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Unsung Heroes
The Real Role Models Didn't Make It To Rushmore
A high school student recently confronted me: "I read in
your book A People's History of the United States about the
massacres of Indians, the long history of racism, the per
sistence of poverty in the richest country in the world, the
senseless wars. How can I keep from being thoroughly alienated
and depressed?"
It's a question I've heard many times before. Another ques
tion often put to me by students is: Don't we need our national
idols? You are taking down all our national heroes—the
Founding Fathers, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore
Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, John F. Kennedy.
Granted, it is good to have historical figures we can admire
and emulate. But why hold up as models the 55 rich white men
who drafted the Constitution as a way of establishing a govern
ment that would protect the interests of their class—slave
holders, merchants, bondholders, land speculators?
Why not recall the humanitarianism of William Penn, an early
colonist who made peace with the Delaware Indians instead of
warring on them, as other colonial leaders were doing?
Why not John Woolman, who, in the years before the
Revolution, refused to pay taxes to support the British wars, and
who spoke out against slavery?
Why not Captain Daniel Shays, veteran of the Revolutionary
War, who led a revolt of poor farmers in Western Massachusetts
against the oppressive taxes levied by the rich who controlled
the Massachusetts legislature?
Why go along with the hero-worship, so universal in our his
tory textbooks, of Andrew Jackson, the slave-owner, the killer of
Indians? Jackson was the architect of the Trail of Tears, which
resulted in the depths of 4,000 of 16,000 Cherokees who*were
kicked off their land in Georgia and sent into exile in Oklahoma.
Why not replace him as national icon with John Ross, a
Cherokee chief who resisted the dispossession of his people, and
whose wife died on the Trail of
Tears? Or the Seminole leader
Osceola, imprisoned and finally
killed for leading a guerrilla cam
paign against the removal of the
Indians?
And while we're at it, should not
the Lincoln Memorial be joined by a
memorial to Frederick Douglass,
who better represented the struggle
against slavery? It was that crusade
of black and white abolitionists,
growing into a great national move
ment, that pushed a reluctant
Lincoln into finally issuing a half-hearted Emancipation .
Proclamation, and persuaded Congress to pass the Thirteenth,
Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments.
Take another Presidential hero, Theodore Roosevelt, who is
always near the top of the tiresome lists of Our Greatest
Presidents. There he is on Mount Rushmore, as a permanent
reminder cf our historical amnesia about his racism, his mili
tarism, his love of war.
Why not replace him as hero—granted, removing him from
Mount Rushmore will take some doing—with Mark Twain?
Roosevelt, remember, had congratulated an American general
who in 1906 ordered the massacre of 600 men, women and chil
dren on a Philippine island. As vice president of the Anti-
Imperialist League, Twain denounced this and continued to
point out the cruelties committed in the Philippine war under
the slogan "My country, right or wrong."
As for Woodrow Wilson, another honored figure in the pan
theon of American liberalism, shouldn't we remind his admirers
that he insisted on racial segregation in federal building:, that
he bombarded the Mexican coast, sent an occupation army into
Haiti and the Dominican Republic, brought our country into the
hell of World War I and put anti-war protesters in prison?
Should we not bring forward as a national hero Emma
Goldman, one of those Wilson sent to prison, or Helen Keller,
who fearlessly spoke out against the war?
And enough worship of John F. Kennedy, a Cold Warrior who
began the covert war in Indochina, went along with the planned
invasion of Cuba and was slow to act against racial segregation
in the South.
Should we not replace the portraits of our Presidents, which
too often take up all the space on our classroom walls, with the
likenesses of grassroots heroes like Fannie Lou Hamer, the
Mississippi sharecropper? Mrs. Hamer was evicted from her farm
and tortured in prison after she joined the civil rights move
ment, but she became an eloquent voice for freedom. Or with
Ella Baker, whose wise counsel and support guided the young
black people in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee,
the militant edge of the civil rights movement in the Deep
South?
In the year 1992, the quincentennial of the arrival of
Columbus in this hemisphere, there were meetings all over the
country to celebrate him, but also, for the first time, to chal
lenge the customary exaltation of the Great Discoverer. I was at
a symposium in New Jersey where I pointed to the terrible
crimes against the indigenous people of Hispaniola committed
by Columbus and his fellow Spaniards. Afterward, the other man
on the platform, who was chairman of the New Jersey Columbus
Day celebration, said to me: "You don't understand—we Italian
Americans need our heroes." Yes, I understood the desire for
heroes, I said, but why choose a murderer and kidnapper for
such an honor? Why not choose Joe DiMaggio, or Toscanini, or
Fiorello LaGuardia, or Sacco and Vanzeiti? (The man was not
persuaded.)
The same misguided values that have made slaveholders,
Ind’an-killers, anti militarists the heroes of our history books
still operate today. We have heard Senator John McCain,
Republican of Arizona, repeatedly referred to as a war hero. Yes,
we must sympathize with McCain's ordeal as a war prisoner in
Vietnam, where he endured cruelties. But must we call someone
a hero who participated in the invasion of a far-off country and
dropped bombs on men, women and children?
I came across only one voice in the mainstream press daring
to dissent from the general admiration for McCain—that of the
poet, novelist ana Boston Globe columnist James Carroll. Carroll
contrasted the heroism of McCain,
the warrior, to that of Philip
Berrigan, who has gone to prison
dozens of times for protesting the
war in Vietnam and the dangerous
nuclear arsenal maintained by our
government. Carroll wrote:
"Berrigan, in jail, is the truly free
man, while McCain remains impris
oned in an unexamined sense of
martial honor."
Our country is full of heroic
people who are not Presidents or
military leaders or Wall Street wiz
ards, but who are doing something to keep alive the spirit of
resistance to injustice and war.
I think of Kathy Kelly and all those other people from Voices
in the Wilderness who, in defiance of federal law, have traveled
to Iraq more than a dozen times to bi ing food and medicine to
people suffering under the U.S.-imposed sanctions.
I think also of the thousands of students on more than 100
college campuses across the country who are protesting their
universities' connection with sweatshop-produced apparel.
I think of the four McDonald sisters in Minneapolis, all nuns,
who have gone to jail repeatedly for protesting against the
Alliant Corporation's production of land mines.
I think, too, of the thousands of people who have traveled to
Fort Benning, Georgia, to demand the closing of the murderous
School of the Americas.
I think of the West Coast Longshoremen who participated in
an eight-hour work stoppage to protest the-death sentence
levied against Mumia Abu-Jamal.
And so many more.
We all know individuals—most of them unsung, unrecog
nized—who have, often in the most modest ways, spoken out or
acted on their beliefs for a more egalitarian, more just, peace-
loving society.
To ward off alienation and gloom, it is only necessary to
remember the unremembered heroes of the past, and to look
around us for the unnot.ced heroes of the present.
Howard Zinn
Howard Zinn is a columnist for The Progressive, where this
article originally appeared.
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