Class Envy in the Early American Colonies?

TCR Musings

Howard Zinn in his People's History of the United States relates how William Berkeley of Jamestown, returning to England circa 1670's complained:

"...we cannot but resent that forty thousand people should be impoverished to enrich little more than 40 merchants who being the only buyers of our Tobacco give us what they please for it, and after it is here, sell it how they please; and indeed have forty thousand servants in us at cheaper rates than any other men have slaves..." (Page 42)

Nothing like injustice to get tempers flying, then or today, which is why to seek peace is to seek justice. Still, I have seen Zinn, a pacifist, dismissed as a socialist or anarchist which he is, and which he isn't. Both Dorothy Day and Zinn were influenced by Upton Sinclaire's The Jungle. How could one not be? Some of us are Distributists at TCR but that does not mean we do not approach both Marx and Adam Smith dialectically, taking what is good and leaving the rest from each. We are Catholics and so do not fit into simple labels. Rather we seek to shape a future which includes whatever is good, wherever it is good, and so believe in both worker ownership and private property.

For more, go to Howard Zinn...