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As long as rabbits don't have historians,

history will be written by the hunters.

Hunters tell stories of victory and of war,

which alas need to be fought in order

to defend the weak and the helpless.

The hunters are only doing their duty for the people,

for democracy, for God and country

in the name of civilization.

Fighting against the bad guys, be they fascists,

Communists, terrorists, et cetera, et cetera.

But the story that hunters

prefer to tell is no story at all.

Aside from their credit card numbers,

rabbits really don't need to remember anything else.

In a few moments, this American B-17 is going to bomb Royan,

a small French city on the Atlantic coast.

Today is April 15, 1945.

The war in Europe is over or almost.

The bombardier on board of this B-17

is 23-year old Lieutenant Howard Zinn.

He enlisted to fight for his country and against fascism.

He is about to discover that his plane

is going to drop a new type of bomb,

napalm.

The mission over Royan will change the course of his life.

Looking down from above, Howard Zinn is

certain that he is on the side of the good guys.

But once he's landed, he'll realize that it's not

just because you kill bad guys that you're a good guy.

He'll land amongst those that can't be seen from above.

This son of working class Jewish

parents will become an historian.

Howard Zinn will become the rabbits' historian,

the historian of those who are on the wrong end of the gun.

Because rabbits don't always run away.

Sometimes they even take advantage of

the hunters' inattention to grab their guns

and force them to back up to the edge of the cliff

and sometimes just a little further.

♪ As we go marching, marching

♪ We'll bring the bread to them

♪ The rising of the women

♪ Is the rising of the rest

♪ No more the drudge and idler

♪ 10 that toil where one reposes

♪ But the sharing of life's glories

♪ Bread and roses, bread and roses

♪ Bread and roses, bread and roses

♪ Our lives shall not be sweated

♪ From birth until life closes

♪ Hearts starve as well as bodies

♪ Bread and roses, bread and roses

We grow up in a controlled society.

So we're taught that if one person kills another person,

that is murder but if a government kills 100,000 persons,

that is patriotism.

Howard Zinn,

drawing on his own personal experience,

will tell the story of those forgotten by history.

He will take part in every major social struggle

of his time, from the Civil Rights movement

to the peace movement against the Vietnam War

as well as the campaigns against

the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

In 1980, Howard Zinn published his book

A People's History of the United States

which revealed chapters of history to the American

public which they knew little or nothing about.

The book was an enormous success.

Over two million copies have been sold in the United States

and it has been translated into languages worldwide.

Howard Zinn died in 2010 but to this day,

his ideas are still controversial.

In 2012, his book was banned from

public schools in Tucson, Arizona and in 2013,

Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, President of of Purdue

University, launched a crusade against teaching Zinn's book.

Indiana Governor.

Thank you.

Let's not overdo it.

What I'm doing here is

to tell you something about how this came about.

It all starts with a book, right?

It starts with A People's History of the United

States or maybe it starts with my wife

Roslyn Zinn who wouldn't let me

stop writing the book.

That's what we're gonna use or try to

use today and this is what they use in

the United Nations and certain other governing bodies.

His textbook is so refreshing to so many

of my students because they are so used to

learning about US history in a certain way.

Learning about Christopher Columbus, he discovered America.

You know, the Founding Fathers.

But Howard Zinn brings forth a lot of

the things that happened in the United States

that aren't in your traditional textbook.

It passes.

There had been historians that had taken

pieces of American history and dissected it

but Zinn took the entire trajectory

from the founding of the nation to the present and

imploded that myth

so that by the time you finished that book,

you realized that all of the stories

that we told ourselves about ourselves were not true.

Howard Zinn would say that history is the memory

of states and so what that means is that history

is usually told from the standpoint of people who

are in power and I think Howard Zinn brings to the plate,

especially in American studies that it's important

to have different standpoints of history told.

When we organize with one another, when we get involved,

when we stand up and speak out together,

we can create a power no government can suppress, thank you.

It's a really important book.

It really changed the conscience

of a generation in the United States.

Here in Clishishua, a Paris suburb,

Noam Chomsky talks about his friend Howard Zinn.

On this side of the Atlantic today,

the hegemony of the United States is taken for granted.

- Up in the sky, look! - It's a bird.

- It's a plane. - It's Superman!

It's Superman.

The United States' domination

as a military, economic and cultural superpower

is considered a completely natural phenomena.

Disguised as a mild-mannered

newspaper reporter, Clark Kent.

There's no longer any debate

over who's pro or anti-American.

How did you come to think the way you do?

I would like to know myself

how come I am the man that I am.

No, I think

we all try to understand

how we became what we are.

We all

try to

figure out why we are thinking this way

because sometimes we find that there are

people who went through some of the same

experiences and yet they think differently.

But I'm sure that my growing up

in a working class family

of Jewish immigrants

and seeing my mother and father work very hard,

struggling

and people around me also

in my neighborhood working very hard, struggling.

I'm sure that gave me a certain class consciousness.

My father

was from the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

My mother came from Siberia

and they came here

and they met as factory workers in New York.

Welcome to the land of liberty.

Between 1900 and 1920, more than 14 million

immigrants arrived in the United States.

They came from all over Europe, from Russia,

Ireland, Germany or like Howard Zinn's parents,

from the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

They came fleeing poverty or war

or racism or religious persecution.

They dreamed of a Promised Land

of wealth or simply of a better life.

The New World opens its arms wide to

the poor and huddled masses of the Old.

It's unwanted, it's fugitives, even a few Utopians.

But above all, the rapidly expanding

industries of the time require cheap labor.

Men, women and children easy to exploit,

easy to divide and easy to use against those damned

worker's unions that demand to work less that 12 hours

a day and their strikes that were ruining the country

and prevented those who wanted to work from doing so.

There were strikes and labor struggles all over the country.

Even children protested.

At the beginning of the 20th century,

300,000 children between the ages of 10 and 15

worked in mines, textile or other industries.

In Philadelphia in 1903, children working

60 hour work weeks went on strike shouting

"We want to go to school, 55 hours or nothing."

I grew up experiencing the Depression in the early 1930s.

My father was a waiter and there was less work for him

when the economic crisis came,

so he had to take different jobs.

He worked as a window cleaner.

He worked

on the streets, selling neckties on the street.

I would come home sometimes from school

and I would find the house dark because

we could not pay the electric bill.

We lived in

different places all the time

because we could not pay the rents.

The condition of my family

was the way I experienced the economic crisis.

I had no larger view of what was

happening in the country or the world.

I just saw what was happening right around me

and right around me, I saw people struggling,

people evicted from their homes, people without work.

The Zinn family lived in

rundown tenements in the slums of Brooklyn.

The poor don't know how lucky they are.

They don't have to spend years studying

sociology to understand the world.

A boy like Howard Zinn only needed to look at himself,

the people around him and the people in his neighborhood

and as his apartment was too dark and small,

he often went outside to play ball, to take boxing

lessons with the local champion and to see his friends.

The advantage that the poor have over sociologists

is that they know what they're talking about.

As I was growing up and 17 years old and so on,

I encountered these young radicals in my neighborhood.

Probably young Communists in my neighborhood

and they took me to this demonstration in Times Square

and I didn't even know, I had never been to a demonstration.

I wasn't even sure what the demonstration was about

but there were all these people carrying signs, you see?

And marching through Times Square

and I saw the word "Peace, No War."

That was okay and then when I heard the sirens,

I thought oh there must be a fire somewhere around

but it was the police and they were coming and they

were going into the crowd and they were hitting people.

They were on horses, some of them were

on horses and they were knocking people down

and then I was knocked unconscious.

I woke up in a hallway who knows how much later

and when I woke up, Times Square was totally

as it was before the demonstration.

It was as if nothing had happened.

But the experience had a profound effect on my thinking

because I suddenly realized that what these radical

friends had been saying to me seemed to be true.

The police were on the side of the Establishment

and that there's no freedom of speech.

I grew up with this naive idea that in America

you can march through the streets, you can hold up signs.

You can demonstrate peacefully because it was

a peaceful demonstration and that is okay because

this is a democracy and what I saw that night in

Times Square said no, there's something wrong with that.

At the age of 17 after getting

hit over the head, Howard Zinn discovered

the violence of social struggles hidden under

the magic glitter of the American Dream, the dream

that attracted millions of people from around the world.

In the United States, there's never been

a recognition of class conflict, class struggle.

The culture and the dominant

elites in the United States and the media,

they've always succeeded in creating

a kind of ideology

of we are one happy family.

We are, you know,

the US Constitution starts off, "We the People."

Of course it wasn't we the people who established

the Constitution, it was 55 rich white men

who established the Constitution and what all Americans

learn,

we were in a war against England for independence,

that was the Revolutionary War, everybody was united.

One, two, three.

One, two,

three.

The United States which would

become an empire sprung out of an empire.

But as Howard Zinn says,

the American Revolution wasn't unanimously supported.

There were the Amerindians, the African-American

slaves and freedmen, the poor, women and even amongst

the revolutionaries, not everyone had the same idea.

One, two, three, into the harbor!

This small museum in Boston portrays

one of the better known historic and heroic stories in

the American Revolution, the Boston Tea Party of 1773

when the people rose to defy the English oppressor.

All the people? Well almost.

On the night of December 16th, 1773,

people of Boston, in fact a group of just

60 patriots calling themselves the Sons of Liberty

and disguised as Mohawk Indians, feathers and all,

boarded three English ships moored in the harbor

and tossed all the chests of tea overboard

to protest against the taxes imposed by the English.

A rebellion of colonists against the colonial power.

For me this is actually the embodiment

of what it means to be an American.

What it takes for man to understand that

God-given right to freedom and to liberty.

I think that it often needs to be remembered that

the tendency for governments and for those

who rule people is to seek ever more and more power

and the founding principle of this country

is that people have their own power,

they have their own right to govern themselves.

Two centuries later, the name Tea Party

has been appropriated by a political pressure group.

Today's tea party opposes taxes and bureaucracy

imposed by the Federal Government in Washington and has

mobilized support in many parts of the United States.

Essentially today's Tea Party advocates

the rights of Americans to individual

freedom unhindered by a large government.

Do you see a link between

the reenactment of what we just saw and today's Tea Party?

Oh exactly, I just mentioned that to my wife.

I said the things that they were talking about

today are exactly what's going on right now.

In fact there is an organization called the TEA Party.

Taxed Enough Already, T-E-A and many of the participants

in that strongly believe that the Federal Government

here in the United States is much to big

and is not following the Constitution.

So you're saying that

the British of the time are today's Washington?

Correct, there are no more British today

but there are too many people that do not believe

in the principles upon which this country was

founded and they believe that there needs to be more

and more government to do more and more things.

What the Tea Party believes is no.

We believe in Constitutionally limited government.

History can be considered as a collection

of stories that we choose to light up like candles

in order to illuminate the darkness of the present.

But some people travel back

into the past and never come back.

1775, the Battles of Lexington and Concord.

A heroic moment for the Minutemen.

Who were the Minutemen?

Militias of patriots ready to mobilize

at a moment's notice in case the enemy,

that is to say the English attacked.

With a Company coming back here...

During the night of April 18th to 19th, 1775,

they opened fire for the first time on English troops

and the first shot fired here was described as

"The shot heard around the world."

The Minuteman in American history, he's iconic.

The statue at the North Bridge of the Minuteman

sums it up in terms of in one hand he has his musket

and in the other his plow, he's ready to leave his,

ready to pick up weapons to defend his land and his liberty.

Yes, some were landowners, some were called mechanics.

So they had a craft.

We'll meet some of the people this evening.

They were couriers, they worked in leathers.

There was a tannery nearby.

I think it's a great story.

People who were here for 150 years

and we were governing ourselves.

We refused to be put under the control of another country

and stood up for our rights and our freedoms

and that's a lesson we still teach our children today.

And they fought the British first at Lexington

as they were heading out early in the morning at about dawn.

The next fight was at the North Bridge

at about 9:30 in the morning and the significance

of the fighting at the North Bridge is it was the

first time that the Colonial Militia and the Minutemen

were ordered to fire on the King's soldiers,

an act of treason known today

as The Shot Heard Around the World.

Make ready, prime and load.

Shoulder up, fire lock.

Make ready to prime and load, fire.

That mostly everybody was united was untrue.

Maybe 1/3 of the colonists were supporting the Revolution.

They had to draft people to go into Washington's army

and once they were in the army, the small farmers,

the poor people who were in the army,

when they saw what their conditions were, they rebelled.

There were mutinies in the army of thousands of soldiers.

George Washington ordered the execution

of some of these mutineers, some of these rebels

and these executions were carried out

and we don't learn about that in the schools.

And after the war, this class conflict continued

because the veterans of the Revolutionary War

who had been promised

land for joining the army,

they had little pieces of land, they were farmers

and then they found that

the taxes being levied on them

by the rich who controlled the State Legislatures,

they could not pay these taxes.

So they were being evicted,

their land and their farms being taken away from them

and so they rebelled and there were rebellions in

a number of states, in Massachusetts, in South Carolina.

Rebellions, class conflict.

In the United States,

even a shoe shiner can become a millionaire.

Propaganda has succeeded in purveying this belief.

However the truth is as studies have shown for years

that the poor in the US generally stay poor

and the rich on the whole generally get richer and richer.

It is a well established fact and everyone can see it

but this fundamental belief is still conveyed

in order to soften the brutal economic reality.

The myth of the American Dream

developed at the end of the 19th century,

the age of railways, electricity, oil and telephones.

The height of the Industrial Revolution.

What historians usually forget to mention

is that many of these fortunes were made

with substantial government financing.

Howard Zinn gives the example of the Union

Pacific Railroad Company, which received 14 million

acres of land and $27 million in Federal funding.

This public generosity didn't benefit

the workers who built the railroads,

of which there were 10,000 Chinese and 3,000 Irish laborers.

They laid over five miles of rail per day

and died by the hundreds from exposure to heat or cold.

In 1900, 1% of the US population

owned 45% of the national wealth.

This was the age of the robber barons,

the superheroes of American Capitalism.

Carnegie,

Vanderbilt, JP Morgan, John Davison Rockefeller.

Rockefeller possessed the largest fortune in history,

up to $190 billion in today's dollars.

That's three times Bill Gates' fortune

and by what right?

Divine right, natural selection.

JD Rockefeller said it himself.

"The growth of big business is merely the survival

"of the fittest according to the laws of nature and God."

His colleague Carnegie the steel magnate adds

"Wealth when concentrated in the hands of a few

"serves much more to the likes of progress than when it

"is dissipated into salaries destined to feed the masses."

As for Carnegie's associate Henry Clay Frick,

he purportedly stated that "I can hire

"one half of the working class to kill the other half."

With labor unrest and thousands of strikes all over the US,

he sees the rising tide of social conflict arriving

on his doorstep and he doesn't like that at all.

In 1892 in Homestead, Pennsylvania,

he hired 300 agents of the Pinkerton Detective Agency to

infiltrate demonstrations as agitators and break up strikes.

Frick also had a company militia formed

which on the night of July Fifth, 1892,

opened fire on the strikers with machine guns,

killing 16 people

including one child.

Alexander Berkman was a 22 year old

Russian Jewish Libertarian Communist

and the lover of the infamous Emma Goldman

who the President later described

as the most dangerous woman in America.

To avenge the workers who were killed,

Berkman pays a visit to Frick in his office

and shoots him twice in the neck.

Frick is seriously injured but

a week later he returns to work.

As for Berkman, he's sentenced to 22 years in prison.

Like the other robber barons,

Mr. Frick will be remembered as a patron of the arts

and philanthropist, having collected paintings by Rembrandt,

Renoir, Watteau and others.

"My dear friends, you, the nouveau riche,

"you've acquired your fortunes with the blood,

"sweat and tears of the poor.

"Yet you would prefer not to pay taxes?

"In addition, you want to be loved?

"No problem, setting up a foundation,

"my wealthy friends, will allow you to conserve your wealth,

"exempt you from taxes and allow you to

"present yourselves as benefactors of humanity."

In the superb Frick Collection in New York City,

it is very unlikely that you will

ever find Jacob Reese's photographs.

Reese, a journalist and photographer,

worked for the Popular Press in the 1880s

and photographed the squalor of tenement living in New York.

He portrayed how the other half lives,

the other half being the poorer half

of the population of New York City.

Jacob Reese was one of the journalists

that Theodore Roosevelt labeled muckrakers,

those who denounced corruption and violence

and the criminal practices of the all-powerful

trusts in the rail, meat and steel industries.

How many people living in Chicago today

know of the events that took place in May 1886,

the labor struggle and the fierce

combat that raged here for days?

For Howard Zinn, an essential chapter

in labor history was written here with

consequences for workers all over the world.

Here we are in Haymarket Square with Tim Yeager,

union organizer with the UAW and Matt Machowski

of the IWW of Chicago.

We owe Labor Day, May First to events that happened in

Haymarket Square, which has since become a parking lot,

and the eight hour work day, both of which benefit

workers all over the world and who surely know

nothing of what occurred here in Chicago.

On May First, 1886,

one of the largest demonstrations was here in Chicago.

The purpose of the nationwide series of strikes

was to show support for the eight hour day.

At the end of the 19th century,

the average work day was 10 to 12 hours, six days a week.

In 1886, the movement for an eight

hour work day spread across the country.

On May Third during a demonstration in front of

the McCormick Factories, the police fired into the crowd.

Four workers were killed and several others wounded.

The next day, May Fourth,

the anarcho-syndicalist unions immediately called

for a demonstration right here in Haymarket Square.

It was a sunny day

and Lucy and Albert Parsons had their children

with them and people marched in their best clothing.

The police,

under orders of the captains of industry,

looked for an opportunity to attack the parade.

Around the country some of the

demonstrations were attacked by police.

Here in Chicago they looked for an opportunity

but there was good discipline, good order.

There was no opportunity given

and so it was a successful day.

They moved the crowd from there up to this area

just north of this alley here and they hauled

a hay wagon up and the speaker stood on the hay wagon.

At the end of the demonstration,

someone threw a stick of dynamite at the police.

Eight policemen were killed in the explosion

and more than 60 others were wounded.

The police open fired on the crowd,

killing several demonstrators and wounding at least 200.

Who threw the dynamite?

No one ever knew.

Some suspect it was a deliberate provocation

carried out by the Pinkerton Detective Agency,

employing more than 10,000 agents

for their business and industrial clients.

Their agents would infiltrate labor movements,

act as police informers and incite acts of violence.

This became the excuse for

a nationwide assault on the labor movement.

Yes.

Here in Chicago, the police raided labor union offices.

They attacked and

beat

people who were still on strike for the eight hour day.

The police, unable to find

the real culprits, arrested union organizers.

There was no evidence brought against any of them.

The trial was a mockery of justice.

The union men were evidently

sentenced to death for their ideas.

One of them, Louis Lingg, committed suicide in prison

by setting off a stick of dynamite in his mouth.

He was 21 years old.

There was a show trial

where their writings for the labor movement

and about anarchy were used against them.

Were the executions public?

It was by invitation

and the people who were invited were

the captains of industry, the well-to-do.

The McCormick family was invited, who had

owned the newspaper which is now the Chicago Tribune

and a sympathetic reporter asked one of the attendees

why he had come to the execution and he said

"I have come to watch the death of the labor movement."

Four of the union men

were hung on November 11th, 1887.

August Spies, Albert Parsons,

Adolf Fischer,

George Engel.

These events had repercussions worldwide.

In Paris, the French decided that May First should

be a day of action in favor of the eight hour workday.

A fight for recognition of people's

right to a life outside of the workplace.

But it wasn't until May 23rd, 1919

after four years of sacrifice in the trenches

that the French workers obtained an eight hour day

and May First became a public holiday.

In 1893, the Haymarket murders were pardoned

by the progressive Governor of Illinois,

John P. Altgeld and the three remaining

union men were released from prison.

He said let's forget it.

At this point let us pardon

these three men

and let them live out their life.

On the gallows with a noose around his neck,

August Spies, one of the martyrs declares

"The time will come when our silence will be more

"powerful than the voices that you are strangling today."

Not far from this monument in the Forest Park

Cemetery just outside of Chicago lies Emma Goldman,

one of Howard Zinn's heroines,

buried among other famous labor activists.

She was an anarchist,

a feminist, a labor organizer

and she was

imprisoned many times

and she opposed war

and

she became famous as a

speaker all over the country.

Finally during World War One,

because she opposed World War One,

she was put in jail and then after the war,

she was deported,

sent back to her homeland to Russia.

Emma Goldman arrived in the US

in 1885 at the age of 16 and participated in

a large number of political, social and labor struggles,

particularly for women's rights.

She was imprisoned on several occasions

for pacifist opinions, inciting people

to riot and defending birth control.

She even had her own newspaper, Mother Earth.

In 1921, she wrote extensively to explain

her disillusionment with the Russian Revolution.

In 1936, she went to Spain to support the Republican cause.

She died in 1939 in Toronto and asked to be buried

here in Chicago next to the Haymarket martyrs.

Look, there's Emma Goldman's grave.

It's dressed with flowers and there are stones placed

on her tombstone as according to the Jewish tradition

and that guy there, he's a member of the IWW who

came all the way from St. Louis to pay tribute to her.

He has left a button from his union

as well as an apple.

You see the red apple?

It was in his bag.

The apple came all the way from St. Louis.

In memory of Emma Goldman.

"Liberty doesn't descend to a people,

"a people must raise themselves to liberty."

The news of the Haymarket Massacre

changed Emma Goldman's life forever

and the lives of many activists of her generation.

Howard Zinn, optimistic as usual in his analyses,

believes that social conflicts like these no matter

how dramatic contribute to understanding history

and the education of following generations.

For Zinn, this is how class struggle

and the movement for social progress move forward.

♪ As we go marching, marching

♪ In the beauty of the day

♪ A million darkened kitchens

♪ A thousand mill lofts gray

♪ Are touched with all the radiance

♪ That a silent sun discloses

♪ For the people hear us singing

♪ Bread and roses, bread and roses

♪ As we go marching, marching

♪ We battle too for men

♪ For they are women's children

♪ And we honor them again

Bread and roses.

Bread and roses too.

We want bread but we also want roses.

Sometimes a song suffices to keep an

event alive despite the passage of time.

♪ Give us bread but give us roses

In his People's History of the United States,

Howard Zinn relates the episode of the 1912

textile strike of the men and women working

in the mills of Lawrence, Massachusetts.

The story of bread and roses.

1912, Lawrence Massachusetts was

an unusual event

in the history of labor struggles in the United States.

Unusual because

it followed a whole series of

strikes and struggles which were lost by the workers.

In Lawrence, Massachusetts,

the workers won their strike

even though

the workers were

poor immigrants, women

and divided by a dozen languages.

But they were helped

by the labor union IWW,

Industrial Workers of the World which believed

in bringing all workers together.

In 1905 in Chicago,

a group of anarchist and socialist

union organizers created the IWW,

Industrial Workers of the World.

One of the founding members of the IWW was

Mary Harris Jones, better known as Mother Jones.

She participated in many minor strikes.

She supported women who resisted

when strike breakers were called in.

She aided children exploited in factories

and organized large demonstrations in which

they marched up to the homes of the great

Puritan bourgeois families that employed them.

Eugene Debs was another founding member of the IWW.

In 1894 he was thrown into prison for his participation

in a strike against the Pearlman Wagon Factory.

Debs ran for President of the United States several times.

Big Bill Haywood was another founding member.

He was dreaded by all the bosses of his time,

particularly those of the silver mines

as he was head of the union.

At the first ever IWW meeting, he addressed the assembly.

"Comrades, we are here to confederate the workers

"of this country into a working class movement

"of which the purpose is to emancipate the

"working class from the slavery of Capitalism."

The IWW was also the hobo's union,

itinerant farm workers who were low cost travelers.

During the massive strikes in Lawrence in 1912,

the Industrial Workers of the World totaled 50,000 members.

They were called the Wobblies.

This is the Lawrence industrial zone one century later.

Cotton produced by slaves in the South arrived by

this river to be processed by wage slaves of the North

in one of the 34 buildings of the American Woolen Company.

In 1912, this factory was one of the biggest in the world.

It employed 30,000 workers, mostly women

who came from 25 different European countries.

They all came with the hopes of a better life.

They all came with the belief in the American Dream.

Much to our surprise, here in the middle

of these abandoned buildings is a small,

little-visited museum run by Jim Boshen.

- Is that where they worked? - Yes.

The mills right across the canal from us

were all textile mills and at the height of the industry

in Lawrence which is around the time of the strike,

over 30,000 people worked in the textile mills here.

Hard work

in

Tough conditions.

The mills were hot and loud, dusty.

A lot of dangerous machinery close by.

These were all textile mills.

It had begun

primarily for cotton textiles,

by the turn of the century, mostly woolen.

The mills in the North had a very

close, interdependent relationship

with the Southern plantations.

In the cotton fields of the South,

African-Americans were exploited and here in the North,

immigrants were exploited.

Very much so and those comparisons were made at the time.

It was something that

defenders of slavery in the South

would point to and say how can you criticize us?

You're exploiting the immigrants in the North.

Well the first wave of immigrants to Lawrence was the Irish

escaping the Irish Potato Famine in the late 1840s.

Then many waves of immigrants followed,

including many of my ancestors

who were French-Canadians from Quebec.

Saw a huge influx of immigrants

during the late 19th and early 20th century.

The famous massive wave from southern and eastern Europe,

many of whom went through Ellis Island in New York.

The workers' nine dollar a week salary

was just enough for them to buy food and pay their rent,

which naturally was owed to their employers.

One study conducted at the time estimated an

infant mortality rate of 50% for children under six.

In Lawrence starting in 1911,

the factory owners decided to put

the ideas of Frederick Taylor into practice.

Skilled workers were no longer required.

Gains in productivity and in competitivity

were achieved by speeding up production.

No one is irreplaceable.

However in 1912, a Federal law was passed limiting the

work week for women and children to 54 hours instead of 56,

two hours less work for the same wages.

But at the end of January when the workers received their

pay, they found that their meager raise hadn't been granted.

The two hours less work had been deducted from their pay.

This set off an immediate strike.

In just a few days,

the number of striking workers went from 1,000 to 5,000

and then to 10,000.

♪ The freaks and fools are apt

♪ To trod in burdens all the time

♪ What we want to see

♪ What I need is a good old picket line

Of the small number of members

they had here when the strike broke out,

most of whom were Italian immigrants by the way

who had brought some of their radical

political philosophies with them.

The IWW sent in organizers

to aid the striking workers.

The best known were Arturo Giovannitti and Joseph Ettor.

Both of them were young, Joseph was 27.

He could speak Italian, Polish, Hungarian and Yiddish.

Across the canal from us right now is

part of the Pacific Mills which was another one of the

very large textile companies in Lawrence at that time

and this is the site of one of

the famous episodes early in the strike.

This bridge across the canal there

is where the marching strikers were hosed

with water from the fire hoses from,

and of course this was during a very cold winter,

so the water would be freezing on their backs.

There were strikes all over

the country at the time but this one became a legend.

The mill owners and city officials began to panic

as did the clergy and other local business leaders.

The Governor called out the local militia,

then the National Guard.

So during one of the confrontations

between strikers and police at the intersection

at the far end of the mill,

a young Italian woman named Anna LoPizzo

was hit by a shot and fell and died.

Ettor and Giovannitti were

arrested and charged as accessories to murder,

to the murder of Anna LoPizzo

even though they were nowhere near the scene

on the theory that they had encouraged people to

protest in the streets and that led to the shooting.

Let's start walking back this way.

The winter of 1912 was cold

and hard and the strikers started running out of food.

The welfare of the strikers' children was

at stake but a show of solidarity occurred.

400 families around the country

volunteered to take in their children.

Yeah, the strike became

a national and international cause celebre.

You did have the

transport of children of strikers

to live with sympathizers in other cities.

And they were helped by the solidarity

of the Socialist movement because when they

were starving in this winter of the strike

and did not have enough food for their children,

the Socialist newspapers advertised

for families that would take care of the children of

Lawrence and that enabled them to continue the strike.

On February 10th, 1912,

119 children left Lawrence for New York City.

They were met by union workers singing the revolutionary

songs The Internationale and the Marseillaise.

In Lawrence, the repression had been so violent

that a special Congressional Committee was appointed.

The testimony of Camilla, a 12 year old girl whose

scalp had been torn off working at a spinning machine

helped lead to a resolution of the strike.

♪ As we come marching, marching

♪ Un-numbered women dead

The stories of these struggles are not told

in American schools or in American textbooks.

Most Americans, even workers today

have never learned that history.

For instance I was in Lawrence, Massachusetts

a few years ago.

I found that the people in Lawrence, Massachusetts

did not know about the history of that strike.

That's why I considered it very important in my book to

tell the story of these labor struggles in American history.

Why did you become interested in this story?

My personal family history as I mentioned

was a grandfather who kept out of it, stayed away.

Is there anyone

here who could still sing the song?

Okay.

Bread and roses.

♪ As we go marching, marching

♪ In the beauty of the day

♪ A million darkened kitchens

♪ A thousand mill lofts gray

♪ Are touched with all the radiance

♪ That a sudden sun discloses

♪ For the people hear us singing

♪ Bread and roses, bread and roses

♪ As we go marching, marching

♪ We'll bring the bread to them

♪ The rising of the women

♪ Is the rising of the rest

♪ No more the drudge and idler

♪ Ten that toil where one reposes

♪ But the sharing of life's glories

♪ Bread and roses, bread and roses

♪ Bread and roses, bread and roses

♪ Our lives shall not be sweated

♪ From birth until life closes

♪ Hearts starve as well as bodies

♪ Bread and roses, bread and roses

One evening after this film was shown

in the Bastille de Rouilleroux, a town in the Tarn

Province in the south of France, a lady in the audience

very politely informed us that a similar situation

had occurred in her region at about the same time.

She told us about the 1909 woolworkers

strike in the mills of Masame and Graulhet.

The strike in Graulhet lasted 147 days.

The workers were predominately women

who were paid only half as much as men.

They worked with toxic substances

in foul-smelling workshops.

So they went on strike.

The strike was long and food ran out.

They invented Communist soup kitchens in Graulhet and the

workers' children were lodged by families all over France.

The same type of solidarity that

was shown for the children of Lawrence.

In England, France, Germany

as well as in the United States,

we share a common history with the Industrial Revolution.

The same causes produced the same effects,

the same suffering and the same resistance.

But there were other forms of

resistance and innovative opposition.

We're here with Noam Chomsky at MIT in Boston.

This region where we are now

are the origins of the Industrial Revolution.

There is a rich literature from the mid-19th

century by working people, people working in

the textile mills and artisans and others.

They had their own newspapers, they were running them.

They were eloquent and had

very interesting material in them.

There was no European influence.

This was just developed indigenously.

They bitterly condemned the industrial system

which they said was crushing them,

taking away their culture, their dignity, their freedom.

They said that people who work in the mills should own them.

They opposed wage labor as

an attack on elementary integrity

and those views were very widely accepted.

For example Abraham Lincoln described

wage labor as not very different from slavery.

That the only difference is with wage labor,

it's not permanent, with slavery it's permanent.

It's taken a lot of effort to drive these thoughts

out of people's minds because those are very natural ideas.

In fact if you look back at the United States,

the United States had a very violent labor history,

much more so than Europe.

Hundreds of American workers were being

killed when nobody was being killed in Europe

and when there were

developments of socialism and democracy,

they were crushed by force.

Crushed revolts and forgotten victories.

If the modest success in Lawrence had been forgotten

by history, it's because for the ruling class,

it set a very bad example.

The Rockefeller family doctrine is

"Don't let them think that revolt can succeed."

JD Rockefeller Jr., who had Rockefeller Center

in New York City built would get a chance to

apply this principle in Ludlow, Colorado in 1914.

There, a coal miners strike was ruthlessly repressed.

When Howard Zinn started studying history,

he began with research on the Ludlow Massacre.

1914, Ludlow, Colorado.

11,000 coal miners worked here for JD Rockefeller Jr.

Immigrants of all different origins,

Greeks, Italians, Serbs as well as African-Americans.

The work was dangerous and the wages were low.

The miners decided to organize,

hoping to obtain better working conditions but a union

representative was shot down by the company's militia.

So the miners went on strike.

They received a visit from Mother Jones.

At 80 years old, she was wanted by police all over

the US but she was able to arrive secretly at Ludlow.

She aided the strikers until she was arrested,

imprisoned and thrown out of the state of Colorado.

Then Rockefeller hired a private militia.

They were armed with rifles and machine guns.

The Colorado National Guard was then called in.

When they arrived in Ludlow,

the miners showed relief because they thought

that the National Guard had come to their rescue.

Despite the bitter cold and the snow,

the miners greeted the soldiers with flag-waving and shouts

of joy but then the National Guard maneuvered towards

them and charged against the miners, women and children.

The miners resisted,

digging foxholes and trenches in order to defend themselves.

Then one day, management offered to negotiate

but when the union representative arrived for discussions,

he was shot down in cold blood by Rockefeller's hired guns.

That evening the National Guard charged

once again and burned down the miners' camp.

The Governor had ordered the soldiers to open fire.

13 people were killed.

At dawn the next morning, the shriveled,

burned corpses of 11 children and two women

were found under a metal plate covering a ditch.

The miners union sent out a call for help.

300 miners arrived in Ludlow from other nearby mines,

cutting telegraph and telephone

wires on the way and ready to fight.

In solidarity with the miners,

train conductors refused to transport troops

and even certain Guardsmen refused to go to Ludlow.

Armed miners counterattacked.

They destroyed all they could

and blew up several mine shafts.

Other unions in the country sent

armed workers as reinforcements.

There were demonstrations and meetings of support

all over the country and even as far away as New York.

The New York Times called on the President

to take firm action against the strikers.

Finally President Wilson sent in the US Army.

The 14 month struggle left 66 people dead

and many more wounded and for what reason?

Because of Rockefeller's sacrosanct principle,

don't let them believe that revolt can succeed.

The repression of the IWW became increasingly violent.

The Wobbly leaders were harassed and killed.

One of their most famous figureheads was Joe Hill,

the singer-songwriter of protest songs.

In November 1915 in Salt Lake City,

Joe Hill was accused of murdering

a grocery store owner during a robbery.

No evidence was ever brought against him.

He was sentenced to death by a firing squad

despite protests from all over the world.

Before he was executed, Joe Hill wrote

"I die like a true blue rebel.

"Don't waste any time mourning, organize."

♪ Don't mourn, oh no

♪ Don't mourn, no no

♪ Don't mourn, oh no

♪ Don't mourn, no no

♪ Don't mourn, oh no no no

♪ Don't mourn, organize

"My body, ah if I could choose,

"I would to ashes it reduce and let the merry

"breezes blow my dust to where some flowers grow.

"Perhaps some fading flower then

"would come to life and bloom again.

"This is my last and final will.

"Good luck to all of you, Joe Hill."

His ashes were distributed in small envelopes

and were scattered throughout the United States

and other countries around the world.

The Wobblies were provoked into violent reaction.

Ferociously repressed and stigmatized,

the union lost momentum and its popular support.

The First World War would bring the final blow to the

Wobblies and other progressive movements around the world.

It's been historically true

that when the government has been in trouble,

it has used

military action, intervention

elsewhere as a way of

trying to solve the domestic crisis,

the economic crisis and this has happened

at other times in American history

and

especially if there's a great opposition in the country

which threatens the Establishment.

One way of dealing with the opposition is by

going to war and when you have a war atmosphere,

you're in a position to suppress the opposition.

That's what happened in the First World War.

Before the First World War,

there was a powerful Socialist movement in this country

and a radical trade union movement, the IWW.

But when the government went to war,

when Wilson took us into the European war,

it created an opportunity for him

to crush the Socialist movement

and the IWW.

In 1914, while the miners were being shot

down in Ludlow, the First World War broke out in Europe.

The Battle of the Somme in July 1916

was one of the biggest military disasters in history.

It was the first joint offensive

by French and British troops.

The battle was personally conducted by General Gough.

On the first day, July First,

the British Army commanded by General Haig lost over

20,000 soldiers with 40,000 more missing or wounded.

10,000 men were killed within the first hour.

Nine million men in the prime of their lives died in

the mud of the trenches, farmers, workers and others.

Another 20 million more people died

after the war from subsequent epidemics.

France alone counted 1,400,000 killed or missing in action,

10% of the active male population.

Three million were wounded in battle,

of which 100,000 were mutilated,

42,000 blinded or visually impaired

and 15,000 disfigured.

In the United States as elsewhere,

the war whetted the appetites of bankers and industrialists.

The US economy was expanding rapidly in 1914

but it wasn't yet internationally dominant.

The First World War helped it to consolidate

while in the meantime weakening its competitors.

With the conquest of new markets abroad,

the US was soon in a position to crush its rivals.

In the US, savvy businessmen know that it is better

to sell shovels to prospectors than to dig for gold oneself.

Two billion dollars worth of material had already been

sold to their allies before they entered the war in 1917.

In the French paper Les Annales,

the journalist Cami Fari Pisane quotes

an important and influential American banker

in his article on March 25th, 1917.

"The war enabled us to quintuple our profits.

"We got rich by providing cotton,

"wool,

"meat,

"steel, artillery shells,

"wheat, leather,

"shoes, machine guns,

"horses and automobiles.

"Anything we could sell, you bought.

"You paid with gold, with paper currency,

"with bonds and with loans.

"So you must win the war at all

"costs in order to pay us back.

"Then the money we have made by these sales will be

"lent to you again to rebuild your cities and factories.

"But we will only profit if you win.

"That is why we want you to win rapidly."

The sinking of the ocean liner Lusitania by a German

submarine on May Seventh, 1915 offered the United

States the pretext they needed to enter the war.

The incident was presented to the American

public as a war crime and became a major argument

in persuading the US to go to war against Germany.

The Germans claimed that the ship

was transporting munitions for the Allies.

This claim that the Lusitania was carrying American

ammunitions was confirmed by historians years later in 1972.

President Woodrow Wilson declared that

"Some countries are simply too proud to fight."

But he swallowed his pride and led

the US into the war in April 1917.

He then asserted that the United States should be willing

to sacrifice lives in the name of its founding principles.

The President was more discrete about the two billion

dollars lent to the Allies, a debt that would never be

repayed if the Germans with their submarines won the war.

In 1917, the war led to the Revolution in Russia.

10 days that shook the world.

It was a new feeling that the oppressed,

the downtrodden could make the world a better place.

Russia pulled out of the war,

thus freeing up the German Army in the east

and putting a possible victory within their grasp.

The United States had no choice but to intervene

in order to protect their best interests.

But fighting a war in faraway Europe was an idea

that would have to be sold to the American public.

Despite the indignation provoked by the sinking

of the Lusitania, most young Americans weren't

ready to die overseas for a matter of principles.

In order to convince them,

President Wilson made eloquent speeches.

He spoke about "a war to end all wars"

and "making the world safe for democracy."

Out of four million American soldiers mobilized,

two million were sent to the front.

116,000 of them would never return.

In this elementary school in Chicago, you see children

throwing down German books in front of the camera.

The journalist George Creel became the official

Head of Propaganda for the Committee on Public Information.

He launched the operation 4 Minute Men.

It consisted in sending out accomplished public speakers

ready to intervene anywhere at a moment's notice

to make persuasive four minute speeches.

Creel mobilized 75,000 orators

who made 750,000 speeches in over 5,000 towns

and cities across the US to convince the public.

This is Douglas Fairbanks.

This is Charlie Chaplin.

Charlie Chaplin was called into service to sell

Liberty Bonds in order to support the war effort.

"I want you for US Army."

Despite the unprecedented propaganda,

very few young people in the US

volunteered and recruitment was disappointing.

So the government decided to institute the draft.

The opposition to the war had to be silenced.

The Espionage Act, a law ostensibly against espionage

enabled the authorities to imprison anyone who

wrote or spoke against the war for up to 20 years.

Union activists were the first victims.

Emma Goldman, Zinn's heroine took part in antiwar meetings

all over the country and helped organize

the No Conscription League to oppose the draft.

She and her companion Alexander Berkman were arrested.

They were then imprisoned on Ellis Island and deported back

to Russia, their country of origin on December 21st, 1919.

Socialist Leader Eugene Debs would

also be silenced by the Espionage Act.

His political career was brought to a halt in June 1918.

He was arrested in Canton, Ohio after giving an antiwar

speech to an audience that included young men of draft age.

He was sentenced to 10 years in prison for

obstructing the Recruitment and Enlistment Service.

But Debs ran for President in 1920 from his

prison cell and received almost a million votes.

Chris Hedges is a journalist, Pulitzer Prize winner

and a former War Correspondent for the New York Times.

He ended up resigning from the paper because

he didn't agree with their editorial policy.

He has investigated the part played by the elites

during the First World War and the role of George Creel,

the chief organizer of war propaganda.

Creel was

created to destroy Debs and what was created,

and I take this from Dwight Macdonald's observation

is the imposition of the psychosis of permanent war.

You are constantly keeping a population in fear

and in the name of the war on Communism,

you destroy your populist and your radical

movements and disembowel your liberal class.

You re saying that in 1917,

that's when propaganda was invented,

when modern advertising was invented.

Yes because it was the first system of modern

mass propaganda because it employed the understanding

of crowd psychology pioneered by Le Bon, Trotter,

Freud which grasped that people were moved not by fact

or reason but by the skillful manipulation of emotion

and that system of mass propaganda is the model that

Goebbels uses when he creates the Nazi propaganda machine.

And quite specifically Bernays' book Propaganda

and when you read the great radical thinkers of the period,

Randolph Bourne or Jane Addams,

they despair that not only have the masses been seduced by

this propaganda but most of the intellectual elite as well.

So the moment the war is over,

that entire machinery which was massive goes to Madison

Avenue and starts working on behalf of corporations.

That's when

you overturn traditional values of thrift,

self-effacement and you replace them with consumption

as a kind of inner compulsion and the cult of the self.

1917 is also the year of the Russian Revolution

and you're saying they went from the Kraut to the Commie.

Yes and of course, that is correct.

That instantly the dreaded Hun becomes the dreaded Red

and the way they do it is to claim that the Germans,

the Kaiser was behind Lenin's arrival because the train

was allowed passage through Germany from Switzerland

and so the ruling elite recognizes that that

apparatus of propaganda, fear and permanent war

is one that can keep them in power which is why

the moment the Cold War is over, we begin the War

on Terror because it serves the same purpose.

And they recognize that if they perpetuate

that propaganda, that fear and permanent war,

they can get the masses to call for their own

enslavement which is precisely what's happened.

Go right.

Halt.

Left, left, go left, right,

go left.

Thank you very much, you have a good parade, thank you.

They manufactured a will of the people for

a very short time right after the war started

as governments are able to do right after

the beginning of an armed conflict.

They're able to create an atmosphere of

war hysteria and so for a short time,

they captivated the minds of the American people.

Yeah.

Our women are proud of us, yeah, that's right.

The rabbits who didn't have historians

and who knew nothing of their own history didn't say

anything when the hunters arrived with their big guns.

"We're here for your security," the hunters told them.

"We're here to protect you from the terrorist rabbits,

"from the Communist rabbits, from the Jewish rabbits,

"from the Muslim rabbits, from the perverted rabbits,

"from those who want to cook a rabbit stew."

The terrified rabbits, paralyzed in

the hunters' headlights, huddled together.

"There's nothing to be afraid of," the hunters told them.

"You'll be free once you're in the cages

"and don't let our big guns scare you.

"If you want peace, you must prepare war,

"war against the bad guys, a just war.

"War is peace."

What Howard Zinn has to say is the power of

the hunters depends on the obedience of the rabbits.

♪ My will is easy to decide

♪ For there is nothing to divide

♪ My kin don't need to fuss and moan

♪ Moss doesn't cling to a rolling stone

♪ Don't mourn, oh no

♪ Don't mourn, no no

♪ Don't mourn, oh no

♪ Don't mourn, no no

♪ Don't mourn, oh no no no

♪ Don't mourn, organize

♪ My body, ah if I could choose

♪ I would to ashes it reduce

♪ And let the merry breezes blow

♪ My dust to where some flowers grow

♪ Don't mourn, oh no

♪ Don't mourn, no no

♪ Don't mourn, oh no

♪ Don't mourn, no no

♪ Don't mourn, oh no no no

♪ Don't mourn, organize

♪ Perhaps some fading flower then

♪ Would come to life and bloom again

♪ This is my last and final will

♪ Good luck to all of you

♪ Don't mourn, oh no

♪ Don't mourn, no no

♪ Don't mourn, oh no

♪ Don't mourn, no no

♪ Don't mourn, oh no no no

♪ Don't mourn, organize

♪ Don't mourn, oh no

♪ Don't mourn, no no

♪ Don't mourn, oh no

♪ Don't mourn, no no

♪ Don't mourn, oh no no no

♪ Don't mourn, organize