Debunking Howard Zinn

by Mary Grabar

  In Zinn’s history, though, sheer fear-mongering through a “series of invented scares about Soviet military build-ups, a false ‘bomber gap’ and a false ‘missile gap,’ ” led to an unnecessary U.S. arms build-up, which by 1962 had produced “the equivalent, in nuclear weapons, of 1,500 Hiroshima-size atomic bombs.” Zinn claims “The Soviet Union was obviously behind. . . . but the U.S. budget kept mounting, the hysteria kept growing, the profits of corporations getting defense contracts multiplied. . . .” There are those “profits” again! “By 1970, the U.S. military budget was $80 billion, with two-thirds of the $40 billion spent on weapons systems going to ‘twelve or fifteen giant industrial corporations.’ ”77 Contrary to Zinn’s claims, the U.S.S.R. was not “obviously behind” in the arms race. In fact, the U.S. was not spending enough. By around 1968, “the U.S.S.R. had at last achieved strategic parity with the United States: if there was to be a ‘missile gap’ now, the Americans were likely to find themselves at the short end of it,” according to Cold War author Gaddis.78

  Of course, Zinn is following the Communist Party line in presenting the Soviet Union as no threat at all. We recall his condemnation of the 1948 Marshall Plan, which rebuilt Western Europe and kept it out of Communist hands, for its “political motive”: the real purpose was to “creat[e] a network of American corporate control over the globe,” “to build up markets for American exports,” and to “use pressure and money to keep Communists out of the cabinets,” such as in France and Italy where the Communist parties “were strong.”79 Well, yes they were, thanks to funding from Moscow. Just as we have seen before, Zinn’s take on history is suspiciously similar to the Soviet propaganda pushed by CPUSA boss William Z. Foster in his Outline Political History. Naturally, he didn’t like the Marshall Plan either, charging, “The Marshall Plan, presented to the world as a project of rehabilitation of war-torn Europe, is fundamentally designed to arm and mobilize the European capitalist countries for an all-out war against the U.S.S.R. and the People’s Democracies of Eastern Europe.”80

  Zinn updated Foster’s litany of injustices against Communism by adding President Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress in Latin America. Nor did he approve of the 1953 overthrow of the Iranian government that had “nationalized the oil industry,” or the 1954 overthrow of the Guatemalan government of Jacobo Árbenz. All were about the U.S. military and industry conspiring to install right-wing dictatorships for their own benefit. Arbenz was “a left-of-center Socialist” whose government was “the most democratic Guatemala had ever had.” His overthrow was at the behest of “American business interests” because he had “expropriated 234,000 acres of land owned by United Fruit.” When U.S. Marines were sent to Lebanon in 1958, it was all about blood for oil—“to make sure the pro-American government was not toppled by a revolution, and to keep an armed presence in that oil-rich area.”81

  But Cuba is Zinn’s favorite case: “The Democrat-Republican, liberal-conservative agreement to prevent or overthrow revolutionary governments whenever possible—whether Communist, Socialist, or anti-United Fruit—became most evident in 1961 in Cuba.” Castro is Robin Hood, because, after assuming power on January 1, 1959, he “moved to set up a nationwide system of education, of housing, of land distribution to landless peasants.” And America is the enemy. The United States did not want to lend Cuba money and refused to let the International Monetary Fund do so. After the U.S. “cut down” on the amount of sugar we bought, Cuba was forced to turn to the Soviet Union. Then the U.S. government armed and trained Cuban exiles for the Bay of Pigs invasion, a mission outrageously kept secret by the New Republic, part of the “liberal-conservative coalition,” at the request of Arthur Schlesinger. Zinn can’t get over the fact that even liberals, like Schlesinger, applauded the effort.82 But so did most Americans, as the rise in Kennedy’s poll numbers after the invasion indicated.83

  The American people may have been happy with the state of the world in the early sixties, characterized as it was by an economic boom, American military strength, and Communism held at bay. But it made Zinn sad. Not only had the U.S. interfered in budding Communist (really communitarian) movements around the globe on behalf of greedy fruit growers and oil companies, but “the fifteen-year effort since the end of World War II to break up the Communist-radical upsurge of the New Deal and wartime years seemed successful. The Communist party was in disarray—its leaders in jail, its membership shrunken, its influence in the trade union movement very small. . . . The military budget was half of the national budget, but the public was accepting this.”84

  But he did his part to change all that! A new field remained to be plowed, new potential sources of “revolt” to be exploited. There was dissatisfaction among “Negroes.” Black Americans had proven their patriotism and competence in World War II, and no doubt, most Americans would agree that equal rights and opportunities for them were long overdue. But for Howard Zinn, equal economic and legal rights fell far short of his goals. He would not be happy with such things as Supreme Court decisions to desegregate the schools, civil rights laws guaranteeing equal rights, or access to jobs and voting. The title of his next chapter “Or Does It Explode?” gives a good indication of what he had in mind.

  CHAPTER

  SEVEN

  Black Mascots for a Red Revolution

  “The black revolt of the 1950s and 1960s—North and South—came as a surprise. But perhaps it should not have. The memory of oppressed people is one thing that cannot be taken away, and for such people, with such memories, revolt is always an inch below the surface. For blacks in the United States, there was the memory of slavery, and after that of segregation, lynching, humiliation. And it was not just a memory but a living presence—part of the daily lives of blacks in generation after generation.”1

  While the African Americans among whom Zinn lived in Atlanta certainly suffered from the indignities of segregation and prejudice, it would be an exaggeration to say that daily life for Spelman professors and students consisted of fear of an imminent lynching, that “revolt” was always “an inch below the surface,” or that mid-twentieth century African Americans remembered slavery. Zinn relies on an inordinate amount of creative literature to sell this take on the black experience in the twentieth century.

  For example, Zinn quotes a famous poem by Harlem Renaissance author Claude McKay to illustrate the supposed “dangerous currents among young blacks,” which he claims Senator Henry Cabot Lodge warned about, but which Zinn himself celebrates:

  If we must die, let it not be like hogs

  Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot. . . .

  Like men we’ll face the murderous cowardly pack,

  Pressed to the wall, dying but fighting back!2

  As it happens, McKay himself, who had been inspired to write “If We Must Die” by the race riots as soldiers returned from World War I and published the poem in 1919 in the Liberator, “insisted that the sonnet had universal intent.” Though the poem, he said, “makes me a poet among colored Americans. . . . frankly, I have never regarded myself as a Negro poet. I have always felt that my gift of song was something bigger than the narrow confined limits of any one people and its problems.” These words of McKay are reported in Harlem Renaissance by Nathan Huggins, the 1971 book that Zinn references on page 445 of A People’s History and includes in his bibliography. But Zinn ignores McKay’s own understanding of the appeal of his poetry beyond the confines of race. After “learn[ing] that a white American soldier, who had died on the Russian front in World War II, had this poem among his belongings,” McKay said, “I felt profoundly gratified and justified. I felt assurance that ‘If We Must Die’ was just what I intended it to be, a universal poem.”3

  Zinn seems to want to confine black poets to a black ghetto. Rather than having universal appeal, their work is always about racial anger. He continues the literary redlining with his treatment of Countee Cullen’s poetry. By choosing to discuss only two of Cullen’s poems—“Sco
ttsboro, Too, Is Worth Its Song” and “Incident”—Zinn gives the impression that he wrote mostly about race.4 In fact, Countee Cullen’s work transcends any single issue. He studied under Hyder E. Rollins, a John Keats scholar, at New York University from 1922 to 1925, graduating Phi Beta Kappa, and earned a graduate degree at Harvard. He expressed little interest in politics and less in an Afro-centric identity. In fact, Cullen wrote for the February 10, 1924, Brooklyn Daily Eagle that “If I am going to be a poet at all, I am going to be POET and not NEGRO POET [emphasis in the original].” Excessive focus on race, he felt, was hindering the “artists among us.” He asserted, “I shall not write of Negro subjects for the purpose of propaganda.” It was precisely for such bourgeois and what he called “white” values that the far-left author Langston Hughes attacked Cullen implicitly in his famous 1926 essay, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.”5

  But for Zinn, literature by African Americans is all about racial resentments that—here’s hoping!—might fuel a leftist revolution in the United States: “It was all there in the poetry, the prose, the music, sometimes masked, sometimes unmistakably clear—the signs of a people unbeaten, waiting, hot, coiled.”6 Here Zinn is on the same page with both the American Communist Party and the Soviet propaganda machine. “The first discussion on record of the Negro problem by an American Communist took place in Russia. . . .” wrote Theodore Draper in his 1960 classic American Communism and Soviet Russia. It was part of the subject of the “national and colonial question” and “on the agenda of the Comintern’s Second Congress in 1920,” the fourteenth point of the sixteen theses Lenin submitted to the delegates: “The Negroes in America.” In 1921, Lenin sent the American Communists a letter urging them to recognize Negroes “as a strategically important element in Communist activity.” The party’s position was articulated in the November 1921 issue of the Communist: “The most important point in our agitation must be to fix responsibility for the Negro’s sufferings where it rightly belongs: on the bourgeoisie and the Capitalist-Imperialist System!” [emphasis in the original].7

  According to Zinn, “black Communists in the South had earned the admiration of blacks by their organizing work against enormous obstacles. There was Hosea Hudson, the black organizer of the unemployed in Birmingham, for instance. And in Georgia, in 1932, a nineteen-year-old black youth named Angelo Herndon, whose father died of miner’s pneumonia, who had worked in mines as a boy in Kentucky, joined an Unemployment Council in Birmingham organized by the Communist party, and then joined the party.”

  Zinn insinuates that the Communists were the only ones concerned about blacks. They were on the right side of the notorious Scottsboro Case, in which several young black men were sentenced to death for raping white women, though the evidence was in their favor. Zinn has to admit, “The [Communist] party was accused by liberals and the NAACP of exploiting the [Scottsboro] issue for its own purposes. . . .” But he admits only to “a half-truth” in the accusations, arguing that “black people were realistic about the difficulty of having white allies who were pure in motive.”8

  Actually, there were plenty of white allies who were pure in motive. They were working with and for the NAACP, which had an integrated leadership with blacks in the most prominent roles. Clarence Darrow, probably the most famous lawyer in America, heeded the call of NAACP executive secretary Walter White to take on the Scottsboro case.

  The NAACP could also brag about their own brilliant African American attorneys, such as Scipio Africanus Jones and Charles Hamilton Houston, some of whom argued cases before the Supreme Court, thank you very much. This is not to mention thousands upon thousands of African Americans who contributed hard-earned wages to the defense of the Scottsboro boys when the alarm was first raised by black ministers and field organizers of the NAACP. By the early 1920s, a little over a decade after its founding, the NAACP had switched from being white-run to black-run.9 Zinn ignores the black supporters that the Scottsboro Boys had in the NAACP, in the black churches, and among black journalists and working class citizens. These black crusaders for civil rights are wiped out of African American history by Zinn—and, increasingly, by the historians who have followed him.

  Instead, he presents Hudson and Herndon—two unusual black men lured into the Communist Party—as examples of black empowerment. Hudson, Zinn writes, was “a black man from rural Georgia, at the age of ten a plowhand, later an iron worker in Birmingham,” who had been “aroused by the case of the Scottsboro Boys in 1931.”10 According to Let Nobody Turn Us Around, an anthology edited by Manning Marable and Leith Mullings, Hudson “subsequently worked in the Works Progress Administration (WPA), served as vice president of the Birmingham and Jefferson County locals of the Workers Alliance, was president of Steel Local 2815, and vice president of the Alabama Political Education Association. Hudson used several aliases and often worked underground, especially during the 1950s when he was a Communist organizer in the South. In 1971 he visited the Soviet Union for the first time.”11

  Herndon was from Ohio and had been recruited in Cincinnati by the Communists to come to Atlanta to lead marches. Zinn quotes—though he does not cite—a ten-line passage from You Cannot Kill the Working Class, published by the International Labor Defense and League for Struggle for Negro Rights around 1937, in which Herndon—who was put on trial for violating a Georgia statute against insurrection—complains about how passages from the Communist literature that he possessed were read to the jury and about how he was asked, “Did I believe in the demand for the self-determination of the Black Belt? . . .”12 The “Black Belt” was the scheme the Soviets had put forth in 1928 to carve out of the eleven black majority states of the American South a separate black republic.

  George Schuyler, the popular Harlem-based columnist for the Pittsburgh Courier, thought that Herndon was being used by white Communists. As Schuyler recounts in his 1966 autobiography Black and Conservative, “A Greenwich Village Communist woman whom I knew had previously asked me to go down there [Atlanta] for that purpose, and I laughed aloud.” He adds with his characteristic sarcasm, “So they got Herndon; he carried out his Red assignment, and he was promptly nabbed, jugged, tried and sentenced to the Georgia chain gang; then released on bail. Soon the Communists were parading him around the country at mass meetings that proved very lucrative.”13

  In Blacks and Reds: Race and Class in Conflict, 1919–1990, Earl Ofari Hutchinson also describes Hudson and Herndon as prizes for the white Communist organizers: “Communists were rewarded in Alabama and Georgia when they found two young black men who emerged as daring leaders. Hosea Hudson in Alabama and Angelo Herndon in Georgia would give the Party greater visibility and stature among blacks.” Herndon was “another martyr” for the Communists.14 Herndon enjoyed his Communist Party role for only about another decade. “By the end of the 1940s” he had returned to the Midwest to lead a bourgeois life as a salesman. He died in 1997.15

  Zinn claims, “The Negro was not as anti-Communist as the white population. He could not afford to be, his friends were so few—so that Herndon, Davis, Robeson, Du Bois, however their political views might be maligned by the country as a whole, found admiration for their fighting spirit in the black community.”16 Zinn—surprise, surprise—provides no statistics for his claim, and the reality is the opposite. Blacks were less supportive of Communists than whites because African American leaders believed, correctly, that the Communist Party was exploiting them. Black newspapers warned their readers. In the Afro-American in 1939, for example, Claude McKay advised readers to “avoid blindly following any ’isms,’ especially communism. . . .” The Amsterdam News, which “supported FDR . . . in the 1936 and 1940 elections” but then endorsed Governor Thomas Dewey in 1944 and 1948, ran “a hostile account of a September 1939 Communist meeting . . . in which Benjamin J. Davis Jr. and other communists denounced the ‘imperialist war’ after having been vocal anti-fascists since the Popular Front.” One of the paper’s report
ers “expressed bewilderment” when the black singer and actor Paul Robeson, who had suddenly—when the Hitler-Stalin pact was signed—shifted to an anti-war position after having been “a vocal anti-fascist for several years.” According to Davidson College professor Daniel Aldridge, the NAACP kept a “vigilant watch for communist activity in NAACP branches and youth groups” after receiving reports, in November 1946, of attempted Communist takeovers of several branches. W. E. B. Du Bois, though a founder of the NAACP, was dismissed from the group for his Communist views. Black Communist Ben Davis was elected to the New York City Council in 1945. But that was under a citywide “proportional representation system,” so that he benefited from the white leftist vote. After the rules were changed in 1947, Davis lost his Harlem district by a three-to-one “margin.”17

  In 1948, presidential candidate Henry Wallace and running mate Glen Taylor, the candidates of the Communist-controlled Progressive Party, fared poorly among blacks. Wallace’s decision to call lawmakers who opposed civil rights “murderers” didn’t seem to help him with black voters. Neither did his party’s platform, which followed the “Marxist line” in rejecting the Marshall Plan and the Truman Doctrine, and in calling “for disarmament talks” to outlaw nuclear weapons, and for the “nationalization of banks and railroads.”18 According to Wilson Record in The Negro and the Communist Party it was estimated that “considerably less than ten percent” of the two million votes for Wallace came from blacks. “In Harlem, Wallace ran a poor third to Truman and Dewey,” and “the Progressive Party’s Negro candidate for the State Senate” was beat out by the white Democratic Party candidate, 55,784 votes to 12,719 votes.19 Aldridge describes African Americans as “cool” towards Wallace’s campaign, even though the Progressive Party had made a “concerted effort” to “address black issues” and run black candidates. He explains, “While prominent African Americans such as Robeson and Du Bois strongly supported Wallace, others, including Roy Wilkins and widely read black journalists such as Pittsburgh Courier’s P. L. Prattis and Amsterdam News political columnist Earl Brown advised black voters to reject Wallace, precisely because of alleged communist domination of the Progressive Party.” And black New York City voters went for Truman 4-to-1.20 Record looked at other heavily black areas, such as “[i]n Chicago,” where “three congressional candidates in ‘Black Metropolis’ divided the vote as follows: Democrats 98,204; Republican, 43,620; Progressive, 5,188. A similar distribution was found elsewhere.” Record explained in 1951, “The [1948] election results were a blow to the Communist Party, which had placed its entire apparatus behind the Progressives. They were likewise a blow to its Negro program. . . . the Progressive Party, contrary to its claims, was not the party of the farmer, the worker, or the Negro.”21 More than a half-century later, David Aldridge countered the thesis that had arisen in the interim among academic historians: that “black anti-communism” was due to a “postwar Red Scare,” or fear of government persecution. Aldridge demonstrates that it was actually “grounded in a deep distrust of the Communist Party and the Soviet Union” that had “roots in the prewar period.” Black voters voted for anti-Communist Democrats whom they perceived as pro-civil rights.22