in ultimate values and openness in regard to historical fact.
There is another kind of dishonesty that often goes unnoticed. That is when historians fail to
acknowledge their own values and pretend to "objectivity," deceiving themselves and their readers.
Everyone is biased, whether they know it or not, in possessing fundamental goals,
purposes, and ends. If we understand that, we can be properly skeptical of al historians
(and journalists and anyone who reports on the world) and check to see if their biases cause
them to emphasize certain things in history and omit or give slight consideration to others.
Perhaps the closest we can get to objectivity is a free and honest marketplace of
subjectivities, in which we can examine both orthodox accounts of the past and unorthodox
ones, commonly known facts and hitherto ignored facts. But we need to try to discover
(which is not easy) •what items are missing from that marketplace and insist that they be
available for scrutiny. We can then decide for ourselves, based on our own values, which
accounts are most important and most useful.
42
Anyone reading history should understand from the start that there is no such thing as impartial history. Al written history is partial in two senses. It is partial in that it is only a tiny part of what real y happened. That is a limitation that can never be overcome. And it is partial in that it inevitably takes sides, by what it includes or omits, what it emphasizes or
deemphasizes. It may do this openly or deceptively, consciously or subconsciously.
The chief problem in historical honesty is not outright lying. It is omission or de-emphasis of
important data. The definition of important, of course, depends on one's values.
An example is the Ludlow Massacre.
I was stil in col ege studying history when I heard a song by folk-singer Woody Guthrie
cal ed "The Ludlow Massacre," a dark, intense bal ad, accompanied by slow, haunting chords on his guitar. It told of women and children burned to death in a strike of miners against
Rockefel er-owned coal mines in southern Colorado in 1914.
My curiosity was aroused. In none of my classes in American history, in none of the
textbooks I had read, was there any mention of the Ludlow Massacre or of the Colorado coal
strike. I decided to study the history of the labor movement on my own.
This led me to a book, American Labor Struggles, written not by a historian but an English teacher named Samuel Yel en. It contained exciting accounts of some ten labor conflicts in
American history, most of which were unmentioned in my courses and my textbooks. One of
the chapters was on the Colorado coal strike of 1913-1914.3
I was fascinated by the sheer drama of that event. It began with the shooting of a young
labor organizer on the streets of Trinidad, Colorado, in the center of the mining district on a
crowded Saturday night, by two detectives in the pay of Rockefel er's Colorado Fuel & Iron
Corporation. The miners, mostly immigrants, speaking a dozen different languages, were
living in a kind of serfdom in the mining towns where Rockefel er col ected their rent, sold
them their necessities, hired the police, and watched them careful y for any sign of
unionization.
The kil ing of organizer Gerry Lippiatt sent a wave of anger through the mine towns. At a
mass meeting in Trinidad, miners listened to a rousing speech by an eighty-year-old woman
named Mary Jones—"Mother Jones"—an organizer for the United Mine Workers: "What
would the coal in these mines and in these hil s be worth unless you put your strength and
muscle in to bring them … . You have col ected more wealth, created more wealth than they
in a thousand years of the Roman Republic, and yet you have not any."4
The miners voted to strike. Evicted from their huts by the coal companies, they packed their
belongings onto carts and onto their backs and walked through a mountain blizzard to tent
colonies set up by the United Mine Workers. It was September 1913. There they lived for
the next seven months, enduring hunger and sickness, picketing the mines to prevent
strikebreakers from entering, and defending themselves against armed assaults. The
Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency, hired by the Rockefel ers to break the morale of the
strikers, used rifles, shotguns, and a machine gun mounted on an armored car, which roved
the countryside and fired into the tents where the miners lived.
They would not give up the strike, however, and the National Guard was cal ed in by the
governor. A letter from the vice president of Colorado Fuel & Iron to John D. Rockefel er, Jr., in New York explained,
43
You wil be interested to know that we have been able to secure the
cooperation of al the bankers of the city, who have had three or four
interviews with our little cowboy governor, agreeing to back the State and
lend it al funds necessary to maintain the militia and afford ample protection
so our miners could return to work … . Another mighty power has been
rounded up on behalf of the operators by the getting together of fourteen of
the editors of the most important newspapers in the state.5
The National Guard was innocently welcomed to town by miners and their families, waving
American flags, thinking that men in the uniform of the United States would protect them.
But the guard went to work for the operators. They beat miners, jailed them, and escorted
strikebreakers into the mines.6
The strikers responded. One strikebreaker was murdered, another brutal y beaten, four
mine guards kil ed while escorting a scab. And Baldwin-Felts detective George Belcher, the
kil er of Lippiatt, who had been freed by a coroner's jury composed of Trinidad businessmen
("justifiable homicide"), was kil ed with a single rifle shot by an unseen gunman as he left a Trinidad drugstore and stopped to light a cigar.
The miners held out through the hard winter, and the mine owners decided on more drastic
action. In the spring, two companies of National Guardsmen stationed themselves in the
hil s above the largest tent colony, housing a thousand men, women, and children, near a
tiny depot cal ed Ludlow. On the morning of April 20, 1914, they began firing machine guns
into the tents. The men crawled away to draw fire and shoot back, while the women and
children crouched in pits dug into the tent floors. At dusk, the soldiers came down from the
hil s with torches, and set fire to the tents. The countryside was ablaze. The occupants fled.
The next morning, a telephone linesman, going through the charred ruins of the Ludlow
colony, lifted an iron cot that covered a pit dug in the floor of one tent, and found the
mangled, burned bodies of two women and eleven children. This became known as the
Ludlow Massacre.
As I read about this, I wondered why this extraordinary event, so ful of drama, so peopled
by remarkable personalities, was never mentioned in the history books. Why was this strike,
which cast a dark shadow on the Rockefel er interests and on corporate America general y,
considered less important than the building by John D. Rockefel er of the Standard Oil
Company, which was looked on as an important and positive event in the development of
American industry?
I knew that there was no secret meeting of industrialists and historians to agree to
emphasize the admirable achievements of the great corporation
s and ignore the bloody
costs of industrialization in America. But I concluded that a certain unspoken understanding
lay beneath the writing of textbooks and the teaching of history: that it would be considered
bold, radical, perhaps even "communist" to emphasize class struggle in the United States, a country where the dominant ideology emphasized the oneness of the nation "We the People,
in order to … etc., etc." and the glories of the American system.
Not long ago, a news commentator on a smal radio station in Madison, Wisconsin, brought
to my attention a textbook used in high schools al over the nation, published in 1986, titled
Legacy of Freedom, written by two high-school teachers and one university professor of
history and published by a division of Doubleday and Company, one of the giant publishers
in the United States. In a foreword "To the Student" we find,
44
Legacy of Freedom wil aid you in understanding the economic growth and
development of our country. The book presents the developments and
benefits of our country's free enterprise economic system. You wil read about
the various ways that American business, industry, and agriculture have used
scientific and technological advances to further the American free market
system. This system al ows businesses to generate profits while providing
consumers with a variety of quality products from which to choose in the
marketplace, thus enabling our people to enjoy a high standard of living.7
In this overview one gets the impression of a wonderful, peaceful development, which is the
result of "our country's free enterprise economic system." Where is the long, complex
history of labor conflict? Where is the human cost of this industrial development, in the
thousands of deaths each year in industrial accidents, the hundreds of thousands of injuries,
the short lives of the workers (textile mil girls in New England dying in their twenties, after
starting work at twelve and thirteen)?
The Colorado coal strike does not fit neatly into the pleasant picture created by most high-
school textbooks of the development of the American economy. Perhaps a detailed account
of that event would raise questions in the minds of young people as it raised in mine,
questions that would be threatening to the dominant powers in this country, that would
clash with the dominant orthodoxy. The questioners—whether teachers or principals, or
school boards—might get into trouble.
For one thing, would the event not undermine faith in the neutrality of government, the
cherished belief (which I possessed through my childhood) that whatever conflicts there
were in American society, it was the role of government to mediate them as a neutral
referee, trying its best to dispense, in the words of the Pledge of Al egiance, "liberty and
justice for al "? Would the Colorado strike not suggest that governors, that perhaps al
political leaders, were subject to the power of wealth, and would do the bidding of
corporations rather than protect the lives of poor, powerless workers?
A close look at the Colorado coal strike would reveal that not only the state government of
Colorado, but the national government in Washington—under the presidency of a presumed
liberal, Woodrow Wilson—was on the side of the corporations. While miners were being
beaten, jailed, and kil ed by Rockefel er's detectives or by his National Guard, the federal
government did nothing to protect the constitutional rights of its people. (There is a federal
statute—Title 10, Section 333—which gives the national government the power to defend
the constitutional rights of citizens when local authorities fail to do so.)
It was only after the massacre, when the miners armed themselves and went on a rampage
of violence against the mine properties and mine guards, that President Wilson cal ed out
the federal troops to end the turmoil in southern Colorado.
And then there was an odd coincidence. On the same day that the bodies were discovered
in the pit at Ludlow, Woodrow Wilson, responding to the jailing of a few American sailors in
Mexico, ordered the bombardment of the Mexican port of Vera Cruz, landed ten boatloads of
marines, occupied the city, and kil ed more than a hundred Mexicans.
In that same textbook the foreword "To the Student" says: "Legacy of Freedom wil aid you in understanding our country's involvement in foreign affairs, including our role in
international conflicts and in peaceful and cooperative efforts of many kinds in many
places." Is that not a benign, misleading, papering over of the history of American foreign
policy?
45
A study of the Ludlow Massacre, alongside the Mexican incident, would also tel students something about our great press, the comfort we feel when picking up, not a scandal sheet
or a sensational tabloid, but the sober, dependable New York Times. When the U.S. Navy
bombarded Vera Cruz, the Times wrote in an editorial:
We may trust the just mind, the sound judgment, and the peaceful temper of
President Wilson. There is not the slightest occasion for popular excitement
over the Mexican affair; there is no reason why anybody should get nervous
either about the stock market or about his business.8
There is no objective way to deal with the Ludlow Massacre. There is the subjective (biased, opinionated) decision to omit it from history, based on a value system that doesn't consider
it important enough. That value system may include a fundamental belief in the beneficence
of the American industrial system (as represented by the passage quoted above from the
textbook Legacy of Freedom) or it may just involve a complacency about class struggle and
the intrusion of government on the side of corporations. In any case, a certain set of values
has dictated the ignoring of an important historical event.
It is also a subjective (biased, opinionated) decision to tel the story of the Ludlow Massacre
in some detail (as I do, in a chapter in my book The Politics of History, 9 or in several pages in A People's History of the United States). My decision was based on my belief that it is important for people to know the extent of class conflict in our history, to know something
about how working people had to struggle to change their conditions, and to understand the
role of the government and the mainstream press in the class struggles of our past.
One must inevitably omit large chunks of what is available in historical information. But
what is omitted is critical in the kind of historical education people get; it may move them one way or another or leave them motionless—passive passengers on a train that is already
moving in a certain direction, which they by their passivity seem to accept. My own
intention is to select subjects and emphasize aspects of those subjects that wil help move
citizens into activity on behalf of basic human rights: equality, democracy, peace, and a
world without national boundaries. Not by hiding factors from them, but by adding to the
orthodox store of knowledge, opening wider the marketplace of information.
The problem of selection in history is strikingly shown in the story of Christopher Columbus,
which appears in every textbook of American history on every level from elementary school
through col ege.10 It is a story, always, of skil and courage, leading to the discovery of the
Western Hemisphere.
Something is
omitted from that story, in almost every textbook in every school in the United
States. What is omitted is that Columbus, in his greed for gold, mutilated, enslaved, and
murdered the Indians who greeted him in friendly innocence, and that this was done on
such a scale as to deserve the term "genocide"—the destruction of an entire people.11
This information was available to historians. In Columbus's own log he shows his attitude
from the beginning. After tel ing how he and his men landed on that first island in the
Bahamas and were greeted peaceably by the Arawak Indians, who seemed to have no
knowledge of weapons and gave the strangers gifts, Columbus says, "They would make fine
servants … . With fifty men we could subjugate them al and make them do whatever we
want."
The closest we have to a contemporary source on what happened after that first landing is
the account by Bartolomeo de las Casas, who as a young priest participated in the conquest
of Cuba. In his History of the Indies, las Casas wrote, "Endless testimonies … prove the mild and pacific temperament of the natives… . But our work was to exasperate, ravage, kil ,
mangle, and destroy… . The admiral … was so anxious to please the King that he committed
irreparable crimes against the Indians."12
46
The "admiral" was Columbus. One of the few historians even to mention the atrocities committed by Columbus against the Indians was Samuel Eliot Morison, who wrote the two-volume biography of Columbus, Admiral of the Ocean Sea. 13 In his shorter book, written for a wider audience in 1954, Christopher Columbus, Mariner, Morison says, "The cruel policy initiated by Columbus and pursued by his successors resulted in complete genocide."14 But
this statement is on one page, buried in a book that is mostly a glowing tribute to
Columbus.
In my book A People's History of the United States I commented on Morison's quick mention
of Columbus's brutality:
Outright lying or quiet omission takes the risk of discovery which, when
made, might arouse the reader to rebel against the writer. To state the facts,
however, and then to bury them in a mass of other information is to say to
the reader with a certain infectious calm: yes, mass murder took place, but