{"id":140462576,"date":"2024-01-24T13:30:27","date_gmt":"2024-01-24T13:30:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lazyandentitled.org\/?p=140462576"},"modified":"2024-01-24T13:30:27","modified_gmt":"2024-01-24T13:30:27","slug":"the-heart-of-the-us-century","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lazyandentitled.org\/?p=140462576","title":{"rendered":"The Heart Of The US Century"},"content":{"rendered":"

“The process is still bitterly remembered by Navajos.” – Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, ‘An Indigenous People’s History of the United States” <\/h2>

Nazis unwelcome: here\u2019s my post about moving this blog off of Substack soon<\/a>. I might put this stinger on every post until then to try to irritate Nazi Sympathizer Hamish McKenzie<\/a>. I might forget\/get bored and stop. Not today though!<\/em><\/p>

We\u2019re getting into labor history this week. My internal promises to \u201cmake this week\u2019s blog shorter\u201d are not<\/em> happening. Anyway, am I going to argue against US involvement in WWII this week? Does Zinn imply the New Deal and war absorbed and stymied in-progress social revolutions? The epigraph, while it could be about *gestures wildly at last few blogs* is in regards to a New Deal conservation scheme\u2026<\/p>

Part One<\/a> | Part Two<\/a> | Part Three<\/a> | Part Four<\/a><\/p>

Read This Week<\/strong><\/p>

\"A<\/figure>

A People\u2019s History of the United States <\/em>by Howard Zinn: \u201cWar Is the Health of the State,\u201d \u201cSelf-Help in Hard Times,\u201d \u201cA People\u2019s War?\u201d and \u201c\u2018Or Does It Explode?\u2019\u201d<\/p>

Four Hundred Souls<\/em> edited by Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain: Part Nine (1939-1979)<\/p>

An Indigenous People\u2019s History of the United States<\/em> by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz: \u201cEight: \u2018Indian Country\u2019\u201d and \u201cUS Triumphalism and Peacetime Colonialism\u201d<\/p>

Thoughts (In Which I Do Not Assert That The US Should Have Stayed Home During WWII)<\/strong><\/p>

The Banana Massacre in 100 Years of Solitude<\/a><\/em> is a thing I think about a lot\u2014it\u2019s real pleasant up in the ol\u2019 cabeza de Corlew\u2014and I always come back to the same bummer conclusion. Workers wanted livable wage and the company mowed them down with machine guns. <\/em>Sure, you can think about the mass forgetting (Brendan and I ripped it off in Vine<\/a> <\/em>with the \u201cOutbreak\u201d arc<\/a>), you can question what accuracy means when a novel represents real events<\/a>, or you can feel bad about eating bananas. Really, though, we\u2019re talking about striking workers getting mown down by machine guns. <\/p>

Capitalism might feel<\/em> inevitable\u2014someone queue up Ursula K. Le Guin<\/a>\u2014but doing this history study is furthering my belief that it absolutely is not inevitable. The 1910s, 20s, and 30s were rife<\/em> with strikes, demonstrations, and leftist activism. This country had to work hard for the Red Scare. While I still think FDR is one of three times in US history that we had a halfway decent president, this week\u2019s reading shifted my perceptions of the New Deal and WWII. Not necessarily good or bad. Shifted. <\/p>

\"File:Garment<\/figure>

Zinn talks about 350,000 steelworkers striking in Pennsylvania in 1919, 150,000 textile and steel workers in New England and New Jersey striking, and my adopted hometown of Chicago gets a quote from local press: \u201cMore strikes and lockouts accompany the mid-summer heat than ever known before at any one time.\u201d What really stayed with me, though, was the story of the Seattle General Strike in 1919. 35,000 shipyard workers walked off the job, then get this\u2014they asked the Seattle Central Labor Council for help<\/em>! Imagine having a Labor Council. The SCLC recommended a city-wide strike, and the AFL and some IWW locals were on board. Strikers organized provisions for essential needs: fire fighters still clocked in, 35 milk stations and 30,000 daily meals were distributed throughout the city, laundry workers only handled hospital linens, vehicles authorized to move carried \u201cExempted by the General Strike Committee\u201d signs, and a Labor War Veteran\u2019s Guard kept the peace. It was peaceful, brought crime down, brought wages up, and ended after five days. <\/p>

After the strike, the socialist party headquarters and a printing plant were raided. 39 IWW members were \u201cjailed as \u2018ring-leaders of anarchy.\u2019\u201d<\/p><\/div>

By the end of WWII, of course, everyone forgot that the profiteers and bosses were the enemy. No time to be rational in the face of \u201ccommunist threat.\u201d Russell Rickford in Four Hundred Souls<\/em> tells the story of the Peekskill after, where singer Paul Robeson (\u201c\u2026an antifascist\u2026who lent his prodigious talents to trade union struggles\u2026had battled lynching and segregation\u2026promoting Black militancy and cultural pride\u2026ally of the Communist Party\u2026opponent of the Cold War who called for peaceful coexistence\u2026\u201d) was set to give a performance. For the crime of suggesting the US\u2019s fight was not with the Soviets but with Jim Crow, the enlightened residents of Peekskill first prevented Robeson from performing by stoning and beating concertgoers. When he came back to perform the next weekend, defiant and flanked by both Black and white trade unionists, the racists again attacked. Cops stood by and laughed the whole of both times. Afterwards, to gin up the Red Scare, war hawks would say \u201cWake up, America! Peekskill did!\u201d Cool. Cool country we got. <\/p>

\"File:Tallahassee<\/figure>

Getting off strikes and getting back to massacres, Wounded Knee was an even flimsier excuse than United Fruit had. I had forgotten (or never been taught?) the specific horrors of Wounded Knee. 350 Lakotas (230 of them women and children) crossed below-zero weather in Pine Ridge to surrender to US troops. They were instead taken to Wounded Knee and surrounded by armed soldiers with two hotchkiss machine guns mounted on the hill. That was more than enough<\/em>, by the way, to hold a surrendering group of mostly non-combatants, to say nothing of annihilating them. During the night, Colonel James Forsyth ordered two more hotchkisses mounted, then he issued the officers whiskey. Next morning comes (Dunbar-Ortiz does not say if the officers were hungover, imagine drinking water in 1890), and the soldiers confiscate anything that could be construed as a weapon. One young Lakota did not want to part with his rifle\u2014something not a single white USian can identify with\u2014a struggle ensued, a single rifle shot went into the air. Chekov\u2019s Hotchkiss time. Within minutes, 300 Sioux and 25 US soldiers lay dead. <\/p>

20 US soldiers got Congressional Medals of Honor. <\/p>

Frank L. Baum\u2014guy who wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz<\/em>\u2014said of Wounded Knee, \u201cHaving wronged [Indigenous Americans] for centuries we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamed creatures from the face of the earth.\u201d <\/p>

Thus was Western Civilization triumphant. Amen. <\/p>

\n