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History of the United States: The Truth About Textbook Patriotism

History of the United States: The Truth About Textbook Patriotism image
Parent Issue
Day
9
Month
May
Year
1975
OCR Text

Harvey Wasserman, Harvey Wasserman's History of the United States. With Introduction by Howard Zinn. New Perennial Library Edition, Harper & Tow, 1975. $1.50

The might deluge of bicentennial garbage is about to begin. The initial blow was struck with first-page news of the celebration of the two hundredth anniversary of Paul Revere's Ride. But it is essential now to learn broader truths of our history, rather than swallow another dosage of elementary school patriotic propaganda. 

Like Paul Revere, Harvey Wasserman's History of the United States rides in with the alert and the news. The book covers the post Civil War to World War 1 era, a period which witnessed a radical transformation of American culture. The nation changed from a fairly simple, predominately rural, and isolated society to an urban and multi-ethnic culture dominated by industry and its owners. Our Found Father's "vision" was rather completely eliminated. Jefferson's dream of a farming utopia vanished, and the elaborate constitutional guarantees of a fair government balanced between the executive, Congress and the Courts was wiped out by the corruption and awesome extending powers of corporate industrialists. As in the Revolutionary period, resistance to distant power was strong, though Wasserman sadly chronicles that it was not ultimately successful.

Harvey Wasserman's History is a people's history -- it discusses the lives and events of those who are usually overlooked or forgotten in the history textbooks and moral fables that are passed on to the young and swallowed by the old. Wasserman's story has been told many times, though not so directly, in many more sophisticated academic histories, but the academic style is geared for an academic audience, not the mistaught masses. Here in one easy-to-read, often humorous and consistently vivid book, is the whole story in an easily absorbable form.

From the viewpoint of historical sophistication, the form has its drawbacks. It is written as a secondary history, or, Wasserman tells his story from the second-hand sources, rather than from the documents of the period itself. His interpretation is therefore not entirely unique, and a professional historian might go so far as to say it is plagiarism. 

Wasserman's greatest debt is to The Rober Barons, Matthew Josephson's magnificent book on the rising billionaire industrialists. Read this, if Harvey Wasserman's book intrigues you enough to go further.

This criticism in many senses has little value, because for those who are not professional academics, Harvey Wasserman's History is the first book to read on the period of time which witnessed more fundamental cultural changes than any other time in our history. The most significant change/event was the rise of a small group of financier industrialists, led by Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Morgan. The control these three, and a few dozen others, had over the nation is incredible, but far more amazing is that the foundation of corporate power which they laid has so much increased. Beseiged by a blind drive and no concern for its human impact, this small group of financiers accumulated the majority of American capital not by inventing anything, but by simply consolidating various diffused economic sources. Their money often stood for nothing at all, so when they literally waged financial war against each other, they could and did drive the whole country into financial ruin. And the corporate giants were strong enough to even "save" the country, as Morgan did in 1895 when he floated the US government a loan of 3.5 million ounces of gold. 

Wasserman's History also tells the story of the many people who fought this corporate power and the effects of its ruthlessness. The period witnessed the birth of a strong and militant labor movement, fighting for recognition and a living wage, struggling against tremendous odds and an entirely ruthless opponent. He also chronicles the histories of the great Populist Movement, Farmers' Alliance, IWW, Woman's Movement, and a reburst of the black consciousness. The period is the story of combat between the extremes of great wealth and great poverty. 

Harvey Wasserman's History of the United States has interest on the Ann Arbor level. Harvey lived here from 1963-1967 when he was an undergraduate history student, and worked for the Michigan Daily. For the past seven years he has been living on a communal farm in Montague, Massachusetts, founded by the rebellious non-doctrinaire faction of the Liberation News Service. Harvey recently wrote a SUN article on Sam Lovejoy, a farm resident who toppled a nuclear power plant's weather tower in protest to the lethal aspects of nuclear power. Harvey and the people at the farm are simply a few of the hopefully millions of us who continue to fight for self-control over our own lives, and for the same right for others. Harvey Wasserman's History was written in one of the farm barns, with an explicit understanding that the struggles of the past have a very distinct relationship to the present. The admirable activist Howard Zinn writes in the introduction, "The United States, much as we talk proudly about its 'progress,' has not changed very much from those days that Harvey Wasserman recalls for us in such shocking color... We are more technologically advanced, we have more gadgets, there are more reforms on the books, but our basic problems remain the same."