Rod’s Reviews > A People's History of the United States > Status Update

Enough help had been given to enough people to make Roosevelt a hero to millions, but the same system that had brought depression and crisis -the system of waste, of inequality, of concern for profit over human need- remained.

... the purpose of Taylorism was to make workers interchangeable, able to do the simple tasks that the new division of labor required -like standard parts divested of individuality and humanity, bought and sold as commodities

But the purpose of the state was to settle upper-class disputes peacefully, control lower-class rebellion, and adopt policies that would further the long-range stability of the system.

The immigrants from Ireland, fleeing starvation there when the potato crop failed, were coming to America now, packed into old sailing ships. The stories of these ships differ only in detail from the accounts of the ships that earlier brought black slaves and later German, Italian Russian immigrants

Lincoln got the praise for freeing us, but did he do it? He gave us freedom without giving us any chance to live to ourselves and we still had to depend on the southern white man... (Thomas Hall, Ex-slave)

... Our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions (John O'Sullivan, Democratic Review, summer 1845

Jefferson's talk of "agriculture... manufactures... civilization " is crucial. Indian removal was necessary for the opening of the vast American lands to agriculture, to commerce, to markets, to money, to the development of the modern capitalist economy

Earlier societies-In America and elsewhere- in which property was held in common and families were extensive and complicated, with aunts and uncles and grandmothers and grandfathers all living together, seemed to treat women more as equals than did the white societies that later overran them, bringing "civilization" and private property