by Howard Zinn
it's not that important—it should weigh very little in our final judgments; it
should affect very little what we do in the world.15
Is my own emphasis on Columbus's treatment of the Indians biased? No doubt. I won't
deny or conceal that Columbus had courage and skil , was an extraordinary sailor. But I
want to reveal something about him that was omitted from the historical education of most
Americans.
My bias is this: I want my readers to think twice about our traditional heroes, to reexamine
what we cherish (technical competence) and what we ignore (human consequences). I want
them to think about how easily we accept conquest and murder because it furthers
"progress." Mass murder for "a good cause" is one of the sicknesses of our time. There were those who defended Stalin's murders by saying, "Wel , he made Russia a major power." As
we have seen, there were those who justified the atom bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
by saying "We had to win the war."
There is stil another kind of historical bias that can mislead us, and that is the tendency of
the culture to emphasize historical trivia, to learn facts for their own sake. The result of this
is to encourage a flat, valueless interest in past facts that have no great significance in the
betterment of the human condition, but that are simply "interesting." The interest served, however, is that of diverting us from the truly important uses of history, thus making
history, literal y, a diversion.
For instance, in the fal of 1986 the Boston Globe carried a front-page story about how a
scholar for the National Geographic Society had concluded that Columbus landed sixty-five
miles to the south of where it had always been assumed he landed, on Samana Cay rather
than on Watling Island.16 The Globe, I am quite sure has never carried a front-page story, and probably not any kind of a story (nor has any other newspaper in the United States I
suspect), on the revelations that Columbus had murdered countless Indians. The celebrants
of Columbus Day would find that story embarrassing. But readers of such news might find it
much more important, much more thought provoking, than the exact route of Columbus's
voyage.
What is important is not Columbus. To defend or attack Columbus is pointless. What is
important is how closely we look today at what is done to human beings, what criteria we
use for "progress." We are accustomed to measuring the state of the nation by the numbers on the stock market (the Dow-Jones average), rather than by how many children died of
malnutrition.
47
The very labels we give to eras accustom us to overlooking some events and highlighting others. The Ludlow Massacre took place in that period labeled in so many American history
books as "the Progressive Era," a phrase based on the fact that certain pieces of reform
legislation were passed by Congress in the early years of the twentieth century. But the
Progressive Era was also the period when the greatest numbers of black people, thousands
of them, were lynched—hanged, burned, shot by mobs—in the United States.
In al the standard treatments of the twenties, this was the "Jazz Age," a time of fun and prosperity for Americans. But when sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd studied Muncie,
Indiana, in the twenties, they found two classes: "the Working Class and the Business
Class." They reported that for two-thirds of the city's families "the father gets up in the dark in winter, eats hastily in the kitchen in the gray dawn, and is at work from an hour to two
and a quarter hours before his children have to be at school."17 Historian Merle Curti
remarked on how the plight of the majority in the twenties was ignored: "It was, in fact,
only the upper ten percent of the population that enjoyed a marked increase in real
income."18
Fiorel o LaGuardia represented a district of poor people in East Harlem during the Jazz Age,
and he kept rising to his feet in the House of Representatives, reminding his col eagues that
there were people in his district and al over the country who could not pay their rent, could
not pay their gas bil s, and could not buy adequate food for their families. In 1928
LaGuardia toured the poorer districts of New York and reported; "I confess I was not
prepared for what I actual y saw. It seemed almost incredible that such conditions of
poverty could real y exist."19
If Americans received a better historical education, if they learned to look beneath the
surface of easy labels ("The Era of Good Wil ," "The Age of Prosperity," etc.), if they understood that our national orthodoxy prefers to conceal certain disturbing facts about our
society, they might, in the 1980s and 1990s, look beneath the glitter and luxury and react
with anger to the homelessness, poverty, and despair that plague mil ions of people in this
country.
Historians, like journalists, select what they think is important or what they think the
publisher wil deem important or what they both think the public wil consider important.
Often they wil report on something because everyone else who has written before has
reported on it. And they wil omit something because it has always been omitted. In other
words, there is a conservative bias to history and a tendency to emphasize what previous
generations have emphasized. The motive for that is safety, because the historian who
breaks the pattern causes stares and suspicions.
This conservative bias, this tendency to repeat the thinking of the past, is true even of
people who think themselves revolutionaries. Karl Marx recognized this in his history of
counterrevolution in France after the 1848 revolution:
The tradition of al the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain
of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves
and things, in creating something entirely new, precisely in such epochs of
revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their
service and borrow from them names, battle slogans and costumes in order
to present the new scene of world history in this time-honored disguise and
this borrowed language.20
48
In the United States historical education has emphasized the doings of the rich and powerful—the political leaders, the industrial entrepreneurs. The classroom education of the
young has often centered on the presidents. One widely used book for teachers (Push Back
the Desks), spoke admiringly of a classroom where the portraits of al the presidents fil ed the wal s and the history lessons were based on that. We often poke fun in the United
States at other countries where political leaders are treated like gods, their portraits and
statues everywhere. But in our culture, the most trivial activities of the presidents are
considered of great significance, while the life-and-death struggles of ordinary people are
ignored.
For instance, on September 17, 1972, the New York Times carried a front-page story about
Chester A. Arthur, who became president in 1881 and whose administration was hardly
noteworthy for any achievements on behalf of human freedom. The headline to the story
was "President Arthur Kept Il ness a Secret." The story is about a conference of historians in Tarrytown, New York: "President Arthur's tightly held secret (that he had a rare kidney
disease), withheld not only from his time but also from history, was made known publicly
for the first time at the conference." The Times story quoted one of the historians at the conference: "The factual record is substantial y corrected, updated and enlarged, and our
inherited assumptions about a bygone era receive a sharp jolt."
What should real y give us a sharp jolt is that such a piece of trivia should become a front-
page story for the nation's major metropolitan newspaper.
The National Historical Papers Commission has spent mil ions of dol ars, given by Congress
and by the Ford Foundation, to publish sixty volumes of Thomas Jefferson's papers, sixty
volumes of James Madison, seventy-five volumes of George Washington, a hundred
volumes on the Adams family. There are plans for sixty-five volumes on Benjamin Franklin
(plus, as the editor noted, "several volumes of addenda and errata").21 One historian, Jesse Lemisch, whose own work dealt with ordinary seamen of the Revolutionary Period and who
lamented the lack of historical attention to the working people of the country, referred to
this project as "the papers of Great White Men."
What sorts of values and ideals are encouraged in the young people of the coming
generation by the enormous emphasis on the Founding Fathers and the presidents? It
seems to me that the result is the creation of dependency on powerful political figures to
solve our problems.
We were being exploited by England? Wel , the Founding Fathers took care of that in leading
the struggle for independence. Was the nation moral y blighted by the existence of 4 mil ion
black slaves? Abraham Lincoln solved that with the Emancipation Proclamation. Did we have
a terrible economic crisis in the early 1930s? Franklin Roosevelt got us out of that one. Do
we face enormous problems today? Wel , the solution is to find the right president, to go to
the pol s and choose either the Republican or Democratic candidate.
Such a view, embedded in the minds of the American public by an education that focuses on
elites, ignores an important part of the historical record. It does not pay sufficient attention
to the "crowds" of the Revolutionary period, the grassroots organizations, rioters,
demonstrators, and boycotters who brought the Revolution to a boil.22
Not enough credit is given to the great Abolitionist movement of tens of thousands of black
and white people, risking their lives and their freedom to demand the end of slavery. It was
this movement that galvanized antislavery sentiment in the country between 1830 and
1860 and pressured Lincoln into his first actions against slavery and pushed Congress into
passing the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, which made slavery and
racial discrimination at last il egal (even if they stil existed in different forms).23
49
The New Deal reforms, although presided over by Roosevelt, were given their momentum by the mass movements of that time: the Bonus March of 1932; the general strikes of
1934; the waves of strikes in the auto, rubber, and steel industries in 1936 and 1937; the
organizations of tenants and the unemployed; and by turmoil in the cities and the
countryside.24
Consider how much attention is given in historical writing to military affairs—to wars and
battles—and how many of our heroes are military heroes. And consider also how little
attention is given to antiwar movements and to those who struggled against the idiocy of
war. Everybody who goes to an American school learns about Theodore Roosevelt's charge
up San Juan Hil in the Spanish-American war. But how many learn about the Anti-
Imperialist League, which criticized the nation's actions in Cuba and the military conquest of
the Philippines.25
As a result of omitting, or downplaying, the importance of social movements of the people
in our history—the actions of abolitionists, labor leaders, radicals, feminists, and pacifists—a
fundamental principle of democracy is undermined: the principle that it is the citizenry,
rather than the government, that is the ultimate source of power and the locomotive that
pul s the train of government in the direction of equality and justice. Such histories create a
passive and subordinate citizenry.
This is not the deliberate intention of the historian, but it comes from a desire to avoid
controversy, to go along with what has always been done, to stress what has always been
stressed, to keep one's job, to stay out of trouble, and to get published. The pol ution of
history comes about like the pol ution of the air and the water. No one plans the poisoning of air and water; each one acts for personal gain in a system where "private enterprise"
operates in education as in industry to keep society along the old tracks and to keep minds
thinking the old way. It is profitable. It is safe.
The pretense of objectivity conceals the fact that al history, while recal ing the past, serves
some present interest. One university professor, in a review of a book on the imprisonment
of Japanese families on the West Coast during World War II (Richard Drinnon's Keeper of
Concentration Camps), was unhappy with the moral indignation shown by the author. He
referred to it as "the fatal flaw … of hindsight." The reviewer advised, "Write history as if you were there at the time it occurred and were seeing it through the eyes of the
participants… . That is difficult, but it must be done to avoid bias."26
This is a common argument. Avoid "presentism," it says. Put yourself back then. But "back then" there were different views. Who were "the participants" in the cruel detention of the Japanese: the bureaucrats who planned and supervised it or the Japanese men, women,
and children who endured it? To put oneself back in the past does not eliminate the
necessity of choosing a viewpoint, a side, or a value. A bias is inevitable. But you can
declare it honestly. To pretend "to avoid bias" too often means exonerating (by the lack of indignation) the moral crimes of the past.27
The claim of historians to objectivity has been examined very closely by Peter Novick.28 He
finds the claim especial y false in wartime. For instance, in April 1917, just after the United
States had entered the European war, a group of eminent historians met in Washington to
discuss "what History men can do for their country now." They set up the National Board for Historical Service to "aid in supplying the public with trustworthy information of historical or similar character."29
50
One result was a huge outpouring of pamphlets written by historians with the purpose of instil ing patriotism in the public; 23 mil ion copies of such pamphlets were distributed. Most
of them, according to a recent study of the role of historians in World War I propaganda,
"reduced war issues to black and white, infused idealism and righteousness into America's
role, and established German guilt with finality."30
During World War II, Samuel Eliot Morison declared his commitment to not instruct the
present but to "simply explain the event exactly as it happened." Yet, in the same essay
("Faith of a Historian"), he criticized those historians who had expressed disil usionment with World War I, saying they "rendered the generation of youth which came to maturity
around 1940 spiritual y unprepared for the war they had to fight… . Historians … are the
ones who should have pointed out that war does accomplish something, that war is better
than servitude."31
In the cold war atmosphere of the 1950s, a number of historians selected
their facts to
conform to the government's position. Two of them wrote a two-volume history of the U.S.
entry into World War II, to show, as they put it, "the tortured emergence of the United
States of America as leader of the forces of light in a world struggle which even today has
scarcely abated."
An honest declaration of their bias would have been refreshing. But, although they had
access to official documents not available to others, they said in their preface, "No one, in
the State Department or elsewhere, has made the slightest effort to influence our views."
Perhaps not. But one of them, Wil iam Langer, was director of research for the CIA at one
time, and the other, S. Everett Gleason, was deputy executive secretary of the National
Security Council.32
Langer was also a president of the American Historical Association (AHA). Another president
of the AHA, Samuel Flagg Bemis, in his address to that group in 1961, was very clear about
what he wanted historians to do:
Too much … self-criticism is weakening to a people. A great people's culture
begins to decay when it commences to examine itself… . We have been losing
sight of our national purpose … our military preparedness held back by
insidious strikes for less work and more pay… . Massive self-indulgence and
massive responsibility do not go together … . How can our lazy dal iance and
crooning softness compare with the stern discipline and tyrannical compulsion
of subject peoples that strengthen the aggressive sinews of our malignant
antagonist.33
Historian Daniel Boorstin testified before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in
1953. He agreed with the committee that Communists should not be permitted to teach in
American universities—presumably because they would be biased. Boorstin told the
committee that he expressed his own opposition to communism in two ways. First, by
participation in religious activities at the University of Chicago, and "the second form of my opposition has been an attempt to discover and explain to students, in my teaching and in
my writing, the unique virtues of American democracy." No bias there.34
After studying the objectivity of American historians, and noting how many slanted their