Can "A People's History" make room for Howard Zinn?
by Michael Schaffer
FEBRUARY 1, 2010 TAGS:
If the Howard Zinn approach to history were applied to the obituary pages, there might be no obits for the left-wing historian. Zinn, who died last week at 87, devoted little attention in his work to the likes of generals, senators, CEOs — or, for that matter, tenured professors at prestigious private universities. A Zinn-style account of modern American history teaching would likely feature the struggles of unionized faculty members, the tribulations of loan-saddled blue-collar students, or perhaps the noxious influence of university trustees, forever silencing any professor who’d speak the truth about society’s vested interests.
“All those histories of this country centered on the Founding Fathers and the Presidents weigh oppressively on the capacity of the ordinary citizen to act,” Zinn declared in his celebrated A People’s History of the United States. “They suggest that in times of crisis we must look to someone to save us.” For Zinn, it was an article of faith that just about all of those would-be saviors are in fact tricksters, eager to divert our attention away from the real issues by ginning up phony patriotic wars or fratricidal racial animus. Anyone not committed to the relentlessly avaricious goals of our economic elites, the reasoning went, would never be allowed a position of power in the first place.
Which raises a disturbing question about the media’s coverage of Zinn’s death: If America’s elite is so determined to hide from its people the realities of their oppression and the possibilities of real change, how did it happen that this full-throated dissident — whose anti-history of the United States begins with a genocidal Christopher Columbus, carries on through a Revolutionary War designed to distract poorer colonists from their class resentments, a Civil War waged in the name of Northern industrial conquest, and all manner of class, ethnic, racial and political brutality — earned long, respectful coverage in establishmentarian pillars like the New York Times or the Washington Post?
For that matter, how did it happen that A People’s History, first published the same year Ronald Reagan was elected president (in Zinn’s world, his victory was a puny matter, simply bringing “another part of the Establishment” to power), still sells more than 100,000 copies a year? What sort of all-powerful, resistance-crushing overclass allows Zinn’s books to be assigned in high schools, or published in special young readers’ editions? What sort of toadying, corporate-owned Hollywood entertainment machine would interrupt the flood of bread-and-circus distractions to feature Zinn’s book in a Matt Damon movie, or celebrate his friendship in a Pearl Jam song, or chronicle his philosophy in a documentary narrated by Viggo Mortensen?
There is nothing wrong, of course, with becoming famous. For a committed activist like Zinn, attention is, and ought to be, a goal: Small-circulation journals are nice, but platinum-selling bands and major motion pictures are even better. Respect from the Times, no matter what A People’s History may suggest, doesn’t prove someone’s yet another propagandistic knave.
But Zinn’s own towering in American pedagogy does call into question the historical approach that made A People’s History a bible for a generation of campus radicals. Zinn’s version of our history doesn’t have a whole lot of room for, well, characters like Howard Zinn. In his telling, America has been a succession of calamities perpetrated by an elite whose style may change but whose greed and power-lust are constant. Every now and then, agrarian radicals may organize cooperatives and noble unionists may pull off sit-down strikes. Inevitably, though, these heroes have their footballs yanked away by the Lucys of entrenched economic interest: The agrarians’ beloved Williams Jennings Bryan throws in with the crooked Democratic Party, the unionists’ national organizations sell out to FDR’s compromising New Deal. Other historians of the left note the small triumphs of progressives, the tactical mistakes of activists, or the complexities of a political system that allows incremental reform but resists wholesale change. Not Zinn, in whose version the powers that be always are.
It’s a remarkably boring, binary version of history — not nearly so interesting as the one that Zinn lived. In the real version, a book that casts American government as two centuries of disenfranchisement can become a perennial bestseller even as Americans elect conservative presidents who enlarge the gap between rich and poor. In the real version, schoolchildren can become newly aware of the country’s ignominious racial history, even as the culture intermittently embraces a noxious sort of backlash. In the real version, an African American can become president on promises of health care for all, even as the logistical bumbling of his unwieldy political party makes that goal seem suddenly unlikely. There is real conflict here, with real winners and real losers and frequent unhappy endings. But it’s hardly a study in black and white.
To read A People’s History is to treat the unhappy parts of this narrative as if they’re inevitable, and to regard the triumphs as if they were illusory. It’s to think that, short of a permanent dethroning of the establishment, there’s nothing much worth working for. In its own way, it’s as conducive to inaction as the “Great Man” theory of history Zinn helped displace. But the historian’s life is actually a pretty good argument for action. The Brooklynite with the unpopular politics and the unconventional historical interpretation managed, in his 87 years, to sell millions of books, teach millions of students, and badger his way onto the establishment’s obituary pages. By any standard, Zinn was personally a success. In his own books, with their resolutely loser’s-eye view of American history, that status might make him unworthy of attention. In the real world, he got plenty of it, most recently from obits that suggested he made the country marginally safer for the egalitarian politics he championed — a life story that’s important, even if it’s not transformative. If only Zinn’s history allowed for such shades of gray.
Michael Schaffer is a regular contributor to Obit, where his column Grim Reader appears Friday. He is the author of One Nation Under Dog.
“All those histories of this country centered on the Founding Fathers and the Presidents weigh oppressively on the capacity of the ordinary citizen to act,” Zinn declared in his celebrated A People’s History of the United States. “They suggest that in times of crisis we must look to someone to save us.” For Zinn, it was an article of faith that just about all of those would-be saviors are in fact tricksters, eager to divert our attention away from the real issues by ginning up phony patriotic wars or fratricidal racial animus. Anyone not committed to the relentlessly avaricious goals of our economic elites, the reasoning went, would never be allowed a position of power in the first place.Which raises a disturbing question about the media’s coverage of Zinn’s death: If America’s elite is so determined to hide from its people the realities of their oppression and the possibilities of real change, how did it happen that this full-throated dissident — whose anti-history of the United States begins with a genocidal Christopher Columbus, carries on through a Revolutionary War designed to distract poorer colonists from their class resentments, a Civil War waged in the name of Northern industrial conquest, and all manner of class, ethnic, racial and political brutality — earned long, respectful coverage in establishmentarian pillars like the New York Times or the Washington Post?
For that matter, how did it happen that A People’s History, first published the same year Ronald Reagan was elected president (in Zinn’s world, his victory was a puny matter, simply bringing “another part of the Establishment” to power), still sells more than 100,000 copies a year? What sort of all-powerful, resistance-crushing overclass allows Zinn’s books to be assigned in high schools, or published in special young readers’ editions? What sort of toadying, corporate-owned Hollywood entertainment machine would interrupt the flood of bread-and-circus distractions to feature Zinn’s book in a Matt Damon movie, or celebrate his friendship in a Pearl Jam song, or chronicle his philosophy in a documentary narrated by Viggo Mortensen?
There is nothing wrong, of course, with becoming famous. For a committed activist like Zinn, attention is, and ought to be, a goal: Small-circulation journals are nice, but platinum-selling bands and major motion pictures are even better. Respect from the Times, no matter what A People’s History may suggest, doesn’t prove someone’s yet another propagandistic knave.
But Zinn’s own towering in American pedagogy does call into question the historical approach that made A People’s History a bible for a generation of campus radicals. Zinn’s version of our history doesn’t have a whole lot of room for, well, characters like Howard Zinn. In his telling, America has been a succession of calamities perpetrated by an elite whose style may change but whose greed and power-lust are constant. Every now and then, agrarian radicals may organize cooperatives and noble unionists may pull off sit-down strikes. Inevitably, though, these heroes have their footballs yanked away by the Lucys of entrenched economic interest: The agrarians’ beloved Williams Jennings Bryan throws in with the crooked Democratic Party, the unionists’ national organizations sell out to FDR’s compromising New Deal. Other historians of the left note the small triumphs of progressives, the tactical mistakes of activists, or the complexities of a political system that allows incremental reform but resists wholesale change. Not Zinn, in whose version the powers that be always are.It’s a remarkably boring, binary version of history — not nearly so interesting as the one that Zinn lived. In the real version, a book that casts American government as two centuries of disenfranchisement can become a perennial bestseller even as Americans elect conservative presidents who enlarge the gap between rich and poor. In the real version, schoolchildren can become newly aware of the country’s ignominious racial history, even as the culture intermittently embraces a noxious sort of backlash. In the real version, an African American can become president on promises of health care for all, even as the logistical bumbling of his unwieldy political party makes that goal seem suddenly unlikely. There is real conflict here, with real winners and real losers and frequent unhappy endings. But it’s hardly a study in black and white.
To read A People’s History is to treat the unhappy parts of this narrative as if they’re inevitable, and to regard the triumphs as if they were illusory. It’s to think that, short of a permanent dethroning of the establishment, there’s nothing much worth working for. In its own way, it’s as conducive to inaction as the “Great Man” theory of history Zinn helped displace. But the historian’s life is actually a pretty good argument for action. The Brooklynite with the unpopular politics and the unconventional historical interpretation managed, in his 87 years, to sell millions of books, teach millions of students, and badger his way onto the establishment’s obituary pages. By any standard, Zinn was personally a success. In his own books, with their resolutely loser’s-eye view of American history, that status might make him unworthy of attention. In the real world, he got plenty of it, most recently from obits that suggested he made the country marginally safer for the egalitarian politics he championed — a life story that’s important, even if it’s not transformative. If only Zinn’s history allowed for such shades of gray.
Michael Schaffer is a regular contributor to Obit, where his column Grim Reader appears Friday. He is the author of One Nation Under Dog.
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