History

A People’s History of the U.S.

A few years ago at the local 4-H fair, I overheard a conversation between a young girl and two older women. The conversation was about an entry in the costume class: a pony express rider, complete with an arrow cleverly devised to look like it had been shot through her helmet. The women waxed at length about how peace-loving the native Americans had been before the Europeans arrived, who deserved every arrow they got.  She wanted the girl to understand that the history books were engaged in a hoax to justify a sordid past.

Had she read this book? Or just picked up its atmospheric effects? Originally published in 1980, it claims to present a corrective to the history taught in schools. Yet the ’60s and ’70s had already substantially changed the discipline of historical scholarship. As Rutgers professor David Greenburg writes, “as far as historians were concerned, the sacred cows that Howard Zinn was purporting to gore had already been slaughtered many times.”

What it does:

Zinn presents a history of the U.S. not from the perspective of “states,” as Henry Kissinger described history, but from the perspective of “people”:

I prefer to tell the story of the discovery of America from the viewpoint of the Arawaks, of the Constitution from the standpoint of the slaves, of Andrew Jackson as seen by the Cherokees, of the Civil War as seen by the New York Irish, of the Mexican War as seen by the deserting soldiers of Scott’s army, of the rise of industrialism as seen by the young women in the Lowell textile mills, of the Spanish-American War as seen by the Cubans, the conquest of the Philippines as seen by black soldiers on Luzon, the Gilded Age as seen by southern farmers, the First World War as seen by socialists, the Second World War as seen by pacifists, the New Deal as seen by blacks in Harlem, the postwar American empire as seen by peons in Latin America.

Zinn died in 2010. The book has been revised multiple times and extends through the second Bush presidency.

What I liked:

To an extent, the book serves a hunger for honest accounting. One cannot grow to my age in this country without recognizing huge hypocrisies in our culture and the workings of government, justice systems, taxation, and treatment of humanity in general. Our political class is unremittingly corrupt, and since they hold the power and make the laws, one has a sense of basic brokenness in how things work in carrying out the democratic dream.

The book’s historical content came as no surprise. While I think the teaching of history has changed since I was in high school, and much of what Zinn includes was not covered then, I’ve encountered a fuller picture of the nation’s history through home educating my children in recent years. Of course, A People’s History gives more detail, and I certainly learned more about America’s checkered past.

I think what stood out to me was how quickly problems, cruelties, and inequities emerged in the young nation. I was also reminded of how little I paid attention to the world when I was growing up. For example, the Carter, Reagan, Bush (x2) and Clinton presidencies were all in my lifetime, but I retained only the most superficial awareness of their policies. I wondered what Mr. Zinn would have thought of President Obama, who seems sympathetic in a number of ways to Zinn’s basic views. In any case, it is interesting to revisit the whole story of the nation, especially the eras in my own lifetime.

Zinn predicts that the discontent of oppressed peoples is rising into the middle classes. He argues that the privileged elites have thrown the middle and lower classes a bone now and then to keep them under control, and have used war in a similar way to create a sense (or illusion) of unity. But as time passes and the system grows more corrupt, the swath of people who suffer is growing. I think he is basically right about this.

The questions the book raises about historical study are perpetually interesting. My subject in graduate English study was autobiography, and it involved many of the same questions: how do you decide what to include and what to exclude in telling someone’s story? What themes are endorsed/rejected in such choices? What implicit judgments are made about what really matters? How does point of view shape narrative, or memory? These questions are as formative in telling the story of a nation as they are in telling the story of a person.

What I didn’t like:

Zinn’s wearyingly pessimistic reading of America wore me out by the end. I found myself waiting — and waiting — for an acknowledgment that in some ways, progress has been made because our stated ideals have set a high bar. The ideals of equality and human worth have resulted in a considerably freer and more equal society than we once had racially and in terms of gender. I also felt his analysis was simplistic. Like the grandmother I described in the opening sentences of this review, Zinn sees all of history in black and white, oppressor and victim terms. If you are privileged, you are never given the benefit of the doubt, but all potentially “noble” or “honorable” motives are mere sham; on the other hand, if you are a protesting victim, you are a valiant hero, and the most biased sources are sufficient “scholarly” basis for establishing this.

Zinn is honest about not trying to be objective. But this would have been a much more powerful book if it showed some of the seriousness of historical critiques like Nathaniel Philbrick’s Mayflower, or Wendell Berry’s The Hidden Wound. Philbrick relates unsparingly the horrific treatment of the natives by the Puritans, but his telling is a complex one that doesn’t indulge in sanctimony or moral oversimplification. Wendell Berry struggles to examine the racism in his own local family and culture, focusing on real people and situations and trying to understand how it was enforced for so long. Zinn’s narrative is more melodramatic and makes me wish he would back off and let us contend with the facts for ourselves before his heavy-handed commentary paves over our own reflexes.

Last but not least, Zinn’s hybrid of Marxism and anarchy is obvious from the start, and I’m a little incredulous at his naivete. He concludes the book with a standard socialist dream of the masses uniting and spontaneously throwing off oppression, even though the very book he’s just written has shown time and again that revolutions rise only to the point when someone starts to organize. The labor and race and anti-war protests that rise with startling power at certain points in America’s history all peter out either because organization drains the energy with the proposition of a communistic sharing of resources under some new authority interposed between the people and the authority they are revolting against, or because they devolve into fragmentation and anarchy.

In Total Truth, Nancy Pearcey suggests that Marxism fits the worldview grid categories of Creation, Fall and Redemption “so neatly that many have called it a religious heresy.” Certainly Howard Zinn’s worldview fits her analysis. In Marxism, the counterpart for Creation is matter itself as the ultimate creative power; the Garden of Eden is humanity in a state of primitive communism. The Fall is the creation of private property, which Zinn sees as responsible for activating all the worst in human character and politics. Redemption for the Marxist is in revolution: an oppressed proletariat rises up against the capitalist oppressors and destroys private property.

The trouble is that it has never worked. As Pearcey writes,

This analysis explains why Marxism continues to have such widespread influence despite its dramatic failure ever to produce a classless society anywhere on earth and why it keeps spawning neo-Marxist movements. By incorporating all the elements of a comprehensive worldview, it taps into a deep religious hunger for Redemption.

Zinn’s concluding “I have a dream” chapter sketches a vision of society that fits this description. His longing for the Kingdom of God on earth (but without God) is so intense that he doesn’t seem to notice it depends on children, the elderly, and the handicapped being put to work in a vast cooperative that just. . . materializes, I guess.

Final thoughts:

I read this book first and plan to read A Patriot’s History of the United States next. It appears to be equally slanted, but to the right instead of the left. My hypothesis was that I might be able to use both books in an American history class with my daughter, but for a 9th grader I think this plan would not be feasible. (It might work for a high school student in the upper grades.) In any case, I plan to soldier on through the next book and see how the two visions compare, and see what kind of core interpretation I might be able to come to.

While I love the idea of looking through the eyes of ordinary people in A People’s History, I remain highly skeptical of its controlling narrative perspective. I am at a point where I don’t need convincing that there is something seriously wrong with the way democracy and capitalism are playing out in America. But I don’t agree with the view that this is all fixable by changing structures. The top tier of our culture is made up of a political class that lacks character, reveres big business, and has come to rely on making war as a way of trying to maintain equilibrium. But it’s that character problem that will haunt any mere change in a political or economic “system.” Capitalism doesn’t work without a moral compass, but at least the individual has a vestige of freedom and independence that would be altogether gone in a socialist state.

For the Christian, the only real hope for individuals or nations is in a Savior who changes human hearts. America is not a theocracy, but many of its founding principles express Christian ideals and grow from Christian assumptions about reality. I’m willing to grant that Howard Zinn may be right, and the motives of the “founding fathers” are not any more purely altruistic than any other human being’s. But the ideals of equality, individual freedom, and the inherent value of human life have still had substantial positive effects. We could have no national debate about race or gender equality or the morality of war without that shared foundation. To the extent that we remain accountable to that expression of national identity, we have some hope of attaining to it.

One Comment

  • Rich Milne

    Thank you, Janet, for once again creating a perceptive, perhaps even provocative, review of a book I suspect most of us will not read. Having spent several days recently engaged in a ‘discussion’ with someone who rather strongly holds Zinn’s position, he held to exactly what you write – the privileged are always wrong, underhanded, and motivated only by money, while the oppressed are always honorable, trustworthy, and thoughtful. And Christians are always in the former category. Black and white thinking makes for easy generalizations but seldom engages with the world as it is.
    If you do decide to pursue using A People’s History of the United States, you have probably already discovered there is now a children’s edition, and many teaching resources – albeit rather one-sided – available here – https://zinnedproject.org/teaching-materials/
    Thanks for the reminder, more essential than ever in the current environment, of the need to consider histories not written by the winners.