Debunking Howard Zinn
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Zinn ignores the historical context of slavery, which Morison brings out: “Slavery was so taken for granted in those days, both by Europeans and by the Moslems (who still practice it), that Columbus never gave a thought to the morality of this proposal. If he had, he would doubtless have reflected that the Indians enslaved each other, so why should we not enslave them, particularly if we convert them, too, and save their souls alive?”90
Zinn also ignores what Morison calls “one of Columbus’s worst decisions” in delegating authority. He planned a “reconnaissance” of “four hundred men” to “relieve” a garrison under the command of Peter Margarit. Columbus “instructed [Alonso de] Hojeda [the delegated leader] to do the Indians no harm and reminded him that the Sovereigns desired their salvation even more than their gold, but the first thing Hojeda did was to cut off the ears of an Indian who stole some old Spanish clothes. . . .” Unfortunately, Columbus did not learn of “these doings” before departing for Cuba. And his younger brother, whom he had left in charge, was incapable of controlling “egoists like Hojeda and Margarit.”91
Columbus and his two brothers had little control on Hispaniola, in part because the Spaniards despised them for being Genoese.92 Nonetheless, Columbus did prevent many abuses and crimes against the Indians. He instructed his men to treat the natives with kindness93—a fact that both Zinn and Koning somehow fail to mention. And on the return trip from Columbus’s second voyage to the New World when the men were desperate for food, some of them proposed eating the captive Indians “starting with the Caribs, who were man-eaters themselves; thus it wouldn’t be a sin to pay them in their own coin! Others proposed that all the natives be thrown overboard so that they would consume no more rations. Columbus, in one of his humanitarian moods, argued that after all Caribs were people and should be treated as such.”94
Zinn painted the New World as a feminist paradise, but as Morison reports, when the Talamanca Indians wanted to trade with the Spaniards “to break down ‘sales resistance,’ the Indians sent on board two virgins, one about eight and the other about fourteen years old.” Columbus had the girls fed and clothed and sent back, leaving the natives astonished at “the continence of the Spaniards.”95 The fact is—as a knowledgeable, careful, and balanced historian of Morison’s caliber amply demonstrates—that relations between the Indians and the Europeans in the wake of Columbus’s discovery of America were fraught with ambiguities that complicate Zinn’s cartoon of Indian innocents enslaved and abused by European devils.
And Morison’s balanced account of Columbus and the other European explorers was far from unique in the pre-Zinn period of history writing. College textbooks such as the 1961 edition of Thomas Bailey’s popular The American Pageant, first published in 1956,96 did not present Columbus as a larger-than-life hero that Zinn and Koning pretend dominated history before they set the record straight. Bailey described Columbus as a “skilled Italian seaman. . . . A man of vision, energy, resourcefulness, and courage,” who, however, “failed to uncover the riches of the Indies” and died “a cruelly disappointed man.”97 The 1963 edition of The Roots of American Civilization by Curtis P. Nettels called Columbus “vain, boastful, arrogant, and deceitful,” but also said he displayed “tenacity, courage, hardihood, and independence,” and was “highly visionary” in his last years.98 In fact, “the leading American history college textbook of the 1960s, The Growth of the American Republic”99 by Morison and Henry Steele Commager, tells students that “Columbus expected to obtain the precious metal [gold] by trade,” but after the Indians were satisfied, “the Spaniards began taking it by force. As elsewhere in America where Europeans came, the newcomers were first welcomed by the Indians as visitors, then resented as intruders, and finally resisted with fruitless desperation.” Morison and Commager describe the complicated situation, explaining, “The Spaniards, who had come for gold and nothing else, resented their governor’s orders to build houses, tend crops, and cut wood; the wine and food supplies from Spain gave out; and before long bands of men in armor were roving about the fertile interior of Hispaniola, living off the country, and torturing the natives to obtain gold.” In the summer of 1494, while Columbus was off “exploring the southern coasts of Cuba and Hispaniola and discovering Jamaica, the colonists got completely out of hand.” When Columbus tried to impose discipline, the “malcontents seiz[ed] vessels and return[ed] to Spain to complain of him. . . .”100
Zinn, perhaps too lazy or too busy with political agitation to do even the most basic research, has to paint a false picture of those historians with whom he disagrees. He places straw men on pedestals and then knocks them down one by one until only he is standing. A result like that would be substandard coming from a high school student writing a research paper—much less a professional historian claiming to be blazing a new trail and leaving the existing Columbus scholarship behind in the dust. Zinn’s pretense to break new ground on Columbus was nothing more than a clever marketing strategy, surpassing in chutzpah the most brazen of ad campaigns for quack tonics in our capitalistic system that he so vehemently condemns.
Morison’s book Christopher Columbus, Mariner was published in 1955, but it is difficult to find today. Neither my public nor college library had a copy. I had to order one of the few remaining used copies to buy. Mine came from St. Mary’s College in Leavenworth, Kansas. Most libraries carry multiple copies of A People’s History.
Unfortunately, Zinn’s attack on the historians who gave students a balanced picture of Columbus has been remarkably effective. Zinn successfully sold himself as a historian knocking down the giants who preceded him and championed the cause of the innocents oppressed by colonizers, capitalists, and Christians. Images of unspeakable cruelty against a gentle people remain in the minds of countless students who have read Zinn’s propaganda, and they now color the public discussion about Columbus. As history education professor Sam Wineburg pointed out with no little amazement, Howard Zinn’s readers believe him. Michael Kazin has noted that Zinn’s History takes on “the force and authority of revelation.”
An interlude Zinn throws into his Columbus chapter has a lot to do with the enormous impact of his take on the discovery of America. After throwing into question the historical method, he throws into question the legitimacy of the United States of America. He tars the Founding Fathers—and essentially every leading figure in American history—with the “conquest and murder” to which he reduced Columbus’s discovery of America: “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, in which the past is told from the point of view of governments, conquerors, diplomats, leaders. It is as if they, like Columbus, deserve universal acceptance, as if they—the Founding Fathers, Jackson, Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt, Kennedy, the leading members of Congress, the famous Justices of the Supreme Court—represent the nation as a whole.”101
It’s tempting to point out that all these men—with the exception of the Supreme Court justices—were literally elected to “represent the nation as a whole,” or at least one of its states.
Then Zinn goes for broke: “The pretense is that there really is such a thing as ‘the United States,’ subject to occasional conflicts and quarrels, but fundamentally a community of people with common interests. It is as if there really is a ‘national interest’ represented in the Constitution, in territorial expansion, in the laws passed by Congress, the decisions of the courts, the development of capitalism, the culture of education and the mass media.”102
Those quotation marks around “United States” and “national interest” are doing a lot of heavy lifting. But the remarkable success of Zinn’s anti-American history in persuading large swathes of the American people to despise their own country is evidence of the remarkable success of his rhetoric. In the absence of that evidence, who could have believed that an American history book denying “that there really is such
a thing as ‘the United States’ ” would be taken seriously by anyone?
One of Zinn’s cleverest rhetorical tricks was to anticipate the doubts that his radical and deeply dishonest take on American history were bound to raise in the reader’s mind and supply answers for them. Any reasonable reader, for example, is going to wonder whether Zinn’s account of Columbus isn’t just a bit biased. Thus, Zinn’s defense of bias—and his attack on balance—in history writing. We have already seen how Zinn eschewed historical judgment and balance in favor of the partisan valorization of approved victim groups and the condemnation of their oppressors. For him, history is not about telling the story of what happened; it’s about being on the right side, “not . . . on the side of the executioners.”103 But lest his readers be unmoved by this moral blackmail, lest they should fail to be carried away on the tide of piled-up atrocity stories and reiterated indictment of our former national heroes, Zinn also provides a theoretical defense of bias in history writing. We have already seen him arguing that to report genocide while also reporting “a mass of other information” is to bury the crimes of history and to tell the reader that mass murder is “not that important.”104 But it’s worse than that. Historical balance also ensures that the heinous crimes of history will continue into the future: “One reason these atrocities are still with us is that we have learned to bury them in a mass of other facts, as radioactive wastes are buried in containers in earth.”105And Zinn was on a mission to stop those atrocities with a new style of partisan history that likens “facts” to radioactive wastes.
In his opening chapter on Columbus, Zinn pretty much revealed himself as the leftist political activist that he was. But Zinn’s success is also due in part to who he was and to the fact that he incessantly promoted himself. He was born at just the right time and cannily took advantage of political shifts. Unlike many of his colleagues, Zinn made the transition from Old Left to New Left quite easily, as Eugene Genovese told me.106 In fact, Zinn was at the forefront leading the youth, adapting Old Left (Communist) goals to the times, and speaking the language of the 1960s Youth Movement. Zinn parlayed a comrade’s work into his own, shunting aside the author of the work that fills up the first several pages of his radical magnum opus. The son of poor Russian-Jewish immigrants in Brooklyn, the professor who claimed that the United States has no right to exist became one of the most popular historians of the United States—and one of the most influential. In 2017, a Harvard Graduate School of Education post on teaching about Columbus listed A People’s History as a resource for teachers.107
Other historians wrote more books and won more awards for scholarly achievement, but none has achieved the celebrity status of Howard Zinn, who is cited as an inspirational figure years after his death and as cool as Che Guevara to the radical youth. Few, if any, history professors have had their autobiographies made into movies. But Zinn has. Zinn was instrumental in the sea change that has transformed Columbus from the discoverer of America into the genocidal villain whose murder and enslavement of the Indians is the original sin that makes America a crime. And the facts of his life are crucial to explaining how he was able to do it. So, the next chapter will take a look at his autobiography.
CHAPTER
TWO
The Life of Zinn
Howard Zinn’s 1994 autobiography You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train begins with a scene in Kalamazoo, Michigan. It is the night of the final televised debate of the 1992 presidential campaign, but hundreds of people have chosen to hear Howard Zinn speak on “The Legacy of Columbus, 1492–1992.” He writes:
Ten years earlier, in the very first pages of my book A People’s History of the United States, I had written about Columbus in a way that startled readers. They, like me, had learned in elementary school (an account never contradicted, however far their education continued) that Columbus was one of the great heroes of world history, to be admired for his daring feat of imagination and courage. In my account, I acknowledged that he was an intrepid sailor, but also pointed out (based on his own journal and the reports of many eyewitnesses) that he was vicious in his treatment of the gentle Arawak Indians who greeted his arrival in this hemisphere. He enslaved them, tortured them, murdered them—all in the pursuit of wealth. . . .1
That night in Kalamazoo, Howard Zinn was doing his part to transform Americans’ opinions about Christopher Columbus. As Zinn’s friend and biographer Martin Duberman recounts, “in Howard’s opinion, the truth about Columbus hadn’t sufficiently sunk in” by 1994. “There were a number of anti-Columbus protests, and Howard delighted in them,” but there were still a significant number of parades and celebrations.2
Looking back at the 1992 election from two years out, Zinn didn’t see Clinton’s victory as a harbinger of change for the better. As he explained in the 2003 edition of A People’s History, Clinton’s presidency was marred by “sensational scandals surrounding his personal life,” capitulation to “caution and conservatism,” and “futile shows of military braggadocio.”3 Clinton’s presidency did not alter “The Establishment—that uneasy club of business executives, generals, and politicos” maintaining “a pretension of national unity”—which is really only a unity of the “highly privileged and slightly privileged.” The elites see to it that “the 99 percent remain split in countless ways. . . .”4
But is there any reason for optimism? Yes! The surprising “success of A People’s History,” which, “in its first decade . . . went through twenty-four printings, sold three hundred thousand copies, [and] was nominated for an American Book Award. . . .” (The American Book Award, not to be confused with the prestigious National Book Award, is given by the Before Columbus Foundation for outstanding “contemporary American multicultural literature.”5) Zinn was getting letters “from all over the country . . . a large proportion of them . . . in excited reaction” to his chapter on Columbus. Most of these, he wrote, “thanked me for telling an untold story.” But some, like “a mother in California . . . became enraged” upon learning that it was being used in her daughter’s class and demanded that the teacher be investigated.6
Zinn explained that people react to A People’s History in such passionate—but divergent—ways because of his “irreverence”: his radical approach to American history, which in the words of “one reviewer” involves “ ‘a reversal of perspective, a reshuffling of heroes and villains.’ ”7
There’s no doubt that Zinn reshuffled the good guys and the bad guys. As we shall see, A People’s History recast World War II—the “good war” fought by the “Greatest Generation”—as a string of Allied atrocities matching those of our Nazi enemies. Zinn inspired young activists to embrace Marxism and see civil rights through its lens rather than as a fight for equal opportunity, as it was originally envisioned by the abolitionists, the NAACP, and even the early black nationalists. He celebrated the defeat of America by the Communists in Vietnam. And, as we have already seen, in the opening chapter of A People’s History of the United States he called into doubt the legitimacy—even the reality—of the United States, itself. Indeed, on page nine of A People’s History, Zinn called the idea that “there really is such a thing as ‘the United States’ . . . a community of people with common interests” a “pretense.”8
Zinn presented himself as a path-breaking truth-teller. What he did in his History, as Zinn explained on page two of his autobiography, was to reveal the Founding Fathers to be not only “ingenious organizers” but also “rich white slaveholders, merchants, bondholders, fearful of lower-class rebellion, or, as James Madison put it, of ‘an equal division of property.’ Our military heroes—Andrew Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt—were racists, Indian-killers, war-lovers, imperialists. Our most liberal presidents—Jefferson, Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt, Kennedy—were more concerned with political power and national aggrandizement than with the rights of nonwhite people.”9
A People’s History certainly does attack re
vered and established ideas. Consider the opening paragraph of chapter four of Zinn’s history, ostensibly about the American Revolution and the founding of the United States: “Around 1776, certain important people in the English colonies made a discovery that would prove enormously useful for the next two hundred years. They found that by creating a nation, a symbol, a legal unity called the United States, they could take over land, profits, and political power from favorites of the British Empire. In the process, they could hold back a number of potential rebellions and create a consensus of popular support for the rule of a new, privileged leadership.”10
The idea that the Revolution “was on behalf of a united people” is a “myth,” Zinn asserts. As evidence for this claim, Zinn tells us that John Locke, whose ideas influenced our government, “himself was a wealthy man, with investments in the silk trade and slave trade, income from loans and mortgages.” Zinn criticizes The Declaration of Independence, which, “like Locke’s Second Treatise, talked about government and political rights, but ignored the existing inequalities in property.” He asks the loaded question, “And how could people truly have equal rights, with stark differences in wealth?”11
Even the universal franchise would not solve the inherent problems in such a government, Zinn says in the next chapter of A People’s History: “The problem of democracy in the post-Revolutionary society was not . . . Constitutional limitations on voting. It lay deeper, beyond the Constitution, in the division of society into rich and poor. For if some people had great wealth and great influence; if they had the land, the money, the newspapers, the church, the educational system—how could voting, however broad, cut into such power?”12
According to Zinn, the Constitution was really written to maintain the privileges of the wealthy elite. It does just “enough for small property owners, for middle-income mechanics and farmers” to keep them invested in the status quo, just the right amount for “the slightly prosperous people who make up this base of support” for the existing regime, and serve as “buffers against the blacks, the Indians, the very poor whites.”13