AMY GOODMAN: You are listening to Democracy Now!, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

Today, a special. It’s become a classic work of history. It’s used in countless schools across the country. It’s inspired a generation of historians and students, and it’s reshaped how many people view this country’s history. Talking about Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States, published 23 years ago. The millionth copy of the book was recently sold.

To celebrate this feat, a group of actors, writers and editors recently gathered at the 92nd Street Y in New York for a public reading of the book. The cast included Alice Walker, Kurt Vonnegut, Danny Glover, James Earl Jones and many others. We begin with James Earl Jones.

HOWARD ZINN: [read by James Earl Jones] My viewpoint, in telling the history of the United States, is that we must not accept the memory of states as our own. Nations are not communities and never have been. The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals a fierce conflict of interest. And in such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus suggested, is not to be on the side of the executioners.

Thus, in that inevitable taking of sides which comes from selection and emphasis in history, I prefer to tell the story of the discovery of America from the viewpoint of the Arawaks, of the Constitution from the standpoint of the slaves, of the rise of industrialism as seen by the young women in the Lowell textile mills, the conquest of the Philippines as seen by black soldiers on Luzon, the postwar American empire as seen by peons in Latin America. And so on, to the limited extent that any one person, however he or she strains, can “see” history from the standpoint of others.

My point is not to grieve for the victims and denounce the executioners. Those tears, that anger, cast into the past, deplete our moral energy for the present. And the lines are not always clear. In the long run, the oppressor is also a victim. In the short run, the victims, themselves desperate and tainted with the culture that oppresses them, turn on other victims.

Still, understanding the complexities, this book will be skeptical of governments and their attempts, through politics and culture, to ensnare ordinary people in a giant web of nationhood pretending to a common interest. I will try not to overlook the cruelties that victims inflict on one another as they are jammed together in the boxcars of the system. I don’t want to romanticize them. But I do remember (in rough paraphrase) a statement I once heard: “The cry of the poor is not always just, but if you don’t listen to it, you will never know what justice is.”

HOWARD ZINN: Arawak men and women, naked, tawny, full of wonder, emerged from their villages onto the islands, beaches, and swam out to get a closer look at the strange big boat. When Columbus and his sailors came ashore, carrying swords, speaking oddly, the Arawaks ran to greet them, brought them food, water, gifts. Columbus later wrote of this in his log:

CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS: [read by Harris Yulin] They … brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks’ bells. They willingly traded everything they owned … They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features. … They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane … They would make fine servants. … With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.

HOWARD ZINN: We have no Indian voices to speak for the men and women of Hispaniola, but we have the volumes written by the Spanish priest Bartolomé de las Casas, who was an eyewitness to what happened after Columbus came.

BARTOLOMÉ DE LAS CASAS: [read by Andre Gregory] These people are by nature the most humble, patient, and peaceable, holding no grudges, free from embroilments, neither excitable nor quarrelsome. These people are the most devoid of rancors, hatred or desire for vengeance of any people in the world. …

Yet into this sheepfold … there came some Spaniards, who immediately behaved like ravening wild beasts, wolves, tigers, or lions that had been starved for many days. And Spaniards have behaved in no other way during the past forty years, down to the present time, for they are still acting like ravening beasts, killing, terrorizing, afflicting, torturing, and destroying the native peoples, doing all of this with the strangest and most varied new methods of cruelty, never seen or heard of before, and to such a degree that this Island of Hispaniola, once so populous (having a population that I estimated to be more than three millions) has now a population of barely two hundred persons.

HOWARD ZINN: Our political leaders like to pretend that there are no classes in this country, that all of us have the same interest—Exxon and me, George Bush and you. But we’ve always had classes in this country, class conflict, class struggle. Before the American Revolution, there were riots of the poor against the rich, of tenants against landlords, flour riots and food riots. During the Revolution, in George Washington’s army, there were mutinies of soldiers who resented the privileges of the officer class and the way they themselves were treated. And they mutinied, and then Washington ordered the execution of some of them, execution done by their fellow mutineers. After the war, veterans who had been given small amounts of land found themselves so heavily taxed they couldn’t meet their payments. In western Massachusetts, thousands of farmers surrounded the courthouses where their farms were being auctioned off and refused to allow the courts to proceed. Eventually Shays’ Rebellion, as it was called, was crushed, but it put a scare into the Founding Fathers, and when they met in 1787, a year later, to create a Constitution, they made sure to set up a government strong enough to put down the uprisings of the poor. These are the words of one of the participants in Shays’ Rebellion, a man named Plough Jogger.

PLOUGH JOGGER: [read by Jeff Zinn] I’ve labored hard all my days and fared hard. I have been greatly abused, have been obliged to do more than my part in the war; been loaded with class rates, town rates, province rates, Continental rates, and all rates … been pulled and hauled by sheriffs, constables and collectors, and had my cattle sold for less than they were worth.

I have been obliged to pay and nobody will pay me. I have lost a great deal by this man and that man and t’other man, and the great men are going to get all we have, and I think it is time for us to rise and put a stop to it, and have no more courts, nor sheriffs, nor collectors, nor lawyers, and I know that we are the biggest party, let them say what they will. … We’ve come to relieve the distresses of the people. There will be no court until they have redress of their grievances.

HOWARD ZINN: What is too often overlooked in the triumphal story of the growth of American industry in the nineteenth century is the human cost of that triumph: the lives cut short, the maimed bodies of the men and women who worked in the factories, the mills. In the Lowell, Massachusetts, textile mills of 1836, where girls went to work at the age of twelve and often died by the time they were twenty-five, one of the first strikes of mill girls took place. It is described by one of them, Harriet Hanson.

HARRIET HANSON: [read by Marisa Tomei] When it was announced that wages were to be cut down, great indignation was felt, and it was decided to strike, en masse. This was done. The mills were shut down, and the girls went in procession from their several corporations to the “grove” on Chapel Hill, and listened to “incendiary” speeches. …

One of the girls stood on a pump, and gave vent to the feelings of her companions in a neat speech, declaring that it was their duty to resist all attempts at cutting down the wages. This was the first time a woman had spoken in public in Lowell, and the event caused surprise and consternation among her audience. …

My own recollection of this first strike (or “turn out” as it was called) is very vivid. I worked in a lower room, where I had heard the proposed strike fully, if not vehemently, discussed; I had been an ardent listener to what was said against this attempt at “oppression” on the part of the corporation, and naturally I took sides with the strikers. When the day came on which the girls were to turn out, those in the upper rooms started first, and so many of them left that our mill was at once shut down. Then, when the girls in my room stood irresolute, uncertain what to do, asking each other, “Would you?” or “Shall we turn out?” and not one of them having the courage to lead off, I, who began to think they would not go out, after all their talk, became impatient, and started on ahead, saying, with childish bravado, “I don’t care what you do, I am going to turn out, whether any one else does or not;” and I marched out, and was followed by the others.

As I looked back at the long line that followed me, I was more proud than I have ever been at any success I may have achieved.

AMY GOODMAN: Marisa Tomei, joining Jeff Zinn, Andre Gregory, Harris Yulin, James Earl Jones, reading from A People’s History of the United States. When we come back, we’ll hear from Alfre Woodard, Alice Walker and others. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: You are listening to Democracy Now! That’s “Jimmy’s Mode,” Coltrane, here on The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we continue with the reading of A People’s History of the United States. Coming up, Alfre Woodard, Alice Walker, Kurt Vonnegut, Danny Glover. We begin with Howard Zinn.

HOWARD ZINN: As part of the long process of driving the Indians off their native lands, Andrew Jackson in 1830s signed an order to remove by force the Five Civilized Tribes from their territory in Florida, Georgia, Alabama, and drive them westward across the Mississippi. There followed what became known as The Trail of Tears, in which sixteen thousand men, women, and children, surrounded by the United States Army, made the long trip westward, and four thousand of them died. The Cherokees and Seminoles resisted, and here they speak to the government of the United States.

THE CHEROKEES: [read by Danny Glover] We are aware that some persons suppose it will be for our advantage to remove beyond the Mississippi. We think otherwise. Our people universally think otherwise. … We wish to remain on the land of our fathers. We have a perfect and original right to remain without interruption or molestation. The treaties with us, and laws of the United States made in pursuance of treaties, guarantee our residence and our privileges and secure us against intruders. Our only request is, that these treaties be fulfilled, and these laws executed.

We entreat those to whom the foregoing paragraph are addressed, to remember the great law of love: “Do to other as ye would that others would do to you.” We pray them to remember that, for the sake of principle, their forefathers were compelled to leave, therefore driven from the old world, and that the winds of persecution wafted them over the great waters and landed them on the shores of the new world, when the Indian was the sole lord and proprietor of these extensive domains. Let them remember in what way they were received by the savage of America, when the power was in his hand. …

We were all made by the same Great Father, and are all alike His Children. We all come from the same Mother, and were suckled at the same breast. Therefore we are brothers, and as brothers, should treat together in an amicable way.

THE SEMINOLES: [read by Danny Glover] Your talk is a good one, but my people cannot say they will go. We are not willing to do so. If suddenly we tear our hearts from the homes around which they are twined, our heartstrings will snap.

HOWARD ZINN: Women, black and white, played a critical part in the building of the antislavery movement in the United States. They worked in antislavery societies all over the country, gathering thousands of petitions to Congress. But when, in 1840, a World Anti-Slavery Society convention met in London, there was a fierce argument about whether women could attend. The final vote was that they could only attend meetings in a curtained enclosure. They sat in silent protest in the gallery, and when they returned to the United States they began to lay the basis for the first Women’s Rights Convention in history. It was held at Seneca Falls, New York, where Elizabeth Cady Stanton lived as a mother, a housewife, full of resentment at her condition, declaring: “A woman is a nobody. A wife is everything.” The convention was attended by three hundred women and some men, who adopted a Declaration of Principles, making use of the language and rhythm of the Declaration of Independence.

DECLARATION OF SENTIMENTS AND RESOLUTIONS: [read by Myla Pitt] We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights governments are instituted, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of those who suffer from it to refuse allegiance to it, and to insist upon the institution of a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. …

When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their duty to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. Such has been the patient sufferance of the women under this government, and such is now the necessity which constrains them to demand the equal station to which they are entitled. …

[Man] has endeavored, in every way that he could, to destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect, and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life.

Now, in view of this entire disfranchisement of one-half the people of this country, their social and religious degradation—in view of the unjust laws above mentioned, and because women do feel themselves aggrieved, oppressed, and fraudulently deprived of their most sacred rights, we insist that they have immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of the United States.

HOWARD ZINN: Frederick Douglass. Frederick Douglass, once a slave, became a brilliant and powerful leader of the anti-slavery movement. In 1852, he was asked to speak in celebration of the Fourth of July.

FREDERICK DOUGLASS: [read by James Earl Jones] Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here to-day? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? And am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?

I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you this day rejoice are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence bequeathed by your fathers is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak today?

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days of the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is a constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes that would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation of the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of these United States at this very hour.

At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could reach the nation’s ear, I would, to-day, pour forth a stream, a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and the crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.

HOWARD ZINN: John Brown, more than any other white American, devoted his life, and finally sacrificed it, on behalf of freedom for the slave. His plan, impossible and courageous, was to seize the arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, with a band of black and white abolitionists and set off a revolt of slaves throughout the South. The plan failed.

Some of his men, including two of his own sons, were killed. John Brown was wounded, captured, sentenced to death by hanging by the state of Virginia, and with the enthusiastic approval of the government of the United States. When he was put to death, Ralph Waldo Emerson said, he will make the gallows holy as the cross.

Here, John Brown addresses the court that ordered his hanging.

JOHN BROWN: [read by Harris Yulin] Had I interfered in the manner which I admit … had I so interfered in behalf of the rich, the powerful, the intelligent, the so-called great, or in behalf of any of their friends, [either] father, mother, brother, sister, wife, or children, or any of that class, and suffered and sacrificed what I have in this interference, it would have been all right, and every man in this Court would have deemed it an act worthy of reward rather than punishment.

This Court acknowledges, as I suppose, the validity of the law of God. I see a book kissed here which I suppose to be the Bible, or, at least, the New Testament. That teaches me that all things “whatsoever I would that men should do unto me, I should do even so to them.” […] I endeavored to act up to that instruction. I say, I am yet too young to understand that God is any respecter of persons. I believe that to have interfered as I have done, as I have always freely admitted I have done, in behalf of His despised poor, was not wrong, but right. Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children, and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I submit: so let it be done!

HOWARD ZINN: Twenty-two years later, in 1881, Frederick Douglass was asked to speak at a college in Harpers Ferry.

FREDERICK DOUGLASS: [read by James Earl Jones] If John Brown did not end the war that ended slavery, he did at least begin the war that ended slavery. If we look over the dates, places and men for which this honor is claimed, we shall find that not Carolina, but Virginia, not Fort Sumter, but Harpers Ferry and the arsenal, not Colonel Anderson, but John Brown, began the war that ended American slavery and made this a free republic. Until that blow was struck, the prospect of freedom was dim, shadowy and uncertain. The irrepressible conflict was one of words, votes and compromises. When John Brown stretched forth his arm, the sky was cleared.

HOWARD ZINN: After the Civil War, with the federal government enforcing the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, guaranteeing the right to vote to black people, African Americans were elected to governing bodies throughout the South. But after a few years of what might be called “Radical Reconstruction,” the political and business interests of the North made a deal with those of the South, to withdraw federal power and allow the white South to have its way. Henry McNeal Turner, elected to the state legislature of Georgia, was expelled by that body in 1872, but before he left, he addressed his colleagues.

HENRY McNEAL TURNER: [read by Danny Glover] Mr. Speaker, I wish the members of this House to understand the position that I take. I hold that I am a member of this body. Therefore, sir, I shall neither fawn or cringe before any party, nor stoop to beg them for my rights. … I am here to demand my rights, and to hurl thunderbolts at the men who would dare to cross the threshold of my manhood. …

The scene presented in this House, today, is one unparalleled in the history of the world. … Never, in the history of the world, has a man been arraigned before a body clothed with legislative, judicial or executive functions, charged with the offense of being of a darker hue than his fellow-men. … [I]t has remained for the State of Georgia, in the very heart of the nineteenth century, to call a man before the bar, and there charge him with an act for which he is no more responsible than for the head which he carries upon his shoulders. The Anglo-Saxon race, sir, is a most surprising one. … I was not aware that there was in the character of that race so much cowardice, or so much pusillanimity. … I tell you, sir, that this is a question which will not die today. This event shall be remembered by posterity for ages yet to come, and while the sun shall continue to climb the hills of heaven. …

[W]e are told that if black men want to speak, they must speak through white trumpets; if black men want their sentiments expressed, they must be adulterated and sent through white messengers, who will quibble, and equivocate, and evade, as rapidly as the pendulum of a clock. …

The great question, sir, is this: Am I a man? If I am such, I claim the rights of a man. …

Why, sir, though we are not white, we have accomplished much. We have pioneered civilization here; we have built up your country; we have worked in your fields, and garnered your harvests, for two hundred and fifty years! And what do we ask of you in return? Do we ask you for compensation for the sweat our fathers bore for you, for the tears you have caused, and the hearts you have broken, and the lives you have curtailed, and the blood you have spilled? Do we ask retaliation? We ask it not. We are willing to let the dead past bury its dead; but we ask you now for our RIGHTS.

AMY GOODMAN: Danny Glover, James Earl Jones, Harris Yulin and others reading from Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States. When we come back from break, we’ll hear from, among others, Alice Walker and Alfre Woodard and Kurt Vonnegut. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: You’re listening to Coltrane here on Democracy Now!, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we return to this historic reading that took place at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan on the occasion of the millionth sale of A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn’s classic work. Among those who read, Alfre Woodard and Alice Walker. Howard Zinn introduced the next segment.

HOWARD ZINN: The orthodox texts in American history pay much attention to what was called “a splendid little war,” the victory of the United States in the three-month-long Spanish-American War of 1898. But these texts slide quickly over the bloody conquest of the Philippines that went on for years, which President McKinley said was necessary to “civilize and Christianize” the Filipinos, and which Theodore Roosevelt hailed as the newest outpost of the American Empire. Roosevelt loved war and militarism, and when the Army massacred 600 Moros on a southern Island in the Philippines in 1906, Roosevelt congratulated the commanding general. Here is Mark Twain’s response:

MARK TWAIN: [read by Kurt Vonnegut] This incident burst upon the world last Friday in an official cablegram from the commander of our forces in the Philippines to our Government at Washington. The substance of it was as follows: A tribe of Moros, dark-skinned savages, had fortified themselves in the bowl of an extinct crater not many miles from Jolo; and as they were hostiles, and bitter against us because we have been trying for eight years to take their liberties away from them, their presence in that position was a menace.

Our commander, Gen. Leonard Wood, ordered a reconnaissance. It was found that the Moros numbered six hundred, counting women and children; that their crater bowl was in the summit of a peak or mountain 2,200 feet above sea level, and very difficult of access for Christian troops and artillery. Then General Wood ordered a surprise, and went along himself to see the order carried out.

Gen. Wood’s order was, “Kill or capture the six hundred.” There, with 600 engaged on each side, we lost 15 men killed outright, and we had 32 wounded—counting that nose and that elbow. The enemy numbered 600—including women and children—and we abolished them utterly, leaving not even a baby alive to cry for its dead mother. This is incomparably the greatest victory that was ever achieved by the Christian soldiers of the United States.

So far as I can find out, there was only one person among our eighty millions who allowed himself the privilege of a public remark on this great occasion—that was the President of the United States. All day Friday, he was as studiously silent as the rest. But on Saturday, he recognized that his duty required him to say something, and he took his pen and performed that duty. This is what he said:

Washington, March 10. Wood, Manila: I congratulate you and the officers and men of your command upon the brilliant feat of arms wherein you and they so well upheld the honor of the American flag. (Signed) Theodore Roosevelt.

I have read carefully the treaty of Paris, and I have seen that we do not intend to free, but to subjugate the people of the Philippines. We have gone there to conquer, not to redeem. It should, it seems to me, be our pleasure and duty to make those people free, and let them deal with their own domestic questions in their own way. And so I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.

HOWARD ZINN: The IWW, Industrial Workers of the World, was a radical labor organization of the early twentieth century. It organized all workers—black, white, men, women, native-born, foreign, skilled, unskilled—which the American Federation of Labor refused to do. Its goal was revolutionary: to take over the industrial system and run it for the benefit of the people. When immigrant women in the textile mills in Lawrence, Massachusetts, went on strike in 1912, they were met with police violence and judicial intimidation. The IWW poet and organizer Arturo Giovannitti was arrested on spurious charges for murder. Here is his speech to the jury, which found him innocent.

ARTURO GIOVANNITTI: [read by Jeff Zinn] Mr. Foreman and gentlemen of the Jury: It is the first time in my life that I speak publicly in your wonderful language, and it is the most solemn moment in my life. …

There has been brought only one side of this great industrial question, only the method and only the tactics. But what about … the ethical pan of this question? … What about the better and nobler humanity where there shall be no more slaves, where no man will ever be obliged to go on strike in order to obtain fifty cents a week more, where children will not have to starve any more, where women no more will have to go and prostitute themselves … where at last there will not be any more slaves, any more masters, but just one great family of friends and brothers.

They say you are free in this great and wonderful country. I say that politically you are, and my best compliments and congratulations … But I say you cannot be half free and half slave, and economically all the working class in the United States are as much slaves now as the Negroes were forty and fifty years ago; because the man that owns the tool wherewith another man works, the man that owns the house where this man lives, the man that owns the factory where this man wants to go to work—that man owns and controls the bread that that man eats and therefore owns and controls his mind, his body, his heart and his soul. …

I am twenty-nine years old—not quite … I have a woman that loves me and that I love. I have a mother and father that are waiting for me. I have an ideal that is dearer to me than can be expressed or understood. And life has so many allurements and it is so nice and so bright and so wonderful that I feel the passion of living in my heart and I do want to live. …

Whichever way you judge, gentlemen of the jury, I thank you.

HOWARD ZINN: In the year 1914, a thousand miners, with wives and children, who had gone on strike against the Rockefeller-owned coal mines in southern Colorado, were holding out in a tent colony near the tiny hamlet of Ludlow. One day in April, the National Guard, financed by Rockefeller, began pouring machine-gun fire into the tent colony, and then came down from the hills and set fire to the tents. The next day the bodies of eleven children and two women were found, suffocated and burned to death. This became known as the Ludlow Massacre. Mother Mary Jones, eighty-two-year-old organizer for the mine workers, had come to Colorado to support the miners, and on the eve of their strike, as they gathered in the Opera House in Trinidad, she spoke to them.

MOTHER MARY JONES: [read by Alfre Woodard] What would the coal in the mines be worth if you did not work to take it out? The time is ripe for you to stand like men. I know something about strikes. I didn’t go into them yesterday. I was carried eighty-four miles and landed in jail by a United States marshal in the night because I was talking to a miners’ meeting. The next morning I was brought to court and the judge said to me, “Did you read my injunction? Did you understand that the injunction told you not to look at the miners?” “As long as the Judge who is higher than you leaves me sight, I will look at anything I want to,” said I. The old judge died soon after that and the injunction died with him. At another time when in the courtroom the bailiff said to me, “When you are addressing the court you must say 'Your Honor.'” “I don’t know whether he has any or not,” said I. Someone said to me, “You don’t believe in charity work Mother.” No I don’t believe in charity; it is a vice. We need the upbuilding of justice to mankind; we don’t need your charity, all we need is an opportunity to live like men and women in this country. I want you to pledge yourselves in this convention to stand as one solid army against the foes of human labor. Think of the thousands who are killed every day and there is no redress for it. We will fight until the mines are made secure and human life valued more than props. Look things in the face. Don’t fear a governor; don’t fear anybody. You pay the governor; he has the right to protect you. You are the biggest part of the population in the state. You create its wealth, so I say, “let the fight go on; if nobody else will keep on, I will.”

HOWARD ZINN: Emma Goldman, in the early part of the twentieth century, became one of the most powerful voices in America for anarchism, feminism, the rights of working people. She lectured all over the country on women’s rights, on the theater of Shaw, Ibsen, Strindberg, on patriotism and war, and was arrested many times. She was jailed for opposing World War I and then was deported, under the personal supervision of J. Edgar Hoover. Here, in the year 1916, she addresses a courtroom where she has been charged with speaking about birth control.

EMMA GOLDMAN: [read by Alice Walker] Your Honor, I am charged with the crime of having given information to men and women as to how to prevent conception. For the last three weeks, every night before packed houses, a stirring social indictment is being played at the Candler Theater. I refer to “Justice” by John Galsworthy. The counsel for the Defense in summing up the charge against the defendant says among other things: “Your Honor: back of the commission of every crime, is life, palpitating life.”

Now what is the palpitating life back of my crime? I will tell you, Your Honor. According to the bulletin of the Department of Health, 30,000,000 people in America are underfed.

Your Honor: what kind of children do you suppose these parents can bring into the world. I will tell you: children so poor and anemic that they take their leave from this, our kind world, before their first year of life. In that way, 300,000 babies, according to the baby welfare association, are sacrificed in the United States every year. This, Your Honor, is the palpitating life which has confronted me for many years, and which is back of the commission of my crime.

After all, the question of birth control is largely a workingman’s question, above all a workingwoman’s question. She it is who risks her health, her youth, her very life in giving out of herself the units of the race. She it is who ought to have the means and the knowledge to say how many children she shall give, and to what purpose she shall give them, and under what conditions she shall bring forth life.

And this is true, not only because of what I say or may not say; there is much profounder reason for the tremendous growth and importance of birth control. The reason is conditioned in the great modern social conflict, or rather social war, I should say. A war not for military conquest or material supremacy, a war of the oppressed and disinherited of the earth againt their enemies, capitalism and the state, a war for a seat at the table of life, a war for well-being, for beauty, for liberty. Above all this war is for a free motherhood and a joyous, playful, glorious childhood.

AMY GOODMAN: Alice Walker reading Emma Goldman from Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States. Part two tomorrow, here on Democracy Now! A historic reading as Howard Zinn sells the millionth copy of this classic grassroots history.

And that does it for today’s program. Our website is www.democracynow.org. That event, the 92nd Street Y in New York. Our email address is mail@democracynow.org. Democracy Now! is produced by Kris Abrams, Mike Burke, Angie Karran, Sharif Abdel Kouddous, Ana Nogueira, Elizabeth Press, with help from Noah Reibel and Vilka Tzouras. Mike Di Filippo is our engineer, with help from Rich Kim. Special thanks to Angela Alston, Emily Kunstler, Orlando Richards, Simba Russeau, Jonny Sender, Fatima Mojaddidy, Karen Ranucci, Denis Moynihan and Alex Wolfe. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks for listening.

[End of Hour 1]

AMY GOODMAN: From Pacifica Radio, this is Democracy Now!

The war is taking a lot out of the budget of the city. And you can’t help anybody else if you can’t help your own. And we are making a statement that we have to have a living wage.

AMY GOODMAN: Budgeting for war, who pays? Then, is a new nuclear arms race going to begin? We go to Geneva, where a major conference on nuclear nonproliferation is taking place, and hear a speech from Jonathan Schell one of the leading advocates for the abolition of nuclear weapons. We’ll also speak with a Belgian lawyer preparing to sue General Franks for war crimes in Iraq. All that and more, coming up. Welcome to Democracy Now!, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

U.S. troops opened fire today on a crowd of thousands of people in the city of Fallujah, killing three people. At least 15 people are injured. People were marching to protest an even deadlier shooting on Monday in which 15 people were killed. The Associated Press is reporting the protesters stopped in front of the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division headquarters. They held signs condemning Monday’s shooting and began to throw stones and shoes at the compound. Then the U.S. troops opened fire. Safa Rusli told the Agence France-Presse, quote, “This was a peaceful demonstration. Religious leaders told us not to be armed. There was no exchange of gunfire.” U.S. intelligence officer Major Michael Marti claimed U.S. troops were returning fire. Muslim religious leaders told the AFP today they met with U.S. forces after the killings today and asked U.S. forces to pull back from the city. The city’s top religious leader, Sheikh Waga Ali al-Mohammedi [phon.], said, quote, “Fallujah is known as a center of Islam. We care about religion. We care about our honor and our land. We told them things will get worse and worse.” An imam who also attended the meeting said they’ve opted for diplomatic means up to now, but it will be difficult to contain the people for long.

In the northern city of Mosul, The New York Times reports nine people were killed and some 30 injured as they celebrated Saddam Hussein’s birthday. The Times quotes a doctor as saying more than half the people were killed by gunshots fired in celebration, but U.S. soldiers shot several Iraqis after they said they thought they were coming under attack.

As the troops opened fire on the people in Fallujah, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld flew into Iraq, pronouncing the Iraqi people free. Over coffee and biscuits in a Basra airport lounge, Rumsfeld said, quote, “What is significant is that large numbers of human beings, intelligent, energetic, have been liberated.” Later, Rumsfeld flew to Baghdad and met top U.S. commanders at a lake palace of Saddam Hussein. British Commander Robin Brims told Rumsfeld it’s important to restore services to the Iraqi capital. He said, quote, “I assume the forces of badness will try to use infrastructure as a means of discrediting what we are trying to do to make things better here.”

Rumsfeld’s visit to Iraq comes a day after he met with Saudi Arabia’s Prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz and then announced the U.S. will remove almost all its forces from Saudi Arabia by the summer. Five hundred troops involved in a training program will remain. Saudi Arabia has the largest oil fields in the world. Thousands of U.S. troops have occupied bases in the country since the Gulf War. Saudi Arabia is home to Islam’s holiest shrines and Mecca and Medina, and the U.S. troop presence has fueled radical Islam. Osama bin Laden has for years called on Muslims around the globe to expel U.S. troops from Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden himself is a Saudi, as were 15 of the 19 September 11th hijackers.

Meanwhile, a South African TV channel is reporting NATO’s supreme commander of allied forces in Europe said the U.S. plans to boost its military presence in Africa, as Africa becomes more of a focus.

The London-based Arabic newspaper al-Quds al-Arabi is reporting it has a handwritten letter signed by Saddam Hussein urging the Iraqi people to rise up against U.S. troops. The paper quoted sources close to Saddam confirming it is his own handwriting and signature. Yesterday al-Quds al-Arabi published a letter from a previously unknown group calling itself Iraqi Resistance and Liberation. The group said Saddam was still alive and would deliver a message to his country within days.

High-ranking Iraqi prisoners are uniformly denying Saddam’s government had any weapons of mass destruction before the war, this according to U.S. officials familiar with their interrogations quoted in the Associated Press.

The U.S. military was yesterday accused of doing nothing to prevent the mass smuggling of Iraq’s antiquities. The head of research for the Iraq Museum, Donny George, told the London Independent that anyone can take anything out of the country. He said border checks are only being conducted on Iraq’s western frontier by Jordanian police.

Editor & Publisher magazine is reporting members of the Western press in Iraq are fueling anti-American sentiment. In one incident, Los Angeles Times reporter Geoffrey Mohan walked to the driver’s window of a destroyed minibus in central Baghdad. Inside the broken window was the carbonized corpse of the vehicle’s driver, its charred arm resting on the window’s ledge. Mohan asked a photographer to take his photo as he stood about a foot from the corpse and, with his pen poised over his notebook, asked the corpse, quote, “Well, sir, do you have any comment on what has happened to you here?” Thirty feet away, 20 Iraqis stood watching the American conduct a mock interview with the corpse of a man, who probably had a family, for a photo op. Mohan was embedded with an Army unit. He later acknowledged the incident was a, quote, “ill-conceived, clumsy and ill-considered attempt at gallows humor.” He described the account by Australian reporter Peter Wilson and the two other eyewitnesses as part of, quote, “an agenda against embedded reporters.”

High-ranking Iraqi prisoners are uniformly denying Saddam’s government had any weapons of mass destruction before the war.

The U.S. military was yesterday accused of doing nothing to prevent the mass smuggling of Iraq’s antiquities.

A U.S. official met yesterday with Iraq’s two most senior deputy oil ministers for the first time. Gary Vogler warned them not to make any changes in their hierarchy without U.S. approval. One Iraqi oil official told The New York Times, “The main question is whether Iraq’s oil will remain in state hands or whether it will be privatized.”

Meanwhile, British Petroleum yesterday announced its biggest-ever profit. The corporation made over $3.5 billion in the first quarter of the year, or over $40 million a day. That’s more than twice what BP earned in the first quarter of last year. The windfall profit is due to the gas and oil prices driven up by the invasion of Iraq, as well as disruptions in supply from Nigeria and Venezuela.

Hours after the Palestinian parliament voted to confirm Mahmoud Abbas as the first-ever Palestinian prime minister, a suicide attack at a popular Tel Aviv cafe killed three people, including the suicide bomber, and injured more than 40 others. A spokesman for the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade told Associated Press the attack was a message to new Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas that “nobody can disarm the resistance movements without a political solution.” Before the attack, Abbas forcefully denounced terrorism in an address to the parliament. He also said Israel must abandon settlements and end its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip to achieve a lasting peace. Envoys from the United Nations, European Union and Russia are presenting the U.S.-backed so-called road map to peace to Abbas today.

Meanwhile, the AP reports Israeli soldiers marked numbers in ink on the hands of hundreds of Palestinians waiting on line at a crowded military checkpoint on Monday. The army confirmed the incident but claimed it was done by a lone soldier who acted on his own and would face a disciplinary hearing. A similar incident happened in March of 2001, when soldiers marked numbers on the foreheads and forearms of Palestinian detainees awaiting interrogation during an army sweep of a West Bank refugee camp. At the time, the action drew outrage from an Israeli lawmaker who survived the Holocaust. During World War II, Nazi concentration camp prisoners, most of them Jews, had numbers tattooed on their forearms. The practice of doing the same to Palestinians, the army said, was halted.

The Supreme Court ruled by 5 to 4 yesterday that the government must detain immigrants, including permanent residents, who have committed certain crimes, while the federal government decides whether to deport them. The Washington Post reports the ruling confirms Congress’s power to limit the rights of even relatively well-established noncitizens. The decision puts the nation’s estimated 11 million permanent resident immigrants or green card holders on notice: If they commit aggravated offenses or offenses of so-called moral turpitude, they’ll serve their sentences and then be locked up again by immigration authorities if removal proceedings against them are pending. Four federal appeals courts had declared the mandatory detention provision for permanent residents unconstitutional. Civil libertarians, immigrant rights groups, the American Bar Association and prominent former immigration officials had urged the court to rule that the Constitution requires giving criminals who are permanent resident immigrants a hearing. But Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote, quote, “This Court has firmly and repeatedly endorsed the proposition that Congress may make rules as to aliens that would be unacceptable if applied to citizens.” He was backed by Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.

Talks are being held between Nigerian union leaders and a Houston-based oil company aimed at ending a hostage crisis in Nigeria. Striking Nigerian oil workers have taken nearly 100 hostages, including 21 Americans, on several offshore oil rigs. The rigs are owned by Houston-based Transocean and were drilling wells on behalf of oil multinationals Royal Dutch Shell and Total Fina Elf.

As the Chinese Health Ministry announced 11 new deaths and over 150 new cases of SARS, The New York Times reports SARS has almost reached the top of the government hierarchy. Authorities have quarantined an unknown number of people inside President Hu Jintao’s leadership compound. The virus has infected the executive director of the largest government-owned financial conglomerate and at least four people at the Commerce Ministry. Canada managed to lift a travel advisory on the city of Toronto after the city went for five days without any locally transmitted cases of SARS. The Washington Post reports the U.S. government has launched a broad effort to develop vaccines and drugs against the SARS virus. The National Institutes of Health is preparing to make money available because many private drug companies are hesitant to invest heavily in SARS research before it’s clear whether SARS will be a long-lasting and widespread phenomenon.