I tried to read the book a couple of years ago, and I failed. The reason, I believe, is that it is close to 700 pages of nonstop, relentless facts and figures. It’s more a transcript than a story. There are conflicts and strikes and marches and executions and fires and sleazy business deals and corrupt politicians and court justices who cannot be bothered denying the fact that their main job is to make sure the rich remain that way. But if there’s a foundation of coherent narrative beneath it, I have yet to discover it. It’s all dates and times and names and places.
It may be that reading A People’s History of the United States is meant to be a crash course, an initiation into the history class most of us were never offered, the one that focused on the absolute might of money, power and greed in the founding and management of the nation. Perhaps Howard Zinn meant for readers to springboard off his book into other areas. The bibliography could keep me happily occupied for the duration, I’m sure.
Or perhaps Howard Zinn intended for his readers to experience the text as an outline, one around which their own experiences and impressions can be arranged.
Lately, on the arranging front, the commercials Wal-Mart is running about its minority employees couldn’t fit into my one-chapter-at-a-time reading of A People’s History of the United States more seamlessly. Wal-Mart, lest we forget, has an abysmal track record when it comes to how it treats and compensates its employees. Not to mention its suppliers.
The first commercial I heard features a Latina woman with a family of four whose employment at Wal-Mart has enabled her to cancel her food stamps and buy a house – her own house! Wal-Mart hit two jackpots with that one. First, they’ve managed to get a member of a minority group off of government assistance, and that’s something we can all celebrate. And secondly, this minoritress – that’s my own word – has joined the home-owning club. While my interpretation of that is that she’s now given up what little freedom she ever had by walking straight into the most jacked-up, mythological trap of them all, I think the broader reading would be more along the lines of someone we’ve been trained to assume is a victim has, thanks to working at Wal-Mart, has made the American Dream something of her very own. And though it shouldn’t even register, given Wal-Mart’s litigation history, the fact that she’s a woman is something of jackpot all on its own. It almost brings a tear to the eye, the sheer sweetness of it.
The second commercial takes the legend of the slave making peace with his former master out for a Sunday drive. There are two voices: The black Wal-Mart employee speaks in a dialect that is pronounced enough that he’s recognizably black; at the same time, kind of like our president, he doesn’t speak in a way that you’d call aggressively black. The white guy, presumably his manager, or perhaps his mentor, sounds like a folksy old cracker, a simple man with simple solutions. He tells us that the black employee is just an all-around good guy. He’s passionate about customers and he’s passionate about service. And he is convinced – you better sit down for this one – that one of these days the black employee will be his boss.
I think there’s more news in commercials than there is on the news itself. They’re quite revealing, I think. So it was interesting to hear Wal-Mart exploit its minority employees while I was reading the chapter entitled “Robber Barons and Rebels” in my history book. The chapter details how the economic growth of the 1870s coincided with a systematic tightening of the controls over the labor force. On page 253, Howard Zinn writes that the wealthy and powerful organized and orchestrated the growing economy – and their growing fortunes – “ … with the aid of, and at the expense of, black labor, white labor, Chinese labor, European immigrant labor, female labor, rewarding them differently by race, sex, national origin, and social class, in such a way as to create separate levels of oppression – a skillful terracing to stabilize the pyramid of wealth.” Apparently, this country’s money learned its lesson quite well. And those of us who are not part of that class, as usual, appear to have learned nothing at all.
