What Howard Zinn Forgets

“No one people, nation or culture has a monopoly on the shadows of human nature. Historians influenced by Zinn and the story he tells should try to remember this.”

For some people, Howard Zinn is the great warrior for the voices of the historically dispossessed, what we now call the “marginalized.” He speaks up for those who can’t speak for themselves, which seems rather paternalistic in today’s parlance. To be fair, Zinn did at least write history from a different point of view to the much-maligned “great man of history” school. There are really two main issues with Zinn’s work: the quality of his history and the motivation behind it. Neither are wholly good, much as his devotees may insist.

A People’s History of the United States is the book that tossed Zinn into fame. His aim was to write history from a different perspective than the “fundamental nationalist glorification of country.” Broadly speaking, it’s a polemic that relies on secondary sources to fulfill the age-old need of the ideologue to claim to stand for the oppressed against the oppressor. In Zinn’s telling, American history is that of the powerful crushing the powerless for their own gain, exploiting and manipulating the masses to keep them quiet as they subject them to their depredations. In this narrative, those who have human agency are the powerful, who have access to the full range of human emotion, thoughts and ideals, but choose to use them to pursue evil. The rest are an amorphous mass, a blank slate of cowering humanity, who simply wait to be abused by their social superiors.

All this is true, but it does not show the whole picture. America has been a story of a nation continually striving to meet the high ideals laid down at its inception.

The themes explored are a long litany of crimes supposedly unique to the Europeans, who became the tyrannical ruling class of what became America. Zinn does make some valid points. It goes without saying that minorities were certainly oppressed at points in America’s history. The institution of slavery was a disgrace that stained America’s Founding and its first 90 or so years. The expansion of the country came at the expense of the Native Americans, who were already there, and large numbers died. The high ideals articulated by the Founders were honored often only in the breach. The record of economic betterment for the many often left much to be desired. All this is true, but it does not show the whole picture. America has been a story of a nation continually striving to meet the high ideals laid down at its inception. Given human nature, and its slow move to make or accept any change, the evolution of the nation towards the embodiment of the motto e pluribus unum has been remarkable. To take one example: the Civil War, while initially fought to maintain the Union, became also a war to end the institution of slavery. As a result, 650,000 people died because the South wouldn’t give up on its pursuit of that “peculiar institution.” Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia didn’t ban slavery until the 1960’s.