by Mary Grabar
PRAISE FOR
DEBUNKING HOWARD ZINN
“It’s about time someone published a comprehensive answer to Howard Zinn’s bestselling A People’s History of the United States, which is the Mein Kampf of the Hate America Left. Zinn was a lifelong communist and sycophantic admirer of Stalin and Mao and the most murderous regimes in human history. But, for Zinn, the real source of evil in the world was his own country—tolerant, inclusive, and free. Mary Grabar has done Americans and the freedoms they have championed a great service by writing a definitive exposure of Zinn’s treasonous life, along with a damning refutation of his dishonest, malignant, and ignorant work.”
—DAVID HOROWITZ, founder of Students for Academic Freedom and the David Horowitz Freedom Center and author of Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey and The Black Book of the American Left
“At long last we have a comprehensive critique of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, an execrable work of pseudohistory, full of mistakes, lies, half-truths, and smears. Students and scholars alike are in Mary Grabar’s debt for her incisive, powerful, and timely takedown of Zinn’s highly popular, but utterly tendentious, ‘study.’ Reasonable people, regardless of their personal politics, should laud the publication of Debunking Howard Zinn.”
—PETER A. COCLANIS, Albert R. Newsome Distinguished Professor of History and director of the Global Research Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
“Mary Grabar has produced a devastating analysis of the lies, plagiarism, violation of academic standards, and simple-minded platitudes that characterize Howard Zinn’s bestselling A People’s History of the United States. That Zinn is taken seriously as a historian is sad commentary on the teachers who rely on his fantasies and a terrible disservice to the students who are forced to read it. And, as Grabar demonstrates, it has contributed to a serious and potentially disastrous misunderstanding of American history and society.”
—HARVEY KLEHR, professor emeritus of politics and history at Emory University and author of The Communist Experience in America
“At last! Mary Grabar tells the truth about Howard Zinn’s bestselling anti-American textbook, A People’s History of the United States. Zinn’s book has probably done more to poison the minds of high school students than any other work of history. Grabar provides an overdue anatomy of Zinn’s many errors and tendentious interpretations of the United States as an evil, racist empire. Her book—which should be required reading—is a much-needed antidote to one of the chief intellectual frauds of our time.”
—ROGER KIMBALL, editor and publisher of the New Criterion and author of Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education and The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America
To Robert Paquette, fighter for truth in history
A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR
There is no historian like Howard Zinn. His cultish following continues to grow nearly forty years after the publication of his A People’s History of the United States, the nation’s bestselling American history survey book as both a trade book and textbook.1
A People’s History is more than another left-wing interpretation of American history. Long before it appeared on bookstore shelves in 1980, historians were writing American history from a liberal, leftist, and even Marxist perspective. In fact, Zinn leans on these histories for much of his material. But their names have largely been forgotten, and Zinn’s stature grows.
Certainly no other history book has taken the place of the Bible at the swearing-in of an elected official. But in April 2019, A People’s History was the sacred object on which newly elected Oklahoma City council member JoBeth Hamon chose to place her hand for her oath of office.2 Similarly, it is doubtful that a district attorney ever cited any other historian’s autobiography in her maiden speech, as Natasha Irving of Waldoboro, Maine, did in January 2019 when she referred to Zinn’s You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train. She said that she could not be “neutral in the face of mass incarceration. . . . in the face of prosecution of the sick for being sick, the poor, for being poor.”3
Nearly a decade after Zinn’s death, a new generation of readers is picking up his book and experiencing the feeling their parents felt in the 1980s and 1990s of having the wool pulled away from their eyes. These members of “Generation Z” seem undisturbed by Zinn’s use of archaic 1960s lingo like “The Establishment” and “The System.” They identify with the oft-mentioned “struggle,” a staple of communist writing. In an age of racial hypersensitivity, no one seems bothered by Zinn’s continual references to “Negroes,” a term that has been considered offensive since the 1960s.
Zinn is often blamed for the decline in history writing, teaching, and knowledge. Conscientious historians seek to replicate the appeal of Zinn’s book while presenting a more balanced and positive view of American history. Thus, a recent Wall Street Journal column about Land of Hope, a new book by Wilfred McClay, is titled, “Reclaiming History from Howard Zinn.”4 Previous attempts to provide an appealing corrective include William J. Bennett’s three-volume America, the Last Best Hope in 2006, and in 2004 Larry Schweikart’s and Michael Allen’s A Patriot’s History of the United States.
Historians on the Left, too, present their books as more respectable alternatives to Zinn. Harvard history professor Jill Lepore positioned her 2018 book These Truths: A History of the United States as a response not only to “the American triumphalism of popular history” but also to Zinn’s “Marxist reckoning with American atrocity.”5 Before that was Eric Foner’s The Story of American Freedom, published in 1996.
Neither such books nor the many critical assessments of A People’s History seem to have decreased the book’s popularity. In fact, controversies only increase sales for the “evergreen” title that sells “ ‘incredibly well’ ” year after year.6
Stanford University education professor Sam Wineburg accounted for the book’s “preternatural shelf life” by the fact that “Zinn shrewdly recognized that what might have been common knowledge among subscribers to the Radical History Review was largely invisible to the broader reading public. . . . It took Zinn’s brilliance to draw a direct line from the rapier Columbus used to hack off the hands of the Arawaks, to the rifles aimed by Andrew Johnson to give the Creek Nation no quarter, and to the 9,000-pound ‘Little Boy’ that Paul Tibbets fatefully released over Hiroshima in August 1945.” (Actually, as will be demonstrated in the following pages, Columbus did not “hack off the hands of the Arawaks” with a rapier.)
Wineburg noted that A People’s History is “as radical in its rhetoric as in its politics.” In fact, Zinn’s rhetorical strategies are more than “radical.” They are fundamentally and grossly dishonest. Wineburg pointed out the unusual way Zinn used questions—not as the rare “shoulder-shrugging admissions of the historian’s epistemological quandary so much as devices that shock readers into considering the past anew.” In one chapter, Wineburg counted twenty-nine “[b]ig in-your-face questions”—questions presenting two stark choices.
Such a “rhetorical turn” is “almost never encountered in professional historical writing,” says Wineburg.7 By presenting outrageous accusations against America as questions rather than assertions, Zinn attempts to evade responsibility for lying about American history. But he has in fact articulated these false claims and fixed them in his readers’ minds.
Take one example highlighted by Wineburg. In the World War II chapter of A People’s History, Zinn asks, “With the defeat of the Axis, were fascism’s ‘essential elements—militarism, racism, imperialism—now gone? Or were they absorbed into the already poisoned bones of the victors?’ ” Here Zinn is suggesting that the United States is the m
oral equivalent of Hitler’s Germany. But by asking a question instead of stating a claim, Zinn has cleverly indemnified himself against the charge that he is making Americans out to be as bad as the Nazis. And no wonder. The proposition is as absurd as it is offensive.
And yet, with dozens of such outlandish suggestions and countless other grossly dishonest rhetorical tricks on nearly every page of A People’s History, Howard Zinn has succeeded in convincing a generation of Americans that the nation Abraham Lincoln truly called “the last best hope of Earth” is essentially a racist criminal enterprise built on murdering Indians, exploiting slaves, and oppressing the working man. It obviously needs to be replaced by something better. And of course, Zinn has the answer: a classless, egalitarian society. Yes, what Zinn is selling is the very same communist utopian fantasy that killed more than a hundred million human beings in the twentieth century.
The dream lives on, though, for the young and the uninformed. Zinn is particularly appealing to adolescents who are typically dissatisfied with their elders, believing themselves to be wiser. Many adults look back at this phase of their life as David Greenberg, writing in the March 19, 2013, New Republic, did as he reflected on his own “adolescent rebelliousness” as a sixteen-year-old when he “thrilled to Zinn’s deflation of what he presented as the myths of standard-issue history.” Zinn had “[mischievously” and “subversively . . . whispered that everything I had learned in school was a sugar-coated fairy tale, if not a deliberate lie.”8 Wineburg’s diagnosis is along the same lines: “A People’s History speaks directly to our inner Holden Caulfield. Our heroes are shameless frauds, our parents and teachers conniving liars, our textbooks propagandistic slop. . . . They’re all phonies is a message that never goes out of style.”9
Zinn whispers that the elders have lied about communism, as they have about everything else. And young people are buying it. In October 2018, the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation reported that 52 percent of millennials surveyed would “prefer” to live in a socialist or communist country. Only 40 percent preferred a capitalist country.10 A 2018 Gallup Poll revealed that only 45 percent of Americans aged 18 to 29 held a positive view of capitalism, marking a disturbing trend: as recently as 2010, 68 percent had “viewed [capitalism] positively.”11 Zinn’s propaganda has been spectacularly effective. His dishonest American history is not the only factor in Americans’ turn away from their heritage of freedom toward communist fantasies. But Howard Zinn has been instrumental in this destructive transformation. The task I undertake in this book is to expose Zinn’s lies. The United States of America—still the last best hope—deserves better than slanders. She deserves our respect and gratitude—and the truth about her history.
Mary Grabar
June 16, 2019
INTRODUCTION
Howard Zinn: Icon, Rock Star
In Good Will Hunting, an emotionally scarred twenty-year-old working-class genius endorses A People’s History of the United States. During his first visit to his therapist, Will Hunting looks over the books in the office and reads a title aloud, “A History of the United States, Volume 1,” then comments, “If you want to read a real history book, read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. That book will knock you on your ass.”1.
The message is clear: Zinn’s history stands superior to any multivolume history of America. A genius says so.
Will is a natural genius in both math and history. In a bar scene early on in the movie, he inserts himself into a conversation in which Clark, a Harvard graduate student, is challenging a friend who is trying to start a conversation with some young women by pretending to be a Harvard student. Clark challenges Will’s friend by asking if he can provide some “insight into the evolution of the market economy in the early colonies.” Will, observing Clark’s mini-academic disquisition on the “economic modalities” of the Southern colonies, jumps into the conversation, saying, “Of course that’s your contention. You’re a first-year grad student. You just finished some Marxian historian, Pete Garrison prob’ly, and you’re going to be convinced of that until next month when you get to James Lemon and you’re goin’ to be talkin’ about how the economies of Virginia and Pennsylvania were strongly entrepreneurial and capitalist back in 1740. That’s goin’ to last until sometime next year, then you’ll be in here regurgitating Gordon Wood about, you know, the pre-revolutionary utopia and the capital-forming effects of military mobilization.”
When the grad student begins quoting from the monograph Work in Essex County, Will completes his sentence and gives the page number. As the bar patrons look on with awe, Will accuses the Harvard student of trying to impress the girls and predicts that in fifty years he may “start thinking” for himself and realize that he has spent $150,000 for an education he could have gotten for “a dollar-fifty” in library late fees.2.
In this devastating exchange, Will has knocked down three historians in quick succession—leaving only the great Howard Zinn standing.
Matt Damon, who played the titular character in Good Will Hunting, was a young neighbor of the Zinns in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He and his brother lived with their divorced mother, an education professor, who “raised her boys with a deep social consciousness,” according to Zinn. When Damon was ten, he took the family copy of the newly published People’s History to school and read from it to his class for Columbus Day.3
And Matt Damon is far from the only American kid who has bought into Howard Zinn’s take on our history. Zinn’s version of our past—from the discovery of America (Columbus committed genocide), through slavery (worse here than anywhere in world history), the founding of the United States (white slave owners scheming to preserve the status quo), World War II (the Allies weren’t any better than the Nazis), and Vietnam (yay! plucky Commies defeat the evil American war machine)—is widely taught and believed. In fact, it is becoming enshrined as an integral part of young Americans’ beliefs. And no wonder—A People’s History is taught throughout our schools and colleges. A Young People’s History of the United States—Zinn’s history adapted for middle schoolers with simplified sentences, but the same content—tells young readers that Zinn’s “radically different” version of history was adapted for them because of parents’ and teachers’ demands. But some adults might object because they feel that young people are “not mature enough to look at their nation’s policies honestly.”4
If students aren’t given Zinn’s book, they may read passages from his work in other books—for example, if they check out young adult books by John M. Dunn from the library on such historical topics as the Vietnam War, the North American Indians, and the Civil Rights Movement. Each of those volumes contains extended passages from A People’s History of the United States, which is listed in the “Works Consulted” and is described as “an unorthodox history told from the perspectives that are often overlooked by mainstream writers.” Dunn presented Zinn as a respected historian.5 And there’s good evidence that the College Board, which “is becoming an unelected national school board, setting curricula—and just as important—largely replacing states and localities as the shaper of both textbooks and teacher training at the high school level” via their frameworks for the Advanced Placement (AP) U.S. History exam, promotes Zinn’s version of history by including his books in AP teacher-training seminars.6
For years now, teachers have used a variety of editions of A People’s History with discussion questions, exercises, lesson plans, and activities.7 Many of these activities involve role-play, a favorite in-class activity of the decidedly non-intellectual Professor Zinn. Students at San Antonio College, to give just one example, learn history from an instructor who has adapted strategies from Zinn, her “mentor.”8 I have been to many teaching conferences through the years where Howard Zinn’s materials were promoted.9 One recently retired public high school history teacher in New York City, Jeffrey Ludwig, described how his fellow teachers would photocopy pages of Zinn’s book (which was not on the o
fficially approved list) for use in class. According to a college student who recently graduated from that school, teachers were still handing out excerpts from Zinn’s book.10 Many high school students are subjected to Zinn’s book in class, along with the America-hating attitude that comes with it. Emily Rentz, now CEO of a clinical trials company she founded, described her horrific experience in Jim Buxton’s Global Studies and International Relations classes at South Kingston High School in Rhode Island. Buxton made students read A People’s History cover to cover and write papers regurgitating its points. He also bullied students who dared to express opinions that differed from Zinn’s. The “grand finale” was a class visit from Zinn himself, who had been presented as a kind of “god,” when Rentz was in eleventh grade in 2005. Zinn’s book and visit at Rentz’s high school enjoyed the blessing of many of the parents.11 Sam Wineburg, a professor of education at Stanford University and the executive director of the Stanford History Education Group, notes that Zinn’s book has become the “dominant narrative” in “many cases” and the “only history book on the syllabus” for future teachers.12
Zinn’s pervasive influence is a national tragedy, especially considering just how distorted, manipulative, and plain dishonest A People’s History of the United States is.
It’s past time to take a closer look at Zinn’s outrageous claims and outright lies and set the historical record straight. No other historian has gotten away with as much as Zinn has. Let’s begin by putting A People’s History of the United States in the context of some recent scandals.
It was around the turn of the twenty-first century that a number of American historians found themselves in the news. In 2000, Emory University professor Deborah Lipstadt was the defendant in a British courtroom for a lawsuit David Irving brought against her because she had called him a “Holocaust denier” in her 1993 book Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory. Well-known historians Stephen Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin were shown to have plagiarized portions of their work. Award-winning author Joseph Ellis was revealed to have lied about his own history—about his service in Vietnam and during the Civil Rights Movement—to his students and to the media. And Michael Bellesiles—a history professor, founder of the Institute on the Study of Violence in America at Emory University, and former “rising star”—was found to have “misrepresented his findings” about the rate of gun ownership in early America in an effort to demonstrate the legitimacy of and need for gun control.13