A Young People's History of the United States

This section highlights the continuity of both political platforms and the protests to the US political system during the last several decades of the 20th century. Although the culture of protest and outwardly expressed anger could hardly remain at the same levels as during the era of the Vietnam War and the freedom struggles of the 1960s and early 1970s, the end of the 20th century continued to be marked by public criticism and activism, a widening gap between the rich and the poor, and a government disconnected from the needs of the people.

A significant international development that influenced American domestic life and policy was the collapse of the Soviet Union, which represented an end to the Cold War of the past four decades. “Almost overnight, it seemed,” Zinn writes, “The old Communist governments fell apart” (355). However, US policy, initiatives, and budgeting did little to reflect this sudden change. A major topic of analysis through this section of the book is increased US military spending, especially at the expense of other governmental programs. During the Cold War, the government justified military spending as a necessary measure against an immediate Soviet threat. Without that threat, it needed new justifications. President George Bush’s administration, “as if to prove that the gigantic military force was still needed […] started two wars” (356). The book says little about the American response to the “‘small’ war” (357) in Panama. The war in Iraq, which lasted only six weeks, was reportedly “massive” (357). Vietnam veterans and others protested Desert Storm, as it was called, and Bush “launched the air war […] with overwhelming force” so that it would “be over before a national anti-war movement could form” (369). Americans did protest, however, and they did not reelect Bush as president for a second term.

A shift back to a Democratic White House after Bush, however, brought no change to military spending. Zinn makes the point several times (and quotes others, including President Dwight Eisenhower, who made the same point before) that “military spending took money away from social programs” (376). By the end of the century, 25% of American children were impoverished, and “[t]he country’s leaders did not look for bold solutions to the problems of health care, education, child care, unemployment, housing, and the environment” (377). As the cost-of-living rose and wages failed to keep up, commentators called for an end to such intense military spending to make funds available “for social programs to attack poverty, joblessness, and other national problems,” but “the military budget kept rising” (381). Welfare cuts continued. One area that received increased governmental attention during the Clinton years was the growth of the prison system and the practice of incarceration, which did not help Americans buy food or care for children.

Perhaps because this section of the book covers a shorter timeline than previous ones, Zinn devotes more space in the analysis to discussions about the men who occupied the presidency. He discusses every president from Richard Nixon to Bill Clinton in much more detail than the dozens of presidents that preceded them, except for the several who Zinn chose to mention because of particularly impactful policy, wars, or patterns. This focus, however, does not emphasize the importance of individual men or their administrations. One of the major points Zinn makes in this section is that what party and personality occupied the White House did not matter to the larger currents of US politics. By the end of the century, the mainstream liberal and conservative factions—represented by Democrats and Republicans, respectively—were close on the political spectrum. A rise of conservativism following World War II brought the mainstream Left closer to the center. This process accelerated under Bill Clinton, who made “the [Democratic] party less liberal and more conservative, so that it would not be too different from the Republican Party” (378). The best challenges to policy therefore resided in the people outside mainstream politics.

Zinn credits activists with long, difficult fights and minimal but significant wins. Women, people of color, the labor movement, and those demanding an end to environmental destruction persistently demonstrated and sought to educate Americans about the inequality at work in the country and around the world—and about the threats that large-scale capitalism held for the world and for future generations. War protests were as old as the country itself. Protests that aimed to increase freedoms for oppressed demographics had picked up earlier in the century. The mainstream Environmental Movement emerged in the 1960s, though advocates for what we might now call sustainability were vocal long before then. The labor movement was another of the oldest threads of protest in American history, and while many of the general concerns remained the same, poignant issues developed in political contexts. By the century’s end, increasingly more people articulated the need for “living wages” because the cost-of-living outpaced wages so drastically through the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Much of the activist rhetoric that came into use in the last decades of the 20th century is still familiar and in circulation several decades later.