Political Crossfire Forums

[halcyon~sky]

One war that is widely ignored in United States history classes is the war that was going on between the social classes: poor whites/blacks vs rich whites. Dorr's rebellion in 1841, which involved a group of destitute individuals led by a lawyer named Thomas Dorr fighting for the constitutional right to rebel against a corrupt government, the Anti-Renter movement in 1837, where landlords who held millions of acres of land were able to charge gross amounts of money as rent, the railroad rebellions in the 1870s and 1880s, in which federal troops were used to put down strikes against railroads that used thier workers as serfs, the Knights of Labor, the original Chicago Eight, the rise of Populism, the reasoning behind the philosophies of Debs, Marx, and Engel.

In all these cases, people were taken advantage of by wealthy industrialists like James Duke, Carnegie, J.P. Morgan, John Rockafeller, and others. As one reformer put it, "30 individuals in America own 1.5 billion dollars of the capital"- then 60% of the nation's wealth- "while half a million walk the streets, homeless, and millions more work for wages with which they can't support thier families."

Comments?

[eynon]

You forgot the bloodiest conflict, the Colorado Coal Field Wars of 1913-14:
http://www.du.edu/anthro/ludlow/cfhist.html

You could even say that the real civil war was an outgrowth of this, Southerns feared being controlled by Northern Industrialists, so broke away.

[halcyon~sky]

It's stuff like this that makes me sick when I hear my intelligent classmates (I'm a junior in HS) preach apathy. If you don't fight the system, it makes it harder to fight it later. What if the early colonists had fought the aristocrasy before they held supreme power? What if people like Nathaniel Bacon had been successful in bringing down the power structure? Things like racism, flour riots, corporate massacres, etc. would have never developed. Greedy capitalists like Ely Hart wouldn't have been able to hoarde 50,000 barrels of flour while Philadelphia starved, and J.P. Morgan wouldn't have been able to buy defective rifles which blew the thumbs off of anyone who shot them for $3.50 each and sell them to Union soldiers (mainly black regiments) for $22 each. If the wealth had been distributed more evenly, Indian massacres, racism, Big Brother corporations, etc. wouldn't have been able to materialize...like they say though...hindsight is 20/20


I also find it very disturbing that this stuff isn't "suitable" for US History classes.