David Rieff: Justice Begins at Home
[David Rieff is the author of eight books including A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis.]
In 1914...France and the United States had roughly the same income gap, with the top decile of income share in both countries somewhat over 40 percent and climbing to close to 50 percent at the depth of the Great Depression. After World War II, and basically until the early 1980s (when, er, who was president, by the way?), U.S. and French income disparities were roughly equal. No, it was not morning in America, as only African Americans, who remained skeptical about President Reagan when majorities in almost every other major demographic group looked at him favorably, seemed to realize. Since then, the level in France has remained fairly stable while U.S. levels have climbed dramatically, and still are climbing.
Imagine that in 1914, when France’s colonial empire was at its zenith, the miners described by Zola in Germinal, or the slum dwellers in the novels of Jules Valles, had dismissed their own concerns instead focusing approvingly on France’s right to an empire because of a civilizing mission it alone could carry out (shades of the contemporary cant about American exceptionalism and America’s self-correcting constitutional system that makes our country “inherently good,” as one liberal policy analyst—forget about Michelle Bachmann—unapologetically put it a couple of years ago). One can’t: The suggestion is preposterous on its face. But if that’s right, why, then, should we? Indeed, how can we dare to do so?...
For now, most of us are still prisoners of American labor history as viewed through the prism of this post-World War II historical anomaly. And what, by European standards, in fact was an extraordinarily sanguinary effort by American capitalism to suppress the American labor movement, one that can be traced from the Molly Maguires in Pennsylvania in the 1870s, through the Pinkertons hired by John D. Rockefeller firing on the miners in Ludlow, Colorado, in 1914, to the Reuther brothers battling Henry Ford’s goons at the River Rouge auto plant in Dearborn, Michigan, from 1937 through the great strike of 1941, has largely disappeared from the generally accepted sense we have (and our children are taught) about the American past....
Much as I admired him, I disagreed with the late Howard Zinn about any number of things. But to his eternal credit he was a popular historian for whom the heroic struggle—and for those of you tempted to smirk at the use of such an unsophisticated, perhaps even a sentimental word, don’t: Heroic is exactly what it was!—of the American labor movement for a living wage and decent working conditions was at least as important as Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points. Of course, I would far prefer there to be almost no humanitarian military interventions at all, and certainly no open-ended American global commitment to promoting democracy. Our modern Wilsonians could do worse than follow his example. But promoting democracy abroad while paying comparatively little heed to the fact that America is less and less a democracy? As Duke Ellington liked to say, that question has no future.
Read entire article at The New Republic
In 1914...France and the United States had roughly the same income gap, with the top decile of income share in both countries somewhat over 40 percent and climbing to close to 50 percent at the depth of the Great Depression. After World War II, and basically until the early 1980s (when, er, who was president, by the way?), U.S. and French income disparities were roughly equal. No, it was not morning in America, as only African Americans, who remained skeptical about President Reagan when majorities in almost every other major demographic group looked at him favorably, seemed to realize. Since then, the level in France has remained fairly stable while U.S. levels have climbed dramatically, and still are climbing.
Imagine that in 1914, when France’s colonial empire was at its zenith, the miners described by Zola in Germinal, or the slum dwellers in the novels of Jules Valles, had dismissed their own concerns instead focusing approvingly on France’s right to an empire because of a civilizing mission it alone could carry out (shades of the contemporary cant about American exceptionalism and America’s self-correcting constitutional system that makes our country “inherently good,” as one liberal policy analyst—forget about Michelle Bachmann—unapologetically put it a couple of years ago). One can’t: The suggestion is preposterous on its face. But if that’s right, why, then, should we? Indeed, how can we dare to do so?...
For now, most of us are still prisoners of American labor history as viewed through the prism of this post-World War II historical anomaly. And what, by European standards, in fact was an extraordinarily sanguinary effort by American capitalism to suppress the American labor movement, one that can be traced from the Molly Maguires in Pennsylvania in the 1870s, through the Pinkertons hired by John D. Rockefeller firing on the miners in Ludlow, Colorado, in 1914, to the Reuther brothers battling Henry Ford’s goons at the River Rouge auto plant in Dearborn, Michigan, from 1937 through the great strike of 1941, has largely disappeared from the generally accepted sense we have (and our children are taught) about the American past....
Much as I admired him, I disagreed with the late Howard Zinn about any number of things. But to his eternal credit he was a popular historian for whom the heroic struggle—and for those of you tempted to smirk at the use of such an unsophisticated, perhaps even a sentimental word, don’t: Heroic is exactly what it was!—of the American labor movement for a living wage and decent working conditions was at least as important as Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points. Of course, I would far prefer there to be almost no humanitarian military interventions at all, and certainly no open-ended American global commitment to promoting democracy. Our modern Wilsonians could do worse than follow his example. But promoting democracy abroad while paying comparatively little heed to the fact that America is less and less a democracy? As Duke Ellington liked to say, that question has no future.