Debunking Howard Zinn

by Mary Grabar

  Michael Kazin had written in 2004 that A People’s History was a “Manichean fable” suitable for “a conspiracy-monger’s Web site.”43 In 2013, however, Kazin said that Daniels, who had quoted Kazin’s critique of Zinn, should be “roundly condemned” for accusing Zinn of being “a biased writer.” Daniels, Kazin claimed, had shown “how little he understands about how history is now written and has always been written.” Although Kazin acknowledged that “Zinn’s point of view is driven more by a desire to inspire his fellow leftists, instead of make them think about the complexities of the past, than I would like,” he now had an excuse for the bias he had formerly condemned. So he wrote, “But I could list many other works of history—by conservatives, liberals, and radicals—which were also written to advance a political cause.”44

  Daniels had the public support of National Association of Scholars President Peter Wood, National Review editor Rich Lowry, and New Criterion editor Roger Kimball, but of very few historians. Alexander Hamilton Institute executive director Robert Paquette, a professor at Hamilton College, was an exception.45 The American Historical Association—whose professional standards we have seen Zinn falls so woefully short of— and the Organization of American Historians sided with Zinn.46

  Daniels capitulated in a lengthy response letter, which stated that he was “in strong general agreement” with the Purdue professors and “dedicated to the freest realm of inquiry possible at Purdue.” He now conceded, “I understand that there are multiple competing theories of historiography,” but in a final meek defense of his criticism of Zinn mentioned a supportive email that had referenced Zinn’s disdain for objective truth as expressed in his essay, “The Uses of Scholarship.”

  The letter from Daniels inspired a further attack by the professors, who accused him of misunderstanding not only “academic freedom and the work of a university” but also “Zinn’s brilliant critique of whether scholarship can be objective and disinterested.” They demanded another statement asserting Daniels’s “uncompromising support” for their free rein.47 Then they set to work planning a “Read-In” of Zinn’s writings, which took place a few months later on the Purdue campus, live-streamed, and “hosted in solidarity with 11 campuses” that held their own similar Read-In events. As USA Today reported, over a hundred students, professors, a state legislator, a French filmmaker, and at least one high school teacher who admitted to using the book in his class came to hear readings and speeches by, among others, Zinn’s friends Staughton Lynd and Anthony Arnove, and by James Loewen, the author of Lies My Teacher Told Me. Over eight thousand dollars were pledged to fund a new graduate student scholarship in Zinn’s name.48

  Lawmakers’ efforts to eliminate Zinn in the classroom usually go nowhere, as Arkansas State representative Kim Hendren learned in 2017 when he introduced House Bill 1834 to prohibit the use of Zinn’s materials in Arkansas classrooms.49 In fact, the Zinn Education Project used the controversy as a fundraising and outreach opportunity. After the bill was introduced, the website announced that “in solidarity with Arkansas educators and students” the organization would send a free copy of A People’s History to any teacher requesting one. As of March 16, 2017, “700 middle and high school teachers and school librarians” had sent requests, and “more continue to come in.” Tax-deductible donations were sought to pay for the books.50

  One can understand teenagers being drawn to A People’s History of the United States, but when professors who have personally pointed out egregious and deliberate historical misrepresentations defend it, we need to ask why. Is it all right to promote falsehoods in the service of your ideological cause, as long as it is your cause? Would Sam Wineburg apply such a standard to any other issue? Certainly, as Kazin asserts, history books have been written to “advance a political cause.” Sometimes bias leads to unintentional misrepresentation. One example of a lapse of that sort would be conservatives’ seeing the Founders as more religious than they really were—as in the original edition of David Barton’s The Jefferson Lies. To their credit, professors at the small Christian college at Grove City pointed out the errors and Barton corrected them. Historians, like everyone else, can get caught up in wishful thinking and not see the evidence objectively. But once their errors are pointed out, particularly in criticism from the court of their peers, they should be willing to make appropriate changes.

  At one time, there was a court of peers. Oscar Handlin, in an essay on the deterioration of the historians’ profession, recalled his first American Historical Association conference as a graduate student in 1936. That meeting was attended by 956 historians with different “background[s], interpretation[s], and points of view,” but they were held together by “adherence to common standards and convictions.” He recalled four of his teachers—Charles H. McIlwain, Frederick Merk, Samuel E. Morison, and Arthur M. Schlesinger—who “had treated the American Revolution, each in a distinctive fashion.” But still, according to Handlin, “the student, confronting that array of divergent viewpoints, found no cause to doubt that a common standard of scholarship animated all four historians.” He cited the philosopher Charles Peirce’s description of the “ ‘community of investigators’ laboriously inching the world toward truth,” as a “perfect term for our company.”51

  At one time, even some historians who were Communists had standards of scholarship—and they did not believe that Zinn met those standards. This was true of the internationally renowned historian of the South, Eugene Genovese, whom I knew in the five years before he died in 2012. Gene and his wife Betsey Fox-Genovese were well-known Marxist historians. But in the 1990s, Betsey converted to Catholicism and Gene followed her, returning to the faith of his childhood. In 2010, he told me that while he knew Zinn as a colleague and had admired his stand in the 1960s on integrating the Southern Historical Association, he refused to review A People’s History.52 When Zinn’s sidekick Staughton Lynd, a proponent of the new “relevant” history that would combine scholarship with activism, ran for president of the American Historical Association in 1969, Genovese objected. What Gene told me comports with David Greenberg’s description in The New Republic:

  For all their leftist bona fides, [Genovese and colleagues Christopher Lasch and James Weinstein] agreed with their stodgy forebears that the intellectual had to hew to the highest standards of rigor; it was by the strength of their scholarship that they might revise entrenched beliefs that gave rise to the social conditions that, as a political matter, they decried. Genovese, most vociferously, flatly rejected the siren song of “relevant” history: he, too, hoped at the time for a socialist future, but he believed that it was best served by history that was true to the evidence, valid in its interpretations, and competent in its execution.53

  Genovese’s 1974 masterpiece Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made, won the Bancroft Prize and is considered to be a classic in the field.

  In spite of their claims about “academic discourse,” we need to ask Zinn defenders if they would support distorted history in service of another goal. Would they accept the use of David Irving’s books in the classroom? Or imagine what would happen to someone writing a history book that deliberately obscured the numbers of slaves and slave deaths and misrepresented the conditions under which they worked and lived. Imagine that historian focusing exclusively on the rare case of a slave who was treated as well as his owners’ own children. Imagine such a historian citing a book by Frederick Douglass or another abolitionist, twisting the words around so that they became arguments for slavery. But that is exactly what Zinn did with the words of Douglas Pike: Pike accused the Viet Cong of genocide, but Zinn used selective quotations of Pike’s work to make them the heroes of the Vietnamese people. Zinn, as we have seen, violated over and over the rules on which the American Historical Association prides itself and by which Richard Evans and his team showed Irving to be a historian of disrepute. Zinn did everything—misrepresented sources, omitted critical information, falsified evidence, and plagiarized. His rhe
torical strategies included leading questions, logical fallacies, and ad hominem attacks.

  All Americans of good will, no matter their political views, should object to such perversion of the truth.

  One of the classroom lessons on Christopher Columbus promoted by the Zinn Education Project involves trying the discoverer of America for the murder of the Indians. This role-play activity is designed for students as young as elementary school. One of the questions to the jury is whether “European life—the ‘System of Empire,’ [made] violence inevitable.”54 In effect such a trial is a show trial, with a jury of naive children who are manipulated by their teachers.

  It is Zinn’s book that should be put on trial. If the historian lies, there is no defense.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I have had the good fortune to be surrounded by a number of exemplary scholars and historians at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization in Clinton, New York, where I have been a resident fellow since 2014. First, I want to thank the Institute’s president and co-founder, Robert Paquette, who, during my initial visit to the AHI in the summer of 2010, made me feel warmly welcome and encouraged me to return to give a lecture, attend AHI’s conferences, and apply for a research fellowship, which I did during the summer of 2011. When the program under which I was teaching at Emory University ended, I knew there was place for me at the AHI.

  Bob Paquette, a prize-winning historian, is the dynamo of the AHI. He is known for his ability to motivate students with his exacting standards and his boundless enthusiasm for the study of history and the AHI. In spite of his myriad duties in administration, teaching, and writing, he gave a careful reading to a draft of a chapter and recommended sources from his vast store of knowledge about American history and slavery.

  I have benefited greatly also from conversations with Hamilton College history professor and AHI co-founder Douglas Ambrose, as well as with Dr. David Frisk, AHI’s other resident fellow, with whom I share an office. The AHI generously offered the research services of their undergraduate fellows, Alex Klosner and Edward Shvets, who, like the other AHI undergraduate fellows, stand head and shoulders above their peers in courage, intellectual curiosity, and conduct.

  Helping to keep the AHI running smoothly by volunteering for countless tasks has been Bob’s wife, Zoya Paquette. Her sincere interest in my work has been much appreciated, as has that of AHI co-founder James Bradfield and his wife, Alice.

  While teaching at Emory University, I had the good luck to meet a top scholar in the field of American Communism, Harvey Klehr, who also directed the American Democracy and Citizenship program under which I was teaching during the latter part of my tenure there. Over the years, Harvey has readily answered questions about a topic that has consumed this daughter of parents who escaped Communist Yugoslavia (Slovenia). For this project, Harvey read two of my chapters and offered corrections. At Emory, Mark Bauerlein, who founded the American Democracy and Citizenship program, gave me valuable direction on early writing projects and served as an ally. On that campus, I also met philosophy professor Ann Hartle, then president of the Georgia state chapter of the National Association of Scholars. She has come through for me in my various pursuits and has become a good friend. I still hear her words of encouragement about this book during one of our lunch get-togethers. I miss the late Eugene Genovese, who understood the evils of Communism and could describe the practitioners in his unique, mockingly funny way.

  Through the National Association of Scholars, I have met colleagues who still adhere to the old-fashioned high standards of scholarship. NAS president Peter Wood was helpful in reviewing chapters and sharing memories of Howard Zinn at Boston University. At NAS, both Peter Wood and David Randall have given me feedback and connected me with other scholars. Through that organization I met Will Fitzhugh, a selfless promoter of history writing for high school students. He also read a draft of a chapter and pointed me to additional sources.

  Ken Masugi, political science professor in Washington, D.C., another member of the “Remnant” of scholars, expanded on his own article about the World War II relocation camps and suggested additional books. Robert Hager, retired Army Reserve Officer, former college professor, and now an editor in chief of Communist and Post-Communist Studies, whose acquaintance I made online, read my chapter on Vietnam and offered helpful suggestions.

  From the website of Bill Humpf, patriot and Army National Guard veteran, in Mount Joy, Pennsylvania, I learned of an important document that helped expose yet another one of Zinn’s lies about the Vietnam War.

  My former neighbor, Lee Harris, author of fine and learned books on politics and history, gave me direction in my reading and shared his vast knowledge during our conversations. Marty Naparsteck, a stalwart friend of over three decades in spite of our differing political views, has happily served as my go-to guy for information on Vietnam writers and baseball.

  This book has had a long genesis. Cliff Kincaid, president of America’s Survival, Inc., commissioned a report on Howard Zinn that I presented at his conference in 2010. And it was at one of Cliff’s conferences that I met Grove City College political science professor Paul Kengor, who through the years has been a great resource and has introduced me to some wonderful people. One was Ralph J. Galliano, director of the Selous Foundation for Public Policy Research, who, in turn, introduced me to historian Irwin F. Gellman, who dedicated many hours to coaching me and helping me get this book idea into the right hands. Through the intercession of Paul, I met Mike Shotwell, who has written about his Communist upbringing and read parts of my manuscript. He and his wife, Gwyneth, have become good friends.

  I am thankful always for my son, Carson. Since childhood, he has cheerfully endured a mother often immersed in books and reminded her of the important things in life. My sister, Regina, and her husband, Eric, have provided encouragement and understanding of my need to postpone visits.

  The librarians at the Kirkland Town Library in Clinton, at Hamilton College, and at Colgate University were generous with special dispensations in checking out the many books that I needed. The staffs at the Tamiment Library at New York University; Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory University; the Library of Congress; and the Library and Archives of the Martin Luther King Jr. Center in Atlanta were all very helpful and professional as I conducted research on Zinn and related topics.

  Finally, I want to thank my agent, Alex Hoyt, and my editor at Regnery, Elizabeth Kantor. Both have ushered this project along with patience, enthusiasm, and good cheer.

  I have sought out reliable and varied sources and the expertise of colleagues to refute Howard Zinn’s lies, but I take responsibility for any errors within these pages.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  MARY GRABAR is a resident fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization and the founder of the Dissident Prof Education Project. She taught at the college level for twenty years, most recently at Emory University, and her work has been published by The Federalist, Townhall, Front-Page Magazine, City Journal, American Greatness, and Academic Questions.

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  NOTES

  A Note from the Author

  1. Gilbert T. Sewell, “The Howard Zinn Show,” Academic Questions, May 2012, 209–17.

  2. William Crum, “Cooper, Hamon Take OKC Council Seats,” Oklahoman, April 10, 2019, https://newsok.com/article/5628297/cooper-hamon-take-seats.

  3. Sarah Thompson, “New Year’s Day Swearing-In Ceremony Kicks Off 2019 with Party,” Penobscot Bay Pilot, January 1, 2019, https://www.penbaypilot.com/article/new-year-s-day-swearing-ceremony-kicks-2019-party/112193.

  4. Naomi Schaefer Riley, “Reclaiming History From Howard Zinn,” Wall Street Journal, May 17, 2019, https://www.wsj.com/articles/reclaiming-history-from-howard-zinn-11558126202; see also “Wilfred McClay on Teaching American History, the Trouble with Howard Zinn, and ‘Land of Hope,�
� an Interview with Wilfred McClay,” Encounter Books, May 15, 2019, https://www.encounterbooks.com/features/wilfred-mcclay-teaching-american-history-trouble-howard-zinn-land-hope/.

  5. Evan Goldstein, “The Academy Is Largely Itself Responsible for Its Own Peril,” Chronicle of Higher Education, November 13, 2018, https://www.chronicle.com/article/The-Academy-Is-Largely/245080.

  6. Alex Beam, “Two-and-a-Half Cheers for Howard Zinn,” Boston Globe, November 23, 2018, https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2018/11/23/two-and-half-cheers-for-howard-zinn/HZPpBU8KrLhCHoMUb2aH0L/story.html.

  7. Sam Wineburg, “Undue Certainty: Where Howard Zinn’s A People’s History Falls Short,” American Educator, Winter 2012–2013, https://www.aft.org/sites/default/files/periodicals/Wineburg.pdf.

  8. David Greenberg, “Agit-Prof, Howard Zinn’s Influential Mutilations of American History,” The New Republic, March 19, 2013, https://newrepublic.com/article/112574/howard-zinns-influential-mutilations-american-history.

  9. Wineburg, “Undue Certainty.”

  10. Marion Smith, “VOC Releases Third Annual Report on Generational Attitudes Toward Socialism in America,” October 30, 2018, https://www.victimsofcommunism.org/voc-news/third-annual-report-on-us-attitudes-toward-socialism.

  11. Kathleen Elkins, “Most Young Americans Prefer Socialism to Capitalism, New Report Finds,” CNBC, August 14, 2018, https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/14/fewer-than-half-of-young-americans-are-positive-about-capitalism.html. The 52 percent of millenials broke down to 46 percent favoring socialism and 6 percent favoring communism.