Zinn’s A People’s History Of The United States: The Oppressed Essay, Research Paper

Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States: The Oppressed

Dr. Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States might be

better titled A Proletarian’s History of the United States. In the first three

chapters Zinn looks at not only the history of the conquerors, rulers, and

leaders; but also the history of the enslaved, the oppressed, and the led. Like

any American History book covering the time period of 1492 until the early

1760’s, A People’s History tells the story of the ?discovery? of America, early

colonization by European powers, the governing of these colonies, and the rising

discontent of the colonists towards their leaders. Zinn, however, stresses the

role of a number of groups and ideas that most books neglect or skim over: the

plight of the Native Americans that had their numbers reduced by up to 90% by

European invasion, the equality of these peoples in many regards to their

European counterparts, the importation of slaves into America and their

unspeakable travel conditions and treatment, the callous buildup of the

agricultural economy around these slaves, the discontented colonists whose

plight was ignored by the ruling bourgeoisie, and most importantly, the rising

class and racial struggles in America that Zinn correctly credits as being the

root of many of the problems that we as a nation have today. It is refreshing to

see a book that spends space based proportionately around the people that lived

this history. When Columbus arrived on the Island of Haiti, there were 39 men on

board his ships compared to the 250,000 Indians on Haiti. If the white race

accounts for less than two hundredths of one percent of the island’s population,

it is only fair that the natives get more than the two or three sentences that

they get in most history books. Zinn cites population figures, first person

accounts, and his own interpretation of their effects to create an accurate and

fair depiction of the first two and a half centuries of European life on the

continent of North America.

The core part of any history book is obviously history. In the first

three chapters of the book, Zinn presents the major historical facts of the

first 250 years of American history starting from when Christopher Columbus’s Ni?

a, Pinta, and Santa Maria landed in the Bahamas on October 12, 1492. It was

there that Europeans and Native Americans first came into contact; the Arawak

natives came out to greet the whites, and the whites were only interested in

finding the gold. From the Bahamas, Columbus sailed to Cuba and Hispa?ola, the

present-day home of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. One-hundred fifteen years

later and 1,500 miles to the north, the colony of Jamestown was founded by a

group of English settlers led by John Smith; shortly after that the

Massachusetts Bay Colony was founded by a group of Puritans known to us today as

the Pilgrims. Because of uneasy and hostile relations with the nearby Pequot

Indians, the Pequot War soon started between the colonists and the natives.

Needless to say, the colonists won, but it was at the expense of several dozen

of their own and thousands of Pequots. But despite Indian conflict, exposure,

starvation, famine, disease, and other hardships, the English kept coming to

America. In 1619 they were settled enough that they started bringing African

slaves into the middle colonies. Before resorting to Africans, the colonists had

tried to subdue the Indians, but that idea failed before it was created. Zinn

writes:

?They couldn’t force the Indians to work for them, as Columbus had done.

They were outnumbered, and while, with superior firearms, they could massacre

the Indians, they would face massacre in return. They could not capture them and

keep them enslaved; the Indians were tough, resourceful, defiant, and at home in

these woods, as the transplanted Englishmen were not.

?White servants had not yet been brought over in sufficient quantity….

As for free white settlers, many of them were skilled craftsmen, or even men of

leisure back in England, who were so little inclined to work the land that John

Smith… had to declare a kind of martial law, organize them into work gangs,

and force them into the fields for survival…..

?Black slaves were the answer. And it was natural to consider imported

blacks as slaves, even if the institution of slavers would not be regularized

and legalized for several decades? (25). Black slavery became an American

institution that the southern and middle colonies began to depend on for their

economic success. The first stirrings of resentment began to come not from the

slaves but from the proletariat in the form of the frontier whites. Nathaniel

Bacon led a revolution against Virginia governor William Berkeley and his

conciliatory Indian policies. Bacon and others who lived on the western frontier

wanted more protection from the government against Indian attacks. Berkeley and

his cronies were so concerned with their own financial and political gain that

they ignored Bacon’s Rebellion and continued their policies. In the end, Bacon

died a natural death (he caught a nasty virus) and his friends were hanged, but

for the first time ever, the government was forced to listen to the grievances

of the underclass that had been for the most part largely ignorable up to that

point. Meanwhile, class distinctions became sharper and the poor grew in number.

Citizens were put into work houses for debt and occasionally rioted against the

wealthy. More and more though, the anger turned from being just a class war to

being a war of nationalities. Impressment and other British policies distracted

the colonists from being mad at the bourgeoisie to being mad at their mother

country. At the end of chapter three, tension is mounting, pitting the Americans

against the English and the workers against the rich. The atmosphere was ripe

for revolution.

The reason that this book might be better titled A Proletarian’s History

of the United States is that Zinn’s main focus on the book besides the actual

history is the effect of the history on the common people and the workers, or

proletarians as Marx and Engels referred to them. While most history books focus

on the dominating Europeans, Zinn focuses on the dominated Native Americans, who

Zinn holds to be at least as advanced as their European masters. He writes that

?Columbus and his successors were not coming into an empty wilderness,

but into a world which in some places was as densely populated as Europe itself,

where the culture was complex, where human relations were more egalitarian than

in Europe, and where the relations among men, women, children, and nature were

more beautifully worked out than perhaps any place in the world.

?They were a people without a written language, but with their own laws,

their poetry, their history kept in memory and passed on, in an oral vocabulary

more complex than Europe’s, accompanied by song, dance, and ceremonial drama.

They paid careful attention to the development of personality, intensity of will,

independence and flexibility, passion and potency, to their partnership with one

another and with nature? (21-22).

In the middle of the first chapter, Zinn uses the historical treatment of

Columbus to explain his own view on teaching history. ?Thus began the history,

five hundred years ago, of the European invasion of Indian settlements in

America. That beginning, when you read [Bartolom? de] Las Casas… is conquest,

slavery, death. When we read history books given to the children in the United

States, it all starts with heroic adventure — there is no bloodshed — and

Columbus Day is a celebration? (7).

He goes on to vituperate historian Samuel Eliot Morison for his brief and buried

mention of Columbus’s genocide of the natives. This is one of the most heinous

crimes a historian can commit, Zinn says, because ?Outright lying or quiet

omission takes the risk of discovery which, when made, might arouse the reader

to rebel against the writer. To state the facts, however, and then bury them in

a mass of other information is to say to the reader: yes, mass murder took place,

but it’s not that important… it should effect very little what we do in the

world? (8). Zinn says that ?selection, simplification, [and] emphasis? (8) are

necessary to the historian, but he chooses to take a different stance in his

writings.

?…I prefer to tell the story of the discovery of America from the viewpoint of

the Arawaks, of the Constitution from the standpoint of the slaves, of Andrew

Jackson as seen by the Cherokees, of the Civil War as seen by the New York

Irish… of the First World War as seen by socialists, the Second World War as

seen by pacifists, the New Deal as seen by the blacks in Harlem, the postwar

American empire as seen by peons in Latin America. And so on, to the limited

extent that any one person, however he or she strains, can ?see? history from

the standpoint of others? (10).

Zinn continues his identification with the oppressed as he discusses black-white

relations. He says that blacks and whites are not naturally prejudiced against

each other as some would have us believe; he points to the fact that laws

actually had to be passed to keep blacks and whites from fraternizing. Servants

and slaves of different races saw each other as oppressed workers first and as

members of a specific race second. On the topic of slavery, Zinn berates the

American system, calling it ?lifelong, morally crippling, destructive of family

ties, without hope of any future? (27). Some argue that African tribes had

slavery of their own so it was a part of their culture to begin with, but Zinn

says that ?the ?slaves’ of Africa were more like the serfs of Europe — in other

words, like most of the population of Europe? (27). Zinn commiserates with the

plight of the oppressed frontier whites, making Nathaniel Bacon out to be a hero.

Over the course of the next 80 years, Zinn cites routine injustices against the

working and under classes, saying that it ?seems quite clear that the class

lines hardened through the colonial period; the distinction between rich and

poor became sharper? (47).

It is refreshing and commendable to see a history text that takes a

stance on the side of the peoples that seldom get represented. Columbus’s

treatment of the Native Americans was atrocious, abominable, and abhorrent, yet

most history texts treat him as one the greatest men to have ever lived. If your

value as a human being is measured by the number of lives you ruin, people you

kill, and civilizations you destroy, then Columbus is on par with Josef Stalin.

This example may seem extreme, but both men were directly responsible for the

deaths of millions on innocent civilians and caused sheer terror and panic among

millions of other people. The difference is that Columbus did it in the name of

exploration and human progress, which Zinn correctly calls a bit of a misnomer,

while Stalin did it to achieve his political ambitions, which Columbus was

certainly not without himself. Columbus committed horrible atrocities, and Zinn

accurately portrays them from a unique standpoint, which gives long overdue

respect and recognition to the millions of Indians who died in the name of

progress. Equally accurate is Zinn’s portrayal of colonial relations. Both

African slaves and proletarian whites were pushed around, tormented, and used as

pawns in the political game of chess for the benefit of the bourgeoisie. Zinn

asserts that there were clear contentions between the races that ultimately led

to the revolution when the anger of the masses that was originally directed

primarily at the bourgeoisie was redirected against England in the form of

rhetoric, concessions, and propaganda calling for loyalty to America’s upper

classes and rebellion, first quiet and then loud, against England. ?[The bind of

loyalty] was the language of liberty and equality, which could unite just enough

whites to fight a Revolution against England, without ending either slavery or

inequality? (58). Zinn is absolutely correct in seeing the ulterior motives of

our founding fathers; they realized that splitting from England would be good

for them financially, socially, and politically. What they did was harness the

people’s anger against them and used it, quite ironically, for their own

advancement.

Ultimately, for the first 250 years of America’s history, there was

oppression and class warfare on varying scales that are traditionally ignored or

unemphasized by traditional history texts, but Zinn masterfully shows the reader

are major and influencial parts of American history. To ignore the plight of the

conquored and oppressed is to ignore a part of history that cannot be ignored.