However hateful they may be sometimes, I have always loved the movies. When I began reading and studying history, I kept coming across incidents and events that led me to think, Wow, what a movie this would make. I would look to see if a movie had been made about it, but I’d never find one. It took me a while to realize that Hollywood isn’t going to make movies like the ones I imagined. Hollywood isn’t going to make movies that are class-conscious, or antiwar, or conscious of the need for racial equality or gender equality.
I wondered about this. It seemed to me that the people in Hollywood didn’t all get together in a room and decide, “We’re going to do just this kind of film and not the other kind of film.” Yet it’s not just an oversight or an accident, either. Leon Trotsky once used an expression to describe events that are not accidents, and are not planned deliberately, but are something in between. He called this the “natural selection of accidents,” in which, if there’s a certain structure to a situation, then these “accidents” will inevitably happen, whether anyone plans them or not. It seems that the structure of Hollywood is such that it will not produce the kinds of films that I imagined. It’s a structure where money and profit are absolutely the first consideration: before art, before aesthetics, before human values.
When you consider the films about war that have come out of Hollywood — and there have been hundreds and hundreds, maybe even thousands — they almost always glorify military heroism. We need to think about telling the story of war from a different perspective.
Let’s take one of our most popular wars to begin with: the Revolutionary War. How can you speak against the Revolutionary War, right? But to tell the story of the American Revolution, not from the standpoint of the schoolbooks, but from the standpoint of war as a complex phenomenon intertwined with moral issues, we must acknowledge not just that Americans were oppressed by the English, but that some Americans were oppressed by other Americans. For instance, American Indians did not rush to celebrate the victory of the colonists over England, because for them it meant that the line that the British had drawn to limit westward expansion in the Proclamation of 1763 would now be obliterated. The colonists would be free to move west into Indian lands.
John Adams, one of the Founding Fathers and a revolutionary leader, estimated that one-third of the colonists supported the American Revolution, one-third were opposed, and one-third were neutral. It would be interesting to tell the story of the American Revolution from the viewpoint of an ordinary workingman who hears the Declaration of Independence read to him from a balcony in Boston, promising freedom and equality and so on, and immediately is told that rich men can get out of service by paying several hundred dollars. This man then joins the army, despite his misgivings, despite his own feelings of being oppressed — not just by the British, but by the leaders of the colonial world — because he is promised some land. But as the war progresses and he sees the mutilations and the killing, he becomes increasingly disaffected. There’s no place in society where class divisions are more clear-cut than in the military, and he sees that the officers are living in splendor while the ordinary enlisted men don’t have any clothes or shoes, aren’t being paid, and are being fed slop. So he joins the mutineers.
In the Revolutionary War, there were two mutinies against Washington’s army: the mutiny of the Pennsylvania Line, and the mutiny of the New Jersey Line. Let’s say our workingman joins the Pennsylvania Line, and they march on the Continental Congress, but eventually are surrounded by Washington’s army, and several of their former comrades are forced to shoot several of the mutineers. Then this soldier, embittered by what he’s seen, gets out of the army and gets some land in western Massachusetts. After the war is over, he becomes part of Shays’ Rebellion, in which a group of small farmers rebel against the rich men who control the legislature in Boston and who are imposing heavy taxes on them, taking away their land and farms. The farmers, many of them Revolutionary War veterans, surround the courthouses and refuse to let the auctioneer go in to auction off their farms. The militia is called out to suppress them, and the militia also goes over to their side. Finally an army is raised by the moneyed class in Boston to suppress Shays’ Rebellion.
I have never seen Hollywood tell this kind of story. If you know of a film that has been made about it, I wish you’d tell me so that we could have a celebration of that rare event.
Wars are more complicated than the simple good-versus-evil scenario presented to us in our history books and our culture. Wars are not simply conflicts of one people against another; wars always involve class differences within each side, and victory is very often not shared by everybody, but only among a few. The people who fight the wars are not the people who benefit from the wars.
I think somebody should make a new movie about the Mexican War. I haven’t seen one that tells how the Mexican War started, or how the president of the United States deceived the American people. I know it’s surprising to hear that a president would willfully deceive the people of the United States, but this was one of those rare cases. President James Polk told Americans that Mexican troops had fired at our troops on U.S. soil. Really the fighting broke out on disputed soil that both Mexico and the U.S. had claimed. The war had been planned in advance by the Polk administration, because it coveted this beautiful territory of the Southwest.
It would be interesting to tell that story from the viewpoint of an ordinary soldier, who sees the mayhem and the bloodshed as the army moves into Mexico and destroys town after town. More and more U.S. soldiers grow disaffected from the war, and as they make their final march toward Mexico City, General Scott wakes up one morning to discover that half his army has deserted.
It would be interesting, too, to tell the story from the point of view of one of the Massachusetts volunteers who comes back at the end of the war and is invited to a victory celebration. When the commander of the Massachusetts volunteers gets up to speak, he is booed off the platform by the surviving half of his men, who resent what happened to their comrades in the war and who wonder what they were fighting for. I should tell you: this really happened.
The film could also include a scene after the war in which the U.S. Army is moving to suppress a rebellion in Santa Fe, because mostly Mexicans still live there. The army marches through the streets of Santa Fe, and all the townspeople go into their houses and close the shutters. The army is met by total silence, an expression of how the population feels about this great American victory.
Another little story about the Mexican War is the tale of the deserters. Many of those who volunteered to fight in the Mexican War did so for the same reason that people volunteer for the military today: they were desperately poor and hoped that their fortunes would improve as a result of enlisting. During the Mexican War, some of these volunteers were recent Irish immigrants. When these immigrant soldiers saw what was being done to the people of Mexico, a number of them deserted and went over to the Mexican side. They formed their own battalion, which they called St. Patrick’s Battalion, or the San Patricio Battalion, and they fought for the Mexicans.
It’s not easy to make the Spanish-American War look like a noble enterprise — though of course Hollywood can do anything. The war has gotten a certain amount of attention, because of the heroism of Theodore Roosevelt and his Rough Riders, but not a lot. In the history textbooks, the Spanish-American War is called “a splendid little war.” It lasted three months. We fought it to free the Cubans, because we’re always going to war to free somebody. We expelled the Spaniards from Cuba, but we didn’t expel ourselves, and the United States in effect took over Cuba after the war. One grievance we have against Fidel Castro is that he ended U.S. control of Cuba. We’re certainly not against him simply because he’s a dictator. We’ve never had anything against dictators in general.
I remember learning in school that, as a result of the Spanish-American War, we somehow took over the Philippines, but I never knew the details. When you look into it, you’ll find that the Spanish-American War lasted three months; the Philippine War lasted for years and was a brutal, bloody suppression of the Filipino movement for independence. In many ways, it was a precursor of the Vietnam War, in terms of the atrocities committed by the U.S. Army. Now, that’s a story that has never been told.
Black American soldiers in the Philippines soon began to identify more with the Filipinos than with their fellow white Americans. While these black soldiers were fighting to suppress the Filipinos, they also were hearing from relatives about the lynchings and race riots in their hometowns. They were hearing about black people being killed in large numbers — and here they were, fighting against a nonwhite people on behalf of the United States government. A number of black soldiers deserted and went over to fight with the Filipinos.
In 1906, when the Philippine War was supposedly over — but really the U.S. Army was still suppressing pockets of rebellion — there was a massacre. That’s the only way to describe it. The Moros are inhabitants of a southern island in the Philippines. The army swooped down and annihilated a Moro village of six hundred men, women, and children — all of whom were unarmed. Every last one of them was killed. Mark Twain wrote angrily about this. He was especially angry about the fact that President Theodore Roosevelt sent a letter of congratulations to the military commander who had ordered this atrocity, saying it was a great military victory. Have you ever seen a movie in which Theodore Roosevelt was presented as a racist? As an imperialist? As a supporter of massacres? And there he is, up on Mount Rushmore. I’ve had the thought: A hammer, a chisel. But no, it wouldn’t do.
War needs to be presented on film in such a way as to encourage the population simply to say no to war. We need a film about those heroic Americans who protested World War I. When you look at them, you see socialists, pacifists, and just ordinary people who saw the stupidity of entering a war that was taking the lives of 10 million people in Europe. You see Emma Goldman, the feminist and anarchist, who went to prison for opposing the draft and the war. You see Helen Keller. Every film about Helen Keller concentrates on the fact that she was disabled. I’ve never seen a film in which Helen Keller is presented as what she was: a radical, a socialist, an antiwar agitator. You also see Kate Richards O’Hare, a socialist who was put in jail for opposing World War I. There is a story from her time in prison that would make a great scene in a movie: The prisoners are stifling for lack of air, and O’Hare takes a book that she’s been reading, reaches through the bars, and hurls the book through a skylight to let the air in. All the prisoners applaud and cheer.
I have to acknowledge that there have been a few antiwar films made about World War I. All Quiet on the Western Front is an extraordinary film. I recently wrote an article comparing it to Saving Private Ryan. Despite the mayhem, Saving Private Ryan was essentially a glorification of war, whereas All Quiet on the Western Front expresses a diamond-clear antiwar sentiment.
What about the many films devoted to World War II, the “good war”? When Studs Terkel did his oral history of World War II, he called it The “Good War,” with quotation marks around Good War. In that war, we fought against a terrible evil — fascism — but our own atrocities multiplied as the war went on, culminating in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I have not seen a Hollywood film about the bombing of Hiroshima. The closest we’ve come to a movie that deals with our bombing of civilian populations was the film version of Kurt Vonnegut’s book Slaughterhouse-Five, about the bombing of Dresden, Germany, and that was a rarity.
Films about the Civil War tend to focus on the famous battles, like Gettysburg, Fredericksburg, and Bull Run. The Civil War is, again, one of our “good wars” — the slaves were freed because of it — but it is not that simple. There is the class element of who was and who was not drafted, who paid substitutes, who made huge amounts of money off the war. And then there is what happened to the Indians. In the midst of the Civil War, while the armies were fighting in the South, another part of the Union Army was out west, destroying Indian settlements and taking over Indian land. In 1864, not long after the Emancipation Proclamation, the U.S. Army was in Colorado attacking an Indian village, killing hundreds of men, women, and children at Sand Creek, in one of the worst Indian massacres in American history. This massacre occurred during the war to end slavery. In the years of the Civil War, more land was taken from the Indians than in any other comparable period in history.
There’s a lot of historical work to be done, a lot of films that need to be made. There are so many class struggles in the U.S. that could be dealt with in movies. We’ve seen movies that deal with working-class people, but it’s always some individual who rises up out of his or her situation and “makes it” in society. Stories of Americans who organize and get together to oppose the powers that hold them down have been very rare.
The American political system and the revered and celebrated Constitution of the United States do not grant any economic rights to the American people. We very often forget that the Constitution gives political rights but not economic rights. If you are not wealthy, then your political rights are limited, even though they are guaranteed on paper in the Constitution. The freedom of speech is granted there, but how much free speech you have depends on how much money and what access to resources you have. The Declaration of Independence talks about the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But how can you have life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness if you don’t have food, housing, and healthcare?
Working people throughout history have had to organize, struggle, go on strike, declare boycotts, and face the police and the army. They have had to do it themselves, against the opposition of government, in order to win the eight-hour workday and other slight improvements to their working conditions. A great film remains to be made about the Haymarket Affair of 1886, which was part of the struggle for the eight-hour workday. The Haymarket Affair culminated in the execution of four anarchists who were charged with planting a bomb, though in the end nobody ever found out who really had planted it.
The great railroad strike of 1894 tied up the railway system of the United States, and all the power of the army and the courts had to be brought against the striking workers. Eugene Debs, who organized the railroad workers, has never been the central figure in a movie. He was sent to prison for opposing World War I, and he made such an impression on his fellow prisoners that, when he was released, the warden let all the inmates out into the yard, and they applauded as Debs was granted his freedom.
I’ve met someone who is actually writing a script about the Lawrence textile strike of 1912, a magnificent episode in American history, because the striking workers won. It was a multicultural strike. A working population that spoke twelve different languages got together and defied the textile companies and the police, who were sent to the railroad station to prevent the children of the workers from leaving town. Police literally attacked the women and children at the station, because the company wanted to starve out the strikers, and that would be less likely to happen if their children were safe. But the strikers held out, and with the help of the Industrial Workers of the World, they finally won.
Then there’s the Ludlow Massacre, which took place during the Colorado coal strike of 1913-14, one of the most bitter, bloody, dramatic strikes in American history. The workers were up against the Rockefeller interests. (It’s not easy to make an unflattering film about the Rockefellers.) One of the strike’s leaders was Mother Jones, an eighty-three-year-old woman who had previously organized textile workers in West Virginia and Pennsylvania. That’s another story that should be told. There were kids working in the textile mills at the age of eleven and twelve. Mother Jones led these children on a march from Pennsylvania to Oyster Bay, New York, where President Theodore Roosevelt was on summer vacation. They stood there outside the resort with signs that said, We Want Time to Play. Has there ever been a film made about that?
We’ve had films on Christopher Columbus, but I don’t know of any film that shows Columbus as what he was: a man ruled by the capitalist ethic. Columbus and the Spaniards were killing people for gold. The Catholic priest Bartolomé de Las Casas was an eyewitness. He exposed what was going on, and a remarkable debate took place before the Royal Commission of Spain in 1650. The debate was between Las Casas and Sepulveda, another priest, who argued that the Indians were not human and therefore you could do anything you wanted to them.
There’s also the story of the Trail of Tears — the expulsion of the Cherokees from the Southeast. Andrew Jackson, one of our national heroes, signed the order to expel them. That was ethnic cleansing on a large scale: the march across the continent, the U.S. Army driving the Indians from their homeland to a little space in Oklahoma that was then called “Indian Territory.” When oil was later discovered there, the Indian population was once again evicted. Of the sixteen thousand people who marched westward, four thousand died on the march, while the U.S. Army pushed them, and the U.S. president extolled what happened.
Of course someone should finally tell the story of black people in the United States from a black person’s point of view. We’ve had a number of films about the civil-rights movement from white points of view. The Long Walk Home (1991) tells the story of the Montgomery bus boycott from Sissy Spacek’s point of view. Mississippi Burning (1988) is about the murder of three civil-rights workers in Mississippi in 1964. The FBI agents are the heroes of the film, but every person who was in Mississippi in 1964 — my wife and I were both there at the time — knew that the FBI was the enemy. The FBI was watching people being beaten and not doing anything about it. The FBI was silent and absent when people needed protection against murderers. In this Hollywood film, they become heroes. We need the story of the civil-rights movement told from the viewpoint of black people.
Of course, many good movies and wonderful documentaries have been made. Michael Moore’s film Roger and Me, which has been seen by tens of millions of people, is a remarkable success story. So the possibilities do exist to practice a kind of guerrilla warfare and make films outside of the Hollywood establishment.
If such films are made — about war, about class conflict, about the history of governmental lies, about broken treaties and official violence — if those stories reach the public, we might produce a new generation. As a teacher, I’m not interested in just reproducing class after class of graduates who will get out, become successful, and take their obedient places in the slots that society has prepared for them. What we must do — whether we teach or write or make films — is educate a new generation to do this very modest thing: change the world.
“Stories Hollywood Never Tells” is an edited version of a talk given at the Taos Film Festival, Taos, New Mexico, April 17, 1999. It is excerpted from Artists in Times of War, by Howard Zinn, an Open Media Book, published by Seven Stories Press, New York, NY. © 2003 by Howard Zinn.
