Debunking Howard Zinn

by Mary Grabar

  Zinn’s more than twenty books are ubiquitous on bookstore shelves—especially in college towns, where they are likely to be featured as staff picks. Zinn’s history is guaranteed to be in stock at almost any bookstore, as it is at my local Barnes & Noble. There is even a Zinn for Beginners—as well as graphic adaptations, such as A People’s History of American Empire.

  Through the nonprofit Zinn Education Project (ZEP)—a collaborative effort with Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change—Zinn’s book and dozens of spin-off books, documentaries, role-playing activities, and lessons about Reconstruction, the 1921 Tulsa race riot, taking down “racist” statues, the “FBI’s War on the Black Freedom Movement,” the “Civil Rights Movement” (synonymous with the Black Panthers), the Black Panther Ten Point Program, “environmental racism,” and other events that provide evidence of a corrupt U.S. regime are distributed in schools across the country. According to a September 2018 ZEP website post, “Close to 84,000 teachers have signed up to access” ZEP’s history lessons and “at least 25 more sign up every day.” Alison Kysia, a writer for ZEP who specializes in “A People’s History of Muslims in the United States” and who taught at Northern Virginia Community College, used Zinn’s book in her classes and defended it for its “consciousness-raising power.”64 ZEP sends organizers to give workshops to librarians and teachers on such topics as the labor movement, the environment and climate change, “Islamophobia,” and “General Approaches to Teaching People’s History” (with full or partial costs borne by the schools!). In 2017, workshops were given in six states, Washington, D.C., and Vancouver, Canada.65

  In a particularly disturbing development, the Zinn lesson on Reconstruction is going to be taught throughout the state of South Carolina, partly in response to pressure from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). Victoria Smalls, a “veteran public historian who has worked for Charleston’s planned International African American Museum and Saint Helena Island’s Penn Center,” became “the first state organizer” for the initiative.66 Adam Sanchez’s lead article gives some indication about how Reconstruction will be taught with the lesson plans: “Every day seems to bring new horrors as the U.S. president’s racist rhetoric and policies have provided an increasingly encouraging environment for attacks on Black people and other communities of color.”67

  Teaching for Change operates the Busboys and Poets bookstore in Washington, D.C., where left-wing authors give readings, often recorded and featured on C-SPAN 2. In addition to providing curricular materials about Christopher Columbus, the Zinn Education Project offers materials for conducting political campaigns to abolish Columbus Day with sample resolutions for school districts, universities, and cities and specific instructions for engaging students in letter-writing campaigns and presentations to school boards. The Zinn Education Project also goes after funders of competing views, as they did when they attacked the Koch Foundation in 2014 for supporting the Bill of Rights Institute.68

  There is A Young People’s History of the United States, but Zinn is also quoted in other books for students, as I learned by checking out books by John M. Dunn from my rural Central New York public library system. Education professor Sam Wineburg writes, “for many students, A People’s History will be the first full-length history book they read, and for some, it will be the only one.” At the 2008 annual meeting of the National Council for the Social Studies (“the largest gathering of social studies teachers in the country”), Zinn received “raucous applause” from social studies and history teachers for his keynote speech. The president of that organization “hailed Zinn as ‘an inspiration to many of us.’ ”69 In 2013, the Philadelphia City Council went so far as to pass a non-binding resolution urging the school district to make A People’s History of the United States required reading.70

  A People’s History has been translated into more than a dozen languages, including French, Spanish, Italian, German, Chinese, and Arabic.71 The “People’s” perspective on American history is now disseminated all over the world, including in a former people’s republic—Russia—not by the Russians, but by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the American Embassy, which sponsored the 2006 Russian-language publication of A People’s History.72

  Zinn’s name is invoked by college student editorialists at the Daily Princetonian and the Yale Herald.73 A columnist at the Detroit Daily News found words of inspiration from Zinn as she wrote about the mass school shooting at Parkland High School in February 2018.74 When Bill Cosby was convicted of drugging and sexually assaulting a woman, and his wife, Camille, issued a statement charging that “unproven accusations evolved into lynch mobs,” she appealed to Zinn, “the renowned, honest historian” who had noted that the writers of the Constitution had excluded “women, Native Americans, poor white men, and . . . enslaved Africans.”75 My daily Google alerts tell me about references to his name by social justice warriors writing letters to the editor and articles in newsletters—as well as by those who use his name as shorthand for the decline of educational standards and the upsurge in America-hatred. Former President Barack Obama “had a special interest in the work” of Zinn, according to fellow community organizer Mike Kruglik.76

  Conservative professors and education reformers fume about the “Zinnification” of history evidenced in new AP (Advanced Placement) standards.77 Talk show host Rush Limbaugh routinely blames Zinn for “Mush Brains” on college campuses and in the voting booth.78 Elected officials try to remove A People’s History from classrooms.

  In 2013, when it was revealed from emails sent during his tenure as governor that Purdue University president Mitch Daniels had sought to eliminate Zinn’s book from classrooms, he was roundly excoriated. The Zinn Education Project conducted a fundraising campaign milking the controversy and sent free copies of A People’s History to teachers across the country. In April 2018, the organization was bragging that “five years after former governor Mitch Daniels tried to ban” Zinn’s People’s History “from Indiana schools, the Zinn Education Project (ZEP) was able to offer three workshops to dozens of educators throughout the state.”79

  In 2017—when Arkansas state representative Kim Hendren introduced (ultimately unsuccessful) legislation to keep Zinn’s materials out of “public schools and state-supported charter schools”—the Zinn Education Project sent Zinn’s books for free to almost seven hundred teachers and librarians, claiming that donations for the book drive had “poured in from across the country” and visits to the website from Arkansas teachers increased “923 percent over the previous year.”80

  Zinn is widely touted as an innovator in writing history “from the bottom up.” As he said, he did not want to focus on military, business, and political leaders, but on the common people. He explains early in A People’s History that he is for the underdog: “I prefer to try to tell the story of the discovery of America from the viewpoint of the Arawaks, of the Constitution from the standpoint of the slaves, of Andrew Jackson as seen by the Cherokees, of the Civil War as seen by the New York Irish. . . .  ”81

  Zinn’s colleagues on the Left—like Kazin and Kammen—gave him credit for his good liberal intentions, but Bruce Kuklick, writing for the Nation—where Zinn frequently enjoyed a platform—pointed out that Zinn was far from the first historian to write a “bottom-up” history. “I don’t mean to derogate A People’s History by assessing it as a radical textbook,” wrote Kuklick. “Zinn writes clearly and articulately; his narrative is coherent and thematically unified. On the assumption that textbooks are socializing agents I prefer this sort of text to the usual ones celebrating industrialists and Presidents, texts for which Zinn has an ill-concealed but justifiable contempt.” Kuklick approved of the way A People’s History covered “the oppression of the people” with “eloquent renditions of the destruction of Indian culture,” “rich analyses of the torments of the slaves,” and “long explorations of the misery of the working class.” He liked how Zinn gave significant time “to the study of left
and radical politics.” But he complained that women were treated as if Zinn were “a relative newcomer to feminism” and that Zinn also neglected “the daily texture of the social life of the people” and “the people’s religion.” As Kuklick noted, a disproportionate number of pages in A People’s History are devoted to recent history: one-third of the book was “on the last sixty years, one-quarter on the last thirty” (between 1950 and 1980), with fifteen percent “on Zinn’s favorite decade in the history of humankind—the 1960s.”

  While Kuklick attributed part of the failures of A People’s History to the “textbook genre,” he preferred Carl Degler’s Out of Our Past, published back in 1959: “Degler’s biases are liberal, but he brought to his task a subtlety and sophistication that Zinn doesn’t possess.” According to Kuklick, Degler’s book covers much of the same ground and should be read before Zinn’s book.82 Out of Our Past had been described on January 1, 1959, in the New York Times as a discussion of “the developments, forces and individuals that have made this country what it is” and of such subjects as “how racial discrimination began and what schools and churches have done about it.”83 Degler had the bona fides, as the headline to his obituary on January 14, 2015, in the New York Times attested: “Carl N. Degler, 93, a Scholarly Voice of the Oppressed.” The Stanford University scholar had “delved into the corners of history” and “illuminated the role of women, the poor and ethnic minorities in the nation’s evolution.” His 1972 book about slavery, Neither Black nor White, won him the Pulitzer. And Degler’s work did not suffer from Zinn’s lack of familiarity with women’s issues. As early as 1966, he had been invited by Betty Friedan “to be one of [the] two men among the founders of the National Organization for Women.” Degler had the respect of colleagues, winning praise from Princeton professor Lawrence Stone for his 1980 book At Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present and from C. Vann Woodward for Southern Dissenters in the Nineteenth Century.84

  Out of Our Past—which is arranged pretty much like A People’s History, though without a chapter on Columbus and the Indians, with which Zinn begins—had received a largely favorable review in the American Historical Review at the time of its publication.85 Vincent Carosso, writing in the Business History Review, noted gaps such as in foreign affairs, but also said that “topics which are often neglected in standard one-volume histories receive detailed and penetrating analysis.” These include “the part played by women, the importance of the changing status of the Negro, and the significance of urbanization in determining national character. . . . ” Carosso said that Degler’s book “should appeal to the general reader who wants a one-volume survey which is sound in scholarship and well written” and recommended it as a supplementary college text.86 Out of Our Past was updated and reprinted in 1970, but today few Americans recognize the name Carl Degler.

  Or the name Oscar Handlin (1915–2011). Handlin, like Zinn, was a son of Russian-Jewish immigrants whose Wikipedia page begins by noting his fifty-year tenure at Harvard, where in the 1950s he “virtually invent[ed] the field of immigration history” and “helped promote social and ethnic history.” Handlin won the 1951 Pulitzer for The Uprooted. Stephan Thernstrom, writing for the American Historical Association, described the young Handlin pushing the grocery delivery cart for his family’s business while reading, entering Brooklyn College at age fifteen, and proving himself at Harvard when few East European Jews of immigrant stock were admitted. Handlin’s Ph.D. dissertation became the award-winning book Boston’s Immigrants: 1790–1865, which “illuminated the experience of the common folks who crossed the ocean and settled in Boston” and marked him as “the nation’s preeminent historian of American immigration.” His many books “examined the American experience in its totality,” covering not only immigration from Europe and beyond, but also African Americans, race, ethnicity, the biographies of Abraham Lincoln and Al Smith, war and diplomacy, and the discipline of history writing. He co-wrote a four-volume series, Liberty in America, and also advocated for reforming the immigration system—then based on the national origins quota system—and supervised more dissertations than any of his Harvard colleagues.87

  Truth in History, which Handlin published a year before Zinn’s A People’s History, bemoaned the decay in history standards as New Left historians—including William Appleman Williams, Lloyd Gardner, Gabriel Kolko, Gerda Lerner, and Barton Bernstein—merged activism with scholarship, sacrificing historical accuracy. All those names would appear in the bibliography of A People’s History.88

  Why does Howard Zinn have name recognition—amounting to a status as the icon and rock star of historians—that more substantial scholars never achieved?

  James Green, a professor of history and labor studies at the University of Massachusetts, wrote for the Chronicle of Higher Education, “While challenging official versions of historical truth, Zinn assumes a moral authority exceedingly rare in professional academic writing.”89 Unlike his New Left colleagues who got bogged down in quasi-Marxist theory, Zinn made dramatic emotional appeals. He forthrightly claimed to provide a corrective to previous histories, to bring long-suppressed facts to light, and to speak on behalf of the oppressed.

  Zinn justified his methods in the first two pages of his afterword to the 2003 edition of A People’s History. He began by describing how he came to write the book. The “circumstances” of his own life had inspired him to write “a new kind of history.” When he sat down at his manual typewriter to type the first page, he had been teaching for twenty years and for as many years been involved in political activism with the Civil Rights Movement in the South and “activity against the war in Vietnam,” experiences that were “hardly a recipe for neutrality in the teaching and writing of history.” He had also been shaped by his upbringing in “a family of working-class immigrants in New York,” years as a shipyard worker, and experiences as a bombardier in World War II.

  Zinn claimed authority from his twenty-year tenure as a professor. But he did not tell the reader that after he wrote his book about Fiorello La Guardia while a graduate student, he wrote nothing else that could properly be called scholarly.

  Zinn made no pretense of objectivity: “By the time I began teaching and writing, I had no illusions about ‘objectivity,’ if that meant avoiding a point of view. I knew that a historian (or a journalist, or anyone telling a story) was forced to choose, out of an infinite number of facts, what to present, what to omit. And that decision inevitably would reflect, whether consciously or not, the interests of the historian.”90

  He claimed that “there is no such thing as pure fact, innocent of interpretation. Behind every fact presented to the world—by a teacher, a writer, anyone—is a judgment. The judgment that has been made is that this fact is important, or that other facts, omitted, are not important.”91

  This is the defense that Zinn would regularly rely on when challenged about the errors of fact in A People’s History of the United States, as he was by Handlin and other more scholarly—and honest—historians: there is no such thing as an objective fact. All that matters is Zinn’s higher purpose: “There were themes of profound importance to me which I found missing in the orthodox histories that dominated American culture. The consequence of those omissions has been not simply to give a distorted view of the past but, more important, to mislead us all about the present.”92 And in any case, his critics were just ideologically motivated conservatives. Zinn claimed that Handlin was biased against his book because Handlin supported President Nixon and the Vietnam War.93

  In fact, as we have seen, some of the most telling criticisms of A People’s History of the United States have come from the Left. They’re on board with the purpose of Zinn’s history, but they fault his execution. Zinn’s errors are those associated usually with an overabundance of enthusiasm. Sam Wineburg addressed a few egregious points of error, but he joined his colleagues on the Left in denouncing Mitch Daniels for attempting to keep Howard Zinn’s writings out o
f classrooms and teachers’ workshops.

  Left-leaning historians have taken issue not so much with the nitty-gritty of Zinn’s factual representations as with his perspective, tone, and balance. Yet these same historians would certainly condemn David Irving for history that misrepresents the facts about the Hitler regime. Why do the same scrupulous standards that Professor Evans and his research assistants applied to Irving’s work not apply to Zinn’s?

  In their painstaking examination of German archival material, the Evans team found that Irving had misrepresented sources and data, used “insignificant and sometimes implausible pieces of evidence to dismiss more substantial evidence that did not support his thesis,” and “ignored or deliberately suppressed material when it ran counter to his arguments.” They also caught Irving “placing quotations in a false context, removing part of the record to a footnote, and mixing up two different conversations. . . . ”94

  Such practices violate the principles set forth by the American Historical Association (AHA)—the standard that Peter Charles Hoffer, a history professor and member of the American Historical Association’s professional division, calls an “integrity code.” Hoffer does concede that “even the most honored historians are not always so willing to admit their own biases or so swift in ‘disclosing . . . all significant qualifications’ of their arguments. Errors of fact creep like sneak thieves into otherwise exemplary works of scholarship. Historians are only human. . . . ”95 But Bellesiles and Irving are guilty not just of the occasional lapse from the standards of the historians’ profession, but of the deliberate attempt to deceive, as well.