A People's History of the United States

The summary

American history is usually told as a widening circle of freedom. Howard Zinn tells it from the other side—from the perspective the privileged left out of the records, the view of the conquered, enslaved, and exploited. Seen that way, the country was not born free. It was born slave and free, servant and master, tenant and landlord, poor and rich. And the same machinery that held that arrangement together in 1676—war, race, and the fanfare of patriotism—is still running.

The conquest was not a discovery

Columbus is taught as the explorer who found America. What he found was the Arawak, whom he treated as subjects to be broken. Europeans forced them to mine gold, raped women, killed children, and shipped the able-bodied back to Spain as slaves. By 1515 more than 83 percent of the Arawak—250,000 people—were dead; by 1650 they were gone entirely. The English used a colder method: feign peace, let a tribe plant its corn, then fall on them just before harvest, killing as many as possible and burning the fields. The Powhatan and Pequot were destroyed this way. The Iroquois, who lived communally with women holding real power, held out longer, so colonists handed them smallpox-infected blankets—one community dropped from 3,000 to 313. Even treaties were temporary. The Cherokee named Alabama, perhaps “here we may rest,” after two forced relocations; in 1831 they were expelled again, and roughly one in four died walking west through winter.

Race was built to divide the poor

By 1800, 10 to 15 million Africans had been captured and shipped to America in conditions that killed a third en route; by 1763 half of Virginia was enslaved. They resisted immediately—in 1712, twenty-one people were executed in New York after a revolt that killed nine whites. The detail schools skip is that early uprisings often joined black slaves with poor white servants. In 1676 Nathaniel Bacon’s rebellion of disgruntled frontiersmen burned Jamestown; after it was crushed, planters hardened slavery and class lines to prevent the next alliance, and laws were passed forbidding black and white people from mixing. Division was policy. The Founding Fathers were wealthy landowners who wrote a government to protect property, not slaves, women, or the poor—some states required 5,000 pounds of property just to run for governor. By 1770 the top 1 percent held 44 percent of the wealth. The Constitution, Zinn argues, gave small farmers and mechanics just enough to make them a buffer against the very poor, the enslaved, and the natives—control kept with a minimum of coercion and a maximum of law, all dressed up as unity.

War as distraction and profit

Leaders learned early that war diverts attention from inequality at home. In 1846 President Polk baited Mexico into firing first, then sold the war as self-defense; poorly equipped immigrants were sent to die of disease while drunk soldiers terrorized villages, and the U.S. took California and New Mexico for $15 million. The Civil War grew as much from a clash between Northern industrialists and Southern planters as from slavery, and Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was partly a war tactic to drain the South of labor. When it ended, Sherman’s promise of forty acres and a mule was rescinded by Andrew Johnson, and the land went back to its former white owners. World War I let American monopolies—U.S. Steel, Standard Oil, Morgan’s banks—plant footholds abroad; Wilson entered after the Lusitania sank without mentioning it also carried munitions, then jailed anti-war speech under the Espionage Act. World War II was about oil and markets as much as Pearl Harbor, and it birthed a “permanent war economy,” in the words of GM’s Charles Wilson. In 1990 Bush’s Gulf War secured Middle East oil under the banner of liberating Kuwait, and after 9/11 the budget soared again into the accounts of contractors.

Every gain came from below—and met force

Nothing was granted from above. In the 1800s workers discovered that striking together gave them power; in 1877 a hundred died in a railroad strike after the National Guard was called, and radical unions like the Industrial Workers of the World organized over 150 strikes, with co-founder Eugene Debs running again and again for president as a socialist. The civil rights movement won real ground through nonviolence—Rosa Parks’s arrest launched a 381-day bus boycott, and 250,000 gathered for King’s “I Have a Dream”—but even there, organizers quietly censored more militant voices like John Lewis after talks with the Kennedy administration. Six years of official inaction and continued lynchings followed, until riots and the 1968 Civil Rights Act. Vietnam was sold as defending independence from communism while the government eyed the country’s resources; Lyndon Johnson lied about an attack on U.S. ships, the My Lai massacre killed up to 500 civilians, and two million Americans joined the 1969 Moratorium against a war most of them already opposed.

The bottom line

Told from below, American history is less a story of expanding liberty than a long contest between a wealthy few and the many they keep divided—by race, by war, by the pledge and the flag. Yet the memory of the oppressed can’t be confiscated, and Zinn insists revolt always sits an inch below the surface. Read this if you want the version of the past that the official records were written to leave out.