Debunking Howard Zinn

by Mary Grabar

  44. Masugi, “Lessons from the WW II Japanese Relocation.”

  45. Ken Masugi email to author, August 24, 2018.

  46. Charles W. Sasser, Patton’s Panthers (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 333–34.

  47. Schweikart and Allen, A Patriot’s History, 609.

  48. Zinn, A People’s History, 416.

  49. Lawrence E. Davies, “West Coast Moves to Oust Japanese,” New York Times, January 29, 1942, 12.

  50. Lawrence E. Davies, “Japanese Seized in Raid on Coast,” New York Times, February 3, 1942, 14.

  51. Lawrence E. Davies, “California Aliens Face Changed Way,” New York Times, February 4, 1942, 7.

  52. Lawrence E. Davies, “20 Aliens on Coast Seized with Arms,” New York Times, February 11, 1942, 12.

  53. Lawrence E. Davies, “West Coast Widens Martial Law Call,” New York Times, February 12, 1942, 10.

  54. Lawrence E. Davies, “Japanese Officers Held in California,” New York Times, February 18, 1942, 10.

  55. “800 West Coast Japanese Go to Enemy Camps As Army Maps Widened ‘Prohibited’ Zones,” New York Times, February 24, 1942, 11.

  56. Lawrence E. Davies, “Shifting of Aliens Nearing on Coast,” New York Times, February 28, 1942, 8.

  57. Brian Masaru Hayashi, Democratizing the Enemy: The Japanese American Internment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 86.

  58. Carey McWilliams, “Moving the West Coast Japanese,” Harper’s Magazine, September 1942, 359–69.

  59. Masugi, “Lessons from the WW II Japanese Relocation.”

  60. Quester Entertainment, “Japanese Relocation: Government Film (1942)—3613,” YouTube, June 25, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esVege1S0OE.

  61. “Japanese Decries Mass Evacuation,” New York Times, June 19, 1942, 8.

  62. “Asks Draft of Japanese,” New York Times, July 17, 1943, 6.

  63. “Captive Exchange Halted by Japan,” New York Times, December 14, 1943, 5.

  64. “Praises Prisoner Camps,” New York Times, April 5, 1944, 10.

  65. Zinn, A People’s History, 416–17.

  66. Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt, 281–82.

  67. Schweikart and Allen, A Patriot’s History of the United States, 602, 597–99.

  68. Lynne Olson, Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America’s Fight Over World War II, 1939–1941 (New York: Random House, 2014), 427.

  69. David W. Moore, “Support for War on Terrorism Rivals Support for WWII, Gallup, October 3, 2001,

  70. Schweikart and Allen, A Patriot’s History, 602.

  71. Hanson, The Second World Wars, 451, 449.

  72. Zinn, A People’s History, 417.

  73. W. Ellison Chalmers, “Voluntarism and Compulsion in Dispute Settlement,” in Problems and Policies of Dispute Settlement and Wage Stabilization During World War II, Bulletin No. 1009 (United States Department of Labor, 1950), 26–71; Immanuel Ness, Benjamin Day, and Aaron Brenner, The Encyclopedia of Strikes (New York: Routledge, 2009), 216.

  74. Joshua Freeman, “Delivering the Goods: Industrial Unionism during World War II” in The Labor History Reader ed. Daniel J. Leab (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985), 383–406; Burton W. Folsom Jr. and Anita Folsom, FDR Goes to War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 67.

  75. Zinn, A People’s History, 419.

  76. Ibid.

  77. Sam Wineburg, “Undue Certainty: Where Howard Zinn’s A People’s History Falls Short,” American Educator, Winter 2012–13, https://www.aft.org/sites/default/files/periodicals/Wineburg.pdf; P. L. Prattis, “The Horizon,” Pittsburgh Courier, April 19, 1941, 6; A. Philip Randolph, “England’s Fight Our Cause,” Pittsburgh Courier, February 8, 1941, 13; Harry MacKinley Williams, “When Black Is Right: The Life and Writings of George S. Schuyler” (Ph.D. diss. Brown University, 1988), 331–32.

  78. Wineburg, “Undue Certainty.”

  79. Lawrence S. Wittner, Rebels Against the War: The American Peace Movement, 1941–1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), 46–47.

  80. Zinn, A People’s History, 421.

  81. Wineburg, “Undue Certainty.”

  82. Ibid.

  83. Walter Laqueur, “Springtime for Hitler,” review of David Irving, Hitler’s War (The Viking Press) and Peter Hoffman, The History of the German Resistance, New York Times, April 3, 1977, 253; John Lukacs, “Caveat Lector,” National Review, August 19, 1977, 946–47.

  84. Hanson, The Second World Wars, 3.

  85. Ibid., 38–39.

  86. Ibid., 40–41.

  87. Zinn, A People’s History, 423.

  88. Reporting World War II: Part II (New York: Library of America, 1995), 893–94; Bailey, The American Pageant, 900.

  89. Zinn, A People’s History, 423.

  90. Sadao Asada, “The Shock of the Atomic Bomb and Japan’s Decision to Surrender: A Reconsideration,” Pacific Historical Review 67: 4 (November 1998), 477–512.

  91. Zinn, A People’s History, 424.

  92. Ibid.

  93. Ibid., 425.

  Chapter Six: Writing the Red Menace Out of History

  1. Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 425.

  2. Howard Jones, “A New Kind of War”: America’s Global Strategy and the Truman Doctrine in Greece (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 7.

  3. Zinn, A People’s History, 425.

  4. John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History (New York: Penguin, 2005) 35, 56.

  5. Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944–1956 (New York: Doubleday, 2012), 239, 238.

  6. Gaddis, The Cold War, 36.

  7. Zinn, A People’s History, 427.

  8. “Our Critique [of chapter 37 of David M. Kennedy, Lizabeth Cohen, and Thomas A. Bailey, The American Pageant 12th ed. (Houghton Mifflin, 2001)]” the Education and Research Institute, no date, https://www.trueamericanhistory.us/pageant/toc/chapter-37-page-858/.

  9. Gaddis, The Cold War, 37–39.

  10. Ibid., 42.

  11. Ibid., 110–12.

  12. Melvyn P. Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 11.

  13. Jones, “A New Kind of War,” 11.

  14. Ibid. 12–13.

  15. Gaddis, The Cold War, 162.

  16. Zinn, A People’s History, 425–27.

  17. John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 52–54.

  18. Jones, “A New Kind of War”, 17–18.

  19. Ibid., 5–6.

  20. Ibid., 4.

  21. Ibid., 63.

  22. Ibid., 66.

  23. Ibid., 121.

  24. Zinn, A People’s History, 429–30.

  25. Gaddis, The Cold War, 40–42.

  26. John E. Haynes, Red Scare or Red Menace? American Communism and Anticommunism in the Cold War, American Ways Series (Ivan R. Dee, 1995), 63.

  27. Zinn, A People’s History, 427–28.

  28. Benedict J. Kerkvliet, The Huk Rebellion: A Study of Peasant Revolt in the Philippines (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 18.

  29. Ibid., 218–19.

  30. Ibid., 224–25.

  31. Robert Aura Smith, Philippine Freedom (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958), 142–43.

  32. Zinn, A People’s History, 430.

  33. John Earl Haynes, Red Scare, 51, 72–73.

  34. Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 164.

  35. John Earl Haynes, Red Scare, 147–48.

  36. Ibid.

  37. Howard Zinn, A People’s History, 430-431.

  38. M. Stanton Evans, Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight against America’s Enemies (New York: Random House, 2007), 469, 471; John Earl Haynes and Harvey Kleh
r, In Denial: Historians, Communism & Espionage (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2003), 38; “Philip Foner,” Discover the Networks, https://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individuals/philip-foner/.

  39. William Henry Chamberlin, America’s Second Crusade (Henry Regnery), 257–59.

  40. William Buckley Jr. and L. Brent Bozell, McCarthy and His Enemies (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1954), 273; Evans, Blacklisted by History, 39; John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev, Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (Yale University Press, 2009), 271-278.

  41. M. Stanton Evans, Blacklisted, 633, 252, 358; Haynes, Klehr and Vessiliev, Spies, 296–305.

  42. Haynes, Klehr, and Vassiliev, Spies, 296–305.

  43. Ibid., 317–20.

  44. Ibid., 195.

  45. Haynes and Klehr, Venona, 17.

  46. Buckley and Bozell, McCarthy, 388–92.

  47. Haynes, Red Scare, 14.

  48. Chamberlin, America’s Second Crusade, 260–1.

  49. Evans, Blacklisted, 106, 415–20, 424.

  50. Haynes, Red Scare, 150–2.

  51. William F. Buckley and the editors of National Review, The Committee and Its Critics: A Calm Review of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1962), 212.

  52. Zinn, A People’s History, 436, 432.

  53. Ibid., 435.

  54. Buckley, The Committee and Its Critics, 17–19, 212.

  55. Zinn, A People’s History, 431.

  56. David Horowitz, Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997). 66–69.

  57. Haynes, Red Scare, 199–200.

  58. Zinn, A People’s History, 432.

  59. Ibid.

  60. Haynes, Red Scare, 168–69.

  61. Haynes and Klehr, Venona, 7, 9–11.

  62. Haynes, Klehr, and Vessiliev, Spies, 262–65.

  63. Haynes and Klehr, Venona, 90-92.

  64. Allen Weinstein, Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978), 64-65, 328-331.

  65. Haynes, Klehr, and Vassiliev, Spies, 31.

  66. Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton, The Rosenberg File: A Search for the Truth (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1983), x–xi

  67. Ibid., xii–xiii.

  68. Zinn, A People’s History, 433–35.

  69. Ibid., 434.

  70. Ronald Radosh, “Case Closed: The Rosenbergs Were Soviet Spies,” Los Angeles Times, September 17, 2008, https://www.latimes.com/la-oe-radosh17-2008sep17-story.html.

  71. Sam Roberts, “A Spy Confesses, and Still Some Weep for the Rosenbergs,” New York Times, September 20, 2008.

  72. Zinn, A People’s History, 437.

  73. Ibid., 435.

  74. Karl Marx, “The Victory of the Counter-Revolution in Vienna,” Neue Rheinische Zeitung 136 (November 1848), trans. by the Marx-Engels Institute, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/11/06.htm.

  75. Vladimir Lenin, “Lessons of the Commune,” Zagranichnaya Gazeta 2 (March 23, 1908), trans. Bernard Isaacs, Collected Works, Vol. 13, p. 478, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1908/mar/23.htm.

  76. Samuel H. Beer, ed., The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (Harvard University Press, 1955), 42–43, 46.

  77. Zinn, A People’s History, 437.

  78. Gaddis, The Cold War, 150.

  79. Zinn, A People’s History, 438.

  80. William Z. Foster, Outline Political History of the Americas (New York: International Publishers, 1951), 487.

  81. Zinn, A People’s History, 438–39.

  82. Ibid., 439–41.

  83. Gaddis, The Cold War, 168.

  84. Ibid., 441.

  Chapter Seven: Black Mascots for a Red Revolution

  1. Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 443.

  2. Ibid., 444.

  3. Nathan Irvin Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 219.

  4. Zinn, A People’s History, 444.

  5. Gerard Early, My Soul’s High Song: The Collected Writings of Countee Cullen, Voice of the Harlem Renaissance (New York: Doubleday, 1991), 20–21, 23, 48–49.

  6. Zinn, A People’s History, 446.

  7. Theodore Draper, American Communism and Soviet Russia (New York: The Viking Press, 1960), 320–22.

  8. Zinn, A People’s History, 447.

  9. Kevern Verney and Lee Sartain, Long Is the Way and Hard: One Hundred Years of the NAACP (Fayetteville: The University of Arkansas Press, 2009), xx.

  10. Zinn, A People’s History, 398.

  11. Manning Marable and Leith Mullings, Let Nobody Turn Us Around: Voices of Resistance, Reform, and Renewal, An African American Anthology (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 313–14.

  12. Ibid., 308–13.

  13. George Schuyler, Black and Conservative (New Rochelle, New York: Arlington House, 1966), 220.

  14. Earl Ofari Hutchinson, Blacks and Reds: Race and Class in Conflict, 1919–1990 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1995), 68–69.

  15. Edward A. Hatfield, “Angelo Herndon Case,” New Georgia Encyclopedia, August 14, 2009, http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/angelo-herndon-case.

  16. Zinn, A People’s History, 448.

  17. Daniel W. Aldridge III, “A Militant Liberalism: Anti-Communism and the African American Intelligentsia, 1939–1955, Conference Paper for the 2004 American Historical Association, December 2003, http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45a/689.html.

  18. Robert Shogan, Harry Truman and the Struggle for Racial Justice (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2013), 126–27.

  19. Wilson Record, The Negro and the Communist Party (Chapel Hill: North Carolina University Press, 1951), 282–83.

  20. Aldridge, “A Militant Liberalism.”

  21. Record, The Negro and the Communist Party, 282–83.

  22. Aldridge, “A Militant Liberalism.”

  23. Ibid.

  24. David Horowitz, Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), 53.

  25. FBI file on Howard Zinn, page 11, part 1, https://vault.fbi.gov/Howard%20Zinn%20.

  26. James Rorty, “The Lessons of the Peekskill Riots: What Happened and Why,” Commentary, October 1, 1950. https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-lessons-of-the-peekskill-riotswhat-happened-and-why/.

  27. Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, and Kyrill M. Anderson, The Soviet World of American Communism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 221.

  28. Ibid., 218–27.

  29. Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919–1950 (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008), 154.

  30. Homer Smith, Black Man in Red Russia (Chicago: Johnson Publishing Company, 1964), 78, 80.

  31. Horowitz, Radical Son, 73–74.

  32. Aldridge, “A Militant Liberalism.”

  33. Zinn, A People’s History, 458, 464.

  34. Ibid., 404.

  35. Ibid., 448.

  36. William J. Collins, “Race, Roosevelt, and Wartime Production: Fair Employment in World War II Labor Markets,” American Economic Review 91: 1 (March 2001), 272–86.

  37. “Race Leaders to Fight for Army Bills,” Pittsburgh Courier, April 10, 1938, 24.

  38. Jervis Anderson, A. Philip Randolph: A Biographical Portrait (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), 274–80.

  39. Ibid.

  40. Simon Hall, “The NAACP and the Challenges of 1960s Radicalism,” in Verney and Sartain, Long Is the Way and Hard, 75–85.

  41. “Howard Zinn,” SNCC Digital Gateway, https://snccdigital.org/people/howard-zinn/; Howard Zinn, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), 51.

  42. Martin Duberman, Howard Zinn: A Life on the Left (New York: The New Press, 2012), 53; “20 Chicagoans Attend SNCC Meet in Atlanta,” Daily Defender, April 7, 1964, 4.

  43. Roy Wilkins to J. Edgar Hoover, April 1, 1957; J. Edgar Hoover to
Roy Wilkins, April 5, 1957; Roy Wilkins to NAACP Youth Council and College Chapters, May 21, 1957; Independent Service on the Vienna Youth Festival committee to Herb Wright, Director, Youth Division, NAACP, December 15, 1958; Herbert Wright to NAACP Youth and College Officers, May 6, 1959, NAACP Papers, Library of Congress, III: E53; Richard Gid Powers, Not without Honor: The History of American Anticommunism (New York: The Free Press, 1995), 308.

  44. Ibid., 297–98.

  45. Howard Zinn, “Finishing School for Pickets,” The Nation, August 6, 1960.

  46. Howard Zinn, SNCC: The New Abolitionists, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: South End Press, 2002), 233, 235.

  47. Ibid., 271–72.

  48. Marian Wright Edelman, “Spelman College: A Safe Haven for a Young Black Woman,” Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 27 (spring 2000), 118–23.

  49. FBI file on Howard Zinn, Part 1, p. 107–13, 120–2, https://vault.fbi.gov/Howard%20Zinn%20.

  50. Author interview with Harvey Klehr, December 21, 2017, Atlanta, Georgia; according to Klehr, Wilkinson was a member of the Communist Party.

  51. Dorothy Marshall to John Lewis, December 12, 1963, SNCC Papers, Martin Luther King Center, Archives, Atlanta, Georgia, Box 23.

  52. Frank Wilkinson to John Lewis, James Forman, and Robert Moses, May 22, 1964, SNCC Papers, Martin Luther King Center Archives, Atlanta, Georgia, Box 23.

  53. Roy Wilkins to Edward King, September 1, 1961, NAACP Papers, Library of Congress, III: A212.

  54. Roy Wilkins to Barbee William Durham, November 3, 1961, NAACP Papers, Library of Congress, III: A199.

  55. Howard Zinn, SNCC, 29.

  56. Robert Cohen, Howard Zinn’s Southern Diary: Sit-Ins, Civil Rights, and Black Women’s Student Activism (University of Georgia Press, 2018), 99–100, 103.

  57. Zinn, A People’s History, 348–49, 382.

  58. William Z. Foster, The History of the Communist Party of the United States (International Publishers, 1951), 286.

  59. Central Committee, Communist Party, U.S.A., “Workers, Negroes Unite! Stop the ‘Legal’ Lynching of Nine Negro Boys in Alabama!” Daily Worker, and “8 Negro Workers Sentenced to Die by Lynching,” reprinted in Philip Foner and Herbert Shapiro, eds., American Communism and Black Americans: A Documentary History, 1930–1934 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), 252–255.