Debunking Howard Zinn

by Mary Grabar

  Zinn used his teaching podium to agitate, assigning readings and activities that kept students at a high emotional pitch. In the 1960s and 1970s, he took them on civil rights and anti-war protests and continued his work with SNCC, encouraging the group to take an anti-war position. After the war, he found causes in the Black Panther cases and in activism against “prisoner abuse.” His students did field research interviewing prisoners and, in the early 1980s, to his admiration, made shantytowns to protest apartheid. (During a trip to South Africa in the summer of 1982, Zinn visited Crossroads, “a real shantytown outside of Capetown.”) This was in a period, as Zinn noted, when “there was wide-spread head-shaking over the ‘apathy’ of the student generation.”72

  Zinn believed that much could be learned in jail: “An encounter with police, even one night in jail, is an intense and unique educational experience.” This insight opens a chapter of his autobiography in which Zinn regales the reader with the story of his own overnight stay in a Massachusetts jail for failing to show up in court after having blocked the transport of soldiers, and then in a D.C. jail for failing to move off the White House lawn.73 He writes that “the ordeal of imprisonment demands a concentration on one’s own needs, to sacrifice for others,”74 but Zinn himself rarely went to jail. When he was at Spelman in Atlanta during the civil rights protests in Albany and Selma, Zinn observed and recorded from a safe distance. It was his students and the members of SNCC who went to jail. In the same way, at Boston University he was known to instigate protests—including takeovers of the president’s office—then disappear before the protesters suffered the consequences for the protests he had instigated. National Association of Scholars president Peter Wood, who worked at Boston University as a librarian in 1984 while finishing his dissertation (and then became assistant to the provost, associate provost, and eventually president’s chief of staff), remembered Zinn as always having “a half smirk on his face and the more trouble he could cause the happier he looked.”75

  Zinn was failing to do what he was paid to do—teach and engage in scholarship. In a 1979 interview, Boston University president Silber said, “[Zinn] has to decide if he thinks he has a higher market value in the academic community some place else. . . . I think he is paid all he can get in the academic marketplace.” When asked, “Do you feel he’s not worth any more than he’s making?” Silber replied that “he did not think Zinn’s ‘standards of scholarship’ were very high.”76 Peter Wood recalls that Zinn was part of a group known as BSASH, “Before Silber and Still Here”—a “collection of mediocrities that hung on after Silber had dramatically raised academic standards for faculty appointments.”77

  Zinn, however, claimed that his activism frightened “the guardians of traditional education.” In the classroom, he wrote, “I didn’t pretend to an objectivity that was neither possible nor desirable. ‘You can’t be neutral on a moving train,’ I would tell them.” (That phrase, which he used as the title for his autobiography, recalled Karl Marx’s 1850 statement that “revolutions are the locomotives of history.”) As Zinn explained, “Events are already moving in certain deadly directions, and to be neutral is to accept that.” Zinn claimed that he was not imposing his views “on blank slates, on innocent minds” because his students had had a “long period of political indoctrination before they arrived in my class—in the family, in high school, in the mass media.” He just wanted to offer his “wares along with others” in a “marketplace. . . . long dominated by orthodoxy”78

  Students in Professor Zinn’s classes did not need to recall historical facts on exams, because no exams were given.79 They did not need to go to the library and present their research in footnoted papers because the only “research” Zinn required was from their involvement in community organizations and interviews with such individuals as prisoners. Writing assignments consisted of journal entries and “day-to-day reactions” to such activities and the freewheeling class discussions. But Zinn’s students were not even required to adhere to these standards, for Zinn made it a policy to never fail any student.80 Instead of textbooks81 or standard history books, students read poetry, fiction, drama, and polemics.82

  Zinn had been hired to teach history and some political science at Spelman. At Boston University, he was asked to join the political science department. “They apparently didn’t care that I was really a historian, but I didn’t care really what department I was in,” Zinn told Davis Joyce in 1997, “ ’cause I knew I was going to teach the way I was going to teach anyway.” He did what he wanted to do “no matter what the description in the catalog was.” This was his “guerrilla warfare with administration.” Over the course of his academic career, Zinn taught classes in American history, American government, Russian history, and Chinese history, as well as an Introduction to Political Theory, a senior seminar on Marxism and anarchism, and a graduate seminar called Politics of History. He also offered a course at first called “Civil Liberties” and then changed to “Law and Justice in America.” Zinn gave the vague title to his “Law and Justice in America” course so that he could, as he said, do “whatever I wanted in there.” He put together “a selection of diverse readings,” including “Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible when talking about McCarthyism; Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo or Born on the Fourth of July by Ron Kovic when dealing with war; and Langston Hughes’s poetry or Richard Wright’s Black Boy when covering race, as well as excerpts from Emma Goldman’s anarchist autobiography, Studs Terkel’s oral histories, and Howell Rains’s [sic] My Soul Is Rested.” In his “Introduction to Political Theory,” Zinn sometimes paired “Plato with Daniel Berrigan . . . or Machiavelli with Henry Kissinger.”83 What his students learned can be gleaned from nine excerpts of students’ journals that Zinn provides in his autobiography. A young woman cried after reading Black Boy and a young man in ROTC had come to hate the Vietnam War.84

  The literary works Zinn taught—such as the novel Johnny Got His Gun by screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, a member of the CPUSA—tended to push the Communist Party line.85 The Crucible, an allegory about the HUAC “witch hunts,” was a favorite among those who subscribed to the Communist publications that Miller wrote for, such as New Masses.86 Langston Hughes, a Zinn favorite, used his writing talents to serve the party. In the 1930s, he had recruited black “actors” to travel to the Soviet Union to make an anti-American film. The film was canceled, but Hughes accepted an offer to stay and write for Izvestia. After his return to America, his plays, articles, poetry, and memoirs continued to praise the Soviet Union. Richard Wright had made something of a devil’s bargain with the party as a young aspiring writer during the Depression, being lured into its John Reed Club for a chance to write—though he later broke with the party.

  Zinn avoided debates with his peers. He did not publish in peer-reviewed journals or present papers at conferences. His audience was young people in the classroom, or on the quad, in a rally, protest, or teach-in. He spoke at “counter-commencements”—one at his alma-mater, Columbia University—while, as he explained, “the historian who had chaired my dissertation defense, Richard Hofstadter was giving the official commencement address nearby.” Zinn shared the “counter-commencement platform” at Wesleyan University with radical clergyman William Sloane Coffin and leftist historian Henry Steele Commager.87 He also did one at his neighborhood high school, setting students against parents.

  In addition to hundreds of anti-war rallies, Zinn participated in an anti-war symposium in Hiroshima in 1966 where he met David Dellinger, who, in 1968, called and asked him to go to Hanoi with the radical priest Daniel Berrigan to bring back three American POWs.88 In Laos, the soldiers were hustled into a military plane—thus sabotaging a prime opportunity for the publicity that North Vietnam had sought from an airport arrival by Zinn. The New York Times reported that Zinn had a “heated 40-minute argument” with Ambassador William H. Sullivan on the mode of transport. Zinn told the reporter, “I feel that this was a violation of the spirit o
f the release. The attitude and feelings of the North Vietnamese should have been considered.” Berrigan reported on the conversation they had had with North Vietnamese premier Pham Van Dong that afternoon, relaying the North Vietnamese official’s message to President Johnson: “We repeat our demand for unconditional cessation of the bombing of North Vietnam.”89

  In 1971, Zinn helped RAND Corporation military analyst Daniel Ellsberg hide the “Pentagon Papers”—U.S. government documents on the Vietnam War that Ellsberg had stolen. They were first published in the New York Times and then in other newspapers. The four-volume Pentagon Papers, Gravel edition, was edited by Zinn and Noam Chomsky, but it did not include “80% of the documents in Part V.B.,” which are titled “Justification for the War,” and parts of the peace negotiations.90 The New York Times published an even more highly selective book with its own editorial commentary in 1971. When Ellsberg and his co-conspirator were indicted on eleven counts, including violation of the Espionage Act,91 Zinn served as an “expert” witness tracing the history of U.S. involvement in Indochina from World War II to 1963. Zinn wrote that “it was like teaching class.”92 The case ended in a mistrial after the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist was broken into during the Watergate scandal.

  After Zinn retired in 1988, he had time for speaking tours. In Boulder, he met David Barsamian, “an ingenuous impresario of radical broadcasting” who would become one of the major promoters of his work. Zinn was “impressed again and again by how favorably people reacted to what, undoubtedly, is a radical view of society—antiwar, anti-military, critical of the legal system, advocating a drastic redistribution of the wealth, supportive of protest even to the point of civil disobedience.” This was even when he was “speaking to cadets at the Coast Guard Academy in Newport, Rhode Island, or to an assembly of nine hundred students at the reputedly conservative California Polytechnic in San Luis Obispo.”93 In 2009, Zinn—referring to a colleague who had complained that students were missing classes for protest—told the assembled group at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, listening to him being interviewed by Nation sportswriter David Zirin that “this guy could not know what education was. The best kind of education you can get is when you’re involved in social struggles for a cause.” The interview was published in International Socialist Review.94

  By the 1990s, A People’s History had made its way into classrooms and Zinn was still a favorite radical on the college lecture circuit—and even in some high school classes. Both during and after his teaching career, Zinn enjoyed a number of European junkets. He spent a semester in 1974 teaching with Herbert Marcuse at the University of Paris, “ ‘at the Vincennes Campus—Paris VIII, set up after the 1968 uprisings as a kind of haven for left-wing faculty and open-admissions students.’ ” Zinn taught there again in 1978 and in 1980.95 In 1995, he went to Bologna, Italy, on a Fulbright.

  Zinn also had plenty of time for political activism. He co-founded the New Party, the socialist party that helped Barack Obama win his Illinois Senate seat, and then worked on the Obama presidential campaign with the now defunct ACORN. He worked for or was associated with the Democratic Socialists of America, the Committees of Correspondence for Socialism and Democracy, Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement (STORM, a Marxist-Maoist collective), and International ANSWER, the anti-war organization controlled by the communist Workers World Party. In June 2004, Zinn spoke at an event put on by the International Socialist Organization, reuniting there with former students Alice Walker and Marian Wright Edelman. In October 2004, he signed a statement calling for an investigation into the possibility that the 9/11 attacks had been orchestrated by the Bush administration. Zinn served as an original board member for the Movement for a Democratic Society (MDS), a revived SDS. In 2009, young MDS members shut down Congressman Tom Tancredo’s speech at the University of North Carolina by chanting loudly and breaking windows. In 2005, Zinn was the commencement speaker at Spelman College, obviously a much-changed institution from when Albert Manley had served as president.

  Howard Zinn died in 2010, but A People’s History of the United States lives on and carries the rhetoric of past decades of leftist politics forward with it. For students who missed the 1960s, it offers the drama of the anti-war struggle. The sharp demarcations between oppressors and oppressed and repeated references to the “struggle” in A People’s History are reminiscent of the rhetoric of old issues of the Daily Worker, New Masses, Negro Worker, and Southern Worker. The explanations for all historical events follow the contours of CPUSA leader William Z. Foster’s Outline Political History of the Americas, published in 1951. Zinn’s is a crusading voice full of moral certainty that appeals to millennials and Generation Z, none of whom seem to be bothered by terms redolent of their grandparents’ youth: “the System” and “the Establishment.” Even Zinn’s use of the word “Negro,” which has been considered offensive since the 1960s, is accepted.

  One indication of the success of A People’s History is the far-reaching effect of the attack on Columbus with which Zinn opens the book. While former president George H. W. Bush, in his last Columbus Day proclamation, offered high praise to “one man who dared to defy the pessimists and naysayers of his day [and] made an epic journey that changed the course of history,”96 Bill Clinton in his 1993 Proclamation commemorated “the mutual discovery of Europeans and Native Americans and the transformations, through toil and pain, that gave birth to brave new hopes for a better future.”97 And by 2017, Columbus Day was a “controversial holiday,” according to USA Today, which noted President Donald Trump’s failure to mention Native Americans, in contrast to Clinton’s final proclamation in 2000 that acknowledged the “clash” between “Columbus and other European explorers and the native peoples of the Western hemisphere,” and Obama’s 2009 proclamation that “noted how the European immigrants joined the ‘thriving indigenous communities who suffered great hardships as a result of the changes to the land they inhabited.’ ”98

  Howard Zinn was a far-left political activist—very possibly a member of the Communist Party USA. The stories he put into A People’s History of the United States weren’t balanced factual history, but crude morality tales designed to destroy Americans’ patriotism and turn them into radical leftists. Recall Zinn’s claim that “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.” Let us look at Zinn’s version of this part of American history.

  CHAPTER

  THREE

  Howard Zinn’s “Usable Indian”

  "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.” Zinn has given fair warning. His account of the entire Age of Discovery is the same morality tale he has already told about Columbus: Europeans bad, Indians good. “The Aztec civilization of Mexico” is glorious, with “the heritage of the Mayan, Zapotec, and Toltec cultures.” It “built enormous constructions from stone tools, and human labor, developed a writing system and a priesthood.” (The Aztecs did not have the wheel or an alphabet, and much of the “human labor” was slave labor.) Zinn acknowledges that the Aztecs perpetrated “the ritual killing of thousands of people as sacrifices to the gods.” (This “ritual killing” included children, slaves, and prisoners of war whose hearts were cut out of them while they were still alive as five priests held them down.) But for Zinn, the “cruelty of the Aztecs. . . . did not erase a certain innocence.” (One might ask where was the “innocence” in the spectacle displayed at the inauguration of the Great Temple in 1487 when over eighty thousand captured prisoners were slaughtered at the rate of fourteen per minute, which “far exceeded the daily murder record at either Auschwitz or Dachau,” as Victor Davis Hanson points out. These killings were intended to be warnings to those who might defy the absolute rule of
Aztec priests, who were seen as incarnations of gods whose faces could not even be looked at directly.)1

  Zinn claims the Aztecs welcomed Cortés “with munificent hospitality” and gifts of gold and silver. They would not have been so munificently hospitable if their king Montezuma had not believed that the pale-skinned Cortés was “the legendary man-god” of their mythology, “the mysterious Quetzalcoatl.” In their innocence, as Zinn explains, the Aztecs could not have known that he had really “come from Spain with an expedition financed by merchants and landowners and blessed by the deputies of God, with one obsessive goal: to find gold.”

  Montezuma began having doubts about Cortés’s divinity and begged him “to go back.” But what did Cortés do? He began “his march of death from town to town, using deception, turning Aztec against Aztec, killing with the kind of deliberateness that accompanies a strategy—to paralyze the will of the population….”2

  Well, no. In fact, there was a battle of epic proportions before Cortés and his men, along with their Tlaxacan allies, escaped—losing half of their force to the Aztecs.