By Jamie York
Americans have forgotten their own history. From the struggle of Native Americans to preserve their subsistence lifestyle and their harmony with the natural world to the fight of labor unions for an eight-hour workday, Americans have forgotten their own history of class struggle.
The result of this national memory loss is that citizens cannot make important decisions regarding the United States today without understanding the events that happened in the past.
This national memory loss is a failure of both the educational system and the mass media. The school administrators and teachers who decide which history textbooks to purchase and the editors and publishers who decide what is newsworthy emphasize certain historical trends and omit others. One could argue that it is not possible for the historians themselves -- let alone educators and journalists -- to be completely objective in their decisions and judgments, but we should expect and demand a more realistic treatment of American history.
When Christopher Columbus arrived in the Americas in 1492, millions of Native Americans were already living here. Columbus's "discovery" opened the Americas to exploitation by the colonizing Europeans, who then proceeded to murder thousands of Native Americans while stealing their land and whatever other treasures they could find.
Native Americans were living in harmony with the Earth and they had a profound respect for all that the natural world -- the Great Spirit -- provided for them. As the United States was formed and the westward expansion began, those Indians who were not murdered were forced to live on smaller and smaller parcels of land, to give up their subsistence lifestyle, and to succumb to the demands of the United States Government. Surrender or starve.
In 1868, the Treaty of Fort Laramie was signed between the United States and the various tribes of the Sioux Nation. The treaty promised some 50 million square miles of land in what is now part of Nebraska, the Dakotas, Wyoming and Montana "as long as the grass shall grow." The treaty stipulated that no changes could be made unless three-fourths of the adult males of the Sioux Nation approved the changes.
Shortly after the treaty was signed, gold was discovered in the Black Hills and white settlers began moving into the area in violation of the treaty and the U.S. government sought to support the interests of the settlers by advocating the construction of new roads into the area in spite of opposition by the Sioux. This led to fierce battles as the Indians sought to hold onto the land granted to them under the 1868 treaty. After suffering embarrassing military defeats by Crazy Horse and Red Cloud, the United States advocated a policy of genocide against the Sioux and their main food supply, the buffalo. This policy began to take its toll on the Sioux and, in 1876, Red Cloud was forced to sign a document abrogating the 1868 treaty and turning the Black Hills -- the sacred "Paha Sapa" -- over to the white man even though three-fourths of the adults males had not agreed to any alteration of the treaty. (To this day, the Sioux Nation considers the 1868 treaty a valid document.)
By 1890, the U.S. government was pursuing the Sioux bands still at large. "On December 29," writes Peter Matthiessen, "when Big Foot and two hundred or more men, women, and children, with a few fugitives from Sitting Bull's Hunkpapa band, were slaughtered by the Seventh Cavalry at Wounded Knee, Custer's avenged regiment received twenty Congressional medals of honor from a grateful government, despite a bungled maneuver in which at least twenty-five Blue Coats perished in the cross fire from their own guns." After the slaughter, the dead Indians were buried in a mass grave on the top of a small hill.
The Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890 is an important historical event, but it and similar atrocities against American Indians -- including, even, the 1973 battle of Wounded Knee -- have been forgotten by most people. A national memory loss. Historian Howard Zinn writes:
"The chief problem in historical honesty is not outright lying. It is the omission or deemphasis of important data. The definition of important, of course, depends on one's values. An example is the Ludlow Massacre. I was in college studying history when I heard a song by folksinger Woody Guthrie called "The Ludlow Massacre," a dark, intense ballad, accompanied by slow, haunting chords on his guitar. It told of women and children burned to death in a strike of miners against Rockefeller-owned coal mines in southern Colorado in 1914. My curiosity was aroused. In none of my classes in American history, in none of the textbooks I had read, was there any mention of the Ludlow Massacre or the Colorado coal strike. I decided to study the history of the labor movement on my own."
What do the Wounded Knee Massacre and the Ludlow Massacre have in common? The answer is simple: The same state forces that wanted to end Indian resistance to the authority of the United States Government also wanted to end the resistance of the miners to the authority of the coal bosses. Today, those who control education and the mass media prefer that people not learn about these events, as any realistic examination must portray the actions of the government and the coal bosses as criminal.
While I do not believe that such historical omissions are part of some conscious conspiracy, I do believe that they happen for reasons that are conspiratorial in nature, that are "conspiracy-like."
It all has to do with state power -- that is, the power of the Wall Street industrialists to maintain control over the economy and maintain political stability so they can reap their immense profits. There are two separate classes of people in the United States today: the ruling class -- those who own the factories, mines, mills, corporate farms, utilities, airlines, railroads, media outlets, and so forth; and the working class -- those who work at these places, or who, for whatever reason, are unemployed.
It is precisely because of these class distinctions that many uprisings -- including demonstrations, riots and strikes -- have occurred in the United States. Such uprisings, if they are allowed to continue and spread, would be a direct threat to political stability, a threat to the authority of the ruling class, so such struggles are squelched as quickly as possible and then are rarely mentioned again. The greatest fear of the ruling class is that the working class will organize itself and seize state power and corporate profit, so the rulers try to keep the working class divided and afraid. It's white vs. black, young vs. old, professionals vs. laborers, men vs. women, straight vs. gay, urban vs. rural, resident vs. immigrant, pro-abortion vs. anti-abortion, and so on.
The educational system and the mass media routinely omit historical events that show the working class organizing itself against the ruling class and the19th century struggle for an eight-hour workday is a good example here.
After the stock market crash of 1873, hundreds of thousands of people were thrown out of work and many were unable to secure even the basic necessities of life. Those lucky enough to still have jobs often had to accept wage cuts of up to 50 percent. This led to mass meetings, strikes, hunger marches, and demonstrations of unemployed workers. It also led to a nationwide movement demanding a shorter, eight-hour workday to spread around the available work. In 1877, a series of railroad strikes protesting wage reductions and long hours became a full-blown labor uprising in some cities and U.S. troops were deployed to crush the strikers. More than 100 workers were killed, hundreds were wounded, and thousands were arrested.
On May 1, 1886, at the height of the movement for the eight-hour workday, some 65,000 workers in Chicago walked off the job. Police and Pinkerton detectives (thugs hired by companies to spy, disrupt and kill) began to use clubs to break up peaceful mass rallies and, on May 3, they opened fire on a crowd of lumber-shavers, killing four and wounding many.
On May 4, after a peaceful rally at Chicago's Haymarket Square, someone threw a bomb into a crowd of policemen, killing seven and wounding 66. The police then opened fire on the strikers. After mass media reports condemned the bombing, but did not condemn the police and Pinkerton violence, many strike leaders were hanged, jailed or blacklisted. No one ever found out who threw the bomb.
A national memory loss. American youth are growing up with no knowledge of these events because they are rarely taught in history classes. Even on Labor Day, which American workers celebrate each September, the mass media do not run stories on the struggle for the eight-hour workday; instead their stories focus on Labor Day parades, picnics in the park, and other activities related to the last three-day weekend of summer. The ruling class have robbed us of our past so they can control our future. Again, while there is no conscious conspiracy and no secret meetings to decide which historical events should be omitted, I believe there has been a consensus among school administrators and among media executives about what to emphasize -- such as the business sector, the economy, and economic growth -- and what to deemphasize or omit -- such as labor struggles and movements within the United States for independence, sovereignty and human rights. Although the issues of the labor movement are of interest to many people, there are no labor shows on network television and no labor sections of daily newspapers. The only time labor is covered at all is when there is a strike of national significance such as the 1997 Teamsters strike against United Parcel Service -- a strike which was won by public support for the strikers in spite of mass media attempts to portray the strikers as greedy villains.
Americans have the power to confront representatives of the educational system and the mass media. We can form student groups to demand the use of history textbooks that are more consistent with reality. We can stage community teach-ins at school board meetings and other public events to educate people about missing historical information. We can write articles for school papers and letters to the editor of local newspapers. American history belongs to us, the people, and we must reclaim it.
Matthiessen, Peter, In The Spirit of Crazy Horse, (New York: Penguin Books, 1992), p. 20.
Yellen, Samuel, America's Labor Struggles, (New York: Nomad Press, 1980), pp. 50-58.
Zinn, Howard, Declarations of Independence, (New York: HarperCollins, 1990), p. 51.