How I Became a Socialist, Part One: I Just Read: "A People's History of the United States"

Sorry for no updates - I spent a long time trying to think of how to summarize the data in the book, but there's just no way to do it, in large part because it's not this or that particular incident that was striking, but the sheer number of incidents. It's not that the governor of a particular state once sent in the National Guard to "pacify" a "riot" of peaceful protesters organizing against 16-hour workdays, or the fact that the mayors were themselves personally related to the business owners making millions of dollars off of virtual slave labor, or one incident of the federal U.S. government breaking a treaty with the Native Americans, or American soldiers committing mass rape against civilian populations during the Spanish-American War, or the fact that the soldiers themselves were dressed in rags because the government outsourced uniform-making to private companies that reaped millions by providing shoddy work, and on and on and on, it's the fact that it all happened so regularly, even consistently, and continues to happen.

All too often, the same people making the political decisions are the same people who profit from deregulation and war. How many U.S. senators are former CEOs compared with the general population? How many congresspeople leave public service for the lobbying industry? How many times have we heard of our soldiers in Iraq having to have their body armor bought for them by their families because the private companies that had won government bids gave them body armor that couldn't stop actual bullets?

Reading all the history that you don't hear in standard U.S. history books really spells out just how predatory Western society has been (and I'd argue continues to be even today). It's not just that the rich preyed on the poor, it's that the rich preyed on the poor, while the whites preyed on the blacks, while men preyed on women, while native populations preyed on immigrants, while the average preyed on the unusual, and so on. The Native Americans did not live in a perfect, idyllic society, but it's astonishing just how generous they were, and how brutal Westerners were. As a few individuals noticed way back when, quite a few Westerners defected to become Native Americans, but there were virtually no Native Americans that defected to become citizens in a Western government.

One last note of something that was surprising to me was how much of the population couldn't vote - not of just the black or female population, but how many adult, white males there were that couldn't vote. It wasn't until the early 20th century that even most white males could vote - before then, as much as 2/3 were disenfranchised due to being too poor to pay poll taxes, or not being legal landowners, or owning land but not enough to be eligible for the vote. So, basically, you're looking at something like 1/8 or less of the population that actually has a right to vote. We all know about black slavery and the women's suffrage movement, but I don't recall hearing anything about the class struggle to extend voting rights to the poor (who happened to constitute most of even the white male population), so learning about that came as a surprise to me.