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4. It's good. These people
5. who are sitting in are reminding us
6. of the invisible people.
7. And that's the idea of a people's history.
8. You know, that's what Ray is doing
9. in his people's history of the American Revolution.
10. There's a connection between
11. the history of invisible people
12. in the past and
13. the story of invisible people in the present.
14. That's the connection between, you know,
15. the invisible people of the American Revolution
16. and its time and the invisible people in our time.
17. That's Howard Zinn, and this is Alternative Radio.
18. I'm David Barsamian.
19. This edition of AR features Howard Zinn and Ray Raphael
20. on the people's history of the American Revolution.
21. On July 4, 1776, 56 men in Philadelphia signed the Declaration of Independence.
22. Today, the day is marked by store sales, fireworks, and parades. The much-revered founding fathers
23. were mostly wealthy merchants and large land and slave owners. One of them was John Adams,
24. who was not so well off. He predicted, I'm quoting, the history of our revolution will be one
25. continued lie from one end to the other, unquote. Adams was prescient. Legends have become facts.
26. The traditional accounts of the revolution are about a handful of brave white men who declared
27. independence from Britain. In the telling, many were left out. Women, for example, played vital
28. roles by raising families, farming, running businesses, making uniforms for the soldiers,
29. cooking and feeding the troops, and even taking up arms and fighting themselves.
30. A people's history ensures their inclusion. To talk about a people's history, the American
31. Revolution are Howard Zinn and Ray Raphael. This classic from the AR archives was recorded at
32. Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2001. We begin with Howard Zinn. He was a leading
33. progressive historian. His A People's History of the United States has sold more than four million
34. copies. Talking about what's going on here, the students sitting in for a living wage.
35. If we're writing a history of Harvard University, we might leave them out unless we were doing a
36. people's history of Harvard University. And if we're doing a people's history of Harvard University,
37. then we would have them. Then we'd have the anti-war protesters of the 60s. We'd have all
38. the people who were turned over to the FBI by Harvard University Now maybe I exaggerating but there some connection between Harvard University
39. and the establishment.
40. Isn't there?
41. I think so.
42. No?
43. But no, no, of course not.
44. But I suppose I'd contrast this, the sit-in.
45. you know, a people's history. And I contrast that with the other Harvard. And the other Harvard
46. is epitomized for me by walking into Widener Library. When you go up the stairs of Widener
47. Library, you see this tribute to a soldier. And tribute to a soldier is good, except that
48. there's a slogan that accompanies this tribute to a soldier. And there are different ways you
49. you can pay tribute to a soldier, and there's a way you pay tribute to a soldier which is unsettling.
50. This tribute at Harvard, it says, happy is he who with one embrace clasps death and victory.
51. Am I right? Do you remember that? Yeah. I didn't like that, you see.
52. and every time I went into Widener
53. I was reminded of that
54. so anyway it's good
55. these people who are sitting
56. are reminding us of the invisible people
57. and that's the idea of a people's history
58. that's what Ray
59. is doing in his people's history
60. of the American Revolution
61. I've read a fair amount on the American Revolution
62. this is the best single book
63. on the American Revolution that I've read
64. there's a connection between
65. the history of invisible people
66. in the past and the story of invisible people in the present.
67. That's the connection between the invisible people of the American Revolution
68. and its time and the invisible people in our time.
69. And it seems to me you can go from one to the other.
70. That is, by looking at the present and being conscious of the people we don't notice in the present,
71. you can then be induced to look into the past and say,
72. hey, what are the counterparts of these people I know about today,
73. the cleaning people and the immigrants and the hardworking people who overlooked?
74. What is their counterpart in the past?
75. And that leads you to a people's history of the past.
76. That leads you to look for different things in the past
77. than the kind of things you get in traditional textbooks.
78. Or you can go the other way.
79. You can go into history and read a book like Ray's
80. or read other books that will tell you about Native Americans
81. and women and black people and working people
82. and African-Americans.
83. And then ask yourself, what is their counterpart today?
84. But in either way, a connection is
85. made between the past and the present.
86. And it's important to know that because there's no point going
87. into the past if you're never going to come out of it.
88. There's no point going to the past
89. unless you're going to make a connection between what you
90. learn about the past and what you see in the present.
91. I must tell you, doing people's history, I was in the South.
92. I was living in the South.
93. I was teaching at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia,
94. in Black Women's College.
95. Became involved in the movement and then
96. became involved with SNCC, the Student Nonviolent
97. Coordinating Committee.
98. Began moving around the South, becoming a kind of writer
99. participant in the movement.
100. Went to Albany, Georgia and Selma, Alabama
101. wherever SNCC was doing things wherever the movement was engaged and going into towns in Mississippi and Jackson and Greenwood and Greenville and Hattiesburg and so on And it occurred to me the things I was seeing I know were not being recorded anywhere
102. They're not becoming part of anyone's history.
103. Oh, sure, I was reading in the papers about what the heads of the NAACP were saying
104. and what the latest legal struggles were on the level of courts
105. and what possible legislation there might be in Congress
106. and what the president might be saying.
107. But the things that I was seeing on the ground level
108. were not becoming part of history.
109. And so I wrote a letter to Columbia University,
110. my alma mater.
111. Although I don't have a maternal or paternal relationship.
112. Let's put it this way.
113. I went to Columbia University.
114. And that's where I got my doctorate.
115. That's where I did my graduate work.
116. And I knew they had an oral history project, which was new at that time.
117. Now oral history is known.
118. At that time, oral history was new.
119. There was no Studs Terkel around then.
120. And I had, in fact, done some work in the Columbia University Oral History Project.
121. And I knew what the oral history project consisted of.
122. It consisted of somebody interviewing ex-secretaries of state, ex-generals, ex-admirals,
123. almost everybody who was important in the higher echelons of government and industry,
124. and trying to catch them before they died.
125. And that's the trick of oral history.
126. You follow the health reports, and you interview people who are about to go,
127. and you get them at the right moment.
128. Because I knew that's what the oral history project consisted of.
129. And so I wrote to Columbia University.
130. I wrote to the oral history project and I said, hey, well, I didn't start off that way because
131. you don't write that way to Columbia University. But I said, there's terrific oral history to be
132. done down here. I mean, come down, send somebody down here with tape recorders.
133. Take the people in Albany, Georgia, who's been demonstrating. I mean, who knows what's happening
134. in Albany, Georgia. Take these people who've just come out of jail in Albany, Georgia. A good part
135. of the black population in Albany, Georgia, has been in jail. Talk to them. Go to Selma, Alabama.
136. Take the Selma Freedom Chorus and the church rally that takes place before the people are going out
137. to try to register to vote in Selma. Go to Greenwood, Mississippi. Talk to Mrs. Ruby Pilcher,
138. who lives next door to the Freedom House set up by the SNCC workers and who brings them food and
139. takes care of them, and talk to her about her life,
140. and that's oral history.
141. I got this letter back from Columbia University.
142. That's a wonderful idea.
143. When somebody starts off that way, you get very suspicious.
144. A wonderful idea.
145. You know, it's like Gandhi said about Western civilization,
146. a great idea.
147. But we don't have the resources.
148. Columbia University doesn't have the resources to do that.
149. It's like Harvard University doesn't have the resources to pay a living wage to its workers.
150. None of these people, you know, it's like, you know, really, it's like the, you know, it's always that way.
151. I mean, the people with the most resources don't have the resources.
152. You know, the United, the richest country in the world doesn't have the resources to take care of the health needs of 40 million people.
153. You know, that's the story.
154. On every possible level, they don't have the resources.
155. But what it really means is they don't have the interest.
156. It means they don care That what it really means It means that they don need these people They don need to represent these invisible people Because we represented We represented by the Secretary of State We represented by the people up on high
157. They're the ones who take care of things. And so, you know, we don't need these voices. That's the idea.
158. And the premise of this is, this is one big family, this country.
159. And we all have a common interest.
160. Therefore, the people who are on top, they can represent everybody.
161. We aren't divided by class and race and sex and this and that.
162. No, it's as the Constitution begins, the preamble of the Constitution begins,
163. we the people of the United States, right?
164. That's all of us.
165. Those 55 rich white men who got together in Philadelphia, this wonderful multicultural group, got together in Philadelphia.
166. And we, the people of the United States, you know.
167. No, so they, yeah, they think, yeah, we're all one and therefore we can be represented by the people with money and power.
168. And so, in fact, we have the language to exemplify that.
169. We have, you know, the national interest.
170. Shall we do this?
171. Should we go here? Should we send troops there? Should we bomb here?
172. Well, if it's in the national interest.
173. Whose interest? And so there's no such thing as the national
174. interest, national defense, national security.
175. Or is it somebody's securities? That's closer to
176. it. But that's
177. the pretense, that we have all this common
178. interest and no recognition of the fact that we are a class society, have always
179. been. You could write a history of the United States and start off with a
180. sentence, the history of the United States is a history of class struggle.
181. Well that would be a dangerous way to start off. It would be hard to get a
182. publisher, a mainstream, certainly a mainstream publisher to do a history of the
183. But the truth is that, yes, we were a society riven by class right from the very beginning,
184. riven by race, riven by, right from the beginning.
185. It's not that we were all pilgrims, you know, coming here dressed in those funny costumes,
186. sharing everything, writing the Mayflower Confession.
187. I remember all that stuff.
188. No, no.
189. There was us, and there were the Native Americans.
190. There were the blacks and slaves, and there were the slaveholders.
191. There were the servants.
192. There were the masters.
193. There were people given huge grants of land, huge, huge grants of land.
194. Other people, no land at all, propertyless people from the beginning and up all through American history.
195. I mean, James Madison recognized this when he was writing the Federalist Papers
196. and he was trying to persuade people to ratify the Constitution.
197. He said, well, we need a government.
198. We need a strong government.
199. Why do we need a strong government?
200. Because, well, there's conflict.
201. Federalist number 10, right?
202. society is divided into factions. Based on what? Some people have property, some
203. people don't have property. There's going to be conflict. We've got to do
204. something about controlling this conflict. We have this nice, new, strong
205. government. It will help to control this conflict. He was very aware, as were all
206. the founding fathers, as were all those people who gathered together for the
207. very conscious of the rebellions that had just taken place after the
208. revolution.
209. Just Shave's Rebellion being the most recent one, just before.
210. And there's an important conjunction between the Shave
211. Rebellion of 1786 and the framing of the Constitution in 1787, because the framers of the Constitution
212. were very conscious of the fact that out in western Massachusetts, thousands of farmers
213. had gathered and rebelled against the elite of Boston, against the high taxes that they
214. had to pay, and they had surrounded courthouses, and they had prevented the court proceedings
215. from going on.
216. This was a real rebellion.
217. And there were similar rebellions in other parts of the country, in Virginia, in Pennsylvania,
218. in New Jersey, similar rebellion.
219. And the founding fathers were conscious of this.
220. One of Washington's generals, General Knox,
221. wrote to him after Shays' rebellions.
222. He said, these people in Shays' rebellion,
223. many of them veterans, you know,
224. veterans of the Revolutionary War,
225. Captain Daniel Shays himself a veteran.
226. They come back and they find that all those promises,
227. oh, how universal a story this is,
228. of veterans being given promises
229. that if they fight and sacrifice,
230. that they will come back and there'll be a new,
231. world and so on. And Knox writes to Washington and says, these people fought in the revolution.
232. They think because they fought in the revolution that the fruits, the wealth of this country
233. belongs equally to them. Well, this is dangerous. And so a government is set up which is going to
234. try to control rebellion. That was the idea of the Constitution. The idea of the Constitution
235. was not as even some very prominent historians,
236. oh, they wanted to, these are very wise,
237. they were smart men, eloquent men,
238. but the myth is their idea was to set up
239. a democratic society and liberty and justice,
240. no, that was not, the intent was to set up
241. a government that would be able to control things,
242. be able to deal with Indians
243. as the settlers moved out west,
244. to be able to deal with slave rebellions,
245. to be able to deal with working people who rebelled.
246. That was the idea of it.
247. And so, in fact, a government was set up
248. that was able to deal with that
249. and has been able to deal with that ever since.
250. Because ever since then,
251. we've had a government and legislation
252. that represented a particular class of Americans
253. that didn't represent the poor
254. and didn't represent the black
255. and didn't represent the immigrants
256. and didn't represent the Native Americans.
257. The history of legislation in this country
258. from that point to this point has been a history of legislation to benefit a very small group of people.
259. There have been a few departures from that.
260. When you have a society divided this way, history is going to reflect those conflicts and those divisions.
261. It can't be a neutral history, a history of, oh, history represents everybody.
262. History is going to be written from a point of view.
263. and some people are going to be left out and some people are going to be given prominent attention.
264. It's inevitable, right, that you have an enormous mass of data
265. and inevitably you must choose from that enormous mass of data
266. what you are going to present when you write history or when you teach history.
267. And you choose according to what you think is important.
268. That is, you choose according to your point of view.
269. And depending on where you are and where you sit and who you're trying to please, you will have a different notion of what is important.
270. But if you look at it from the point of view of people who have been generally left out of the dominant landscape of American history, things look different.
271. The American Revolution looks different from the point of view of Indians.
272. The Jacksonian period I remember was taught to us as Jacksonian democracy say Those words always went together Jacksonian democracy Jackson was a slaveholder Jackson was a racist Jackson was an Indian killer
273. And in the period of Jacksonian democracy, the industries were beginning in New England and girls were going to work at the age of 12 and dying at the age of 25.
274. and and you know in this period of Jacksonian democracy and also this is a
275. period in which the the army of the United States under Jackson's orders
276. were driving the Indians of the southeast out of their homes across the
277. Mississippi the Trail of Tears 4,000 out of 16,000 die in the Trail of Tears this
278. was that showing a democracy so looking at Jacksonian democracy from different
279. points of view, you have to separate those two words.
280. Look at a civil war from the standpoint of Indians.
281. A civil war is a war for liberation of slaves.
282. Yes, and in fact, there's a kind of emancipation
283. that takes place as a result of the Civil War.
284. And yet, during the Civil War, while armies
285. were fighting the Confederates in various parts
286. of the country, other parts of the army
287. were out west, annihilating Indian tribes.
288. More land was taken away from Indians
289. during the years of the Civil War
290. than in any comparable period in American history.
291. So yes, if you look at the Civil War
292. from a different point of view, it becomes something else.
293. The Industrial Revolution, the great economic miracle
294. of the United States.
295. And I remember sitting there in class and marveling at, wow,
296. That's when we became a great economic power.
297. And we're taught to take pride in the wealth of Carnegie
298. or the achievements of the great,
299. and how many steel ingots were produced,
300. and how many miles of railroad track were laid.
301. And it's all us.
302. It's all us.
303. Our interests are the same.
304. But from the point of view of the people who worked
305. in Rockefeller's oil refineries, the people who
306. worked in the Chinese and Irish immigrants who
307. worked on the Transcontinental Railroad,
308. from the standpoint that people worked in Carnegie steel mills,
309. it wasn't simply a great economic miracle.
310. It was a human cost to economic progress,
311. which is not much dealt with in the traditional histories
312. of that great period of industrial expansion
313. between the Civil War and World War I.
314. Well, take the so-called progressive era
315. in American history.
316. Progressive era, why?
317. Some reforms were passed.
318. Roosevelt was president.
319. Progressive era is exactly that period
320. in which more black people were lynched in this country
321. than any other period.
322. Roosevelt, the great progressive.
323. Roosevelt, there he is on Mount Rushmore.
324. A warmonger, a militarist, a lover of war,
325. man who observes a massacre taking place in the Philippines
326. while he's president and congratulates the general who
327. orders the massacre of 600 Philippine men, women, and children.
328. And our heroes, when you look at it,
329. depending on your point of view, the heroes are different.
330. It's no longer Theodore Roosevelt.
331. It's Emma Goldman and Mother Jones,
332. and Helen Keller and Eugene Debs,
333. and Frederick Douglass and W.B. Du Bois.
334. You just get different heroes depending on your point of view.
335. This approach to history,
336. this presenting of history from the standpoint of what do our leaders do,
337. you know what is Congress you know telling the story of America from the standpoint of what are the statutes passed by Congress and what are decisions made by the Supreme Court and what are the edicts by the presidents and so on and who are the military heroes that we should direct statute to
338. This approach is a profoundly undemocratic one.
339. And we're presumably a democratic country, but that's a profoundly undemocratic approach to history.
340. The leaving out of the point of view of people who are, yes, invisible, who don't have power.
341. And what it does, that kind of history, it creates a passive citizenry.
342. It creates a citizenry that believes that the important things that are done are done by important people.
343. And that all that is left for us to do, all that's left for citizens to do, is to engage in the most puny act of citizenship, and that is to vote.
344. Really.
345. Because all we have to do is vote for these, you know, we have a choice.
346. What a choice we always have.
347. But to vote, that's the pinnacle of citizenship in this supposedly democratic country, to vote for A or B, or A or A prime, you see.
348. But in fact, the history of the country shows that when important gains were made in justice, in economic justice or racial justice,
349. or the attention paid to the problems of women and the existence of women,
350. And whenever progress was made, it was not made through the initiative of people on top.
351. It was made by citizens, by people getting together, by organizing, by the labor organizing, by anti-war people organizing, by women organizing, by disabled people organizing, by gay and lesbian people.
352. That's when things change.
353. It's important to know that so that you don't remain a passive citizen.
354. and so you understand that we all
355. have a role to play. It seems to me that
356. is the importance of people's history
357. and that's why I'm so glad that Ray Raphael has done
358. his book and now he's going to talk to you. Thank you.
359. I'm going to talk tonight about
360. writing common people into history.
361. people. That's my focus. First, let me define that, common people. You have to watch out with people,
362. the term people, because it's really that that term can really be mustered from the left or the right
363. or even the center in its behalf. The center, I'm referring to the will of the American people
364. uttered by ultra-privileged male politicians in this last election a little too often for my
365. liking. So I'm going to define common people, very simple definition, as those who do not enjoy the
366. special privileges of wealth, prestige, or political power. Or alternately, if you prefer,
367. all those whom Alexander Hamilton warned us against. So why do we study common people?
368. First, on the most basic level, it's a question of just simple social justice,
369. giving equal airtime, give credit where credit's due. Beyond that, what's really more important is
370. it's through history that we learn how to interpret the political process through the
371. study of history. For years in school, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth grade, so on,
372. until you're about a senior, you learn history before you learn how our present political
373. process is supposed to work. And in history, then, if you study the workings from basically
374. top-down history of the elite, that's the way you just come to imagine that's what politics is.
375. That's the way history works, politics works, since it worked then. We can marginalize people
376. in the past. Therefore, we can marginalize people in the present. So there's a whole political
377. message there. And beyond that, from the historian's point of view, you want to
378. study common people just for the sake of accuracy You leave out too much when you don Let me give you an idea of some of the things that it leaves out What I do in my book I take my lens my focusing lens and I switch from George Washington and come over to his slaves the Indians whom he displaced the soldiers whom
379. he commanded in the army, their wives, their mothers, the women who followed the army, all
380. these other people. So let's look at some of these other people, the slaves. About one in every five
381. slaves in the South ran to the British for their freedom during the Revolutionary War.
382. This included 17 of Washington's own slaves, 30 of Jefferson's own slaves. And this was really
383. an exodus of biblical proportions, really greater than the more famous Underground Railroad that
384. followed. So huge consequences here. You think of Indian wars as, you know, okay, the whites going
385. out and after the Indians. It's much more complex than that. In the Revolutionary War, every single
386. Every single Native American east of the Mississippi was directly affected by the Revolutionary
387. War.
388. Most of them sided one way or the other, and most of them sided with the losing side, namely
389. the British.
390. This opened up all the lands, and they suffered the consequences.
391. It was really the largest war, Indian War, in the nation's history.
392. Most people, everybody really agrees that the beginning of the American Revolution started
393. in Lexington and Concord, Shot Heard Round the World, Paul Revere and all that.
394. That's April 19, 1775.
395. The previous summer, 1774, there were in every county seat throughout rural Massachusetts,
396. thousands upon thousands of farmers went to the courthouses, dragged out every British
397. appointed official, deposed them, dragged them out into the streets or onto the commons
398. where they'd have to run the gauntlet.
399. They made them take off their hats and recite their resignations between maybe 3,000, 4,000
400. 6,000 people lined up on each side. Once was not enough. They had to do it over and over and over.
401. They didn't have microphones, and all the people wanted to hear. At every juncture during these
402. proceedings, the people would take votes. Was that resignation sufficient? Maybe he should change it.
403. This amazing, amazing outpouring. By the end of it, you have the no-zero British presence in the
404. Massachusetts Country Pride. 1774, what happens eight months later, the British try to reconquer
405. a land they had already lost, and that is the counter-revolution, which for all these years
406. has masqueraded as the revolution, the beginning of the revolution. Phenomenal discovery. It's like
407. the emperor's new clothes. Why don't people see that? Because we're locked into certain myths.
408. We get those myths by too narrow a focus. If you just look at what the farmers were doing during
409. that time, you see what's happening. Go on and on like this. All these people are seeking freedom,
410. slaves, the farmers, the Indians, they're all seeking their own version of freedom.
411. It's not just the taxation without representation people.
412. A lot of the loyalists were seeking their freedom.
413. You have in Maryland, Delaware, Hudson Valley, New York, southern backcountry,
414. you have loyalists who are rebelling against the elite.
415. The elite were patriots in those areas.
416. These people become loyalists, and they fight for the loyalists, for their freedom, lower-class tenant farmers.
417. Pacifists, they're fighting for their freedom a whole different way.
418. One in 30 free Americans during the Revolutionary time belonged to a religious, pacifistic organization which opposed all war, and this one in particular.
419. They had to face the power of a very oppressive government, which was going at them.
420. They wanted their money, they wanted their bodies, and they wanted them to take oaths.
421. These people wouldn't do it. A lot of them landed in jail.
422. You're listening to Ray Raphael and Howard Zinn on A People's History of the American Revolution.
423. This is Independent Alternative Radio.
424. For copies of this program, call us 1-800-444-1977.
425. That's 1-800-444-1977.
426. 800-444-1977
427. or online at our website, alternativeradio.org.
428. Women, a lot of us know that women gave up tea and fancy ornaments
429. for the sake of the revolution.
430. Well, some women gave up fancy ornaments and tea,
431. those who could afford it.
432. A lot of other women behaved quite differently.
433. You had the lower class women.
434. Many of them joined the Continental Army, basically.
435. They had nowhere else to go.
436. These were basically homeless people, and they became camp followers.
437. Other women rioted against war profiteers for lower prices.
438. You have a whole other level of involvement here.
439. When you look at the revolution from the standpoint of class,
440. you find out that it was really in 1775,
441. there was a massive outpouring of all classes, virtually
442. all classes except at the very top,
443. of people against the British.
444. By the end of that year, most people
445. with any form of property, whether that
446. was a shop or a farm, they went home to tend to that property.
447. There was nobody left except poor people.
448. They had to resort to a draft.
449. So in this draft, if you didn't want to go, you'd be drafted.
450. Your number was called.
451. You simply pay $20.
452. You get a substitute.
453. It's an easy way out if you have the money.
454. So by the end of the war, you have an absolutely,
455. an army which is absolutely class driven, lower class only,
456. except, of course, for the officers,
457. and impressionable young boys.
458. That's who won the Revolutionary War.
459. This is all by class.
460. This is not the simple story.
461. This is not the kind of the one-dimensional morality tale
462. that we're raised with.
463. All we have to do is look at the common people,
464. and all this just emerges.
465. We find all this.
466. These are not really that controversial
467. if you just look there.
468. So why aren't we looking there?
469. That's the big question I want to address now.
470. What are the impediments to looking at people's history?
471. Why don't we do it?
472. First of all, there's the need to mythologize.
473. I mean, all cultures have to create some kind of sort
474. of founding mythology, why they came to be who they are.
475. And implicitly, that's justification of who they are.
476. So we've done that.
477. We've created our founding myth.
478. And in that myth, we have our heroes.
479. And these heroes kind of embody all the things
480. that we supposedly want, all the virtues and the values
481. that we aspire to.
482. Then added to this, we have the natural human inclination
483. to identify with somebody.
484. So history kind of calls out for protagonist.
485. It needs that one individual.
486. the single person who embodies the attributes of the many.
487. So we have George Washington is courageous.
488. Meanwhile, there's 10,000 other men
489. who are waking up about to go into battle
490. and having to face that battle knowing they might die.
491. And what do we learn?
492. We learn George Washington is courageous.
493. It's kind of a shorthand for the other people.
494. And then the other people, through history,
495. just kind of get left out.
496. We have Washington marched against Cornwallis
497. at Yorktown.
498. I love that one, Washington March, because Washington didn't march.
499. Washington rode a horse.
500. So Washington is marching in this kind of grand single combat against Cornwallis.
501. This kind of like leader down, this top down, it's trickle downs.
502. You know trickle down economics?
503. Okay, this is trickle down history.
504. Historians don't call it trickle down history.
505. That's not the official school of historians.
506. We are the historians.
507. Because Howard and I believe we come from a school.
508. We're kind of the school of people historians.
509. And they don't say we're from the school of trickle-down historians.
510. But they do say, but there's another related word, it's called dissemination.
511. And the way dissemination works is a few people have these great ideas.
512. These are great thinkers and visionaries and wonderful people who generally tend to be quite well off and a lot of time to think about these things.
513. And they envision something and then it happens So you have like in the revolutionary period these great men conceptualize the revolution and others follow They just fall into line
514. OK?
515. You have a few men kind of like writing a play,
516. and the rest are just delivering the script.
517. These top people, they're called leaders.
518. Think of what that means.
519. You hear leaders, leaders.
520. What does that mean?
521. So now, if they're leaders, who's everybody else?
522. There's a follower, right?
523. OK, so you have leaders and followers.
524. What does that do?
525. That means these people are just following along.
526. It's a way of belittling their very real concerns.
527. So if you're against any kind of social movement,
528. you have a great vested interest in calling people leaders.
529. This is the way it works.
530. And this is the way we, this is kind of in the sort
531. of underlying grammar of the way most history is told
532. from the standpoint of leaders.
533. Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence,
534. one of the great documents of our time,
535. conceived by a mighty genius, Thomas Jefferson.
536. Well, it's a great document, yes,
537. And it says many great things.
538. So were several other documents which preceded it
539. on a local level, which had many of the same words, which
540. were made by little county committees and conventions
541. and so on, which drafted these things.
542. And Jefferson had at his disposal.
543. And he did a marvelous job of synthesizing all these lesser
544. known works and coming up with a document
545. that he is then credited with.
546. And that's kind of a good model for the way
547. that the process of leaders and followers.
548. You actually have a groundswell of support
549. doing a lot of the work, one person kind of putting it
550. together in some way and then getting all the credit is kind of like, you know, just
551. spun out of his mind in some kind of sort of immaculate conception sort of way.
552. Okay.
553. Anyway, this is what we're faced with, all these sorts of things.
554. A lot of this is, by the way, consciously manipulated, create these special people on
555. top.
556. Let me read you a little section here.
557. This is a direct quote from Charles Thompson.
558. He's the Secretary of the Congress.
559. I could not tell, the Continental Congress, that is, I could not tell the truth without
560. giving great offense. Let the world admire our patriots and heroes, their supposed talents and
561. virtues, where they were so, by commanding imitation will serve the cause of patriotism
562. in our country. Okay, so he's very consciously creating this kind of image of heroes, and he
563. doesn't want to burst the bubble. A lot of this stuff, if we just take a self-conscious approach
564. to try to overcome it, we can. For instance, this Washington March business. In people's history,
565. I tell the military story of the war. I give a narrative. So when I come to the military history,
566. I tell the story through five common soldiers who were at the various battles. Here's the biggest
567. problem we face, which is more than just a problem of attitude. It's a very concrete physical problem
568. that has to be addressed. And that's the problem with sources. Where do you get sources for slaves,
569. for Indians, for tenant farmers who don't write, and so on? A lot of common people, particularly
570. as we go back in time. They didn't write. So you have to overcome that. How do you do it?
571. First of all, you look for what is there. And sometimes you get a little lucky. Out of half a
572. million slaves in the United States at that time, there were two complete narratives. I mean,
573. by complete, I mean only 20 pages long or something about their experiences during that time.
574. These were people who did flee to the British. They were preachers. So they basically wrote
575. their memoirs in religious journals that were published during that time. So we're lucky. We
576. do have those two stories. Then you have a few pension applications later on. Then, oh, here's
577. another one. An Iroquois warrior named Black Snake. This is really one of my favorites.
578. He didn't know how to write, but a friend of his learned a little English. And so he knew how to
579. write So Black Snake dictated to his friend his memoir And it just fascinating stuff incredible stories We get an inside look about when the British are trying to basically convince the Iroquois warriors to join their side
580. And he narrates the entire argument between the hawks and the doves.
581. And then he also talks about what it's like to be part of a slaughter, what it's like to be on a massacre, kind of both ends.
582. Incredible documents.
583. Then you have a few soldiers did leave letters and later memoirs.
584. The things that you learn from these firsthand pieces, let me read you one, because this is really, in a nutshell, shows you how much you can learn from a very personal document.
585. This is actually a pension application.
586. This guy is applying for a pension after the war.
587. What's beautiful about this is you didn't have to know how to write.
588. This was oral history.
589. They would actually, if you were applying for a pension,
590. you would go and they would take down your story.
591. So a lot of time it says, deponent says this, deponent says that.
592. It's really a first-person kind of thing.
593. Here we have, this guy is in the South, and this is a story he tells.
594. His name is Moses Hall.
595. The evening after our battle with the Tories,
596. we having a considerable number of prisoners,
597. I recollect a scene which made a lasting impression upon my mind.
598. I was invited by some of my comrades to go and see some of the prisoners.
599. We went to where six were standing together.
600. some discussion taking place, I heard some of our men cry out, remember Buford. This was a site
601. where the Tories massacred the Patriot prisoners. And the prisoners were immediately hewed to pieces
602. with broadswords in revenge for Buford. At first, I bore the scene without any emotion,
603. but upon a moment's reflection, I felt such horror as I never did before nor have since.
604. And returning to my quarters and throwing myself upon my blanket, I contemplated the cruelties of
605. war until overcome and unmanned by a distressing gloom from which I was not relieved until
606. commencing our march next morning before day by moonlight. So he's sensitive to the tragedies of
607. war. But later the next day, being on the left side of the road as we marched along, I discovered
608. lying upon the ground something with appearance of a man. Upon approaching him, he proved to be a
609. youth about 16 who, having come out to view the British through curiosity, for fear he might give
610. information to our troops, they had run him through with a bayonet and left him for dead.
611. Though able to speak, he was mortally wounded. The sight of this unoffending boy, butchered,
612. relieved me of my distressful feeling for the slaughter of the Tories, and I desired nothing
613. so much as the opportunity of participating in their destruction. So you have this very sensitive
614. guy who doesn't want to do this, and he gets into it. This, in a nutshell, is war,
615. this kind of strange twisted logic of revenge. When you can find the sources, take them. And
616. basically in the people's history, I've combed far and wide for every available direct source,
617. and it's in there. Beyond that, though, you have to be more creative. I use a trick I call
618. reflected images. We have the documents of the elite, multi-volumes of them. By looking at these
619. things, you can get glimpses of the life for the common people. For instance, 1777, July 4th,
620. This is the first anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
621. Washington's general orders.
622. No women shall ride in the wagons.
623. What's he talking about?
624. What's he talking about is the women camp followers are riding in the wagons.
625. He doesn't like that because he wants the wagons to be for men so they'll save their energy.
626. A month later, absolutely no women ride in the wagons.
627. Two months later, if any women ride in the wagon, the men will be punished.
628. And he keeps escalating the punishment.
629. This goes on for four years.
630. until we find out from the one direct source from a camp follower at Yorktown that she arrived at Wartown riding in a wagon So what do we learn We learned that the
631. women rode in the wagons. We learned that the the men appreciated what they were
632. doing. We learned that the men disobeyed orders whenever they wanted pretty much.
633. So we learn all sorts of things from these indirect indirect sources.
634. Reflected images I call them. One of the most incredible reflected
635. images really comes from runaway slave ads. As I said, there are very few direct statements from
636. slaves, but consider this. As I read this, try to figure out what you can surmise by the slave owner,
637. the slave in question, and the nature of slavery. This runaway slave ad appears really right when
638. Lord Dunmore is issuing, the British governor of Virginia is issuing his proclamation freeing the
639. slaves if they run to the British. Absented himself from the subscriber, the fourth of this
640. instant, a Negro man named Limus. He is of yellow complexion and has the ends of three of his
641. fingers cut off his left hand. He is well known in Charleston from his saucy and impudent tongue,
642. of which I had many complaints. Therefore, I hereby give free liberty and will also be much
643. obliged to any person to flog him so as not to take his life, in such manner as they shall think
644. proper whenever he is found out of my habitation without a ticket. For though he is my property,
645. he has the audacity to tell me he will be free, that he will serve no man, and that he will be
646. conquered or governed by no man. I forewarn masters of vessels from carrying him off the province.
647. So, I mean, that's a whole textbook in the nature of slavery right there. Sometimes we don't even
648. have that to go on. We don't even have reflected images, okay, but we can still make statements.
649. Let's continue with the slavery theme. By the way, I'm focusing maybe more on slavery now,
650. but I also deal with a full range.
651. All the Native American groups east of the Mississippi are covered in here
652. with complete narratives.
653. Loyalists, pacifists, women of all classes,
654. the boys who did the fighting and so on.
655. But I'm focusing on slavery here.
656. These people did run to the British.
657. Okay, we know that.
658. What we don't know is how they made that decision.
659. But about a fifth of them did, four-fifths did not.
660. It was a very dangerous task.
661. I mean, a lot of them died.
662. As a matter of fact, about as many people died trying to find their freedom in the British as white soldiers died in the war.
663. They died from being caught or they died from disease.
664. So that's another unknown and huge fact.
665. But they have to make a decision.
666. Are they going to go or are they not going to go?
667. So how are they going to do this?
668. Maybe they're going to call a meeting like this.
669. Okay, all the slaves on Washington's plantation at 5 o'clock, let's get together and we're going to decide.
670. We're going to have a rally.
671. It doesn't work like that.
672. There's slave informers everywhere.
673. This is dangerous business.
674. We're talking about undercover, clandestine operations.
675. So we know it has to have been because there were slaves that were turned in.
676. They have to have done it this way.
677. So they're having these meetings.
678. They have to be in small groups.
679. They're making these decisions.
680. Shall we run?
681. Shall we not?
682. So they're evaluating.
683. If we run, what's going to happen if we get caught?
684. What's going to happen once we get there?
685. If we don't run, what happens if the British then conquer the plantation?
686. We're going to be sold into slavery and go to the West Indies?
687. They're trying to figure all this out.
688. They're trying to weigh the dangers and the prospects.
689. They have to be doing this.
690. We have no records of the journals, okay?
691. But we know they have to be doing this, so I include that in the story.
692. It has to be.
693. Because all I'm doing is I'm putting myself in their position
694. and trying to evaluate their hypothetical prospects.
695. Now, there's a movement in history which does exactly this.
696. If you look into what's being done in, say, diplomatic history now,
697. you'll see people say, you can't just look at history as a train leading up to the present.
698. You know, everything has a neat conclusion to, you know,
699. cause and effect to something else. That's too one-dimensional, and history doesn't work like
700. that. At every point, there's choices, and that's what history is about, is those choices and why
701. they make those choices. So to make those choices, you have to go back to the times and try to
702. evaluate the prospects, and that's how you really get to learn about how the people are experiencing
703. those times. This is done in all sort of political history. What I'm suggesting is we take this kind
704. of sophisticated and very obvious approach all the way down to common people, to the full version.
705. When we do this, we find that people are making, all the people throughout the revolutionary era,
706. are making very willed and conscious choices about how to participate in political action.
707. You have Andrew Gearing, a pacifist.
708. He's in jail because he won't take the oath.
709. His minister is telling him, he's saying, you're great, Andrew, because you're really true to your beliefs, so stay in jail.
710. And his wife is telling him, it's August, the crops are in, if you don't do whatever you have to do to get out of jail, we starve.
711. He's making a decision. He's trying to figure that out.
712. You have Joseph Plum Martin, one of my five principal soldiers here, talking in very moving terms about his decision.
713. Shall he join the mutiny or not?
714. He's patriotic.
715. He believes in his cause.
716. He's suffered all this time, and yet all the people are, so he doesn't want to go against his army, against his leaders, but they haven't been paid, and they're starving.
717. Does he mutiny or not?
718. You have Cornplanter, the Iroquois warrior.
719. He captures his own father because his father is an Irishman, as it turns out, John O'Bale.
720. And he captured what I mean, what's he gonna do with his own father when he captures him on the other side?
721. You have another Iroquois captures his brother who's also fighting on the other side. This is really a civil war
722. This is happening all over the place. What are these people gonna do? How are they?
723. How are they gonna deal with these kinds of decisions? You have this is a very moving one several cases
724. You have questions of soldiers the whites and also some Indian soldiers
725. Coming across an unarmed man, you know, and he's got the bead on him
726. He's pointing the rifle and he has to decide whether to pull the trigger on a guy who he knows is going to die
727. You know that direct and these guys for years later there. This is haunting them
728. This isn't the view of war that we get, you know, when we just kind of read the revolution
729. That's not the rah-rah view. These people are making choices. They are political actors and their actions are the revolution
730. There's some total of actions to get the full story. That's what we have to do
731. We have to study how all these people are navigating the troubled waters of revolution
732. seeking their own freedoms in their own multivarious ways.
733. When we do this, what we do is we go beyond the simplistic morality tale,
734. which is the usual revolution, good and bad, and of course we're the good,
735. and we arrive at a much more complex and intriguing
736. and really humanly full picture, something we can really identify with,
737. much more indicative of the true diversity that we're seeking today
738. for our nation's identity, and also as individuals.
739. So this is it.
740. this is a people's history
741. I think what's happening now
742. maybe some people
743. probably need to leave
744. but Howard and I
745. would love to have questions
746. and engage in some dialogue
747. I was in Binghamton, New York
748. recently
749. and in the newspaper
750. I read a controversy
751. regarding an Indian Holocaust memorial
752. I wonder if you're familiar with this
753. apparently George Washington
754. ordered the Indians
755. in that region around Binghamton
756. he ordered General Sheridan, I guess, to eradicate the Indians, men, women, and children, including their villages.
757. And I looked up a little bit about this, and apparently this did happen.
758. Washington gave the order, and the Indians really were, many of them killed,
759. and the rest were moved to, or moved themselves to Niagara.
760. I never heard this before and I was amazed It appears to be true If it true why haven we heard about this in history before There was a major major campaign against the Iroquois by General Sullivan
761. and actually a lot of his officers kept journals,
762. and the journals were fascinating because they were like the body counts, you know, for the Vietnam War.
763. And this was on direct order from George Washington.
764. Oh, yeah, direct order, except they were vegetable counts
765. because the idea was to starve them.
766. So the orders were to burn every piece of everything that was growing.
767. It was an early version of defoliation.
768. So they did this.
769. They burned all the Indian fields throughout New York.
770. And, of course, the following winter was a very hard one and great starvation.
771. And it did absolutely zero to stop the Indian raids
772. because the people who had survived were the warriors, and they were furious.
773. So next year, of course, it was much worse along the frontier.
774. But that's what it was.
775. It was really a genocidal type of operation.
776. It's covered in the book, and then there are references
777. where you can actually go back to the original sources written by, once again, reflected images.
778. Because the Indians, actually, there's some of this.
779. There is a captured Indian. Mary Jameson was captured when she was a child.
780. She married an Iroquois warrior, and she wrote about the starvation that followed, and that's in here.
781. And then you can read, actually, the accounts of the officers themselves as well.
782. Most of our traditional histories tend to skew heavily towards elite-driven histories, as you both discussed today.
783. And the Revolution is certainly a great example of that.
784. And some of those reasons for it are contemporary.
785. And some of them are interposed.
786. And David Hackett Fisher in Paul Revere's Ride gives us a good account of how the Lexington Alarm,
787. which had dozens and dozens and dozens of artisans involved with,
788. became transposed by Longfellow because of Civil War propaganda into a single rider, a lone voice in the night.
789. Some of the reasons why we have an elite history of the Revolution, I think, were contemporaneous with the Revolution itself.
790. what were some of those reasons for burnishing the elites?
791. What was the perception of the elites at the time?
792. If you look at Adams and Jefferson,
793. they're self-conscious of their place in history.
794. And in most of the, quote, founding fathers' writings,
795. they're speaking to posterity.
796. What do you see as being some of the reasons
797. for their own skewing history?
798. Well, they had a very difficult job
799. because they wanted something that was called a revolution,
800. but obviously they didn't want revolution.
801. It's a hard balancing act,
802. and they wanted to basically
803. ally themselves with people who did
804. want a revolution, and then
805. quickly distance themselves from that same,
806. from those same people.
807. After the revolution, there was an attempt
808. at another revolution. Let me
809. just, speaking of Shays' Rebellion,
810. which Howard mentioned,
811. remember I mentioned the 1774
812. revolution, which was the revolution,
813. it was the real overthrow of the government
814. throughout all of Massachusetts.
815. That was in 1774. In 1786, the exact same people showed up, but not quite as many of them, and tried to do the exact same thing.
816. They tried to engage in a second revolution. This is something, in terms of the history of Shays' Rebellion, it's never fully understood,
817. because people don't understand the context that these guys were just trying to do a repeat performance.
818. The result was, the first one succeeded, and the second one failed.
819. And that's sort of how you can mark what happened after the revolution.
820. That was the mark that the revolution was not going to, the second revolution, the full social revolution was not going to succeed.
821. Let me just say one more thing about that.
822. And that is that there's this continuity, you know, that Ray is talking about, you know, from 1774, 1786, and of course before 1774 and after 1786.
823. but in the midst of the revolution in the midst of the war against England which presumably is you know as Ray said you know the story is of united colonists patriotic war and so on But in the midst of that
824. there are mutinies, which are class-based. That is, the soldiers, the privates,
825. are being treated like dirt. The officers are being treated like kings. And, you know, they're
826. getting high pay and good clothes and good food and having parties and so on
827. and and the and the pilots are not giving any clothes not getting any pay
828. and to be kept in when they want to be mustered out their time of services up
829. in 1781 there the mutiny of thousands of soldiers in the Pennsylvania line and
830. Washington has to be very careful in dealing with that because there's
831. thousands of them he's worried and expresses this that this is this may
832. spread to the whole revolutionary army. And so he deals with them by compromising. But then shortly
833. after that, there's another mutiny in the New Jersey line, where only a few hundred mutineers
834. are involved. At that point, Washington gets tough. And there's this romanticized picture
835. of Washington, which, well, as we see, is dispelled when you look at how he treats black people and
836. how he treats Indians, but also how he treats presumably his own, his own soldiers. When he
837. He feels he can handle the mutiny in the New Jersey line.
838. His orders are, shoot them.
839. And so they take out, by random, actually,
840. it's almost like the movie Paths of Glory,
841. where they pick out at random the troublemakers,
842. at random, and they have them executed by their fellow mutineers.
843. You were just listening to Howard Zinn and Ray Raphael
844. on a People's History of the American Revolution. This classic from the AR archives was recorded
845. at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2001. Howard Zinn was a leading progressive
846. historian. His masterpiece, A People's History of the United States, has sold more than four
847. million copies. He passed away in 2010. Before Howard Zinn, you heard Ray Raphael, an award-winning
848. historian and the author of A People's History of the American Revolution. This program is produced
849. by Alternative Radio, an independent non-profit in our 40th year. We're supported solely by
850. individuals just like you. We feature such voices as Noam Chomsky, Chris Hedges, and Roxanne Dunbar
851. Ortiz. And we have an extensive Howard Zinn archive. To access our complete audio and book
852. catalog, just go to our website, alternativeradio.org. Again, our website where we are podcasting,
853. www.alternativeradio.org. For copies of today's program, Howard Zinn and Ray Raphael on A People's
854. History of the American Revolution, and for Ray Raphael's book with the same title, and for Howard
855. Zinn's classic book, A People's History of the United States, call us 1-800-444-1977. That's
856. 1-800-444-1977
857. or online on our website,
858. alternativeradio.org.
859. That's alternativeradio.org.
860. Printed transcripts PDFs and MP3s of this program are free of charge To get them just call us 1
861. Series theme music is performed by the Kronos Quartet from Pieces of Africa.
862. Special thanks to Martin Volker.
863. Joe Rich is our general manager and editor.
864. I'm David Barsamian.
865. Thank you for listening.
866. and remember to support your local public station.
867. We'll be right back.
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