Debunking Howard Zinn

by Mary Grabar

  This information is hardly new or obscure. Keegan’s Archaeology article was published in 1992—three years before Zinn brought out the second edition of A People’s History—and it is cited in the Wikipedia article on the Arawak. At the very least, the reasons that the garrison at Fort Navidad was wiped out are complicated and difficult to be sure about. But Zinn does not hesitate to blame the Europeans for their fate. It’s consistent with the rest of his chapter about Columbus, which is characterized by relentless bias against the explorer and his men and hopeless idealism about the Indians. The Europeans are always violent slavers and the Indians are always noble primitives—or budding Communists.

  Not only were the Indians Communists ahead of their time—four hundred years before Karl Marx—but they were pro-choice feminists, too, who were comfortable with their bodies and advocates of free love. In support of which, Zinn gives us Bartolomé de Las Casas on “sex relations”:

  Marriage laws are non-existent: men and women alike choose their mates and leave them as they please, without offense, jealousy or anger. They multiply in great abundance; pregnant women work to the last minute and give birth almost painlessly; up the next day, they bathe in the river and are as clean and healthy as before giving birth. If they tire of their men, they give themselves abortions with herbs that force stillbirths, covering their shameful parts with leaves or cotton cloth; although upon the whole, Indian men and women look upon total nakedness with as much casualness as we look upon a man’s head or at his hands.

  And in yet another eerie anticipation of Marx, the American natives weren’t taken in by the opiate of the people: “The Indians, Las Casas says, have no religion, at least no temples.”55

  As is already obvious, Zinn relies heavily—both for his canards against Columbus and for his romantic idolization of the Indians—on Bartolomé de Las Casas, whose “many volumes on what happened to the Indians” Zinn implied he had read. But his quotations of Las Casas in A People’s History (except the ones he cribbed from Koning!) are sourced to a single-volume edition of Las Casas’s History of the Indies published by Harper & Row in 1971.

  Bartolomé de Las Casas was consecrated Bishop of Chiapas in 1544. In 1552, he began writing his History of the Indies using Christopher Columbus’s journals.56 The first priest ordained in the Americas, he was known as the Apostle to the Indians. Zinn tells us, Las Casas “as a young priest, participated in the conquest of Cuba,” and “owned a plantation on which Indian slaves were used, but he gave that up and became a vehement critic of Spanish cruelty.”57 Such a vehement critic, in fact, that even the introduction to the version of Las Casas’s History that Zinn used admits his bias. As Andrée M. Collard, the translator of this particular version of the book, points out there, Las Casas’s Very Brief Relation of the Destruction of the Indies, first translated into English in 1583, was one of two works that “supplied the main ammunition to the foreign detractors of Spain who instigated the so-called Black Legend.”58 According to Collard, the priest “intended his History to be a work of moral enlightenment and awakening, leading to political and social change.”59 Therefore, it “verge[s] on the polemical” and is marked by exaggerations. “The sweeping statements and prodigious numbers in the History must be taken with caution,” warns Collard in her introduction, giving a telling example: “A Spaniard on horseback may not have killed ‘10,000 Indians in one hour’s time’. . . .”60 Some of Las Casas’s other numbers invite skepticism, as well—like, for example, when he concludes from the fact that there were “60,000 people living on this island [of Hispaniola], including the Indians” when he arrived there in 1508 “that from 1494 to 1508, over three million people had perished from war, slavery, and the mines.”61

  In fact, even Zinn, who quotes these incredible statistics, has to admit that they are in dispute.62 But that doesn’t stop him from building his argument on the work of the crusading priest: “Thus began the history, five hundred years ago, of the European invasion of the Indian settlements in the Americas. That beginning, when you read Las Casas—even if his figures are exaggerations (were there 3 million Indians to begin with, as he says, or less than a million, as some historians have calculated, or 8 million as others now believe?)—is conquest, slavery, death.”63

  As William and Carla Phillips observe, “One of the great ironies of Spanish history is that the work of . . . Las Casas and other Spanish reformers became a powerful weapon in the hands of Spain’s enemies in sixteenth century and beyond.” Besides being riddled with exaggeration, the priest’s work is problematic in other ways. Las Casas ignored “evidence of peaceful contacts and intermarriage between Spanish colonists and the native population” and the enactment of laws to protect the Indians in the colonies during the 1530s. Instead, he filled the Brief History of the Destruction of the Indies that he presented to Charles V in 1540 with the “horrendous cases” from the 1510s and 1520s, adding exaggerations. But Las Casas himself still accepted slavery as an institution and recommended that Spain buy “black African slaves,” whom he saw as hardier, “to spare the Indians.” It was not until late in life, and “not in print,” that Las Casas recognized the wrongness of slavery—regardless of the race of the slaves.64 As Collard explains, the priest saw America as “virgin territory, unspoiled by vitiated systems and corrupt men,” with the Indians “possessing the innate goodness of man before the Fall.”65 Such a view, coupled with the fact that “the early years of conquest were marked by anarchy and license,” went hand in hand with exaggerating the Indians’ good qualities and the Europeans’ bad ones. In Las Casas’s work, “all Indians are disinterested and humble” and “all Spaniards are gold-hungry and power mad. Away from the battlefield, they are lazy, vain, arrogant. . . . In short, they are materialistic beasts leading reckless lives of insubordination, adultery, rape and pillage.”66

  No wonder it was easy for Zinn to use Las Casas’s book to make the Indians out to be noble savages, and the Europeans cartoon villains. But Zinn wanted to go beyond even Las Casas’s exaggerations. To paint Columbus as a brutal genocidaire, Zinn had to suppress the distinctions that Las Casas made between Columbus and some Spaniards who truly were brutal and hide the genuine admiration that the priest expressed for the explorer. Here, for example, is an admiring Las Casas passage about Columbus, which Zinn deliberately did not quote: “Many is the time I have wished that God would again inspire me and that I had Cicero’s gift of eloquence to extol the indescribable service to God and to the whole world which Christopher Columbus rendered at the cost of such pain and dangers, such skill and expertise, when he so courageously discovered the New World. . . .”67 This is not to say that Las Casas did not criticize Columbus. He blamed him for an “ignorance of the law” that led to abuses.68 But even in his Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, Las Casas described “the torture and genocidal practices of the Spanish colonialists who followed Columbus.”69 In the History, Las Casas blamed not Columbus, but “the men who turned Columbus’s ‘divine exploit’ into a hellish performance and his own dream of Christianization into a nightmare.”70

  Zinn, however, gives the impression that Columbus personally and gleefully carried out the atrocities. He makes no distinction between Columbus and those who disobeyed his orders. In his wrap-up as he leads into a mid-chapter moralistic rant, Zinn indicts Columbus, proclaiming in high dudgeon, “The treatment of heroes (Columbus) and their victims (the Arawaks)—the quiet acceptance of conquest and murder in the name of progress, is only one aspect of a certain approach to history. . . .” And Columbus is just one of many similar figures in the murderous Western tradition: “What Columbus did to the Arawaks of the Bahamas, Cortés did to the Aztecs of Mexico, Pizarro to the Incas of Peru, and the English settlers of Virginia and Massachusetts to the Powhatans and the Pequots.” Thus, to “emphasize the heroism” of these men is “to deemphasize their genocide.”71

  Zinn also suppresses—and, where he doesn’t suppress, downplays—th
e evidence from even the sympathetic Las Casas that the Indians could be violent and cruel. Zinn has to admit that they were “not completely peaceful, because they do battle from time to time with other tribes.” But, like Koning, he is eager to explain their violent behavior away, arguing, “but their casualties seem small, and they fight when they are individually moved to do so because of some grievance, not on the orders of captains or kings.”72 Here he is following Las Casas: “They have no kings or captains but call on one another when they need to fight an enemy, who is usually an Indian of another language group who has killed one of them. In that case the aggrieved—the oldest member of the family—convokes his neighbors to help him against the enemy.”73 Where Zinn doesn’t follow Las Casas is where the priest mentions the Indians’ cannibalism—the priest reports, on the very next page after the passage Zinn has paraphrased, that the Indians eat very little meat “unless it be the flesh of their enemies.”74

  Zinn, busy painting the Europeans as uniquely violent and oppressive, naturally never gives credit to the feature of Western civilization that is actually responsible for Las Casas’s indictment of the abuses to which many of the Spanish did subject the Indians: Christianity. It was after he heard anti-slavery sermons by Dominican monks that Las Casas gave up his own plantation and became “the Apostle to the Indians.” Thus, the priest describes the perpetrators of atrocities against the Indians as “so-called Christians.” Las Casas preaches, “Sin leads to sin, and for many years they lived unscrupulously, not observing Lent or other fasts” and eating meat on Fridays.75 Zinn ignores such old-fashioned religious explanations for the Spaniards’ descent into criminality against the natives and pretends that Las Casas, like himself, is a secular critic of imperialism. But in fact, as Collard explains: “Las Casas’s criticism of slavery reflects the enlightened Spanish legal tradition, the main expression of which is found in the Siete Partidas (compiled in the thirteenth century), which under the code of slavery provides for slaves’ civil rights. This liberal tradition is being reinforced by the strong influence of Erasmian humanism in Spain which stresses the Pauline view of humanity—all people are God’s people. In dealing with the Indians, the Spaniards have failed to respect the God-given ‘natural rights of man.’ ”76

  All this—Christianity, enlightenment, human rights, the rule of law, humanism, equal dignity for all persons—is the very essence of the European civilization that Zinn was indicting in the person of Columbus. But all Zinn could see in Europe was “the religion of popes, the government of kings, the frenzy for money that marked Western civilization and its first messenger to the Americas, Christopher Columbus.”77

  Zinn claimed to be correcting for a massive coverup of Columbus’s crimes. “When we read the history books given to children in the United States,” Zinn asserts on page seven of A People’s History, “it all starts with heroic adventure—there is no bloodshed—and Columbus Day is a celebration.” According to Zinn, the pro-Columbus bias is not just about dumbing things down for little kids or protecting them from nightmares about rape and pillage: “Past the elementary and high schools, there are only hints of something else.”78 At this point, Zinn launches into his full-bore attack on historian Samuel Eliot Morison, the same man who was excoriated by Koning in his indictment of Columbus (to which Zinn’s is so suspiciously similar).

  Koning had called Morison a “Columbus fan.”79 Zinn takes it further and accuses Morison of spinning a “grand romance” and “bury[ing]” the facts about Columbus’s genocide “in a mass of other information” so as “to say to the reader with a certain infectious calm: yes, mass murder took place, but it’s not that important.”80

  Who was Zinn’s scapegoat—the man he held up to represent the historians who had supposedly sold deluded generations of Americans on the Columbus myth? Samuel Eliot Morison was a Navy admiral, seaman, Harvard professor, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize (twice) and of numerous other prizes for dozens of books on history. His research on Columbus included retracing the discoverer’s voyages to the New World. Writing in 2011, Laurence Bergreen, the author of Columbus: The Four Voyages, called Morison’s 1942 Admiral of the Ocean Sea, based on his recreation of Columbus’s journeys, “outstanding” and pointed out that it was still the “largest maritime database pertaining to Columbus.”81 Any historian writing about the discovery of America has to acknowledge the groundbreaking work of Morison. Unlike Zinn, whose purported scholarship was (as we shall see) just in pursuit of his radical politics by other means, Morison did real historical research. In 1939, while the teenaged Zinn was cavorting with the Communists (details will follow), Morison was recognizing the scarcity of objective reports about this period of history and writing an article, published in the Hispanic American Historical Review, about the “pitfalls into which English translators of [Columbus’s] Journal have fallen”—for which he examined the French and English translations of Las Casas’s Abstract of the Journal of the First Voyage of Christopher Columbus.82

  And it is simply not the case that, as Zinn claims, Morison makes the story of Columbus a “grand romance” by discounting what Morison himself—as Zinn has to admit—calls “genocide.” The fact is that what Zinn actually hates about Morison is not his bias but his balance. As Fuson pointed out, Morison may have been too hard on Columbus. While Zinn accuses Morison of writing a “grand romance,” the truth is that Zinn’s book is the real “grand romance”—about himself. Zinn is the hero championing the approved downtrodden groups. Zinn is the swashbuckling historian rescuing the forgotten story—the one covered up by all previous historians who lack his compassion and moral vision. Here he is, the crusader-historian, the knight in shining armor rushing to the rescue of the oppressed:

  I prefer to try to tell the story of the discovery of America from the viewpoint of the Arawaks, of the Constitution from the standpoint of the slaves, of Andrew Jackson as seen by the Cherokees, of the Civil War as seen by the New York Irish, of the Mexican war as seen by the deserting soldiers of Scott’s army, of the rise of industrialism as seen by the young women in the Lowell textile mills, of the Spanish-American war as seen by the Cubans, the conquest of the Philippines as seen by black soldiers on Luzon, the Gilded Age as seen by southern farmers, the First World War as seen by socialists, the Second World War by pacifists, the New Deal as seen by blacks in Harlem, the postwar American empire as seen by peons in Latin America. And so on, to the limited extent that any one person, however he or she strains, can “see” history from the standpoint of others.83

  In Zinn’s telling, the Arawaks—or black slaves, or Cherokees, or New York Irish, or whoever—must always be persecuted innocents and the condemnation of their sufferings must be absolute. The officially oppressed cannot be blamed even for any crimes they themselves commit, which are inevitably the fault of their oppressors: “The victims, themselves desperate and tainted with the culture that oppresses them, turn on other victims. . . . I will try not to overlook the cruelties that victims inflict on one another as they are jammed together in the boxcars of the system.” (Here, Zinn is following Karl Marx’s maxim that proletarian victims are “tainted with the culture that oppresses them” and so oppress others, in turn). To dilute the reader’s indignation at the approved victims’ injuries with balancing facts—any violence that the officially oppressed group might be legitimately held responsible for, for example, or any achievements of the oppressed group’s enemies, or any benefits that the oppressors may have conferred on the world—is tantamount to saying that “mass murder” is “not that important.”84

  According to Zinn, there’s no such thing as objective history, anyway: “the historian’s distortion is more than technical, it is ideological; it is released into a world of contending interests, where any chosen emphasis supports (whether the historian means to or not) some kind of interest, whether economic or political or racial or national or sexual.” Once ideology has become a moral virtue, Zinn can discount standards of scholarship—such as thos
e of the American Historical Association—as having to do with nothing more important than “technical problems of excellence”—standards of no importance compared to his kind of history, which consists in forging “tools for contending social classes, races, nations.”85

  Thus it would seem that the noble political purpose behind Zinn’s history justifies him in omitting facts that are inconvenient for his Columbus-bad-Indians-good narrative. The Edenic Arawaks were “remarkable (European observers were to say again and again) for their hospitality, their belief in sharing,”86 but Zinn ignores the evidence Morison brings out of infighting among them and historical episodes in which the Spaniards were greeted with hostility, and even violence. For example, the tawny-skinned pacific “Arawaks” that Columbus first met turn out to be from the Taino branch of the Arawak language group, who “within the previous century . . . had wrested the Bahamas and most of Cuba from the more primitive Siboney.”87 One factor in the episode of Fort Navidad—not mentioned by Zinn, but covered in Morison’s account—was a request from the cacique of Marien, the Indian chief of the northeastern part of Haiti, that Columbus establish a base there. The chief wanted the Spaniards to protect him from enemies on the island, as Fernández-Armesto also pointed out. And on their first return voyage to the New World, Columbus’s men encountered “a branch of the Tainos called Ciguayos, who in self-defense against raiding Caribs from Puerto Rico had adopted their weapons.” These Tainos, “not pleased to meet [Columbus’s men],” were “appeased” with gifts of cloth and trinkets.88 During an expedition to what is now St. Croix, twenty-five Spaniards returning to the ship were met by four Carib men and two women armed with bows and arrows who wounded two of the Spaniards, one mortally.89