by Mary Grabar
Irving had never held an academic position or even finished college, yet he had established himself as a historian of “the German side of World War II,” beginning in 1963 with his first book, The Destruction of Dresden. Although some of Irving’s scholarship was respected, much was suspect. His books covered up Hitler’s full role in the Jewish genocide and contained factual errors about leaders, events, and statistics. The overall effect was to minimize Hitler’s culpability and the number of Jewish deaths. When Lipstadt’s Denying the Holocaust was published in England in 1996, Irving sued for libel.14 History professor Richard J. Evans, who served as an expert witness for the defense, and two graduate student assistants spent two years reviewing Irving’s sources, a process described by Evans in his book Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial. Irving lost the case.
Goodwin and Ambrose were exposed in the pages of the conservative magazine the Weekly Standard. Ambrose died in 2002, but Goodwin resigned from her post on the Pulitzer Prize review board and took a “leave” from PBS NewsHour.15
Ellis was suspended “without pay” from teaching for a year.16
Bellesiles was initially exposed by Clayton Cramer, who had questioned the Emory University professor while working on his master’s degree in history. After much discussion in professional forums, Emory University finally undertook a three-month investigation. The “Emory committee of inquiry” uncovered “evidence of falsification” and “serious deviations from accepted practice in carrying out [and] reporting results from research.” They found that Bellesiles had “violated Emory’s regulations on research and the integrity code of the AHA [American Historical Association], ‘the standard of professional historical scholarship.’ ” As a result, Bellesiles lost his contract with Knopf and the Bancroft Prize. He resigned his teaching position at Emory University in 2002.17 Ten years later at the time of the publication of his A People’s History of the U.S. Military, Bellesiles was described as a “history buff” and reported to be bartending and working as an adjunct teacher at Central Connecticut State University.18
Meanwhile, another American historian, Howard Zinn, was enjoying increasing success with the book he wrote and published in 1980: A People’s History of the United States. More than a decade after its initial publication, sales were so good that an updated and expanded version was released in 1995.
The book received a big boost when Matt Damon and fellow actor Ben Affleck incorporated it into key dramatic moments of Good Will Hunting, which won an Oscar.
As Irving, Ellis, Goodwin, Ambrose, and Bellesiles were disgraced and punished for their dishonesty, Zinn’s sales marched steadily toward the million mark. In 2002, Zinn was negotiating with the Fox network for, as he said, “an option on the book for a miniseries.” The deal fell through. But in 2008, a documentary titled The People Speak, featuring movie and rock stars, was recorded in Boston, California, Toronto, and at Bruce Springsteen’s recording studio in New Jersey.19 In 2003, a third revised and expanded edition of Zinn’s book came out, and it passed a million in sales.20
To celebrate, Zinn was fêted at a celebrity-studded party in New York City where A People’s History was given a dramatic reading by Danny Glover and James Earl Jones. Zinn, along with Damon and Affleck, was trying to get an HBO television series based on the book. Zinn’s editor said that in his more than forty years of publishing experience, he had not known of another book “that sold more copies each year than it sold the year before.”21
In 2012, Gilbert Sewall, director of the American Textbook Council—noting by then the sales of two million copies—called A People’s History of the United States the nation’s “best-known work of American history” and the “best-selling survey of American history.”22 As of this writing in 2018, it is estimated the book has sold more than 2.6 million copies.23
The enormous sales, though, do not mean that there is universal respect for Zinn’s work. In fact, in the court of scholarly opinion, Zinn’s book is closer to David Irving’s frauds than to an esteemed work of history. Zinn has been slammed for distortions, omissions, and factual errors by reviewers and historians on both the left and right.
The late renowned historian Eugene Genovese was a declared Marxist in political agreement with Zinn at the time A People’s History was published. But Genovese thought the book was so bad that he refused to review it. Years later, he told me it was nothing more than “incoherent left-wing sloganizing.”24
Liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger called Zinn “a polemicist, not a historian.”25
Cornell history professor Michael Kammen began his review of Zinn’s history in the Washington Post by lauding Zinn as a “radical academic and social activist.” But as much as he wanted to pronounce the attempt to write the “bottom-up” history a success, he said he could not. According to Kammen, the book was “a scissors-and-paste-pot job.” Too much attention to “historians, historiography, and historical polemic” left “precious little space for the substance of history.” Figures of social protest and political criticism crowded out influential religious figures, inventors, intellectuals, and authors. Kammen concluded, “We do deserve a people’s history; but not singleminded, simpleminded history, too often of fools, knaves and Robin Hoods.”26
History professor Eric Foner, who had met Zinn a few times and admired him,27 gave A People’s History a mixed review. Two paragraphs from the good part of the review have graced the covers of the book. Those excerpts include Foner’s praise for writing that displays “enthusiasm rarely encountered in the leaden prose of academic history” with “vivid descriptions of events that are usually ignored” and “telling quotations from labor leaders, war resisters and fugitive slaves.” Not appearing on the cover of the book are Foner’s criticisms of Zinn’s “deeply pessimistic vision of the American experience” in which “stirring protests, strikes and rebellions never seem to accomplish anything,” and his portrayal of “anonymous Americans . . . strangely circumscribed” with targeted groups appearing “either as rebels or as victims.” Foner suggested that the problem with Zinn’s book was “inherent in the method: history from the bottom up, though necessary as a corrective, is as limited in its own way as history from the top down.” Zinn gives only a “partial view” of the history he purports to cover.28
Michael Kazin, a history professor at Georgetown University and an author or coauthor of several books on progressive and populist movements, as well as a well-known figure on the left from his days as a leader of the Harvard Students for a Democratic Society (and briefly a member of the Weatherman),29 echoed Kammen’s criticism in Dissent Magazine, a journal for social Democrats that he co-edits. Kazin described A People’s History as “bad history, albeit gilded with virtuous intentions.” That was the nice part of the review. According to Kazin, Zinn’s book is “unworthy of [the] fame and influence” it has earned; he has reduced the past to a “Manichean fable” and failed to acknowledge the work and successes of progressives. Despite containing phrases “hint[ing] of Marxism,” A People’s History is really an insult to the memory of Karl Marx, who “never took so static or simplistic a view of history.” Kazin charged that “Zinn’s conception of American elites” such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton “is akin to the medieval church’s image of the Devil.” Zinn’s “failure,” he said, was “grounded in a premise better suited to a conspiracy-monger’s Web site than to a work of scholarship.” Leftist Kazin deemed A People’s History “polemic disguised as history.”30
Stanford education professor Sam Wineburg, in an article in the Winter 2012–2013 American Educator, called Zinn’s history “educationally dangerous.” He homed in on points in the chapter about World War II, charging Zinn with using evidence selectively, conflating time periods, misrepresenting sources, using dishonest rhetorical strategies, and posing leading questions. Although Zinn drew together material that “blew apart the consensus school” of American history of
the 1950s, he had substituted one “monolithic reading of the past for another.” Zinn’s history was written in a manner that spoke “directly” to students’ “hearts,” but his “power of persuasion” was dangerous because it “extinguishes students’ ability to think.” A People’s History was a “history of certainty,” and whether of the Left or the Right, such histories invite a slide into “intellectual fascism,” according to Wineburg.31
From the Right, Harvard history professor Oscar Handlin attacked numerous claims of fact in Zinn’s history in his 1980 review in the American Scholar. He called A People’s History a “fairy tale” with “biased selections” that “falsify events”—from Zinn’s claims of a widened “gap between rich and poor” in “the eighteenth century colonies” to his account of the Tet Offensive. Handlin charged that the book “conveniently omits whatever does not fit its overriding thesis.”32 In 2003, Daniel Flynn, then the executive director of Accuracy in Academia, called Zinn an “unreconstructed, anti-American Marxist” and his book a “cartoon anti-history.”33
A 2012 survey of readers conducted by the History News Network (HNN), a site which trends left, revealed that A People’s History was a close runner-up—after David Barton’s The Jefferson Lies—for first place as the “least credible history book in print.” While new editions of Barton’s flawed book have included corrections, the inaccuracies in A People’s History remain. The HNN editors also noted that Zinn received “the most intense discussion” on the discussion board with “some commentators on one end condemning the book as ‘cheap propaganda’ and ‘the historians equivalent of medical malpractice.’ ”34
And yet, A People’s History continues to be a phenomenal success. It started with an initial print run of only about four thousand copies and steadily picked up sales each year, going through twenty-four printings “in its first decade.”35 After retiring from Boston University in 1988, Zinn remained active in the promotion of the book until his death in 2010 at the age of eighty-seven. In fact, Zinn died of a heart attack while swimming in a hotel pool in Santa Monica, where he was giving a talk about using his materials in children’s education. Throughout his retirement, Zinn continued to travel around the country and abroad for speaking engagements. In 1995, he enjoyed a Fulbright fellowship in Italy. He was sought out for radio and television interviews, including on The Daily Show. His book was featured on The Sopranos and The Simpsons. He starred in his own film, The People Speak, and the dramatization of his autobiography, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train. Zinn participated in political activities, often as a speaker at protest rallies. With book royalties and earnings from multiple spin-off products—including films, curricula, and graphic adaptations—Zinn was much better off than the average retired professor. David Greenberg estimated that his “franchise was earning him some $200,000 annually.”36
Howard Zinn’s death in 2010 pushed his book to the number four position on the New York Times paperback nonfiction list37 and inspired tributes from celebrities and rock bands on Saturday Night Live and MTV.38 Plaudits also came from former students Alice Walker and Marian Wright Edelman; from Mumia Abu-Jamal, Bill Moyers, and Jane Fonda; from the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and the Washington Post; The Daily Show, the NAACP, NPR, and the Nation; several socialist publications, including Socialist Review; and the American Historical Association.39 In the press, Zinn’s book is routinely portrayed in just the way he promoted it: as a corrective “ground-up approach to history.”40
Zinn’s book has inspired a creative outpouring. The PEN Freedom to Write Award in 2015, in Zinn’s honor, went to DeRay Mckesson and Johnetta Elzie, Black Lives Matter and Ferguson bloggers and activists. A 2011 movie, Even the Rain, about “Spanish imperialism” was inspired by Zinn’s account of Christopher Columbus and was dedicated to Zinn.41 Zinn’s book has inspired songs for Columbus Day.42 British actor Riz Ahmed was prompted by A People’s History to write a nine-part BBC series titled Englistan about a British-Pakistani family in England (American oppression apparently translates to the British immigrant experience of the last four decades).43 Zinn’s memory lives on in loving performances, such as the dramatic reading “Voices of a People’s History of the United States” by Marisa Tomei, Maggie Gyllenhaal, and others at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in March 2017.44 Zinn’s three plays are performed in major cities, especially on the anniversary of his death and on May Day.45 Zinn’s play, Marx in Soho, was a favorite in May 2018 on the two hundredth anniversary of Karl Marx’s birth, enjoying performances in the United States and abroad.46 The “political dance troupe” Grrrl Brigade’s fifteenth anniversary show was based on A People’s History.47 “Monolinguist” Mike Daisey performed eighteen “stand-alone monologues that crib from Howard Zinn’s . . . classic” at the Seattle Repertory Theatre in October and November 2018. Daisey’s set was a classroom, and each performance focused on roughly a chapter of Zinn’s book. A reviewer saw the lesson on the Mexican-American War.48
In the summer of 2018, New York City’s Parks Foundation collaborated with VOICES, “a non-profit arts, education and social justice organization founded by Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove” based on Voices of a People’s History of the United States, for the Summer Stage series in Central Park. Zinn’s tract “The Problem Is Civil Disobedience,” from a debate in 1970 after he had been arrested in an anti-war protest, was read alongside works by such luminaries as Angela Davis, Malcolm X, Public Enemy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Maya Angelou. The final night, August 28, was a celebration of the 1963 March on Washington, with actor Viggo Mortensen reading from A People’s History and from Bartolomé de Las Casas. The performance was part of Mortensen’s effort to use American history to “understand the current political climate,” including the “division and ideological rigidity” he believes is being “fomented’ ” by our current president.49
Zinn’s book has provided inspiration for protestors from Occupy Wall Street to tree-sitters,50 and even to sports figures. When former Patriots tight end Martellus Bennett tweeted a “scathing” message about Columbus Day, sportswriter Alex Reimer fact-checked with A People’s History and declared Bennett’s claims about Columbus “start[ing] the slave trade” to be “accurate.”51 In basketball, San Antonio Spurs’ Rudy Gay was reported to have Zinn’s book on his reading list as a result of the recommendation of Cam Hodges, the team’s player development assistant.52 One Arizona teacher read passages from Zinn’s chapter on the Great Depression aloud to her seventh grade class before participating in a teacher walkout (she sees parallels between her condition and fruit-pickers of that era).53
When the successful Hamilton touring group in the spring of 2018 did a statewide student workshop in Utah on “rapping” history in the manner of the Broadway hit, the student playing King George recommended A People’s History.54 In November 2017, the fourth annual Howard Zinn Book Fair at City College in San Francisco featured such sessions as “Teaching Children About the Resistance,” “Releasing Our Radical Imaginations: A Conversation on Movement Building in the Age of Trump” (featuring Weatherman cofounder Bill Ayers), “Teaching the Hidden History of Reconstruction in High School,” and “100 Years of Struggle for Sex Workers’ Rights in the Bay Area.” They were held in rooms named after Howard Zinn and his heroes, including Emma Goldman and Fred Hampton.55
Clearly, Zinn’s influence extends beyond history departments. At the University of Southern California, Viet Thanh Nguyen—the Aerol Arnold chair of English and professor of English, comparative literature, American studies, and ethnicity—claims that high school students should read A People’s History as a “corrective” to the history of the “dominant and the powerful” (along with Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl for insights on the #MeToo movement and “intersectional thinking”).56 Zinn’s Marx in Soho was performed at Grand Valley State University in February 201857 and also at Carleton College, sponsored by Carleton’s economics department.58 In February 2017, a suburban Chicago school
held an all-day attendance-mandatory seminar on “today’s struggle for civil rights” that included a workshop titled “A People’s History of Chicago” and described as “in the tradition of Howard Zinn.”59
In September 2018, I attended a lecture on “A People’s History of Utica” by Brandon Dunn, an adjunct faculty member of the history department at Mohawk Valley Community College. The room was packed with adults and teenagers. In the audience was Dunn’s high school history teacher, Jeffrey Gressler, whom he credited with introducing him to Zinn and his “history from below.” Dunn opened by projecting an image of Zinn and his now famous quotation: “Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. . . .” Dunn had given the same talk in January 2018.60 Spin-off books—such as A People’s History of the Civil War, A People’s History of Poverty in America, and A People’s Art History of the United States, to which Zinn lent his name as series editor for a percentage of the royalties—are published by the New Press. And a book by a former Zinn student, now a history and philosophy professor at Purdue University, claims that Zinn’s detractors (including yours truly) are plagued by “Zinnophobia”!61
By the turn of the twenty-first century, Zinn’s book had become a status marker for radicals; it was featured as such in the 2017 movie Lady Bird, a “loosely autobiographical coming-of-age tale” set in the post-9/11 period. One of the heroine’s “romantic interests,” a seventeen-year-old boy named Kyle, “asserts his radical status by rolling his own cigarettes and toting Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States.”62 As Sam Wineburg has observed, Zinn “speaks directly to our inner Holden Caulfield,” the cynical teenage protagonist of The Catcher in the Rye.63 And just as J. D. Salinger’s novel has earned a place as a favorite among adolescents since its publication in 1951, Zinn’s “history” has appealed to adolescents since 1980.