A Young People's History of the United States

Here, Zinn covers the extremes of rich and poor—and explains how the widening gap between the two continued to fuel class tension and influence society and politics in the last decades of the 19th century.

A major reason that some people became so wealthy was that the government continually supported rich individuals and big business while quashing potential gains for poor people. This happened at both the state and federal levels. With burgeoning American capitalism came “the greatest march of economic growth in human history” (171). However, “the wealth it produced was like a pyramid” (171). The masses that supported industrial growth—the workers—lived in poverty, while a generation of the wealthiest men became multimillionaires. The book names a few of these men—known alternatively as “captains of industry,” a celebratory term, and “robber barons,” who “were powerful, like the barons of medieval nobility, and much of their wealth was gained through greedy or dishonest methods” (174).

Among the numerous challenges to capitalism, some were more meaningful than others. The federal government made a minimal effort to limit monopolies (single businesses that own the entire supply chain for a particular product and therefore control the market without challenge) in the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1877, but the Supreme Court rendered it meaningless within 20 years. The government continually “kept wealth at the top of the pyramid” (177).

The challenge from below was significant in the 1880s and 1890s, however. A renewed labor movement represented a stronger challenge to capitalism and more widely circulated ideologies that the government feared—namely socialism, communism, and anarchism, each of which placed power with people instead of an elite or even a government. Zinn writes, “Revolutionary societies existed in American cities, and revolutionary talk was in the air” (178). Labor strikes often became violent, and politicians demonized labor leaders, blaming them for the violence.

Like urban workers, farmers struggled to support their families and realized the discrepancy in governmental support between themselves and powerful capitalists. Farmers formed “union-like organizations” that fueled “a new movement called populism (political and economic beliefs and activities ‘of the people’)” (182-83). Though some populist candidates emerged, the movement ultimately failed because a strong third party in the political system would have required solidarity between Black and white workers and between urban and rural workers. Populists agreed on the dangers of capitalism, but many racial and ethnic divisions persisted. Democrats eventually absorbed and diluted populist platforms.

In this final chapter of Part 1, Zinn explains the process of the US becoming an empire and a “World Power” around the turn of the 20th century. This process involved instigating warfare and “stretching the United States’ arm overseas” (187) for economic, political, and cultural reasons.

Overseas expansion was a logical extension of the Manifest Destiny ideology described in Chapter 8. Politicians and capitalists “believed that the United States had to open up other countries to American goods—even if those markets were not eager to buy” (186). Americans wanted to expand their economy to avoid the types of economic downturns that the country periodically experienced (which, as Zinn notes, tended to inflame class conflict).

The process of integrating foreign markets began before the US became an empire, but the Spanish-American War catapulted US influence on the world through masked violence. Marketing its intervention as “helping a nation’s people overthrow foreign rule” (189), the US sent troops to Cuba with the intention to transfer imperial influence there from Spain to the US. The US government certainly did not support full Cuban independence, as they feared a republic shared by Black and white people there due to the implications it would have beyond Cuba (189-90). At the war’s end, Spain and the US drafted and signed a treaty with no input or representation from Cubans. The US maintained “the right to involve itself in Cuba’s affairs pretty much whenever it wanted” (191) via a law called the Platt Amendment.

In addition, the chapter examines war in the Philippines. Motivated by white supremacy and nationalism, Americans entered the Philippines with the express desire to “educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them” (193). Filipinos revolted against the US and a “harsh war,” with high death rates and atrocities, lasted for three years. The US won the war.

Americans did not unilaterally support imperialism. Even high-profile groups, such as the Anti-Imperialist League, which “worked to educate the American public about the horrors of the Philippine war and the evils of imperialism” (196), challenged it. Regardless of the challenges, imperialism prevailed, and the US annexed territories throughout the Pacific.