by Mary Grabar
Indian culture was also communal and self-actualizing: “They paid careful attention to the development of personality, intensity of will, independence and flexibility, passion and potency, to their partnership with one another and with nature.”59 In short, Columbus and the European civilization he represents are the serpent that destroyed the real-live Garden of Eden.
And just as in the Garden of Eden, there was perfect peace before the serpent destroyed paradise. “Human relations” were “egalitarian” and “beautifully worked out”—except that in reality the Indians did more than just grow corn and follow the orders of their women. As we have seen, native cultures were plagued by warfare and fighting—not unlike European cultures. When the Iroquois raided other Indian communities, they took women and children as prized slaves and tortured the men to death. As Karim M. Tiro, chair of the department of history at Xavier University, explains, “Communal torture and even cannibalism was regarded as another way to extract the spiritual power that inhered in human beings.”60 Abraham D. Lavender points out that “prior to European contact, slavery had been practiced by some American Indians, who frequently sold captives as slaves. . . .”61
Indians engaged in warfare, kidnapping, torture, slavery, and profit-seeking—not exactly the idyllic, hippie lifestyle Zinn depicts. Men were the hunters. Women took care of the home front and grew and cooked the food. And life was harsh. As Francis Parkman described long ago in The Jesuits in North America, “Female life among the Hurons had no bright side. It was a youth of license, an age of drudgery.”62 The Hurons, targeted by the Iroquois, also engaged in torture and cannibalism:
Warlike expeditions . . . were always preceded by feasting, at which the warriors vaunted the fame of their ancestors’ and their own past and prospective exploits. A hideous scene of feasting followed the torture of a prisoner. Like the torture itself, it was, among the Hurons, partly an act of vengeance, and partly a religious rite. If the victim had shown courage, the heart was first roasted, cut into small pieces, and given to the young men and boys, who devoured it to increase their own courage. The body was then divided, thrown into the kettles, and eaten by the assembly, the head being the portion of the chief. Many of the Hurons joined in the feast with reluctance and horror, while others took pleasure in it.63
This is not to single out Native Americans and imply that they alone in history committed acts of cruelty and barbarity, or to deny that gross injustices were perpetrated against them (as we recall such things as the Trail of Tears). The objective is to point out how false Zinn’s caricature is. Zinn never gets beyond a second-grade level of description, dwelling on happy topics like sharing, farming, hunting, and fishing.
In fact, Indians were proud of their warrior skills and served honorably in both World Wars. During World War I, Indians enlisted—mostly in the Army—and “in greater proportion than any other population.” During World War II, “tribes with strong warrior traditions volunteered,” again, “in disproportionate numbers”—some even bringing their own rifles to the induction stations. Writes Carole A. Barrett, “On all the reservations there was a great deal of enthusiasm and pride in the young men and women who volunteered for military service. It was common for the family members or the tribal community to honor the new recruits by sponsoring a feast and having old men talk about tribal traditions of warfare. . . .” The media “almost universally” praised the men “for natural fighting instincts, endurance, and ferocity.” Pima Indian and paratrooper Ira Hayes appears in the iconic photograph of the Marines raising the U.S. flag on Iwo Jima.64 And there are the 420 famous Navajo “code talkers” who sent vital encrypted messages in their language. Participating in battles at Saipan, Tinian, Bougainville, Okinawa, Tarawa, Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, and the Solomon Islands were thirty-six hundred Navajos. They have been recognized for their service by American presidents, most recently by President Donald Trump.65
Zinn acknowledged none of this. He was bent on exploiting “the usable Indian” to indict America, Western civilization, capitalism, and the traditional family. This kind of rhetoric has a long history in the annals of the polemics of the radical Left.
In his 1974 Last Americans: The Indian in American Culture, William Brandon described the use to which the Indian had been put. He quotes Columbus, the nineteenth-century Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville, and the twentieth-century anthropologist Franz Boas, who remarked on the lack of acquisitiveness among primitive peoples. In this tradition, claims Brandon, was the “pioneer American evolutionary anthropologist” Lewis Henry Morgan, who compared property-less Indian society to modern materialistic culture in his 1877 Ancient Society, which became a classic of socialist literature and thought.66
According to National Association of Scholars president Peter Wood, who holds a Ph.D. in anthropology, Ancient Society is Morgan’s “least good book” and is not representative of his excellent scholarship as America’s first scientific ethnographer. Morgan, a lifelong Christian, “admired the Iroquois” but did not “romanticize them.” He did not live long enough to voice objections to the misrepresentation of his ideas by Marxists.67 Marx saw Morgan’s work as a “corroboration of ‘the materialistic conception of history.’ ” He was only able to take notes on Morgan’s work before he died. His partner, Friedrich Engels, then added Marx’s misinterpretation of Morgan’s ideas to the 1888 English edition of The Communist Manifesto and then to The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.68 In his introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of The Origin of the Family, Tristram Hunt describes the excitement that Engels felt even as he sorrowfully sorted through Marx’s papers after his death in 1883. At that time, Engels wrote to his own “acolyte” Karl Kautsky, “There is a definitive book—as definitive as Darwin’s was in the case of biology—on the primitive state of society.” Morgan had found “downright communist postulates” in that primitive state—postulates that could be applied to modern society.69 In presenting “the tribe and its communal forms of land ownership and family structure” as “the first, natural state of man,” Morgan’s book seemed to have demolished “the bourgeois myth that the modern, monogamian, ‘nuclear’ household had existed since the dawn of human society.”70
According to Marxist theory, the patriarchal family came in with capitalism. It was at that point that men became obsessed with monogamy so that fathers could be sure that the children who would inherit their accumulated capital were their own. And monogamy led to the oppression of women:
Marx and Engels had first hinted at [a] sex/class comparison in The German Ideology where they connected the modern system of the division of labour back to household injustices. The nucleus of private property and inequality, they suggested, “lies in the family, where wife and children are the slaves of the husband. This latent slavery in the family . . . is the first form of property….” In The Origin of the Family, Engels went further to suggest that antagonism between the social classes was first predicated upon male oppression of the female within the monogamian family. . . . The modern individual family is founded on the open or concealed domestic slavery of the wife. . . .”71
That’s the line Zinn takes in A People’s History of the United States. He calls women “invisible” and titles chapter six “The Intimately Oppressed.”72 As Zinn complains, in 1960, there were slots in nursery schools for only 2 percent of the children of working mothers so that the rest of them “had to work things out for themselves.”73 In early America, says Zinn, women were actually “something like black slaves.”74 This was all because of capitalism: “Societies based on private property and competition, in which monogamous families became practical units for work and socialization, found it especially useful to establish this special status of women, something akin to a house slave in the matter of intimacy and oppression. . . .” Echoing Marx and Engels, Zinn maintains, “Earlier societies—in America and elsewhere—in which property was held in common and families were extensive
and complicated, with aunts and uncles and grandmothers and grandfathers all living together, seemed to treat women more as equals than did white societies that later overran them bringing ‘civilization’ and private property.”75
Here Zinn is touting anthropology now so thoroughly debunked that even honest leftists no longer rely on it. Tristram Hunt is a former member of the Labour Party in Britain and is still sympathetic to the views of Marx and Engels, but he admits the problems with their argument that the nuclear family is a byproduct of capitalism. The Origin of the Family by Engels, Hunt concedes, is “widely dismissed on account of its flawed anthropological foundations.” As he explains, research has demonstrated that the view of the state of women in pre-modern societies was “far too rosy.” Nuclear families did dominate society before industrialization.76
But Howard Zinn’s presentation of American history follows the old-style Marxist line. His line of rhetoric in A People’s History about the proto-Communism of the Indians is not all that different from the propaganda one can find in official Communist Party USA “histories.” Take, for example, William Z. Foster, leader of the Russia-run CPUSA during the Stalin era. His Outline Political History of the Americas was published in 1951 by the Soviet publisher, International Publishers, when Zinn was probably an active Communist Party member and teaching a class in Marxism at the Communist Party headquarters in Brooklyn, as his FBI file indicates.
Consider Foster’s account of “The Conquest of the Western Hemisphere,” a chapter that presents the Age of Exploration as a “tragic sea of violence, bloodshed, slavery, exploitation, poverty, and general misery” on account of the “brutal greed . . . of the ruling classes of all the feudal-capitalist colonizing states.” The Indians, on the other hand, “as a natural result of their primitive democratic system of society, were infused with high conceptions of honor and fair dealings with one another and with outsiders,” with “none of the frightful poverty, neglect of the aged, exploitation of children, and general misery that has been the Indians’ lot since they were conquered by the technically far superior and supposedly civilized capitalist nations.”77
The “tribal communalism prevailing throughout the Americas” was “profoundly democratic.” Citing Morgan and Engels, Foster claimed that before Columbus the Indian woman “held an honored position in the primitive society within which she lived, indeed far more so than she has had since in America.” The Indian woman had great authority: “She was the mistress of the home and of all its associated industries, including agriculture in its early stages; she took full part in tribal elections, and in certain stages the tribal lineage was traced solely through her.” Foster quotes the anthropologist Clark Wessler: “She was a strong laborer, a good mechanic, a good craftsman, no mean artist, something of an architect, a farmer, a traveler, a fisherman, a trapper, a doctor, a preacher, and, if need be, a leader.”78 One is reminded of the post-war photographs of kerchiefed middle-aged Soviet women doing heavy outdoor labor.
Few women desire the kind of “equality” that Engels, Foster, and Zinn offer. Marxists may present monogamy as a capitalist trick for enslaving women, but the fact is that most women desire lifelong, monogamous marriages—which redound to their benefit, compared to any other arrangement in which men can use women and then discard them. Few women in the United States wanted to trade places with women in the Soviet Union or would want to live the life of an Indian woman. American women today have more freedom than women have ever enjoyed anywhere in the globe at any time in world history. And even in early America, women’s rights here were greater than in England, and certainly than in most places in the world.79 Women in colonial America enjoyed the benefits of chivalry and security and respect in the family. Some women were tavern-keepers, merchants, dress-makers, midwives, teachers, writers, and landed proprietors, as the 1924 study Colonial Women of Affairs: A Study of Women in Business and the Professions in America before 1776 tells us.80
There were women who were slaves, but not all women were slaves, as Zinn implies. This brings us to our next chapter, which addresses a real historical injustice that provides more fodder for Zinn’s anti-Western polemic: slavery.
CHAPTER
FOUR
America the Racist
Writing in the December 1991 issue of Academic Questions, Fred Siegel, associate professor of history at Cooper Union and a self-described liberal and Democrat, bemoaned a fashionable trend in history writing. The “New Historians,” he quipped, saw American life as “a story of defeat, despair, and domination. American history became a tragedy in three acts: what we did to the Indians, what we did to the African-Americans, and what we did to everyone else.”1
That’s a pretty fair description of A People’s History of the United States. Zinn winds up Act 1 of his book on the oppression of Indians and women only to launch into Act 2 on slavery—beginning with an eight-line description from J. Saunders Redding’s 1950 They Came in Chains of the ship carrying the first slaves to the colonies in 1619: “a strange ship, indeed, by all accounts, a frightening ship, a ship of mystery. . . . through her bulwarks black-mouthed cannon yawned. The flag she flew was Dutch; her crew a motley. Her port of call, an English settlement, Jamestown, in the colony of Virginia. . . . her cargo? Twenty slaves.”
They Came in Chains was the work not of an historian, but of a Hampton Institute English professor. Arna Bontemps, in Saturday Review, described it as “a deeply felt, sometimes impassioned account,” “a fever chart of rising and falling hopes.”2 Zinn quotes from this dramatic description to set up his own contention that “there is not a country in world history in which racism has been more important, for so long a time, as the United States. And the problem of ‘the color line,’ as W.E.B. Du Bois, put it, is still with us.” In light of America’s uniquely horrible racism, Zinn wonders, “Is it possible for whites and blacks to live together without hatred?”3
As usual, capitalism is the culprit. Zinn plays fast and loose with numbers and sources in his effort to prove that capitalism is at the root of racism. He misreports and distorts the slaves’ truly horrific suffering for his own purposes. For example, he claims that “perhaps one of every three blacks transported overseas died”4—allowing the “perhaps” to do a lot of work. In fact, according to the best quantitative evidence, 12 to 13 percent of slaves died in transit from Africa to the Americas during the history of the Middle Passage.5 Sometimes a larger percentage of the slave ship’s crew died on the voyage. In the Dutch slave trade, one in five crewmen died at sea.6 But it suits Zinn’s purpose to exaggerate the true numbers and to ignore the historical context of a time and place when life was more perilous for all.
Zinn acknowledges that slavery existed in Africa—where, in fact, it predated the discovery of America—but presents it as a kinder, gentler kind of slavery: “Slavery existed in the African states, and it was sometimes used by Europeans to justify their own slave trade. But . . . the ‘slaves’ of Africa were more like the serfs of Europe—in other words, like most of the population of Europe.” The difference was the still-powerful “tribal life” of Africa: “Africa had a kind of feudalism, like Europe based on agriculture, and with hierarchies of lords and vassals. But African feudalism did not come, as did Europe’s, out of the slave societies of Greece and Rome, which had destroyed ancient tribal life. In Africa, tribal life was still powerful, and some of its better features—a communal spirit, more kindness in law and punishment—still existed. And because the lords did not have the weapons that European lords had, they could not command obedience as easily.”7
Here Zinn is simply romanticizing life in pre-colonial Africa—just as he romanticized life in pre-colonial America. “Tribal life,” as Zinn presents it, was “communal” and gentle in “law and punishment.” In contrast, “American slavery” is categorically “the most cruel form of slavery in history.”8 For his account of slavery and the Middle Passage, Zinn relies on Basil Davidson’s 1961 The African Slave T
rade. Davidson did do groundbreaking work in the field of pre-colonial African history. But by 1971, well before Zinn published his People’s History in 1980, many of his generalizations were coming under fire from specialists in African history.9 Zinn didn’t care enough to keep up with the literature. It might have interfered with his desire to indict capitalism: “African slavery is hardly to be praised,” Zinn concedes. But it lacked “the frenzy for limitless profit that comes from capitalistic agriculture; the reduction of the slave to less than human status by the use of racial hatred, with that relentless clarity based on color, where white was master, black was slave.”10 The real problem between blacks and whites in America wasn’t so much slavery itself—owning other human beings as chattels—but “class exploitation.”11
Thus, the Civil War was a tragic missed opportunity. If only it had been fought to overthrow the capitalist system that undergirded the particularly cruel American form of slavery, it might have ended racism (not to mention, presumably, ushering in a worker’s paradise). But sadly, the Civil War, as Zinn presents it, was fought “to retain the enormous national territory and market and resources.”12
So why did such an evil, capitalist system fight a bloody war to end slavery? After all, within the capitalist system, slavery was profitable: it “remained a profitable investment at the time it was abolished regardless of country,” write Robert Paquette and Mark M. Smith.13 So there was something beyond the profit motive that ended slavery in the West. Yes, within the capitalist country that Zinn condemns, slavery was killed for moral reasons. As early as the American Revolution, the fight for liberty inspired debates about slavery. Then, by the early nineteenth century, the slave trade had been abolished in England and the United States and the American abolitionist movement was in full swing. Abolitionists were arguing against slavery from Christian and Enlightenment principles (and some, wrongly, on economic grounds). Yet, in 1842, when the Sultan of Morocco was asked by the British consul general what his country was doing to abolish slavery or to reduce its trade, he replied that he was “not aware of its being prohibited by the laws of any sect.” Indeed, the question was absurd to him. Why would anyone even ask such a thing? The sultan thought that the rightness of slavery “needed no more demonstration than the light of day.”14