Helen Keller's 20/20 Vision
Zinn turns to Helen Keller for what remains still one of the most insightful examples of imagery regarding the U.S. electoral system to define the inherent problem of democratic rule. In this particular case, Keller is making a sad point about women finally getting the vote and what little difference it would make. The point, still just as sad, but more universal, remains unaddressed:
“Our democracy is but a name. We vote? What does that mean? It means that we choose between two bodies of real, though not avowed, autocrats. We choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee…”
“Rules for Female Teachers”
The insanity of a deeply misogynist perspective is put on display in the imagery of a posting by a small-town Massachusetts school board at the turn of the last century. The condition of the working woman in the 1800’s even as the new century was dawning is revealed in all its patriarchal glory of self-empowerment through domination of the opposite sex:
“1. Do not get married. 2. Do not leave town at any time without permission of the school board. 3. Do not keep company with men. 4. Be home between the hours of 8 P.M. and 6 A.M. 5. Do not loiter downtown in ice cream stores. 6. Do not smoke. 7. Do not get into a carriage with any man except your father or brother. 8. Do not dress in bright colors. 9. Do not dye your hair. 10. Do not wear any dress more than two inches above the ankle.”
America's Imagery
John O’Sullivan is a name little remembered today, but in the summer of 1845 he wrote an essay on the issue of annexing Texas into the United States which included one single piece of imagery that received very little attention at the time. Over the course of the succeeding year, however, it would rise to status that makes it perfectly within reason to say it became America’s defining imagery, using the most mundane of language to describe a concept that would result in nothing short of genocidal behavior on the part of America’s leaders and tacit acceptance of that behavior by generations of citizens. Claiming the entire unsettled territory west of the Mississippi which did not already belong to America, O’Sullivan insisted, was essential as part of:
“Our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.”
The Problem with America…
America has and has always had a problem: its claims to equality and democratic principles is at all times corrupted by its faithful service to an economic system that would collapse upon if adhering to those very same claims and principles. The beliefs (if actually believed) and premise constructed as a foundation for supporting this paradoxical relationship can be found in writings throughout the country’s history even up to today’s sermons by super-wealthy mega-ministers. But perhaps nowhere it is as detached from reality as in the lectures of Russell Conwell, whose last name could not be more appropriate:
“The men who get rich may be the most honest men you find in the community…ninety-eight out of one hundred of the rich men of America are honest. That is why they are rich. That is why they are trusted with money. That is why they carry on great enterprises and find plenty of people to work with them. It is because they are honest men…To sympathize with a man whom God has punished… is to do wrong…let us remember there is not a poor person in the United States who was not made poor by his own shortcomings.”
