The Untold History of the United States

by Oliver Stone

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A project of this scope required the support, assistance, and forbearance of a large number of people. On the film side, we’d like to thank the following: Fernando Sulichin for finding the financing and maintaining his composure through difficult times; Rob Wilson and Tara Tremaine were anchors from the beginning, culling archives around the world; Alex Marquez edited on and off through four years and many late nights, aided at various intervals by Elliot Eisman, Alexis Chavez, and Sean Stone; on the aural side, Craig Armstrong, Adam Peters, and Budd Carr—and Wylie Stateman; in the administrative grapple, Evan Bates and Suzie Gilbert; and Steven Pines for managing the money out of thin air. Many thanks to Showtime, through two different administrations—David Nevins for his insights; and the help of Bryan Lourd, Jeff Jacobs, Simon Green, and Kevin Cooper.

  On the book side, we are indebted to Peter’s colleagues and graduate students in American University’s History Department. Max Paul Friedman lent his expertise on the history of U.S. foreign policy, reading the entire manuscript with painstaking care, challenging some of our interpretations and saving us from errors both large and small. Because U.S.-Soviet and U.S.-Russian relations figure so prominently in our story, we drew heavily on the expertise of Russian historian Anton Fedyashin, who was always ready to answer questions and check Russian language sources to make sure we got things right. Among Peter’s other colleagues who responded with generosity to questions regarding their own fields of historical scholarship were professors Mustafa Aksakal, Richard Breitman, Phil Brenner, Ira Klein, Allan Lichtman, Eric Lohr, and Anna Nelson.

  Among the graduate students, Eric Singer and Ben Bennett were indispensable. They took vast amounts of time out of their own research and writing to help with a variety of research tasks. Eric was a master at tracking down obscure information that no one else could find. Ben, among his many contributions, took charge of finding the visuals that add such an important dimension to this book. Other current and former Ph.D. students who worked extensively on this project include Rebecca DeWolf, Cindy Gueli, Vincent Intondi, Matt Pembleton, Terumi Rafferty-Osaki, Jay Weixelbaum, and Adam Zarakov. Additional research assistance and fertile leads were provided by Daniel Cipriani, Nguyet Nguyen, David Onkst, Allen Pietrobon, Arie Serota, and Keith Skillin.

  Numerous friends and colleagues also provided invaluable assistance along the way. Daniel Ellsberg was extremely generous with his insights, suggestions, critical readings, and enthusiastic support. His knowledge of much of this history remains unsurpassed. Among the other scholars who gave generously of their time and expertise, answered questions, and suggested documents are Gar Alperovitz, Robert Berkowitz, Bill Burr, Bob Dreyfuss, Carolyn Eisenberg, Ham Fish, Michael Flynn, Irena Grudzinska Gross, Hugh Gusterson, Anita Kondoyanidi, Bill Lanouette, Milton Leitenberg, Robert Jay Lifton, Arjun Makhijani, Ray McGovern, Roger Morris, Satoko Oka Norimatsu, Robert Norris, Robert Parry, Leo Ribuffo, Jonathan Schell, Peter Dale Scott, Mark Selden, Marty Sherwin, Chuck Strozier, Janine Wedel, and Larry Wittner.

  Because the project has taken as long as it has, we were sad to lose four of our biggest supporters along the way—Howard Zinn, Bob Griffith, Charlie Wiener, and Uday Mohan.

  Barbara Koeppel provided additional assistance with the visuals and captions. Erin Hamilton offered valuable insights on Chile. Matt Smith and Clement Ho of the American University library were extremely helpful with finding sources and providing other assistance.

  The team at Gallery Books did everything they could to meet our often unwieldy requests as we rushed to complete the two projects on schedule. We are especially indebted to our editor, Jeremie Ruby-Strauss, and his assistant, Heather Hunt. We would also like to thank Louise Burke, Jen Bergstrom, Jessica Chin, Emily Drum, Elisa Rivlin, Emilia Pisani, Tricia Boczkowski, Sally Franklin, Jen Robinson, Larry Pekarek, and Davina Mock.

  Peter’s daughter Lexie and his wife, Simki Kuznick, helped with research and footnoting and Simki pored patiently over numerous drafts of this manuscript with the skill of an editor and the eye of a poet.

  OLIVER STONE has won numerous Academy Awards for his work on such iconic films as Platoon, Wall Street, JFK, Born on the Fourth of July, Natural Born Killers, Salvador, and W.

  PETER KUZNICK is a professor of history and director of the award-winning Nuclear Studies Institute at American University and is currently serving his third term as distinguished lecturer with the Organization of American Historians. He has written extensively about science and politics, nuclear history, and Cold War culture.

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  JACKET ART © 2012 SHOWTIME NETWORKS INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  AUTHOR PHOTOGRAPHS: OLIVER STONE BY MICHAEL SEGAL PHOTOGRAPHY, PETER KUZNICK BY AMERICAN UNIVERSITY

  COPYRIGHT © 2012 SIMON & SCHUSTER

  NOTES

  INTRODUCTION: ROOTS OF EMPIRE: “WAR IS A RACKET”

  1 Lloyd C. Gardner, Walter F. LaFeber, and Thomas J. McCormick, Creation of the American Empire, vol. 1: U.S. Diplomatic History to 1901 (Chicago: Rand McNally College Publishing, 1976), 108.

  2 Alfred W. McCoy, Francisco A. Scarano, and Courtney Johnson, “On the Tropic of Cancer: Transitions and Transformations in the U.S. Imperial State,” in Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State, ed. Alfred W. McCoy and Francisco A. Scarano (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009), 21.

  3 J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians (London: Secker & Warburg, 1980), 133.

  4 Sam Dillon, “U.S. Students Remain Poor at History, Tests Show,” New York Times, June 15, 2011.

  5 President Woodrow Wilson speaking on the League of Nations to a luncheon audience in Portland, OR. 66th Cong., 1st sess. Senate Documents: Addresses of President Wilson (May–November 1919), vol. 11, no. 120, p. 206.

  6 Barack Obama, News Conference, April 4, 2009, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=85959&st=american+exceptionalism&st1=#axzz1RXk$VS7z.

  7 Jonathan Martin and Ben Smith, “The New Battle: What It`¡ Means to Be American,” August 20, 2010, www.politico.com/news/stories/0810/41273.html.

  8 Nina J. Easton, “Thunder on the Right,” American Journalism Review 23 (December 2001), 320.

  9 Emily Eakin, “Ideas and Trends: All Roads Lead to D.C.,” New York Times, March 31, 2002.

  10 Ibid.

  11 William Appleman Williams, Empire as a Way of Life: An Essay on the Causes and Character of America’s Present Predicament Along with a Few Thoughts About an Alternative (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 62.

  12 Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 51.

  13 Max Boot, “American Imperialism? No Need to Run Away from Label,” USA Today, May 6, 2003.

  14 Niall Ferguson, Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004), 14–15.

  15 Paul Kennedy, “The Eagle Has Landed,” Financial Times, February 22, 2002.

  16 Jonathan Freedland, “Is America the New Rome?” Guardian, September 18, 2002.

  17 “Joint Vision 2010,” www.dtic.mil/jv2010/jvpub.htm; General Howell M. Estes III, USAF, United States Space Command, “Vision for 2020,” February 1997, www.fas.org/spp/military/docops/usspac/visbook.pdf; “Joint Vision 2020,” www.dtic.mil/jointvision/jvpub2.htm.

  18 Benjamin J. Cohen, The Question of Imperialism: The Political Economy of Dominance and Dependence (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 23.

  19 Amiya Kumar Bacgchi, Perilous Passage: Mankind and the Global Ascendance of Capital (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 272.

  20 Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 150.

  21 Lars Shoultz, Beneath the United States: A History of U.S. Policy Toward Latin America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998)
, 86.

  22 Walt Whitman, Complete Poetry and Collected Prose (New York: Viking, 1982), 1074.

  23 Robert V. Bruce, 1877: Year of Violence (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1989), 225–226.

  24 Philip Sheldon Foner, The Great Labor Uprising of 1877 (New York: Monad Press, 1975), 157.

  25 Philip Sheldon Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States, vol. 2: From the Founding of the A.F. of L. to the Emergence of American Imperialism (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 50.

  26 Maury Klein, The Life and Legend of Jay Gould (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 357.

  27 Ida Minerva Tarbell, All in the Day’s Work: An Autobiography (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 82.

  28 John D. Hicks, Populist Revolt: A History of the Farmers’ Alliance and the People’s Party (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1931), 140, 440.

  29 Walter LaFeber, The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860–1898 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 366.

  30 Robert L. Beisner, Twelve Against Empire: The Anti-Imperialists 1898-1900 (New York: McGraw Hill, 1968), xiv.

  31 William Roscoe Thayer, ed. “John Hay’s Years with Roosevelt,” Harper’s Magazine 131 (1915), 578.

  32 Homer Clyde Stuntz, The Philippines and the Far East (Cincinnati: Jennings and Pye, 1904), 144.

  33 John Byrne Cooke, Reporting the War: Freedom of the Press from the American Revolution to the War on Terrorism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 78.

  34 “Ratification of the Treaty Now Assured,” Chicago Tribune, February 6, 1899.

  35 “Treaty Wins in the Senate by One Vote,” Chicago Tribune, February 7, 1899.

  36 Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq (New York: Times Books, 2006), 49.

  37 George Frisbie Hoar, Autobiography of Seventy Years, vol. 2 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1905), 304.

  38 “Gain for the Treaty,” New York Times, February 6, 1899.

  39 Kinzer, Overthrow, 52–53.

  40 David Howard Bain, Sitting in Darkness: Americans in the Philippines (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1984), 84.

  41 Congressional Record, Senate, 56th Cong., 1st Sess., 1900, vol. 33, pt. 1, 704.

  42 William Jennings Bryan, Speeches of William Jennings Bryan, vol. 2 (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1909), 17, 24–26. For an excellent biography of Bryan, see Michael Kazin, A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006).

  43 Stuart Creighton Miller, Benevolent Assimilation: The American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899–1903 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 211.

  44 Henry Moore Teller, The Problem in the Philippines (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1902), 52.

  45 Epifanio San Juan, Crisis in the Philippines: The Making of a Revolution (South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey, 1986), 19.

  46 Some estimate that the death toll among Filipinos was higher than 600,000. See John M. Gates, “War-Related Deaths in the Philippines, 1898–1902,” Pacific Historical Review 53 (1984), 367–378.

  47 Eric Rauchway, Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt’s America (New York: Hill & Wang, 2003), 102.

  48 Howard C. Hill, Roosevelt and the Caribbean (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1927), 67.

  49 Schoultz, Beneath the United States, 191.

  50 Richard F. Grimmett, “Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798–2009,” January 27, 2010, Congressional Research Service, www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL32170.pdf.

  51 Walter LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), 42.

  52 Ibid., 46.

  53 Ibid., 50.

  54 “The Republic of Brown Bros.,” Nation, 114 (1922), 667.

  55 LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions, 69.

  56 Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove, Voices of a People’s History of the United States, 2nd. ed. (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2009), 251–252.

  CHAPTER 1: WORLD WAR I: WILSON VS. LENIN

  1 William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988), 72.

  2 Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (New York: HarperPerennial, 1992), 240.

  3 Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949), 237–241.

  4 Lloyd C. Gardner, Wilson and Revolutions: 1913–1921 (New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1976), 12.

  5 Walter LaFeber, The American Age: United States Foreign Policy at Home and Abroad Since 1750 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 262; Lloyd C. Gardner, Walter F. LaFeber, and Thomas J. McCormick, Creation of the American Empire, vol. 2: U.S. Diplomatic History Since 1893 (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1976), 305.

  6 George C. Herring, From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 390.

  7 Gardner, LaFeber, and McCormick, Creation of the American Empire, vol. 2, 306–307; LaFeber, The American Age, 278.

  8 Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, 70.

  9 Lars Schoultz, Beneath the United States: A History of U.S. Policy Toward Latin America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 246.

  10 Nicholas D. Kristof, “Our Broken Escalator,” New York Times, July 17, 2011.

  11 Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York: Harper Colophon, 1980), 350.

  12 Nell Irvin Painter, Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877–1919 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987), 293.

  13 Ray Ginger, The Bending Cross: A Biography of Eugene Victor Debs (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1949), 328.

  14 Herring, From Colony to Superpower, 399.

  15 Kathryn S. Olmsted, Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 34.

  16 “Notes Linking Wilson to Morgan War Loans,” Washington Post, January 8, 1936.

  17 Herring, From Colony to Superpower, 403, 409–410.

  18 “Scene in the Senate as President Speaks,” New York Times, January 23, 1917.

  19 “Amazement and Bewilderment Caused by Proposal of Wilson for Peace Pact for the World,” Atlanta Constitution, January 23, 1917.

  20 LaFeber, The American Age, 278; Carter Jefferson, Anatole France: The Politics of Skepticism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1965), 195.

  21 Thomas J. Knock, To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 118.

  22 Ibid., 120.

  23 Ibid., 121, 131.

  24 David M. Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 184–185.

  25 Ibid., 60–62.

  26 William Graebner, The Engineering of Consent: Democracy and Authority in Twentieth-Century America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 42.

  27 Victor S. Clark, “The German Press and the War,” Historical Outlook 10 (November 1919), 427.

  28 “Shows German Aim to Control World,” New York Times, December 3, 1917.

  29 Stewart Halsey Ross, Propaganda for War: How the United States Was Conditioned to Fight the Great War of 1914–1918 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 1996), 241.

  30 “Documents Prove Lenin and Trotzky Hired by Germans,” New York Times, September 15, 1918.

  31 Ross, Propaganda for War, 241.

  32 “Creel Upholds Russian Exposure,” New York Times, September 22, 1918.

  33 “Spurns Sisson Data,” Washington Post, September 22, 1918.

  34 Ross, Propaganda for War, 241–242.

  35 “The Sisson Documents,” Nation, November 23, 1918, in Philip Sheldon Foner, The Bolshevik Revolution: Its Impact on American Radicals, Liberals, and Labor (New York: International Publishers, 1967), 137.

  36 George F. Kennan, “The Sisson Documents,” Journal
of Modern History 28 (June 1956), 130–154.

  37 Charles Angoff, “The Higher Learning Goes to War,” The American Mercury, May–August 1927, 178.

  38 Harold D. Lasswell, Propaganda Technique in the World War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1927), 14–15.

  39 “Oust Traitors, Says Butler,” New York Times, June 7, 1917.

  40 “Columbia Ousts Two Professors, Foes of War Plans,” New York Times, October 2, 1917.

  41 “The Expulsions at Columbia,” New York Times, October 3, 1917.

  42 “Quits Columbia; Assails Trustees,” New York Times, October 9, 1917.

  43 Ibid.

  44 Horace Cornelius Peterson and Gilbert Courtland Fite, Opponents of War, 1917–1918 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1957), 104–112.

  45 Carol S. Gruber, Mars and Minerva: World War I and the Uses of the Higher Learning in America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1975), 213–214.

  46 “War Directed College Course to be Intensive,” Chicago Tribune, September 1, 1918.

  47 Gruber, Mars and Minerva, 217–218, 237–244; Kennedy, Over Here, 57–59.

  48 “Bankers Cheer Demand to Oust Senator La Follette; ‘Like Poison in Food of Army,’ ” Chicago Tribune, September 28, 1917.

  49 Gruber, Mars and Minerva, 208.

  50 Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, 356.

  51 Painter, Standing at Armageddon, 335; Kennedy, Over Here, 76.

  52 “Sedition Act of 1918,” www.pbs.org/wnet/supremecourt/capitalism/sourcesdocument1.html.

  53 Nick Salvatore, Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), 292.

  54 Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, 358.

  55 Ibid., 358–359.

  56 Ibid., 359.

  57 “The I.W.W.,” New York Times, August 4, 1917.

  58 Kennedy, Over Here, 67–68; Knock, To End All Wars, 133; Alan Axelrod, Selling the Great War: The Making of American Propaganda (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 181–182.