The four biggest myths they tell about U.S. history

The Trump administration has hijacked the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Declaration of Independence not only for its crass grifts, but to promote its ideological view of U.S. history. This view rests on comforting myths about the history of the nation that conservatives and many liberals embrace. Two U.S. socialists dispel the myths and tell a history that Trump and his enablers would like to bury.

The U.S. is the “world’s greatest democracy”

The U.S. Declaration of Independence from Britain in 1776 uses some radical language: “all men are created equal”; governments derive “just powers from the consent of the governed”; “the right of the people to alter or to abolish” government, and so on. The colonial elite used this sort of rhetoric to mobilize the population to cast their lot with independence from Britain.

But the founders, mostly drawn from the leading merchants and plantation owners, weren’t about to turn their newly independent state over to artisans and farmers. One of the most class conscious of them, Alexander Hamilton, the first treasury secretary, put it succinctly: “that power that holds the purse strings absolutely must rule.”

Given that the colonial population had fought a revolution to win independence, the founders realized that it was impossible to simply junk democracy. But they wanted to ensure that the government did not allow the many to unite to threaten the property of the few.

Shay’s Rebellion of 1786, an armed uprising of western Massachusetts farmers against confiscation of their property to pay state debts, shook the post-colonial elite. It decided to scrap the Articles of Confederation (the original national government) in favor of a stronger federal government under the U.S. Constitution.

General Henry Knox said of Shay’s rebels: “Their creed is that the property of the United States has been protected from the confiscation of Britain by the joint exertions of all and therefore ought to be the common property of all.” Knox continued, “This dreadful situation has alarmed every man of principle and property in New England.”

Much of the 1787 constitutional convention obsessed on this question of preventing the majority from asserting its will. The founders created a system in which, initially, only one part of the government (the House of Representatives) was directly elected. Until only a bit more than 100 years ago, state governments, not voters, picked U.S. senators. Today, under the Electoral College system, U.S. voters still don’t directly elect the president.

The Constitution’s “checks and balances” fragmented power so that the majority could not push its representatives to enact any “improper or wicked project” against the propertied, as James Madison, the main drafter of the Constitution, wrote. The key such “wicked project” the framers feared ultimately amounted to the largest expropriation of wealth in U.S. history: the abolition of slavery. Future president Madison hailed from the Virginia aristocracy whose economic and political power derived from plantation slavery.

Other features of the U.S. system, such as the Electoral College and the equal representation of states regardless of size or population in the U.S. Senate, represented “compromises” with the slave owners’ power that even the Civil War didn’t eliminate.

The Constitution initially counted enslaved people as “three-fifths” of white people for purposes of representation in Congress. Women could not vote until the 20th century. To the framers, the Bill of Rights (for freedom of speech, freedom of religion, the right to legal due process among others) was an afterthought added only to assure the Constitution’s ratification in the states.

The USA stands for “liberty and justice” for all.

The end of slavery with the 1861-1865 Civil War could have—but didn’t—bring about racial equality. Congress passed and states ratified the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution that abolished slavery, granted citizenship and equal protection to former slaves, and explicitly prohibited discrimination in voting rights of citizens on the basis of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

But the Reconstruction Era after the war opened a new power struggle to determine whether those rights would become a reality. The former Confederate states fought to preserve the system of white supremacy, while former slaves and Radical Republicans championed an end to racial discrimination.

Newly freed African Americans made clear their intention to transform Southern plantation society into a participatory democracy. Poor whites in Southern states began voting Republican for the first time in the early years of Reconstruction, based on common class interests.

African Americans embraced political activism and posed a challenge to corporate rule. Florida’s Black legislators, for example, collectively stated their opposition to a pro-corporate bill in 1872: “Capital needs no legislation in order to provide for its use. Capital is strong enough to take care and provide for itself, but corporations are a dangerous power, especially large or consolidated corporations, and the American people fear them with distrust.”

On the other side, white supremacists’ slogan for the defeat of Reconstruction was “Redemption.” The Redeemers did not attempt to overturn Reconstruction at the federal level, but by defeating Republicans at state polls using violence and voting fraud.

The Ku Klux Klan (KKK) was the Redeemers’ primary vehicle for lynching, home burnings, and other forms of racial violence used to defeat Reconstruction. Leading members of the Democratic Party used the KKK to drive out radical Republicans, both Black and white, after the Civil War. Historian Jack Bloom described the situation in Alabama: “In one county, the polling place was stormed as the ballots were being counted; the judge who was counting was fired upon, his son was killed, and the ballot box was stolen.”

But the Republicans shared common class interests with Democrats, including a strong allegiance to manufacturers’ right to make their profits with workers “free” from labor unions. The Republican Party establishment ultimately defeated its own radical wing, uniting with Democrats to enact the Compromise of 1877, withdrawing federal troops from the South—dealing Reconstruction its final blow.

Southern lawmakers passed segregation laws (nicknamed “Jim Crow” laws) and voting restrictions disenfranchising African Americans across the South as the century drew to a close. Jim Crow banned all forms of racial integration, forbidding poor whites and poor Blacks from having any social contact. White racists went on the rampage after the defeat of Reconstruction, using lynching, castration, and other mob violence to impose a reign of terror on the African American population.

As historian Lee Sustar noted, “Between 1882 and 1903, 285 people were lynched in Louisiana, 232 of them Black, and many of the rest immigrant workers.” This example demonstrates how the violence of Jim Crow was directed against not only Black people but also other racially oppressed parts of the population. Racial discrimination, including racist violence, remains ingrained in the legal system today. The U.S. today has the highest incarceration rate of any self-proclaimed “democracy” in the world, with a prison population that is disproportionately made up of Blacks and other people of color.

But racial segregation was also a tool to “divide and conquer” the entire U.S. working class. White Southern workers and poor sharecroppers did not benefit from the extreme level of racism. In fact, the higher the level of racism, the more they lost. When the racist poll tax was passed in the South, imposing property and other requirements designed to shut out Black voters, many poor whites also lost the right to vote. After Mississippi passed its poll tax law, the number of qualified white voters fell from 130,000 to 68,000.

The effects of segregation extended well beyond the electoral arena—and empowered only the rule of capital. Whenever employers have been able to use racism to divide Black from white workers, preventing unionization, both Black and white workers earn lower wages. The South today remains a bastion of low wages and anti-unionism.

The U.S. fights for “freedom and democracy” around the world

As a state whose origins lay in a war of independence against the world’s most powerful empire at the time, the U.S. has often deployed the rhetoric of “freedom,” “democracy” and “self-determination” to justify its actions on the world stage. U.S. President Woodrow Wilson famously promoted U.S. intervention in the First World War as necessary to “make the world safe for democracy.”

When U.S. president James Monroe proclaimed his “doctrine” in 1823 against “old world” meddling in the Americas, the newly independent states of Latin America applauded it. During the 1898 U.S. war with Spain, indigenous independence forces in Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines initially believed that the U.S. would support their causes. After ending Spanish rule, the U.S. fought bloody (and in the case of the Philippines genocidal) wars of occupation to establish the U.S. empire beyond its shores.

The period of the Spanish-American war is often considered the time when the U.S. emerged as an imperial power. But that forgets that the U.S. “forged” the U.S. empire, in the phrase of socialist Sidney Lens, in the conquest of the continent—taking most of northern Mexico in the 1847-48 war—and the extermination of the native population. Having achieved domination of a large part of the North American continent by the end of the 19^th century, the U.S. looked outside its borders to establish its global reach.

Although it arrived late on the empire-building scene, the U.S. operated no differently than the European empires. It turned the Caribbean into a virtual U.S. lake. In the more than a century since the Spanish-American War, the U.S. has invaded Cuba five times; Honduras four times; Panama four times; and twice each for Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua; and Grenada once.

Gen. Smedley Butler, who headed many U.S. military interventions in the early part of the 20^th century, later provided a stark account of his career:

I have spent 34 years in active service as a member of the Marine Corps. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for big business, for Wall Street and for the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism.

The First and Second World Wars resulted from the struggle between rival capitalist classes over the division of the globe. For example, the carve-up of the Ottoman Empire between Britain and France after the First World War set boundaries of most of the countries of today’s Middle East.

Even the U.S. claims to fight the Second World War for freedom and democracy wane when one considers that the U.S. largely closed its borders to Jewish refugees, imprisoned U.S. citizens of Japanese descent, fought with a segregated army, and quickly rehabilitated Nazis and their European collaborators to aid the U.S. in its post-war struggle against the Soviet Union.

The Second World War ended with the division of the world into two rival empires–the U.S.-led Western bloc and the Russian-led Eastern bloc. Until the Eastern bloc collapsed in 1989, the Cold War competition between the U.S. and the USSR threatened nuclear war. To “stop the spread of communism,” the U.S. fought wars in Vietnam and Korea. And it used the same excuse to destabilize and overthrow regimes it opposed–from the Mossadegh government in Iran in 1953 to the Allende government in Chile in 1973.

U.S. officials have justified wars and interventions with rhetoric about “protecting democracy,” “stopping aggression,” or, more recently, performing “humanitarian” duties. But these merely cover the real aims of U.S. policy–to make the world safe for big business and to establish, as President George H.W. Bush said after the 1991 Gulf War, that “what we say goes.”

In the US, anyone can achieve the “American Dream” if they work hard enough.

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, … I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” These words, etched on the Statue of Liberty, have greeted generations of arriving immigrants.

But that is where the welcome ends, which they learned as soon as they entered Ellis Island for processing. Migrant workers, especially Black and Brown migrants, quickly find themselves on the receiving end of discrimination in every walk of life, from open racism to poverty wages. And when capitalist politicians find it financially or politically expedient, they just slam the door shut on immigration while carrying out mass deportations.

Trump’s deportations are not the rare exception that they might seem. Obama, for example, also drastically raised the number of deportations via executive order. The “Red Scares” of the 1920s and 1950s, were ruling class responses to periods of working-class struggle and radicalization—whipping up anti-communist and anti-immigrant hysteria to justify persecuting and crushing the left. Large scale deportations featured prominently in both.

The Constitution, as argued above, is designed not to protect democracy but rather the wealth of the capitalist class. Its framers feared nothing more than rebellion from below, having personally witnessed uprisings of slaves, indigenous people and poor farmers. The so-called “checks and balances” that allegedly prevent any one branch of government (executive, legislative or judicial) from exceeding its authority actually act as a collective brake on the popular will in order to preserve the class and social status quo.

Social inequality—including racism, xenophobia, sexism, discrimination against LGBTQ-plus people (all reinforced with violence)—strengthen the class inequality and exploitation that capitalism requires by keeping working-class people divided from each other.

Historically, democracy in the U.S. has also only been expanded through mass struggle—the most important of which included the overthrow of slavery through the Civil War; agitation for women to win the right to vote; the struggle for referendum, the recall and the direct election of senators from the Populist and Progressive movements; through the struggles for union rights in the 1930s and for civil rights in the 1960s; and the struggle for same sex marriage and transgender rights in the twenty first century.

And although the myth of the American Dream has persisted far longer than the bygone era of rising wages, history has shown that the only way that workers have ever gained is by uniting through class struggle. This is the most important truth that our rulers prefer to hide from us.