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A People’s History of the United States, 1492-Present
By Howard Zinn
Index
1. Columbus , The Indians, and Human Progress
2. Drawing the Color Line
3. Persons of Mean and Vile Condition
4. Tyranny is Tyranny
5. A Kind of Revolution
6. The Intimately Oppressed
7. As Long as Grass Grows or Water Runs
8. We Take Nothing by Conquest, Thank God
9. Slavery without Submission, Emancipation without Freedom
10. The Other Civil-War
11. Robber Barons and Rebels
12. The Empire and the People
13. The Socialist Challenge
14. War is the Health of the State
15. Self-Help in Hard Times
16. A People’s War?
17. “Or Does it Explode?”
18. The Impossible Victory: Vietnam
19. Surprises
20. The Seventies : Under Control?
21. Carter, Reagan, Bush; The Bipartisan Consensus
22. The Unreported Resistance
23. The Clinton Presidency and the Crisis of Democracy
24. The Coming Revolt of the Guards
Afterword
Bibliography
1. Columbus , The Indians, and Human Progress
Arawak men and women, naked, tawny, and full of wonder, emerged from their villages onto
the island’s beaches and swam out to get a closer look at the strange big boat. When
Columbus and his sailors came ashore, carrying swords, speaking oddly, the Arawaks ran to
greet them, brought them food, water, gifts. He later wrote of this in his log:
They … brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they
exchanged for the glass beads and hawks’ bells. They willingly traded everything they
owned… . They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features…. They do not bear
arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut
themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane… . They
would make fine servants…. With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do
whatever we want.
These Arawaks of the Bahama Islands were much like Indians on the mainland, who were
remarkable (European observers were to say again and again) for their hospitality, their
belief in sharing. These traits did not stand out in the Europe of the Renaissance, dominated
as it was by the religion of popes, the government of kings, the frenzy for money that marked
Western civilization and its first messenger to the Americas , Christopher Columbus.
Columbus wrote:
As soon as I arrived in the Indies , on the first Island which I found, I took some of the
natives by force in order that they might learn and might give me information of whatever
there is in these parts.
The information that Columbus wanted most was: Where is the gold? He had persuaded the
king and queen of Spain to finance an expedition to the lands, the wealth, he expected would
be on the other side of the Atlantic -the Indies and Asia , gold and spices. For, like other
informed people of his time, he knew the world was round and he could sail west in order to
get to the Far East .
Spain was recently unified, one of the new modern nation-states, like France , England , and
Portugal . Its population, mostly poor peasants, worked for the nobility, who were 2 percent
of the population and owned 95 percent of the land. Spain had tied itself to the Catholic
Church, expelled all the Jews, driven out the Moors. Like other states of the modern world,
Spain sought gold, which was becoming the new mark of wealth, more useful than land
because it could buy anything.
There was gold in Asia , it was thought, and certainly silks and spices, for Marco Polo and
others had brought back marvelous things from their overland expeditions centuries before.
Now that the Turks had conquered Constantinople and the eastern Mediterranean , and
controlled the land routes to Asia , a sea route was needed. Portuguese sailors were working
their way around the southern tip of Africa . Spain decided to gamble on a long sail across an
unknown ocean.
In return for bringing back gold and spices, they promised Columbus 10 percent of the
profits, governorship over new-found lands, and the fame that would go with a new tide:
Admiral of the Ocean Sea . He was a merchant’s clerk from the Italian city of Genoa, parttime weaver (the son of a skilled weaver), and expert sailor. He set out with three sailing
ships, the largest of which was the Santa Maria, perhaps 100 feet long, and thirty-nine crew
members.
Columbus would never have made it to Asia, which was thousands of miles farther away
than he had calculated, imagining a smaller world. He would have been doomed by that
great expanse of sea. But he was lucky. One-fourth of the way there he came upon an
unknown, uncharted land that lay between Europe and Asia-the Americas. It was early
October 1492, and thirty-three days since he and his crew had left the Canary Islands, off the
Atlantic coast of Africa. Now they saw branches and sticks floating in the water. They saw
flocks of birds.
These were signs of land. Then, on October 12, a sailor called Rodrigo saw the early morning
moon shining on white sands, and cried out. It was an island in the Bahamas, the Caribbean
sea. The first man to sight land was supposed to get a yearly pension of 10,000 maravedis for
life, but Rodrigo never got it. Columbus claimed he had seen a light the evening before. He
got the reward.
So, approaching land, they were met by the Arawak Indians, who swam out to greet them.
The Arawaks lived in village communes, had a developed agriculture of corn, yams, cassava.
They could spin and weave, but they had no horses or work animals. They had no iron, but
they wore tiny gold ornaments in their ears.
This was to have enormous consequences: it led Columbus to take some of them aboard ship
as prisoners because he insisted that they guide him to the source of the gold. He then sailed
to what is now Cuba, then to Hispaniola (the island which today consists of Haiti and the
Dominican Republic). There, bits of visible gold in the rivers, and a gold mask presented to
Columbus by a local Indian chief, led to wild visions of gold fields.
On Hispaniola, out of timbers from the Santa Maria, which had run aground, Columbus built
a fort, the first European military base in the Western Hemisphere. He called it Navidad
(Christmas) and left thirty-nine crewmembers there, with instructions to find and store the
gold. He took more Indian prisoners and put them aboard his two remaining ships. At one
part of the island he got into a fight with Indians who refused to trade as many bows and
arrows as he and his men wanted. Two were run through with swords and bled to death.
Then the Nina and the Pinta set sail for the Azores and Spain. When the weather turned
cold, the Indian prisoners began to the.
Columbus’s report to the Court in Madrid was extravagant. He insisted he had reached Asia
(it was Cuba) and an island off the coast of China (Hispaniola). His descriptions were part
fact, part fiction:
Hispaniola is a miracle. Mountains and hills, plains and pastures, are both fertile and
beautiful … the harbors are unbelievably good and there are many wide rivers of which the
majority contain gold. . . . There are many spices, and great mines of gold and other metals….
The Indians, Columbus reported, “are so naive and so free with their possessions that no one
who has not witnessed them would believe it. When you ask for something they have, they
never say no. To the contrary, they offer to share with anyone….” He concluded his report by
asking for a little help from their Majesties, and in return he would bring them from his next
voyage “as much gold as they need … and as many slaves as they ask.” He was full of
religious talk: “Thus the eternal God, our Lord, gives victory to those who follow His way
over apparent impossibilities.”
Because of Columbus’s exaggerated report and promises, his second expedition was given
seventeen ships and more than twelve hundred men. The aim was clear: slaves and gold.
They went from island to island in the Caribbean, taking Indians as captives. But as word
spread of the Europeans’ intent they found more and more empty villages. On Haiti, they
found that the sailors left behind at Fort Navidad had been killed in a battle with the
Indians, after they had roamed the island in gangs looking for gold, taking women and
children as slaves for sex and labor.
Now, from his base on Haiti, Columbus sent expedition after expedition into the interior.
They found no gold fields, but had to fill up the ships returning to Spain with some kind of
dividend. In the year 1495, they went on a great slave raid, rounded up fifteen hundred
Arawak men, women, and children, put them in pens guarded by Spaniards and dogs, then
picked the five hundred best specimens to load onto ships. Of those five hundred, two
hundred died en route. The rest arrived alive in Spain and were put up for sale by the
archdeacon of the town, who reported that, although the slaves were “naked as the day they
were born,” they showed “no more embarrassment than animals.” Columbus later wrote: “Let
us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold.”
But too many of the slaves died in captivity. And so Columbus, desperate to pay back
dividends to those who had invested, had to make good his promise to fill the ships with gold.
In the province of Cicao on Haiti, where he and his men imagined huge gold fields to exist,
they ordered all persons fourteen years or older to collect a certain quantity of gold every
three months. When they brought it, they were given copper tokens to hang around their
necks. Indians found without a copper token had their hands cut off and bled to death.
The Indians had been given an impossible task. The only gold around was bits of dust
garnered from the streams. So they fled, were hunted down with dogs, and were killed.
Trying to put together an army of resistance, the Arawaks faced Spaniards who had armor,
muskets, swords, horses. When the Spaniards took prisoners they hanged them or burned
them to death. Among the Arawaks, mass suicides began, with cassava poison. Infants were
killed to save them from the Spaniards. In two years, through murder, mutilation, or suicide,
half of the 250,000 Indians on Haiti were dead.
When it became clear that there was no gold left, the Indians were taken as slave labor on
huge estates, known later as encomiendas. They were worked at a ferocious pace, and died
by the thousands. By the year 1515, there were perhaps fifty thousand Indians left. By 1550,
there were five hundred. A report of the year 1650 shows none of the original Arawaks or
their descendants left on the island.
The chief source-and, on many matters the only source-of information about what happened
on the islands after Columbus came is Bartolome de las Casas, who, as a young priest,
participated in the conquest of Cuba. For a time he owned a plantation on which Indian
slaves worked, but he gave that up and became a vehement critic of Spanish cruelty. Las
Casas transcribed Columbus’s journal and, in his fifties, began a multivolume History of the
Indies. In it, he describes the Indians. They are agile, he says, and can swim long distances,
especially the women. They are not completely peaceful, because they do battle from time to
time with other tribes, but their casualties seem small, and they fight when they are
individually moved to do so because of some grievance, not on the orders of captains or kings.
Women in Indian society were treated so well as to startle the Spaniards. Las Casas
describes sex relations:
Marriage laws are non-existent men and women alike choose their mates and leave them as
they please, without offense, jealousy or anger. They multiply in great abundance; pregnant
women work to the last minute and give birth almost painlessly; up the next day, they bathe
in the river and are as clean and healthy as before giving birth. If they tire of their men, they
give themselves abortions with herbs that force stillbirths, covering their shameful parts
with leaves or cotton cloth; although on the whole, Indian men and women look upon total
nakedness with as much casualness as we look upon a man’s head or at his hands.
The Indians, Las Casas says, have no religion, at least no temples. They live in_ large
communal bell-shaped buildings, housing up to 600 people at one time … made of very strong
wood and roofed with palm leaves…. They prize bird feathers of various colors, beads made of
fishbones, and green and white stones with which they adorn their ears and lips, but they
put no value on gold and other precious things. They lack all manner of commerce, neither
buying nor selling, and rely exclusively on their natural environment for maintenance. They
are extremely generous with their possessions and by the same token covet the possessions of
then; friends and expect the same degree of liberality. …
In Book Two of his History of the Indies, Las Casas (who at first urged replacing Indians by
black slaves, thinking they were stronger and would survive, but later relented when he saw
the effects on blacks) tells about the treatment of the Indians by the Spaniards. It is a unique
account and deserves to be quoted at length:
Endless testimonies . .. prove the mild and pacific temperament of the natives…. But our
work was to exasperate, ravage, kill, mangle and destroy; small wonder, then, if they tried to
kill one of us now and then…. The admiral, it is true, was blind as those who came after him,
and he was so anxious to please the King that he committed irreparable crimes against the
Indians….
Las Casas tells how the Spaniards “grew more conceited every day” and after a while refused
to walk any distance. They “rode the backs of Indians if they were in a hurry” or were carried
on hammocks by Indians running in relays. “In this case they also had Indians carry large
leaves to shade them from the sun and others to fan them with goose wings.”
Total control led to total cruelty. The Spaniards “thought nothing of knifing Indians by tens
and twenties and of cutting slices off them to test the sharpness of their blades.” Las Casas
tells how “two of these so-called Christians met two Indian boys one day, each carrying a
parrot; they took the parrots and for fun beheaded the boys.”
The Indians’ attempts to defend themselves failed. And when they ran off into the hills they
were found and killed. So, Las Casas reports, “they suffered and died in the mines and other
labors in desperate silence, knowing not a soul in the world to whom they could turn for
help.” He describes their work in the mines:
… mountains are stripped from top to bottom and bottom to top a thousand times; they dig,
split rocks, move stones, and carry dirt on then: backs to wash it in the rivers, while those
who wash gold stay in the water all the time with their backs bent so constantly it breaks
them; and when water invades the mines, the most arduous task of all is to dry the mines by
scooping up pansful of water and throwing it up outside….
After each six or eight months’ work in the mines, which was the time required of each crew
to dig enough gold for melting, up to a third of the men died.
While the men were sent many miles away to the mines, the wives remained to work the soil,
forced into the excruciating job of digging and making thousands of hills for cassava plants.
Thus husbands and wives were together only once every eight or ten months and when they
met they were so exhausted and depressed on both sides … they ceased to procreate. As for
the newly born, they died early because their mothers, overworked and famished, had no
milk to nurse them, and for this reason, while I was in Cuba, 7000 children died in three
months. Some mothers even drowned their babies from sheer desperation…. hi this way,
husbands died in the mines, wives died at work, and children died from lack of milk . .. and
in a short time this land which was so great, so powerful and fertile … was depopulated. …
My eyes have seen these acts so foreign to human nature, and now I tremble as I write. …
When he arrived on Hispaniola in 1508, Las Casas says, “there were 60,000 people living on
this island, including the Indians; so that from 1494 to 1508, over three million people had
perished from war, slavery, and the mines. Who in future generations will believe this? I
myself writing it as a knowledgeable eyewitness can hardly believe it….”
Thus began the history, five hundred years ago, of the European invasion of the Indian
settlements in the Americas. That beginning, when you read Las Casas-even if his figures
are exaggerations (were there 3 million Indians to begin with, as he says, or less than a
million, as some historians have calculated, or 8 million as others now believe?)-is conquest,
slavery, death. When we read the history books given to children in the United States, it all
starts with heroic adventure-there is no bloodshed-and Columbus Day is a celebration.
Past the elementary and high schools, there are only occasional hints of something else.
Samuel Eliot Morison, the Harvard historian, was the most distinguished writer on
Columbus, the author of a multivolume biography, and was himself a sailor who retraced
Columbus’s route across the Atlantic. In his popular book Christopher Columbus, Mariner,
written in 1954, he tells about the enslavement and the killing: “The cruel policy initiated by
Columbus and pursued by his successors resulted in complete genocide.”
That is on one page, buried halfway into the telling of a grand romance. In the book’s last
paragraph, Morison sums up his view of Columbus:
He had his faults and his defects, but they were largely the defects of the qualities that made
him great-his indomitable will, his superb faith in God and in his own mission as the Christbearer to lands beyond the seas, his stubborn persistence despite neglect, poverty and
discouragement. But there was no flaw, no dark side to the most outstanding and essential of
all his qualities-his seamanship.
One can lie outright about the past. Or one can omit facts which might lead to unacceptable
conclusions. Morison does neither. He refuses to lie about Columbus. He does not omit the
story of mass murder; indeed he describes it with the harshest word one can use: genocide.
But he does something else-he mentions the truth quickly and goes on to other things more
important to him. 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 to bury them in a mass of other information is to say to the reader with a certain
infectious calm: yes, mass murder took place, but it’s not that important-it should weigh very
little in our final judgments; it should affect very little what we do in the world.
It is not that the historian can avoid emphasis of some facts and not of others. This is as
natural to him as to the mapmaker, who, in order to produce a usable drawing for practical
purposes, must first flatten and distort the shape of the earth, then choose out of the
bewildering mass of geographic information those things needed for the purpose of this or
that particular map.
My argument cannot be against selection, simplification, emphasis, which are inevitable for
both cartographers and historians. But the map-maker’s distortion is a technical necessity
for a common purpose shared by all people who need maps. The historian’s distortion is more
than technical, it is ideological; it is released into a world of contending interests, where any
chosen emphasis supports (whether the historian means to or not) some kind of interest,
whether economic or political or racial or national or sexual.
Furthermore, this ideological interest is not openly expressed in the way a mapmaker’s
technical interest is obvious (“This is a Mercator projection for long-range navigation-for
short-range, you’d better use a different projection”). …
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