Teaching Zinn: Part I
This post and a planned Part II are mostly based on a draft I wrote in March of 2013. That’s nearly ten years ago – how time does fly! I’ve mentioned before that I have a lot of old drafts hanging around. I can’t remember why I never polished the Zinn one up and published it, but I guess seemingly more pressing things always intervened. There are a lot of pressing things at the moment, too, but this topic is perennially relevant. So here it is.
I thought of it again when commenter “huxley” wrote this comment the other day:
However, it seemed to me I was taught [in school] to idolize America above all else without question and it kinda went into the BS hopper of stuff I was supposed to nod along to, like the perfection of the Catholic Church or the indisputable evil of marijuana.
I felt like adults, near and far, were constantly lying to me, and I couldn’t figure it out beyond I would have to figure it out for myself.
In a later comment, huxley added this:
I take Campbell’s point that myths of some sort, including Santa Claus, are part of the human experience because whatever the Truth may be, it’s probably bigger than us poor humans can handle, especially as children. We need some way to grow big enough to assimilate more truth.
I complain that I felt lied to when I was young, including all that Yankee-Doodle-Dandy stuff, that it seemed adults told me more for their benefit than mine.
Yet I agree with neo, that it’s important to have some reverence for one’s country, especially a country as great as America.
I’m not sure how to handle reverence and warts at the same time. The solution today is to forget reverence and get into the warts.
But emphasizing the warts is another set of lies told to benefit a different set of adults.
Which brings us to one of the ways they’re being lied to: by reading the works of Howard Zinn without much challenge, and/or by having teachers who were schooled in the words of Zinn and accepted his basic assertions as truth.
There have been books written about Zinn’s propaganda and the errors it contains, but I doubt those books reach more than a small fraction of those who have swallowed Zinn’s work hook line and sinker. Even a periodical like The New Republic has offered criticism (relatively mild, I might add) of Zinn’s history revisionism, probably to little avail:
Yet when it comes to Zinn’s demand for history to be judged for its political utility, Duberman is finally too indulgent. He can never bring himself to say that the fatal flaw of Zinn’s historical work is the shallowness, indeed the fallaciousness, of his critique of scholarly detachment. Zinn rests satisfied with what strikes him as the scandalous revelation that claims of objectivity often mask ideological predilections. Imagine! And on the basis of this sophomoric insight, he renounces the ideals of objectivity and empirical responsibility, and makes the dubious leap to the notion that a historian need only lay his ideological cards on the table and tell whatever history he chooses. He aligns himself with the famous line from the British historian James Anthony Froude, who asked rhetorically if history “was like a child’s box of letters, with which we can spell any word we please. We have only to pick out such letters as we want, arrange them as we like, and say nothing about those which do not suit our purpose.” Froude made this observation in the middle of the nineteenth century.
Note also how the author of that TNY piece, David Greenberg, mentions his own initial attraction to Zinn’s work in terms much like huxley’s. It’s probably a very common reaction and accounts for much of Zinn’s popularity:
As a faculty brat in those years [the 1980s], I was doubly enamored of Zinn after a classmate gave me A People’s History of the United States, his now-famous victims’-eye panorama of the American experience. In my adolescent rebelliousness, I thrilled to Zinn’s deflation of what he presented as the myths of standard-issue history. Do you know that the Declaration of Independence charged King George with fomenting slave rebellions and attacks from “merciless Indian Savages”? That James Polk started a war with Mexico as a pretext for annexing California? That Eugene Debs was jailed for calling World War I a war of conquest and plunder? Perhaps you do, if you are moderately well-read in American history. And if you are very well-read, you also know that these statements themselves are problematic simplifications. But like most sixteen-year-olds, I didn’t know any of this. Mischievously—subversively—A People’s History whispered that everything I had learned in school was a sugar-coated fairy tale, if not a deliberate lie. Now I knew.
The idea of being in on a subversive and secret truth is part of the huge draw Zinn’s work has for teenagers – and for many adults his work retains that attraction. What’s more, the activist left has been promoting Zinn’s work for many many decades. They are organized and dedicated; here’s a website devoted to the endeavor. Zinn was probably a Communist and certainly a far-leftist, and his lifework, in David Horowitz’s summary, was this: “All Zinn’s writing was directed to one end: to indict his own country as an evil state and soften his countrymen up for the kill.”
I think we can safely say that Zinn has been wildly successful in achieving that goal. Probably even more important than teaching children the work of Zinn himself is teaching it without a critique of his points, and especially teaching it to the teachers who will teach those younger people, teachers who are themselves converts to the Zinn cause.
[NOTE: My intention in Part II is to go into some of the details of many teachers’ dedication to teaching the work of Zinn as the truth of American history.]
Although the corruption of our system of public education into ideological indoctrination has been apparent for some time, the true reality of the horror (subsidized by tax-payers who are funding the destruction of the republic) was laid bare by the various manifestations of the left’s draconian strategy of subjugation and control unleashed by the “crisis” of the Wuhan-virus. The NEA and the AFT and the UFT (amongst other utterly malign and utterly partisan teachers’ unions) received billions from DC in exchange for millions in campaign-contributions, while keeping schools shuttered and innocent children stupidly masked. The propaganda of Zinn has, of course, been insidious and harmful, but even more malign has been the recent obsession, amongst tens of thousands of teachers, with poisoning the minds of the young with BLM/CRT/1619 propaganda and with radical “queer theory” and “gender ideology”.
1) yes that charge was in the declaration
2) considering it was santa ana, who provoke the attack, and the gold rush came two years later,
In retrospect, I was one of the lucky ones: the American history textbook that my high school history teacher used was a two-volume college-level text, the 1962 edition of Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager’s Growth of the American Republic. (Some of you may know Morison as the author of a lengthy biography of Christopher Columbus, Admiral of the Ocean Sea.) The two volumes came to over 1,600 pages, a lot to expect of teenagers over the course of a year, but I thrived on the material. Commager in particular was a liberal in the older tradition of the 1960s, who thought that an educated public knowledgeable of American history would support a broadly internationalist outlook along with a high regard for such programs as the New Deal. He did, however, supply readers with access to the primary sources so that we could read them and think for ourselves– an approach that has been termed “an open marketplace of tough ideas.” Neither Morison nor Commager ignored or covered up the unsavory parts of American history, so I never felt, pace huxley, that they or my teacher were lying to me.
As for that teacher, I was in his classroom on that day in November 1963 when the headmaster gently tapped on the classroom door, summoned our teacher outside, and asked him to tell our class that JFK had just died. He dealt with the news by inviting us to situate Kennedy’s assassination within the history of previous attempts on the lives of presidents as well as coming to grips as best we could with the emotional shock. In short, he treated us like adults-in-progress rather than helpless children, and I never forgot that particular lesson.
To return to M & C, the other appeal of Growth of the American Republic to me was its style– the two authors worked together so smoothly that I could never tell which man wrote which sections. In addition, their style invited teenagers to join the authors on a marvelous educational journey– an appeal to the intellect that either bypassed or recruited teenage rebelliousness. No surprise that I chose to major in history in college.
As for Howard Zinn, Neo may get a chuckle out of this: I had never heard of the man until I had occasion some years back to write entries on alternative medicine for a company that publishes medical and nursing encyclopedias. I had been asked to do an entry on stress reduction and mindfulness meditation, and came across the collected works of one Jon Kabat-Zinn, the resident guru of a stress reduction clinic at UMass Medical School. Kabat-Zinn married Howard Zinn’s daughter, and thought so highly of his in-law that he hyphenated his surname. So of course I thought I had better look up the father-in-law, and . . . came to the conclusion that therapeutic mindfulness is no protection against lefty mindlessness. YMMV, as they say.
I remember that the late john silber, president of boston university, and populist democrat candidate against bill weld, tried to limit zinn’s reach, his mind arson seems to have affected the likes of ocasio cortez,
The teaching profession, once underpaid but highly respected now consists of uneducated, overpaid, increasingly disrespected… child abusers.
latin american history is blighted by a similar figure, eduardo galeano’s ‘open veins, that was a pretty dreadful track, by contrast he admitted that he had gotten some conclusions wrong, late in life, the perfect latin american idiot, by plinio mendoza and the junior vargas llosa provided some antidote, although not as pervasive,
Zinn is just the most well known example of a common error. I’ve seen it a lot, including many college professors, who really believe that US HS kids don’t know that Washington and Jefferson et al owned slaves. They really believe that.
Note, they also believe that, before Columbus, everyone in Europe thought the world was flat. Yes, they often do. I knew better, because Admiral of the Ocean Sea was a fixture on Dad’s bookshelf.* That gave me a lifelong distrust of the standard line of popular and academic history. Yet I have nothing but contempt for simplifiers like Zinn. I am surprised at how often others are surprised at my respect for those historians I like, but disagree with, combined with those I contemn. (Froude, btw, is pretty much in the bad list. I don’t think he ever forgave Catholics for the death of his brother. Another brother was a naval architect. An interesting family. A sister was mother of W H Mallock.)
*Incidentally, I’ve talked with some people who were heavy into designing WWII games, who agreed with me that his is the best “official” history, though it was not technically official.
When I was in 8th grade, I discovered my cousin’s high school copy of “World History.” He had graduated in 1938, the year I was born. I read it cover to cover several times. It read like a novel. Very few pictures but some maps. I lost track of it when I left for college and have tried to find a copy for my kids and grandkids.
Fortunately, I never experienced public school except for one semester of Organic Chemistry at LA City College after I had been accepted to medical school. My first wife and I disagreed on public schools (She was an advocate) but after our divorce, I sent the kids to private school. Years later, she went back to teaching briefly (She had a lifetime credential) and told me that the public schools now were so bad, she would homeschool the kids.
Our problem now is that Zinn and his ilk have already happened. A whole generation of educated Americans have been indoctrinated by his nonsense.
Alan Wolfe also had an article in the New Republic (before the current crew took over) about how American Studies became Anti-American Studies. The link doesn’t seem to work now, but I remember being in high school and reading college catalogues and thinking that American studies sounded like the coolest possible thing to study, because of all the enthusiasm I had for US history growing up. In later life when I actually met some American Studies grad students they all seemed down on the country and determined to “deconstruct” it into various racial or ethnic or gender or sexual orientation groups. The emphasis was always on excluded or marginalized groups or on politically correct dissection of figures from the majority culture.
In academia, especially in the humanities and social sciences, ideology is always a factor, but also consider that the demand is always for “original work” and topics and methods get used up relatively quickly. The kinds of literary interpretation one was doing in the 1950s won’t get you anywhere in today’s academic world, nor will a celebratory (or even a neutral) view of American history. What happens though, when race-gender-sexual orientation also becomes old hat. Will scholars cling to it for ideological reasons or will they look for a new approach, maybe something suggested by science, or will they just give up on the whole thing?
Mary Grabar, Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation Against America (Regnery, 2019).
Good post, Neo! A sociologist friend gave me a copy of Zinn’s book when it first came out in the 1970s…. I was trained as an historian, though my graduate work was mostly in European intellectual history and the philosophy of history. I read Zinn carefully and wrote a careful critique of it, but unfortunately lost my copy in a move somewhere along the line…Zinn’s work is really execrable…bad history with a heavy ideological hand. It’s a pity Mary Grabar’s debunking book is not better. Oscar Handlin who wrote a scathing review of Zinn’s book in The American Scholar. I went around and around with the history faculty in my kids’ (then) highly rated elite suburban high school over their use of Zinn back at the turn of this century. I had the kids read Morison and Commager’s The Growth of the American Republic as an antidote! Liberal consensus history, but factually pretty straight. I’m very much looking forward to Part II!
I liked “Good Will Hunting” (1997) with Ben Affleck, Matt Damon and Robin Williams. I liked how faithful it was to the Boston scene. Why not? Affleck and Damon grew up in Somerville. They wrote the script and they got it right.
But when I watched it later, I noticed Damon, the super-genius street kid, advertising Zinn as a paragon of historical knowledge:
____________________________
If you want to read a real history book, read Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States.” That book will knock you on your ass.
–“Good Will Hunting (1997) – Howard Zinn”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKqR2Tss8Es&t=19s
____________________________
Robin Williams, Damon’s therapist, isn’t much help. His riposte:
____________________________
How about Noam Chomsky’s “Manufacturing Consent?”
____________________________
Sad.
I want a copy of Morison’s History of United States Naval Operations in World War Two. All 13 volumes.
Zinn has clearly a very strange, and nasty piece of work.
It gets worse.
__________________________
Of course, Damon and Zinn go way back. They were neighbors in Newton when Damon was 5 and Zinn was writing “People’s History,” and have been close ever since. In his breakthrough flick, “Good Will Hunting,” Matt’s character, a Southie genius janitor, tells his shrink, played by Robin Williams, to read Zinn’s book: “It’ll knock you on your ass.”
And Will Hunting’s monologue about why he shouldn’t work for the NSA (“It’ll be some kid from Southie over there taking shrapnel in the ass.”) was inspired by Zinn’s work.
“Ben [Affleck] and I were laughing our asses off writing that,” he recalled. “We liked it that the smartest guy in Boston was reading Howard Zinn.”
After Damon’s big-screen shout-out, Zinn’s book went on to sell 2 million copies.
https://www.bostonherald.com/2009/12/07/howard-zinn-fan-matt-damon-speaks-up-at-last/
Say, huxley, OT, but in another thread you mentioned that you saw a UFO as a youth, which intrigued me. Would you care to provide more details?
As a young man I once saw a strange bright green light in the sky for a second. I called J. Allen Hynek, a leading UFO researcher of the day, and his staff told me it was a big meteor which a lot of other people had reported. [I’m not suggesting in any way that your sighting was not legit.]
I recall reading that Zinn used to hang out with members of the CPUSA. I don’t know if there is any proof Zinn was a communist, like a party membership card, but it is probable.
I remember Galeano as the writer of short historical scenes that rehashed his long-held beliefs and didn’t add anything new. That he used his mother’s name rather than his father’s (Hughes) also made me smile.
Before he died, Galeano disavowed The Open Veins of Latin America and had to admit that he didn’t know enough about economics to prove his contentions. Still, leftwing media asserted that he hadn’t gone renegade and US professors said that they would still assign the book. Apparently, Galeano thought the right took his self-criticism too far and recanted his recantation.
It doesn’t look like Zinn ever recanted anything.
Zinn was not only a Communist Party member ca. 1947, but a three-meetings-a-week member. This history was known to the FBI. It was either not passed on to Boston University when he was hired in 1959 or they were told and did not care. That’s a piece of evidence that the much maligned ‘blacklists’ were fairly hit-and-miss. (Do you really believe that FBI agents arrived at Jessica Mitford’s workplace and persuaded her supervisor to fire her from her job selling classified ads? Some of this was just yarn).
Zinn published many books, but the bulk of them were verbose exercises in opinion journalism. His signature was the ‘bibliographic essay’ in the back of each volume, where he tells you what he’s been reading lately. Proper footnotes, endnotes, and bibliography you do not find. From the time he completed his dissertation in 1959 until his death in 2011, he produced about three works of original history making use of primary sources. One was a reworking of his dissertation and the others were minor labor histories; in re one, he had two co-authors and he was the 3d author listed. He specialized in 20th century American history, so his work did not require he master foreign languages, archeological technique, or interpretive skills with antique material. The academic job market was fairly soft ca. 1965, so he received tenure with very modest accomplishment. Nowadays, he’d have been at a branch campus or an unremarkable teaching institution and not at a research university.
A great many professional-managerial types are fundamentally self-aggrandizing. This is more common in certain regions, subcultures, vintages, and occupations. Trash your ancestors, trash that guy’s ancestors, trash ordinary people you fancy are less sophisticated than yourself. Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky were mollycoddled for decades for being assholes. Schoolteachers are dependents and hangers-on.
I read galeano, I knew he was full of carp, it’s also rather short, a small mercy, zinn just goes on an and on, chomsky might have had some understanding of semiotics but he went far afiled, jill lepore, has a successor volume to zinn, but it really hasn’t caught on, in the field of social history,
@SCOTTtheBADGER
I had been picking them up piecemeal until, in the mid-90s, BAM had them all, at low prices too. Don’t know if that’s still possible. About the same time I got William James’s history of the RN in the Nap Wars. And Roskill’s WWII. It wasn’t until some years later I found Corbett/Newbolt’s WWI.
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A one sided presentation of history is more propaganda than teaching, from the Right or the Left. That is, in a nutshell, a reason the Left’s domination of education (primary, secondary and higher) is such failure point for society or, with our weapons and dumbass choices in energy and food), civilization.
}}} claims of objectivity often mask ideological predilections.
ErmaGERD!!!
…Which is essentially a legitimate challenge to expose the ideological substrata, not to abandon the concept of objectivity.
How big of a fuckwit moron makes this conclusion, and how much of an even bigger fuckwit moron decides that the original fuckwit was “correct in doing so”??
SMH. There are some people who should not be allowed out in public, given that they clearly lack the capacity to count to 21 with their shoes and pants on.
}}} A one sided presentation of history is more propaganda than teaching, from the Right or the Left.
The problem with this assertion is that equates one — which overly reveres the nation — with the other — which leads to nothing but social destruction.
The former is misleading but “does limited harm”. The latter is a literal social cancer.
The statement is inappropriate on that level, as a result. The two are not the same by ANY rational means.
}}} If you want to read a real history book, read Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States.” That book will knock you on your ass.
–“Good Will Hunting (1997) – Howard Zinn”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKqR2Tss8Es&t=19s
____________________________
Robin Williams, Damon’s therapist, isn’t much help. His riposte:
____________________________
How about Noam Chomsky’s “Manufacturing Consent?”
____________________________
Sad.
Neither of them are/were actual geniuses. They just played them in movies. 😛
@ PA Cat > “I was in his classroom on that day in November 1963 when the headmaster gently tapped on the classroom door, summoned our teacher outside, and asked him to tell our class that JFK had just died.”
I was in sixth grade, in a small Texas town, and our teacher had the radio on so we could listen to the motorcade parade’s narrators gush over the significance of Kennedy’s visit to Dallas.
For us, listening to the chaotic report of his assassination was like our kids watching the Challenger explosion live on TV — fortunately, not as graphic.
The “hate America first crowd” has always been “Woke.” (or today’s woke is just the latest iteration of hate America first.) Commies gotta commie. They lie. They hate. They misrepresent. Even when they get a fact right, they attribute meaning to it that is false.
Some years back the haters swooned over a video featuring Jeff Daniels citing all kinds of facts and statistics that supposedly demonstrated that America wasn’t great. At one point he goes on at great length about how poorly our students rank academically. Ignore the serious problems with comparing apples and oranges in such rankings or that he is really just impugning what liberals have done to our schools. It’s an excellent example of lefty cluelessness missing the point.
What Daniels and the haters don’t understand is that America’s greatness has nothing to do with scores of average students. America’s greatness is due to a system that encourages and rewards the smartest, most innovative, hardest working people in the world to come here to create wealth and jobs for all of us including dummies.
We win because we encourage a system that raises the incomes and wealth of our least intelligent and least successful. What Jeff Daniels and his fellow haters are far too stupid to understand is that the lower our average test scores, the STRONGER the argument for America’s greatness. Not surprisingly, just another example of lefties getting it exactly backward.
Our problem now is that Zinn and his ilk have already happened. A whole generation of educated Americans have been indoctrinated by his nonsense.
Perhaps a decade ago I had a conversation with two fellow engineers about history. They thought the US had engaged in actual genocide against Native Americas. I told them that wasn’t true, one of them said that his kids textbooks said it happened. He believe the textbook. I was a bit surprised and the conversation moved on, so I didn’t correct him. He was probably in his 40s, and the younger 30 something engineer also agreed with him.
I’ve always regretted not telling them about Zinn, how awful history texts were, etc.
What Daniels and the haters don’t understand is that America’s greatness has nothing to do with scores of average students. America’s greatness is due to a system that encourages and rewards the smartest, most innovative, hardest working people in the world to come here to create wealth and jobs for all of us including dummies.
Fundamentally is rooted in culture: a culture that enables rule of law. Eventually the culture will change and no longer enable it. Our education system as well as open borders are working towards destroying rule of law culture.
huxley,
I hated “Good Will Hunting.” Damon and Affleck might have got Boston right, but they got everything else wrong. Their depiction of a prodigy growing up in an abusive household (and the foster system*?) was immature and two dimensional.
Steve Tesich’s “Breaking Away” was a much more entertaining and realistic depiction of non-credentialed “townies” living amongst College students in a town dominated by elite academia.
*I think Will was in the foster system. Been a long time since I saw it and I never had any desire to re-watch.
It’s said Ben Affleck walked out of a screenwriting class when an instructor ridiculed an early draft of Good Will Hunting. For some people it’s tempting to say that Affleck got the last laugh, but if you saw the movie, and know about the role of rewrites, ghosts and script doctors, and look at Ben’s life lately, you may wonder if they are right.
Re: Good Will Hunting
Rufus T. Firefly:
I understand. But the first time I saw it I was still a committed leftist and also more entranced by conventional, yet fantastic notions of “prodigy.” So a lot of the film’s realistic problems went by me.
The film largely fit my prejudices because the writers had the same prejudices.
One of my themes here — on the Planet of Apes — is that humans will believe almost anything, given the proper circumstances.
I know I have.
huxley,
You don’t have to tell me. I believed the White Sox would go to the MLB playoffs this season!