Debunking Howard Zinn

by Mary Grabar

  Zinn, who quotes Hofstadter’s claim that the Emancipation Proclamation “had all the grandeur of a bill of lading,”78 either misses or purposely obscures Lincoln’s intentions and his political genius in promulgating it—for example, in his reply to Horace Greeley’s open letter accusing Lincoln of deferring to “Rebel Slavery.” James McPherson calls Lincoln’s presidential letter a “stroke of genius” in “preparing public opinion” for the Proclamation. McPherson explains that “to conservatives who insisted that preservation of the Union must be the sole purpose of the war, Lincoln said that such was his purpose. To radicals who wanted him to proclaim emancipation in order to save the Union, he hinted that he might do so. To everyone he made it clear that partial or even total emancipation might become necessary . . . to accomplish the purpose to which they all agreed.”79

  Howard Zinn claims that Lincoln, in his efforts to eliminate slavery, was simply reacting to “abolitionist pressures” and angling for “practical political advantage.” In fact, Lincoln was putting pressure on radical abolitionists—and on opponents of abolition, too—to win the war, preserve the Union, and free the slaves. To achieve those worthy goals, he had to take political risks and exercise his formidable political skills. As Debra Sheffer writes, “Lincoln believed predictions that the proclamation would seriously hurt the Republican Party in the [1862] elections, but he forged ahead with the plan in order to win the war and save the Union. The Republican Party did indeed suffer losses as a result of the proclamation, but the damage was minimal, with Republicans still holding a majority in both the Senate and the House.” Lincoln’s annual address to Congress in December included “one final plea for the Border States to consider emancipation.”80

  But Howard Zinn is unimpressed. Zinn is determined to knock Lincoln off his pedestal. He wants to replace “Lincoln freed the slaves”—a true fact of history, learned by generations of Americans for a century—with the notion that Lincoln was a small-minded political operator who “skillfully” blended “the interests of the very rich and the interests of the black” and “link[ed ] these two with a growing section of Americans, the white, up-and-coming, economically ambitious, politically active middle class.”81 In other words, the Civil War didn’t so much free the slaves as enable bourgeois oppression. Only Zinn could present Lincoln—the American president with the humblest background, a man who worked his way up from poverty and was often ridiculed by the elites—as a member of the elite ruling class. Zinn simply cannot give Abraham Lincoln—and thus the American people who elected him and fought to win the Civil War—credit for ending slavery.

  Frederick Douglass saw it differently. In 1876, more than a decade after the president had been assassinated for his anti-slavery position, Douglass said, “Abraham Lincoln was at the head of a great movement and was in living and earnest sympathy with that movement, which, in the nature of things, must go on until slavery should be utterly and forever abolished in the United States.”82

  Of course, that estimate of Lincoln is not included in A People’s History. And of course, Zinn neither quotes nor even refers to Douglass’s 1865 speech, “What the Black Man Wants”:

  What I ask for the Negro is not benevolence, not pity, not sympathy, but simply justice. . . . everybody has asked the question, and they learned to ask it early of the abolitionists, “What shall we do with the Negro?” I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are wormeaten at the core, if they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall! I am not for tying or fastening them on the tree in any way, except by nature’s plan, and if they will not stay there, let them fall. And if the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone!83

  For Howard Zinn, it was not a good thing to simply treat former slaves as men, to leave them free to run their own lives. He was unwilling to acknowledge Douglass’s accomplishments in national affairs, preferring to present Douglass as a pitiful and angry militant waiting for a revolutionary leader, and the Civil War as a tragic missed opportunity for a leftist social revolution against the “deeply entrenched system” of capitalism.84

  For Zinn, the very real horrors of slavery are simply more fodder for his war against America and Western civilization. The nearly three-quarters of a million dead in the Civil War are just casualties of a military machine, and blacks are no better off than they were under slavery. The irony is that, as historian Robert Paquette, a specialist in the history of slavery, has remarked in his criticism of the use of Zinn’s history as a text in high school classrooms:

  An assessment in a classroom of, say, the history of slavery—the peculiar institution—by a professional historian should take into consideration the fact that the institution was not peculiar at all in the sense of being uncommon, and that it had existed from time immemorial on all habitable continents. In fact, at one time or another, all the world’s great religions had stamped slavery with their authoritative approval. Only at a particular historical moment—and only in the West—did an evolving understanding of personal freedom, influenced by evangelical Christianity, emerge to assert as a universal that the enslavement of human beings was a moral wrong for anyone, anywhere.85

  Or as President Lincoln reminded the nation at the dedication of the new cemetery at Gettysburg: the dead had “not died in vain” because “a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” would “endure.”86

  CHAPTER

  FIVE

  Casting a Pall on the Finest Hour

  Howard Zinn has made dishonest use of the discovery of America, slavery, and the Civil War to indict America and promote communist revolution. But in his treatment of World War II, he hits a new low. Through a series of four long, leading questions about “imperialism, racism, totalitarianism, and militarism,” Zinn insinuates that the “enemy of unspeakable evil,” “Hitler’s Germany,” was no worse than the United States and her allies.1 Imperial Japan, too, was a victim of American aggression.

  We weren’t really fighting against racist totalitarianism, but rather to maintain the evil capitalist system. World War II was “a war waged by a government whose chief beneficiary—despite volumes of reforms—was a wealthy elite.” Just like all of America’s wars: “The alliance between big business and the government went back to the very first proposals of Alexander Hamilton to Congress after the Revolutionary War. By World War II that partnership had developed and intensified. During the Depression, Roosevelt had once denounced the ‘economic royalists,’ but he always had the support of certain important business leaders.”2

  Zinn’s theory that all American wars have been fought to benefit plutocrats is not an original one. It was in wide dissemination in the 1930s during Zinn’s teenage years as Americans suffering from the Great Depression looked back on World War I. During that decade, “An avalanche of lurid articles and books poured from American presses condemning the munitions manufacturers as war-fomenting ‘merchants of death,’ ” according to an American history text by Thomas Bailey: Many “naïve souls” leapt to “the illogical conclusion that [the arms manufacturers] had caused [World War I] in order to make money. This kind of reasoning suggested that if the profits could only be removed from the arms business, America could keep out of any World conflict that might erupt in the future.”3

  President Franklin Roosevelt, as is well known, had a contentious relationship with business and military leaders. It began early. In his second “Fireside Chat” on May 7, 1933, he announced his massive and numerous New Deal programs, as well as a policy of “a general reduction of armaments,” which he said would reduce costs and remove “the fear of invasion and armed attack.”4 Roosevelt’s plan to reduce an “already small Army of 140,000 men as a way to free up money for relief” caused
General Douglas MacArthur, the army chief of staff, to “explode” in anger.5 When it came time to help Britain, many feared that the United States would be vulnerable because of the weakened military.6 During the 1930s, both Germany and Japan expanded through military force, with Germany taking over Czechoslovakia, Austria, and then Poland in 1939 and Japan brutally invading China with the rape of Nanking in 1937.

  Fortunately, once the order was given to increase production for armaments and other military supplies, American factories were able to get close enough to meeting President Roosevelt’s “seemingly impossible yearly production goals” to vaunt the Allies to victory, according to Victor Davis Hanson. The United States had “over twelve million in uniform,” but “suffered only about 416,000 combat casualties,” which was just slightly above “3 percent of those enrolled in the military” and was “proportionally the fewest combat casualties of the major powers.” American industries might have helped save American lives and win the war.7

  But Howard Zinn’s account of World War II is a pacifist fantasy riddled with conspiracy theories. The tone is set on the first page of his chapter on the war, where he opens with a long quotation from “a skit put on in the United States in the year 1939 by the Communist party” suggesting that America fought World War II for “imperialist” reasons. Later—after Germany violated its pact with the Soviet Union and invaded Russia in 1941—the CPUSA called World War II “a ‘people’s war’ against Fascism.” But, “Was it?” Zinn asks. He doesn’t seem to think so. Momentarily presenting himself as a critic of the Soviet Union, he asks whether “England, the United States, the Soviet Union,” really represented “something significantly different” from the “unspeakable evil” of Nazi Germany. The Allies’ victory, Zinn suggests, would not really “be a blow to imperialism, racism, totalitarianism, militarism, in the world.”8

  Citing the massive involvement of Americans on the war front and the home front, Zinn asks, “could this be considered a manufactured support, since all the power of the nation—not only of the government, but the press, the church, and even the chief radical organizations—was behind the calls for all-out war? Was there an undercurrent of reluctance; were there unpublicized signs of resistance?”9

  Of course, there was internal opposition to the war. There was a very strong and public anti-interventionist movement. One of the fears that the anti-interventionists had was about allying with the Soviet Union, whose executions and mass starvations were already known. They were rightly concerned about the Soviets’ imperialist ambitions. As Melvyn Leffler noted, “Almost a third of all Americans” continued to distrust our military ally the Soviet Union even at the height of the fighting against the Nazis, and “most polls showed that fewer than half of all Americans expected cooperation to persist in the postwar period.”10 But after the attack on Pearl Harbor, many anti-interventionists, including future president Gerald Ford and aviator Charles Lindbergh, gave the war effort their full support.

  But this is not the opposition to the war that Zinn has in mind. This important part of history is not even given a mention in Zinn’s book. Instead he is interested in how “blacks, looking at anti-Semitism in Germany, might not see their own situation in the United States as much different.”11 As we shall see in more detail below, Zinn grossly exaggerates the degree to which African Americans opposed World War II. To be sure, bitterness was expressed in the black newspapers about the attention given to Nazi persecution of the Jews even as African Americans faced discrimination at home.12 But Zinn ignores the fact that African Americans were fighting for the right to fight.

  Years before the United States entered the war, black leaders were supporting bills by Congressman Hamilton Fish to expand the opportunities for African Americans in the military beyond the support services to which they were relegated. The exploits of black soldiers in the Civil War, the Indian Wars, the Mexican-American War, and in the Philippines were the subjects of lectures by black leaders that boosted the pride and morale of African Americans and also provided arguments for equal rights. In World War II, Africans Americans would once again exhibit their fighting ability, beginning with Dorie Miller on the ship West Virginia in Pearl Harbor rushing to wield an anti-aircraft gun (in spite of having been denied combat training), to the Tuskegee Airmen and the 761st Tank Battalion, the original “Black Panthers.” During 183 days of combat in the last two years of the war, the 761st “captured or liberated more than 30 major towns and four airfields,” “pierced the Siegfried line into Germany and fought in the Battle of the Bulge,” and liberated “at least one concentration camp, the Gunskirchen camp in Austria.”13 They received their Distinguished Unit Citation only in 1978.

  Their overdue recognition was in the news as Zinn was writing his history,14 but Zinn ignores such events. (Instead, he harps on President Jimmy Carter for the generic sins of all the American presidents and glorifies the other Black Panthers). Nor does Zinn bother to read about their performance in the black newspapers from the accounts by Trezzvant Anderson, the black “combat journalist assigned by the War Department to cover the battalion.”

  Joe Wilson Jr., son of First Sergeant Joseph Wilson Sr. of the 761st Battalion, wrote in his history of his father’s unit, “In another one of the war’s ironies, Jewish-American soldiers helped to liberate black inmates from Nazi concentration camps.” These were the “Rhineland Mulattoes,” children from the German African colonies.15

  Zinn, however, sets out to debunk the myth that “seemed clear at the time . . . that the United States was a democracy with certain liberties, while Germany was a dictatorship persecuting its Jewish minority, imprisoning dissidents, whatever their religion, while proclaiming the supremacy of the Nordic ‘race.’ ” Zinn will set the record straight!16

  Zinn sets out to correct his readers’ belief in “the United States . . . as a defender of helpless countries.” In contrast to that “image” being promulgated “in American high school history textbooks,” the true “record in world affairs” is a long train of abuses: The United States:

  had opposed the Hatian [sic] revolution for independence from France. . . . It had instigated a war with Mexico and taken half of that country. It had pretended to help Cuba win freedom from Spain, and then planted itself in Cuba with a military base, investments, and rights of intervention. It had seized Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam, and fought a brutal war to subjugate the Filipinos. It had “opened” Japan to its trade with gunboats and threats. It had declared an Open Door Policy in China as a means of assuring that the United States would have opportunities equal to other imperial powers in exploiting China.17

  The list goes on. America created the “ ‘independent” state of Panama “in order to build and control the Canal,” sent “marines to Nicaragua in 1926 to counter a revolution,” and “intervened” in the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Cuba, Nicaragua, Panama, Guatemala, and Honduras. As a result—the horror!—“By 1935, over half of U.S. steel and cotton exports were being sold in Latin America.” And to top it off, American troops interfered in the Bolshevik Revolution!18

  What is the purpose of this litany of supposed American sins? To demonstrate that the U.S. didn’t have the moral standing to oppose Nazi Germany. “In short, if the entrance of the United States into World War II was (as so many Americans believed at the time, observing the Nazi invasions) to defend the principle of nonintervention in the affairs of other countries, the nation’s record cast doubt on its ability to uphold that principle.”19 Zinn suggests that the American government’s “main interest was not stopping Fascism but advancing the imperial interests of the United States.” That’s why “when Japan and Germany threatened U.S. world interests, a pro-Soviet, anti-Nazi policy became preferable.”20

  The fact that the United States declared war after the attack on Pearl Harbor instead of when Hitler invaded Austria, took over Czechoslovakia, or attacked Poland (the simultaneous Soviet attack on Poland is not mentioned) is supposed to prove our
imperial ambitions. If we had really cared about fighting injustice, we might have gone to war with the Japanese back in 1937 when they attacked China and raped Nanking. But America waited to go to war until America was attacked. Why? Because we’re wicked imperialists: “It was the Japanese attack on a link in the American Pacific Empire that did it.”

  Besides, President Roosevelt told lies! While Zinn pretends to eschew “the wild accusations against Roosevelt (that he knew about Pearl Harbor and didn’t tell, or that he deliberately provoked the Pearl Harbor raid. . . . ),” he suggests in the same sentence that “it does seem clear that [Roosevelt] did as James Polk had done before him in the Mexican war and Lyndon Johnson after him in the Vietnam war—he lied to the public for what he thought was a right cause. In September and October 1941, he misstated the facts in two incidents involving German submarines and American destroyers.”21 But Zinn does not even identify these “incidents”—the clashes between the U.S. destroyers Greer, Kearney, and Reuben James, and German U-boats in September and October 1941—much less acknowledge the danger they represented.

  In any case, in the estimation of Thomas Bailey, the Greer incident, the only one of the three in which there was no damage or loss of life, “was the only one of the three clashes that raised grave doubts as to Roosevelt’s basic honesty. This destroyer . . . was carrying passengers, mail, and freight to the American outpost on Iceland” and “had been trailing a German submarine and broadcasting its position to British aircraft and warships, who dropped bombs nearby.” The Germans retaliated. Even though the Greer was the “aggressor. . . . Roosevelt delivered a shoot-on-sight radio message” a week later, on September 11, 1941.22