By
Mary Grabar @ Real Clear Public Affairs
This essay is part of RealClearPublicAffairs's 1776 Series, which explains the major themes that define the American mind.
Recently,
Michael Barone heralded a bipartisan refutation of the
New York Times’s
1619 Project. As part of “an ongoing battle for control of the central narrative of American history,” Barone noted, the August 2019
Times magazine supplement had made the case for redefining the founding of the United States from
1776 to 1619, when,
presumably, the first slave ship came to Virginia, beginning a chain of exploitation by which the country supposedly built her wealth.
Barone notes how
Sean Wilentz, writing in the liberal
Atlantic, made “mincemeat” of lead writer Nikole Hannah-Jones’
contention
that “protecting slavery was the main motive of the American
Revolution.” With distinguished historians James McPherson, James Oakes,
Victoria Bynum, and Gordon Wood, Wilentz also
co-signed a letter to the
Times “lamenting” the Project’s “factual errors.” The
National Association of Scholars,
Law & Liberty, and
World Socialist also published effective rebuttals.
Racism and fascism, Zinn argued, were in America’s very “bones”—a charge echoed by
the 1619 Project’s claim about racism being in “our DNA.”
And yet, the 1619 Project is being taught in schools. The Project writers’ success in getting their
materials adopted owes a considerable debt to Howard Zinn’s
A People’s History of the United States, first published in 1980 and also used widely in classrooms
. Zinn, too, draws attention to that ship approaching Jamestown, quoting
at length from an imaginative reconstruction in order to introduce the idea that “There is not a country in world history in which racism has been so important, for so long a time, as the United States.” Racism and fascism, Zinn argued, were in America’s very “bones”—a charge echoed by the 1619 Project’s claim about racism being in “our DNA.” For Zinn, the idea of a
United States was a “myth,” and the nation itself was a “pretense.” Hannah-Jones even claims Zinn’s motto of “bottom-up” history as her own invention.
Zinn advanced Communist Party USA
Chairman William Z. Foster’s interpretation of American history as an
Edenic land subjugated by greedy capitalists, which Foster had
articulated in his 1951
Outline Political History of the Americas.
Both Zinn and Foster trace every bloody event—Indian massacres,
slavery, wars, riots, factory fires—to capitalism. The simplistic
explanation captivates readers. For many, Georgetown University
professor
Michael Kazin notes,
A People’s History
carries “the force and authority of revelation,” such that readers
believe that they have gotten all the American history they will ever
need. Zinn especially captivates adolescents and Hollywood actors—most
of whom, as
Ricky Gervais
quipped, have a Greta Thunberg-level knowledge of history. Zinn himself
became a wealthy celebrity, and he received tributes from rockers and
movie stars when he died in 2010 at the age of 87.
Zinn was asked to write the book after
he had made headlines as a professor butting heads with his college
president, Boston University’s John Silber. Earlier, he had been
fired
for insubordination by Spelman College president Albert Manley. Zinn
led students on civil rights and anti-Vietnam War protests, helped
hide the stolen
Pentagon Papers, testified at Daniel Ellsberg’s trial,
brought home three American POWs from North Vietnam in a propaganda ploy, and lectured in France, Italy, Japan, and South Africa.
In writing Debunking Howard Zinn,
I read many of Zinn’s sources and found egregious plagiarism, . . .
deletion of critical information, deliberate misrepresentation of
sources, and invention of facts.
But Zinn did not do real history—that
is, scholarship that builds on the work of previous historians, gives
accurate and detailed information, and presents a balanced view.
A People’s History,
like the 1619 Project, drew criticism from historians on the left and
right. Kazin felt that it shortchanged progressive accomplishments like
labor laws and civil rights; Harvard professor
Oscar Handlin called it a “fairy tale.” Still, the book kept selling, and sales total about three million today.
In writing Debunking Howard Zinn,
I read many of Zinn’s sources and found egregious plagiarism (usually
from New Left historians and socialist non-historians, like Hans
Koning), deletion of critical information, deliberate misrepresentation
of sources, and invention of facts. Zinn used his status as a professor
to discredit other historians. He attacked Gordon Wood’s mentor,
Bernard Bailyn, whose name appears on many of Zinn’s lecture notes.
Zinn’s devotee, Matt Damon, who grew up next door to the Zinns in
Cambridge, Massachusetts, championed Zinn’s book and mocked Wood in his
1997 blockbuster movie, Good Will Hunting.
Zinn targeted the most accomplished
historians, mainly associated with Harvard University, and winners of
multiple prizes, such as the Bancroft and the Pulitzer. They include
Samuel Eliot Morison (an expert on Columbus) and Bailyn (an expert on
the Founding). Zinn charged such historians with complicity in promoting
a false history of the United States.
The first five-and-a-half pages of A People’s History were largely plagiarized from Koning’s paperback for high school students, Columbus: His Enterprise: Exploding the Myth,
and exaggerate Koning’s own distortions of Columbus. Zinn also attacks
Morison, accusing him of burying the truth about “genocide.”
To preempt criticism, Zinn presents an
analogy of the historian as mapmaker, who “must first flatten and
distort the shape of the earth,” then choose from “the bewildering mass
of geographic information” for the “particular map.” He must consider
“contending interests” and emphasize certain facts over others. So
Morison makes an “ideological choice” by telling “ a grand romance”
about Columbus, whose “’defects,’” in Morison’s words, “were largely . .
. of the qualities that made him great—his indomitable will, his superb
faith in God, and in his own mission to be the Christ-bearer to lands
beyond the seas.” Traditional historiography like Morison’s promotes
“the quiet acceptance of conquest and murder,” Zinn believed, as “the
past is told from the point of view of governments, conquerors,
diplomats, leaders. . . . as if they, like Columbus, deserve universal
acceptance, as if they—the Founding Fathers, Jackson, Lincoln, Wilson,
Roosevelt, Kennedy, the leading members of Congress, the famous Justices
of the Supreme Court—represent the nation as a whole.”
"The Founding Fathers were mortals, not gods; they could not overcome their own
limitations and the complexities of life that kept them from realizing their ideals."
In the People’s History chapter “A Kind of Revolution,” Zinn attacks Bailyn’s essay “The Central Themes of the American Revolution: An Interpretation,” published in the 1973 collection Essays on the American Revolution.
“To say, as one historian (Bernard Bailyn) has done recently, that ‘the
destruction of privilege and the creation of a political system that
demanded of its leaders the responsible and humane use of power were
their highest aspirations’ is to ignore what really happened in the
America of these Founding Fathers.”
Yet the source of this quotation,
Bailyn’s own concluding paragraph, addresses Zinn’s criticism. Preceding
the Bailyn sentence that Zinn quotes is this one: “The Founding Fathers
were mortals, not gods; they could not overcome their own limitations
and the complexities of life that kept them from realizing their
ideals.” Bailyn goes on: “To note that the struggle to achieve these
goals is still part of our lives—that it is indeed the very essence of
the politics of our time—is only to say that the American Revolution, a
unique product of the eighteenth century, is still in process, in this
bicentennial age. It will continue to be, so long as men seek to create a
just and free society.” Bailyn did not ignore “what really happened in
the America of these Founding Fathers,” as Zinn claims.
Zinn also targets a passage from Bailyn’s The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution
(1967): “Everyone knew the basic prescription for a wise and just
government. It was so to balance the contending powers in society that
no one power could overwhelm the others and, unchecked, destroy the
liberties that belonged to all. The problem was how to arrange the
institutions of government so that this balance could be achieved.” The
passage appears in the context of Bailyn’s explanation of a quotation
from John Adams’s 1776 pamphlet, Thoughts on Government, in
which Adams comments on the colonists’ opportunity “to form and
establish the wisest and happiest government that human wisdom can
contrive.” Bailyn himself asks, “how fair . . . was the opportunity?” in
order to introduce the “basic prescription,” i.e., “England’s ‘mixed’
government”—which offered the aristocracy and nobility as safeguards
against anarchy and mob rule.
After quoting this deceptively selected passage, Zinn ignores what Bailyn writes—and
asks: “Were the Founding Fathers wise and just men trying to achieve a
good balance?” He answers: “In fact, they 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.”
Zinn charges that both the Declaration of Independence and its inspiration, Locke’s Second Treatise of Government,
“talked about government and political rights, but ignored the existing
inequalities in property,” and asks, “And how could people truly have
equal rights, with stark differences in wealth?”
Zinn’s ad hominem attacks on John
Locke, whose ideas he wrongly presents as being accepted wholesale by
the Founders, focus on the philosopher’s wealth. And besides, Locke’s
“nice phrases about representative government” were betrayed by the
reality in England, after the Revolution he had advocated had taken
place: “At the very time the American scene was becoming tense, in 1768,
England was racked by riots and strikes—of coal heavers, saw mill
workers, hatters, weavers, sailors—because of the high price of bread
and the miserable wages.” In the American colonies, Zinn notes, “the
reality behind the words of the Declaration of Independence” was that “a
rising class of important people needed to enlist on their side enough
Americans to defeat England, without disturbing too much the relations
of wealth and power.”
No wonder Zinn does not want his readers to read Bailyn, who quotes from a
1776 pamphlet:
“no reflection ought to be made on any man on account of birth,
provided that his manners rises decently with his circumstances, and
that he affects not to forget the level he came from.” Nor would Zinn
want readers to be exposed to the belief expressed in 1774 that “lawful
rulers are the servants of the people” who exhibit “wisdom, knowledge,
prudence,” and “Godliness.”
Contrary to Zinn’s
insinuations, Bailyn thoughtfully explores how the "presence of an
enslaved Negro population in America inevitably became a political issue
where slavery had [the] general meaning [of political oppression]."
Contrary to Zinn’s insinuations,
Bailyn thoughtfully explores how the “presence of an enslaved Negro
population in America inevitably became a political issue where slavery
had [the] general meaning [of political oppression].” Furthermore,
“[t]he contrast between what political leaders in the colonies sought
for themselves and what they imposed on, or at least tolerated in,
others became too glaring to be ignored.” Bailyn cites the increasing
number and intensity of arguments from James Otis, Reverend Stephen
Johnson, Richard Wells, John Allen, and John Mein, including a
“jeremiad” by Levi Hart refuting Locke with Biblical appeals, along with
the measures taken against the slave trade by several northern states.
Bailyn’s mountains of evidence show that a new kind of social system and
government offered a way out of the conditions in England that led to
“riots and strikes” and the injustices of slavery.
Zinn’s attacks on the nation’s most
respected historians, however, seemed to increase the book’s popularity.
By 1992, 300,000 copies of
A People’s History of the United States had been sold, and a second, expanded edition was published in 1995. It got another boost in
Good Will Hunting,
written by Damon and co-star Ben Affleck. When Zinn’s book came out in
1980, Damon was an impressionable ten-year-old. Seventeen years later,
he played the titular star, a 20-year-old victim of child sexual
abuse—and a genius working as a janitor at MIT.
Zinn probably helped write a key
scene. It begins with a barroom debate with a Harvard graduate student
about other historians. Will pegs the Harvard student as a “first-year
grad student” who has “just finished some Marxian historian, Pete
Garrison prob’ly,” whose ideas will convince him for a month, whereupon
he will “get to James Lemon” and become enthralled with “how the
economies of Virginia and Pennsylvania were strongly entrepreneurial and
capitalist back in 1740.” But by “next year,” the genius predicts, he
will be “regurgitating Gordon Wood, about . . . the pre-revolutionary
utopia and the capital-forming effect of military mobilization.” In
response, the grad student presumably quotes from Daniel Vickers’s
Farmers and Fishermen: Two Centuries of Work in Essex County, Massachusetts, 1630-1850,
but Will completes the sentence, saying, “Wood drastically
underestimates the impact of social distinctions ‘predicated upon
wealth, especially inherited wealth.’ You got that from Vickers’ ‘Work
in Essex County,’ page 98, right? Yeah, I read that, too.” The
rapid-fire rebuke suggests that the nation’s oldest and most respected
university serves the rich, while real geniuses are relegated to
janitorial work. It’s class warfare on the big screen.
The information in this exchange comes from one essay, “
Inventing American Capitalism,” by Wood in a journal Zinn read and notated,
The New York Review of Books.
Wood includes a passing reference to Lemon as co-leader of a post-World
War II change in perspective about the shift among colonial
farmers—from “mere subsistence agriculture” to entrepreneurial
production of “surpluses for markets.” Marx’s theory about “the
transition from feudalism to capitalism” did not apply, Wood wrote,
because, while in England large landowners employed tenant farmers,
American farmers, cultivating their own land, were motivated to produce
surplus.
In a later exchange with Lemon, Wood conceded that, yes, “many
social and other distinctions” existed “among the so-called common
people,” but made clear that “those distinctions were less important
than the commonality of ordinary people, that is, the common working
people (the producers) as distinguished from those who in the eighteenth
century were labeled leisured gentlemen (the consumers).” The “blurring
and transformation of this age-old distinction . . . lay at the heart
of the democratic revolutions of the late eighteenth century, the
American version of which was carried further than elsewhere.” One can
see, then, why Wood would be targeted in a movie praising
A People’s History, which presents the middle class as gulled by the “language of freedom” by “a government of the rich and powerful.”
Two generations
have come of age believing Zinn’s fraudulent history. . . . As I’ve
discovered while giving talks, his followers refuse to consider
countervailing evidence.
The cinematic fantasy of a bar-hopping
20-year-old outwitting the best historians is repeated in a later
scene, when Will Hunting scans the books in his psychiatrist’s office.
He reads, “
A History of the United States, Volume I,” with
tough-guy skepticism and tells the psychiatrist that if he wants to read
a “real” history book he should read “Howard Zinn’s
A People’s History of the United States.
That book will knock you on your ass.” Thus, the movie repeats Zinn’s
own claim that his book is the alpha and omega of history writing.
Two generations have come of age
believing Zinn’s fraudulent history. Zinn has become a sainted figure,
and his book has even been used as a
sacred object on which to take
oaths of office. As I’ve discovered while giving talks, his followers refuse to consider countervailing evidence.
By contrast, Wood’s tribute to Bailyn, “
Reassessing Bernard Bailyn’s The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution on the Occasion of Its Jubilee,”
is a hallmark of scholarship. Wood builds upon Bailyn’s research and
ends with a plea for continuing the work. The current academic trends,
Wood predicts, will leave a “popular hunger for impartial and balanced
histories of the nation’s origins” for “non-academic historians” to
fulfill. “Politicized monographs,” meanwhile, will “lie moldering in
university libraries,” to be read, “if they are read at all, only by
other scholars.”
If only this were so. The 1619 Project suggests otherwise.
A People’s History
and the 1619 Project not only teach a false history but also make
students cynical about their country, about historical truth, and about
the possibility of reasoned debate.
Another of Bailyn’s mentors, Oscar Handlin, practically invented immigration history. In responding to his critical review of
A People’s History,
Zinn accused Handlin of political bias. But Handlin, of similar
Russian-Jewish immigrant background as Zinn, enjoyed the opportunities
offered him in our oldest and most revered institutions of higher
learning, where barriers against Jews came down. Handlin’s career is a
testament to the improved realization of our country’s founding
principles.
Traditional history writing is meritocratic. It values learning from the past and engaging in fair debate. A People’s History and the 1619 Project not only teach a false history but also make students cynical about their country, about historical truth, and about the possibility of reasoned debate.
History must be reclaimed from its new aristocracy of ideological
scholars, who see the past only as a battlefield of ideological, ethnic,
racial, and sexual conflict. This approach, which Howard Zinn did much
to advance, has been distressingly successful in misleading young people
in the United States.
Mary Grabar earned her Ph.D. in
English from the University of Georgia in 2002, after working in
advertising and as a free-lance writer. While holding a series of
positions as an instructor, the last in the Program in American
Democracy and Citizenship at Emory University, she wrote articles about
the corruption of education, including by Howard Zinn, and founded the
nonprofit Dissident Prof Education Project (dissidentprof.com). In 2014, she became a resident fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization
in Clinton, New York, where she continued her research on a biography
of the late black conservative writer, George Schuyler. In 2017, she
began writing Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America, which was published in August 2019.
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Earlier this month, Neil Ferguson was awarded membership in the Bureaucrat Hall of Fame
after he and his mistress were caught violating lockdown rules that
Ferguson – in his role as a supposed public health expert – demanded for
the entire United Kingdom.There is a class divide between those who are hard-line on lockdowns and those who are pushing back. We see the professionals on one side—those James Burnham called the managerial elite, and Michael Lind, in “The New Class War,” calls “the overclass”—and regular people on the other. The overclass are highly educated and exert outsize influence as managers and leaders of important institutions—hospitals, companies, statehouses. …Since the pandemic began, the overclass has been in charge—scientists, doctors, political figures, consultants—calling the shots for the average people. But personally they have less skin in the game. The National Institutes of Health scientist won’t lose his livelihood over what’s happened. Neither will the midday anchor. I’ve called this divide the protected versus the unprotected. …Here’s a generalization based on a lifetime of experience and observation. The working-class people who are pushing back have had harder lives than those now determining their fate. They haven’t had familial or economic ease. No one sent them to Yale. …they look at these scientists and reporters making their warnings about how tough it’s going to be if we lift shutdowns and they don’t think, “Oh what informed, caring observers.” They think, “You have no idea what tough is. You don’t know what painful is.”
…there is a broader distrust that we need to understand. …Social power exists in three realms — government, the economy, and the culture. …In all three, leaders tend to be urban, college-educated professionals, often with a postgraduate degree. That makes them quite distinct from much of the rest of the country. …And yet, the top echelons everywhere are filled with this “credentialed overclass.” …many non-college-educated people…see the overclass as enacting policies that are presented as good for the whole country but really mostly benefit people from the ruling class… Let’s look at the covid-19 crisis through this prism. Imagine you are an American who works with his hands — a truck driver, a construction worker, an oil rig mechanic — and you have just lost your job… You turn on the television and hear medical experts, academics, technocrats and journalists explain that we must keep the economy closed — in other words, keep you unemployed — because public health is important. All these people making the case have jobs, have maintained their standards of living… The covid-19 divide is a class divide.
…in Los Angeles — where less than half the county is working now — radio journalist Steve Gregory asked the L.A. County Board of Supervisors whether any of them were willing to take voluntary pay cuts during this crisis. He was told by the chair that his question was “irresponsible,” which is to say embarrassing and inconvenient. (By contrast, New Zealand’s senior officials, including the prime minister, are taking a 20% pay cut.) …There really are two Americas here: Those still getting a paycheck from government, corporations or universities, and those who are unemployed, or seeing their small businesses suffer due to shutdowns. …Then there are the hypocritical gestures, like Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s illicit haircut… People don’t appreciate being lectured and condescended to and bossed around. They especially don’t appreciate being urged to sacrifice by people who make no sacrifices themselves.
Heck, all levels of bureaucracy should take a haircut. Bureaucrats already have a significant advantage
in compensation compared to the private sector, and that gap surely
will grow now that so many businesses have been shuttered and so many
workers have been forced into unemployment.
Now
Senate Democrats have cited the incident in Senate Resolution 580 which
condemns the terms “Wuhan Virus” and “Chinese Virus”, that correctly
describe the origin of the pandemic, as likely to lead to “Asian
Americans being harassed, assaulted, and scapegoated.”
Jose
L. Gomez III, the perpetrator, was stopped by an off-duty Border Patrol
Agent. That’s the organization targeted by some of the Senate Democrats
who signed on to S. Res. 580, especially Senator Elizabeth Warren.
Bernie Ramirez, a graduate of Robert E. Lee High School, an ex-Marine,
and Border Patrol Agent, who prevented Gomez from killing anybody, is
everything that Democrats oppose.
