CHAPTER 7: THE LAND OF OPPORTUNITY

1 Abraham Lincoln quoted in Carl Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln (New York:
Harcourt, Brace, 1954), 271.

2 Helen Keller, Midstream: My Later Life (New York: Greenwood, 1968
[1929]), 156.

3 Kwame Nkrumah, Consciencism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1964),
63.

4 Similarly, Cynthia S. Sunal and Perry D. Phillips tell how their students aged
six to eighteen “seemed unable to explain inequalities.” See “Rural Students’
Development of the Conception of Economic Inequality” (New Orleans:
American Educational Research Association, 1988, abstract, ERIC
ED299069).

5 Two recent books do mention the air traffic controllers’ strike broken by
President Reagan, but as part of the Reagan presidency rather than labor
history.

6 Jean Anyon, “Ideology and United States History Textbooks,” Harvard
Educational Review 49, no. 3 (8/1979): 373. Anyon claims that high school
history textbooks always concentrate on “the same three strikes”: the 1877
railroad strike, 1892 Homestead steel strike, and 1894 Pullman strike. Each
was “especially violent,” she writes, and labor lost all three; hence to
emphasize them is “to cast doubt on striking as a valid course of action.”
However, if textbooks emphasized successful strikes, Anyon could then charge
them with minimizing the seriousness of the struggle labor faced. Conversely,
some appallingly violent instances of class conflict go unmentioned by most
textbooks.

7 Gregory Mantsios, “Class in America: Myths and Realities,” in Paula S.
Rothernberg, ed., Racism and Sexism: An Integrated Study (New York: St.
Martin’s, 1988), 56. The 2003 Holt American Nation does treat “The New
Working Class” around 1900 and in other eras contains some discussion of
poverty.

8 Ibid., 60; Kevin Phillips, The Politics of Rich and Poor (New York: