The U.S. government did not seem to recognize that its punitive foreign policies, its military installations in countries all over the globe, might arouse anger in foreign countries, and that anger mi...
That myth led ordinary people to believe that they had a voice in government and that government looked out for their interests. It was a way of speaking for the lower and middle classes to get their...
Socialism moved out of the small circles of city immigrants—Jewish and German socialists speaking their own languages—and became American. The strongest Socialist state organization was in Oklahoma, w...
Since the Indians were better woodsmen than the English and virtually impossible to track down, the method was to feign peaceful intentions, let them settle down and plant their corn wherever they cho...
Ruling elites seem to have learned through the generations—consciously or not—that war makes them more secure against internal trouble.
Revenge! Workingmen, to Arms!!! . . . You have for years endured the most abject humiliations; . . . you have worked yourself to death . . . your Children you have sacrificed to the factory lord—in sh...
Racism was becoming more and more practical.
Poverty and Discontent appear in every Face (except the Countenances of the Rich) and dwell upon every Tongue. He spoke of a few men, fed by Lust of Power, Lust of Fame, Lust of Money, who got rich du...
Posters appealed for volunteers in Massachusetts: Men of old Essex! Men of Newburyport! Rally around the bold, gallant and lionhearted Cushing. He will lead you to victory and to glory! They promised...
Police, I learned over the years, are like soldiers, normally good-natured people, but part of a culture of obedience to orders and capable of brutal acts against anyone designated as the enemy—in thi...
Perhaps the most important thing I learned was about democracy, that democracy is not our government, our constitution, our legal structure. Too often they are enemies of democracy. Certainly this was...
One reason these atrocities are still with us is that we have learned to bury them in a mass of other facts, as radioactive wastes are buried in containers in the earth. We have learned to give them e...
On October 1, 1838, the first detachment set out in what was to be known as the Trail of Tears. As they moved westward, they began to die—of sickness, of drought, of the heat, of exposure. There were...
No doubt the odds are against dissenters in any nation’s judicial system. But human beings are not machines, and however powerful the pressure to conform, they sometimes are so moved by what they see...
More important, there was a very painful thought in my head: those young Communists on the block were right! The state and its police were not neutral referees in a society of contending interests. Th...
Mark Twain commented on the Philippine war: We have pacified some thousands of the islanders and buried them; destroyed their fields; burned their villages, and turned their widows and orphans out-of-...
Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reforms. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of struggle. . . . If th...
Just as African Americans had learned that they did not have enough strength to make good the promises of emancipation, working people learned that they were not united or strong enough to defeat the...
It was either Madison or Hamilton (the authorship of the individual papers is not always known) who in Federalist Paper #63 argued the necessity of a well-constructed Senate as sometimes necessary as...
It was a time of intense racism in the United States. In the years between 1889 and 1903, on the average, every week, two Negroes were lynched by mobs—hanged, burned, mutilated. The Filipinos were bro...