rather short supply in America since Watergate and the Indochina War, so many people have hailed the two-hundredth anniversary of the American Revolution as a chance to restore faith in tradition. The problem, of course, is figuring out exactly what that tradition is.
Thus President Ford launched the bicentennial celebration by urging a return to 'first principles". •We must renew ourselves as a people, he intoned, "and rededicate this nation to the principles of two centuries ago.' He then proceeded to declare that this could best be implemented by curbing government regulation of business and sharply cutting back welfare spending.
Five hundred yards away, however, the People's Bicentennial Commission had gathered a demonstration of 20,000 to protest Ford's economic policies. They argued that the first principles of the American Revolution required control of big business and an extension of economic aid to the poor. Traditions *Both Democratic and Republi can politicians and their liberal critics have solemnly declared themselves the true defenders of the American way. All of them are wrong.
There are actually two American raditions-two totally different American traditions. Both have seen present from the beginning una born nave ten ronowers today. One is the tradition of those who save subordinated everything to he pursuit of private profit. The other is the tradition of those who nave fought for democracy and social justice.
The American profit tradition was planted by the joint stock companies that set up the first colonial settlements on Indian lands. It nourished on the slave raids along the African coast and fattened in the holds of the slave ships, where ap to half the human cargo often died. But it really took root and flourished on American soil, and along its trunk is carved a bloody record of genocide stretching from the massacres of the Native Americans to the murderous bombardment of Indochina.
The American profit tradition has been upheld by murder, oppres •sion, and deceit. It was in this tradition that the Puritan settlers massacred the Pequod Indians and ruled that the very name of the tribe was to be wiped off the face of the earth. The Pequod River was renamed the Thames. The town of Pequod became New. London.
It was in this tradition, too, that the colonists let 5,000 Blacks fight with them for independence from England and then denied them a share of the freedom that was WOLL. Slave Trade Thomas Jefferson contributed to this first American tradition when he dropped from the Declaration of Independence his original attack on the slave trade-a gesture that appeas-ed the Southern planters and served as a precedent for the whole line of rotten compromises and sell-outs that American politicians have since perpetrated on Blacks.
It was in this reactionary American tradition that Tom Paine was denied the right to vote in the nation he helped found and left to die in poverty, remembered as a *filthy little atheist" by Theodore Roosevelt. And it was also in this tradition that the Jim Crow laws were spread in the South to reverse the new power and influence of Blacks in southern politics, and were finally introduced into the nation's capital by Woodrow Wilson.
Today's politicians are indeed the heirs of this reactionary American tradition. There is a direct line from the genocide against the Indians to Woodrow Wilson's war to save imperialism. It leads to John F. Kennedy and the invasion of Cuba; Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon and the aggression against But there is a second American tradition, a tradition of egalitarianism, of fighting for the common people, of resistance to minority rule. It is a tradition whose roots JOHN BROWN can be found in the tribal societies of the Native Americans where. William Penn reported: *Wealth circulateth like the blood, all parts partake, and... none shall want what another hath.' This tradition was built by the many Americans who refused to disband the organisations of dual power such as the Committees of Correspondence, that had sprung up during the struggle against Britain, and began to use them to take action against profiteers and mono polists.
It was in this tradition, too, that Mecklenberg County, North Carolina, instructed its delegates to the Ku Klux Klan members dressed to kill in Boston First Constitutional Convention: *Oppose anything that leans to aristocracy of power .... exercised to the oppression of the poor.
Blacks were part of the democratic American tradition, both fighting for their freedom in slave rebellions and using the arguments of the Declaration of Independence in numerous petitions and suits against slavery. They were supported by the radical leaders of the American Revolution, though these were temporarily defeated. In Georgia, St.Andrew's Parish, meeting in 1775, declared slavery an 'unnatural practice-founded in injustice and cruelty' second American tradition. One of the revolution's most valuable spies was a woman we only know by her number-355. She died on a British prison ship. Mercy Otis Warren was a leading propagandist for the revolution in her satirical plays. She also opposed the wars against the Indians and argued for a further extension of democracy.
Rebels it is a travesty of history to let the politicians of the two ruling class parties lay claim to even a piece of that history er, put this second American tradition in its proper place when, during a steel strike in Pennsylvania, she was asked if she had a permit to speak. "Yes, your honour', she said. asked the judge. Pattick Henry, replied Mother Jones. son, John Adams.
the real sons and daughters of the second American tradition -the direct line from Tom Paine to Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass.3It leads to Eugene Debs* the 1920s and 1930s, and from partyS Women also helped to found the These people helped to found the great American rebel tradition, and Mother Jones, the Wobblyl lead'Well, who gave it to you?"
Thomas JefferThe fact is that we socialists are American rebel tradition. There is a and the union militants of there to Malcolm X, La Raza Unida , and the anti-war movement.
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writer for Young Socialist in US Respect for authority has been in