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A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn

Chapter 22:The Unreported Resistance

In the early 1990s, a writer for theNew Republic magazine, reviewing with approval in theNewYork Times a book about the influence of dangerously unpatriotic elements among Americanintellectuals, warned his readers of the existence of "a permanent adversarial culture" in the UnitedStates.

It was an accurate observation. Despite the political consensus of Democrats and Republicans inWashington which set limits on American reform, making sure that capitalism was in place, thatnational military strength was maintained, that wealth and power remained in the hands of a few,there were millions of Americans, probably tens of millions, who refused, either actively orsilently, to go along. Their activities were largely unreported by the media. They constituted this"permanent adversarial culture."

The Democratic party was more responsive to these Americans, on whose votes it depended. Butits responsiveness was limited by its own captivity to corporate interests, and its domestic reformswere severely limited by the system's dependency on militarism and war. Thus, President LyndonJohnson's War on Poverty in the sixties became a victim of the war in Vietnam, and Jimmy Cartercould not go far so long as he insisted on a huge outlay of money for the military, much of this tostockpile more nuclear weapons.

As these limits became clear in the Carter years, a small but determined movement against nucleararms began to grow. The pioneers were a tiny group of Christian pacifists who had been activeagainst the Vietnam war (among them were a former priest, Philip Berrigan, and his wife, ElizabethMcAlister, a former nun). Again and again, members of this group would be arrested forengaging in nonviolent acts of dramatic protest against nuclear war at the Pentagon and the WhiteHouse—trespassing on forbidden areas, pouring their own blood on symbols of the war machine.

In 1980, small delegations of peace activists from all over the country maintained a series ofdemonstrations at the Pentagon, in which over a thousand people were arrested for acts ofnonviolent civil disobedience.

In September of that year, Philip Berrigan, his brother Daniel (the Jesuit priest and poet), MollyRush (a mother of six), Anne Montgomery (a nun and counselor to young runaways and prostitutesin Manhattan), and four of their friends made their way past a guard in the General Electric Plant atKing of Prussia, Pennsylvania, where nose cones for nuclear missiles were manufactured. Theyused sledgehammers to smash two of the nose cones and smeared their own blood over missileparts, blueprints, and furniture. Arrested, sentenced to years in prison, they said they were trying toset an example to do as the Bible suggested, to beat swords into plowshares.

They pointed to the huge allocations of taxpayers' money to corporations producing weaponry:"G.E. drains $3 million a day from the public treasury-an enormous larceny against the poor."Before their trial (they came to be known as the Plowshares Eight), Daniel Berrigan had written intheCatholic Worker.

I know of no sure way of predicting where things will go from there, whether others will hear andrespond, or how quickly or slowly. Or whether the act will fail to vitalize others, will come to agrinding halt then and there, its actors stigmatized or dismissed as fools. One swallows dry andtakes a chance.

Even the very Middle-American Pennsylvania jurors who convicted the Plowshares Eight showedremarkable sympathy with their actions. One juror, Michael DeRosa, told a reporter, "I didn't thinkthey really went to commit a crime. They went to protest." Another, Mary Ann Ingram, said thejury argued about that: "We . . . really didn't want to convict them on anything. But we had tobecause of the way the judge said the thing you can use is what you get under the law." She added:"These people are not criminals. Here are people who are trying to do some good for the country.But the judge said nuclear power wasn't the issue."

Reagan's huge military budget was to provoke a national movement against nuclear weapons. In theelection of 1980 that brought him into the Presidency, local referenda in three districts in westernMassachusetts permitted voters to say whether they believed in a mutual Soviet-American halt totesting, production, and deployment of all nuclear weapons, and wanted Congress to devote thosefunds instead to civilian use. Two peace groups had worked for months on the campaign and allthree districts approved the resolution (94,000 to 65,000), even those that voted for Reagan asPresident. Similar referenda received majority votes between 1978 and 1981 in San Francisco,Berkeley, Oakland, Madison, and Detroit.

Women were in the forefront of the new antinuclear movement. Randall Forsberg, a youngspecialist in nuclear arms, organized the Council for a Nuclear Weapons Freeze, whose simpleprogram—a mutual Soviet-American freeze on the production of new nuclear weapons—began tocatch on throughout the country. Shortly after Reagan's election, two thousand women assembledin Washington, marched on the Pentagon, and surrounded it in a great circle, linking arms orstretching to hold the ends of brightly colored scarves. One hundred forty women were arrested forblocking the Pentagon entrance.

A small group of doctors began to organize meetings around the country to teach citizens themedical consequences of nuclear war. They were the core of the Physicians for SocialResponsibility, and Dr. Helen Caldicott, the group's president, became one of the most powerfuland eloquent national leaders of the movement. At one of their public symposia, Howard Hiatt,dean of the Harvard School of Public Health, gave a graphic description of the results of onetwenty-megaton nuclear bomb falling on Boston. Two million people would die. Survivors wouldbe burned, blinded, crippled. In a nuclear war there would be 25 million severe burn cases in thenation, yet all existing facilities could take care of only 200 cases.

At a national meeting of Catholic bishops early in the Reagan administration, the majority opposedany use of nuclear weapons. In November 1981, there were meetings on 151 college campusesaround the country on the issue of nuclear war. And at local elections in Boston that month, aresolution calling for increased federal spending on social programs "by reducing the amount of ourtax dollars spent on nuclear weapons and programs of foreign intervention" won a majority in everyone of Boston's twenty-two wards, including both white and black working-class districts.

On June 12, 1982, the largest political demonstration in the history of the country took place inCentral Park, New York City. Close to a million people gathered to express their determination tobring an end to the arms race.

Scientists who had worked on the atom bomb added their voices to the growing movement. GeorgeKistiakowsky, a Harvard University chemistry professor who had worked on the first atomic bomb,and later was science adviser to President Eisenhower, became a spokesman for the disarmamentmovement. His last public remarks, before his death from cancer at the age of eighty-two, were inan editorial for theBulletin of Atomic Scientists in December 1982. "I tell you as my partingwords: Forget the channels. There simply is not enough time left before the world explodes.Concentrate instead on organizing, with so many others of like mind, a mass movement for peacesuch as there has not been before."

By the spring of 1983, the nuclear freeze had been endorsed by 368 city and county councils acrossthe country, by 444 town meetings and 17 state legislatures, and by the House of Representatives.A Harris poll at this time indicated that 79 percent of the population wanted a nuclear freezeagreement with the Soviet Union. Even among evangelical Christians—a group of 40 million peoplepresumed to be conservative and pro-Reagan—a Gallup poll sampling showed 60 percent favoring anuclear freeze.

A year after the great Central Park demonstration, there were over three thousand antiwar groupsaround the country. And the antinuclear feeling was being reflected in the culture-in books,magazine articles, plays, motion pictures. Jonathan Schells impassioned book against the armsrace,The Fate of the Earth, became a national best-seller. A documentary film on the arms racemade in Canada was forbidden to enter the country by the Reagan administration, but a federalcourt ordered it admitted.

In less than three years, there had come about a remarkable change in public opinion. At the time ofReagan's election, nationalist feeling—drummed up by the recent hostage crisis in Iran and by theRussian invasion of Afghanistan—was strong; the University of Chicago's National OpinionResearch Center found that only 12 percent of those it polled thought too much was being spent onarms. But when it took another poll in the spring of 1982, that figure rose to 32 percent. And in thespring of 1983, aNew York Time/CBS News poll found that the figure had risen again, to 48percent.

Antimilitarist feeling expressed itself also in resistance to the draft. When President Jimmy Carter,responding to the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan, called for the registration of young menfor a military draft, more than 800,000 men (10 percent) failed to register. One mother wrote to theNew York Time:

To the Editor: Thirty-six years ago I stood in front of the crematorium. The ugliest force in theworld had promised itself that I should be removed from the cycle of life-that I should never knowthe pleasure of giving life. With great guns and great hatred, this force thought itself the equal ofthe force of lift.

I survived the great guns, and with every smile of my son, they grow smaller. It is not for me, sir, tooffer my son's blood as lubricant for the next generation of guns. I remove myself and my ownfrom the cycle of death.

Isabella Leitner

One of the young men who refused to register, James Peters, wrote an open letter to PresidentCarter:

Dear Mr. President: On July 23, 1980, I ... am expected to report to my local post office for thepurpose of registering with the Selective Service System. I hereby inform you, Mr. President, that Iwill not register on July 23, or at any time thereafter... . We have tried militarism, and it has failedthe human race in every way imaginable.

Once he was in office, Ronald Reagan hesitated to renew draft registration, because, as hisSecretary of Defense, Caspar Weinberger, explained, "President Reagan believes that resuming thedraft to meet manpower problems would lead to public unrest comparable to that in the sixties andseventies." William Beecher, a former Pentagon reporter, wrote in November 1981 that Reagan was"obviously concerned, even alarmed, by the mounting voices of discontent and suspicion overemerging U.S. nuclear strategy both in the streets of Europe and more recently on Americancampuses."

Hoping to intimidate this opposition, the Reagan administration began to prosecute draft resisters.One of those facing prison was Benjamin Sasway, who cited U.S. military intervention in ElSalvador as a good reason not to register for the draft.

Aroused by Sasway's civil disobedience, a right-wing columnist (William A. Rusher, of theNational Review) wrote indignantly that one heritage of the sixties was a new generation of antiwarteachers:

Almost certainly there was a teacher, or teachers, who taught Benjamin Sasway to look atAmerican society as a hypocritical, exploitative, materialistic roadblock on the path of humanprogress. The generation of the Vietnam protesters is now in its early thirties, and the academiciansamong them are already ensconced in the faculties of the country's high schools and colleges....What a pity our jurisprudence doesn't allow us to reach and penalize the real architects of this sortof destruction!

It was a scene reminiscent of the 1960s, a rally of students in Harvard Yard shouting antiwarslogans, a candlelight march through the streets of Cambridge.. .. 2000 persons, mostly students,gathered to protest U.S. involvement in El Salvador... . Students from Tufts, MIT, BostonUniversity and Boston College, the University of Massachusetts, Brandeis, Suffolk, Dartmouth,Northeastern, Vassar, Yale and Simmons were represented.

The last slogan was a reference to the execution in the fall of 1980 of four American nunsby Salvadoran soldiers. Thousands of people in El Salvador were being murdered each year by"death squads" sponsored by a government armed by the United States, and the American publicwas beginning to pay attention to events in this tiny Central American country.

As has been true generally in the making of U.S. foreign policy, there was no pretense atdemocracy. Public opinion was simply ignored. ANew York Time/CBS News poll in the springof 1982 reported that only 16 percent of its sampling favored Reagan's program of sending militaryand economic aid to El Salvador.

In the spring of 1983, it was disclosed that an American physician named Charles Clement wasworking with the Salvadoran rebels. As an Air Force pilot in Southeast Asia, he had becomedisillusioned with U.S. policy there, having seen firsthand that his government was lying, andrefused to fly any more missions. The Air Force response was to commit him to a psychiatrichospital, then to discharge him as psychologically unfit. He went to medical school, and thenvolunteered to be a doctor with the guerrillas in El Salvador.

There was much talk in the American press in the early eighties about the political cautiousness ofa new generation of college students concerned mostly with their own careers. But when, at theHarvard commencement of June 1983, Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes criticized Americanintervention in Latin America, and said, "Because we are your true friends, we will not permit youto conduct yourselves in Latin American affairs as the Soviet Union conducts itself in CentralEuropean and Central Asian affairs," he was interrupted twenty times by applause and received astanding ovation when finished.

Among my own students at Boston University, I did not find the pervasive selfishness andunconcern with others that the media kept reporting, in deadening repetition, about the students ofthe eighties. In the journals they kept, I found the following comments:

A male student: "Do you think anything good that has happened in the world had anything to dowith government? I work in Roxbury [a black neighborhood]. I know the government doesn't work.Not for the people of Roxbury, and not for the people anywhere. It works for people with money."

A graduate of a Catholic high school: "America to me is a society, a culture. America is my home;if someone were to rob thatculture from me, then perhaps there would be reason to resist. I will notdie, however, to defend the honor of thegovernment."

A young woman: "As a white middle class person I've never felt discriminated against at all. ButI'll say this: If anyone ever tried to make me sit in a different schoolroom, use a different bathroom,or anything like that, I would knock them right on their ass.. . . The people are the last ones thatneed their rights stated on paper, for if they're abused or injusticed by government or authority, theycan act on the injustice directly.. . . When you look at the ... statements of rights and laws, it's reallygovernment and authority and institutions and corporations that need laws and rights to insulatethem from the physicality, the directness of the people."

Over 60,000 Americans signed pledges to take action of some sort, including civil disobedience, ifReagan moved to invade Nicaragua. When the President instituted a blockade of the tiny country totry to force its government out of power, there were demonstrations around the country. In Bostonalone, 550 people were arrested protesting the blockade.

During Reagan's presidency, there were hundreds of actions throughout the nation against hispolicies in South Africa. He obviously did not want to see the white ruling minority of South Africadisplaced by the radical African National Congress, which represented the black majority. ChesterCrocker, Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, in his memoirs, called Reagan"insensitive" to the conditions under which blacks lived there. Public opinion was strong enough tocause Congress to legislate economic sanctions against the South African Government in 1986,overriding Reagan's veto.

Reagan's cuts in social services were felt on the local level as vital needs could not he taken care of,and there were angry reactions. In the spring and summer of 1981, residents of East Boston took tothe streets; for fifty-five nights they blocked major thoroughfares and the Sumner Tunnel duringrush hour, in order to protest cutbacks in funds for fire, police, and teachers. The policesuperintendent, John Doyle, said: "Maybe these people are starting to take lessons from the protestsof the sixties and seventies." The BostonGlobe reported: "The demonstrators in East Boston weremostly middle-aged, middle- or working-class people who said they had never protested anythingbefore."

The Reagan administration took away federal funds for the arts, suggesting that the performing artsseek help from private donors. In New York, two historic Broadway theaters were razed to makeway for a luxury fifty-story hotel, after two hundred theater people demonstrated, picketing,reading plays and singing songs, refusing to disperse when ordered by police. Some of thenation's best-known theater personalities were arrested, including producer Joseph Papp, actressesTammy Grimes, Estelle Parsons, and Celeste Holm, actors Richard Gere and Michael Moriarty.

The budget cuts spurred strikes across the country, often by groups unaccustomed to striking. In thefall of 1982, United Press International reported:

Angered by layoffs, salary cuts and uncertainty about job security, more schoolteachers throughoutthe country have decided to go on strike. Teachers' strikes last week in seven states, from RhodeIsland to Washington, have idled more than 300,000 students.

Surveying a series of news events in the first week of January 1983, David Nyhan of the BostonGlobe wrote: "There is something brewing in the land that bodes ill for those in Washington whoignore it. People have moved from the frightened state to the angry stage and are acting out theirfrustrations in ways that will test the fabric of civil order." He gave some examples:

In Little Washington, Pennsylvania, in early 1983, when a 50-year-old computer science teacherwho led a teachers' strike was sent to jail, 2000 people demonstrated outside the jailhouse in hissupport, and the PittsburghPost-Gazette called it "the largest crowd in Washington County sincethe 1794 Whiskey Rebellion."

When unemployed or bankrupt home owners in the Pittsburgh area could no longer make mortgagepayments, and foreclosure sales were scheduled, 60 pickets jammed the courthouse to protest theauction, and Allegheny sheriff Eugene Coon halted the proceedings.

The foreclosure of a 320-acre wheat farm in Springfield, Colorado, was interrupted by 200 angryfarmers, who had to be dispersed by tear gas and Mace.

When Reagan arrived in Pittsburgh in April 1983 to make a speech, 3000 people, many of themunemployed steelworkers, demonstrated against him, standing in the rain outside his hotel.Demonstrations by the unemployed were taking place in Detroit, Flint, Chicago, Cleveland, LosAngeles, Washington—over twenty cities in all.

Just around that time, Miami blacks rioted against police brutality; they were reacting against theirgeneral deprivation as well. The unemployment rate among young African-Americans had risenabove 50 percent, and the Reagan administration's only response to poverty was to build more jails.Understanding that blacks would not vote for him, Reagan tried, unsuccessfully, to get Congress toeliminate a crucial section of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which had been very effective insafeguarding the right of blacks to vote in Southern states.

Reagan's policies clearly joined the two issues of disarmament and social welfare. It was gunsversus children, and this was expressed dramatically by the head of the Children's Defense Fund,Marian Wright Edelman, in a commencement speech at the Milton Academy in Massachusetts inthe summer of 1983:

You are graduating into a nation and world teetering on the brink of moral and economicbankruptcy. Since 1980, our President and Congress have been turning our national plowshares intoswords and been bringing good news to the rich at the expense of the poor. .. . Children are themajor victims. Our misguided national and world choices are literally killing children daily.... Yetgovernments throughout the world, led by our own, spend over $600 billion a year on arms, whilean estimated 1 billion of our world's people live in poverty and 600 million are under- orunemployed. Where is the human commitment and political will to find the relative pittance ofmoney needed to protect children?

Her words seemed to represent a growing mood that worried the Reagan administration. Itwithdrew some of its proposed cutbacks, and Congress eliminated others. When, in its second year,the administration proposed $9 billion in cuts in support for children and poor families, Congressaccepted only $1 billion. The Washington correspondent of theNew York Time reported:"Political concerns about the fairness of Mr. Reagan's programs have forced the Administration tocurtail its efforts to make further cutbacks in programs for the poor."

The repeated elections of Republican candidates, Reagan in 1980 and 1984, George Bush in 1988,were treated by the press with words like "landslide" and "overwhelming victory." They wereignoring four facts: that roughly half the population, though eligible to vote, did not; that those whodid vote were limited severely in their choices to the two parties that monopolized the money andthe media; that as a result many of their votes were cast without enthusiasm; and that there waslittle relationship between voting for a candidate and voting for specific policies.

In 1980 Reagan received 51.6 percent of the popular vote, while Jimmy Carter received 41.7percent and John Anderson (a liberal Republican running on a third-party ticket) received 6.7percent. Only 54 percent of the voting-age population voted, so that—of the total eligible to vote—27 percent voted for Reagan.

A survey by theNew York Time found that only 11 percent of those who voted for Reagan did sobecause "he's a real conservative." Three times as many said they voted for him because "it is timefor a change."

For a second term, running against former Vice-President Walter Mondale, Reagan won 59 percentof the popular vote, but with half the electorate not voting, he had 29 percent of the votingpopulation.

In the 1988 election, with Vice-President George Bush running against Democrat Michael Dukakis,Bush's 54 percent victory added up to 27 percent of the eligible voters.

Because our peculiar voting arrangements allow a small margin of popular votes to become a hugemajority of electoral votes, the media can talk about "overwhelming victory," thus deceiving theirreaders and disheartening those who don't look closely at the statistics. Could one say from thesefigures that "the American people" wanted Reagan, or Bush, as President? One could certainly saythat more voters preferred the Republican candidates to their opponents. But even more seemed towant neither candidate. Nevertheless, on the basis of these slim electoral pluralities, Reagan andBush would claim that "the people" had spoken.

Indeed, when the people did speak about issues, in surveys of public opinion, they expressed beliefsto which neither the Republican nor Democratic parties paid attention.

For instance, both parties, through the eighties and early nineties, kept strict limits on socialprograms for the poor, on the grounds that this would require more taxes, and "the people" did notwant higher taxes.

This was certainly true as a general proposition, that Americans wanted to pay as little in taxes aspossible. But when they were asked if they would be willing to pay higher taxes for specific purposes like health and education, they said yes, they would. For instance, a 1990 poll of Bostonarea voters showed that 54 percent of them would pay more taxes if that would go toward cleaningup the environment.

And when higher taxes were presented in class terms, rather than as a general proposal, peoplewere quite clear. AWall Street Journal/NBC News poll in December 1990 showed that 84 percentof the respondents favored a surtax on millionaires (this provision was dropped around that timefrom a Democratic-Republican budget compromise). Even though 51 percent of the respondentswere in favor of raising the capital gains tax, neither major party favored that.

A Harris/Harvard School of Public Health poll of 1989 showed that most Americans (61 percent)favored a Canadian-type health system, in which the government was the single payer to doctorsand hospitals, bypassing the insurance companies, and offering universal medical coverage toeveryone. Neither the Democratic nor the Republican party adopted that as its program, althoughboth insisted they wanted to "reform" the health system.

A survey by the Gordon Black Corporation for the National Press Club in 1992 found that 59percent of all voters wanted a 50 percent cut in defense spending in five years. Neither of the majorparties was willing to make major cuts in the military budget.

How the public felt about government aid to the poor seemed to depend on how the question wasput. Both parties, and the media, talked incessantly about the "welfare" system, that it was notworking, and the word "welfare" became a signal for opposition. When people were asked (aNewYork Times/CBS News poll of 1992) if more money should he allocated to welfare, 23 percent saidno. But when the same people were asked, should the government help the poor, 64 percent saidyes.

This was a recurring theme. When, at the height of the Reagan presidency, in 1987, people wereasked if the government should guarantee food and shelter to needy people, 62 percent answeredyes.

Clearly, there was something amiss with a political system, supposed to be democratic, in whichthe desires of the voters were repeatedly ignored. They could be ignored with impunity so long asthe political system was dominated by two parties, both tied to corporate wealth. An electorateforced to choose between Carter and Reagan, or Reagan and Mondale, or Bush and Dukakis couldonly despair (or decide not to vote) because neither candidate was capable of dealing with afundamental economic illness whose roots were deeper than any single presidency.

That illness came from a fact which was almost never talked about: that the United States was aclass society, in which I percent of the population owned 33 percent of the wealth, with anunderclass of 30 to 40 million people living in poverty. The social programs of the sixties-Medicare and Medicaid, food stamps, etc.-did not do much more than maintain the historicAmerican maldistribution of resources.

While the Democrats would give more help to the poor than the Republicans, they were not capable(indeed, not really desirous) of seriously tampering with an economic system in which corporateprofit comes before human need.

There was no important national movement for radical change, no social democratic (or democraticsocialist) party such as existed in countries in Western Europe, Canada, and New Zealand. Butthere were a thousand signs of alienation, voices of protest, local actions in every part of thecountry to call attention to deep-felt grievances, to demand that some injustice be remedied.

For instance, the Citizens' Clearinghouse for Hazardous Wastes in Washington, D.C., which hadbeen formed early in the Reagan administration by housewife and activist Lois Gibbs, reported thatit was giving help to 8000 local groups around the country. One of these groups, in Oregon,brought a series of successful lawsuits to force the Environmental Protection Agency to dosomething about unsafe drinking water in the Bull Run reservoir near Portland.

In Seabrook, New Hampshire, there were years of persistent protest against a nuclear power plantwhich residents considered a danger to themselves and their families. Between 1977 and 1989, over3500 people were arrested in these protests. Ultimately, the plant, plagued by financial problemsand opposition, had to shut down.

Fear of nuclear accidents was intensified by disastrous events at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvaniain 1979 and by an especially frightening calamity in Chernobyl in the Soviet Union in 1986. All ofthis was having an effect on the once-booming nuclear industry. By 1994, the Tennessee ValleyAuthority had stopped the construction of three nuclear plants, which theNew York Time called"the symbolic death notice for the current generation of reactors in the United States."

In Minneapolis, Minnesota, thousands of people demonstrated year after year against theHoneywell Corporation's military contracts, and between 1982 and 1988 over 1800 people werearrested.

Furthermore, when those who engaged in such civil disobedience were brought into court, theyoften found sympathetic support from juries, winning acquittals from ordinary citizens who seemedto understand that even if they had technically broken the law, they had done so in a good cause.

In 1984, a group of Vermont citizens (the "Winooski Forty-four") refused to leave the hallwayoutside a U.S. Senator's office, protesting his votes to give arms to the Nicaraguan contras. Theywere arrested, but at their trial they were treated sympathetically by the judge and acquitted by thejury.

At another trial shortly after, a number of people (including activist Abbie Hoffman and AmyCarter, daughter of former President Jimmy Carter) were charged with blocking CIA recruiters atthe University of Massachusetts. They called to the witness stand ex-CIA agents who told the jurythat the CIA had engaged in illegal and murderous activities all around the world. The juryacquitted them.

One juror, a woman hospital worker, said later: "I was not familiar with the CIA's activities.... Iwas shocked.... I was kind of proud of the students." Another juror said: "It was very educational."The county district attorney, prosecuting the case, concluded: "If there is a message, it was that thisjury was composed of middle America.. .. Middle America doesn't want the CIA doing what theyare doing."

In the South, while there was no great movement comparable to the civil rights movement of theSixties, there were hundreds of local groups organizing poor people, white and black. In NorthCarolina, Linda Stout, the daughter of a mill worker who had died of industrial poisons,coordinated a multiracial network of 500 textile workers, farmers, maids—most of them low-incomewomen of color—in the Piedmont Peace Project.

The historic Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, which had nurtured so many black and whiteactivists throughout the South, was now joined by other folk schools and popular education centers.

Anne Braden, a veteran of racial and labor struggles in the South, was still organizing, leading theSouthern Organizing Committee for Economic and Social Justice. The group gave help in localactions: to 300 African-Americans in Tift County, Georgia, who were protesting the existence of achemical plant which was making them sick; to Native Americans in Cherokee County, NorthCarolina, who were organizing to stop a polluted landfill.

Back in the sixties, Chicane farm workers, people of Mexican descent who came to work and livemostly in California and the Southwestern states, rebelled against their feudal working conditions.They went out on strike and organized a national boycott of grapes, under the leadership of CesarChavez. Soon farmworkers were organizing in other parts of the country.

In the seventies and eighties, their struggles against poverty and discrimination continued. TheReagan years hit them hard, as it did poor people all over the country. By 1984, 42 percent of allLatino children and one-fourth of the families lived below the poverty line.

Copper miners in Arizona, mostly Mexican, went on strike against the Phelps-Dodge companyafter it cut wages, benefits, and safety measures in 1983. They were attacked by NationalGuardsmen and state troopers, by tear gas and helicopters, but held out for three years until acombination of governmental and corporate power finally defeated them.

There were victories too. In 1985, 1700 cannery workers, most of them Mexican women, went onstrike in Watsonville, California, and won a union contract with medical benefits. In 1990 workerswho had been laid off from the Levi Strauss company in San Antonio because the company wasmoving to Costa Rica called a boycott, organized a hunger strike, and won concessions. In LosAngeles, Latino janitors went on strike in 1990 and despite police attacks, won recognition of theirunion, a pay raise, and sick benefits.

Latino and Latina activists (not necessarily Chicano, which refers to those of Mexican ancestry),through the eighties and early nineties, campaigned for better labor conditions, for representation inlocal government, for tenants' rights, for bilingual education in the schools. Kept out of the media,they organized a bilingual radio movement, and by 1991 had fourteen Latino stations in thecountry, twelve of them bilingual.

In New Mexico, Latinos fought for land and water rights against real estate developers who tried tothrow them off land they had lived on for decades. In 1988 there was a confrontation, and thepeople organized an armed occupation, built bunkers for protection against attack, and won supportfrom other communities in the Southwest; finally, a court ruled in their favor.

Abnormal rates of cancer for farmworkers in California aroused the Chicano community. CesarChavez of the United Farm Workers fasted for thirty-five days in 1988 to call attention to theseconditions. There were now United Farm Workers unions in Texas, Arizona, and other states.

The importation of Mexican workers for low wages, under terrible conditions, spread from theSouthwest to other parts of the country. By 1991, 80,000 Latinos lived in North Carolina, 30,000 innorth Georgia. The Farm Labor Organizing Committee, which had won a difficult strike in theOhio tomato fields in 1979, the largest agricultural strike ever in the Midwest, brought thousands offarmworkers together in several Midwest states.

As the Latino population of the country kept growing, it soon matched the 12 percent of thepopulation that was African-American and began to have a distinct effect on American culture.Much of its music, art, and drama was much more consciously political and satirical thanmainstream culture.

The Border Arts workshop was formed in 1984 by artists and writers in San Diego and Tijuana, andits work dealt powerfully with issues of racism and injustice. In Northern California, TeatroCampesino and Teatro de la Esperanza performed for working people all over the country, turningschoolhouses, churches, and fields into theaters.

Latinos were especially conscious of the imperial role the United States had played in Mexico andthe Caribbean, and many of them became militant critics of U.S. policy toward Nicaragua, ElSalvador, and Cuba. In 1970 a great march in Los Angeles against the Vietnam war, which hadbeen attacked by police, left three Chicanos dead.

When the Bush administration was preparing for war against Iraq in the summer of 1990, thousandsof people in Los Angeles marched along the same route they had taken twenty years before, whenthey were protesting the Vietnam war. As Elizabeth Martinez wrote (500 Years of Chicano Historyin Pictures):

Before and during President Bush's war in the Persian Gulf many people- including Raza [literally"race"; a term adopted by Latino activists]-had doubts about it or were opposed. We had learnedsome lessons about wars started in the name of democracy that turned out to benefit only the richand powerful. Raza mobilized to protest this war of mass murder, even faster than the U.S. war inVietnam, though we could not stop it.

In 1992, a fund-raising group which came out of the Vietnam war called Resist made donations to168 organizations around the country- community groups, peace groups, Native American groups,prisoners' rights organizations, health and environmental groups.

A new generation of lawyers, schooled in the sixties, constituted a small but socially consciousminority within the legal profession. They were in court defending the poor and the helpless, orbringing suit against powerful corporations. One law firm used its talent and energy to defendwhistleblowers—men and women who were fired because they "blew the whistle" on corporatecorruption that victimized the public.

The women's movement, which had managed to raise the consciousness of the whole nation on theissue of sexual equality, faced a powerful backlash in the eighties. The Supreme Court's defense ofabortion rights in its 1973Roe v.Wade decision aroused a pro-life movement that had strongsupporters in Washington. Congress passed, and the Supreme Court later let stand, a law thateliminated federal medical benefits to help poor women pay for abortions. But the NationalOrganization of Women and other groups remained strong; in 1989, a Washington rally for whathad come to be known as the right to choose drew over 300,000 people. When, in 1994 and 1995,abortion clinics were attacked and several supporters murdered, the conflict became grimly intense.

The rights of gay and lesbian Americans had come vividly to the forefront in the Seventies withradical changes in ideas about sexuality and freedom. The gay movement then became a visiblepresence in the nation, with parades, demonstrations, campaigns for the elimination of state statutesdiscriminating against homosexuals. One result was a growing literature about the hidden history ofgay life in the United States and in Europe.

In 1994, there was a Stonewall 25 march in Manhattan, which commemorated an eventhomosexuals regarded as a turning point: twenty-five years earlier, gay men fought back vigorouslyagainst a police raid on the Stonewall bar in Greenwich Village. In the early nineties, gay andlesbian groups campaigned more openly, more determinedly, against discrimination, and for moreattention to the scourge of AIDS, which they claimed was being given only marginal attention bythe national government.

In Rochester, New York, a local campaign achieved an unprecedented decision barring militaryrecruiters from a school district because of the Defense Department discrimination against gaysoldiers.

The labor movement in the eighties and nineties was considerably weakened by the decline ofmanufacturing, by the flight of factories to other countries, by the hostility of the Reaganadministration and its appointees on the National Labor Relations Board. Yet organizing continued,especially among white collar workers and low-income people of color. The AFL-CIO put onhundreds of new organizers to work among Latinos, African-Americans, and Asian-Americans.

Rank-and-file workers in old, stagnant unions began to rebel. In 1991, the notoriously corruptleadership of the powerful Teamsters Union was voted out of office by a reform slate. The newleadership immediately became a force in Washington, and took the lead in working forindependent political coalitions outside the two major parties. But the labor movement as a whole,much diminished, was struggling for survival.

Against the overwhelming power of corporate wealth and governmental authority, the spirit ofresistance was kept alive in the early nineties, often by small-scale acts of courage and defiance. Onthe West Coast, a young activist named Keith McHenry and hundreds of others were arrested againand again for distributing free food to poor people without a license. They were part of a programcalled Food Not Bombs. More Food Not Bombs groups sprang up in communities around thecountry.

In 1992, a New York group interested in revising traditional ideas about American history receivedapproval from the New York City Council to put up thirty metal plaques high on lampposts aroundthe city. One of them, placed opposite the Morgan corporate headquarters, identified the famousbanker J.P. Morgan as a Civil War "draft dodger." In fact, Morgan had avoided the draft andprofited in business deals with the government during the war. Another plaque, placed near theStock Exchange, portrayed a suicide and carried the label "Advantage of an Unregulated FreeMarket."

The general disillusionment with government during the Vietnam years and the Watergatescandals, the exposure of anti-democratic actions by the FBI and the CIA, led to resignations fromgovernment and open criticism by former employees.

A number of former CIA officials left the agency, and wrote books critical of its activities. JohnStockwell, who had headed the CIA operation in Angola, resigned, wrote a hook exposing theCIA's activities, and lectured all over the country about his experiences. David MacMichael, ahistorian and former CIA specialist, testified at trials on behalf of people who had protestedgovernment policy in Central America.

FBI Agent Jack Ryan, a twenty-one-year veteran of the bureau, was fired when he refused toinvestigate peace groups. He was deprived of his pension and for some time had to live in a shelterfor homeless people.

Sometimes the war in Vietnam, which had ended in 1975, came back to public attention in theeighties and nineties through people who had been involved in the conflicts of that day. Some ofthem had since made dramatic turnabouts in their thinking. John Wall, who prosecuted Dr.Benjamin Spock and four others in Boston for "conspiring" to obstruct the draft, showed up at adinner honoring the defendants in 1994, saying the trial had changed his ideas.

Even more striking was the statement by Charles Hutto, a U.S. soldier who had participated in theatrocity known as the My Lai massacre, in which a company of American soldiers shot to deathwomen and children by the hundreds in a tiny Vietnamese village. Interviewed in the eighties,Hutto told a reporter:

I was nineteen years old, and I'd always been told to do what the grown-ups told me to do. , . . Butnow I'll tell my sons, if the government calls, to go, to serve their country, but to use their ownjudgment at times ... to forget about authority ... to use their own conscience. I wish somebody hadtold me that before I went to Vietnam. I didn't know. Now I don't think there should be even a thingcalled war ... cause it messes up a person's mind.

It was this legacy of the Vietnam war-the feeling among a great majority of Americans that it was aterrible tragedy, a war that should not have been fought-that plagued the Reagan and Bushadministrations, which still hoped to extend American power around the world.

In 1985, when George Bush was Vice-President, former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger hadwarned the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: "Vietnam brought a sea change in domesticattitudes ... a breakdown in the political consensus behind foreign policy. . .."

When Bush became President, he was determined to overcome what came to be called the Vietnamsyndrome-the resistance of the American people to a war desired by the Establishment. And so, helaunched the air war against Iraq in mid-January 1991 with overwhelming force, so the war couldbe over quickly, before there was time for a national antiwar movement to develop.

The signs of a possible movement were there in the months of the prewar buildup. On Halloween,600 students marched through downtown Missoula, Montana, shouting "Hell no, we won't go!" InShreveport, Louisiana, despite theShreveport Journal's front-page headline: "Poll Favors MilitaryAction," the story was that 42 percent of the respondents thought the U.S. should "initiate force"and 41 percent said "wait and see."

The November 11, 1990, Veterans Parade in Boston was joined by a group called Veterans forPeace, carrying signs: "No More Vietnams. Bring 'Em Home Now" and "Oil and Blood Do NotMix, Wage Peace." The BostonGlobe reported that "the protesters were greeted with respectfulapplause and, at some places, strong demonstrations of support by onlookers." One of thoseonlookers, a woman named Mary Belle Dressier, said: "Personally, parades that honor the militaryare somewhat troublesome to me because the military is about war, and war is troublesome to me."

Most Vietnam veterans were supporting military action, but there was a strong dissident minority.In one survey that showed 53 percent of the veterans polled saying they would gladly serve in theGulf War, 37 percent said they would not.

Perhaps the most famous Vietnam veteran, Ron Kovic, author ofBorn on the Fourth of July, madea thirty-second television speech as Bush moved toward war. In the appeal, broadcast on 200television stations in 120 cities across the country, he asked all citizens to "stand up and speak out"against war. "How many more Americans coming home in wheelchairs—like me—will it take beforewe learn?"

That November of 1990, several months into the Kuwait crisis, college students in St. Paul,Minnesota, demonstrated against war. The local press reported:

It was a full-blown antiwar demonstration with mothers pushing kids in strollers, college professorsand grade school teachers carrying signs, peace activists bedecked in peace symbols, and hundredsof students from a dozen schools singing, beating drums and chanting, "Hey, hey, ho ho, we won'tfight for Amoco."

On the eve of war, 6000 people marched through Ann Arbor, Michigan, to ask for peace. On thenight the war began, 5000 people gathered in San Francisco to denounce the war and formed ahuman chain around the Federal Building. Police broke the chain by swinging their clubs at thehands of the protesters. But the San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed a resolution declaringthe city and county a sanctuary for those who for "moral, ethical or religious reasons cannotparticipate in war."

The night before Bush gave the order to launch the bombing, a seven-year-old girl in Lexington,Massachusetts, told her mother she wanted to write a letter to the President. Her mother suggestedit was late and she should write the next day. "No, tonight," the girl said. She was still learning towrite, so she dictated a letter:

Dear President Bush. I don't like the way you are behaving. If you would make up your mind therewon't be a war we won't have to have peace vigils. If you were in a war you wouldn't want to gethurt. What I'm saying is: I don't want any fighting to happen. Sincerely yours, Serena Kabat.

Nevertheless, even with little time to organize, and with the war over very fast, there was anopposition-a minority for sure, but a determined one, and with the potential to grow. Compared tothe first months of the military escalation in Vietnam, the movement against the Gulf Warexpanded with extraordinary speed and vigor.

That first week of the war, while it was clear most Americans were supporting Bush's action, tensof thousands of people took to the streets in protest, in towns and cities all over the country. InAthens, Ohio, over 100 people were arrested, as they clashed with a prowar group. In Portland,Maine, 500 marched wearing white arm bands or carrying white paper crosses with one word,"Why?," written in red.

At the University of Georgia, 70 students opposed to the war held an all-night vigil, and in theGeorgia Legislature, Representative Cynthia McKinnon made a speech attacking the bombing ofIraq, leading many of the other legislators to walk off the floor. She held her ground, and it seemedthat there had been at least some change In thinking since Representative Julian Bond was expelledfrom the very same legislature for criticizing the war in Vietnam during the 1960s. At a junior highschool in Newton, Massachusetts, 350 students marched to city hall to present a petition to themayor declaring their opposition to the war in the Gulf. Clearly, many were trying to reconcile theirfeelings about war with their sympathy for soldiers sent to the Middle East. A student leader, CarlyBaker, said: "We don't think bloodshed is the right way. We are supporting the troops and are proudof them, but we don't want war."

In Ada, Oklahoma, while East Central Oklahoma State University was "adopting" two NationalGuard units, two young women sat quietly on top of the concrete entrance gate with signs that read"Teach Peace ... Not War." One of them, Patricia Biggs, said: "I don't think we should be overthere. I don't think it's about justice and liberty, I think it's about economics. The big oilcorporations have a lot to do with what is going on over there. . . . We are risking people's lives formoney."

Four days after the United States launched its air attack, 75,000 people (the estimate of the CapitolPolice) marched in Washington, rallying near the White House to denounce the war. In SouthernCalifornia, Ron Kovic addressed 6000 people who chanted "Peace Now!" In Fayetteville,Arkansas, a group supporting military policy was confronted by the Northwest Arkansas CitizensAgainst War, who marched carrying a flag-draped coffin and a banner that read "Bring ThemHome Alive."

Another disabled Vietnam veteran, a professor of history and political science at York College inPennsylvania named Philip Avillo, wrote in a local newspaper: "Yes, we need to support our menand women under arms. But let's support them by bringing them home; not by condoning thisbarbarous, violent policy." In Salt Lake City, hundreds of demonstrators, many with children,marched through the city's main streets chanting antiwar slogans.

In Vermont, which had just elected Socialist Bernie Sanders to Congress, over 2000 demonstratorsdisrupted a speech by the governor at the state house, and in Burlington, Vermont's largest city, 300protesters walked through the downtown area, asking shop owners to close their doors in solidarity.

On January 26, nine days after the beginning of the war, over 150,000 people marched through thestreets of Washington, D.C., and listened to speakers denounce the war, including the movie starsSusan Sarandon and Tim Robbins. A woman from Oakland, California, held up the foldedAmerican flag that was given to her when her husband was killed in Vietnam, saying, "I learned thehard way there is no glory in a folded flag."

Labor unions had supported the war in Vietnam for the most part, but after the bombing started inthe Gulf, eleven affiliates of the AFL-CIO, including some of its more powerful unions—like steel,auto, communications, chemical workers—spoke out against the war.

The black community was far less enthusiastic than the rest of the country about what the U.S. AirForce was doing to Iraq. An ABC News/Washington Post poll in early February, 1991, found thatsupport for the war was 84 percent among whites, but only 48 percent among African-Americans.

When the war had been going on for a month, with Iraq devastated by the incessant bombing, therewere feelers from Saddam Hussein that Iraq would withdraw from Kuwait if the United Stateswould stop its attacks. Bush rejected the idea, and a meeting of black leaders in New York sharplycriticized him, calling the war "an immoral and unspiritual diversion ... a blatant evasion of ourdomestic responsibilities."

In Selma, Alabama, which had been the scene of bloody police violence against civil rightsmarchers twenty-six years before, a meeting to observe the anniversary of that "bloody Sunday"demanded that "our troops be brought home alive to fight for justice at home."

The father of a twenty-one-year-old Marine in the Persian Gulf, Alex Molnar, wrote an angry openletter, published in theNew York Time, to President Bush:

Where were you, Mr. President, when Iraq was killing its own people with poison gas? Why, untilthe recent crisis, was it business as usual with Saddam Hussein, the man you now call a Hitler? Isthe American "way of life" that you say my son is risking his life for the continued "right" ofAmericans to consume 25 to 30 percent of the world's oil? ... I intend to support my son and hisfellow soldiers by doing everything I can to oppose any offensive American military action in thePersian Gulf.

Peg Mullen, of Brownsville, Texas, whose son had been killed by "friendly fire" in Vietnam,organized a busload of mothers to protest in Washington, in spite of a warning that her house wouldbe burned down if she persisted.

The actress Margot Kidder ("Lois Lane" in the Superman films), despite the risk to her career,spoke out eloquently against the war.

A basketball player for Seton Hall University in New Jersey refused to wear the American flag onhis uniform, and when he became the object of derision for this, he left the team and the university,and returned to his native Italy.

More tragically, a Vietnam veteran in Los Angeles set fire to himself and died, to protest the war.

In Amherst, Massachusetts, a young man carrying a cardboard peace sign knelt on the towncommon, poured two cans of flammable fluid on himself, struck two matches, and died in theflames. Two hours later, students from nearby universities gathered on the common for acandlelight vigil, and placed peace signs at the site of death. One of the signs read, "Stop this crazywar."

There was no time, as there had been during the Vietnam conflict, for a large antiwar movement todevelop in the military. But there were men and women who defied their commanders and refusedto participate in the war.

When the first contingents of U.S. troops were being sent to Saudi Arabia, in August of 1990,Corporal Jeff Patterson, a twenty-two-year-old Marine stationed in Hawaii, sat down on the runwayof the airfield and refused to board a plane bound for Saudi Arabia. He asked to be discharged fromthe Marine Corps:

I have come to believe that there are no justified wars.... I began to question exactly what I wasdoing in the Marine Corps about the time I began to read about history. I began to read up onAmerica's support for the murderous regimes of Guatemala, Iran under the Shah, and ElSalvador.... I object to the military use of force against any people, anywhere, any time.

Fourteen Marine Corps reservists at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, filed for conscientious objectorstatus, despite the prospect of a court-martial for desertion. A lance corporal in the Marines, ErikLarsen, issued a statement:

I declare myself a conscientious objector. Here is my sea bag full of personal gear. Here is my gasmask. I no longer need them. I am no longer a Marine. ... It, to me, is embarrassing to fight for away of life in which basic human needs, like a place to sleep, one hot meal a day and some medicalattention, cannot even be met in our nation's capital.

Corporal Yolanda Huet-Vaughn, a physician who was a captain in the Army Reserve MedicalCorps, a mother of three young children, and a member of the Physicians for Social Responsibility,was called to active duty in December 1990, a month before the start of the war. She replied: "I amrefusing orders to be an accomplice in what I consider an immoral, inhumane and unconstitutionalact, namely an offensive military mobilization in the Middle East." She was court-martialed,convicted of desertion, and sentenced to 2 1/2 years in prison.

Another soldier, Stephanie Atkinson of Murphysboro, Illinois, refused to report for active duty,saying she thought the U.S. military was in the Persian Gulf solely for economic reasons. She wasfirst placed under house arrest, then given a discharge under "other than honorable conditions."

An Army physician named Harlow Ballard, stationed at Fort Devens in Massachusetts, refused tofollow an order to go to Saudi Arabia. "I would rather go to jail than support this war," he said. "Idon't believe there is any such thing as a just war."

Over a thousand reservists declared themselves conscientious objectors. A twenty-three-year-oldMarine Corps reservist named Rob Calabro was one of them. "My father tells me that he's ashamedof me, he screams at me that he's embarrassed by me. But I believe that killing people is morallywrong. I believe I'm serving my country more by being true to my conscience than by living a lie."

An information network sprang up during the Gulf War to tell what was not being told in the majormedia. There were alternative newspapers in many cities. There were over a hundred communityradio stations, able to reach only a fraction of those tuned in to the major networks but the onlysources, during the Gulf War, of critical analyses of the war. An ingenious radio person in Boulder,Colorado, named David Barsamian recorded a speech by Noam Chomsky made at Harvard-adevastating critique of the war. He then sent the cassette out to his network of community stations,which were eager for a point of view different from the official one. Two young men in New Jerseythen transcribed the talk, put it in pamphlet form, in a shape easily photocopied, and placed thepamphlets in bookstores all over the country.

After "victorious" wars there is almost always a sobering effect, as the war fervor wears off, andcitizens assess the costs and wonder what was gained. War fever was at its height in February 1991.In that month, when people being polled were reminded of the huge costs of the war, only 17percent said the war was not worth it. Four months later, in June, the figure was 30 percent. In themonths that followed, Bush's support in the nation dropped steeply, as economic conditionsdeteriorated. (And in 1992, with the war spirit evaporated, Bush went down to defeat.)

After the disintegration of the Soviet bloc began in 1989, there had been talk in the United States of a "peacedividend," the opportunity to take billions of dollars from the military budget and use it for humanneeds. The war in the Gulf became a convenient excuse for the government determined to stop suchtalk. A member of the Bush administration said: "We owe Saddam a favor. He saved us from thepeace dividend" (New York Time, March 2, 1991).

But the idea of a peace dividend could not be stifled so long as Americans were in need. Shortlyafter the war, historian Marilyn Young warned:

The U.S. can destroy Iraq's highways, but not build its own; create the conditions for epidemic inIraq, but not offer health care to millions of Americans. It can excoriate Iraqi treatment of theKurdish minority, but not deal with domestic race relations; create homelessness abroad but notsolve it here; keep a half million troops drug free as part of a war, but refuse to fund the treatmentof millions of drug addicts at home. ... We shall lose the war after we have won it.

In 1992, the limits of military victory became apparent during the quincentennial celebrations ofColumbus's arrival in the Western Hemisphere. Five hundred years ago Columbus and his fellowconquerors had wiped out the native population of Hispaniola. This was followed during the nextfour centuries by the methodical destruction of Indian tribes by the United States government as itmarched across the continent. But now, there was a dramatic reaction.

The Indians—the Native Americans—had become a visible force since the sixties and seventies, andin 1992 were joined by other Americans to denounce the quincentennial celebrations. For the firsttime in all the years that the country had celebrated Columbus Day, there were nationwide protestsagainst honoring a man who had kidnapped, enslaved, mutilated, murdered the natives who greetedhis arrival with gifts and friendship.

Preparations for the quincentennial began on both sides of the controversy. Official commissions,nationally and in the states, were set up long before the year of the quincentennial.

This spurred action by Native Americans. In the summer of 1990 350 Indians, representatives fromall over the hemisphere, met in Quito, Ecuador, at the first intercontinental gathering of indigenouspeople in the Americas, to mobilize against the glorification of the Columbus conquest.

The following summer, in Davis, California, over a hundred Native Americans gathered for afollow-up meeting to the Quito conference. They declared October 12, 1992, International Day ofSolidarity with Indigenous People, and resolved to inform the king of Spain that the replicas ofColumbus's three ships, theNina,Pinta, andSanta Maria, "will not receive permission from theNative Nations to land in the western hemisphere unless he apologizes for the original incursion500 years ago. . .."

The movement grew. The largest ecumenical body in the United States, the National Council ofChurches, called on Christians to refrain from celebrating the Columbus quincentennial, saying,"What represented newness of freedom, hope and opportunity for some was the occasion foroppression, degradation and genocide for others."

The National Endowment for the Humanities funded a traveling exhibition called "FirstEncounter," which romanticized the Columbus conquest. When the exhibition opened at the FloridaMuseum of National History, Michelle Diamond, a freshman at the University of Florida, climbedaboard a replica of one of Columbus's ships with a sign reading "Exhibit Teaches Racism." Shesaid: "It's a human issue—not just a Red [Indian] issue." She was arrested and charged withtrespassing, but demonstrations continued for sixteen days against the exhibit.

A newspaper calledIndigenous Thought began publication in early 1991 to create a link among allthe counter-Columbus quincentenary activities. It carried articles by Native Americans aboutcurrent struggles over land stolen by treaty.

In Corpus Christi, Texas, Indians and Chicanos joined to protest the city's celebrations of thequincentennial. A woman named Angelina Mendez spoke for the Chicanos: "The Chicano nation,in solidarity with our Indian brothers and sisters to the north, come together with them on this dayto denounce the atrocity the U.S. government proposes in reenacting the arrival of the Spanish,more specifically the arrival of Cristobal Colon, to the shores of this land."

The Columbus controversy brought an extraordinary burst of educational and cultural activity. Aprofessor at the University of California at San Diego, Deborah Small, put together an exhibit ofover 200 paintings on wood panels called "1492." She juxtaposed words from Columbus's diarywith blown-up fragments from sixteenth-century engravings to dramatize the horrors thataccompanied Columbus's arrival in the hemisphere. A reviewer wrote that "it does remind us, in themost vivid way, of how the coming of Western-style civilization to the New World doesn't provideus with a sunny tale."

When President Bush attacked Iraq in 1991, claiming that he was acting to end the Iraqi occupationof Kuwait, a group of Native Americans in Oregon distributed a biting and ironic "open letter":

Dear President Bush. Please send your assistance in freeing our small nation from occupation. Thisforeign force occupied our lands to steal our rich resources. They used biological warfare anddeceit, killing thousands of elders, children and women in the process. As they overwhelmed ourland, they deposed our leaders and people of our own government, and in its place, they installedtheir own government systems that yet today control our daily lives in many ways. As in your ownwords, the occupation and overthrow of one small nation ... is one too many. Sincerely, AnAmerican Indian.

The publicationRethinking Schools, which represented socially conscious schoolteachers all overthe country, printed a 100-page book calledRethinking Columbus, featuring articles by NativeAmericans and others, a critical review of children's books on Columbus, a listing of resources forpeople wanting more information on Columbus, and more reading material on counter-quincentenary activities. In a few months, 200,000 copies of the book were sold.

A Portland, Oregon, teacher named Bill Bigelow, who helped put togetherRethinking Schools,took a year off from his regular job to tour the country in 1992, giving workshops to other teachers,so that they could begin to tell those truths about the Columbus experience that were omitted fromthe traditional books and class curricula.

One of Bigelow's own students wrote to the publisher Allyn and Bacon with a critique of theirhistory textThe American Spirit:

I'll just pick one topic to keep it simple. How about Columbus. No, you didn't lie, but saying,"Though they had a keen interest in the peoples of the Caribbean, Columbus and his crews werenever able to live peacefully among them," makes it seem as if Columbus did no wrong. The reasonfor not being able to live peacefully is that he and crew took slaves and killed thousands of Indiansfor not bringing enough gold.

Another student wrote: "It seemed to me as if the publishers had just printed up some 'glory story'that was supposed to make us feel more patriotic about our country. . .. They want us to look at ourcountry as great and powerful and forever right. . . ."

A student named Rebecca wrote: "Of course, the writers of the books probably think it's harmlessenough-what does it matter who discovered America, really.... But the thought that I have been liedto all my life about this, and who knows what else, really makes me angry."

A group was formed on the West Coast called Italian-Americans Against Christopher Columbus,saying: "When Italian-Americans identify with Native people ... we are bringing ourselves, each ofus, closer to possible change in the world."

In Los Angeles, a high school student named Blake Lindsey went before the city council to argueagainst celebrating the quincentennial. She spoke to the council about the genocide of the Arawaks,but she got no official response. However, when she told her story on a talk show, a woman phonedin who said she was from Haiti: "The girl is right. We have no Indians left. At our last uprising inHaiti people destroyed the statue of Columbus. Let's have statues for the aborigines."

There were counter-Columbus activities all over the country, unmentioned in the press or ontelevision. In Minnesota alone, a listing of such activities for 1992 reported dozens of workshops,meetings, films, art shows. At Lincoln Center in New York City, on October 12, there was aperformance of Leonard Lehrmann'sNew World: An Opera About What Columbus Did to theIndians. In Baltimore, there was a multimedia show about Columbus. In Boston and then in anational tour, the Underground Railway Theater performedThe Christopher Columbus Follies topacked audiences.

The protests, the dozens of new books that were appearing about Indian history, the discussionstaking place all over the country, were bringing about an extraordinary transformation in theeducational world. For generations, exactly the same story had been told all Americanschoolchildren about Columbus, a romantic, admiring story. Now, thousands of teachers around thecountry were beginning to tell that story differently.

This aroused anger among defenders of the old history, who derided what they called a movementfor "political correctness" and "multicultural-ism." They resented the critical treatment of Westernexpansion and imperialism, which they considered an attack on Western civilization. RonaldReagan's Secretary of Education, William Bennett, had called Western civilization "our commonculture ... its highest ideas and aspirations."

A much-publicized book by a philosopher named Allan Bloom,The Closing of the AmericanMind, expressed horror at what the social movements of the sixties had done to change theeducational atmosphere of American universities. To him Western civilization was the high pointof human progress, and the United States its best representative: "America tells one story: theunbroken, ineluctable progress of freedom and equality. From its first settlers and its politicalfoundings on, there has been no dispute that freedom and equality are the essence of justice for us."

In the seventies and eighties, disabled people organized and created a movement powerful enoughto bring about the passage by Congress of the Americans with Disabilities Act. It was anunprecedented piece of legislation, setting standards which would enable persons with disabilitiesto contest discrimination against them, and ensuring they would have access to places where theirdisabilities would otherwise bar them.

In the civil rights movement, black people disputed that claim of America's standing for "freedomand equality." The women's movement had disputed that claim, too. And now, in 1992, NativeAmericans were pointing to the crimes of Western civilization against their ancestors. They wererecalling the communitarian spirit of the Indians Columbus met and conquered, trying to tell thehistory of those millions of people who were here before Columbus, giving the lie to what aHarvard historian (Perry Miller) had called "the movement of European culture into the vacantwilderness of America."

As the United States entered the nineties, the political system, whether Democrats or Republicanswere in power, remained in the control of those who had great wealth. The main instruments ofinformation were also dominated by corporate wealth. The country was divided, though nomainstream political leader would speak of it, into classes of extreme wealth and extreme poverty,separated by an insecure and jeopardized middle class.

Yet, there was, unquestionably, though largely unreported, what a worried mainstream journalisthad called "a permanent adversarial culture" which refused to surrender the possibility of a moreequal, more humane society. If there was hope for the future of America, it lay in the promise ofthat refusal.