work toward support for the United States, Peter Novick wondered if that kind of "hubris,"
the arrogance of national power, played a part in the ugly American intervention in Vietnam
and the cold war itself. He put it this way:
51
If il -considered American global interventionism had landed us in this
bloodiest manifestation of the cold war, was it not at least worth considering
whether the same hubris had been responsible for the larger conflict of which
it was a part? Manifestly by the sixties, the United States was overseeing an
empire. Could scholars comfortably argue that it had been acquired as had
been said of the British Empire, "in a fit of absence of mind"?35
In the sixties, there was a series of tumultuous social movements against racial segregation
and against the Vietnam War and for equality between the sexes. This caused a reappraisal
of the orthodox histories. More and more books began to appear (or old books were brought
to light) on the struggles of black people, on the attempts of women throughout history to
declare their equality with men, on movements against war, and on the strikes and protests
of working people against their conditions—books that, while sticking close to confirmed
information, openly took sides for equality, against war, and for the working classes.
The unapologetic activism of the sixties (making history in the street as wel as writing it in
the study) was startling to many professional historians. And in the seventies and eighties,
it was accused by some scholars and some organs of public opinion of hurting the proper
historical education of young people by its insistence on "relevance." As part of the attack, a demand grew for more emphasis on facts, on dates, and on the sheer accumulation of
historical information.36
In May of 1976 the New York Times published a series of articles in which it lamented the
ignorance of American students about their own history.37 The Times was pained. Four
leading historians whom it consulted were also pained. It seemed students did not know
that James Polk was president during the Mexican War, that James Madison was president
during the War of 1812, that the Homestead Act was passed earlier than Civil Service
reform, or that the Constitution authorizes Congress to regulate interstate commerce but
says nothing about the cabinet.
We might wonder if the Times, or its historian-consultants, learned anything from the
history of this century. It has been a century of atrocities: the death camps of Hitler, the
slave camps of Stalin, and the devastation of Southeast Asia by the United States. Al of
these were done by powerful leaders and obedient populations in countries that had
achieved high levels of literacy and education. It seems that high scores on tests were not
the most crucial fact about those leaders and those citizens.
In the case of the United States the kil ing of a mil ion Vietnamese and the sacrifice of
55,000 Americans were carried out by highly educated men around the White House who
scored very wel in tests and who undoubtedly would have made impressive grades in the
New York Times exam. It was a Phi Beta Kappa, McGeorge Bundy, who was one of the chief
planners of the bombing of civilians in Southeast Asia. It was a Harvard professor, Henry
Kissinger, who was a strategist of the secret bombing of peasant vil ages in Cambodia.
Going back a bit in history, it was our most educated president, Woodrow Wilson—a
historian, a Ph.D., and a former president of Princeton—who bombarded the Mexican coast,
kil ing hundreds of innocent people, because the Mexican government refused to salute the
American flag. It was Harvard-educated John Kennedy, author of two books on history, who
presided over the American invasion of Cuba and the lies that accompanied it.
52
What did Kennedy or Wilson learn from al that history they absorbed in the best
universities in America? What did the American people learn in their high-school history
texts that caused them to submerge their own common sense and listen to these leaders?
Surely how "smart" a person is on history tests like the one devised by the Times, or how
"educated" someone is, tel s you nothing about whether that person is decent or indecent, violent or peaceful, and whether that person wil resist evil or become a consultant to
warmakers. It does not tel you who wil become a Pastor Niemol er (a German who resisted
the Nazis) or an Albert Speer (who worked for them), a Lieutenant Cal ey (who kil ed
children at My Lai), or a Warrant Officer Thompson (who tried to save them).
One of the two top scorers on the Times test was described as fol ows: "Just short of 20
years old, he lists outdoor activities and the Augustana War Games Club as constituting his
favorite leisure-time pursuits, explaining the latter as a group that meets on Fridays to
simulate historical battles on a playing board."38
We do need to learn history, the kind that does not put its main emphasis on knowing
presidents and statutes and Supreme Court decisions, but inspires a new generation to
resist the madness of governments trying to carve the world and our minds into their
spheres of influence.
1 Noam Chomsky, who began exploring human potential in his theories of language
acquisition, concluded that humans have a built-in grammar that gives them a universal
ability to learn language, even though the specific form of the language depends on history
and culture. He seems also to believe that there is an innate human desire for freedom,
which can be suppressed or distorted, but which continual y strives to express itself. See his
book Reflections on Language (Pantheon, 1975). The philosopher Bernard Wil iams, in his
book Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Harvard University Press, 1986), is dubious that
we can derive our values from the pure thought of philosophy, that there is some rational
system of thought to tel us what is right and what is wrong. But this does not leave us
hanging helplessly in an amoral atmosphere. There is something inside us that is a better
guide than cool philosophical analysis. And we can help this along, he thinks, not through
abstract ethical theories, but by taking a closer, deeper look at the world about us, its
history and its present characteristics.
2 Oddly enough, E. O. Wilson, who sometimes speaks as if he finds aggressiveness in
human nature, also finds cooperation in it. He talks about (in his book On Human Nature)
"the mammalian imperative." He finds it a basic characteristic of mammals (which includes human beings and other species) to seek, among other things, "grudging cooperation … to
enjoy the benefits of group membership." This "fact" about people is, therefore, a basis for the value of "universal rights," he says. The philosopher Peter Singer disputes this, saying,
"Human beings have been mammals at al times and in al places." And yet they have not
always supported universal rights. We do not need a biological justification for universal
rights, Singer says. It is a good in itself. Peter Singer, "Ethics and Sociobiology," Philosophy and Public Affairs (Winter 1982).
3 Samuel Yel en, American Labor Struggles (Harcourt Brace, 1936).
4 The entire speech is reprinted in the report of the House Mines and Mining Committee,
Conditions in the Coal Mines of Colorado (1914), 2631-2634.
5 Commission on Industrial Relations, Senate, Report and Testimony (1915), 8607.
6 A Yale law professor named Wil iam Brewster compiled a 600-page document of
eyewitness reports of National Guard brutality, titled Militarism in Colorado (1914).
53
7 Glenn M. Linden, Dean C. Brink, and Richard H. Huntington, Legacy of Freedom, Vol. II
(Laidlaw Brothers, 1986) 15.
8 New York Times, Apr. 21, 1914.
9 Howard Zinn, The Politics of History (Il inois University Press, 1900).
10 I am drawing this account of Columbus from the first chapter of my book, A People's
History of the United States (Harper & Row, 1980).
11 The Jewish Advocate in Boston, Oct. 5, 1989, carried an article by Judea B. Mil er, who
asked: "Why would American Jews gather in a cathedral in Spain to honor Columbus? The
reason is that Columbus was of Jewish origin." How ironic that Jews, remembering their own
Holocaust, would honor the perpetrator of an earlier one. I would guess that the writer, like
most Americans, did not know the story of Columbus’s treatment of the Indians.
12 B. de las Casas, History of the Indies (Harper & Row, 1971).
13 Samuel Eliot Morison, Admiral of the Ocean Sea (Little Brown, 1942).
14 Samuel Eliot Morison, Christopher Columbus, Mariner (Little Brown, 1955).
15 Zinn, A People's History of the United States, 8.
16 Boston Globe, Oct. 7, 1986.
17 Robert Lynd and Helen Lynd, Middletown, A Study in American Culture (Harcourt Brace,
1929), 85.
18 Merle Curti, The Growth of American Thought (Harper, 1933), 692-693.
19 LaGuardia Papers, New York Public Library. Quoted in Howard Zinn, LaGuardia in
Congress (Cornel University Press, 1959).
20 Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
21 New York Tines, Aug. 31, 1974.
22 A useful corrective to the orthodox treatment of the American revolution is a set of essays
edited by Alfred Young, The American Revolution (Northern Il inois University Press, 1976).
There is also an excel ent overview of the revolution in Edward Countryman, The American
Revolution (Hil & Wang, 1985).
23 For an excel ent treatment of this, see James McPherson, The Negro's Civil War
(Pantheon, 1965).
24 See Jeremy Brecher's book Strike! (South End Press, 1079), for the labor actions of the 1930s. For a specific example of the effect of strikes on the passage of the National Labor
Relations Act, see Peter Irons, New Deal Lawyers (Princeton University Press, 1982).
25 For a study of the anti-imperialist movement during the war in the Philippines, see Daniel
B. Schirmer, Republic or Empire (Schenkman, 1972).
26 Patrick S. Washburn, reviewing Richard Drinnon, Keeper of Concentration Camps: Dil on
S. Myer and American Racism, (University of California Press, 1087) in New York Times
Book Review, Feb. 22, 1988.
27 The argument against "presentism" is looked on skeptical y by the historian Immanuel
Wal erstein, who writes, in his book The Modem World-System (Academic Press, 1974), that
"recounting the past is a social act of the present done by men of the present and affecting
the social system of the present."
54
28 Peter Novick, That Noble Dream (Cambridge University Press, 1088).
29 Ibid., 121.
30 See Richard Polenberg's review of George T. Blakey, Historians on the Homefront:
American Propagandists/or the Great War (University Press of Kentucky, 1970), which
appeared in American Political Science Review (Sept. 1973).
31 Quoted by Novick, That Noble Dream.
32 Quoted by Novick, Ibid.
33 Quoted by Novick, Ibid.
34 Novick, That Noble Dream.
35 Ibid.
36 Two best-sel ing books played a part in this attack. Alien Bloom's The Closing of the
American Mind (Simon & Schuster, 1987) deplored the sixties' students leaving the seminar room to take part in demonstrations for racial equality or against the war. E. D. Hirsch's
Cultural Literacy (Vintage, 1988) drew up lists of facts that he believed al educated people should know.
37 New York Times, May 3, 1976.
38 Ibid.
55
Five
Just and Unjust War
There are some people who do not question war.
In 1972, the general who was head of the U.S. Strategic Air Command told an interviewer,
"I've been asked often about my moral scruples if I had to send the planes out with
hydrogen bombs. My answer is always the same. I would be concerned only with my
professional responsibility.”1
It was a Machiavel ian reply. Machiavel i did not ask if making war was right or wrong.2 He
just wrote about the best way to wage it so as to conquer the enemy. One of his books is
cal ed The Art of War.
That title might make artists uneasy. Indeed, artists—poets, novelists, and playwrights as
wel as musicians, painters, and actors—have shown a special aversion to war. Perhaps
because, as the playwright Arthur Mil er once said, "When the guns boom, the arts die." But that would make their interest too self-centered; they have always been sensitive to the
fate of the larger society around them. They have questioned war, whether in the fifth
century before Christ, with the plays of Euripedes, or in modern times, with the paintings of
Goya and Picasso.
Some people have believed that war is not just inevitable but desirable; It is adventure and
excitement, it brings out the best qualities in men—courage, comradeship, and sacrifice. It
gives respect and glory to a country. In 1897, Theodore Roosevelt wrote to a friend, "In
strict confidence … I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one."3
In our time, fascist regimes have glorified war as heroic and ennobling. Bombing Ethiopia in
1935, Mussolini's son-in-law Count Qano described the explosions as an aesthetic thril , as
having the beauty of a flower unfolding.
In the 1980s two writers of a book on war see it as an effective instrument of national policy
and say that even nuclear war can, under certain circumstances, be justified. They are
contemptuous of "the pacifist passions: self-indulgence and fear," and of "American
statesmen, who believe victory is an archaic concept." They say, "The bottom line in war
and hence in political warfare is who gets buried and who gets to walk in the sun."4
Most people are not that enamored of war. They see it as bad, but also as a possible means
to something good. And so they distinguish between wars that are just and those that are
unjust. The religions of the West and Middle East—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—
approve of violence and war under certain circumstances. The Catholic church has a specific
doctrine of "just" and "unjust" war, worked out in some detail. Political philosophers today argue about which wars, or which actions in wars, may be considered just or unjust.5
Beyond both viewpoints—the glorification of war and the weighing of good and bad wars—
there is a third: that war is too evil to ever be just. The monk Erasmus, writing in the early
sixteenth century, was repel ed by war of any kind. One of his pupils was kil ed in battle and
he reacted with anguish:
Tel me, what had you to do with Mars, the stupidest of al the poet's gods,
you who were consecrated to the Muses, nay to Christ? Your youth, your
beauty, your gentle nature, your honest mind—what had they to do with the
flourishing of trumpets, the bombards, the swords?
57
Erasmus described war: "There is nothing more wicked, more disastrous, more widely destructive, more deeply tenacious, more loathsome." He said this was repugnant to
nature: "Whoever heard of a hundred thousand animals rushing together to butcher each
other, as men do everywhere?"
Erasmus saw war as useful to governments, for it enabled them to enhance their power
over their subjects; " … once war has been declared, then al the affairs of the State are at
the mercy of the appetites of a few."6
This absolute aversion to war of any kind is outside the orthodoxy of modern thinking. In a
series of lectures at Oxford University in the 1970s, English scholar Michael Howard talked
disparagingly about Erasmus. He cal ed him simplistic, unsophisticated, and someone who
did not see beyond the "surface manifestations" of war. He said,
With al [Erasmus's] genius he was not a profound political analyst, nor did he
ever have to exercise the responsibilities of power. Rather he was the first in
that long line of humanitarian thinkers for whom it was enough to chronicle
the horrors of war in order to condemn it.
Howard had praise for Thomas More: "Very different was the approach of Erasmus's friend,
Thomas More; a man who had exercised political responsibility and, perhaps in
consequence, saw the problem in al its complexity." More was a realist; Howard says,
He accepted, as thinkers for the next two hundred years were to accept, that
European society was organized in a system of states in which war was an
inescapable process for the settlement of differences in the absence of any
higher common jurisdiction. That being the case, it was a requirement of
humanity, of religion and of common sense alike that those wars should be
fought in such a manner as to cause as little damage as possible … . For
better or worse war was an institution which could not be eliminated from the
international system. Al that could be done about it was, so far as possible,
to codify its rationale and to civilize its means.