Its a good article on class and the 2000 election.
A CAMPAIGN WITHOUT CLASS
By Howard Zinn
There came a rare amusing moment in this election campaign when George Bush (who has $220 million dollars for his campaign) accused Al Gore (who has only $170 million dollars) of appealing to 'class warfare'. It recalled the 1988 election campaign when Bush's father (is this a genetic disorder?) accused candidate Michael Dukakis of instigating class antagonism.
I noticed that neither of the accused responded with a defiant "Yes, we have classes in this country." Only Ralph Nader has dared to suggest that this country is divided among the rich, the poor, and the nervous in between. This kind of talk is unpardonably rude, and would be enough to bar him from the televised debates.
We have learned that we mustn't talk of class divisions in this country. It upsets our political leaders. We must believe that we are one family - me and Exxon, you and Microsoft, the children of the CEOs and the children of the janitors. Our interests are the same - that's why we speak of going to war "for the national interest" as if it was in all our interest; why we maintain an enormous military budget for "national security," as if our nuclear weapons strengthen the security of all and not the securities of some.
That's why our culture is soaked in the idea of patriotism, which is piped into our consciousness from the first grade, where we begin every day by reciting the Pledge of Allegiance "…one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all". I remember stumbling over that big word "indivisible" -- with good reason, although I didn't know the reason, being quite politically backward at the age of six. Only later did I begin to understand that our nation, from the start, has been divided by class, race, national origin, has been beset by fierce conflicts, yes, class conflicts, all through our history.
The culture labors strenuously to keep that out of the history books, to maintain the idea of a monolithic, noble "us" against a shadowy but unmistakably evil "them." It starts with the story of the American Revolution, and, as the recent movie THE PATRIOT tells us once more, (kindergarten history, put on screen for millions of viewers), we were united in glorious struggle against British rule. The mythology surrounding the Founding Fathers is based on the idea that we Americans were indeed one family, and that our founding document, the Constitution, represented all our interests, as declared proudly by the opening words of its preamble - "We, the people of the United States…."
It may therefore seem surly for us to report that the American Revolution was not a war waged by a united population. The hundred and fifty years leading up to the Revolution were filled with conflict, yes, class conflict -- servants and slaves against their masters, tenants against landlords, poor people in the cities rioting for food and flour against profiteering merchants, mutinies of sailors against their captains. Thus, when the Revolutionary War began, some colonists saw the war as one of liberation, but many others saw it as the substitution of one set of rulers for another. As for black slaves and Indians, there was little to choose between the British and the Americans.
This class conflict inside the Revolution came dramatically alive with mutinies in George Washington's army. In 1781, after enduring five years of war (casualties in the Revolution exceeded, in proportion to population, American casualties in World War II), over a thousand soldiers in the Pennsylvania line at Morristown, New Jersey, mostly foreign-born, from Ireland, Scotland, Germany, mutinied. They had seen their officers paid handsomely, fed and clothed well, while the privates and sergeants were fed slop, marched in rags without shoes, paid in virtually worthless Continental currency or not paid at all for months. They were abused, beaten, whipped by their officers for the smallest breach of discipline.
Their deepest grievance was that they wanted out of the war, claiming their terms of enlistment had expired, and they were kept in the army by force. They were aware that in the spring of 1780 eleven deserters of the Connecticut line in Morristown were sentenced to death but at the last minute the received a reprieve, except for one of them, who had forged discharges for a hundred men. He was hanged.
General Washington, facing by this time, 1700 mutineers - a substantial part of his army -- assembled at Princeton, New Jersey, decided to make concessions. Many of the rebels were allowed to leave the army, and Washington asked the governors of the various states for money to deal with the grievances of the soldiers. The Pennsylvania line quieted down.
Continued;
http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2000-09/30zinn.htm
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