by Mary Grabar
And how do Zinn and A People’s History of the United States measure up against those standards? These are from section three of the AHA’s “Statement on Standards of Professional Conduct,” updated in 2018. I have broken them into bullet points for ease in reading. The AHA begins by noting the need for “awareness of one’s own biases and a readiness to follow sound method and analysis wherever they may lead.” The rules read as follows:
• Historians should document their findings and be prepared to make available their sources, evidence, and data, including any documentation through interviews.
• Historians should not misrepresent their sources.
• They should report their findings as accurately as possible and not omit evidence that runs counter to their own interpretation.
• They should not commit plagiarism.
• They should oppose false or erroneous use of evidence, along with any efforts to ignore or conceal such false or erroneous use.
Another section is devoted to the topic of plagiarism, which is defined as “the expropriation of another’s work, and the presentation of it as one’s own.” It takes such forms as “use of another’s language without quotation marks and citation,” “appropriation of concepts, data, or notes all disguised in newly crafted sentences, or reference to a borrowed work in an early note and then extensive further use without subsequent attribution,” and “borrowing unexamined primary source references from a secondary work without citing that work.”96
The AHA first published these standards in 1987,97 but historians understood them long before then. In fact, the historian’s aim to recreate the past in a narrative that is both enjoyable to read and accurate in its presentation of fact goes back to the ancient Greeks—Herodotus, born approximately in 484 B.C., who is considered to be the father of history, and Thucydides, born approximately in 460 B.C., who is considered to be the father of scientific history.
These are the standards by which A People’s History of the United States will be judged in this book. The question is not, as Zinn liked to pretend, whether he chose the correct topics to investigate. We will not concern ourselves with whether presidents or slaves are more important. But we will also not assume that a purported concern with slaves, factory workers, and immigrants gives a historian a special dispensation to play fast and loose with the facts of history.
CHAPTER
ONE
Columbus Bad, Indians Good
Howard Zinn rode to fame and fortune on the “untold story” of Christopher Columbus—a shocking tale of severed hands, raped women, and gentle, enslaved people worked to death to slake the white Europeans’ lust for gold.1 Today, that story is anything but untold. Zinn’s narrative about the genocidal discoverer of America has captured our education system and popular culture.
Consider what Columbus Day had become by the fall of 2017 when the violent, Marxist-inspired group Antifa declared a nationwide “Deface Columbus Day.”2 The defacement of statues of Columbus with red paint had already become an annual ritual in many places. In the Pittsburgh area, it had been going on for twenty years.3 In New York City, the large bronze statue in Columbus Circle at the corner of Central Park had had “hate will not be tolerated” scrawled on the base and Columbus’s hands painted red.4
And the transformation in Americans’ attitudes toward the man who discovered America wasn’t limited to a few vandals. Besides the physical attacks, there were continual demands for the government to take down the statue. Zinn is the inspiration behind the current campaign to abolish Columbus Day and replace it with “Indigenous Peoples’ Day.” High school teachers cite his book in making the case for the renaming to their local communities.5
In October 2018, San Francisco, Cincinnati, and Rochester, New York, joined at least sixty other cities in replacing Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples’ Day. Six states also do not recognize the holiday as Columbus Day.6 In 2018, for the first time, Columbus, Ohio, did not observe the federal holiday, with officials claiming that the city could not afford to give its employees the day off. Many articles reporting on this trend cited Howard Zinn’s role in the change in attitude.7 Courthouse News Service, describing the overwhelming support in San Francisco for changing the holiday with a board vote of ten to one, explained, “Social activist and historian Howard Zinn dedicated the first chapter of his 1980 book, ‘A People’s History of the United States,’ challenging the popular narrative of Christopher Columbus as a stoic hero who overcame adversity to become the first Western explorer to find the New World.” The news report claimed that Zinn had “cited evidence that Columbus enslaved and killed the ‘gentle’ Native people he encountered in the Caribbean Islands, leading to the mass murder and taking of land from natives across the continent.” The sponsor of the bill, San Francisco Supervisor Malia Cohen, had written in a Facebook post, “The indisputably horrific things that Christopher Columbus did to the established inhabitants of the Americas with whom he came in contact are #facts.”
Stanford anthropology professor Carol Delaney, who was quoted in the Courthouse News Service article to provide a counter-narrative, informed reporters that Columbus acted on his Christian faith and instructed his crew to treat the native people with kindness.8 But such inconvenient facts are inevitably drowned out by the Columbus-hate that Howard Zinn has succeeded in spreading. So it should not have been all that surprising when on Columbus Day in 2018, in a man-on-the-street interview at the Columbus Fountain near Union Station in Washington, D.C., a man who looked to be in his thirties explained in reply to a reporter’s question about celebrating the holiday that “the guy [Columbus] killed a lot of Native Americans.” He cited Zinn’s “history.”9
Zinn’s work has “affected the teaching of history . . . even in cases where his own materials are not used,” according to University of Massachusetts professor James Green, who noted in 2003 that “nearly every college textbook published during the last two decades now begins, as Zinn did, with the European destruction of the Indians.”10 Zinn was quite proud of that accomplishment. He lived to see the day when—on the five hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s first landing in the New World—Americans were bitterly divided over whether Columbus Day should be a day of celebration or mourning, of pride or of shame.
Zinn’s warped version of Columbus and the discovery of America was always intended to reverberate into American political life, as the 1995 edition’s new chapter, “The Unreported Resistance,” which dealt with protests against military efforts in Central America and Iraq under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, respectively, showed. Three-and-a-half pages were devoted to Native Americans who connected these “conquests” with the original one by Columbus and protested against the quincentennial celebration of the discovery of America. One promoter of Zinn’s books, the co-sponsor of the Zinn Education Project, Rethinking Schools, sold two hundred thousand copies of a booklet called Rethinking Columbus in a few months. Protests of Columbus included workshops, meetings, multimedia shows, films, plays, art shows, and an opera at Lincoln Center.11
In that 1995 edition of A People’s History, Zinn exulted, “For generations, exactly the same story had been told all American schoolchildren about Columbus, a romantic, admiring story. Now, thousands of teachers around the country were beginning to tell that story differently.”12 So what exactly was Zinn’s new and different story about Columbus, and where did it come from?
In a 1998 interview, Zinn promoter David Barsamian asked his hero, “In the course of your investigations in writing A People’s History, what facts came out that were startling to you?” Zinn replied:
I suppose just as the reader of my People’s History were [sic] startled by my Story of Columbus, I was startled myself. I must confess that until I began looking into it, I did not know any more about Columbus than I had learned in school. By this time I had a Ph.D. in American history. Nothing that I learned on any level of education, from elementary school through Columbia Universit
y, changed the story of the heroic Columbus and his wonderful accomplishments. It wasn’t until I began to look into it myself, read Columbus’ journals, read Las Casas, the great eyewitness who produced many volumes on what happened to the Indians, not until I began to read did I suddenly realize with a kind shock how ignorant I had been led to be by the education I had gotten in our national education system.13
Presumably extrapolating from the “many volumes” he had read, Zinn found the inspiration for the dramatic opening sentences of A People’s History: “Arawak men and women, naked, tawny, and full of wonder, emerged from their villages onto the island’s beaches and swam out to get a closer look at the strange big boat. When Columbus and his sailors came ashore, carrying swords, speaking oddly, the Arawaks ran to greet them, brought them food, water, gifts. He later wrote of this in his log: ‘They . . . brought us parrots and balls of cotton, and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks’ bells. They willingly traded everything they owned. . . . ’ ”
The quoted passage from Columbus’s log continues with Columbus’s description of the Arawaks. They are “well-built” and handsomely featured. Having never seen iron, they accidentally cut themselves on the Europeans’ swords when they touch them. The passage ends with Columbus’s now infamous words: “They have no iron. Their spears are made out of cane. . . . They would make fine servants. . . . With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.”14
The ellipses in this passage are Zinn’s, not mine. And as we shall see, those omissions are essential to Zinn’s dishonest retelling of the Columbus story. By leaving crucial words out of the quotation, Zinn makes Columbus say something very different from what he actually said.
Zinn began and finished A People’s History of the United States in less than a year, after he returned from a four-month professorship in Paris in 1978. This fact “surprises people and sometimes makes them think I obviously did it in a hurry and didn’t spend much time on it,” he explained. But he claimed, “I’d been accumulating the notes and material, the data, for twenty years as a result of teaching and writing about history.” Once he sat down at his typewriter, “it came very fast.”15
According to Zinn, he gave up on his original idea for organizing the book—by topics such as race, “from the first slaves brought to Jamestown down through the present, do the same thing with labor and so on”—and opted for the traditional rough chronological approach. “Then it would be more obvious that I was dealing with the same topics but from a different point of view, and also my book would be more useful to teachers.”16 Zinn told biographer Davis Joyce that he had started with a “fairly orthodox outline”: for each chapter he would bring into his office the relevant books with slips of paper in the appropriate sections and files on periods like the American Revolution, the Civil War, and industrial development. Consulting these materials, he said he would “type out a first draft, go over it with pen and ink to make changes, and so on, and then type up the final copy. And that’s it.” Zinn considered himself “a pretty fast writer.”17
But there is no evidence that Zinn ever actually made extensive notes in preparation for writing A People’s History. On the contrary, there is telling proof that he did no such thing. It’s unlikely that he even read as much of “Columbus’s journals” or the works of “Las Casas, the great eyewitness” as he claimed. The truth is that Zinn’s description of Columbus’s first encounter with the American Indians is lifted from Columbus: His Enterprise: Exploding the Myth, a book for high school students that Zinn’s friend and fellow anti-Vietnam War activist, Hans Koning, first published in 1976. In other words, though one of Zinn’s radical America-hating colleagues did the initial work of smearing Columbus, Zinn got the credit.
Koning’s book is the source for Zinn’s indictment of Columbus, which is the opening gambit of A People’s History. The first five-and-a-half pages of A People’s History of the United States are little more than slightly altered passages from Columbus: His Enterprise. The text on pages 1–3 of A People’s History—Zinn’s opening narrative about how Columbus cruelly exploited the generosity of the Arawaks—is paraphrased mostly from Columbus pages 51–58. From the middle of Zinn’s page three to the middle of page four, he follows Koning’s pages 59–70; then on the bottom half of page four and the top half of page five, he uses Koning’s pages 82–84. Zinn lifts wholesale from Koning the very same quotations of Columbus. He also includes an attack on the historian Samuel Eliot Morison, just like Koning—complete with references to the Vietnam War. That’s a rather odd coincidence, given that both Zinn and Koning were purportedly recounting the fifteenth-century discovery of America.
The material on Columbus with which Zinn begins A People’s History of the United States is eerily similar to Koning’s work. Zinn’s introductory passage about the Arawaks bearing gifts quotes a passage from Bartolomé de Las Casas’s transcription of Columbus’s log that Koning quotes on page fifty-two of Columbus. Zinn even echoes Koning’s bizarre attack on an aspect of Columbus’s character that would hardly seem to be a weak point: the explorer’s navigational expertise. To see how closely Zinn tracks Koning, compare the People’s History’s description of Spain as a wicked European nation corrupted by the dual evils of Christianity and capitalism to Koning’s description.
Zinn’s description: “Spain was recently unified, one of the new modern nation-states, like France, England, and Portugal. Its population, mostly poor peasants, worked for the nobility, who were 2 percent of the population and owned 95 percent of the land. Spain had tied itself to the Catholic Church, expelled all the Jews, driven out the Moors. Like other states of the modern world, Spain sought gold, which was becoming the new mark of wealth, more useful than land because it could buy anything.”18
Koning’s description: “In 1492, Spain became autocratic, theocratic, and homogeneous. It became a ‘modern’ nation-state. After centuries of division (and religious tolerance), the last Moslem city had been conquered, and in that same year a royal decree was signed that expelled all Jews from the country. What this new state sorely lacked was gold . . . a means of payment universally acceptable. . . . The nobility, about 2 percent of the population, owned 95 percent of the land.”19
(Of course, neither Koning nor Zinn acknowledges that Ferdinand and Isabella took Spain back from the Muslims, who had conquered the Christians there in 711.)
Here is Zinn’s description of the Arawaks: “So, approaching land, they were met by the Arawak Indians. . . . The Arawaks lived in village communes, had developed agriculture of corn, yams, cassava. They could spin and weave, but they had no horses or work animals. They had no iron, but they wore tiny gold ornaments in their ears.”20
Zinn’s description is suspiciously like Koning’s: “The population were Arawak Indians . . . a people who had a developed agriculture (corn, yams, cassava), who could spin and weave, but had no iron, no horses, no beasts of burden. . . . Their society seems to have been based on village communes where most property was jointly held. . . . Some of these people wore little gold ornaments in their ears or noses.”21
When Koning’s book, which called Columbus a “murderer,” was republished in 1992 with a teaching guide in the back to capitalize on the quincentennial anniversary of Columbus’s “landfall in the New World,” the New York Times noted that it had been assigned to students in “several schools in the New York region” and to “students participating in the Native American Education Project, a federally financed agency that offers supplementary classes to American Indians attending the city’s public schools.”22
Koning’s slim volume does not cite any sources. Koning was not a Columbus scholar any more than Zinn was. In fact, he was not even a historian, while Zinn was at least a college professor. But what the two men shared was an interesting history in politics. Koning had been a member of the Dutch Resistance unde
r his original name, Hans Koningsberger, which he changed in 1970. He was a Socialist and a founder, along with Noam Chomsky and Zinn, of the anti-Vietnam War Resist organization. Koning’s 2007 obituary in the Guardian described him as a novelist, a playwright, and a journalist who had traveled to Russia and China in the 1960s.23
Zinn mentions Koning only once in A People’s History—on page seventeen, when he quotes a summary passage. He does include Columbus: His Enterprise in his bibliography. But Zinn completely glosses over how generously he borrowed from his friend’s book. And Koning does not seem to have minded that Zinn filled up the first several pages of A People’s History of the United States with slightly altered passages from his own Columbus: His Enterprise, and then marketed himself as having discovered this history. Commitment to the political agenda that they shared seems to have outweighed any authorial jealousy Koning might have felt about Zinn using his work, failing to give credit where credit was due, and becoming the rock star of leftist historians as a result.
And the two men absolutely did share a political agenda. The surprise bestseller Columbus: His Enterprise was described by the Guardian as “a highly polemical biography of the Genoese adventurer that countered the prevailing orthodoxy of heroic discovery in favour of a dark story of exploitation and fanaticism”; it “enraged traditionalists and attracted a politically conscious generation of ‘third world’ activists.”24
The description of Koning’s book as “highly polemical” says a lot coming from the left-wing Guardian—as does the fact that the New York Times obituary for Koning noted that he had created an “emotional firestorm” by portraying Columbus as “a deep-eyed [sic] villain, raping, pillaging and enslaving as he ruthlessly pursued profits.”25 The republication of Koning’s book in 1992 was a strategic marketing ploy to capitalize on the attention on Columbus that year. But to begin the rain storm on the coming Columbus Day parade, Koning had already published a screed in the New York Times in August 1990 charging that Columbus “set into motion a sequence of greed, cruelty, slavery and genocide that, even in the bloody history of mankind has few parallels.” He asserted that these claims were “substantiated in the logs of Columbus’s son, in the writing of Bartolomé de las Casas . . . and other period documents.”26 In the Monthly Review in 1992, Koning argued, “We must tell our children that the industrial prosperity of the West was largely financed with the blood and tears of colonial and slave labor put in place by the Conquest.”27