History of the United States

The contents of this article have been adapted from United States of America#History.

The history of the United States in its modern political form began with European colonization of North America. The prehistory or oral history of Native Americans in the territory of the modern United States will not be heavily emphasized here.

Early history

Exploration and colonization

Modern American mythology surrounding its early history tends to treat North American natives before 1610 as an alien, uncontacted culture. In fact, European influence in North America penetrated much further than the Europeans themselves were aware. Charles C. Mann writes:

In 1501, just nine years after Columbus's first voyage, the Portuguese adventurer Gaspar Corte-Real abducted fifty-odd Indians from Maine. Examining the captives, Corte-Real found to his astonishment that two were wearing items from Venice: a broken sword and two silver rings."

Disease was no exception. The travels of Europeans such as Hernando de Soto, John Cabot, and others such as fishermen likely spread illnesses throughout North America through trade and exposure, much in the same way as explorers had done throughout Meso- and South America. By the time Puritan settlers (so-called Pilgrims, although many of them were non-Puritans) arrived at Plymouth in 1620, the area was deserted and overgrown. Ill-prepared and underequipped, the English resorted to raiding local settlements, crops, and even graves. Until then, colonial expeditions across the North Atlantic had been repulsed by thickly settled Indian communities; within decades resistance had collapsed. In successful cases like Jamestown and Plymouth, political factors such as inter-tribal rivalry often played a role, but the crippling effect of the epidemics was consistently an overriding factor. The drop in population for such an unexposed community could have exceeded 90%.

First colonies

Once established, Jamestown became a profitable fixture of emerging British mercantilism, producing the lucrative and addictive tobacco crop. At Plymouth, however, the Puritans succeeded in creating an ideal religious order untrammeled by European interference, most infamously represented in the Salem Witch Trials.

Colonial era

Indentured servitude

The first Africans in the United States were indentured servants with similar status to many White colonists. Fraternization was common, as was collective struggle against the elites.

Origins of slavery

Slave codes

The slave system was developed by degrees and through intense class struggle:

• 1655: Virginia judge condemns John Punch, an African indentured servant, to lifelong servitude, the first time an African is condemned to slavery on the basis of race.
• 1662: Overturning English common law, Virginia rules legal status of children to follow that of the mother, enslaving children of raped slaves.
• 1664: Maryland passes law enslaving white women with black husbands. Similar law passed in Virginia.
• 1682: Virginia makes all "Negroes, Moors, Mullattos" slaves regardless of religion, removing all pretense of a religious basis for slavery.
• 1691: Virginia bans all interracial marriage on pain of banishment. The Lovings received this penalty nearly three centuries later.
• 1705: The first modern slave code becomes law in Virginia colony, becoming a model for other colonies, with:
  • Enshrinement of slavery for all non-Whites, with no legal rights
  • Right of masters to kill their slaves with no penalty
  • Whipping, branding, or maiming for association with Whites
  • No legal recourse for slaves against their masters
  • Whipping and mutilation for theft or other offenses

Revolution

Main article: American Revolution

Karl Marx considered the American Revolution to be a historically progressive bourgeois revolution which held great importance for the defeat of feudal society and the spread of bourgeois democracy and liberal thought. In comparison to the French Revolution, however, it was rather conservative, and when it came time for the American revolutionaries to support the French movement they had inspired, they vacillated as much as did their British cousins.

Civil War

Main article: American Civil War

Slavery first spread to the colonies in the 17th century but only exploded in profitability in the 1790s, when the Industrial Revolution increased British demand for cotton and the labor-saving "cotton gin" revolutionized the production process. To quote Edward E. Baptist's The Half Has Never Been Told:

…Despite something of a northern consensus that slavery was backward and inefficient, and despite the hard times of the previous decade, plenty of southern readers and talkers answered the question of whether or not the South could continue to use slavery as its recipe for modern economic development with a resounding yes.…

By 1860, the eight wealthiest states in the United States, ranked by wealth per white person, were South Carolina, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, Connecticut, Alabama, Florida, and Texas⁠—seven states created by cotton's march west and south, plus one that, as the most industrialized state in the Union, profited disproportionately from the gearing of northern factory equipment to the southwestern whipping-machine.

In the long run, of course, capitalist farming proved to be superior. In fact, among the reasons why slaveowners wanted the "freedom" to extend slavery into new territories and states was to offset soil erosion and to prevent slaves from accumulating in one area, increasing the threat of a serious slave revolt. This conflict would ultimately trigger a crisis in the 1850s.

Marx and Engels themselves discussed the Civil War as it was in progress, making many accurate predictions, including that the war would have to attack slavery as an institution in order to succeed. Marxists have continued to discuss the war to the present day, including historian Herbert Aptheker in a summary of the origins and course of the war. According to Aptheker, war resulted when the emerging industrial bourgeoisie came to see the spread of slavery in the American West as hostile to its own economic interests and lent its support to the Republican Party for its explicit opposition to this expansion. This would also have the benefit of slowly undermining the political power of slaveowners in the Senate and Supreme Court as more free (non-slave) states were added to the Union. The industrial bourgeoisie had no interest in waging war against slavery otherwise and was only forced to do so after the slaveowners, in response to the election of Lincoln, seceded and took up arms instead of accepting a gradual and peaceful demise. The Union government continued to insist until well into the war that its aim was to force the seceding states to accept the results of the election and bring them back into the Union, rather than to abolish slavery itself.

Some sections of the American bourgeoisie, in fact, were able to profit from slavery and supported its preservation. British capitalists, interested in weakening the Union as well as ending the blockade which had induced a "cotton famine" in the textile trade, sympathized with the Confederate cause and attempted to find pretexts to support them, including the so-called Trent Affair, as Marx describes in his correspondence for the New York Tribune. While British workers had cause to sympathize with the anti-slavery Union, being hurt by competition with slave labor and receiving almost none of the gains , they also, according to Marx, suffered from unemployment on account of the cotton shortage, but continued to show solidarity and to oppose the craven bourgeoisie in its efforts to aid reaction.

Zenith of labor struggle

The Civil War had transformed American capitalism overnight. The United States would surpass the British Empire in GDP by the 1880s. Thenceforth, class struggle and imperialism would take off, culminating in the era of American industrial struggle.

"The Great Upheaval"

After shooting over 20 civilians, US troops were forced to take cover in a railroad depot. On the night of July 21, 1877, rioters burned down the building, forcing soldiers to flee.

At least 100 demonstrators were killed nationwide during the suppression of the Strike of 1877.

1880s and the Haymarket Affair

The Haymarket Affair is the origin of the worldwide celebration of Labor Day on May the 1st.

First Red Scare

Palmer Raids

Over 200 foreign leftists, including the Russian immigrant Emma Goldman, were deported in the so-called Palmer Raids of 1920.

New Deal

The New Deal program of President Franklin D. Roosevelt began a period of concessions and compromise between American labor and capital (roughly patterned after similar concessions won in Europe) with the stated aim of reducing unemployment and poverty. However, liberal historians debate whether the Keynesian New Deal or the state capitalism of the wartime era did more to alleviate the Depression. In any case, Roosevelt was one of the most radical presidents in recent memory, pushing against the bounds of the American political and legal systems in order to enact his reforms. His popularity was overwhelming, creating a coalition which would last decades, and his four-term tenure directly resulted in the modern two-term maximum.

McCarthy era

The First Red Scare was an open attack on domestic labor and radical politics, culminating in 1919 with the Palmer Raids and the deportation of hundreds of communists and anarchists.

After World War II, when the wartime pact between labor and capital came to an end, the struggle resumed on a national scale and fiercer than ever. President Truman used federal power to put down an attempted rail strike in 1946, but otherwise attempted to continue the New Deal agenda and push forward labor rights in the face of renewed Republican opposition. Truman was defeated, and the Republicans enacted the repressive Taft-Hartley Act, in legal force to this day.

While Taft-Hartley was an effective legal attack against labor, an attack on the ideological front was needed. The Second Red Scare, later known as the McCarthy Era, was a simultaneous attack against the Soviet Union and against domestic labor, creating an effective weapon against the most radical elements of the labor movement. Liberal unionists like John L. Lewis of the AFL were a crucial piece of the McCarthyist suppression apparatus, banning organizers and reporting them to the HUAC. Actors like John Wayne produced propaganda films about communist influence among the "good" liberal unions, and future presidents Richard Nixon, a red-baiting California politician, and Ronald Reagan, anti-communist snitch while President of SAG, counted among the Inquisitors' ranks.

General crisis (1960s-70s)

The rate of profit crashed during the 1960s, producing an acute crisis by the end of the decade. In addition, social contradictions came to the fore, including racial oppression and opposition to the massive Vietnam War effort.

End of Jim Crow

Black Panther Party

Main article: Black Panther Party for Self Defense

Resolution of the crisis

Volcker shock

Jimmy Carter pioneered several elements of the neoliberal push. Paul Volcker was his appointee. However, the election of Ronald Reagan signalled the onset of an openly reactionary push against labor and American Blacks.

Neoliberal era

See also: Neoliberalism

Capital responded to the general crisis of the 1970s with an ideological and political assault on the postwar consensus and helped to develop the ideology and world-system known as neoliberalism.

Carter

In 1978, Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy, liberal Harvard professor (and later Supreme Court Justice) Stephen Breyer, and President Carter teamed up to begin neoliberal deregulation, creating legislation with both Republican and Democrat support in Congress. This started with the Airline Deregulation Act passed the same year, after which was targeted the transportation system and the telecommunications industry. This ramped up under the Republican Reagan administration and continued beyond.

Reagan

Main article: Ronald Reagan

New World Order

After the fall of the Eastern Bloc, the United States took out two of its last major rivals in Iraq and Yugoslavia, ushering in what George Bush called the "New World Order". Iran was one of the only major anti-American powers left.

Crisis of the 21st century

In the early 2000s, several signs of instability were present, including the highly contested 2000 election, the 2001 attacks, the Dot-com crash, and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. This became a crisis in earnest with the 2008 recession, Obama's "Pivot to Asia" policy, and the collapse of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The details of this crisis are still recent and are therefore debated. In any case, the election of Donald Trump, the deaths of over one million due to COVID, the 2020 George Floyd unrest, and the January 6th Capital riot all indicate a newly sharpened domestic crisis, and internationally the US continues its belligerent policy in Ukraine and the Pacific Ocean. Trust in the political process has eroded, and gun violence, mass shootings, and general crime have all exploded since 2020.

Economist Michael Roberts has argued that the economic crises of 2008 and 2020 are only extensions of a deeper crisis that has been in effect since the 2001 dotcom crash.