administration, and lasting until the 1930s, when the New Deal began to interfere in the economy on behalf of the poor by instituting job programs, subsidized housing, social security, unemployment insurance, and minimum wages. During that long period the country was industrialized, fortunes were made by a small number of rich people, but the human cost was atrocious. Hunger, sickness, and poverty were the normal state of large numbers of people in the city and in the country. In the periodic depressions of those years of “free enterprise,” conditions were even worse.
The year 1877 is a case in point. It was the heyday of conservative philosophy (let people fend for themselves), and that summer in the hot cities, where poor families lived in cellars and drank infested water, their children got sick. The New York Times reported: “already the cry of the dying children begins to be heard.…Soon, to judge from the past, there will be a thousand deaths of infants per week in the city.”8
That depression was barely over when another one came in 1893. This was still the period of government indifference to the poor, glorifications of the capitalist system, the growth of huge fortunes for the Carnegies, the Rockefellers, the Mellons. That year, after several decades of wild industrial growth, financial manipulation, and uncontrolled speculation and profiteering, the economy collapsed. The worst hit, of course, were the poor: Of a labor force of fifteen million, three million were unemployed. Neither the federal government nor any state government voted relief to the hungry, but mass demonstrations all over the country forced city governments to set up soup kitchens and give people work on street or park crews.
The conservative philosophy of government noninterference had always been hypocritical. From the time of the suppression of the Pennsylvania farmers’ insurrection in 1794, it was clear that the government, disdaining to help the poor, would act decisively against the poor if they dared to rebel against their condition.
Thus, in 1877 when the railroad workers went on strike to protest a pay cut, the government called out the army against them and a hundred people were killed.9 When another railroad strike took place in 1894 (because two thousand railroad workers were dying every year in industrial accidents) the federal government moved in with court injunctions and troops to break the strike.
The Reagan administration’s praise of the “free enterprise” system (it had never been free, but controlled by private wealth with the collaboration of government) counted on a general historical amnesia. It was easy to forget how that system (never working well for the poor even in “prosperity”) collapsed in 1929 and brought hunger and homelessness to a large part of the American people in the 1930s.
When Reagan’s successor, George Bush, ran for office in 1988 he told an audience in Ohio: “In my view, there is no place in American public life for philosophies that divide Americans one from another on class lines and that excite conflict among them.”10 The premise of this statement was that the excitation of class conflict in this country came from “philosophies” and not from the reality of class division, the existence of very rich and very poor. Here too a historical corrective would have been useful. But it was not to be expected that Bush’s Democratic opponent, Michael Dukakis, would supply it, given the history of the Democratic party for blurring the reality of class difference in America.
On the eve of Reagan’s accession to the presidency, a popular revolution in Nicaragua overthrew the military dictatorship of Anastasia Somoza, whose family had been kept in power by the support of the United States over a period of forty years. The attitude of the U.S. government to the new regime in Nicaragua (the Sandinistas) became a critical issue.
Almost immediately the Reagan administration began to take steps to overthrow the revolutionary government in Nicaragua. The Central Intelligence Agency secretly organized and trained a small army, led by former members of Somoza’s National Guard, based in Honduras, for this purpose. This counterrevolutionary army—the “contras,” as they came to be known—was financed by congressional appropriations. In 1984, after it was becoming clear that the contras had virtually no support inside Nicaragua and were desperately trying to destabilize the Sandinistas by military raids from outside to terrorize the countryside, Congress cut off funds. The Reagan administration then set up a secret and illegal team, headed by Marine Colonel Oliver North but involving CIA head William Casey and several of Reagan’s closest advisers, to divert funds from other countries to the contras.
The Reagan-Bush administration defended these acts—though they involved serious violations of domestic law and international law (indeed, the World Court found the United States guilty of legal violations in the mining of Nicaragua’s harbors)—by several arguments. The administration primarily argued that Nicaragua (which had been getting Soviet aid since the 1979 revolution) was a Soviet base and a threat to the security of the United States. Another justification was that a “Marxist dictatorship” now existed in Nicaragua, but the United States wanted democracy there.
Surely this was an appropriate time for a bit of historical perspective to help judge the soundness of these arguments. A number of books began to appear that recounted some of the history of United States relations with Central America. (I would point now to only one of them by Cornell University historian Walter LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions.)11 To anyone concerned with throwing light on U.S. policy toward Nicaragua—indeed, toward all of the Caribbean since the arguments for intervention were the same for El Salvador, Guatemala, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic—it seemed evident that an important question should be answered: What was U.S. policy in these areas before there was a possibility of a Soviet threat, that is, before the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917?
The historical evidence must then be startling to any citizen who easily accepted the U.S. government’s rationale for military intervention. It is clear that the United States was intervening in the Caribbean and Latin America long before the Bolshevik Revolution. In 1846 our government provoked a war with Mexico and took almost half of that country’s land, which now comprises California and our whole Southwest. In 1854 warships were sent to destroy the Nicaraguan town of Greytown on the Atlantic coast because a U.S. diplomat suffered a bloody nose.
Intervention intensified after 1898. That year we expelled Spain from Cuba, established U.S. control over that island with military bases and corporate plundering, and at the same time took Puerto Rico. A few years later we engineered the establishment of the new Republic of Panama so that we could set our own terms for the canal rights. And in the decade and a half before World War I, U.S. marines made many forays into Central America, as well as shelling a Mexican town and occupying Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
All that adds up to a lot of military interventions before 1917. It doesn’t conclusively disprove the claim of a Soviet threat as rationale for the support of counterrevolution in Nicaragua—there are limits to the uses of history for solving current problems—but it does make us very skeptical about that claim, causes us to scrutinize the situation more closely than if we simply accepted our government’s statements at face value. It therefore makes us more competent, watchful citizens.
We can also make use of history to check on the other justification for military intervention in the Caribbean—that our aim is to promote democracy. In fact, the history of U.S. activity in Latin America in this century does not show any deep commitment to democracy. On the contrary, we see a pattern of U.S. support of military dictatorships—the Somoza family in Nicaragua, Batista in Cuba, Duvalier in Haiti, Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, and more. Indeed, in two recent situations where democratic elections put into power governments not dictatorial but mildly socialist—Guatemala in 1954, Chile in 1973—the Central Intelligence Agency went to work to overthrow the elected presidents. In both places the result was the opposite of democracy—brutally murderous
