Debunking Howard Zinn
Well, it’s about time this book was written. It’s called Debunking Howard Zinn:
Not only is Grabar’s book a thoroughly researched and exquisitely compiled refutation of Zinn’s book, but she covers the historical analysis in an approachable, flowing style that keeps you fully engaged with her discussion.
I haven’t read the book, but anything that could cut into the influence of the pernicious Zinn text A People’s History of the United States is worth taking a look at. Thing is, will the people who need to take a look at it be doing so? Grabar’s book’s subtitle is Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation Against America,” and that’s a mouthful—although, actually, I’d revise it and say that Zinn’s book helped to turn several generations against America. And it had a lot of help.
After all, Zinn’s magnum opus was written in 1980, and it received considerable attention and plaudits from the start:
A People’s History was a runner-up in 1980 for the National Book Award. It frequently has been revised, with the most recent edition covering events through 2005. More than two million copies have been sold.
In a 1998 interview, Zinn said he had set “quiet revolution” as his goal for writing A People’s History. “Not a revolution in the classical sense of a seizure of power, but rather from people beginning to take power from within the institutions. In the workplace, the workers would take power to control the conditions of their lives.”
The Marixist premises of Zinn’s vision are clear. 1980, of course, was the year Ronald Reagan was elected. He may have been elected, but Zinn may have had the last laugh.
Zinn’s book had plenty of help, as I’ve mentioned. Look, for example, at Wikipedia’s excerpts from laudatory book reviews when the work first came out. Of course, there was also criticism (Wiki offers excerpts from some of that, too). But Zinn’s was the book a lot of leftist educators were waiting for, and it became a standard in many classrooms in the US, to great effect, and was embraced by many teachers.
Even before Zinn wrote his book, there was a movement to tear down the way American history had been taught before. I am reminded of the observations of Allan Bloom, author of The Closing of the American Mind and in some ways Zinn’s opposite. In this previous post of mine I offered a quote from Bloom describing how long this has been going on, and from how many sources.
So Zinn’s book fell on fertile ground, and without that encouragement I doubt it would have had the widespread effect it did. Most of us (and that includes me) weren’t paying much attention at the time. That’s how it was possible that the book’s influence became so widespread. At this point, can a counterbook such as Grabar’s have much effect? It seems to me that the tide against which it is swimming is very very strong.
“In a 1998 interview, Zinn said he had set “quiet revolution” as his goal for writing A People’s History. “
So for almost 4 decades our children have been taught history not from a history book, but from a polemic; Zinn’s little red book.
“It seems to me that the tide against which it is swimming is very very strong.” [Neo]
This is true, but then again, they keep saying that about Trump, too, and he just keeps on.
The National Book Award is distributed by members of our chatterati – people like Kurt Vonnegut, not people who are actually well-educated in any department of history.
Academic historians august and scruffy can see Zinn for what he was – an opinion journalist whose career benefited greatly from having entered the field when the academic job market was quite soft. He produced little or nothing in the way of academic journal articles. From the time he entered graduate school (ca. 1953) until the time he died in 2010, his original scholarly work consisted of his dissertation, a revision of his dissertation (that it might be issued as a university press book), and two or three labor histories (in re one of which he was the tertiary author in a collaboration). He specialized in 20th c American history, which did not require a foreign language facility or delving into recondite literature. He had no manifest skills as a cliometrician. He wrote and wrote, but all of his works bar those named above were extended exercises in opinion journalism. None of them had a proper architecture of notes and bibliography. His signature was the ‘bibliographical essay’ (he called it), a brief squib on the last page telling you what he’d been reading lately. He wasn’t a theoretician of any kind, so there isn’t much excuse for investing your time in this kind of writing. (Starboard authors who wish to write this way have a choice of about three small imprints who put out fewer than twenty titles a year between them, of which yours likely will not be one). Faculty members under 70 are cognizant of the reality that one of their contemporaries with Zinn’s demonstrated skills would have likely spent their career at a rank and file teaching institution. There would not be a place for such a person at a research university of moderate selectivity like BU.
Who takes Zinn seriously? Again, our chatterati, schoolteachers, school administrators, the media, &c. And that’s the reality. The dependents and hangers-on of our academic intelligentsia have no loyalty to the country which they inhabit and fancy themselves visitors from some superior place.
Who takes Zinn seriously?
On spec I’d suggest contemporary phrenologists most of all.
The first time I ever heard of this book was in the movie ‘Good Will Hunting’.
“Most of us (and that includes me) weren’t paying much attention at the time. That’s how it was possible that the book’s influence became so widespread. At this point, can a counterbook such as Grabar’s have much effect? It seems to me that the tide against which it is swimming is very very strong.” – Neo
Cue the Solzhenitsyn quote about “if we had only known we would have stopped the Communists sooner.”
What was the excuse in 1980?
If he’s such a nonentity, and his book is so bad: how did he manage to win so bigly?
Who was actually pushing the book, and who was buying it?
Why didn’t parents and (real) teachers and scholars push back?
Why wasn’t anyone on the right paying attention?
I do not believe Zinn’s book was in the curriculum at my kids’ schools (1983 ff), but they didn’t always bring home all their books — and at the time, with no internet or research access, how would I (“just” a parent) have known how pernicious it was?
Even more to the point, what kind of effort would it take NOW to restore a conservative infrastructure to the point that a non-propaganda leftist-brainwashing environment could even begin to be constructed?
/rant
I started reviewing books for a local newspaper in Portland, Oregon in 1985, and soon enough I had great freedom to pick non-fiction books that caught my fancy — such as a biography of Wilhelm Reich, also a book by Jonathan Schell. I was caught up for a while in the delusion that I was “educating” the community, and to this end I did survey pieces on Japanese and the Eastern European fiction, pieces that turned out to be very popular and helped move me on to writing for the L.A. Times later on.
I picked up and read the Zinn book, and I should have been sympathetic, as I certainly conceived of myself as being on the Left at that time. However, Zinn’s slanted pseudo-history repelled me. I found myself losing interest and disliking and distrusting the author before I finished. I don’t think I realized what a big deal the book was, nor how it would endure. I do know I was much more likely, always, to do a positive review as opposed to shooting something down.
So that was the end of it for me. I remember sharing my opinion of it a few times in coffee shops or bars, but that’s as far as it went.
Like all other postmodernists, Zinn did not believe in objective truth. Exactly like the others, he felt true objectivity was impossible, and he took this belief to the grave. Postmodernists are unable to disentangle from their limited perspective of history, and they project this disability onto the rest of humanity. They thereby give themselves permission to adopt and hold unchallenged biases in perpetuity.
Although they can persuade fools to adopt their narrow visions, time mercilessly slays each and every one of them, thus saving them all from self-imposed foolishness.
Like all other postmodernists, Zinn did not believe in objective truth.
Zinn was an old-school Red. Seriously doubt he didn’t believe in objective truth. I think Sidney Hook discovered in his Marxist days that other Marxists were antagonistic to empirical tests of their viewpoint; for something to be acknowledged as truth, it had to be consistent with Grand Theory and evaluation of Grand Theory was discursive.
The first time I ever heard of this book was in the movie ‘Good Will Hunting’.
IIRC, the Damon family was haut bourgeois and personally acquainted with the Zinns and the Chomskys. Damon has next-ot-no background in quantitative disciplines just the sort of person who’d be taken in by the book. I have a dear cousin who is an admirer of Zinn and outspoken Berniebro; he’s employed as a writing instructor.
“Good Will Hunting” did nail the Dunkin’ Donuts devotion among the Boston area working-class. Many’s the evening I picked up a medium DD coffee with a chocolate old-fashioned doughnut then caught the Cambridge Central Square bus to Brighton for the night shift at the Honeywell factory.
I read Zinn’s “People’s History” on account of “Good Will Hunting.” I was a leftist then, so I wasn’t terribly indignant. But the main thing missed in this discussion is that Zinn’s History is phenomenally readable. Bite-sized anecdotes strung together with punchy leftist commentary. It is a real page-turner.
Because American History has usually been taught, or conveyed in books, movies and television, with a one-sided, aristocratic grandeur, Zinn’s version comes like a thunderbolt. Reading Zinn is like an initiation into a great secret. What about the labor movements, the average person or minorities?
These are legitimate questions, which had been largely down-played until the sixties. Zinn is an unreliable historian, as I hope Grabar reliably demonstrates, but his lifting the curtain on America’s shadow side has its place and Zinn wouldn’t have had his impact if the shadows had been so strongly upheld.
Of course, the problem now is that the astonishing miracle which is the United States of America is in the shadows, waiting to be re-revealed.
My sisters live in the Boston area, so I still return, and though I’ve tried, I’ve never recovered the ambrosial satisfaction I recall from a Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and a chocolate old-fashioned.
You can’t go home again.
–Thomas Wolfe
The coffee is mediocre. Too weak. Some of the doughnuts are satisfactory – fried cakes, sour cream, blueberry, not the more elaborate flavors. The real ace is the crescent rolls. Especially filled with sausage and cheese.
Art Deco: Well, as you know, I always bow to your superior pronouncements.
However, it occurs to me that maybe the DD product has changed from what I ate and drank in the late 1970s. I have heard that today’s Twinkie is not the same.
DD coffee is not a gourmet blend, but if that’s most of what you drink, it is splendid enough. I’d still take DD over a dark-roasted Starbucks.
Last night I watched “The American President,” directed by Rob Reiner and written by Aaron Sorkin. It’s the movie which basically launched “The West Wing” TV show and its script outtakes became much of WW’s first season.
The odd thing, in retrospect, was the aristocratic grandeur and reverence Democrats had for the Presidency and America as the shining city on a hill. It seems so … 1997.
The film is almost humorous for its hard-hitting liberal tropes, completely unexamined of course, that gun control and climate change were the obvious principled issues and the right guy as President, i.e. Michael Douglas at the peak of his powers, could make that right (and get the girl!) with a single speech.
Almost twenty years later that’s still where Democrats are and no smarter that their signature issues haven’t taken hold no matter what they do.
Democrats have become so anti-American that I question whether they can ever return to the “West Wing-ish” love for the United States they claimed not long ago.
Zinn: “I was not going to be an objective historian, because I didn’t really believe objectivity was possible, nor was it desirable…”
Moreover,
“Objectivity is impossible and it is also undesirable. That is, if it were possible it would be undesirable, because if you have any kind of a social aim, if you think history should serve society in some way; should serve the progress of the human race; should serve justice in some way, then it requires that you make your selection on the basis of what you think will advance causes of humanity.”
The common overarching theme among postmodernists is their abiding belief that the narrow focus they are trapped in is inescapable by anyone. As objectivity is the surest bridge to a changed perspective, it is the bridge they seek to deny and destroy if possible. Yet quite obviously they cannot. Best to avoid these chronically frustrated pissants. They see enemies everywhere.
The common overarching theme among postmodernists i
Again, what he said was that ‘objectivity’ is impossible, not that there is no truth. And he’s right. Some sort of normative consideration is incorporated into what you deem salient and what you don’t.
Grabar’s book will force you to understand why Zinn’ book is so very destructive, so intentionally destructive. “Debunking Howard Zinn”, in almost every single sentence, unwinds and exhaustively documents the depths of Zinn’s falsehoods and deceptive approach.
All three of my children were subjected to Zinn’s “history”. Most parents, in a very good school district, were oblivious because it was only mentioned as an aside as a “resource” supplement. There were no other counter-factual resource supplements provided. I complained to the Department head, a highly respected “educator”. He said he used Zinn’s book when he taught. He was shocked that anyone would question Zinn.
Similarly, my sister-in-law was also shocked when I pointed out how awful Zinn’s false narrative is and how harmful it will be for her children. She has a graduate degree from Georgetown and thought the book the most influential she ever read.
Grabar’s exhaustive research and documentation does just cites multiple alternative sources – heaps of sources and books that Zinn intentionally ignored. Willfully and intentionally ignored. And, unlike Zinn, she demonstrates how an author should source background material
Ironically the mantra in the ’60’s from radicals like Zinn was to not trust anyone over thirty and to question authority. Grabar makes the case. Zinn’s work should never have ever been trusted and every word he wrote, and those of his sources should be questioned. It should be placed in the dust bin and ignored.
But it’s more than the future. The use of Zinn’s “history” in a public school, really any school, borders on criminal. Our children deserve better. Grabar’s book provides the antidote to remove the scales from the eyes of a generation of children who have been subjected to Zinn’s “work”. Buy this book and gift it to those who have been cheated out of an education! Buy it now. They need to begin questioning what they’ve been taught!
The Left is very patient, good at playing the long game. Conservatives, not so much. Thus, turning the tide may be a futile effort.
Grabar’s exhaustive research and documentation does just cites multiple alternative sources – heaps of sources and books that Zinn intentionally ignored. Willfully and intentionally ignored. And, unlike Zinn, she demonstrates how an author should source background material
Zinn didn’t make a habit of constructing a proper architecture of references. His dissertation advisor may have insisted on it in 1959, but it’s usually absent from his books.
I’m 3/4 through “Debunking.” It is worthwhile and highly recommended. It’s not a polemic–it’s a true debunking, so it’s filled with historical context missing in Zinn’s book.
Zinn’s book is filled with plagiarism, quotations out of context (in many cases, reversing meaning) and outright error and falsification, failing standards of historical and ethical scholarship.
The editions issued in the last 20 years have been under the imprint of HarperCollins. Not sure about the earlier editions. So, a trade publisher thought they could make money off this. Again, there’s an audience among a certain sort of bourgeois for verbose libels. A great many sh!ts in this world.
I think if he’d wanted to place it with a university press he might have been compelled to incorporate a proper set of notes and bibliography.
The first indication a book or a thing is Red is the use of the term “People’s” in its title.
Journalism ethics and standards
While various existing codes have some differences, most share common elements including the principles of truthfulness, accuracy, objectivity, impartiality, fairness, and public accountability, as these apply to the acquisition of newsworthy information and its subsequent dissemination to the public.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalism_ethics_and_standards
Traditional journalists at least strove for objectivity, which made for a vastly superior product to that of today’s advocacy journalists.