Debunking Howard Zinn

by Mary Grabar

  The polemics of Columbus: His Enterprise are crude. Koning claims, “The grade-school image of Columbus is not naïve, it is false.”28 Far from being “the dashing adventurer, the fearless knight with blazing blue eyes,” Columbus was probably short, uneducated, intellectually unsophisticated, poor at navigation, and a thief of others’ ideas.29

  Koning’s book was panned by commentators and historians who took notice of the change in tenor as the five hundredth anniversary of the discovery of America approached. On the day before Columbus Day in 1992, Harvey Morris, writing for the Independent, called Koning a “historical reductionist,” someone who “refuse[s] to accept any nuances in the character or context of Columbus’s life,” instead resorting to “the cliché of comparing him to Hitler and the Nazis.” Koning’s work, he said, represented the “nadir” in the new “line of argument.” An appalled Morris wrote, “Concluding a diatribe against the admiral as a ‘typical man of the [white] West’, Mr. Koning opines that at least the Nazis ‘did the subject races of this world a favour. The great white-race civil war which we call World War II weakened Europe and broke its grip on Asia and Africa.’ ” Morris also noted that while Koning did not deny the cruelty of other races, he maintained that they were less “hypocritical.” Koning had ignored the fact that Columbus, as primarily a discoverer who had “claimed the new lands of his patrons, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain,” could not be wholly blamed for the injustices of the “Spanish colonial enterprise.”30 Around the same time, Time magazine noted the “school of scandalized thought,” represented by Koning’s book, which maintained that “Columbus’s arrival instigated genocide.” Time quoted Koning’s claim that it was “almost obscene” to “celebrate a man who was really . . . worse than Attila the Hun.”31

  In the December 21, 1991, Economist, Professor Felipe Fernández-Armesto—a specialist in Latin American history and the author of Columbus, published that year by Oxford University Press—claimed that “the most damaging of the currently fashionable myths—damaging to the truth and damaging to race relations—is that Latin America was created by a crime of genocide initiated by Columbus. . . .” He called it “a particularly wicked lie, because it makes real examples of genocide seem commonplace and unshocking.” He titled Koning “the guru of Columbus-haters” who had “compounded the felony by claiming that ‘the Nazis did the subject races of this world a favour.’ ” In reality, the “demographic catastrophe” that Koning blamed on Columbus was a “tragedy caused . . . by human failing and by a form of fate”—including the diseases that killed so many of the natives. As Fernández-Armesto pointed out, Columbus was actually “welcomed as a deliverer” by the Arawaks because they were “already doomed by the fierce imperialism of the neighboring Caribs.”32

  So, Zinn based his famous opening pages on a controversial book. And while Koning’s work was treated dismissively, Zinn’s transcriptions of Koning’s material to his own book are taken as groundbreaking historical revelations. And few know that they are little more than transcriptions.

  Zinn perpetuates Koning’s smears. In Koning’s telling and in Zinn’s, Columbus set out to enslave a uniformly gentle people for the sole purpose of enriching himself with gold.

  In fact, that is far from the truth. European efforts to find a sea route to Asia had been going on for hundreds of years. As William and Carla Phillips point out in The Worlds of Christopher Columbus, Columbus’s voyages of discovery were a continuation of Europeans’ ventures of sailing to Asia—at first, around Africa—that had begun in 1291. For centuries before Columbus, Portuguese and Spanish explorers had also ventured farther and farther out into the Atlantic Ocean.33

  Spain had one particularly pressing reason—quite apart from greed for gold—for sailing to East Asia. As Andrew G. Bostom, quoting Louis Bertrand’s 1934 book The History of Spain, pointed out in a Columbus Day 2018 post on PJ Media, “Columbus sought ‘eastern (even far eastern) alliances’ to end a millennium of Islam’s jihad-imposed tyranny against Christendom. . . . When the Spanish Christian monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella recaptured Grenada on January 2, 1492, they ended almost eight centuries of jihad ravages . . . massacres, pillage, mass enslavement, and deportation” under Muslim rule. As Bertrand described it, the situation faced by the Spanish was “expel the foreigner or be expelled by him!” Thus, Columbus’s mission was multi-faceted and inspired by several different motivations: “to reach the East Indies, so as to take Islam in the rear, and to effect an alliance with the Great Khan—a mythical personage who was believed to be the sovereign of all that region, and favorable to the Christian religion—and finally . . . to diffuse Christianity throughout that unknown continent and trade with the traditional sources of gold and spices.”34

  Desires to find new lands for more resources and to escape enemies and persecution are not impulses unique to Europeans. The natives of North America “in prehistoric times” themselves came from Asia and “crossed the land bridge across the Bering Strait to the lands of the Western Hemisphere.”35 When he encountered naked natives instead of the Asian merchants he was expecting, Columbus did not jump to thoughts of working them to death for gold as Zinn, following Koning, suggests. Koning introduces passages by leading sentences and then quotes, out of context, carefully selected passages from Columbus’s log—which Zinn then quotes even more selectively, leaving out passages that flatly contradict the Columbus-as-greedy-for-gold-genocidaire narrative. For example, in his log entry for October 12, 1492, Columbus wrote, “I warned my men to take nothing from the people without giving something in exchange”36—a passage left out by both Koning and Zinn.

  But Zinn’s most crucial omissions are in the passage from Columbus’s log that he quotes in the very first paragraph of his People’s History. There he uses ellipses to cover up the fact that he has left out enough of Columbus’s words to deceive his readers about what the discoverer of America actually meant. The omission right before “They would make fine servants” is particularly dishonest. Here’s the nub of what Zinn left out: “I saw some who bore marks of wounds on their bodies, and I made signs to them to ask how this came about, and they indicated to me that people came from other islands, which are near, and wished to capture them, and they defended themselves. And I believed and still believe that they come here from the mainland to take them for slaves.”37

  In his translation of Columbus’s log, Robert Fuson discusses the context that Zinn deliberately left out: “The cultural unity of the Taino [the name for this particular tribe, which Zinn labels “Arawaks”] greatly impressed Columbus…. Those who see Columbus as the founder of slavery in the New World are grossly in error. This thought occurred to [Samuel Eliot] Morison (and many others), who misinterpreted a statement made by Columbus on the first day in America, when he said, ‘They (the Indians) ought to be good servants.’ In fact, Columbus offered this observation in explanation of an earlier comment he had made, theorizing that people from the mainland came to the islands to capture these Indians as slaves because they were so docile and obliging.”38

  Zinn’s next ellipsis between “They would make fine servants” and “With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want” covers for Zinn’s dishonest pretense that the second statement has anything at all to do with the first. The sentences that Zinn joins here are not only not in the same paragraph—as he dishonestly pretends by printing them that way on the very first page of A People’s History— but they’re not even in the same entry of Columbus’s log. In fact, they’re from two days apart.39

  Zinn’s highly selective quotations from Columbus’s log are designed to give the impression that Columbus had no concern for the Indians’ spiritual or physical well-being—that the explorer was motivated only by a “frenzy for money” that drove him to enslave the natives for profit when he wasn’t hunting them down with dogs because they couldn’t supply him with large quantities of gold from supposed mines
whose very existence was “part fiction” created by Columbus himself. Zinn wrote, “The Indians had been given an impossible task. The only gold around was bits of dust garnered from the streams. So they fled, were hunted down with dogs, and were killed.”40

  But literally the explorer’s first concern—the hope that he expressed in the initial comment about the natives in his log—was for the Indians’ freedom and their eternal salvation: “I want the natives to develop a friendly attitude toward us because I know that they are a people who can be made free and converted to our Holy Faith more by love than by force.” Even Koning had quoted this passage—though only to make the discoverer of America out to be a shameless hypocrite. He immediately undercut what Columbus actually said by warning his readers about what he supposedly “said and did later.”41 According to Koning:

  Even in that religious and bigoted age, Columbus stood out as a very fierce Catholic. When he discussed his westward voyage, he always dwelt on its religious aspects. . . . He must himself have believed that his Enterprise was Christian, if only to ensure God’s help; and the priests who came west later were, with one or two glorious exceptions, as quick as he was in forgetting those pious intentions. (In a similar way, modern corporations used to capture oil fields and mines in underdeveloped nations while telling us and themselves that their main interest in these enterprises was to protect those unhappy countries from communism.)42

  Zinn just entirely omits the passage in which Columbus expresses his respect and concern for the Indians.

  In fact, even the quest for gold was related to the higher religious purpose that motivated Columbus and inspired him with a genuine concern for the Indians’ well-being. As Carol Delaney explains, “Columbus wanted to launch a new Crusade to take back the Holy Land from the infidels (the Muslims). This desire was not merely to reclaim the land of the Bible and the place where Jesus had walked; it was part of the much larger and widespread, apocalyptic scenario in which Columbus and many of his contemporaries believed.” Delaney notes Columbus’s profound faith. Christopher Columbus, who was named after the patron saint of travelers, believed that he had been divinely ordained to carry out God’s mission as discoverer. In reference to the October 12 log entry, Delaney comments, “In my first reading of the diary I could not understand why he seemed so driven to find gold. . . . But this understanding changes when one realizes that finding the gold was necessary not only to repay the people who had invested in the voyage (and to induce them to finance another), but also . . . essential if he was ever to finance another Crusade. Today, we might disapprove of that motive, but at the time it was felt to be a worthwhile and Christian duty.”

  The search for gold for Columbus was “less a commercial venture than ‘a spiritual quest,’ a medium not so much of exchange as ‘a medium of redemption.’ ”43

  And as William and Carla Phillips point out, “One prime motive for European expansion, reiterated by nearly all of the early explorers, was a desire to spread Christianity. To the current cynical age, religious motivation is difficult to understand; it is much easier to assume that missionary zeal merely served to justify a lust for gold and glory.” Christian faith in early modern Europe touched “virtually every aspect of human life.”44

  Samuel Eliot Morison also commented on Columbus’s ultimate goal of liberating Jerusalem in what Delaney calls his “superb, classic study, Admiral of the Ocean Sea (1942).”45

  But Zinn, following Koning closely—where he doesn’t outdo his source in the manipulation of the historical sources and the suppression of inconvenient facts—simply disregards all such historical context.

  Leaning heavily on secondary sources was not that unusual for Zinn. In 1989, Yale University visiting associate professor Edward Countryman, checking a student’s footnote that referenced A People’s History, was, as he put it in a letter to Zinn, “perturbed . . . to find not only my ideas being borrowed … but also my wording and then to find that you do not bother to list my piece in your bibliography. . . .” Countryman laid out three passages from his essay “ ‘Out of the Bounds of the Law’: Northern Land Rioters in the Eighteenth Century,” next to Zinn’s very similarly worded ones.46 Countryman’s essay had appeared in the collection The American Revolution: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism, which was published in 1976 and upon which Zinn drew heavily for chapters four and five of A People’s History. Zinn admitted to “roughly” paraphrasing Countryman’s essay and promised to give him credit in a future edition,47 which he did by inserting, “See Edward Countryman’s pioneering work on rural rebellion” in parentheses48 and including the Countryman essay in his bibliography. But the placement of Zinn’s note about “Countryman’s pioneering work” does not make clear how extensively Zinn relied on his work and his phraseology. There are other similar letters from colleagues among Zinn’s papers.

  Countryman told Zinn that he had “no intention of going public” on his charge because that “would be petty and uncomradely.”49 Koning apparently never complained either. As a fellow leftist, he was 100 percent on board with Zinn’s project to destroy the reputation of Columbus in order to turn future generations of young Americans against Western civilization, capitalism, and America.

  In pursuit of that agenda, Zinn reproduces three of Koning’s quotations from Las Casas’s History of the Indies and also selectively quotes from the edition of the History that Koning lists in his bibliography—omitting the many good things that Las Casas had to say about Columbus. But Zinn does approve of the Indians’ primitive, communal way of life that Las Casas described:

  [The natives occupied] “large communal bell-shaped buildings, housing up to 600 people at one time . . . made of very strong wood and roofed with palm leaves. . . . They prize bird feathers of various colors, beads made of fishbones, and green and white stones with which they adorn their ears and lips, but they put no value on gold or other precious things. They lack all manner of commerce, neither buying nor selling, and rely exclusively on their natural environment for maintenance. They are extremely generous with their possessions and by the same token covet the possessions of their friends and expect the same degree of liberality. . . .”50

  Zinn’s quotation from Las Casas is intended to contrast the communal and peaceful lifestyles of the natives to the acquisitive and militaristic lifestyles of the Europeans. So in language that follows Koning’s closely, Zinn recounts how the first European fort in the Americas was built from the wood of the Santa Maria after that ship ran aground.

  Zinn’s version: “On Hispaniola, out of timbers from the Santa Maria, which had run aground, Columbus built a fort, the first European military base in the Western Hemisphere. He called it Navidad (Christmas) and left thirty-nine crewmembers there….”51

  Or, in Koning’s remarkably similar telling: “The Santa Maria had been run aground on Christmas day, and the fort that Columbus built from its timbers was named Puerto de Navidad, Spanish for Christmas Harbor. It was the first European foothold in the Western Hemisphere….”52

  Columbus sailed back to Spain to report to Ferdinand and Isabella, leaving behind the thirty-nine men who couldn’t fit on the return voyage now that the Santa Maria had been lost. And when he sailed back to the New World again, he found that the men he had left behind had been massacred by the Indians—to a man. Zinn essentially says the Spaniards were asking for it: “On Haiti [Hispaniola] they found that the sailors left behind at Fort Navidad had been killed in a battle with the Indians, after they had roamed the island in gangs looking for gold, taking women and children as slaves for sex and labor.”53

  But it is by no means certain that that’s the reason they were killed. As William F. Keegan—professor of anthropology and Curator of Latin American Studies at the University of Florida and the author of The People Who Discovered Columbus: The Prehistory of the Bahamas—pointed out in an article published in Archaeology magazine, the theory that the Spaniard
s were killed by the Indians because “they violated local behavioral rules—they stole looted and raped,” is contradicted by the facts about which particular native chiefs the Spanish held responsible for killing their men. They blamed “primary caciques [chiefs]” who as “a matter of politics . . . could not permit a second-level cacique [chief] to harbor a garrison of well-armed Europeans. The Europeans had to be eliminated because they upset the established balance of power.”

  Yet another motivation for the killings of the Spaniards may have arisen out of the Indians’ mythology. As Keegan also points out, Columbus recorded that the Indians “initially identified the Spaniards as Caribes. Caribes were mythical beings associated with the underworld who consumed human flesh. Rather than beings from heaven, then, the Spaniards were viewed as the incarnation of beings from hell. Thus, the Taino caciques [chiefs] may have justified the killing of 39 men who founded La Navidad as appropriate because the Spaniards had violated mythic proscriptions. After all, mythic beings were not supposed to remain on earth permanently.”54