by Mary Grabar
But then we have to consider where Zinn is coming from, where he gets his theory of economic determinism. McDonald’s critique of Beard applies equally well to Marx, who wrote in the Critique of Political Economy, “The mode of production of material life determines the social, political, and intellectual life process in general.”20 And also to Engels, who wrote in the introduction to the 1888 English edition of The Communist Manifesto, “the whole history of mankind (since the dissolution of primitive tribal society, holding land in common ownership) has been a history of class struggles, contests between exploiting and exploited, ruling and oppressed classes. . . .”21 That’s all it is for Zinn, too.
Such a worldview cannot allow for the idea that men may be motivated by something other than material gain. Yes, many of the Founders, including Washington, Hancock, and Benjamin Franklin, were wealthy men. (George Washington was not, though, as Zinn claims, “the richest man in America.”)22 But the wealth of many of the Founders is the more reason to doubt Zinn’s thesis that they “engineered the revolt” for financial gain. As David McCullough writes of Washington—who was not born to great wealth, who worked as a surveyor and speculated in property, and who then married the wealthy Martha Custis—“Washington’s wealth and way of life, like his physique and horsemanship, were of great importance to large numbers of the men he led and among many in Congress. The feeling was that if he, George Washington, who had so much, was willing to risk ‘his all,’ however daunting the odds, then who were they to equivocate.”23
As Lebergott points out, Beard is one of “a succession of historians” who mischaracterized the support for the Constitution—“as though that support had been restricted to holders of debt certificates, one of many species of property.” Lebergott explains, “That somewhat myopic view has obscured the fact that over three-fourths of all American families owned property (land, farms, debts, certificates, etc.) and that nearly every species of property was likely to rise in value” with the adoption of the Constitution.24
In Good Will Hunting, Matt Damon—thoroughly indoctrinated by age ten, when he took Zinn’s book to class—discounts Gordon Wood as a historian. Perhaps that’s because Wood’s history debunks Zinn’s thesis. As Wood demonstrates, it was actually the Loyalists, not the Patriots, who came mostly from the upper level of society. The majority of the colonists were in the Whig tradition, the “ ‘country’ opposition to . . . the ‘court,’ ”—in other words, it was the people who made the Revolution who were “the people.”
The American revolutionaries were the heirs of the men who had agitated for increased representational voting power for the House of Commons.25 Articulating their ideas was Thomas Paine, the author of Common Sense, who “rejected the traditional and stylized forms of persuasion designed for educated gentlemen.” Paine carried on the project of the writers from the mother country, like Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, who had criticized the crown for supporting powerful commercial interests that corrupted “traditional values.”26 Colonists from all walks of life rebelled against trade restrictions and excessive taxation without representation through the Stamp Act rebellion and the Boston Tea Party. Farmers and speculators in search of new land resisted British control. They resented military intrusion into their homes through the Quartering Act.27 In short, this was a revolution for the common man.
Zinn, who presumes to write a “people’s history,” does not consider that meetings called to resist the threat of British tyranny also made demands for inclusion of colonists who were not of the elite classes: in Philadelphia, radicals “demanded that seven artisans and six Germans” be added to that city’s “revolutionary committee”; in Savannah, to the royal’s governor’s horror, revolutionaries “consisted of ‘a Parcel of the Lowest People, chiefly carpenters, shoemakers, Blacksmiths etc. with a Jew at their head.’ ”28 Colonists also took note of the prosecution of “English radical John Wilkes” for criticizing the Crown and his “four successive expulsions” from the House of Commons, “despite his repeated reelection by his constituents.” As Wood explains, “Americans were involved not simply in a defense of their own rights, but in a worldwide struggle for the salvation of liberty itself. When they looked over the past several centuries of European history, all they could see were the efforts of monarchs everywhere to build up state power in order to extract money from their subjects for the waging of war”29—exactly the thing Zinn claimed to be fighting against.
Wood is Brown University’s Alva O. Way University Professor and Professor of History Emeritus at Brown University and, according to the Wall Street Journal, has been called the “dean of 18th-century American historians.” He has accumulated “virtually every award available to historians,” including the Bancroft Prize, Pulitzer, and the National Humanities Medal in 2010.30 But Howard Zinn simply dismisses Wood’s work as the “Great Man” version of history, in contrast to his own “people’s” history.31 One wonders if he read the page on which Wood describes the “ ‘carpenters, shoemakers, Blacksmiths’ ” who demanded a place on revolutionary committees.
In fact, if there is a “Great Man” in the history Wood writes, he is different from the “Great Men” before America—the Caesars and Napoleons of world history. In Wood’s historical work, George Washington and the other Founders represent a new kind of character emerging in an America abandoning a “monarchical society” defined by “ties of blood, kinship, and dependency”: “Americans offered a different conception of what people were like and new ways of organizing both the state and society. The Revolutionary leaders were not naïve and they were not utopians—indeed, some of them had grave doubts about the capacities of ordinary people. But by adopting republican governments in 1776 all of them necessarily held to a more magnanimous conception of human nature than did supporters of monarchy.”32
Zinn contrasts the very real and very effective American Revolution with an imaginary egalitarian paradise in order to lure the young and ignorant to support the Marxist nightmare from which millions have fled—and by which millions who were unable to escape have been killed. He is uninterested in the ideas that undergird our American republic—which have made America so attractive to those fleeing totalitarian regimes. He’s not satisfied with America’s uniquely successful constitutional system of checks and balances. In fact, even pure democracy won’t do: “For if some people had greater wealth and influence; if they had the land, the money, the newspapers, the church, the educational system—how could voting, however broad, cut into such power? There was still another problem: wasn’t it the nature of representative government, even when most broadly based, to be conservative, to prevent tumultuous change?”33 Notice Zinn’s slippery rhetoric here: the posing of questions in rapid succession, with answers implied rather than asserted, and the presentation of a bloody Communist revolution as “tumultuous change” with those refusing it fearful enemies of the people. No revolution (certainly not the American Revolution) and no system of government (certainly not our Constitution) will satisfy Zinn until what he calls “the division of society into rich and poor” can somehow be made to vanish away. Those who know history know what this Marxist siren song leads to. The only way to disguise it is to ignore the more than one hundred million corpses that it produced in the twentieth century and to present the United States, the freest nation in world history, as a tyrannical, murderous, and imperialistic regime—which is exactly what Zinn has done in his History.
He has done this by lying, distorting and misusing evidence, hijacking other historians’ work, and falsifying the facts, as we have seen again and again. The problem is not that, as Zinn liked to pretend in his own defense, he wrote a “people’s” history, telling the bottom-up story of neglected and forgotten men and women. The problem is that he falsified American history to promote Communist revolution.
Howard Zinn laid out his communistic objectives openly and frequently, all the while denying that he was a Communist and charging Americans wh
o called out Communists with delusions and paranoia implanted by the capitalists. He called them crazy. He smeared them as “red-baiters.” Recall his high dudgeon about Columbus: “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. . . .” The “leaders” he wants to take down include “the Founding Fathers, Jackson, Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt, Kennedy. . . .” Recall that he went on to assert that it was a “pretense” to believe that “there really is such a thing as ‘the United States’ ” or a “ ‘national interest’ represented in the Constitution. . . .” Such a statement sounds ludicrous, but not to a follower of Karl Marx, who states in The Communist Manifesto, “The Communists are . . . reproached with desiring to abolish countries and nationality. The workingmen have no country.” Zinn does not believe in representative democracy. That is because, according to Marx, “[p]olitical power . . . is merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another.”34 Under that view, of course, voting has no meaning. As Samuel H. Beer explains, quoting Marx in his introduction to The Communist Manifesto, “Like the slave-owners’ state and the feudal state, the modern representative state is a ‘means of holding down and exploiting the oppressed class.’ ”35 It sounds very much like Zinn’s take on the entire history of the United States, doesn’t it?
Or perhaps Zinn was borrowing from CPUSA leader William Z. Foster. Consider the way Foster casts the American founding. He quotes from The Growth of the American Republic by Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager: “The upper colonial class consisted of merchants, landed gentry, clergy of the established churches, lawyers, and officials. . . . they controlled the colonial assemblies, in certain colonies owned most of the land, sat on the county courts, controlled credits by individual loans [for as yet there were no banks] and set the social and cultural standards.” So, in Foster’s estimation, “The official leaders of the revolution came mainly from these exploiting classes.” Like Zinn, Foster points out that among the signers of the Declaration of Independence, there “were no small farmers, workers, women, Negroes, or Indians, who constituted the overwhelming majority of the colonial population.” Zinn repeats this point at least seven times. For example, on page 86, he claims that the “rebellion . . . allowed a certain group of the colonial elite to replace those loyal to England” and the Indians were “ignored by the fine words of the Declaration”; on page 89: “The inferior position of the blacks, the exclusion of Indians from the new society, the establishment of supremacy for the rich and powerful in the new nation. . . .”; on page 91, in discussing Beard’s theory about “four groups . . . not represented in the Constitutional Convention: slaves, indentured servants, women, men without property”; on page 101: “the Founding Fathers. . . . did not want a balance, except one which kept things as they were, a balance among the dominant forces at that time. They certainly did not want an equal balance between slaves and masters, propertyless and property holders, Indians and white”; and 102: “As many as half the people were not even considered by the Founding Fathers. . . . were absent in the Constitution, they were invisible in the new political democracy. . . . the women of early America.” (See also pages 97 and 99.) The idea is reinforced by sporadic examples, such as Shays’s rebellion. Zinn simply repeats the idea the same way he repeated his nonsense about the equal distribution of wealth.
Communist leader Foster, like Zinn, describes the Revolutionists as “characteristic bourgeois self-seekers,” many of them “brazenly speculat[ing] in army supplies, furnishing worthless munitions for the troops. They were the forerunners of those capitalists, of the same breed, who later sold antiquated muskets to the government during the Civil War, provided embalmed beef to the soldiers of the Spanish-American, and made billions in munitions orders during the two world wars.”36 Yes, all of the “same breed.” Doesn’t that sound familiar? Recall Zinn’s attacks on the “arms merchants” he claimed were responsible for World War I. Remember his faulting Hamilton for World War II? All of “the same breed.” A “pattern,” to recall one of Zinn’s favorite words—like “the System” and “the Establishment.”
We can now see Zinn’s purpose in calling on his fellow historians to abandon “disinterested scholarship” to effect “a revolution in the academy,” and ultimately in the larger world.37 That argument, in an essay often republished under the title “The Uses of Scholarship,” but originally called “The Case for Radical Change,” is of a piece with his attack on historical balance in the first chapter of A People’s History. Zinn wanted to abandon disinterested scholarship and truthful history for ideology and propaganda, overturning all traditional academic standards. He wanted to do this because he thought the revolution in academic standards would lead to the Communist revolution in the larger world. He knew his history would not stand on the facts.
A People’s History of the United States is intended to inspire anger of such magnitude that its readers want to overthrow the American Republic. As even fellow leftist Michael Kazin noted, in Zinn’s opinion nothing works: Not the progressive reforms in labor laws and food safety. Not the legislation for civil rights and against discrimination in the workplace. All the improvements are dismissed or undercut by Zinn’s cynical commentary. Here, again, Zinn is following the Communist script, specifically the closing words of The Communist Manifesto: “[The Communists] openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution.”38 That’s why John Brown and H. Rap Brown were Zinn’s heroes. It’s amazing to think that Zinn’s book has become a respected and revered source for the teaching of American history in our schools, even a kind of sacred cow—as became evident with professors’ reaction to the revelation in 2013 that three years earlier Indiana governor Mitch Daniels had questioned the use of Howard Zinn’s book to teach children in Indiana public schools. In February 2010, in correspondence with state school officials, Daniels had questioned the use of Zinn’s book in K-12 classrooms, in colleges of education, and in a National Endowment for the Humanities teachers’ continuing education summer seminar titled “Social Movements in Modern America: Labor, Civil Rights, and Feminism.” Daniels had argued that Zinn’s history “should not be accepted for any credit by the state. . . .” and had asked “how do we get rid of it before any more young people are force-fed a totally false version of our history?” He called A People’s History “a truly execrable, anti-factual piece of disinformation that misstates American history on every page.”39 Daniels, of course, was absolutely right.
When the emails were revealed in 2013, Daniels stood firm, explaining that the K–12 curriculum was within the purview of state government. The leftist professoriate did not care and circled the wagons. Ninety outraged Purdue professors signed onto an open letter published by Academe, the site of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), stating that Daniels’s assessment of Zinn’s scholarship went against their own “assessment,” as well as that of “scholars around the world.” Many in their group, they claimed, used Zinn’s works in syllabi and published research. They lectured Daniels on the flaws of the “consensus school” of history—of which Arthur Schlesinger and Oscar Handlin, who had criticized Zinn and whom Daniels had cited, were presumably members. They claimed that Zinn was not “anti-American,” but rather committed to “bringing out our better collective selves.” The professors avowed, “We trust our K–12 colleagues to know how and when to present challenges to received knowledge and how to encourage their students to judge such challenges for themselves.” The letter contained a grandiloquent defense of “academic inquiry and the university’s mission,” claiming that
“this issue transcends one author and one book” and “concerns the very legitimacy of academic discourse.” They diverted attention from Daniels’s criticism of Zinn’s history, stating, “Scholarship emerges virtually every day that challenges the ‘conventional wisdom’ of prior generations. Do we assess such scholarship critically, or do we censor uncomfortable ideas out of hand?”
The letter was long on moral outrage and short on logic, on the one hand asserting that no one disputes Zinn’s facts, just his conclusions, and then on the other implying that the shift in historical perspective from the old “consensus school” to Zinn’s kind of history is how historiography has advanced.40
And the Purdue professors weren’t the only ones contradicting themselves. In support of his entirely justified criticism of Zinn, Daniels had cited not only Schlesinger and Handlin, but two other historians: Sam Wineburg and Michael Kazin. You may remember Wineburg from his numerous telling criticisms of Zinn’s World War II history. The Margaret Jacks Professor of Education at Stanford had attacked Zinn on the facts in the Winter 2012/2013 American Educator, calling Zinn’s history “educationally dangerous.”41 But just months later, he was blasting Daniels for his “shameless attempt to censor free speech” and asserting that he himself used Zinn’s book in his classes. Wineburg claimed that the controversy was about “whether in an open democratic society we should be exposed—whether you’re in ninth grade or seventh grade or a freshman at Purdue—whether you should be exposed to views that challenge your own cherished view.”42
