Howard Zinn, A People’s Champion? Part 36: The Final Chapter! Closing Thoughts.

Why am I doing this? What made me spend countless hours poring over thousands of pages of history to refute a now dead academic? Part of it is personal. There was a time when I wanted to be a history professor. I wonder, had I gone down that path, could I have turned into someone like Zinn? What offends me is not that he said bad things about America; a whole subculture of people does that. What offends me is he got away with (and was celebrated for) what I was told not to do when I was 20, which is you don’t force your historical research to fit your beliefs. If I’d written a paper in college using a single bullet theory to discuss my topic I’d have failed the course.  For various reasons I’ve given up the dream of a scholarly life, hence this may be my last historical writing. If that be the case, I bid my beloved farewell. Moving on.

A real historian asks questions, then researches and writes as much as possible to try to answer those questions. Why was there slavery in America? Why did the founding fathers not dispose of it? Why did it last so long? Why did the U.S. stay in Vietnam so long? Why did America intervene in places like Grenada and Guatemala? In earnestly trying to answer these questions we see the moral dilemmas and complex decisions faced by people at those times. In other words, as Michael Kazin writes “to make sense of a nation’s entire history, an author has to explain the weight and meaning of worldviews that are not his own and that, as an engaged citizen, he does not favor. Zinn has no taste for such disagreeable tasks.” (1)

Is it possible that Zinn deserved some credit for recording social history, which is often neglected by textbooks? I would dare raise the question of whether it was neglected out of hatred or out of ignorance? I can only speak for my own experience as a high school student in the mid-90s. “People’s History” was originally published in 1980. Maybe before then high school students really didn’t learn about slavery, or the black experience in America, or Civil Rights movement or the Vietnam War and My Lai massacre, but I did. Could Zinn be given credit for this? Maybe, but this brings us to an attitude that seems to be expressed around this book, as if some secret was discovered that no one knew about. Today there’s countless books freely available regarding women’s history, black history, the counterculture movement of the 60s, Native American History, etc. The government is certainly not oppressing this. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee for example, the history of the Indians of the Old West, was published in 1971. Zinn on his best day couldn’t write a book that good.

Even if traditional textbooks neglected social history,  the information it did present, dates, the presidents, the wars, isn’t necessarily wrong. As much as Zinn is praised for being a people’s champion it is my view that he ultimately did his people  a disservice. He exploited them to support his own political ends, he used them to support his own viewpoints on various issues like war, the fairness doctrine, redistribution of wealth, privatization of Social Security, and hot button issues like abortion.

To believe “People’s History” is to believe in an America with absolutely no social mobility. It is to believe that the same monolithic elite, which never changes, has duped us for centuries, and as more and more people come to America the conditions never get better. “The People” in the end are a bunch of suckers.They were suckers for coming to America in the first place, they’re suckers for voting Democrat, they’re suckers for voting Republican, they’re suckers for voting independent, they’re certainly suckers for joining the military, and they’re obviously stupid for waving the flag and falling for tricks like patriotism and national unity. Or as Micahel Kazin continues,

“For Zinn, ordinary Americans seem to live only to fight the rich and haughty and, inevitably, to be fooled by them. They are like bobble-head dolls in work-shirts and overalls-ever sanguine about fighting the powers-that-be, always about to fall on their earnest faces. Zinn takes no notice of immigrants who built businesses and churches and craft unions, of women who backed both suffrage and temperance on maternalist grounds, of black Americans who merged the community-building gospel of Booker T. Washington and the militancy of W.E.B. Du Bois, or of wage-earners who took pleasure in the new cars and new houses those awful long-term contracts enabled them to buy. (2)

In closing, if I were to call Zinn a traitor or anti-American, my criticism would be dismissed as that of a right-wing nut. The thing is it’s not enough to say he was anti-American, he was anti-human. His book is a slap in the face of everyone who came to this country and did indeed find a better life for themselves/the American Dream. He gave a pass to the most nightmarish monstrosities of he 20th century, exploited groups for his own ends, and called any progress ever made was simply a ploy by the elite to dupe others.

In the final analysis, Howard Zinn was a disgrace, in no way deserving of his title of People’s Champion.

1.Kazin, Michael Howard Zinn’s History Lessons  http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=385

2. http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=385