Debunking Howard Zinn

by Mary Grabar

  How did the actual “people” Zinn presumes to speak for feel about the internments? Surprise. Not all agreed with him. For example, a June 19, 1942, article in the New York Times reported that Japanese organizations were divided on internment. While Mike M. Masaoka, national secretary of the Japanese American Citizens League, asserted that the internments represented a larger threat to civil liberties and members of the American Friends Service Committee and the ACLU charged that the camps went against American democratic values, Miss Teru Masumoto of the Japanese American Committee for Democracy put forth a resolution (narrowly defeated) proclaiming that “as all loyal Americans we support every measure that will help to insure victory . . . despite any personal hardships or sacrifices.”61

  A year later, the Senate Military Affairs Committee was recommending a draft for Japanese men and reporting that “more than 7,500 Japanese” were already in the Army.62 A December 14, 1943, article about an exchange of prisoners noted that “about 110,000 Japanese and Japanese-Americans” were being interned and that any of them could “apply for return to Japan.”63 The Swedish General Secretary of the Y.M.C.A. on a tour of war prisoner and civilian internment camps praised the U.S. camps as “the cleanest he has seen anywhere in the world.”64

  Disregarding all the evidence, including the news accounts he would have seen as a young man, Zinn goes so far as to suggest that the internment of the Japanese is proof that America fought World War II for racism rather than against it. “Was it a ‘mistake’—or was it an action to be expected from a nation with a long history of racism and which was fighting a war, not to end racism, but to retain the fundamental elements of the American system?” These racist “elements” of America were so “fundamental” that they went back to . . . Alexander Hamilton. According to Howard Zinn, World War II “was a war waged by a government whose chief beneficiary—despite volumes of reforms—was a wealthy elite,” with “the alliance between big business and the government” going back “to the very first proposals of Alexander Hamilton to Congress after the Revolutionary War.”65

  Americans did not relish the idea of going to war, but it was not because of their allegiance to memories of the capitalist villain Alexander Hamilton. Still reeling from World War I, they were in an isolationist mood in the years leading up to Pearl Harbor. In 1937, 70 percent of Americans said that U.S. involvement in World War I had been a mistake, and a majority were angry about the European nations defaulting on their war debts.66 But by 1941, even before the attack on Pearl Harbor, “89 percent of American men” said they “would spend one day a week training for homeland defense” and “78 percent of all Americans” said they “would ‘willingly’ pay a sales tax on everything and cut gasoline consumption by a third in the event of war.” Once war was declared, boys, men, and women volunteered in an unprecedented manner. Older men and teenage boys lied about their age to enlist, and many celebrities volunteered.67 Immediately after Pearl Harbor, the anti-interventionist group America First called for support of the war efforts and closed up shop. Former skeptics even got on board. Famous aviator Charles Lindbergh volunteered his services. Representative Hamilton Fish said, “The time for debate is past. The time for action has come. . . .” And Senator Burton Wheeler said, “Let’s kick hell out of them.”68 At that time, 97 percent of Americans “approved of Congress’s declaration of war against Japan,” according to a Gallup poll,69 and they demonstrated their support in efforts that ranged from buying war bonds to planting Victory Gardens to working extra hours in factories.

  In fact, the Allied victory was due in large part to an American workforce that worked with resolve and to a free market system that supported industrial output and innovation by the so-called arms merchants, including Nebraskan Andrew Jackson Higgins, a builder of “fishing and pleasure boats,” who designed the “Higgins boats”—the landing craft that made D-Day possible. After the war, President Eisenhower, who was certainly in a position to know, said that Higgins was “ ‘the man who won the war.’ ”70 Military historian Victor Davis Hanson credits the American free enterprise system: “In critical areas such as transport planes, merchant ships, locomotives, food supplies, medicines, oil production, and metals production,” the Allies far “outproduced” the Axis powers, who often relied on “coerced” workers.71

  But in Zinn’s world, businessmen are always exploiters: “Despite the overwhelming atmosphere of patriotism and total dedication to winning the war, despite the no-strike pledges of the AFL and CIO, many of the nation’s workers, frustrated by the freezing of wages while business profits rocketed skyward, went on strike. During the war, there were fourteen thousand strikes, involving 6,770,000 workers, more than in any comparable period in American history.”72

  These numbers are technically correct; they match those from the United States Bureau of Labor. What Zinn fails to say, though, is that only 29.2 percent ever came to the attention of the National War Labor Board, according to a report published in 1950, which also noted that “many of the stoppages were not considered important to the war program” and “many others were of short duration.” According to the Encyclopedia of Strikes (2009), “Most strikes during the war involved a small number of workers, a single plant or department, and lasted a short time. . . . ”73

  Many of these were “wildcat” strikes conducted by workers without the blessings of the unions. They were usually not over wages, but over working conditions, such as speed-ups, or having to work with black co-workers. Joshua Freeman, who is pro-labor, is one of the few scholars in the field who acknowledges that “workers,” especially those who were “militant,” could also be racist. Some of the wildcat strikes were led by local union officials and some were “taking place outside of union structures.” Contrary to Zinn’s claims, “The most frequent causes of these true wildcats included disciplinary action—particularly the firing of union officials or militant workers, working and safety conditions, long hours, and speed ups. . . . only infrequently were wages a cause of wildcats.” Some of the wildcat strikes were “hate strikes,” “walkouts by white workers protesting the hiring or upgrading of blacks,” which sometimes led to riots, including at shipyards in Chester, Pennsylvania; Mobile, Alabama; and Sparrows Point, Maryland. Freeman admits that “wartime racist strikes present a tricky problem for those historians who uncritically extol all militant labor action in and of itself.” They are so much of a tricky problem for Zinn that he does not mention them.

  Freeman attributes many of the strikes to “militants.” At one of the early strikes at the North American Aviation plant in Inglewood, California, in June 1941, “communist-led workers” walked out and then “kept other workers from entering the plant through threats and beatings,” according to Burton and Anita Folsom. To the applause of the public, President Roosevelt finally gave the orders and twenty-five hundred soldiers “marched on the plant with their bayonets fixed,” “restor[ing] order” and allowing workers to return to work and “reorganize” the union. Non-communist workers were probably very happy to have their jobs because, as Freeman explains, “For the majority of workers the war was an experience of opportunity rather than limitation. Their wartime income was larger than ever before. . . . the men of draft age were also aware that every day in the shipyard was a day not spent in a barracks or a foxhole.”74

  Zinn, however, simply lets the reader believe that the strikes were all part of a general revolt against the capitalist-controlled war-mongering Establishment, a revolt which included “350,000 cases of draft evasion, including technical violations as well as actual desertion, so it is hard to tell the true number.” Zinn also speculates that “the number of men who either did not show up or claimed C.O. [conscientious objector] status was in the hundreds of thousands—not a small number.” It was, he claims, “hard to know how much resentment there was against authority, against having to fight in a war whose aims were unclear, inside a military machine whose lack of democracy was
very clear. No one recorded the bitterness of enlisted men against the special privileges of officers in the army of a country known as a democracy.”75 Instead of giving hard statistics, Zinn would rather throw around possible numbers with the caveat that it was “hard to know” exactly how many soldiers in the 1940s expected a “democracy” within the military. But it’s easy to guess that that number was vanishingly small—though perhaps not as small as the number who thought that the war’s “aims were unclear.”

  Zinn then uses anecdotal and problematic evidence to make a claim about the black community in order to buttress his own argument about “manufactured” support for the war and the country. He claims that “there seemed to be widespread indifference, even hostility, on the part of the Negro community to the war despite the attempts of Negro newspapers and Negro leaders to mobilize black sentiment.” Laurence Wittner (Rebels Against War) quotes a black journalist who states, “the Negro. . . . is angry, resentful, and utterly apathetic about the war.” In addition, “A student at a Negro college told his teacher: ‘The Army jim-crows us. The Navy lets us serve only as messmen. The Red Cross refuses our blood. . . . lynchings continue. . . . what more could Hitler do than that?’ ” Zinn also quotes a “Draftee’s Prayer” that appeared in “a Negro newspaper” in January 1943.76

  Sam Wineburg points to these references cited by Zinn as misleading evidence by which “Zinn hangs his claim” that African Americans had only one aim in World War II—for “victory over racism.” In actuality, there was a popular “Double V” campaign: for victory here and abroad, over racism and over the enemy. Many of Zinn’s readers “will likely conclude” that the sentiments selectively quoted in A People’s History “represented broad trends in the black community.” But that is far from the truth. Wineburg went to Wittner’s source and found that when Horace Mann Bond, “president of Georgia’s Fort Valley State College and the father of civil rights leader Julian Bond,” was asked by the editors of Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, “Should the Negro care who wins the war?” Bond “bristled at  . . . the insinuation that blacks were apathetic to America’s fate.” The very question, Bond said, implied that the Negro was “divested of statehood.’ ” Similarly, in the pages of the African American newspaper the Pittsburgh Courier, editor P. L. Prattis and labor leader A. Philip Randolph argued in early 1941 in favor of ramping up efforts to aid the Allies. NAACP leader William Pickens and other black leaders were also in support.77

  As usual, Zinn omitted statistics that cut against his polemic. In just the same two pages from the passage in Rebels Against War from which Zinn pulled his anecdotes, there are statistics demonstrating that African Americans were far less likely than the general population to register as conscientious objectors. Of the total 10,022,367 American males (ages 18–37) eligible to serve, 2,427,495, or 24 percent, were black. The total number of conscientious objectors was 42,973. “If the number of black conscientious objectors were proportional” to their numbers in the population, Wineburg explains, “there would have been 10,000 African-American conscientious objectors. . . .” But the “total number of black conscientious objectors” was only four hundred. Blacks were also far less likely than whites to be draft evaders; they were “only 4.4 percent of the Justice Department cases.”78 While Zinn’s source, Lawrence Wittner, presents anecdotes as evidence of the “smoldering discontent of America’s Negro population,” he also describes “the peace movement” as being in a “debilitated state,” so bad that “it was unable to turn this rebellion into antiwar activity.” There was a “virtual disappearance of peace sentiment” among the working class.79 In Zinn-world, however, African Americans and the working class were united against the war because it was only being perpetuated to promote racism, which, in turn, supports capitalism.

  Not only was America’s cause in World War II tainted by our racism at home, but the war effort was actually fueled by racism: only racial hatred of the Japanese can explain why “the vast bulk of the American population was mobilized” for war. This racism explains the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And those bombings were only the culmination of the Allied bombing campaign, which was worse than the Nazi one: “These German bombings were very small compared with the British and American bombings of German cities.” Zinn cites a 1943 agreement of the Allies “on large-scale air attacks to achieve ‘the destruction and dislocation of the German military, industrial and economic system’ ” as if that were evidence that military leaders gleefully wanted to commit mass murder of civilians. Zinn claims, “The English flew at night with no pretense of aiming at ‘military’ targets; the Americans flew in the daytime and pretended precision, but bombing from high altitudes made that impossible.”80

  According to Wineburg, Zinn is “on solid ground” only in “a technical sense” when he compares Allied bombing to Nazi bombing: “In the bombing of Rotterdam on May 14, 1940, there was an estimated loss of a thousand lives, and in the bombing of Coventry on November 14, 1940, there were approximately 550 deaths. In Dresden, by comparison, somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 people lost their lives.” But as Wineburg points out, “fourteen months before bombing Coventry,” the Nazis had “unleashed Operation Wasserkante, the decimation of Warsaw,” where “smoke billowed 10,000 feet into the sky” and 40,000 Poles died. As Wineburg notes, “Zinn is silent about Poland.”81

  Zinn gives a much larger number—“[m]ore than 100,000”—than Wineburg for Dresden. But as Wineburg points out, this is the number “long favored by Nazi sympathizers who held up the Allies’ bombing of Dresden as tantamount to Nazi atrocities at Auschwitz.” As a matter of fact, it is the number given by the discredited historian David Irving in his 1963 book, The Destruction of Dresden, in which, as Wineburg explains, Irving “credulously (or calculatingly) drew on mortality figures provided by the Nazis for propagandistic purposes.”82

  But surely there must be some excuse for leftist icon Howard Zinn retailing Nazi propaganda and citing a Hitler apologist for his supposed facts? David Irving must not have come out as a Hitler fanboy at the time Zinn was writing A People’s History. In fact, he had. Three years earlier, in 1977, Irving had published Hitler’s War. Reviewers blasted the book. Walter Laqueur in the New York Times stated that there was “no shred of evidence” for Irving’s claim that Hitler’s subordinates had “killed several million Jews without his knowledge and against his wish.” John Lukacs in National Review called it “appalling” because of its errors, misuse of sources, and attempt to present Hitler as “morally superior to his opponents.”83

  A bit of statistical context is needed here, in light of Zinn’s insinuation that the Allies gleefully outdid the Axis in mass murder. As Victor Davis Hanson points out, “The Axis losers killed or starved to death about 80 percent of all those who died during the war. The Allied victors largely killed Axis soldiers; the defeated Axis, mostly civilians.”84 Hanson lists five causes of noncombatant deaths:

  (1) the Nazi-orchestrated Holocaust and related organized killing of civilians and prisoners in Eastern occupied territories and the Soviet Union, as well as Japanese barbarity in China; (2) the widespread use of air power; . . . (3) the famines that ensued from brutal occupations, mostly by the Axis powers; (4) the vast migrations and transfers of populations, mostly in Prussia, Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and Manchuria; and (5) the idea prevalent in both totalitarian and democratic governments that the people of enemy nations were synonymous with their military and thus were fair game through collective punishments.85

  As Hanson explains, “Despite German brutality in 1914, there had been nothing quite similar to the Waffen SS. . . and nothing at all akin to Dachau or the various camps at Auschwitz. The Kaiser’s Germany would not have exterminated seventy to ninety thousand of its own disabled, chronically ill, and developmentally delayed citizens, as the Third Reich had by August 1941. The idea of Japanese kamikazes might have been as foreign in 19
18 as it was largely unquestioned in late 1944.”86

  But in Zinn’s account of World War II, the Japanese aggressors are the victims—just like the Nazis. Zinn drags out the old canard that Japan was already on the verge of surrender before the atomic bombs. The Japanese “had begun talking of surrender a year before this, and the Emperor himself had begun to suggest, in June 1945, that alternatives to fighting to the end be considered.” Zinn takes the word of the Japanese Foreign Minister that “[u]nconditional surrender is the only obstacle to peace. . . .”

  “If only,” Zinn wails, “the Americans had not insisted on unconditional surrender—that is, if they were willing to accept one condition to the surrender, that the Emperor, a holy figure to the Japanese, remain in place—the Japanese would have agreed to stop the war.” Then Zinn launches into full conspiracy mode: “Why did the United States not take that small step to save both American and Japanese lives? Was it because too much money and effort had been invested in the atomic bomb not to drop it?”87

  In fact, the insistence on “unconditional surrender” was intended to prevent remilitarization of a nation that had sought “world conquest,” as the Potsdam Proclamation of July 26, 1945, stated. Zinn ignores this fact and presents U.S. unwillingness to allow a “holy figure” to remain on his throne as the only stumbling block. Germany had surrendered, but the Japanese would fight to the death, as evidenced by the increasing use of kamikaze fighters and villagers committing suicide instead of surrendering. Zinn ignores the fact that the Potsdam Proclamation, which demanded unconditional surrender, also promised “eventual establishment of a ‘peacefully inclined and responsible’ Japanese government ‘in accordance with the freely expressed will of the Japanese people.’ ” The Japanese rejected this offer on July 28. And in fact, when the Japanese did surrender, Hirohito was allowed to “remain on his ancestral throne as nominal Emperor.”88