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As long as rabbits don't have historians,
history will be written by the hunters.
Hunters tell stories of victory and of war,
which alas need to be fought in order
to defend the weak and the helpless.
The hunters are only doing their duty for the people,
for democracy, for God and country
in the name of civilization.
Fighting against the bad guys, be they fascists,
Communists, terrorists, et cetera, et cetera.
But the story that hunters
prefer to tell is no story at all.
Aside from their credit card numbers,
rabbits really don't need to remember anything else.
In a few moments, this American B-17 is going to bomb Royan,
a small French city on the Atlantic coast.
Today is April 15, 1945.
The war in Europe is over or almost.
The bombardier on board of this B-17
is 23-year old Lieutenant Howard Zinn.
He enlisted to fight for his country and against fascism.
He is about to discover that his plane
is going to drop a new type of bomb,
napalm.
The mission over Royan will change the course of his life.
Looking down from above, Howard Zinn is
certain that he is on the side of the good guys.
But once he's landed, he'll realize that it's not
just because you kill bad guys that you're a good guy.
He'll land amongst those that can't be seen from above.
This son of working class Jewish
parents will become an historian.
Howard Zinn will become the rabbits' historian,
the historian of those who are on the wrong end of the gun.
Because rabbits don't always run away.
Sometimes they even take advantage of
the hunters' inattention to grab their guns
and force them to back up to the edge of the cliff
and sometimes just a little further.
♪ As we go marching, marching
♪ We'll bring the bread to them
♪ The rising of the women
♪ Is the rising of the rest
♪ No more the drudge and idler
♪ 10 that toil where one reposes
♪ But the sharing of life's glories
♪ Bread and roses, bread and roses
♪ Our lives shall not be sweated
♪ From birth until life closes
♪ Hearts starve as well as bodies
♪ Bread and roses, bread and roses
We grow up in a controlled society.
So we're taught that if one person kills another person,
that is murder but if a government kills 100,000 persons,
that is patriotism.
Howard Zinn,
drawing on his own personal experience,
will tell the story of those forgotten by history.
He will take part in every major social struggle
of his time, from the Civil Rights movement
to the peace movement against the Vietnam War
as well as the campaigns against
the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
In 1980, Howard Zinn published his book
A People's History of the United States
which revealed chapters of history to the American
public which they knew little or nothing about.
The book was an enormous success.
Over two million copies have been sold in the United States
and it has been translated into languages worldwide.
Howard Zinn died in 2010 but to this day,
his ideas are still controversial.
In 2012, his book was banned from
public schools in Tucson, Arizona and in 2013,
Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, President of of Purdue
University, launched a crusade against teaching Zinn's book.
Indiana Governor.
Thank you.
Let's not overdo it.
What I'm doing here is
to tell you something about how this came about.
It all starts with a book, right?
It starts with A People's History of the United
States or maybe it starts with my wife
Roslyn Zinn who wouldn't let me
stop writing the book.
That's what we're gonna use or try to
use today and this is what they use in
the United Nations and certain other governing bodies.
His textbook is so refreshing to so many
of my students because they are so used to
learning about US history in a certain way.
Learning about Christopher Columbus, he discovered America.
You know, the Founding Fathers.
But Howard Zinn brings forth a lot of
the things that happened in the United States
that aren't in your traditional textbook.
It passes.
There had been historians that had taken
pieces of American history and dissected it
but Zinn took the entire trajectory
from the founding of the nation to the present and
imploded that myth
so that by the time you finished that book,
you realized that all of the stories
that we told ourselves about ourselves were not true.
Howard Zinn would say that history is the memory
of states and so what that means is that history
is usually told from the standpoint of people who
are in power and I think Howard Zinn brings to the plate,
especially in American studies that it's important
to have different standpoints of history told.
When we organize with one another, when we get involved,
when we stand up and speak out together,
we can create a power no government can suppress, thank you.
It's a really important book.
It really changed the conscience
of a generation in the United States.
Here in Clishishua, a Paris suburb,
Noam Chomsky talks about his friend Howard Zinn.
On this side of the Atlantic today,
the hegemony of the United States is taken for granted.
- Up in the sky, look! - It's a bird.
- It's a plane. - It's Superman!
It's Superman.
The United States' domination
as a military, economic and cultural superpower
is considered a completely natural phenomena.
Disguised as a mild-mannered
newspaper reporter, Clark Kent.
There's no longer any debate
over who's pro or anti-American.
How did you come to think the way you do?
I would like to know myself
how come I am the man that I am.
No, I think
we all try to understand
how we became what we are.
We all
try to
figure out why we are thinking this way
because sometimes we find that there are
people who went through some of the same
experiences and yet they think differently.
But I'm sure that my growing up
in a working class family
of Jewish immigrants
and seeing my mother and father work very hard,
struggling
and people around me also
in my neighborhood working very hard, struggling.
I'm sure that gave me a certain class consciousness.
My father
was from the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
My mother came from Siberia
and they came here
and they met as factory workers in New York.
Welcome to the land of liberty.
Between 1900 and 1920, more than 14 million
immigrants arrived in the United States.
They came from all over Europe, from Russia,
Ireland, Germany or like Howard Zinn's parents,
from the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
They came fleeing poverty or war
or racism or religious persecution.
They dreamed of a Promised Land
of wealth or simply of a better life.
The New World opens its arms wide to
the poor and huddled masses of the Old.
It's unwanted, it's fugitives, even a few Utopians.
But above all, the rapidly expanding
industries of the time require cheap labor.
Men, women and children easy to exploit,
easy to divide and easy to use against those damned
worker's unions that demand to work less that 12 hours
a day and their strikes that were ruining the country
and prevented those who wanted to work from doing so.
There were strikes and labor struggles all over the country.
Even children protested.
At the beginning of the 20th century,
300,000 children between the ages of 10 and 15
worked in mines, textile or other industries.
In Philadelphia in 1903, children working
60 hour work weeks went on strike shouting
"We want to go to school, 55 hours or nothing."
I grew up experiencing the Depression in the early 1930s.
My father was a waiter and there was less work for him
when the economic crisis came,
so he had to take different jobs.
He worked as a window cleaner.
He worked
on the streets, selling neckties on the street.
I would come home sometimes from school
and I would find the house dark because
we could not pay the electric bill.
We lived in
different places all the time
because we could not pay the rents.
The condition of my family
was the way I experienced the economic crisis.
I had no larger view of what was
happening in the country or the world.
I just saw what was happening right around me
and right around me, I saw people struggling,
people evicted from their homes, people without work.
The Zinn family lived in
rundown tenements in the slums of Brooklyn.
The poor don't know how lucky they are.
They don't have to spend years studying
sociology to understand the world.
A boy like Howard Zinn only needed to look at himself,
the people around him and the people in his neighborhood
and as his apartment was too dark and small,
he often went outside to play ball, to take boxing
lessons with the local champion and to see his friends.
The advantage that the poor have over sociologists
is that they know what they're talking about.
As I was growing up and 17 years old and so on,
I encountered these young radicals in my neighborhood.
Probably young Communists in my neighborhood
and they took me to this demonstration in Times Square
and I didn't even know, I had never been to a demonstration.
I wasn't even sure what the demonstration was about
but there were all these people carrying signs, you see?
And marching through Times Square
and I saw the word "Peace, No War."
That was okay and then when I heard the sirens,
I thought oh there must be a fire somewhere around
but it was the police and they were coming and they
were going into the crowd and they were hitting people.
They were on horses, some of them were
on horses and they were knocking people down
and then I was knocked unconscious.
I woke up in a hallway who knows how much later
and when I woke up, Times Square was totally
as it was before the demonstration.
It was as if nothing had happened.
But the experience had a profound effect on my thinking
because I suddenly realized that what these radical
friends had been saying to me seemed to be true.
The police were on the side of the Establishment
and that there's no freedom of speech.
I grew up with this naive idea that in America
you can march through the streets, you can hold up signs.
You can demonstrate peacefully because it was
a peaceful demonstration and that is okay because
this is a democracy and what I saw that night in
Times Square said no, there's something wrong with that.
At the age of 17 after getting
hit over the head, Howard Zinn discovered
the violence of social struggles hidden under
the magic glitter of the American Dream, the dream
that attracted millions of people from around the world.
In the United States, there's never been
a recognition of class conflict, class struggle.
The culture and the dominant
elites in the United States and the media,
they've always succeeded in creating
a kind of ideology
of we are one happy family.
We are, you know,
the US Constitution starts off, "We the People."
Of course it wasn't we the people who established
the Constitution, it was 55 rich white men
who established the Constitution and what all Americans
learn,
we were in a war against England for independence,
that was the Revolutionary War, everybody was united.
One, two, three.
One, two,
three.
The United States which would
become an empire sprung out of an empire.
But as Howard Zinn says,
the American Revolution wasn't unanimously supported.
There were the Amerindians, the African-American
slaves and freedmen, the poor, women and even amongst
the revolutionaries, not everyone had the same idea.
One, two, three, into the harbor!
This small museum in Boston portrays
one of the better known historic and heroic stories in
the American Revolution, the Boston Tea Party of 1773
when the people rose to defy the English oppressor.
All the people? Well almost.
On the night of December 16th, 1773,
people of Boston, in fact a group of just
60 patriots calling themselves the Sons of Liberty
and disguised as Mohawk Indians, feathers and all,
boarded three English ships moored in the harbor
and tossed all the chests of tea overboard
to protest against the taxes imposed by the English.
A rebellion of colonists against the colonial power.
For me this is actually the embodiment
of what it means to be an American.
What it takes for man to understand that
God-given right to freedom and to liberty.
I think that it often needs to be remembered that
the tendency for governments and for those
who rule people is to seek ever more and more power
and the founding principle of this country
is that people have their own power,
they have their own right to govern themselves.
Two centuries later, the name Tea Party
has been appropriated by a political pressure group.
Today's tea party opposes taxes and bureaucracy
imposed by the Federal Government in Washington and has
mobilized support in many parts of the United States.
Essentially today's Tea Party advocates
the rights of Americans to individual
freedom unhindered by a large government.
Do you see a link between
the reenactment of what we just saw and today's Tea Party?
Oh exactly, I just mentioned that to my wife.
I said the things that they were talking about
today are exactly what's going on right now.
In fact there is an organization called the TEA Party.
Taxed Enough Already, T-E-A and many of the participants
in that strongly believe that the Federal Government
here in the United States is much to big
and is not following the Constitution.
So you're saying that
the British of the time are today's Washington?
Correct, there are no more British today
but there are too many people that do not believe
in the principles upon which this country was
founded and they believe that there needs to be more
and more government to do more and more things.
What the Tea Party believes is no.
We believe in Constitutionally limited government.
History can be considered as a collection
of stories that we choose to light up like candles
in order to illuminate the darkness of the present.
But some people travel back
into the past and never come back.
1775, the Battles of Lexington and Concord.
A heroic moment for the Minutemen.
Who were the Minutemen?
Militias of patriots ready to mobilize
at a moment's notice in case the enemy,
that is to say the English attacked.
With a Company coming back here...
During the night of April 18th to 19th, 1775,
they opened fire for the first time on English troops
and the first shot fired here was described as
"The shot heard around the world."
The Minuteman in American history, he's iconic.
The statue at the North Bridge of the Minuteman
sums it up in terms of in one hand he has his musket
and in the other his plow, he's ready to leave his,
ready to pick up weapons to defend his land and his liberty.
Yes, some were landowners, some were called mechanics.
So they had a craft.
We'll meet some of the people this evening.
They were couriers, they worked in leathers.
There was a tannery nearby.
I think it's a great story.
People who were here for 150 years
and we were governing ourselves.
We refused to be put under the control of another country
and stood up for our rights and our freedoms
and that's a lesson we still teach our children today.
And they fought the British first at Lexington
as they were heading out early in the morning at about dawn.
The next fight was at the North Bridge
at about 9:30 in the morning and the significance
of the fighting at the North Bridge is it was the
first time that the Colonial Militia and the Minutemen
were ordered to fire on the King's soldiers,
an act of treason known today
as The Shot Heard Around the World.
Make ready, prime and load.
Shoulder up, fire lock.
Make ready to prime and load, fire.
That mostly everybody was united was untrue.
Maybe 1/3 of the colonists were supporting the Revolution.
They had to draft people to go into Washington's army
and once they were in the army, the small farmers,
the poor people who were in the army,
when they saw what their conditions were, they rebelled.
There were mutinies in the army of thousands of soldiers.
George Washington ordered the execution
of some of these mutineers, some of these rebels
and these executions were carried out
and we don't learn about that in the schools.
And after the war, this class conflict continued
because the veterans of the Revolutionary War
who had been promised
land for joining the army,
they had little pieces of land, they were farmers
and then they found that
the taxes being levied on them
by the rich who controlled the State Legislatures,
they could not pay these taxes.
So they were being evicted,
their land and their farms being taken away from them
and so they rebelled and there were rebellions in
a number of states, in Massachusetts, in South Carolina.
Rebellions, class conflict.
In the United States,
even a shoe shiner can become a millionaire.
Propaganda has succeeded in purveying this belief.
However the truth is as studies have shown for years
that the poor in the US generally stay poor
and the rich on the whole generally get richer and richer.
It is a well established fact and everyone can see it
but this fundamental belief is still conveyed
in order to soften the brutal economic reality.
The myth of the American Dream
developed at the end of the 19th century,
the age of railways, electricity, oil and telephones.
The height of the Industrial Revolution.
What historians usually forget to mention
is that many of these fortunes were made
with substantial government financing.
Howard Zinn gives the example of the Union
Pacific Railroad Company, which received 14 million
acres of land and $27 million in Federal funding.
This public generosity didn't benefit
the workers who built the railroads,
of which there were 10,000 Chinese and 3,000 Irish laborers.
They laid over five miles of rail per day
and died by the hundreds from exposure to heat or cold.
In 1900, 1% of the US population
owned 45% of the national wealth.
This was the age of the robber barons,
the superheroes of American Capitalism.
Carnegie,
Vanderbilt, JP Morgan, John Davison Rockefeller.
Rockefeller possessed the largest fortune in history,
up to $190 billion in today's dollars.
That's three times Bill Gates' fortune
and by what right?
Divine right, natural selection.
JD Rockefeller said it himself.
"The growth of big business is merely the survival
"of the fittest according to the laws of nature and God."
His colleague Carnegie the steel magnate adds
"Wealth when concentrated in the hands of a few
"serves much more to the likes of progress than when it
"is dissipated into salaries destined to feed the masses."
As for Carnegie's associate Henry Clay Frick,
he purportedly stated that "I can hire
"one half of the working class to kill the other half."
With labor unrest and thousands of strikes all over the US,
he sees the rising tide of social conflict arriving
on his doorstep and he doesn't like that at all.
In 1892 in Homestead, Pennsylvania,
he hired 300 agents of the Pinkerton Detective Agency to
infiltrate demonstrations as agitators and break up strikes.
Frick also had a company militia formed
which on the night of July Fifth, 1892,
opened fire on the strikers with machine guns,
killing 16 people
including one child.
Alexander Berkman was a 22 year old
Russian Jewish Libertarian Communist
and the lover of the infamous Emma Goldman
who the President later described
as the most dangerous woman in America.
To avenge the workers who were killed,
Berkman pays a visit to Frick in his office
and shoots him twice in the neck.
Frick is seriously injured but
a week later he returns to work.
As for Berkman, he's sentenced to 22 years in prison.
Like the other robber barons,
Mr. Frick will be remembered as a patron of the arts
and philanthropist, having collected paintings by Rembrandt,
Renoir, Watteau and others.
"My dear friends, you, the nouveau riche,
"you've acquired your fortunes with the blood,
"sweat and tears of the poor.
"Yet you would prefer not to pay taxes?
"In addition, you want to be loved?
"No problem, setting up a foundation,
"my wealthy friends, will allow you to conserve your wealth,
"exempt you from taxes and allow you to
"present yourselves as benefactors of humanity."
In the superb Frick Collection in New York City,
it is very unlikely that you will
ever find Jacob Reese's photographs.
Reese, a journalist and photographer,
worked for the Popular Press in the 1880s
and photographed the squalor of tenement living in New York.
He portrayed how the other half lives,
the other half being the poorer half
of the population of New York City.
Jacob Reese was one of the journalists
that Theodore Roosevelt labeled muckrakers,
those who denounced corruption and violence
and the criminal practices of the all-powerful
trusts in the rail, meat and steel industries.
How many people living in Chicago today
know of the events that took place in May 1886,
the labor struggle and the fierce
combat that raged here for days?
For Howard Zinn, an essential chapter
in labor history was written here with
consequences for workers all over the world.
Here we are in Haymarket Square with Tim Yeager,
union organizer with the UAW and Matt Machowski
of the IWW of Chicago.
We owe Labor Day, May First to events that happened in
Haymarket Square, which has since become a parking lot,
and the eight hour work day, both of which benefit
workers all over the world and who surely know
nothing of what occurred here in Chicago.
On May First, 1886,
one of the largest demonstrations was here in Chicago.
The purpose of the nationwide series of strikes
was to show support for the eight hour day.
At the end of the 19th century,
the average work day was 10 to 12 hours, six days a week.
In 1886, the movement for an eight
hour work day spread across the country.
On May Third during a demonstration in front of
the McCormick Factories, the police fired into the crowd.
Four workers were killed and several others wounded.
The next day, May Fourth,
the anarcho-syndicalist unions immediately called
for a demonstration right here in Haymarket Square.
It was a sunny day
and Lucy and Albert Parsons had their children
with them and people marched in their best clothing.
The police,
under orders of the captains of industry,
looked for an opportunity to attack the parade.
Around the country some of the
demonstrations were attacked by police.
Here in Chicago they looked for an opportunity
but there was good discipline, good order.
There was no opportunity given
and so it was a successful day.
They moved the crowd from there up to this area
just north of this alley here and they hauled
a hay wagon up and the speaker stood on the hay wagon.
At the end of the demonstration,
someone threw a stick of dynamite at the police.
Eight policemen were killed in the explosion
and more than 60 others were wounded.
The police open fired on the crowd,
killing several demonstrators and wounding at least 200.
Who threw the dynamite?
No one ever knew.
Some suspect it was a deliberate provocation
carried out by the Pinkerton Detective Agency,
employing more than 10,000 agents
for their business and industrial clients.
Their agents would infiltrate labor movements,
act as police informers and incite acts of violence.
This became the excuse for
a nationwide assault on the labor movement.
Yes.
Here in Chicago, the police raided labor union offices.
They attacked and
beat
people who were still on strike for the eight hour day.
The police, unable to find
the real culprits, arrested union organizers.
There was no evidence brought against any of them.
The trial was a mockery of justice.
The union men were evidently
sentenced to death for their ideas.
One of them, Louis Lingg, committed suicide in prison
by setting off a stick of dynamite in his mouth.
He was 21 years old.
There was a show trial
where their writings for the labor movement
and about anarchy were used against them.
Were the executions public?
It was by invitation
and the people who were invited were
the captains of industry, the well-to-do.
The McCormick family was invited, who had
owned the newspaper which is now the Chicago Tribune
and a sympathetic reporter asked one of the attendees
why he had come to the execution and he said
"I have come to watch the death of the labor movement."
Four of the union men
were hung on November 11th, 1887.
August Spies, Albert Parsons,
Adolf Fischer,
George Engel.
These events had repercussions worldwide.
In Paris, the French decided that May First should
be a day of action in favor of the eight hour workday.
A fight for recognition of people's
right to a life outside of the workplace.
But it wasn't until May 23rd, 1919
after four years of sacrifice in the trenches
that the French workers obtained an eight hour day
and May First became a public holiday.
In 1893, the Haymarket murders were pardoned
by the progressive Governor of Illinois,
John P. Altgeld and the three remaining
union men were released from prison.
He said let's forget it.
At this point let us pardon
these three men
and let them live out their life.
On the gallows with a noose around his neck,
August Spies, one of the martyrs declares
"The time will come when our silence will be more
"powerful than the voices that you are strangling today."
Not far from this monument in the Forest Park
Cemetery just outside of Chicago lies Emma Goldman,
one of Howard Zinn's heroines,
buried among other famous labor activists.
She was an anarchist,
a feminist, a labor organizer
and she was
imprisoned many times
and she opposed war
and
she became famous as a
speaker all over the country.
Finally during World War One,
because she opposed World War One,
she was put in jail and then after the war,
she was deported,
sent back to her homeland to Russia.
Emma Goldman arrived in the US
in 1885 at the age of 16 and participated in
a large number of political, social and labor struggles,
particularly for women's rights.
She was imprisoned on several occasions
for pacifist opinions, inciting people
to riot and defending birth control.
She even had her own newspaper, Mother Earth.
In 1921, she wrote extensively to explain
her disillusionment with the Russian Revolution.
In 1936, she went to Spain to support the Republican cause.
She died in 1939 in Toronto and asked to be buried
here in Chicago next to the Haymarket martyrs.
Look, there's Emma Goldman's grave.
It's dressed with flowers and there are stones placed
on her tombstone as according to the Jewish tradition
and that guy there, he's a member of the IWW who
came all the way from St. Louis to pay tribute to her.
He has left a button from his union
as well as an apple.
You see the red apple?
It was in his bag.
The apple came all the way from St. Louis.
In memory of Emma Goldman.
"Liberty doesn't descend to a people,
"a people must raise themselves to liberty."
The news of the Haymarket Massacre
changed Emma Goldman's life forever
and the lives of many activists of her generation.
Howard Zinn, optimistic as usual in his analyses,
believes that social conflicts like these no matter
how dramatic contribute to understanding history
and the education of following generations.
For Zinn, this is how class struggle
and the movement for social progress move forward.
♪ As we go marching, marching
♪ In the beauty of the day
♪ A million darkened kitchens
♪ A thousand mill lofts gray
♪ Are touched with all the radiance
♪ That a silent sun discloses
♪ For the people hear us singing
♪ Bread and roses, bread and roses
♪ As we go marching, marching
♪ We battle too for men
♪ For they are women's children
♪ And we honor them again
Bread and roses.
Bread and roses too.
We want bread but we also want roses.
Sometimes a song suffices to keep an
event alive despite the passage of time.
♪ Give us bread but give us roses
In his People's History of the United States,
Howard Zinn relates the episode of the 1912
textile strike of the men and women working
in the mills of Lawrence, Massachusetts.
The story of bread and roses.
1912, Lawrence Massachusetts was
an unusual event
in the history of labor struggles in the United States.
Unusual because
it followed a whole series of
strikes and struggles which were lost by the workers.
In Lawrence, Massachusetts,
the workers won their strike
even though
the workers were
poor immigrants, women
and divided by a dozen languages.
But they were helped
by the labor union IWW,
Industrial Workers of the World which believed
in bringing all workers together.
In 1905 in Chicago,
a group of anarchist and socialist
union organizers created the IWW,
Industrial Workers of the World.
One of the founding members of the IWW was
Mary Harris Jones, better known as Mother Jones.
She participated in many minor strikes.
She supported women who resisted
when strike breakers were called in.
She aided children exploited in factories
and organized large demonstrations in which
they marched up to the homes of the great
Puritan bourgeois families that employed them.
Eugene Debs was another founding member of the IWW.
In 1894 he was thrown into prison for his participation
in a strike against the Pearlman Wagon Factory.
Debs ran for President of the United States several times.
Big Bill Haywood was another founding member.
He was dreaded by all the bosses of his time,
particularly those of the silver mines
as he was head of the union.
At the first ever IWW meeting, he addressed the assembly.
"Comrades, we are here to confederate the workers
"of this country into a working class movement
"of which the purpose is to emancipate the
"working class from the slavery of Capitalism."
The IWW was also the hobo's union,
itinerant farm workers who were low cost travelers.
During the massive strikes in Lawrence in 1912,
the Industrial Workers of the World totaled 50,000 members.
They were called the Wobblies.
This is the Lawrence industrial zone one century later.
Cotton produced by slaves in the South arrived by
this river to be processed by wage slaves of the North
in one of the 34 buildings of the American Woolen Company.
In 1912, this factory was one of the biggest in the world.
It employed 30,000 workers, mostly women
who came from 25 different European countries.
They all came with the hopes of a better life.
They all came with the belief in the American Dream.
Much to our surprise, here in the middle
of these abandoned buildings is a small,
little-visited museum run by Jim Boshen.
- Is that where they worked? - Yes.
The mills right across the canal from us
were all textile mills and at the height of the industry
in Lawrence which is around the time of the strike,
over 30,000 people worked in the textile mills here.
Hard work
in
Tough conditions.
The mills were hot and loud, dusty.
A lot of dangerous machinery close by.
These were all textile mills.
It had begun
primarily for cotton textiles,
by the turn of the century, mostly woolen.
The mills in the North had a very
close, interdependent relationship
with the Southern plantations.
In the cotton fields of the South,
African-Americans were exploited and here in the North,
immigrants were exploited.
Very much so and those comparisons were made at the time.
It was something that
defenders of slavery in the South
would point to and say how can you criticize us?
You're exploiting the immigrants in the North.
Well the first wave of immigrants to Lawrence was the Irish
escaping the Irish Potato Famine in the late 1840s.
Then many waves of immigrants followed,
including many of my ancestors
who were French-Canadians from Quebec.
Saw a huge influx of immigrants
during the late 19th and early 20th century.
The famous massive wave from southern and eastern Europe,
many of whom went through Ellis Island in New York.
The workers' nine dollar a week salary
was just enough for them to buy food and pay their rent,
which naturally was owed to their employers.
One study conducted at the time estimated an
infant mortality rate of 50% for children under six.
In Lawrence starting in 1911,
the factory owners decided to put
the ideas of Frederick Taylor into practice.
Skilled workers were no longer required.
Gains in productivity and in competitivity
were achieved by speeding up production.
No one is irreplaceable.
However in 1912, a Federal law was passed limiting the
work week for women and children to 54 hours instead of 56,
two hours less work for the same wages.
But at the end of January when the workers received their
pay, they found that their meager raise hadn't been granted.
The two hours less work had been deducted from their pay.
This set off an immediate strike.
In just a few days,
the number of striking workers went from 1,000 to 5,000
and then to 10,000.
♪ The freaks and fools are apt
♪ To trod in burdens all the time
♪ What we want to see
♪ What I need is a good old picket line
Of the small number of members
they had here when the strike broke out,
most of whom were Italian immigrants by the way
who had brought some of their radical
political philosophies with them.
The IWW sent in organizers
to aid the striking workers.
The best known were Arturo Giovannitti and Joseph Ettor.
Both of them were young, Joseph was 27.
He could speak Italian, Polish, Hungarian and Yiddish.
Across the canal from us right now is
part of the Pacific Mills which was another one of the
very large textile companies in Lawrence at that time
and this is the site of one of
the famous episodes early in the strike.
This bridge across the canal there
is where the marching strikers were hosed
with water from the fire hoses from,
and of course this was during a very cold winter,
so the water would be freezing on their backs.
There were strikes all over
the country at the time but this one became a legend.
The mill owners and city officials began to panic
as did the clergy and other local business leaders.
The Governor called out the local militia,
then the National Guard.
So during one of the confrontations
between strikers and police at the intersection
at the far end of the mill,
a young Italian woman named Anna LoPizzo
was hit by a shot and fell and died.
Ettor and Giovannitti were
arrested and charged as accessories to murder,
to the murder of Anna LoPizzo
even though they were nowhere near the scene
on the theory that they had encouraged people to
protest in the streets and that led to the shooting.
Let's start walking back this way.
The winter of 1912 was cold
and hard and the strikers started running out of food.
The welfare of the strikers' children was
at stake but a show of solidarity occurred.
400 families around the country
volunteered to take in their children.
Yeah, the strike became
a national and international cause celebre.
You did have the
transport of children of strikers
to live with sympathizers in other cities.
And they were helped by the solidarity
of the Socialist movement because when they
were starving in this winter of the strike
and did not have enough food for their children,
the Socialist newspapers advertised
for families that would take care of the children of
Lawrence and that enabled them to continue the strike.
On February 10th, 1912,
119 children left Lawrence for New York City.
They were met by union workers singing the revolutionary
songs The Internationale and the Marseillaise.
In Lawrence, the repression had been so violent
that a special Congressional Committee was appointed.
The testimony of Camilla, a 12 year old girl whose
scalp had been torn off working at a spinning machine
helped lead to a resolution of the strike.
♪ As we come marching, marching
♪ Un-numbered women dead
The stories of these struggles are not told
in American schools or in American textbooks.
Most Americans, even workers today
have never learned that history.
For instance I was in Lawrence, Massachusetts
a few years ago.
I found that the people in Lawrence, Massachusetts
did not know about the history of that strike.
That's why I considered it very important in my book to
tell the story of these labor struggles in American history.
Why did you become interested in this story?
My personal family history as I mentioned
was a grandfather who kept out of it, stayed away.
Is there anyone
here who could still sing the song?
Okay.
Bread and roses.
♪ As we go marching, marching
♪ In the beauty of the day
♪ A million darkened kitchens
♪ A thousand mill lofts gray
♪ Are touched with all the radiance
♪ That a sudden sun discloses
♪ For the people hear us singing
♪ Bread and roses, bread and roses
♪ As we go marching, marching
♪ We'll bring the bread to them
♪ The rising of the women
♪ Is the rising of the rest
♪ No more the drudge and idler
♪ Ten that toil where one reposes
♪ But the sharing of life's glories
♪ Bread and roses, bread and roses
♪ Our lives shall not be sweated
♪ From birth until life closes
♪ Hearts starve as well as bodies
♪ Bread and roses, bread and roses
One evening after this film was shown
in the Bastille de Rouilleroux, a town in the Tarn
Province in the south of France, a lady in the audience
very politely informed us that a similar situation
had occurred in her region at about the same time.
She told us about the 1909 woolworkers
strike in the mills of Masame and Graulhet.
The strike in Graulhet lasted 147 days.
The workers were predominately women
who were paid only half as much as men.
They worked with toxic substances
in foul-smelling workshops.
So they went on strike.
The strike was long and food ran out.
They invented Communist soup kitchens in Graulhet and the
workers' children were lodged by families all over France.
The same type of solidarity that
was shown for the children of Lawrence.
In England, France, Germany
as well as in the United States,
we share a common history with the Industrial Revolution.
The same causes produced the same effects,
the same suffering and the same resistance.
But there were other forms of
resistance and innovative opposition.
We're here with Noam Chomsky at MIT in Boston.
This region where we are now
are the origins of the Industrial Revolution.
There is a rich literature from the mid-19th
century by working people, people working in
the textile mills and artisans and others.
They had their own newspapers, they were running them.
They were eloquent and had
very interesting material in them.
There was no European influence.
This was just developed indigenously.
They bitterly condemned the industrial system
which they said was crushing them,
taking away their culture, their dignity, their freedom.
They said that people who work in the mills should own them.
They opposed wage labor as
an attack on elementary integrity
and those views were very widely accepted.
For example Abraham Lincoln described
wage labor as not very different from slavery.
That the only difference is with wage labor,
it's not permanent, with slavery it's permanent.
It's taken a lot of effort to drive these thoughts
out of people's minds because those are very natural ideas.
In fact if you look back at the United States,
the United States had a very violent labor history,
much more so than Europe.
Hundreds of American workers were being
killed when nobody was being killed in Europe
and when there were
developments of socialism and democracy,
they were crushed by force.
Crushed revolts and forgotten victories.
If the modest success in Lawrence had been forgotten
by history, it's because for the ruling class,
it set a very bad example.
The Rockefeller family doctrine is
"Don't let them think that revolt can succeed."
JD Rockefeller Jr., who had Rockefeller Center
in New York City built would get a chance to
apply this principle in Ludlow, Colorado in 1914.
There, a coal miners strike was ruthlessly repressed.
When Howard Zinn started studying history,
he began with research on the Ludlow Massacre.
1914, Ludlow, Colorado.
11,000 coal miners worked here for JD Rockefeller Jr.
Immigrants of all different origins,
Greeks, Italians, Serbs as well as African-Americans.
The work was dangerous and the wages were low.
The miners decided to organize,
hoping to obtain better working conditions but a union
representative was shot down by the company's militia.
So the miners went on strike.
They received a visit from Mother Jones.
At 80 years old, she was wanted by police all over
the US but she was able to arrive secretly at Ludlow.
She aided the strikers until she was arrested,
imprisoned and thrown out of the state of Colorado.
Then Rockefeller hired a private militia.
They were armed with rifles and machine guns.
The Colorado National Guard was then called in.
When they arrived in Ludlow,
the miners showed relief because they thought
that the National Guard had come to their rescue.
Despite the bitter cold and the snow,
the miners greeted the soldiers with flag-waving and shouts
of joy but then the National Guard maneuvered towards
them and charged against the miners, women and children.
The miners resisted,
digging foxholes and trenches in order to defend themselves.
Then one day, management offered to negotiate
but when the union representative arrived for discussions,
he was shot down in cold blood by Rockefeller's hired guns.
That evening the National Guard charged
once again and burned down the miners' camp.
The Governor had ordered the soldiers to open fire.
13 people were killed.
At dawn the next morning, the shriveled,
burned corpses of 11 children and two women
were found under a metal plate covering a ditch.
The miners union sent out a call for help.
300 miners arrived in Ludlow from other nearby mines,
cutting telegraph and telephone
wires on the way and ready to fight.
In solidarity with the miners,
train conductors refused to transport troops
and even certain Guardsmen refused to go to Ludlow.
Armed miners counterattacked.
They destroyed all they could
and blew up several mine shafts.
Other unions in the country sent
armed workers as reinforcements.
There were demonstrations and meetings of support
all over the country and even as far away as New York.
The New York Times called on the President
to take firm action against the strikers.
Finally President Wilson sent in the US Army.
The 14 month struggle left 66 people dead
and many more wounded and for what reason?
Because of Rockefeller's sacrosanct principle,
don't let them believe that revolt can succeed.
The repression of the IWW became increasingly violent.
The Wobbly leaders were harassed and killed.
One of their most famous figureheads was Joe Hill,
the singer-songwriter of protest songs.
In November 1915 in Salt Lake City,
Joe Hill was accused of murdering
a grocery store owner during a robbery.
No evidence was ever brought against him.
He was sentenced to death by a firing squad
despite protests from all over the world.
Before he was executed, Joe Hill wrote
"I die like a true blue rebel.
"Don't waste any time mourning, organize."
♪ Don't mourn, oh no
♪ Don't mourn, no no
♪ Don't mourn, oh no
♪ Don't mourn, no no
♪ Don't mourn, oh no no no
♪ Don't mourn, organize
"My body, ah if I could choose,
"I would to ashes it reduce and let the merry
"breezes blow my dust to where some flowers grow.
"Perhaps some fading flower then
"would come to life and bloom again.
"This is my last and final will.
"Good luck to all of you, Joe Hill."
His ashes were distributed in small envelopes
and were scattered throughout the United States
and other countries around the world.
The Wobblies were provoked into violent reaction.
Ferociously repressed and stigmatized,
the union lost momentum and its popular support.
The First World War would bring the final blow to the
Wobblies and other progressive movements around the world.
It's been historically true
that when the government has been in trouble,
it has used
military action, intervention
elsewhere as a way of
trying to solve the domestic crisis,
the economic crisis and this has happened
at other times in American history
and
especially if there's a great opposition in the country
which threatens the Establishment.
One way of dealing with the opposition is by
going to war and when you have a war atmosphere,
you're in a position to suppress the opposition.
That's what happened in the First World War.
Before the First World War,
there was a powerful Socialist movement in this country
and a radical trade union movement, the IWW.
But when the government went to war,
when Wilson took us into the European war,
it created an opportunity for him
to crush the Socialist movement
and the IWW.
In 1914, while the miners were being shot
down in Ludlow, the First World War broke out in Europe.
The Battle of the Somme in July 1916
was one of the biggest military disasters in history.
It was the first joint offensive
by French and British troops.
The battle was personally conducted by General Gough.
On the first day, July First,
the British Army commanded by General Haig lost over
20,000 soldiers with 40,000 more missing or wounded.
10,000 men were killed within the first hour.
Nine million men in the prime of their lives died in
the mud of the trenches, farmers, workers and others.
Another 20 million more people died
after the war from subsequent epidemics.
France alone counted 1,400,000 killed or missing in action,
10% of the active male population.
Three million were wounded in battle,
of which 100,000 were mutilated,
42,000 blinded or visually impaired
and 15,000 disfigured.
In the United States as elsewhere,
the war whetted the appetites of bankers and industrialists.
The US economy was expanding rapidly in 1914
but it wasn't yet internationally dominant.
The First World War helped it to consolidate
while in the meantime weakening its competitors.
With the conquest of new markets abroad,
the US was soon in a position to crush its rivals.
In the US, savvy businessmen know that it is better
to sell shovels to prospectors than to dig for gold oneself.
Two billion dollars worth of material had already been
sold to their allies before they entered the war in 1917.
In the French paper Les Annales,
the journalist Cami Fari Pisane quotes
an important and influential American banker
in his article on March 25th, 1917.
"The war enabled us to quintuple our profits.
"We got rich by providing cotton,
"wool,
"meat,
"steel, artillery shells,
"wheat, leather,
"shoes, machine guns,
"horses and automobiles.
"Anything we could sell, you bought.
"You paid with gold, with paper currency,
"with bonds and with loans.
"So you must win the war at all
"costs in order to pay us back.
"Then the money we have made by these sales will be
"lent to you again to rebuild your cities and factories.
"But we will only profit if you win.
"That is why we want you to win rapidly."
The sinking of the ocean liner Lusitania by a German
submarine on May Seventh, 1915 offered the United
States the pretext they needed to enter the war.
The incident was presented to the American
public as a war crime and became a major argument
in persuading the US to go to war against Germany.
The Germans claimed that the ship
was transporting munitions for the Allies.
This claim that the Lusitania was carrying American
ammunitions was confirmed by historians years later in 1972.
President Woodrow Wilson declared that
"Some countries are simply too proud to fight."
But he swallowed his pride and led
the US into the war in April 1917.
He then asserted that the United States should be willing
to sacrifice lives in the name of its founding principles.
The President was more discrete about the two billion
dollars lent to the Allies, a debt that would never be
repayed if the Germans with their submarines won the war.
In 1917, the war led to the Revolution in Russia.
10 days that shook the world.
It was a new feeling that the oppressed,
the downtrodden could make the world a better place.
Russia pulled out of the war,
thus freeing up the German Army in the east
and putting a possible victory within their grasp.
The United States had no choice but to intervene
in order to protect their best interests.
But fighting a war in faraway Europe was an idea
that would have to be sold to the American public.
Despite the indignation provoked by the sinking
of the Lusitania, most young Americans weren't
ready to die overseas for a matter of principles.
In order to convince them,
President Wilson made eloquent speeches.
He spoke about "a war to end all wars"
and "making the world safe for democracy."
Out of four million American soldiers mobilized,
two million were sent to the front.
116,000 of them would never return.
In this elementary school in Chicago, you see children
throwing down German books in front of the camera.
The journalist George Creel became the official
Head of Propaganda for the Committee on Public Information.
He launched the operation 4 Minute Men.
It consisted in sending out accomplished public speakers
ready to intervene anywhere at a moment's notice
to make persuasive four minute speeches.
Creel mobilized 75,000 orators
who made 750,000 speeches in over 5,000 towns
and cities across the US to convince the public.
This is Douglas Fairbanks.
This is Charlie Chaplin.
Charlie Chaplin was called into service to sell
Liberty Bonds in order to support the war effort.
"I want you for US Army."
Despite the unprecedented propaganda,
very few young people in the US
volunteered and recruitment was disappointing.
So the government decided to institute the draft.
The opposition to the war had to be silenced.
The Espionage Act, a law ostensibly against espionage
enabled the authorities to imprison anyone who
wrote or spoke against the war for up to 20 years.
Union activists were the first victims.
Emma Goldman, Zinn's heroine took part in antiwar meetings
all over the country and helped organize
the No Conscription League to oppose the draft.
She and her companion Alexander Berkman were arrested.
They were then imprisoned on Ellis Island and deported back
to Russia, their country of origin on December 21st, 1919.
Socialist Leader Eugene Debs would
also be silenced by the Espionage Act.
His political career was brought to a halt in June 1918.
He was arrested in Canton, Ohio after giving an antiwar
speech to an audience that included young men of draft age.
He was sentenced to 10 years in prison for
obstructing the Recruitment and Enlistment Service.
But Debs ran for President in 1920 from his
prison cell and received almost a million votes.
Chris Hedges is a journalist, Pulitzer Prize winner
and a former War Correspondent for the New York Times.
He ended up resigning from the paper because
he didn't agree with their editorial policy.
He has investigated the part played by the elites
during the First World War and the role of George Creel,
the chief organizer of war propaganda.
Creel was
created to destroy Debs and what was created,
and I take this from Dwight Macdonald's observation
is the imposition of the psychosis of permanent war.
You are constantly keeping a population in fear
and in the name of the war on Communism,
you destroy your populist and your radical
movements and disembowel your liberal class.
You re saying that in 1917,
that's when propaganda was invented,
when modern advertising was invented.
Yes because it was the first system of modern
mass propaganda because it employed the understanding
of crowd psychology pioneered by Le Bon, Trotter,
Freud which grasped that people were moved not by fact
or reason but by the skillful manipulation of emotion
and that system of mass propaganda is the model that
Goebbels uses when he creates the Nazi propaganda machine.
And quite specifically Bernays' book Propaganda
and when you read the great radical thinkers of the period,
Randolph Bourne or Jane Addams,
they despair that not only have the masses been seduced by
this propaganda but most of the intellectual elite as well.
So the moment the war is over,
that entire machinery which was massive goes to Madison
Avenue and starts working on behalf of corporations.
That's when
you overturn traditional values of thrift,
self-effacement and you replace them with consumption
as a kind of inner compulsion and the cult of the self.
1917 is also the year of the Russian Revolution
and you're saying they went from the Kraut to the Commie.
Yes and of course, that is correct.
That instantly the dreaded Hun becomes the dreaded Red
and the way they do it is to claim that the Germans,
the Kaiser was behind Lenin's arrival because the train
was allowed passage through Germany from Switzerland
and so the ruling elite recognizes that that
apparatus of propaganda, fear and permanent war
is one that can keep them in power which is why
the moment the Cold War is over, we begin the War
on Terror because it serves the same purpose.
And they recognize that if they perpetuate
that propaganda, that fear and permanent war,
they can get the masses to call for their own
enslavement which is precisely what's happened.
Go right.
Halt.
Left, left, go left, right,
go left.
Thank you very much, you have a good parade, thank you.
They manufactured a will of the people for
a very short time right after the war started
as governments are able to do right after
the beginning of an armed conflict.
They're able to create an atmosphere of
war hysteria and so for a short time,
they captivated the minds of the American people.
Yeah.
Our women are proud of us, yeah, that's right.
The rabbits who didn't have historians
and who knew nothing of their own history didn't say
anything when the hunters arrived with their big guns.
"We're here for your security," the hunters told them.
"We're here to protect you from the terrorist rabbits,
"from the Communist rabbits, from the Jewish rabbits,
"from the Muslim rabbits, from the perverted rabbits,
"from those who want to cook a rabbit stew."
The terrified rabbits, paralyzed in
the hunters' headlights, huddled together.
"There's nothing to be afraid of," the hunters told them.
"You'll be free once you're in the cages
"and don't let our big guns scare you.
"If you want peace, you must prepare war,
"war against the bad guys, a just war.
"War is peace."
What Howard Zinn has to say is the power of
the hunters depends on the obedience of the rabbits.
♪ My will is easy to decide
♪ For there is nothing to divide
♪ My kin don't need to fuss and moan
♪ Moss doesn't cling to a rolling stone
♪ Don't mourn, oh no
♪ Don't mourn, no no
♪ Don't mourn, oh no
♪ Don't mourn, no no
♪ Don't mourn, oh no no no
♪ Don't mourn, organize
♪ My body, ah if I could choose
♪ I would to ashes it reduce
♪ And let the merry breezes blow
♪ My dust to where some flowers grow
♪ Don't mourn, oh no
♪ Don't mourn, no no
♪ Don't mourn, oh no
♪ Don't mourn, no no
♪ Don't mourn, oh no no no
♪ Don't mourn, organize
♪ Perhaps some fading flower then
♪ Would come to life and bloom again
♪ This is my last and final will
♪ Good luck to all of you
♪ Don't mourn, oh no
♪ Don't mourn, no no
♪ Don't mourn, oh no
♪ Don't mourn, no no
♪ Don't mourn, oh no no no
♪ Don't mourn, organize
♪ Don't mourn, oh no
♪ Don't mourn, no no
♪ Don't mourn, oh no
♪ Don't mourn, no no
♪ Don't mourn, oh no no no
♪ Don't mourn, organize