by Mary Grabar
He had also “been doing a huge amount of speaking in debates, teach-ins, etc. on Vietnam, several times each week, and sometimes almost every night, here and there to all sorts of odd groups—Catholics in Leominister, rich folk in Greenwich, Conn., students at Duke University (last night—a guest of Sam Cook, first Negro prof. at Duke).”126
According to Zinn, by 1972 there was “no victory in sight” and North Vietnamese troops “were entrenched in the South.” (That’s in contrast to what Morris and Colby reported from their time on the ground in Vietnam.) The U.S. made “one final attempt to bludgeon the North Vietnamese into submission” through bombings. “Many of the B-52s were shot down, there was angry protest all over the world,” and Kissinger signed the peace agreement. “In late April 1975, North Vietnamese troops entered Saigon. The American embassy staff fled, along with many Vietnamese who feared Communist rule, and the long war in Vietnam was over. Saigon was renamed Ho Chi Minh City, and both parts of Vietnam were unified as the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.”127
Of course, Zinn does not describe the real terror of the scene. As former Marine officer Philip Caputo reported for the April 28, 1975, Chicago Tribune, events of the “Communist drive on Saigon” were “almost Goyaesque in their horror,” with enemy mortars exploding all around and body parts in the road, rotting in the rain. Communist tanks growled “like armored monsters” behind a procession of fleeing humanity, a “long, relentless column” of at least twenty miles, on foot, motor scooters, in cars, trucks, buses, and oxcarts.128
And this is how CIA veteran William Colby described the events as helicopters began lifting evacuees off rooftops and improvised landing pads:
Crowds of Vietnamese frantically tried to be included in the escape. Although literally every American was removed, the confusion made it impossible to take the thousands of Vietnamese clamoring to go—including many who had been assured that they would be taken care of by the power that had dominated their lives, and that they had served and relied upon, for so many years. A few Vietnamese officers put bullets to their heads, some as a gesture of honor in defeat, others to escape the draconian punishment that they knew awaited them in Communist “reeducation” camps.129
American servicemen, as is evident from surveys, were as disappointed as Colby by this outcome, with 82 percent angered by the fact that “political leaders in Washington would not let them win.” Zinn did his part to paint a picture of abandonment of support of the war among the military. But surveys of Vietnam veterans tell a different story: 74 percent said they “ ‘enjoyed’ their service in Vietnam, 71 percent are ‘glad’ they went, and 66 percent report that they’d serve again.” Veterans were also found to be “better educated” and earning “higher salaries than their peers who did not serve.”130
As to the claim that what America was fighting against in Vietnam was a nationalist movement—or, as Zinn puts it, a movement for “local communism”—Morris points out that “after their victory in 1975, the Vietnamese Communists provided captured American weapons to the Soviet Union for use in Communist insurrections in other nations, most notably in El Salvador in the 1980s.”131 So, yes, Virginia, there was an international Communist conspiracy to bring about a worldwide Communist revolution, and Americans were properly “scared” of the Reds.
Like others around the globe, the Vietnamese suffered greatly at the hands of the Communists. The South Vietnamese armed forces had “lost 275,000 killed in action.” Nearly twice as many Vietnamese civilians—465,000 men, women, and children—had lost their lives, “many of them assassinated by Viet Cong terrorists or felled by the enemy’s indiscriminate shelling and rocketing of cities,” wrote Sorley. A million became boat people; many died at sea in their desperate flight from Communist oppression. “Perhaps 65,000 others were executed by their liberators. As many as 250,000 more perished in brutal reeducation camps. Two million, driven from their homeland, formed a new Vietnamese diaspora.”132
In a book that claims to celebrate the overlooked masses and the downtrodden, there is no mention of the Vietnamese refugees who were streaming to the United States when Zinn was writing his book in the late 1970s. But the only “people” Zinn was interested in were—as always—Communists, and people who can help the Communists win: “Traditional history portrays the end of wars as coming from the initiatives of leaders—negotiations in Paris or Brussels or Geneva or Versailles—just as it often finds the coming of war a response to the demand of ‘the people.’ The Vietnam war gave clear evidence that at least for that war (making one wonder about the others) the political leaders were the last to take steps to end the war—‘the people’ were far ahead.”133
So, let us hear from one of the Vietnamese “people” whose story didn’t make it into Zinn’s book. In a City Journal article, Triumph Forsaken author Mark Moyar provides this testimony from Nguyen van Thai and Nguyen Phuc Lien: “We, Vietnamese. . . . fought because we understood the cruelty and dictatorship of the communists. We fought because we did not wish the communists to impose a barbarous and inhuman regime upon us. More than 1,000,000 people from North Vietnam fled their native land and emigrated to the South in 1954 in order to escape totalitarianism, which is ample evidence for this point. The second exodus of the 70’s, 80’s and early 90’s also corroborated this fact.”134
Zinn, in contrast, was jubilant about the triumph of the Vietnamese Communists—and the defeat of the United States. He quoted C. L. Sulzberger of the New York Times about the U.S. emerging “as the big loser. . . . we lost the war in the Mississippi valley, not the Mekong valley. . . .” But he tops Sulzberger: “In fact, the United States had lost the war in both the Mekong Valley and the Mississippi Valley. It was the first clear defeat to the global American empire formed after World War II. It was administered by revolutionary peasants abroad, and by an astonishing movement of protest at home.” More good news, from Howard Zinn’s point of view: “From a long-range viewpoint, something perhaps even more important had happened. The rebellion at home was spreading beyond the issue of war in Vietnam.”135
Zinn’s distorted and anti-American version of the Vietnam War is widely promulgated in our educational system. Children watching videos produced and distributed by the Zinn Education Project (ZEP)—a plethora of educational materials is available from this organization—are presented with a film about the anti-war movement within the military or about hero Daniel Ellsberg who purloined the Pentagon Papers. My Lai is presented as “typical” of American involvement in Vietnam, as the Young People’s History indicates with the claim, “An army officer admitted that many other tragedies like My Lai remained hidden.”136 Close to eighty-four thousand teachers have signed up at ZEP. Non-affiliated writers of history books for children also reference Zinn’s history. One stamped “class book” in the Utica branch of my rural upstate New York library system features a five-paragraph excerpt from Ho Chi Minh’s “Independence Day” speech of September 2, 1945, and quotes extensively from Zinn’s book. The head note explains, “In his book, A People’s History of the United States, historian Howard Zinn includes this selection of a Declaration of Independence and a list of grievances against the French proclaimed by Ho Chi Minh and his fellow revolutionists at the end of World War II in 1945.” The text states, “The Vietnamese revolutionary carried with him a copy of the U.S. Declaration of Independence.”137
CHAPTER
NINE
Howard Zinn, the Founders, and Us
No assessment of Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States would be complete without some consideration of his perverse take on the founding of our nation. His chapter about the American Revolution is titled “A Kind of Revolution.”1 Why? Because American independence and the establishment of a republic on the basis that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” is not revolutionary enough for Zinn. To satisfy him, the
American Revolution should have smashed the capitalist system and toppled the “elite” to whom he refers sneeringly throughout the chapter.
In Zinn’s telling, the revolution actually helped the “elite” keep their grip on power. How? “Ruling elites seem to have learned through the generations—consciously or not—that war makes them more secure against internal trouble.”2 Sure, laws were changed during the war to relieve poor debtors and require the rich to bear a larger part of the tax burden. But that was just “a sacrifice by the upper class to maintain power.”3 The revolution only enshrined a “new elite”4—including Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, and John Adams: “The Continental Congress, which governed the colonies through the war, was dominated by rich men, linked together in factions and compacts by business and family connections.”5 In fact, America would “create the richest ruling class in history.”6 Zinn is much less interested in the conflict between the British and the colonists than he is in the “conflicts between rich and poor among the Americans.”7
So, Zinn does his best to import the Communist class struggle into the American Founding—by “examining the Revolution’s effect on class relations.” According to A People’s History, “land confiscated from fleeing Loyalists . . . was distributed in such a way as to give double opportunity to the Revolutionary leaders: to enrich themselves and their friends, and to parcel out some land to small farmers to create a broad base of support to the new government.” This kind of massive redistribution—an ingenious tactic to shore up the ruling class and prevent a true revolution that would put the workers in control—“became characteristic of the new nation: finding itself possessed of enormous wealth, it could create the richest ruling class in history, and still have enough for the middle classes to act as a buffer between the rich and dispossessed.”8 (In Marxist theory, the middle class is always the real impediment to a true revolution. No wonder Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels said in The Communist Manifesto that the “bourgeois,” “the middle-class owner of property” must be “swept out of the way. . . .” and that the “first step in the revolution by the working class, is to raise the proletariat to the position of the ruling class, to establish democracy” and then “centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state.”)9
What a clever ruse by the wealthy! In actuality, from the very beginning, America offered opportunities and hope—even for the poorest. The late Wesleyan University economics professor Stanley Lebergott offered some historical perspective (sorely lacking in Zinn’s history!). While life was challenging for most settling in the New World in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was much better than life in the Old. In Scotland, “men sold themselves into slavery because of poverty, and worked in the salt and coal mines.” In France, “the ragged peasant . . . yoked his plow with a donkey in one trace and his wife in the other.” In Switzerland, “women filled buckets with urine and manure, yoked them across their shoulders, and carried them uphill to fertilize the fields. . . .” We’ve seen the statistics that show that even slaves in America were better nourished than many Europeans. In Switzerland, for example, “the simple people” had meat and bread only on holidays, while per capita meat consumption in Flanders in 1800 was estimated at “22 pounds per year”—in the United States, 360.10
As Alexis de Tocqueville commented in the 1830s, there were no peasants in America. At that time, Europe was still filled with them, many living in “absolute slavery” with no way to escape their lot, as Lebergott demonstrates. Peasants were not only “subject to taxes by central and local governments,” but “also subject to even more rigorous charges imposed by landowners who took a substantial portion of their grain as payment for milling the rest into flour, forbidding them to do their own milling. Americans averaged less than a dollar a year in taxes. And anyone was free to set up a mill.”11
That is why millions of these impoverished “left in an unplanned exodus,” following “a handful of earnest religious leaders and believers, entrepreneurs and gold seekers, who had shown the way.” The French-American writer Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur in his Letters from an American Farmer, published in 1782, described the situation in America: “The European does not find, as in Europe, a crowded society where every place is overstocked; he does not feel that . . . difficulty of beginning. . . . here is room for everybody, in America. Has he any particular talent, or industry? He exerts it in order to procure a livelihood, and it succeeds. . . . is he a laborer, sober and industrious? He need not go many miles . . . before he will be hired, well fed . . . and paid four or five times more than he can get in Europe.”12
Zinn overlooks the fact that four centuries before the Communist scheme for land redistribution failed in Asia and Europe, “communal land cultivation” had already famously “failed in Massachusetts Bay.” After that abortive attempt, “virtually every white family owned its own farm,” and “by 1774, of every four free families, three owned their own farm.”13
The true, Communist-style revolution that Zinn wishes had happened in America actually did happen during the French Revolution just a few years later—with disastrous results: “Before his fellow French revolutionaries carted him off to be guillotined in 1794, Georges Danton had described his purpose: ‘to put on top what was below.’ ”
But fortunately for Americans, dividing “the spoils among the conquerors,” was not the zealous aim of the “American revolutionary leaders,” despite the fact that “perhaps a quarter of the population were counterrevolutionaries.” Amazingly—in comparison to the typical treatment of the defeated in any war—three-quarters of the “Loyalists remained in the United States,” as Lebergott shows. While Zinn claims “Revolutionary leaders” divvied up the land of the Loyalists to “enrich themselves and their friends,” in fact it was the “land holdings of the royal governors,” “the massive holdings of King George III,” and the “estates of wealthy Loyalists, chiefly those who fled” that were confiscated by the states. And “in the end . . . ‘less than 4 percent of the nation’s real and personal estates changed hands.’ ”14
“The federal Constitution” was “the work of the commercial people in the seaport towns, of the slaveholding states, of the officers of the Revolutionary Army, and the property holders everywhere,” as John Adams wrote. And what a good thing that was—in spite of the aspersions Zinn casts upon it for that reason. As Lebergott explains, Adams and his peers “recognized that by funding its debts and paying to defend its frontiers government would enhance the value of farms and land, as well as other property throughout the nation.”15
None of these facts matter to Howard Zinn. He sets out to debunk the idea believed by “many Americans over the years”—that “the Constitution drawn up in 1787” was “a work of genius put together by wise, humane men who created a legal framework for democracy and equality.”16 Howard Zinn has a more up-to-date take he wants to sell his readers from a work published in 1913: An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States by Charles Beard. According to Zinn, Beard’s updated 1935 version “arous[ed] anger and indignation,” because it put forth the idea “that most of the makers of the Constitution had some direct interest in establishing a strong federal government: the manufacturers needed protective tariffs; the moneylenders wanted to stop the use of paper money to pay off debts; the land speculators wanted protection as they invaded Indian lands; slaveowners needed federal security against revolts and runaways; bondholders wanted a government able to raise money by national taxation, to pay off those bonds.”17
But Beard’s thesis that the Founders were solely motivated by such materialistic interests had been debunked several times over before Zinn wrote A People’s History. It had been thoroughly demolished by Forrest McDonald, following Robert E. Brown’s 1956 study, Charles Beard and the Constitution: A Critical Analysis of ‘An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution. Zinn makes a pretense of acknowledging w
hat he calls Brown’s “interesting point”: “Granted that the Constitution omitted the phrase ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,’ which appeared in the Declaration of Independence, and substituted ‘life, liberty, or property’—well, why shouldn’t the Constitution protect property? As Brown says about Revolutionary America, ‘practically everybody was interested in the protection of property’ because so many Americans owned property.”
But for Zinn, Brown’s argument “is misleading. True, there were many property owners. But some people had more than others. A few people had great amounts of property; many people had small amounts; others had none.” An estimated one-third “were small farmers.” Such small property holders, including tradesmen, such as “bakers, blacksmiths, brewers, . . . coopers” acted—Marxist theory strikes again!—as “buffers against the blacks, the Indians, the very poor whites.” The “slightly prosperous people. . . . enable the elite to keep control with a minimum of coercion, a maximum of law—all made palatable by the fanfare of patriotism and unity.” Therefore, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are suspect. Those really in power were the wealthy, and liberty was “shaky” “when entrusted to a government of the rich and powerful.”18 Zinn repeats the same old conspiracy theory—and the same old Marxist assumption that only equality of wealth can ensure democracy.
So, Zinn’s argument is circular; he is simply reiterating Beard’s idea that the Founding was a conspiracy of the rich against the poor. He does not answer Brown’s objection to Beard’s thesis. Nor does he consider the criticism of Beard by McDonald: “The idea of man as economic animal” is “simpleminded” because it fails to consider other “driving forces” like “love of power,” and patriotism, which can “override selfish considerations of economic gain”—as displayed by two delegates, Nathaniel Gorham, “a wealthy Massachusetts merchant” who knew that the Constitution would raise the prices of securities, and lead to his losing his investments, but voted for it anyway, and Robert Morris, “who in 1787 was the richest merchant in America and who ended up in debtors’ prison.”19