At least two things were at play here and coloured my outlook: I was very young and, like all very young folk, very impressionable; and it was the height of the Cold War in which the world, or most of it, acknowledged that there were ‘the Good Guys and the Bad Guys’. For us, ‘the West’ and ‘the Free World’, we were the Good Guys and ‘the ‘Ruskies’ and other ‘Commies’ were the Bad Guys.
Of course, for many it was the other way round: for countries in Africa, the Middle East, Asia and South America where ‘the Ruskies’ and the ‘Commies’ were seen as allies in the struggle against nasty dictatorships, they were seen as the Good Guys, and the putative ‘Free World’ which for purely venal reasons all too often bolstered and often put in place many a nasty dictatorship, they were the Bad Guys.
That gullible ten-year-old, 60-odd years down the line, has learned a lot more history and seen a lot more of life, both personally and at a distance. He no longer believes in black and white, but in infinite shades of grey, with the occasional darker and brighter shades, and the, even less occasional, almost jet-black and almost pure-white spots. This gullible ten-year-old 60-odd years (who if truth be told has had quite an easy, comfortable and happy life) somehow manages down the line to be both cynically pessimistic and agreeably optimistic.
He now knows that ‘America’s’ — and in the United States’s — 1950s outbreak of prosperity and the picture of affluence it was able to purvey throughout much of the world was almost wholly the result of the resurgence of its domestic industries because of World War II. It was a war which was, in a sense, a god-send for the United States. Until Japan — it has to be said inexplicably — attacked Pearl Harbor and the US joined the war, the nation was still largely on its uppers.
Given the vast social discrepancies between the haves and have nots, as great in ‘the land of the free’ as anywhere else despite the faux-patriot insistence than in the ‘land of the free’ anyone could make it, some, many even, were doing quite nicely thank you after a few lean years at the beginning of the 1930s. But a great many more were not and were still scrabbling around for steady work and a steady income to feed their families. For much of the 1930s a staggering one in four men was without a job. But World War II changed all that.
Almost overnight the nation’s factories would be put back to work to produce goods needed for the war effort. And folk again had jobs, a steady income and a future. Until then, though, the US was in parts as much like what we until recently — and patronisingly — referred to as ‘Third World’ countries as were those ‘Third World’ countries. The Northern eastern seaboard states were perhaps in reasonable fettle, but, for example, until ‘that socialist’ Huey Long was elected governor of Louisiana, the whole state had less than 400 miles of tarmacked roads. And the dustbowl of the Mid-West was in an appalling state.
Roosevelt’s first New Deal went some way to alleviating the lives of many at the bottom of the pile, but the nation’s economy was still sluggish and he launched a second New Deal a few years later, giving manual workers rights to join trades unions. But congressional opposition slowly grews — none of the politicians were on there uppers — and the bad times dragged on and remained bad until it was kickstarted by the US entering the war. Then it all changed.
She sheen came off the ‘American Dream’ for those in the ‘free West’ who had observed the country so enviously when the Vietnam War was escalated (a war, incidentally, started by the French, but they rarely get the blame).
Arguably however horrible war is, a case can be made for ‘a just war’. World War II was ‘a just war’. But World War I wasn’t and neither were either the Korean War and the Vietnam War. But it was the latter which really fucked the ‘America’s image’. Timing didn’t help. At the time of the Korean War the West was still in war mode and prepared to die for ‘world peace’. But the late 1960s the WWII survivors were getting on, getting comfortable and getting impatient with their sons and daughters who were as unconvinced by the US’s pious democratic sanctity was we have been ever since.
Those sons and daughters, ironically today’s reactionary generation, refused to play the game, and as more and more of their generation died completely futile deaths in the Far East, they were less and less inclined to help to perpetuate the patriotic myth — as it happened a myth that was less than 30 years old but as a rule folk have short memories — that it was the United States destiny to ‘save the world’. But that’s only one side of the coin.
The other side is a loathsome, offensive, simplistic and widespread knee-jerk anti-Americanism, and it is not restricted to the political left of any country. It is bizarrely quite common. Yet whenever some silly anti-American generalisation is aired there is usually ripply of approval. ‘The Americans are all . . . ‘ What, all of them, all 330 million of them?
On many issues I am the last man to defend many American practices and attitudes. For all its much-touted status as ‘land of the free’, the US as more six times as many of its citizens banged up in jail per head of population than does ‘Red’ China. On the other hand you have a better chance of loudly ranting against the government and staying out of jail or even alive in the US than you do in China. So what does that tell us? Very little, actually, except that the world is a complex place and it is not just stupid but dangerously stupid to try to reduce it to one or two smug certainties. Anyone who thinks she or he understands the world is deluded.
. . .
There was much in that book which appalled me as very little had appalled me before. I could and can never again see the United States as a defender of human rights after reading Zinn’s quite sober and unsensational account of the wholesale genocide of what I as a that ten-year-old ‘red indians’ and to whom we now rather more respectfully describe as ‘native Americans’.
Then there are America’s black population. I am at the moment watching Ken Burns’s account of the American Civil War and its purported emancipation of black American slaves, and cannot forget, because of what I read in Zinn’s book, how within just 12 years of the end of the Civil War, blacks were back were they started with the first establishment of the first Jim Crow laws. And from there on — for the next 100 years — it got worse and worse. Take a look to the left. I am no sentimental liberal but since then I cannot hear Billie Holiday’s rendition of the song Strange Fruit without tears coming to my eyes. And I’m as white as chalk. For those who are unfamiliar with it, you can hear it below. And if you didn’t know — but I’m sure you will guess — the ‘strange fruit’ she sings of are the bodies of lynched blacks hanging from the trees.
Zinn makes a very good point in his book about white working class racism. He believes — he claims, I am obliged to write, but I can only say that he makes a great deal of sense for me from what I know of the world — that whipping up hatred of the white underclass against blacks in order to suppress newly emancipated blacks (‘they’re after your jobs!’) was simply a cynical ploy by the ruling class (I can’t believe I’ve used that phrase, but, well, I have because it is true) to kill two birds with one stone.
. . .
All this came to mind — the assumed efficiency and glamour of 1950s America as much as everything else — over these past few days when I read about the complete pig’s ear Donald Trump is making of his country’s response to the coronavirus, the lies he is telling, the confusion he is sowing, the history he is re-writing. Yet apparently as much as his reputation among many in the US is falling — even if it can fall any further — in other quarters it is rising. Those who cheered along the would-be iconoclast who promised them he would ‘drain the Washington swamp’ are convinced that the growing, ever more appalled antagonism towards Trump and how unbelievably ham-fisted he is proving to be is simply more ‘proof’ that ‘they’ are out to get their man. And that thus their man, Trump, somehow must be right.
From what I know of US history the times are not, in fact, exceptionally extraordinary. But what is different is that the world in 2020 is different (as the spread of coronavirus has shown us) than what is was in 1820 or 1920. We smug Brits are half-convinced that when all is said and done those loud, whooping, classless, tacky Yanks have pretty much got a screw loose and not much else can be expected from them. What, though, all of them? All 330 million of them? My one week (!) in the US, a week’s visit to New York in June 1989, was long enough to teach me that however much we Brits think the US is ‘like us’ because we speak the same language, it just ain’t so. It is as much a foreign country as Russia or Tibet. And I suspect that in some ways there are ‘several countries’ even within the US — just how much to Texans have in common with the folk in Maine, for example?
The main difference the US makes to the world is by virtue of its size and the size of its economy. But that is a hell of a difference. And because of the impact it has the world, and not just the US, really does not need a total idiot like Trump in charge. The sad thing is there’s bugger all we can do about it.
Might I end on a plea: if you feel that despite my pious disclaimer I am also guilty of knee-jerk anti-Americanism, can I urge you to accept that I am not, that the impression is merely conveyed by this piece not being as well written as it might have been?
