“They Began to Organize”: The Twentieth Century and Beyond
What happened in the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot? And maybe you could also tell me what life was like for black people in places like Oklahoma at that time.
The Tulsa Race Riot is one of those events like so many—very dramatic, very important, and yet somehow not mentioned in traditional histories. The memory of it was actually wiped out. It was part of a wave of anti-black riots that took place in the United States right after World War I. There had been another really deadly attack against black people in East St. Louis in 1917, but after the war there were many such riots all over the country.
They usually started with one incident that fueled anger and hysteria. In this case, a black kid in Tulsa was accused of molesting a white woman. It was very unclear whether this had really happened or not, but a number of black people gathered around where this kid was being held to protect him from lynching. They were armed, because they expected trouble. Seventy-five black people were there, but about fifteen hundred armed whites gathered around and immediately rampaged. And essentially the black neighborhood in Tulsa was destroyed. It was really as if a war had taken place. How many people died in that riot, nobody knows exactly.
Then the records were destroyed. It seemed like a scene out of Gabriel García Márquez, where a huge massacre takes place, and then all evidence of it is gone. And nobody seems to want to know about it.
These riots had a very powerful effect on the black community. I suspect that some of the important literature and art that came out of the black community after the war was in some way inspired and provoked by what happened. After the riot in East St. Louis in 1917, the great black performer Josephine Baker went to France. She said, “The very idea of America makes me shake and tremble and gives me nightmares.”
One thing they have in common—they seem to come at a time when these black communities that are attached to part of the commercial life of midsize cities around the country, when the population gets to a certain level, there is a growing sense of the presence of this parallel black city within a city. Then with the excuse of sexual indiscretion running like a strong undercurrent, involving young black men and white women, it starts. Even though its roots seem to have more to do with real estate and population levels than with sex, sex is often the excuse. It’s almost pathological.
There is nothing that arouses hatred more than the idea that some alien person, some person of another race, has somehow violated people in your pure race. So yes, sex has been very often a critical element in the beginning of a riot or some sort of outbreak of violence. But economics is very important in all of this. Sex may have been the excuse, but very often there were other resentments. Very often it was the fact that whites were having trouble getting jobs and they saw black people coming in and taking their jobs.
As we look back over the history of the last century, should we be focused more on the fact that this history was almost completely erased and lost, or more on the fact that now people are in good faith trying to re-create the story—to find out exactly what happened and why it happened?
I think both are important. I think it is important to know and to be conscious of how important events in history are erased. We should be conscious of the stories today that may be wiped out of memory ten years from now, because the problem of obliterating pieces of the past is not a problem of the past. It is a continuing problem.
It’s important to be aware of the fact that you have been deprived of important pieces of history. At a certain point you begin to learn about these things. It gives you at least a modicum of confidence that, after a while, the erased is beginning to reappear and it’s possible to begin to unearth things that were intended to be buried.
White people of goodwill are involved in this project, too, not just black people trying to document their own past.
There is no question that white people of goodwill and black people have both worked to reconstitute those events that have been hidden from view. And that is encouraging. There were always white people in the South who understood what was going on and tried in some way to counteract that.
The conventional tellings of American history often portray the Great Depression as an aberration, a sudden descent into economic calamity from the relatively prosperous efflorescence of the Jazz Age. But in A People’s History, you tell a very different story about the roots of the Great Depression being very much in the 1920s.
The idea that the Great Depression of the 1930s was an aberration in an otherwise prolonged march of prosperity in the United States is itself simply false. There had been depressions, and severe ones, all through American history from the early nineteenth century on. The Depression of 1873 was one of the causes of the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. There was a Great Depression in 1893; I mentioned the fact that Emma Goldman was imprisoned for addressing people in New York who were in desperate trouble because of the economic crisis of 1893.
I became aware of this myself after studying history—and you would think that somebody who studies history on the graduate level is now really a master and knows everything. Of course, what you discover is that there are things you don’t know, things that even your most advanced courses in history would not tell you. I did not learn a certain important truth about the pre-Depression years, about the 1920s, until I began doing research on the life and career of Fiorello La Guardia. I was doing my doctoral dissertation and I came across the papers of Fiorello La Guardia, which had just been deposited in the Municipal Archives of New York City by his widow.
La Guardia was a congressman in the 1920s, representing a district in East Harlem. I was reading all of the letters that had been sent to La Guardia in the 1920s, in the age of prosperity, the Jazz Age, this period that still is remembered that way. There were people writing letters saying, “My husband is out of work. They have turned off the electricity, ’cause we can’t pay the bill. My kids are going hungry.” And when I looked into other parts of the country, I realized that although it wasn’t a depression in the strictest sense, the 1920s was a period of great wealth on one side and poverty on another side.
What that did for me—and I think this is what history very often does—was make me wonder if what I had learned about that period was true also of other periods.
I was writing about this in the 1950s, and I realized that the 1950s are not considered a period of tough economic deprivation for most Americans. But I wondered, is there an underside to the 1950s? I read Michael Harrington’s book The Other America, and that is exactly what he was talking about. Here in the so-called prosperous 1950s there were people suffering all over the country. So yes, the Great Depression was indeed a low point, but it doesn’t mean that the other periods preceding it and after it were high points.
It’s funny how master narratives get built, and even in the face of all kinds of other evidence, you just can’t pierce the armor of that master narrative. When you think about the sepia-toned silent movie footage that runs through Jazz Age storytelling, those people doing the Charleston, the tops being knocked off of champagne bottles, and so on—they don’t intersperse that with mounted soldiers ousting people out of tents during the Bonus Marches. Those Bonus Marchers were working-men who just couldn’t make it in 1920s America.
It’s interesting that you talk about the Bonus Army, because that is certainly something known to people who know history. But most Americans don’t know about the Bonus Army, even though it was a very, very dramatic moment in American history at the very beginning of the Great Depression.
It was only thirteen years after the end of World War I, and these veterans were now probably in their thirties, and they had families. And they were suffering. They had been promised money, they had been promised a bonus, as veterans are always given promises.
If you are going to risk your limbs, you have to be given promises, so the veterans had been given promises that at least they would get a bonus after the war. But a bonus was never given to them, and now that they were hungry, they organized what was called a Bonus Army. They came from all over the country, thousands of them, came in every which way they could—riding the rails, hitchhiking, whatever. They arrived in Washington and encamped across the Potomac River from the Capitol. They set up tents there, and they wanted to be a visible presence in Washington, to say to Congress, “We want our bonus.”
Herbert Hoover was president. I don’t know if any other president would have behaved differently. I don’t know, if we had had a Democratic president at that time, if he would have behaved differently. But what Hoover did was to send the army to destroy their camp and drive them out of there. It was one of the most shameful episodes in modern American history.
Now, maybe it had some effect on Franklin D. Roosevelt. Maybe he decided when he came into office in 1933 that you couldn’t simply send the army to suppress people who were in dire economic straits. I think Roosevelt was more sensitive than Hoover, and probably Roosevelt was more sensitive than any president that followed him in regard to the plight of people.
The country was in turmoil in the 1930s when Roosevelt came into office. There were strikes all over the country. There were riots. There were people breaking into places where there was food. There were children marching into city halls demanding that they be fed and taken care of. Tenants were organizing and refusing to be evicted, bringing furniture back into the homes after it had been taken out to the street. It was a country that was in a state of near-revolution, something that very much worried the people in Washington.
Certainly Roosevelt was sensitive to this. The New Deal was the result of it—the result of the combination of Roosevelt’s sensitivity and the events, the uproar, the rebellions taking place all over the country, which he had to take notice of.
It sounds as though, in part, you think the New Deal was done to forestall revolution. I guess historians have different points of view that we could graph out on a continuum, from the belief that he saved the country because he wanted to save the people, to a more cynical take that he saved capitalism because he realized it was having a nervous breakdown but really wasn’t all that interested in saving the people per se.
I would probably argue that there was truth in both sides. This sounds as if I am a moderate, compromising, finding the center between two points of view, but I wouldn’t give equal weight to both analyses. I think, yes, Roosevelt was saving capitalism, no question about that—and I think he was conscious of that too.
I think he was saving the system that he believed in from revolution, from very deep trouble, but I think he also was a human being responding to the plight of people. He may not have responded so easily if there hadn’t been all this turmoil and threat to the system, but there was something in Roosevelt that wanted to do some good.
I think probably one of the elements that should be considered in assessing Roosevelt is that he had a wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, who was actually more sensitive than he was to the plight of poor people. She had been a social worker on the Lower East Side of New York; she had actually been among the poor. You can’t say this about Roosevelt himself. She had a better grasp of how poor people lived, of how black people were suffering in a racist society, and I think she was a good influence on Franklin Roosevelt.
The personal reminiscences of people who lived through those times feature a very strong narrative undercurrent of “We did what we had to to get through.” There was a lot of sharing, a lot of digging deep and figuring out ways to get over—a story of self-reliance, you might say. How does that mesh with the tremendous flowering at the same time of relief programs, of direct supply of nutrition, of work, of public works projects and all that? How do those two narratives move together on parallel tracks?
People like to think of themselves as self-reliant. It’s a part of American culture that people will take care of themselves, will not depend on other people, but will take a certain pride in not being dependent on the government.
But it’s also true that when people become desperate enough, that pride and self-reliance break down. They will accept the fact that, for survival, they need the government. My family was a poor family, a working-class family, living in Brooklyn at that time. My father and mother were both garment workers, then factory workers. Then my father was a waiter. Now, in the Depression, he couldn’t find jobs as a waiter. And they were proud people. They had always worked hard to keep the family alive.
I have a vivid memory of seeing my mother standing on the line where they were giving out food baskets. When later I reminded my mother of that, I recall that she shook her head. She said, “No, I never did that.”
But the New Deal also fostered a kind of cooperation and collectivity. When I spoke about the people in the neighborhood getting together to stop an eviction, to bring furniture of an evicted family back into the house—this was people helping one another.
New Deal programs brought people together. The WPA brought people together on work projects, whether it was planting trees or cleaning up places in the country. The Federal Arts Program was a magnificent achievement of the New Deal, which has not been matched since, because for the first time artists were not simply left to the whims of the free market.
The New Deal brought writers together in cooperative enterprises, producing books. It brought artists together, making murals. It brought people together in the theater, creating hundreds of plays under the Federal Theatre Project.
So it was a period where you might say, in a certain sense, people learned to rely on government help, but they also developed in many ways a very warm, cooperative spirit.
I find the stories that people tell of that time to be as revealing as what really happened. I wonder sometimes if that story of self-reliance in the Depression gives us a problem in seeing what really happened. Rarely do you hear people talk about the unusual level of family dissolution that went on during those times. Men in the hundreds of thousands walked out of homes, left children, left wives. There were small armies of unattached children in the big cities of America, young people who had nobody looking out for them, in part because of the economic calamity of that time.
We really were having a social nervous breakdown. Seattle, San Francisco, New York, and other big port cities were filling up with unattached men. Railroad camps were filled with family men who now were suddenly at loose ends.
By telling ourselves that we hunkered down and pulled through, don’t we sort of blunt the heartbreaking, horrifying truth of what went on during the economic meltdown?
It is very hard to recapture the real depth of suffering and the breakup of family ties that happened. People left their homes and went to other places in the country to find work. Families were broken up, and children were given over to other families or were left to the care of the state. So, yes, the real intensity of those stories sometimes gets lost as time goes on, and the retelling loses some of the reality.
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Moving ahead to World War II, which is often called the Good War. It is often remembered as one of the times when people stood shoulder to shoulder and the country was unified against a common enemy.
But one part of the story that sort of sticks out is the internment of Japanese Americans and Japanese nationals living in the United States. Is that all of a piece, in your view, with the history of Asian settlement in the United States, or is it an aberrant story, something that really wasn’t in the American past?
The internment of Japanese and Japanese Americans, which took place right after Pearl Harbor, was a more traumatic event in terms of anti-Japanese, anti-Asian feeling than anything else we can point to in American history. But it was not alone. There has always been anti-immigrant feeling in the United States. We had the Chinese Exclusion Act, which was passed in the late nineteenth century to keep the Chinese out of the country. And Asians had always faced discrimination in this country in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
So what happened in World War II was not an isolated fact, but the attack on Pearl Harbor created a special situation of hysteria in which the War Department falsified information to suggest that all Japanese on the West Coast might be couriers and spies giving signals to Japanese naval vessels.
One of the most terrible things of Roosevelt’s administration was the order he signed to remove these Japanese families, to uproot them from their homes on the West Coast, 110,000 of them, and put them in these camps.
It was certainly not an event in American history to make us proud. It was one of the events of World War II that might lead you to at least question the purity of that war.
Here is a war fought against Hitler, one of the great racists of history, and yet the United States in fighting this war committed this racist act of putting these hundred thousand and more people in these camps. And in the midst of this war, black soldiers were segregated from white soldiers.
I was in the Air Force, and I confess that I wasn’t conscious of racial segregation, until one day in basic training at Jefferson Barracks, in Missouri, I suddenly found myself in the midst of black soldiers. They had been invisible to me in the way that black people are so often invisible to white people.
What happened to the Japanese, and the segregation of black people—these things made me begin to question more and more the whole notion of a Good War.
I was a bombardier in the war. I had just come back from England; the war was over in Europe, and I and my crew were slated to go to Japan. I had a thirty-day leave and had been married just before I went overseas and my wife and I were going on a little vacation. We stopped near a bus stop, and there was this headline, ATOMIC BOMB DROPPED ON HIROSHIMA. I remember my feeling at the time: Well, this is good. This will end the war. I won’t have to go to Japan, and I won’t have to fly missions in Asia.
Well, after the war, I read John Hersey’s book Hiroshima. He had gone into Hiroshima and interviewed the survivors of the atomic bomb. You can imagine what those survivors looked like. They were people without arms, people without legs; they were blind; they were people whose skin you could not bear to look at.
He had talked to these people and described what they told him. He was a wonderful journalist, and as I read this for the first time, I who had dropped bombs on various cities in Europe, for the first time I realized what bombing does to human beings. I began to think about what had happened to people when I dropped those bombs, because when you fly at thirty thousand feet, as we did over cities in Europe, you don’t see anything down below. You don’t see human beings. You don’t see blood. You don’t hear screams. You don’t see kids with their limbs torn off. It is possible not to really understand what you are doing.
I then began to look into the bombing of cities in Europe. I learned that the bombing of civilian populations was deliberate. There was a deliberate strategy to bomb the working-class districts of cities, to destroy the morale of the German people. And that is why sixty thousand people could be killed in one raid in Hamburg or Frankfurt, and perhaps a hundred thousand in Dresden in the spring of 1945.
The work of the historian is to see the world from thirty thousand feet and the world at ground level, together, and make some sort of coherent understanding out of it. You think with regret about the work you did in World War II, but wasn’t it necessary to win the war? Should you have not bombed those places? Should we have not defeated Hitler? I’m not sure I understand what the final moral count is.
Well, I don’t agree with the moral calculus that says this was terrible, and that was terrible, and this was intolerable, but it had to be done. I think it’s more complicated than that. When people want me to give a very simple judgment, after putting all of the evidence together—Was it good? Was it bad? Was it justified? Was it unjustified? I cannot give that simple judgment.
What I can say is that I refuse simply to push all of that aside and say, “Well, it was necessary,” as people push Hiroshima and Nagasaki aside and say, “Oh, they were necessary.” When I actually looked into whether Hiroshima and Nagasaki were necessary, I found they weren’t necessary.
Was Hitler evil? Of course, and Mussolini was evil, and the Japanese Empire was evil. Yet that should not lead to the acceptance of the huge number of atrocities we committed. And that is what we were doing; we were committing atrocities. We probably killed six hundred thousand ordinary Germans. They weren’t Hitler. They were ordinary Germans.
We killed an equal number, probably six hundred thousand Japanese civilians. We killed a hundred thousand ordinary Japanese men, women, and children in Tokyo in one firebombing. When you add all of that up and you say, “Well, but it had to be done because we had to beat Hitler”—I don’t think we can come to that simple a judgment.
I think we have to reconsider it, not because we can go back in time and change history, but so that we don’t today make the error of looking at atrocities that we may commit when we bomb cities in the Middle East, or that we committed when we bombed people in Vietnam, and say, “Well, it had to be done in Vietnam to stop communism,” or “It has to be done in the Middle East to stop terrorism.” I think we need to reconsider World War II because we have to learn something about the world today and how we’re behaving today.
I came out of that war and at a certain point, I came to the conclusion that war itself should not be tolerated, not even a so-called Good War, not even a war against an evil enemy. Because war is inevitably the indiscriminate killing of large numbers of innocent people, and I don’t think it can be morally justified.
Now sure, evil has to be resisted, it’s true, but why should we accept the belief that evil can be resisted only by war? We have seen instances in our own time in which apparently powerful dictatorships have fallen without war. Tyrants die, empires overextend themselves, people rise up in such numbers that dictatorships suddenly topple. Apartheid was done away with in South Africa without the bloody civil war that people very often imagined would have to take place in order to end apartheid. So I don’t think we should so easily accept the immorality of our actions and justify them on the grounds that they were necessary to defeat Hitler.
The ratio of civilians killed to military personnel killed has risen constantly since World War II. In World War I, it was probably 90 percent military and 10 percent civilians; in World War II, it was more like 50 percent military and 50 percent civilians. Since then, the ratio has gone up to 80 percent or 85 percent civilians killed in war. That cannot be justified.
Something else occurred to me in the years following World War II, and that is that war is a quick fix. Violence is a way of solving something quickly. It is satisfying in that sense—like a drug. The drug may give you a high, but then you come off it.
I received a letter after World War II from General George C. Marshall. It’s not exactly a personal letter. Sent to 16 million GIs, the letter said, “Congratulations, we have won the war—it will be a new world.” But it wasn’t a new world. Hitler and Mussolini were gone, but fascism, dictatorships, and military autocracies still existed all over the world. Racism was not gone from the world, and war certainly was not gone.
So I came to the conclusion that we can no longer accept war as a way of solving problems. In fact, you might say that this is the great challenge before the human race in our time: how to solve problems of tyranny, aggression, and injustice without killing huge numbers of people.
Are you suggesting in your view of World War II that, despite our memory of it as a war that united all Americans, the resistance you see throughout American history didn’t stop in the 1940s? Are you suggesting that there was no national consensus during World War II?
I think there was a national consensus in support of World War II among Americans, but the extent of that consensus changed over time. Let’s put it another way. At the beginning of the war, even after the war had started in Europe, most Americans did not want anything to do with it. There was a fundamental repugnance against war unless you feel you’re defending yourself. Roosevelt ran for office in 1940 on a pledge that he would not bring the United States into war.
But then the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, creating an atmosphere of fear, which created the possibility then for mobilizing a country that had been reluctant to go to war.
There were still people who didn’t go along with the war, people from different sides of the political spectrum. There were America Firsters, a right-wing group who thought that the United States should not get involved. There were pro-Nazi sympathizers, the German American Bund, active in the United States, which was actually admiring of Hitler. Then on the extreme other side, there were pacifists, people who simply did not believe in war. Several thousand pacifists who refused to be drafted went to prison during World War II.
The Communist Party was in support of the war, but there was another, smaller left-wing group, the Trotskyists or Socialist Workers Party, who were opposed to the war. Some of them were in fact prosecuted and sent to prison because of their opposition.
I think it’s fair to say it was probably the most popular war in American history. There was more dissension, more disagreement in the Revolutionary War than in World War II.
And it has remained the most popular war. When Studs Terkel did his oral histories of veterans and other people who lived in that period, he called his book “The Good War”—and if you look closely, you’ll see he put quotation marks around “Good War,” because when he actually talked to people, he found it wasn’t unanimous.
I have found in speaking to people all over the country that it is very hard to talk about World War II and say anything critical about it. Yet there are people who served in the war who have written to me to say, “You know, I feel the way that you do.” There is a man who lives in Denver who was badly wounded in World War II in Europe, and he wrote to me to say, “I just don’t believe in war anymore.” So there are individuals who question the simple goodness of that war—and of any war, really.
I think the most hurtful legacy of the war is that the memory of the “Good War” has been used to justify any war. That’s the most dangerous thing about the memory of World War II. We can’t do anything about World War II anymore. It’s gone. Good or bad, it’s gone. But its recollection as a Good War has been used to create analogies, to say our enemy today is like Hitler. Ho Chi Minh is like Hitler. Noriega is like Hitler. Saddam Hussein is like Hitler. And not to fight is like being Neville Chamberlain and appeasing. All these analogies to World War II are ways of getting people to support war, even though the situations are very different from World War II.
The pattern in your storytelling about American history seems to feature a certain amount of pushback from rank-and-file Americans, which is then suppressed. Pushback, suppression. The suppression of slave revolts. The flowering of Reconstruction and then its suppression. The use of World War I to suppress various radical movements in the interwar period. Does World War II fall into that pattern? Was there a way in which World War II gave those in power the upper hand to push back down on things that were happening during the Great Depression?
War gives the government an opportunity to do what it would like to do all the time—to control oppositional movements and suppress dissonant opinion. This was true of World War II also.
We saw that in the Cold War, too, after the Soviet Union rose out of World War II to rival the power of the United States. The existence of the Soviet Union and the exaggerated threat of communism created an atmosphere that enabled the government, even under Truman, to compel government employees to sign loyalty oaths in order to attain their jobs. The FBI’s powers expanded enormously. We put people in jail for refusing to talk to congressional committees about their political affiliations.
This raises the prospect of a government that assumes dictatorial power over the thinking of the population, and dictatorial control of the population—with defense of this control resting on the idea that we are in danger and therefore cannot have the democratic liberties that you think the Bill of Rights gives us.
War is a poisoning of the mind. War poisons everybody who is engaged in it.
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In recounting these episodes and the long haul of American history, you have delivered a pretty tough critique of this country and its past. Is there any country that has gotten it right? Is there any country that’s delivered justice to its people and security to its workers? One that’s been fair where you have seen the United States as being unfair?
When you criticize the government of the United States harshly as I’ve done, criticize its foreign and domestic policy, you are asked the question, “Do you know of a better place?” The assumption is that, if all other places in the world are flawed, if you can’t find a really good society, then we must be the best. I don’t accept that. I don’t think there is a really good society anywhere in the world. We live in a world of imperfect societies. There are terrible societies. There are places that are much more repressive of their populations than the United States, and certainly there are places that have much more severe poverty than the United States.
However, there are also places that have better social systems, that have better health systems than the United States. There are countries that take better care of their children, their old people, and their unemployed.
And if you look at the figures given out by the United Nations, by the World Health Organization, you’ll find that in the ranking of countries with fair health programs, programs that will take care of the poor as well as the rich, the United States ranks twentieth in the world. In infant mortality, there are twenty-five countries that have lower rates of infant mortality. One out of every five children in the United States is born poor. There are countries with much better literacy rates than the United States.
Of course, there are many countries that are worse.
We have over 2 million people in prison in the United States. We have the highest rate of incarceration of any country in the world. There must be something wrong when you have 2 million people in prison, plus another 6 to 8 million people who have been in prison or are on probation.
There is another way in which the United States is probably worse than any other country in the world at present, and that is the extent to which it has used its military power to invade other countries and to kill faraway people who are no threat to us. The U.S. government has been doing this ever since the Spanish-American War.
My point is that I don’t think it’s necessary to find a totally good society somewhere in the world in order to be critical of what we have in the United States. I don’t think we should measure ourselves against dictatorships. We should measure ourselves against an ideal, against what we would like our country to be.
You are not anti-American when you criticize the United States. It is part of democracy to live in this country and to be critical of what you see, as well.
If you were to give us a short action plan, what are some of the things that you would like to see the country do, to do better by its poor people, by its working people?
We are a very rich country, and I believe there are things we can do that we haven’t done. We can have free universal health care for everybody—and I don’t mean one of these complicated health-care systems like the one Hillary Clinton proposed in 1993, a thousand pages long and designed to keep the insurance companies in the game.
I don’t mean the present system. I don’t mean any health system where you have to deal with insurance companies, make co-payments, or fill out forms. When I talk about a universal health-care system, I think of the time that I was in Air Force training and caught pneumonia out in California. There were no antibiotics at that time, but they had just discovered sulfa drugs. I was close to death, but sulfa drugs saved me.
I didn’t have to fill out forms. I didn’t have to pay any money. People in the military get good free medical care. Why can’t everybody get this? Sure, the government has to pay, but it’s a simple, clear, efficient, egalitarian system, and everybody gets medical care.
There are countries where this is true. I got sick in Italy, and even though I was a foreigner, I was getting free medical care. I was in France, and the same thing happened to me. We could afford it if we weren’t spending $500 billion a year on war and military preparations.
We could afford it if we had a truly progressive income tax, not the tax system we have now, in which wealth rises toward the top because of the tax breaks at the top. If we had a truly progressive tax system, we would be freeing hundreds of billions of dollars a year that we could spend on universal health care. We could spend some of it on guaranteeing paid work to people who lose their jobs. The government could do what the New Deal did in 1930s—provide jobs to the unemployed. We have the money, but we’re just wasting it—wasting it on war, wasting it by giving it to the richest 1 percent of the population.
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After you learned about the violent, ugly events leading up to the Revolution—the massacre of the Indians, the diaries of de las Casas and the oppression of Columbus, mutiny, class conflict, Shays’ Rebellion—why didn’t you just walk away from the research and pick a new topic? This is pretty grim stuff.
It is grim stuff, and yet there is another side to it. There are always people who recognize what is wrong and try to do something about it. De las Casas doing something to expose Columbus. People in the Revolutionary Army mutinying against the conditions that the privates endured. The rebels of Shays’ Rebellion, the small farmers, acting out of their needs. That is what has inspired me.
When you think about the events of the first half of the twentieth century—the movement against World War I, the Tulsa Race Riot, Helen Keller’s outspokenness, postwar black organizing, Frank Emi and the Japanese internment—does it get more difficult because you actually have personal memories of some of these historic events and saw some of them? Is it harder to get the necessary distance?
I guess I don’t want distance (laughs). I’ve never thought that distance gives you a truer picture. In fact, I’ve always thought the opposite. I thought that the closer you could get to a story, the more you were personally involved in it, the more truths you’d find that you would not get at a distance. It has been a greater education for me to combine the history I read in books with the history I’ve experienced in my own life.
So it’s not more difficult to separate out your own feelings, to open yourself up to new truths about things that you remember personally?
I would like to think that, although I have had formative experiences—in the Depression, World War II, and the postwar period—I like to think that I’ve been listening to other people, also.
If other people have experiences different from mine, I want to listen to theirs. I don’t want to have a view of history that’s narrowed by my own relationship to it. It’s a challenge to do that—to combine the memories of others with your own memory and come out, not with a simple picture but with a more complex picture.
I think people who haven’t looked deeply into the history of both the civil rights movement and the labor movement might assume that they are natural allies. Have they been? Have there been moments when black workers have had to demand that the labor movement recognize them and understand their struggle?
There has been a very complex relationship between black people and white people in the labor movement. When the CIO [Congress of Industrial Organizations] rose as a rebel organization in the labor movement in the 1930s, it did what the AF of L [American Federation of Labor] never succeeded in doing—organizing black workers and bringing them together with white workers. This happened in the rubber plants and the auto plants and steel plants, and you saw black and white workers getting together in the meat-packing industry, and forming these new industrial unions, which carried on the great strikes of the 1930s.
When I was eighteen and nineteen years old, working in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, black people as well as unskilled white people were not allowed into the AF of L craft meetings. And black people were assigned the toughest jobs. But I am very impressed with the fact that there are certain times in history when the divisions between black people and white people are overcome and they work together against a common enemy.
In Tennessee, the Highlander Folk School was a sort of oddity in the South, a little oasis in the midst of racial segregation where black people and white people got together, went to classes together, and studied history together. There working people and trade unionists, black and white, met in, you might say, a little protected enclave in the South. That to me was a glimpse of what might be possible.
What was the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM)?
The Dodge Revolutionary Movement was a movement mostly of black workers in the Dodge plants in the auto industry who became convinced that they had to organize themselves.
It was an instance of what became known as Black Power—the belief that black people had to organize their own groups in order to defend their rights, that white people would dominate integrated groups and the interests of black people would be subordinated. They were a force and an inspiration to black workers.
But did that hinder the work of the UAW, which was trying to represent war workers in the auto union, in the auto industry?
I think it was temporarily troublesome for the United Auto Workers. In the short run, it created some dissension and hostility. But I think in the longer run, it had a positive effect, in making white workers more conscious of the needs of black workers, more conscious of the need for equal pay for black and white workers.
Separatist movements, while they are not the solution for the human race, very often serve a function of at least temporarily giving a kind of self-respect and dignity to people who have been overlooked. This was true of DRUM, and it was true of the black separatist movement of the 1960s and 1970s.
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Moving on to the Vietnam War, was there frequent rebellion in the ranks of soldiers fighting in Southeast Asia? Was there resistance there as in other wars?
There was probably more resistance to the Vietnam War in the military ranks than to any other war in American history. It is hard to measure, because there were no large-scale mutinies as in the Revolutionary War.
Rebellion in the ranks of the soldiers in Vietnam was continuous as the war went on, as it became more unpopular at home, as the number of casualties grew, and as recognition spread that there was something wrong with this war. There were hundreds of fragging incidents, in which GIs rolled grenades under the tents of their officers—and this is something that most Americans to this day know very little about.
Rebellion took many forms. It took the form of soldiers taking drugs; it took the form of desertions, a remarkable number of desertions. It took the form of soldiers refusing to go out in the field, of soldiers wearing black armbands to signify their solidarity with the antiwar movement at home.
This revolt inside the ranks then manifested itself when these veterans came back from Vietnam and formed a group called Vietnam Veterans Against the War. They assembled at the Capitol in Washington in 1971, when the war was still going on, and they threw their medals over a fence into a pile, to dramatize their opposition to the war.
The movement against the Vietnam War is seen as a student movement, but if there is any one factor that may have been most important in making the U.S. government realize that it could not carry on the war, it was an army that was becoming more and more rebellious.
Thirty years after the evacuation of Saigon, you can still get into a pretty good argument about whether the United States was defeated in Vietnam, but whatever it was, it certainly wasn’t a victory. Did the U.S. government learn anything from that experience?
I think the U.S. government learned a lot from that experience. I think it was forced to learn. After all, it was confronting a situation that was hardly to be believed. The United States was always the victor in war. And here we had actually lost one. We have to admit that.
I think this caused a lot of reflection in high government circles. They didn’t want to give up the idea of American military intervention in other parts of the world, and yet they didn’t want the same thing to happen that happened in Vietnam. And so what they learned from the Vietnam War was that if they were going to have more military interventions, they had better be short. They’d better not last long enough for an antiwar movement to develop.
It took several years before the American public turned against the war. When the war began in 1965, two-thirds of the American people supported the war. Three years later, two-thirds of the American people opposed the war. That was a very dramatic turnaround.
So the government decided that we’re going to have short wars. We are going to have “splendid little wars”—and what could be shorter than President Reagan’s war in Grenada?
It was almost laughable that this tiny Caribbean island was perceived as a threat to the United States. All sorts of propaganda disseminated by the United States said it was going to be used as a Cuban or Soviet military base. Alternatively, the invasion was explained as a way to save Americans who were in the medical school and had to be evacuated, and so on.
How much military resistance are they going to get on the island of Grenada? Virtually none—it was a great military victory.
There was a short war in Panama under George Bush Sr. Then in 1991, a very short war against Iraq, lasting a couple of months. So they learned from the Vietnam War that you mustn’t give the American population a chance to think about what is happening and to reconsider whether the reasons the government is giving you for the war are valid.
One of the other things they learn from the Vietnam War is that they must do a better job of selling the war to the American people, and to do that they must have better control over the information that becomes public. In Grenada, Panama, and Iraq, they made great attempts to control the information that was given out by journalists to the American public. In the current war in Iraq, they did a very interesting thing. They decided to entice journalists into believing that they would get a better story if they embedded themselves in the American military. This is a way of suggesting to reporters that they’ll get a more accurate story because they will be right there in the middle of things, but it’s also a way of controlling them.
But for all the dismay and the regrouping that had to be done inside American institutions after the Vietnam War, there would seem to be no question that America still reserved to itself the right to remove governments, to go beyond its shores, and to use military force around the world.
That is absolutely true. The government was not going to be daunted by its loss in Vietnam. If the United States government was going to remain a world power, we would need to feel free to intervene in the affairs of other countries.
But I also think that one of the lessons learned from the Vietnam War is to avoid intervening overtly with military force. If possible, do it surreptitiously—do it covertly.
In 1976 the report of the Church Committee of the Senate included a volume called Covert Action in Chile 1963–1973. The United States did not like the government of Chile. Chile had elected a socialist named Salvador Allende. Instead of sending a military force, as we had done again and again in Latin America in the early part of the century, and later in Vietnam, the Nixon administration decided to overthrow the Allende government by covert action—by secret actions to support the opposition and encourage a military coup. In 1973, the coup succeeded, and Allende was overthrown.
Covert action became notorious when the Reagan administration gave support to the counter-revolutionaries in Nicaragua, who were working to overthrow the left-wing revolutionary government that had taken power in Nicaragua in 1979.
Beginning in 1946, the United States openly operated the U.S. Army School of the Americas [in 2001 renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation] to train officers from armies throughout the hemisphere—to professionalize those forces and keep the soldiers in their barracks instead of in the presidential palace, as well as to regularize what it means to be a soldier elsewhere in the hemisphere. Has it worked?
The School of the Americas actually started in Panama and then was moved to Fort Benning, Georgia. It has been a way for the United States to exercise even more control over Latin America than it had in the past.
The real reason for the school is not simply training, but to send back into their countries a group of officers who have been indoctrinated in an American school, who will be from that point on in touch with the American government, and perhaps ready to do its bidding. When somebody pointed out that many of the leaders of the Chile coup had been graduates of the School of the Americas, the head of the school said in effect, “Well, we keep in touch with our graduates, and they keep in touch with us.”
* * *
One hundred forty years or so after the removal of American Indians from the southeastern United States, after the Trail of Tears, and after the Jacksonian approach toward Indians in white-settled areas, there is an American Indian movement again in the United States. What does that tell us?
This is one of the most fascinating developments of the last few decades. The Indian population had been nearly annihilated in the massacres of the nineteenth century and had been pushed into Indian territory in Oklahoma, then pushed out of Indian territory when oil was discovered there. Then in the 1960s, an Indian movement formed—AIM, the American Indian Movement. They engaged in acts of resistance. They did dramatic actions. They took over the island of Alcatraz. They went to Wounded Knee, the site of the last great massacre of Indians, in 1890, and they occupied it until they were routed by federal forces.
AIM made themselves visible in the way that black people made themselves visible in the civil rights movement.
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Speaking of movements in the 1960s, one of the most important to arise during that time is the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender rights movement. The early years of ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), in the 1980s, may be the first time that people really took notice. But what was happening before that?
I think one of the most extraordinary developments in the 1960s was the very slow, almost invisible change in attitude about sexual orientation. If you go back a century, there is a history of black resistance, the labor movement, antiwar activity—but no real history of a gay rights movement.* I have no doubt that the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer rights movement was encouraged by the existence of other rights movements, but it was something that was new on the American scene, and at times it took dramatic form. Like the incident at Stonewall, where people from the LGBTQ community got together and rebelled against their treatment by the police. The culture began to change. And I think this was part of and connected with the new freedoms of the 1960s, a greater willingness to talk about sex and sexual orientation, and an openness about things that you couldn’t talk about before. That has been, I think, one of the most remarkable developments of these past decades.
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There have been Spanish-speaking people in what is now the United States for five hundred years, but the Latino movement seems to be a fairly late comer to the American tradition of pushback and resistance. Why?
The Latino movement took a while to become part of the general movement of revolt that we saw throughout American society in the 1960s. To a great extent, that’s because Latinos were very often segregated, the work that they did was unrecognized, and they were kind of a submerged part of the population. They first burst upon the American scene in an important way in the late 1960s, when farmworkers out in California began to organize.
The name of Cesar Chavez is an important name in the history of American social movements. He was one of the leaders of a new movement among Latino farmworkers in the West—a particularly charismatic and effective leader.
This was something unusual for migrant workers, separated from other people by language, and so many of them were undocumented. Moreover, they faced a very powerful farming industry, agribusiness, the great food corporations.
But they began to organize in the 1960s, and they succeeded in forcing these very powerful corporations to deal with them. One of the ways they did it was by organizing a boycott of grapes. This was a technique that had not been used in such a dramatic way in America for a long time, but it was remarkably successful. They appealed to people all over the country to support them. And I think the fact that other people in the country were involved in other movements of protest against the establishment helped create an atmosphere in which people observed the boycott.
The thing about rich corporations is that, powerful as they are, a boycott that cuts into their profits is something that they will listen to. The result was that the farmworkers on the West Coast organized successfully and won victories and managed to make some change in their conditions.
In thinking of the role of the Latino people as part of the general wave of movements in the 1960s, we should point out that they were an unnoticed part of the antiwar movement. On the West Coast, there were demonstrations involving thousands of Latinos and Latinas protesting against the war in Vietnam.
We now are becoming more aware of Latino organization and resistance, and I think maybe part of the reason is that we have more Latino people here. You can see this in the arguments over bilingualism. To me, this is all a positive development.
* * *
How do these more recent stories and movements help connect the modern decades with our earlier history?
What we have today is the continuation of the struggles that we have had all through American history, taking different forms and with movements maybe not as visible and strong as they have been in the past, but the conflicts are still there—that is, the conflicts among classes and between the interests of the rich and the interests of the poor.
The struggle may take different forms than it did with the strikes of the 1930s. The struggle may take the form of a conflict over the tax system. And I suspect it will continue to go on, so long as we have a country that’s very rich, most of whose wealth is used for things that do not make life better for most people in this country.
The movement against the war in Iraq was in many ways a continuation of that long history of movements against war—a movement against poor young people being sent to war, being enticed into the army by promises, and propagandized into the military by talk of democracy and liberty being brought to other countries. That struggle against war and against militarism continues today.
The women’s movement today is organized in a different way—and perhaps not as well organized as the women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s, but there is certainly a movement among women today, for instance, to defend the right of abortion.
The labor movement today is much weaker than it has been in the past. We had as much as 30 percent of the labor force organized in the 1930s; now we have perhaps 12 percent of the labor force organized. Yet there are still labor struggles going on in this country. There are still strikes going on. Some of them lose; some of them win. We have nurses going out on strike; we have janitors going out on strike. We have campus workers on colleges and universities throughout the country demanding a living wage.
Although we certainly are not seeing the great wave of protest that we saw during the Vietnam era, during the civil rights era, the struggles still continue—rich against poor, antiwar people against the war makers, women against the special form of subjection and intimate oppression that takes place in families and in society. We are still seeing a population that will not simply accept what they perceive to be injustice.
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You write often of the possibilities for surprise that A People’s History can show us. In all these stories, is there embedded the idea that the people who read the book are themselves actors in history. Is it an implicit call to action, to get people to think in a different way about themselves and their role in the life of the country?
I suppose that it might be considered an unprofessional thing for a historian to write a history that somebody else interprets as a call to action. But to me, the historian is a citizen before he is a historian. The historian is a human being before he is a historian.
He is not a historian, in my view, just to be a historian—just to teach history, just to write books, just to go to professional meetings. I assume that a historian is somebody who cares about what is going on in the world, someone who studies history and teaches history and writes about history in a way that will have a beneficial effect on the world.
I have said that there is no such thing as being neutral in writing history, no such thing as being objective. And there’s no such thing as staying apart from the conflicts that there are in the world. In fact, it is not only undesirable to do that, but it is really impossible to do that, because the world is already moving in certain directions. To pretend to neutrality—to stand off, to say things and do things and write things that will not have an effect—is to deceive yourself.
What you are doing, then, is allowing the world to go on without your intervention. I see the historian as somebody who intervenes, whose work should lead other people to think that they are not simply passive instruments. If you tell the history of the United States as a history of presidents and Congresses and Supreme Court justices and military leaders and “important people,” you are telling your readers that these are the people who make history, and their job is simply to go to the polls every four years and elect a leader who will take care of them. That to me is a crippling of democracy. Democracy requires an active citizenry. Therefore, you might say the writing of history should itself be a democratic act. It should promote democracy by giving people the idea that they too can participate in history.
In fact, they had better participate in history, because if they leave the decisions to the people who now run the society, we will just have endless wars. We will have an endless class struggle in which the rich increase their wealth, and the poor in this country and other countries have a hard time to survive.
You write that history suggests new definitions of power. How does looking back at the past shine that kind of light into the future?
What we learn from history about power is that power is not what we have always thought it to be, or what on the surface it seems to be. That is, if you have the most money and the most guns, you have the most power. And if you control the media, you certainly have the most power.
What history shows is that people who seemed to have no power—who did not have the money, people who did not have military forces at their disposal, who did not control the means of communication—were able nevertheless at certain points in history to change their lives because they found their own kind of power—the power of organized people.
They found that if the people who are troubled by their lives organize in enough numbers and persist long enough, and are willing to take enough risks, they can overcome the people who seem to have all the power.
We have seen this in the labor movement. How are workers going to win the eight-hour day in the nineteenth century? They don’t have the power the corporations have. The government is not on their side. They don’t have political power. There is nothing in the Constitution that requires employers to limit workdays to eight hours. The workers don’t have the army or the police on their side. But they have this kind of power—if they get together, if they organize, they can stop the machinery of production by going on strike. That is a power that the corporation must recognize.
Even though the corporation may try everything it can, bringing in strikebreakers, bringing in the police and the army, if the strikers persist—if they actually succeed in really diminishing the profits of the corporation, in preventing the factories from running—they have succeeded in forcing these apparently powerful corporations to change their ways.
When workers in the auto industry in the 1930s struck against Ford and General Motors, many people said they would never win. You couldn’t win against Ford or GM. They had too much money, too much force on their side. And the government was not going to help you either. The police were not going to help you. But workers discovered that if they stuck together and persisted, they were creating a power that had to be recognized.
And the same thing is true of black people in the South. I could see this firsthand when I moved south, to Atlanta, Georgia, in 1956. Who were more powerless than black people in the South? They had nobody on the police force, no mayors, nobody in the state legislatures. They had no political power. They certainly had very, very little economic power. They were the poorest part of the population. They did not even have the federal government on their side, even though we had the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and constitutionally the federal government was supposed to enforce these and make sure that black people could vote, that they were not discriminated against. The federal government was not doing any of that.
Black people in 1950s and 1960s in the South decided they had to do it on their own. They had to organize themselves.
They boycotted the buses in Montgomery. They began to demonstrate all over the South, and the word of what they were doing began to get out. The media—even though it was not particularly sympathetic to black people—the media was sympathetic to dramatic news stories. The media began to cover the demonstrations, and the pictures were seen all over the world. The U.S. government became embarrassed by the pictures of black people being beaten by police and being driven back by fire hoses. So black people discovered that they had a power that could change things—and they did change things. Things changed in the South. And the federal government changed, Congress changed, the president changed.
We had a president who was a Southerner and who had never been particularly sympathetic to the movement going on national radio and saying the anthem of the civil rights movement, “We Shall Overcome.”
And the movement against the Vietnam War showed the power of people to cause a government to move away from a war. I remember the beginnings of the antiwar movement. As we protested against the war in early 1965, when the escalation of the war began significantly, we thought, How in the world are we going to have an effect on government policy? They have the power; we don’t. But in fact, our power grew as more and more people joined the antiwar movement.
Truth has a power of its own. The truth about the war in Vietnam became clearer and clearer to more and more people.
I spoke at an antiwar rally in Boston on the Boston Common in early 1965, and I think there were perhaps a hundred people there. Four years later, in 1969, I spoke at another rally on the Boston Common; there were a hundred thousand people there.
The movement grew to a point where the government had to pay attention to it. And the movement extended to people who are never expected to be rebellious, to priests and nuns and rabbis and businessmen and people in all walks of life.
Organization, persistence, moral fervor, commitment—those are elements of a different kind of power.
* * *
The stories you’ve just recounted, and the ones you have spun out from the history of the fifteenth to the twenty-first centuries—do they leave you optimistic about the future of this country?
I would be naive if I said I’m confident that this country has a glorious future, based on the past.
Nevertheless, the future is open. I would say I’m not optimistic and not pessimistic. I would say I’m cautiously hopeful. I think it depends so much on what people do and how fast and how seriously people organize to change their lives. But the element of optimism in my feeling comes from faith in people’s essential decency.
I don’t think people want war. I don’t think people are born racists. I think people are basically decent, but their decency can be twisted and distorted by people in power who will create reasons for them to go to war, or will persuade them that free-market capitalism is the best system ever devised.
It takes time, but I believe that the truth—even though it emerges only slowly and over a long period—does have a power of its own.
And I expect that power to become more and more crucial. I am hopeful that people will turn against the idea of war. I think the point will come when people will finally say, “We can’t go to war anymore. It hasn’t done us any good.”
There are people everywhere who want to see a different kind of world, who want to be at one with their fellow men and women, who think that people in other countries are human beings as we are, and that if somebody is suffering anywhere in the world, we have a responsibility to help them.
I believe that that compassion is basic to human nature. And I am counting on that to pull us through.
* There are of course now any number of powerful histories of the gay rights movement available.