An edited version of a talk given at the Taos Film Festival, Taos, New Mexico, April 17, 1999.
When I began reading history and studying history and teaching history and writing history, I kept coming across incidents and events and people that led me to think, “Wow, what a movie this would make.” However hateful they may have been sometimes, I have always loved the movies. When I would read about things in history, I would then look to see if a movie had been made about it. But it was never there. It took me a while to realize that Hollywood isn’t going to make movies like the ones I’d been thinking about. Hollywood isn’t going to make movies that have the effect of making people more class conscious, or more antiwar, or more conscious of the need for racial equality or sexual equality. No, they’re not going to make movies like this.
I wondered about this. It seemed to me that it wasn’t really an accident. You could say it was just an oversight on the part of Hollywood that they have not made a film about the Ludlow massacre in Colorado—just an accident, like the accidents you hear about if you turn on the television, as I turned it on this morning. They were explaining the “accident” that happened when NATO forces bombed a column of refugees from Kosovo. These things are always accidents. Now you might say, “They’re not really deliberate. They did not really mean to do this.” But they are rarely accidents.
That is, the people in Hollywood didn’t all get together in a room and decide, “We’re going to do just this kind of film and not the other kind of film.” Nobody in NATO headquarters or the U.S. government had to get together and say, “We are going to bomb civilians.” They don’t have to do that, and yet it’s not an accident. Somebody at one point used an expression to describe events that are not accidents, not planned deliberately, but something in between. He called it “the natural selection of accidents,” in which, if there’s a certain structure to a situation, then these things will inevitably happen, whether anyone plans them or not. The structure of war is such that innocent people are going to killed. I heard President Clinton say, “Well we didn’t mean this, but civilian casualties are inevitable when you carry on war.” He was absolutely right, which then leads you to two conclusions: either you just have to accept civilian casualties, or you have to do away with war. Of course, you know, the second is unthinkable.
It seems that the structure of war is such, and the structure of Hollywood is such, that it will not produce the kinds of films that I imagined when I read and began to write history. There is a structure that you can describe simply as “based on the need to make lots of money”; a structure where money and profit are absolutely the first consideration before art, before aesthetics, before human values. When I was invited to this film festival I thought, “Well, here’s my chance. Here are filmmakers. I’ll tell them about things I’ve wanted to see done on film, so they can all immediately go out and do it.”
I think about making films that will make war abhorrent to people. When you consider the films about war that have come out of Hollywood—and there have been hundreds and hundreds and hundreds, maybe even thousands, of films about war—they are almost always films that glorify military heroism. There are occasional departures from that, but mostly it’s military heroes, military heroism, and the kind of films that will not persuade young audiences that they should not immediately go to war and embrace war. I began to think about telling the story of wars from a different perspective; when you look at war from a different perspective, you come up with all sorts of scenarios.
I’ll take one of the best of our wars to begin with: the Revolutionary War. How can you speak against the Revolutionary War, right? To tell the story of the revolution, not from the standpoint of the Founding Fathers, but from the standpoint of war as a complex phenomenon intertwined with moral issues, we must see that Americans were oppressed by the English—and we must also see that some Americans were also oppressed by other Americans. The Revolutionary War was not simple. For instance, American Indians did not rush in exultation to celebrate the victory of the colonists over England, because for them it meant that the line that the British had set against westward expansion in the Proclamation of 1763 would now be obliterated. The colonists would be free to move west into Indian territory. American Indians did not celebrate the American Revolution. Black slaves did not celebrate the American Revolution.
It was estimated that maybe one-third of the colonists supported the American Revolution, one-third were opposed, and one-third were neutral. This was the estimate of John Adams, one of the Founding Fathers and one of the revolutionary leaders. I thought it would be interesting to tell the story of the American Revolution from the standpoint of an ordinary working man who hears the Declaration of Independence read to him from a balcony in Boston, promising freedom and equality and so on, and immediately is told that rich people can get out of service by paying several hundred dollars. This man then joins the army, despite his misgivings, despite his own feelings of being oppressed—not just by the British, but by the leaders of the colonial world in which he is having such a hard time surviving—because he is promised some land. But as the war progresses and he sees mutilations and killings, he becomes increasingly disaffected. There’s no place in society where class divisions are more clear cut than in the military, and he sees that the officers of the Revolutionary army are living in high splendor while the ordinary enlisted men don’t have any clothes or shoes, aren’t being paid, and are being fed slop. So he joins the mutineers.
In the Revolutionary War, there were mutinies against Washington’s army: the mutiny of the Pennsylvania Line, the mutiny of the New Jersey Line. I thought it would be interesting to tell the story of a working man who joins the Revolutionary army and fights in battles and is wounded, but who then joins the Pennsylvania Line, and they mutiny. They march on the Continental Congress but finally they are surrounded by Washington’s army, and several of their comrades are forced to shoot several of the mutineers. Then this soldier, embittered by what he’s seen, gets out of the army and gets some land in western Massachusetts. After the war is over, he becomes part of the rebellion. There is a rebellion in western Massachusetts called Shays’s Rebellion, in which small farmers rebel against the rich men who control the legislature in Boston who are imposing heavy taxes on them, taking away the land and farms of the families who live there. Shays’s Rebellion is a popular rebellion of Revolutionary War veterans, as well as of other small farmers who surround the courthouses and refuse to let the auctioneer go in to auction off their farms. The militia is then called out to suppress them, and the militia also goes over to their side, until eventually an army is raised by the moneyed people in Boston that finally suppresses Shays’s Rebellion.
I have never seen Hollywood tell this kind of story. I talked to someone who really knows a lot about film and I told him, “You know, I think that probably at some point I am going to say I’m waiting for a film like this to be made, and then somebody will say ‘Yes, it was made.’ ” But I don’t think that film I just described was made. And if I describe a film that I think should be made, and you know that it has already been made—I wish you’d let me know so we can have a celebration of that rare event.
Wars can be described in such a way that complicate the simple “good versus evil” scenario presented to us in our history books and in our culture. Wars are not simply wars of one people against another; wars always involve class differences within each side, where victory is very often not shared by everybody, but only by a few. The people who fight the wars are not the people that benefit from the wars.
I thought somebody should also make a movie about the Mexican War. I haven’t seen anything on it that tells how the Mexican War started, or how the president of the United States deceived the American people. I know it’s surprising to hear that a president would willfully deceive the people of the United States, but this was that one rare case in which President James Polk told Americans that Mexican troops had fired at us on U.S. soil. It wasn’t, in fact, U.S. soil—it was disputed soil that both the Mexicans and the Americans had claimed. During this incident, people were killed—and zoom, we were at war, a war that had been planned in advance, before this incident, by the Polk administration because they coveted this beautiful territory of the Southwest.
It would be interesting to tell that story again from the standpoint of an ordinary soldier in the Mexican War, who sees the mayhem and the bloodshed as the army moves into Mexico and destroys town after town. Such a story would describe how more and more of these soldiers grow disaffected from the war, and as they’re moving on the final march under General Scott toward Mexico City, General Scott wakes up one morning and discovers that half of his army has deserted. It would be interesting to tell it from the point of view of one of the Massachusetts volunteers who comes back at the end of the war and is invited to a victory celebration over how half of Mexico had been taken away by the United States. As the commander of the Massachusetts volunteers is being honored up at the podium, he gets up to speak and he is booed off the platform by the remaining half of the Massachusetts volunteers who are still alive—who think about what happened to their comrades in the war, and who look around and wonder what they were fighting for. I should tell you: that really happened.
The story would also include a scene in which the American army is moving to take control of territory seized from Mexico. The invading troops march on northern Mexico, into what is now called New Mexico. They move into Santa Fe, where they must suppress a rebellion because mostly Mexicans live there, and the United States government is taking it over. The army marches through the streets of Santa Fe after their military victory. All the people of Santa Fe go into their houses and close the shutters, and the army is met by total silent resistance, which is an expression of how the population feels about this great victory of the American army.
Another little thing about the Mexican War, which might make the movie a little more interesting, is the story of some of the deserters. A lot of the people who volunteered in the Mexican War did so for the same reason that so many of the poor and working-class people volunteer for the military today. It’s not that they are imbued with the idea of going to war; they’re just desperately poor and they hope that their fortunes will improve as a result of enlisting. During the Mexican War, some of these volunteers were recent immigrants, many of them Irish. A number of these Irish immigrant soldiers, as they watched what was being done to the people of Mexico, deserted and went over to the Mexican side. I don’t know how many of you know about it; maybe in New Mexico people know more about this, in fact I’m sure people in New Mexico know more about this than people in other parts of the country. They formed their own battalion, fighting with the Mexicans, which they called St. Patrick’s battalion (which became the San Patricio battalion), and this becomes an amazing event in the Mexican War.
I was reminded of that as I thought of the war in Philippines, right after the Spanish-American War. It’s not easy to make the Spanish-American War a noble enterprise—though of course Hollywood can do anything—but I don’t think it’s gotten a lot of attention in film. In the textbooks and the history classes, the Spanish-American war is called “a splendid little war.” It lasts three months. A short victory over the Spaniards. We did it to free the Cubans, because we’re always going to war to free somebody. We expel the Spaniards from Cuba, but we don’t expel ourselves from Cuba, and the United States in effect takes over Cuba from that point on. One of the things that we have against Fidel Castro is that he broke into that long uninterrupted control of Cuba by the United States. Though the Cuban revolution is a complicated thing, I think it’s fair to say that it’s one grievance that the United States has against Castro. I can’t believe the grievance they have against him is simply because he’s a dictator, because we’ve never held grudges against dictators, you see.
The Spanish-American War gets a certain amount of attention, because there’s the heroism of Theodore Roosevelt, the Rough Riders, and all of that. I remember learning about it in school, but they never said anything about the war in the Philippines. We learned something about how, as a result of the Spanish-American War, we took over the Philippines, but I never knew the details.
When you look into it, the Spanish-American War lasted three months; the Philippine War lasted for years and years and was a brutal, bloody suppression of the Filipino movement for independence. In many ways, it was a precursor of the Vietnam War, if you look at the atrocities committed by the American army in the Philippine Islands. Now that’s a story that has never been told, though it would not accrue to military heroism or to the glory of the United States to tell that story. There were black American soldiers in the Philippines, who soon began to identify more with the Filipinos than with their fellow white Americans. They were very conscious of the fact that while these black soldiers were fighting to suppress the Filipinos, they also were hearing from back home about the lynchings and race riots that were taking place in their hometowns. They were hearing about black people being killed in large numbers—and here they were, fighting against colored people, against non-white people, for the United States government. A number of black soldiers deserted and went over to fight with the Filipinos.
In 1906, when the Philippine War was supposed to be over—but really the American army was still suppressing pockets of rebellion—there was a massacre. That’s the only way to describe it. The “Moros” are inhabitants of a southern island in the Philippines, and there was a Moro village composed of 600 men, women and children—all of whom were unarmed. The American army swooped down on them and annihilated every last one of them. Mark Twain wrote angrily about this. He was especially angry about the fact that President Theodore Roosevelt sent a letter of congratulations to the military commander who did this, saying it was a great military victory. This happens again and again: When the military does heinous things, they are congratulated for great military victories. Have you ever seen a movie in which Theodore Roosevelt was presented as a racist? As an imperialist? As a supporter of massacres? And there he is up on Mount Rushmore. It would take a lot to change that. I’ve had the idea—a hammer, a chisel—no, it wouldn’t do.
War needs to be presented on film in such a way as to create a new population of people who will simply say “no” to war. We need to see that more and more. We need a film about those heroic Americans who protested against World War I. There were socialists, there were pacifists, there were people who just saw the stupidity of the war that was taking the lives of 10 million people in Europe and that now the United States was entering. We look for people who can be really interesting as characters in films. Look at some of the people who, at that important point during World War I, opposed the war. You see Emma Goldman, the feminist and anarchist, who goes to prison for opposing the draft and the war. You see Helen Keller; I haven’t seen Helen Keller in any film other than the kind of film that concentrates on the fact that she was a disabled person. I’ve never seen a film in which Helen Keller is presented as what she was: a radical, a socialist, an antiwar agitator. She was somebody who would refuse to cross a picket line set up against a play that was about her. What a remarkable subject for a film. I think also of Kate Richards O’Hare, the socialist who was put in jail for opposing World War I. There could be a great scene when she’s in the prison, where they are stifling for lack of air. She takes a book that she’s been reading, reaches through the bars, and hurls the book through a skylight above a prison corridor to let the air in. All the prisoners applaud and cheer because finally they’re getting some fresh air.
I could say a lot more about possible stories and scenarios about war. What about World War II? Again, a good war. The best of wars. But it’s not that simple, and that’s why Studs Terkel, when he did his oral history called A “Good War,” put quotation marks around “good war,” if you noticed. In that war, we have humanitarian sympathies, we are fighting against a terrible evil (fascism); but on the other hand, we have a war marked by our own atrocities that multiplied as the war went on, culminating in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I have not seen a film that has dealt with our bombing of Hiroshima. The closest we’ve come to a film that deals with our bombing of civilian populations was the film made of Kurt Vonnegut’s book, Slaughterhouse-Five, and that was an oddity, a rarity.
I have to acknowledge that there were a few antiwar films made about World War I. All Quiet on the Western Front is an example of an absolutely extraordinary film. I recently compared Saving Private Ryan to All Quiet on the Western Front in an article I wrote. I thought that, despite the mayhem, Saving Private Ryan was essentially a glorification of war; whereas we had that absolutely diamond clear anti-war expression in All Quiet on the Western Front.
There are so many issues connected with class, class conflict, and class struggle in America that we could deal with in movies. We’ve had movies that deal with working-class people, but it’s always some individual person in the working class who rises up out of his or her situation individually and “makes it” in American society. Stories of Americans who organize and get together along class lines to oppose the powers that hold them down—now that has been very rare. You do not see films about the struggles of the textile girls: the girls who went to work in the textile mills of Massachusetts, in Lowell and Lawrence, from the early nineteenth century. There’s a marvelous story there about the Lowell girls of the 1830s who organized and went on strike. You’ll not see films about what they did. You’ll not see films about all of the rich history of labor struggles that took place in the United States. After all, the American system set up by the Constitution, the American political system, and the revered and celebrated Constitution of the United States did not grant any economic rights to the American people. We very often forget that the Constitution gives political rights but not economic rights. Even those political rights are circumscribed by the nonexistence of economic rights. If you are not wealthy, then your political rights are limited, even though they exist on paper in the Constitution. The freedom of speech is something that exists there, but how much free speech you have depends on how much money you have and what access to resources you have. But as far as economic rights, there are none in the Constitution. Here’s the Declaration of Independence: the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But how can you have life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness if you don’t have the right to food, housing, and health care?
Working people all throughout history have had to organize, struggle, go on strike, declare boycotts, and face the police and the army and the National Guard. They had to do it themselves, against the opposition of government, in order to win the eight-hour day, in order to somewhat change their working conditions. So I say a great film remains to be made about the railroad strikes of 1877, or about the Haymarket affair of 1886, which was part of the struggle for the eight-hour day. The Haymarket affair culminated in the execution of four anarchists who were charged with planting a bomb, though in the end nobody ever found out who really planted it.
What about the story of Eugene Debs and the great railroad strike of 1894, in which they tied up the railway system of the United States and all the power of the army and the courts had to be brought against them? Debs is another character for a movie, but I’ve never seen a movie in which he was the central figure. I’ve seen all sorts of pitiful central figures in movies, but never the magnificent Eugene Debs, who starts off as an organizer of railroad workers, and they send him to jail, and he comes out of jail a socialist. Jail will do that to people, so they’d better be careful about how many people they send to prison—we now have 2 million people in prison, and if all of them did as Debs did, well! When he was finally released after being sent to prison for opposing World War I—not by the liberal Woodrow Wilson but by the conservative Warren Harding—Debs had made such an impression on his fellow prisoners that, as he was being let out of prison, the warden opened up all the jail cells and let everybody out into the yard. They all applauded and shouted as Debs was given his freedom.
A movie needs to be made—and I met someone who is actually writing a script—about the Lawrence textile strike of 1912, a magnificent episode. It was magnificent because a lot of strikes are lost; this strike was won. It was a multicultural strike of people who spoke twelve different languages, got together, and defied the textile companies and the police, who were sent to the railroad to prevent the children of the workers from leaving. Police attacked the women and children at the railroad station because they didn’t want the children to be sent away and looked after; what the police wanted was to starve out the strikers, which would be less likely to happen if their children were safe. But the strikers held out, and they were helped by the IWW, the Industrial Workers of the World, and they finally won. Out of that strike comes the song “Bread and Roses.” It’s a wonderful episode.
There’s also the Ludlow Massacre, which took place during the Colorado coal strike of 1913–14. It was one of the most bitter, bloody, dramatic strikes in American history, against the Rockefeller interests. It’s not easy to make a film against the Rockefeller interests. One of its leaders was Mother Jones, an eighty-three-year-old woman who had organized in West Virginia and Pennsylvania. Mother Jones led children on a march from Pennsylvania to Oyster Bay, New York to confront President Theodore Roosevelt, because these kids were working in the textile mills at the age of eleven and twelve. She got permission from their parents and marched with these kids all the way to New York, where Theodore Roosevelt was having summer vacation. They stood there with their signs, which say “We Want Time to Play.” Has there ever been a film made about Mother Jones? She’s eighty-three years old, arrested by the National Guard in Colorado, thrown into dungeons, and still leads the women of the strike in marches through the city of Trinidad, Colorado.
Of course, good movies and wonderful documentaries have been made. I’m talking about what Hollywood hasn’t made. But we’ve never had so many wonderful documentaries as we’ve had in the last ten or fifteen years. These are documentaries that have to struggle to raise the money and then struggle, struggle to be distributed and to be seen by people. There are amazing successes. I think that Michael Moore’s film Roger and Me, which has been seen by tens of millions of people, is remarkable. So the possibilities do exist to play a kind of guerrilla warfare with the system and make films and show films outside of the Hollywood establishment. Sometimes you might sneak something in there—and so you always try and see if you can make them forget for a moment who they are and what they stand for.
We’ve had films on Christopher Columbus, but I don’t know of any film that shows Columbus as what he was, as a man ruled by the capitalist ethic. Is Hollywood going to make a film that puts down the capitalist ethic of killing people for gold, which is what Columbus and the Spaniards were doing? A great film could be made, and one of the figures in it could be Bartolome de la Casas, who exposed what Columbus did in volumes. Las Casas was an eyewitness to what was going on, and there could be a scene of the remarkable debate that took place before the royal commission of Spain in 1650. This great debate was between Las Casas and Sepulveda, another priest who argued that the Indians were not human and therefore you could do to them anything that you wanted to do to them.
There’s also the story of the removal of the Cherokees from the Southeast—of the Trail of Tears and Andrew Jackson, one of our national heroes. I didn’t learn in school that Jackson was a racist and an Indian killer; that he signed the order to expel the American Indians from the southeast part of the United States across the Mississippi. That was ethnic cleansing on a very large scale: the march of the American armies across the continent, driving the Indians from their homeland to a little space in Oklahoma that was then called Indian Territory. When oil was later discovered there, Indian Territory was once again invaded. It was then no longer to be called Indian Territory. Now this was really ethnic cleansing. No movie depicts the story of the Cherokee Trail of Tears, of the 16,000 people marching westward and the 4,000 who died on this march, while the American army pushed them and the American presidents extolled what had happened.
Of course there is also the story of black people in the United States finally told from the black people’s point of view. We’ve had a number of films about the Civil Rights movement from which you see the story of the Montgomery bus boycott from Sissy Spacek’s point of view. You see the story of the murder of the three civil rights workers in Mississippi in 1964 from the standpoint of the FBI, who are the heroes of this film; but every person who was in Mississippi in 1964—my wife and I were both there at the time—knew that the FBI was the enemy. The FBI was watching people being beaten and not doing anything about it. The FBI was silent and not present when people needed protection against murder. In this Hollywood film, they become heroes. We need the story of the Civil Rights movement told from the standpoint of black people, and the story of Mississippi told from the standpoint of Fanny Lou Hamer.
I want to say just one little thing about the Civil War. The Civil War is again one of our “good wars”—the slaves were freed in the course of it—but it is not that simple. There is the class element of who was drafted and who was not drafted; who made huge amounts of money off the Civil War, and the paying of substitutes; and what happened to Indians. When you see documentaries on the Civil War, what you see mostly are battle scenes. You see Gettysburg and Fredericksburg and Bull Run. When I run into someone, they often say, “Oh, you’re a historian. I am very interested in the Civil War.” And they proceed to tell you about the Battle of Fredericksburg, since that’s what we see as the Civil War: the battles. Or black people being freed. But there’s another angle to it—just an element to it that at least complicates the picture. In the midst of the Civil War, while the Union armies are fighting in the South, there’s another part of the Union army that is out West, destroying Indian settlements and taking over Indian land. In 1864, not long after the Emancipation Proclamation, the American army is out in Colorado attacking an Indian village, killing hundreds of men, women, and children at Sand Creek, Colorado, in one of the worst Indian massacres in American history. This massacre occurred during the war for freedom. In the years of the Civil War, more land was taken away from the Indians than in any other comparable period in history. There’s a lot of historical work to be done, a lot of films that need to be made.
If such films are made and reach the public, about war, class conflict, and who controls what; and about the history of governmental lies, broken treaties, and official violence; if those stories are told, we might really produce a new generation. As a teacher and a writer, that’s what I’m interested in. I’m not interested in just producing books, and I’m not interested in just reproducing class after class of people who will get out, become successful, and take their obedient places in the slots that society has prepared for them. What most of us must be involved in—whether we teach or write, make films, write films, direct films, play music, act, whatever we do—has to not only make people feel good and inspired and at one with other people around them, but also has to educate a new generation to do this very modest thing: change the world.