d been getting, they’d go to work and take the place of strikers.

Often they weren’t even told what they were doing. In the Colorado coal strike of 1914, strikebreakers—black and white—were brought in on trains whose windows were blacked out so they couldn’t see picketing going on. They were very often deceived. But it was most often desperation that led them to take the place of strikers.

Of course, this was also a way of building up anger and animosity between two groups of people both of whom really were the victims of the capitalist system. For the corporations and the employer class, it was useful and practical to hire immigrants and Negroes as strikebreakers.

It didn’t always work. There were times when black people and white people got together, as they did in New Orleans at the turn of the century. In the textile strike of 1912, the workers themselves were immigrants.

In one of its most glorious moments, the IWW played a role in bringing varied immigrant groups together in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1912, and holding out against the American Woolen Company and the other textile manufacturers, leading the strikers to victory. A victorious strike was a rare thing.

A century after the high-water mark of American socialism, why is it almost a secret that there were Socialist members of Congress and state legislatures and Debs got millions of votes for president?

The word socialism has lost its glamour. In the early part of the twentieth century, when the Socialist Party was a force and when people were elected as Socialists, socialism was something romantic and idealistic. It represents the idea of equality, the idea of companionship, of people getting together.

The Soviet Union’s emergence onto the world scene in the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, I believe, was the most important factor in leading to a new, very negative view of the very idea of socialism. It’s also true that the Socialist Party was broken by the attacks on it in World War I, when so many of its leaders went to prison for opposing the war. They came out of that period very much beaten back.

But the Soviet Union became the representative of socialism—and a more and more obviously poor one. In the 1930s and 1940s, when Stalinism became more clearly understood as a dictatorship—not a benign dictatorship of the proletariat as perhaps Marx had envisioned, but a dictatorship over the proletariat—it was very hard to expect people to gather around socialism as a unifying word.

However, to jump decades ahead, to 1989 and 1990 and the breakup of the Soviet Union, I think the fall of the Soviet Union created a new opening for the idea of socialism, because socialism had become identified with Stalinism, with tyranny and the gulag. The disappearance of the Soviet Union created an opportunity for socialism to reconstitute itself as an idea—to look back to the time of Eugene Debs, Mother Jones, Emma Goldman, Clarence Darrow, Jack London, Helen Keller, and the many other very famous Americans who were socialists.

* * *

During this same period that we’ve been talking about, the United States embarked on military actions overseas. It began with the war against Spain in 1898 and continued with the suppression of the Philippine rebellion and their war for independence. It then continued in Haiti, Nicaragua, throughout the Caribbean. What was going on there?

What is called the Age of Imperialism is seen as starting in 1898 with the Spanish-American War, that is, a war in Cuba against Spain.

But I think it’s fair to say that American imperialism started long before that. It started with the march across the continent, with the seizing of Indian lands. It started with one of the major ethnic cleansings, to use a current expression, of modern history—the taking away from the Indians of this enormous expanse of territory and turning that land over to white Americans who were moving westward from the Atlantic Ocean. The war with Mexico was part of that expansion. Manifest Destiny, the idea that it was the work of Providence, of God ordaining the United States government to become a mighty continental power from the Atlantic to the Pacific and down to the Gulf of Mexico—all that predated the Spanish-American War.

With the country now so large, and with industries turning out goods for which the domestic market was insufficient, and where there was a greater demand for the raw materials possessed by other countries, U.S. political and military leaders began to look overseas.

Cuba was a natural first target. It was so close, and there was a good excuse—that Spain was occupying Cuba. This has been a constant in American expansionism, finding a kind of humanitarian excuse. Of course, there is a half truth to it in that the Spanish were cruel occupiers of Cuba. And the United States did in fact, in a short war—what Secretary of State John Hay called a “splendid little war”—drive Spain out of Cuba.

Spain was gone. The United States and American corporations were in. United Fruit was in. American banks were in. American railroads were in. And the United States wrote parts of the Cuban constitution, giving it the right to intervene militarily in Cuba anytime.

This was the beginning of overseas expansion by the United States. At the very end of the war in Cuba, the United States turned its attention to the Philippines. While the 1898 war in Cuba is given a lot of attention in American history books, with a kind of romantic attention to Theodore Roosevelt marching up San Juan Hill and the Rough Riders and all that, the Philippine War is barely mentioned. Yet the Spanish-American War lasted three months, and the Philippine War lasted for years and years. And it was a bloody war in which at least half a million Filipinos died.

The war in the Philippines was in many ways a preview of the Vietnam War. Here was the United States sending an army and navy halfway around the world to subdue a local population. President McKinley explained his decision to take over the Philippines by saying that he got down on his knees and prayed to God to tell him what to do about the Philippines and God told him that it was his duty to civilize and Christianize the Filipinos. The Filipinos, of course, got a different message from God. They rebelled, holding out for years until they were finally subdued. There followed fifty years of American military occupation, and dictatorship after dictatorship in the Philippines.

This was only the start. In 1915, Woodrow Wilson sent an army into Haiti, the first black republic in the Western Hemisphere. Several thousand Haitians were killed, and the American occupation of Haiti lasted for nearly two decades. Wilson also sent troops into the Dominican Republic, another long occupation. This pattern of American military intervention in other countries continued. All through the early twentieth century, the marines were sent into countries in Central America, to Nicaragua and Panama.

But isn’t there something very different about the way the United States goes about this projection of power—unlike the British, who brought a state church and their flag and their laws and their army to India, Nigeria, southern Africa, East Africa; unlike the French, who colonized North Africa and parts of the Caribbean, and had members of their Chamber of Deputies who had seats in these far-flung places throughout the world. The United States didn’t annex or colonize Liberia or the Philippines or Central America or Venezuela or any of the other places in which Americans had extensive commercial interests. They just did business.

The United States came late onto the imperial scene. By the time the United States moved out of its continental limits into the world, it already had behind it the experiences of the older empires, of the British and French and German empires.

U.S. leaders understood that they didn’t have to colonize these places in the same way, so long as they controlled their economies and so long as the American military was ready to move in at crucial times to make sure governments were in power that would be friendly to American business interests.

For instance, in Central America and in the Caribbean, you don’t find colonization in the same way that the British colonized India or East Africa. But you find the marines moving into every country in Central America whenever there is a threat to a government that the United States is confident about, friendly with, and accustomed to.

And you do find periods of occupation. You find the United States going into Haiti in 1915 and staying there until 1934. When the Haitians rebel against American occupation, they are put down. This happens under Woodrow Wilson—and here’s another example of history being distorted. Wilson is portrayed generally in history as an idealist and a sort of moral person who is associated with the League of Nations and so on, but Wilson was ruthless in occupying Haiti and the Dominican Republic and in sending warships to Mexico to bombard the Mexican coast.

It was a more sophisticated kind of imperialism, but imperialism nevertheless. And today American imperialism takes the form of military bases all over the world, of American corporations being dominant in the affairs of other countries. It is in many ways a more pervasive kind of imperialism than existed in the old order and maybe more effective, because it doesn’t involve a constant occupation of troops, like the British occupying India. It only requires the occasional occupation of countries when other methods fail.

Nevertheless, American imperialism has the same fundamental characteristic of traditional European imperialism: the control of other people’s economies for the benefit of American business interests.

Now, in many of these cases—certainly in the Spanish-American War of 1898, again in putting down the rebellion in the Philippines, again in the American incursion into northern Mexico during the Civil War there—black troops were used very heavily by the American military. Did that have repercussions at home?

The use of black troops in the Philippines did have repercussions in the United States, as well as causing dissension in the ranks of soldiers in the Philippines. That was the result of black soldiers hearing their white fellow soldiers call the Filipinos niggers—and this very blatant racism in the American army shocked the black soldiers.

These black soldiers wrote letters to African American newspapers back in the United States complaining about this. And they were learning from the people back home about the riots and lynchings going on. Here were black soldiers supposedly fighting for freedom and democracy, and meanwhile members of their families were being lynched.

So there were repercussions. Part of the reason for the Niagara Movement and rising of the NAACP was this consciousness of imperialism, this consciousness of American power being used against people of color in other places in the world.

* * *

Should stories of resistance like the ones you’ve been telling force us to rethink conventional American history?

If you leave out the history of resistance, then what you get out of American history is a kind of toothless history. You get a history in which everything seems okay. You get the kind of history that leads Americans to say to one another, “This is the greatest country in the world. We have always done good things in the world.” Then they’re surprised when the United States is criticized by people in other countries.

Many Americans grow up believing that we have done nothing but good in the world. Then if they learn that we have in fact been an imperialist nation, that corporations have exploited the working class, and that we have a long history of slavery and racism, well, that is an awakening of consciousness. It’s very important, then, for people who are conscious of victimization to also become conscious of the fact that the victims did not always accept their situation humbly. That they resisted. That we had strikes and riots, and desertions from the army, and movements against the war. It’s important for Americans to know this, so that they understand that it is possible for people to resist. Whether Americans remain passive in the face of a government that ruins America’s reputation by what it does abroad, whether Americans remain passive in the face of a small number of powerful and rich people who seize control of the government and use it for their purposes—whether Americans remain passive in the face of all this is in part determined by what they know of their history.

People are desperately in need of support if they want to resist powers that are essentially immoral. They can get some of that support by learning this history of resistance, all through the American past.

I’m going to guess it’s quite difficult for a lot of Americans to square what they know of their own family history with this story of oppressors and victims and resisters. People don’t think of their Scandinavian forebears who were given farms by the American government in the Great Plains as oppressors; they think of them as people who went and farmed. People don’t think of their Slavic coal-miner ancestors or their Hungarian steelworker ancestors in Cleveland, or even more recent arrivals, as shareholders in a story of exploitation and oppression.

It’s certainly true that, for many people in this country, the history of their families is a story of success. Many people now own their own homes, can afford to go on vacation, and have cars and television sets and cell phones, all the paraphernalia of modern civilization. That is the great American middle class.

But there is also a very large underclass of people who are living under terrible conditions. They live in bad housing in cities all over the country, with inadequate medical care or none. These people work long hours for very little and have trouble feeding their families.

We have a middle class. I think that explains the lack of a revolutionary movement in the United States. That explains the relative stability of the American system. There obviously have been signs of rebellion and struggle, but still the system has maintained stability, and one of the reasons is that it has offered something to enough Americans to make them supporters of the system. And you might say they act as a buffer between the small number of very rich people and the large number who are desperate and struggling. So yes, I think we have to see both sides of this. We cannot explain the continued power of wealth in the American political system without understanding that the wealthy have been able to use the middle class, which has done pretty well, as a support for itself. The American system is ingenious, as it constantly skims off part of the working class and brings them into the middle class, making rebellion harder.

I see this, for instance, in what has happened to the black movement in this country. At the end of the period of the civil rights movement, the United States had a substantial black middle class—not a large part of the black population, perhaps 10 or 15 percent, but enough to take the edge off black rebellion. So black people moved into the business world, more of them went to college, more of them appeared on television and in media.

And yet 75 or 80 percent of the population still live in difficult circumstances. All you have to do is walk through any American city, and you’ll see a microcosm of American life. When you walk through the city of Boston, where I live, you’ll walk through neighborhoods that match your description of the contented American, the successful American—neighborhoods where people live in nice houses.

Then, if you’re a good walker, if you’re persistent, you will soon come to parts of the city that look as if a war has taken place there. You’ll see broken-down homes, you’ll see littered streets, and you’ll see the signs of unemployment. I am sure this is true not just in Boston; it’s true in New York, in Chicago, in Detroit and Los Angeles.

This country has the wealth to take care of everybody, to give everybody free health care, to give everybody free university education, to give everybody good housing. But it doesn’t do that, and this is probably in part because of the existence of this contented middle class.

You’ve just given us a tour of the vast divergence of interests, the different groups in the population opposed to each other, having mutually exclusive visions of the future. So, in your view, is there such a thing as an American national interest?

I don’t think there is a national interest. I think national interest is an example of one of those terms that’s used to suggest a unity of interests that doesn’t exist.

This starts right from the beginning, with the Founding Fathers. It starts with the Constitution, with the first words in the preamble to the Constitution, “We the People establish this constitution,” because it wasn’t “We the People,” it was fifty-five rich white men gathered in Philadelphia. There was no unified interest at that time. There were the slave owners and the slaves. There were the landlords and the tenants. There were the rich and the poor.

Those words “We the People” were a way of deceiving people into thinking that there was a national interest. The term national interest is what the novelist Kurt Vonnegut called a granfalloon (this is one of his invented words), which is sort of an artificial constellation of people, people who are artificially brought together but really don’t have any common interests.

I think that in order for Americans to progress, to change things, to not become victims anymore, they have to recognize that there are different interests—differences in status, differences in income—which if not recognized simply contribute to freezing the status quo.

We talked about the way Manifest Destiny jumped the border and headed out into the developing world in the early years of the twentieth century. Is the U.S. entry into World War I part of that same story?

The entry into World War I is another example of the pretense that we’re going to war for one reason, while there are other reasons that are not given to the American public. The pretense was that we were going to war because we wanted to make the world safe for democracy and because the Germans were attacking our ships on the high seas.

It’s interesting how often, in preparing the nation to go to war, a president first declares his intention not to go to war at all—because there is, I believe, a natural disinclination on the part of the public to send their young people to war. In 1916, Wilson was reelected president with the slogan “There is such a thing as being too proud to fight.”

Wilson was not going to get us into war in 1916, but then he’s elected, and in 1917 he gets us into war. It was presented as total evil on one side and total good on the other side. The Kaiser was total evil, and had committed atrocities. Our side, the British and French side, was okay. Of course, on our side was the British Empire and the French Empire, people who massacred the native people in India and Africa. Part of the propaganda was that the Germans were committing atrocities against the Belgians, but Belgium was responsible for the deaths of at least a million people in the Belgian Congo.

My point is that this was a war of imperial countries against one another, fighting for possession and control of various parts of the world. But it was presented as a war for democracy and liberty.

In World War I, over four years of war, 10 million soldiers died. And at the end of it, nobody could really figure out why the war was fought.

There was a movement inside the United States of resistance against the war. The Socialist Party and the IWW both opposed it. Two thousand people were prosecuted for speaking out against the war. Congress had passed the Espionage Act, which was not really about espionage. The Espionage Act made it a crime to say anything or print anything that would discourage recruitment or enlistment in the armed forces. If you spoke out against the war, against American entrance into World War I, you were violating the Espionage Act. Eugene Debs made a speech in Ohio against the war, and he was sentenced to ten years in prison.