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"To emphasize the heroism of Columbus and his successors as navigators and discoverers, and to de-emphasize
their genocide, is not a technical necessity but an ideological choice. It serves- unwittingly-to justify what was done. My
point is not that we must, in telling history, accuse, judge, condemn Columbus in absentia. It is too late for that; it would
be a useless scholarly exercise in morality. But the easy acceptance of atrocities as a deplorable but necessary price to
pay for progress (Hiroshima and Vietnam, to save Western civilization; Kronstadt and Hungary, to save socialism; nuclear proliferation,
to save us all)-that is still with us. 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 exactly
the same proportion of attention that teachers and writers often give them in the most respectable of classrooms and textbooks.
This learned sense of moral proportion, coming from the apparent objectivity of the scholar, is accepted more easily than
when it comes from politicians at press conferences. It is therefore more deadly.
The treatment of heroes (Columbus) and their victims (the Arawaks)-the quiet acceptance of conquest and murder in the name
of progress-is only one aspect of a certain approach to history, in which the past is told from the point of view of governments,
conquerors, diplomats, leaders. It is as if they, like Columbus, deserve universal acceptance, as if they-the Founding Fathers,
Jackson, Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt, Kennedy, the leading members of Congress, the famous Justices of the Supreme Court-represent
the nation as a whole. The pretense is that there really is such a thing as "the United States," subject to occasional conflicts
and quarrels, but fundamentally a community of people with common interests. It is as if there really is a "national interest"
represented in the Constitution, in territorial expansion, in the laws passed by Congress, the decisions of the courts, the
development of capitalism, the culture of education and the mass media.
"History
is the memory of states," wrote Henry Kissinger in his first book, A World Restored, in which he proceeded to tell the history
of nineteenth-century Europe from the viewpoint of the leaders of Austria and England, ignoring the millions who suffered
from those statesmen's policies. From his standpoint, the "peace" that Europe had before the French Revolution was "restored"
by the diplomacy of a few national leaders. But for factory workers in England, farmers in France, colored people in Asia
and Africa, women and children everywhere except in the upper classes, it was a world of conquest, violence, hunger, exploitation-a
world not restored but disintegrated.
My viewpoint, in telling the history of the
United States, is different: that we must not accept the memory of states as our own. Nations are not communities and never
have been, The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals fierce conflicts of interest (sometimes
exploding, most often repressed) between conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators
and dominated in race and sex. And in such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking
people, as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners.
Thus,
in that inevitable taking of sides which comes from selection and emphasis in history, I prefer to try to tell the story of
the discovery of America from the viewpoint of the Arawaks, of the Constitution from the standpoint of the slaves, of Andrew
Jackson as seen by the Cherokees, of the Civil War as seen by the New York Irish, of the Mexican war as seen by the deserting
soldiers of Scott's army, of the rise of industrialism as seen by the young women in the Lowell textile mills, of the Spanish-American
war as seen by the Cubans, the conquest of the Philippines as seen by black soldiers on Luzon, the Gilded Age as seen by southern
farmers, the First World War as seen by socialists, the Second World War as seen by pacifists, the New Deal as seen by blacks
in Harlem, the postwar American empire as seen by peons in Latin America. And so on, to the limited extent that any one person,
however he or she strains, can "see" history from the standpoint of others.
My point
is not to grieve for the victims and denounce the executioners. Those tears, that anger, cast into the past, deplete our moral
energy for the present. And the lines are not always clear. In the long run, the oppressor is also a victim. In the short
run (and so far, human history has consisted only of short runs), the victims, themselves desperate and tainted with the culture
that oppresses them, turn on other victims.
Still, understanding the complexities,
this book will be skeptical of governments and their attempts, through politics and culture, to ensnare ordinary people in
a giant web of nationhood pretending to a common interest. I will try not to overlook the cruelties that victims inflict on
one another as they are jammed together in the boxcars of the system. I don't want to romanticize them. But I do remember
(in rough paraphrase) a statement I once read: "The cry of the poor is not always just, but if you don't listen to it, you
will never know what justice is."
I don't want to invent victories for people's movements.
But to think that history-writing must aim simply to recapitulate the failures that dominate the past is to make historians
collaborators in an endless cycle of defeat. If history is to be creative, to anticipate a possible future without denying
the past, it should, I believe, emphasize new possibilities by disclosing those hidden episodes of the past when, even if
in brief flashes, people showed their ability to resist, to join together, occasionally to win. I am supposing, or perhaps
only hoping, that our future may be found in the past's fugitive moments of compassion rather than in its solid centuries
of warfare."
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