Progressives and History
In the first summer of the Civil War, the radical Republicans in Congress pressed hard on President Lincoln. Stevens, Sumner, and Wilson demanded instant emancipation and aggressive, destructive warfare against the South. Lincoln was explaining this to a Missouri Senator in the White House one day, and as he stood at the window, sure enough he saw the triumvirate of Stevens, Sumner, and Wilson marching up Pennsylvania Avenue. It reminded him, as just about everything did, of a Western story.
In the old-time frontier schools, which Lincoln and his senator friend had attended, the Bible was the only reading textbook, reading was done aloud in the class, and every mistake earned a whipping.
One of Lincoln's classmates had the misfortune to be reading when the verse came up with the Israelite names Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. He stumbled through the first, slipped on the second, and went all to pieces on the third. The boy received the expected corporal punishment from the teacher. He bit his lip and returned to his desk, and started reading again, then suddenly let out a yell.
The schoolmaster asked him what was the matter. The boy pointed to the next verse, in the Bible in front of him, and said, "Look there; there comes them same damned fellows again!"
* * *
When I had a politically liberal view of things, I felt frustration at my fellow liberals, who conceded American history to the conservatives. American history is a rich field, full of ammunition for progressive arguments. Aggressively theocratic Christians, especially, tend to make twisted, simplified presentations of the Founding Fathers. Yet these tend to go unanswered. Liberals just shrug. I think they feel alienated from American history because on every page, they encounter "them same damned fellows again": Slavery, religion, greed.
Every hero in our history book bears the taint of one or the other, in some degree. Better, perhaps my liberal friends thought, to let the past go and concentrate on the future they want to build. The American past, to them, is a hopelessly corrupt country.
This is complicated; I don't pretend to offer more than a partial answer. And I am not generalizing all "liberals" or whatever you choose to call yourself. I know many who disagree with me on current events, but who can appreciate U.S. history in its complexity, in its lack of purity, who can see America as a muddled human adventure. They can love this place that nurtured them, even as they lament its wrong turns and oppose what they fear it will become. They appreciate that they live in a country where dissent and disagreement have a worthy tradition, a place that allows more diverse cultures to flourish than any other place on earth ever has.
But some others are pure iconoclasts. Their summation of U.S. history is "Lies My Teacher Taught Me." Except those teachers evidently didn't do a good job, because the iconoclast often only knows the scrapings of the story he's gleaned since leaving school.
Iconoclasts have a certain use, especially academic ones. They put a reality check on excesses. They force the dominant views to stay in shape, to defend themselves. They introduce balance by reminding people of what has been left out of the stories. In an integrated culture, where most citizens have essentially the same solid education, iconoclasts are a positive good, if an annoyance. In a land where the basic and accepted version is well-known, a scholarly historian can take a tilt at it and give a fresh perspective.
As an example, I'd give Jeffrey Rogers Hummel's "Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men," which ought to be every history buff's second book about the Civil War. Your first, these days is likely to be McPherson's "Battle Cry of Freedom," but it really doesn't matter. Hummel brilliantly takes on all the sacred cows and received wisdoms, North and South, and stacks up the best evidence against them, or for alternative views.
However, we live in a dis-integrated culture. Our intellectual society is a hive of echo-chambers. So what begins as, or pretends to be, corrective iconoclastic history can become the pure view of the past, in many people's minds. And you no more want a history entirely based on iconoclasm than you want a climate that only rains.
"The People's History of the United States," by the contrarian historian Howard Zinn, was published in 1980. It started out as an iconoclasm. But by now, in its 25th printing, with more than 1 million copies sold, it has crossed over into the mainstream. Whole college courses are taught based on it. Many more courses use it as a central text.
Here's what the Amazon.com review of it says:
Woo-hoo. Except Zinn's attitude toward America is all rocks, no richness. And if you stopped paying attention after 8th grade, you're exactly unsuited to use this book as Zinn claims it is intended to be used: as a counterweight to the prevailing views.
One of many extensive critiques of Zinn's book is here. But the objections can be boiled down to three points: rigid Marxist views, some factual errors (in a book with so much ground to cover in so short a time, they are bound to crop up) and too much left out of the picture.
The last is the most serious. Really, the last two blend; omissions create inaccuracies. Here's an example, a case that is particularly infuriating to me, because I lived close enough to it to understand it in a way the distant "social justice" zealots never can:
But the book features omissions in wholesale as well as in detail. As the "Frontpage" article lists them:
Zinn makes no pretense of presenting a complete overview of the past. But he does aim to change the future. As Zinn explains on the Amazon.com site devoted to his book: "My point is not that we must, in telling history, accuse, judge, condemn Columbus in absentia. It is too late for that; it would be a useless scholarly exercise in morality. But the easy acceptance of atrocities as a deplorable but necessary price to pay for progress (Hiroshima and Vietnam, to save Western civilization; Kronstadt and Hungary, to save socialism; nuclear proliferation, to save us all) -- that is still with us. One reason these atrocities are still with us is that we have learned to bury them in a mass of other facts, as radioactive wastes are buried in containers in the earth."
Note that. He equates "socialism" and "Western civilization" as paired examples of "progress" worth (or not worth) fighting for, as though "headache" was equivalent to "head." And if all this begins to look like the Chomskyite/Michael Moore/Euro-intellectual view of American history, it should.
OK, we all know where Mr. Zinn is coming from. "Publishers Weekly" has him pegged: "According to this classic of revisionist American history, narratives of national unity and progress are a smoke screen disguising the ceaseless conflict between elites and the masses whom they oppress and exploit. Historian Zinn sides with the latter group in chronicling Indians' struggle against Europeans, blacks' struggle against racism, women's struggle against patriarchy, and workers' struggle against capitalists." The book is "a definitive statement of leftist, multicultural, anti-imperialist historiography."
Marxism can have its uses in academic history. Especially if it shines some light on economic motivations in American history. A great many historians come from the social sciences and have a pathetic lack of understanding of money, how it works, and what getting it means to most people. But Zinn's book overlooks some examples crying out for exposure, such as the influence of the tariff on Southern secession, and only calls attention to those that serve his polemical purpose. And, as the "Frontpage" article describes it,
I have the older edition of "People's History." According to PW, the chapters added to the new one "deplore Clinton's pro-business agenda, celebrate the 1999 Seattle anti-globalization protests and apologize for previous editions' slighting of the struggles of Latinos and gays." The reviewer concludes: "It's too bad that Zinn dismisses two centuries of talk about 'patriotism, democracy, national interest' as mere 'slogans' and 'pretense,' because the history he recounts is in large part the effort of downtrodden people to claim these ideals for their own."
Yet even while seeing through the smoke, PW finds Zinn's work "a vital corrective to triumphalist accounts."
What triumphalist accounts? Where are they in the reading lists of the college students who are assigned Zinn's book? Hell, even the middle school textbooks were purged 20 years ago of the old "march of progress" style. Diane Ravitch, assistant secretary in the Department of Education under Bush père, later serving on the National Assessment Governing Board, writes that students now are reading history books that, to avoid the appearance of "ethnocentrism," eschew the very idea of progress. According to an "L.A. Times" article [4-28-03]:
Zinn's vew is the new triumphalism -- the triumph of negativity. And it's now almost triumphant. America is left with a history without heroes. Only the ones who fought against whatever prevailed in America at the time can claim the heroic mantle, in Zinn's world, and then only if they were some sort of approved minority, and only if they never attained any sort of power (and thus became involved in the next crime). His book scorns the Southern slaveholding aristocrat with all the murderous zeal of John Brown, then it turns around and slams the Northern industrialist for mistreating his workers, using the same rhetoric the Southern slavery apologists used.
Here is Zinn's version of the history of the founding of the United States, as quoted in the "Frontpage" article:
The "Frontpage" writer then goes to the trouble of poking for holes in Zinn's argument, as though the author actually was interested in discussing any of this: "If the Founders wanted a society they could direct, why didn’t they put forth a dictatorship or a monarchy resembling most other governments at the time? Why go through the trouble of devising a constitution guaranteeing rights, mass political participation, jury trials, and checks on power? Zinn doesn’t explain, contending that these freedoms and rights were merely a facade designed to prevent class revolution."
It doesn't matter. People who read Zinn now likely don't read "Frontpage" or anything like it. And the rest of us are increasingly cut off from the complex and heroic character of the great players in America's past. It's in a climate like this that a flaccid history book like Ron Chernow's "Hamilton" can become a popular best-seller.
But if you want to see American history from the point of view of the bitter, coccooned Left, Zinn's book is the place to start. From there, it all begins to make a sad sort of sense.
More Zinn-ful thoughts here.
In the old-time frontier schools, which Lincoln and his senator friend had attended, the Bible was the only reading textbook, reading was done aloud in the class, and every mistake earned a whipping.
One of Lincoln's classmates had the misfortune to be reading when the verse came up with the Israelite names Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. He stumbled through the first, slipped on the second, and went all to pieces on the third. The boy received the expected corporal punishment from the teacher. He bit his lip and returned to his desk, and started reading again, then suddenly let out a yell.
The schoolmaster asked him what was the matter. The boy pointed to the next verse, in the Bible in front of him, and said, "Look there; there comes them same damned fellows again!"
* * *
When I had a politically liberal view of things, I felt frustration at my fellow liberals, who conceded American history to the conservatives. American history is a rich field, full of ammunition for progressive arguments. Aggressively theocratic Christians, especially, tend to make twisted, simplified presentations of the Founding Fathers. Yet these tend to go unanswered. Liberals just shrug. I think they feel alienated from American history because on every page, they encounter "them same damned fellows again": Slavery, religion, greed.
Every hero in our history book bears the taint of one or the other, in some degree. Better, perhaps my liberal friends thought, to let the past go and concentrate on the future they want to build. The American past, to them, is a hopelessly corrupt country.
This is complicated; I don't pretend to offer more than a partial answer. And I am not generalizing all "liberals" or whatever you choose to call yourself. I know many who disagree with me on current events, but who can appreciate U.S. history in its complexity, in its lack of purity, who can see America as a muddled human adventure. They can love this place that nurtured them, even as they lament its wrong turns and oppose what they fear it will become. They appreciate that they live in a country where dissent and disagreement have a worthy tradition, a place that allows more diverse cultures to flourish than any other place on earth ever has.
But some others are pure iconoclasts. Their summation of U.S. history is "Lies My Teacher Taught Me." Except those teachers evidently didn't do a good job, because the iconoclast often only knows the scrapings of the story he's gleaned since leaving school.
Iconoclasts have a certain use, especially academic ones. They put a reality check on excesses. They force the dominant views to stay in shape, to defend themselves. They introduce balance by reminding people of what has been left out of the stories. In an integrated culture, where most citizens have essentially the same solid education, iconoclasts are a positive good, if an annoyance. In a land where the basic and accepted version is well-known, a scholarly historian can take a tilt at it and give a fresh perspective.
As an example, I'd give Jeffrey Rogers Hummel's "Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men," which ought to be every history buff's second book about the Civil War. Your first, these days is likely to be McPherson's "Battle Cry of Freedom," but it really doesn't matter. Hummel brilliantly takes on all the sacred cows and received wisdoms, North and South, and stacks up the best evidence against them, or for alternative views.
However, we live in a dis-integrated culture. Our intellectual society is a hive of echo-chambers. So what begins as, or pretends to be, corrective iconoclastic history can become the pure view of the past, in many people's minds. And you no more want a history entirely based on iconoclasm than you want a climate that only rains.
"The People's History of the United States," by the contrarian historian Howard Zinn, was published in 1980. It started out as an iconoclasm. But by now, in its 25th printing, with more than 1 million copies sold, it has crossed over into the mainstream. Whole college courses are taught based on it. Many more courses use it as a central text.
Here's what the Amazon.com review of it says:
If your last experience of American history was brought to you by junior high school textbooks -- or even if you're a specialist -- get ready for the other side of stories you may not even have heard. With its vivid descriptions of rarely noted events, "A People's History of the United States" is required reading for anyone who wants to take a fresh look at the rich, rocky history of America.
Woo-hoo. Except Zinn's attitude toward America is all rocks, no richness. And if you stopped paying attention after 8th grade, you're exactly unsuited to use this book as Zinn claims it is intended to be used: as a counterweight to the prevailing views.
One of many extensive critiques of Zinn's book is here. But the objections can be boiled down to three points: rigid Marxist views, some factual errors (in a book with so much ground to cover in so short a time, they are bound to crop up) and too much left out of the picture.
The last is the most serious. Really, the last two blend; omissions create inaccuracies. Here's an example, a case that is particularly infuriating to me, because I lived close enough to it to understand it in a way the distant "social justice" zealots never can:
According to Zinn, it was Mumia Abu-Jamal’s “race and radicalism,” as well as his “persistent criticism of the Philadelphia police” that landed him on death row in the early 1980s. Nothing about Abu-Jamal’s gun being found at the scene; nothing about the testimony of numerous witnesses pointing to him as the triggerman; nothing about additional witnesses reporting a confession by Abu-Jamal—it was Abu-Jamal’s dissenting voice that caused a jury of twelve to unanimously sentence him to death.
But the book features omissions in wholesale as well as in detail. As the "Frontpage" article lists them:
Washington’s Farewell Address, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, and Reagan’s speech at the Brandenburg Gate all fail to merit a mention. Nowhere do we learn that Americans were first in flight, first to fly across the Atlantic, and first to walk on the moon. Alexander Graham Bell, Jonas Salk, and the Wright Brothers are entirely absent. Instead, the reader is treated to the exploits of Speckled Snake, Joan Baez, and the Berrigan brothers. While Zinn sees fit to mention that immigrants often went into professions like ditch-digging and prostitution, American success stories like those of Alexander Hamilton, John Jacob Astor, and Louis B. Mayer — to name but a few — are excluded. Valley Forge rates a single fleeting reference, while D-Day’s Normandy invasion, Gettysburg, and other important military battles are left out. In their place, we get several pages on the My Lai massacre and colorful descriptions of U.S. bombs falling on hotels, air-raid shelters, and markets during the Gulf War of the early 1990s.
Zinn makes no pretense of presenting a complete overview of the past. But he does aim to change the future. As Zinn explains on the Amazon.com site devoted to his book: "My point is not that we must, in telling history, accuse, judge, condemn Columbus in absentia. It is too late for that; it would be a useless scholarly exercise in morality. But the easy acceptance of atrocities as a deplorable but necessary price to pay for progress (Hiroshima and Vietnam, to save Western civilization; Kronstadt and Hungary, to save socialism; nuclear proliferation, to save us all) -- that is still with us. One reason these atrocities are still with us is that we have learned to bury them in a mass of other facts, as radioactive wastes are buried in containers in the earth."
Note that. He equates "socialism" and "Western civilization" as paired examples of "progress" worth (or not worth) fighting for, as though "headache" was equivalent to "head." And if all this begins to look like the Chomskyite/Michael Moore/Euro-intellectual view of American history, it should.
OK, we all know where Mr. Zinn is coming from. "Publishers Weekly" has him pegged: "According to this classic of revisionist American history, narratives of national unity and progress are a smoke screen disguising the ceaseless conflict between elites and the masses whom they oppress and exploit. Historian Zinn sides with the latter group in chronicling Indians' struggle against Europeans, blacks' struggle against racism, women's struggle against patriarchy, and workers' struggle against capitalists." The book is "a definitive statement of leftist, multicultural, anti-imperialist historiography."
Marxism can have its uses in academic history. Especially if it shines some light on economic motivations in American history. A great many historians come from the social sciences and have a pathetic lack of understanding of money, how it works, and what getting it means to most people. But Zinn's book overlooks some examples crying out for exposure, such as the influence of the tariff on Southern secession, and only calls attention to those that serve his polemical purpose. And, as the "Frontpage" article describes it,
Zinn’s Marxism extends beyond economic concerns. If classical Marxism can be boiled down to “worker=good, entrepreneur=bad,” cultural Marxism’s primitive grunt might be translated into “minorities, good; white guys, bad.” In a “people’s history,” the “people” include feminist women, racially conscious blacks, socialists, and other politically attuned folks. Conservatives, believing Christians, rich guys, and other such people aren’t “the people,” at least the ones Zinn is referring to.
I have the older edition of "People's History." According to PW, the chapters added to the new one "deplore Clinton's pro-business agenda, celebrate the 1999 Seattle anti-globalization protests and apologize for previous editions' slighting of the struggles of Latinos and gays." The reviewer concludes: "It's too bad that Zinn dismisses two centuries of talk about 'patriotism, democracy, national interest' as mere 'slogans' and 'pretense,' because the history he recounts is in large part the effort of downtrodden people to claim these ideals for their own."
Yet even while seeing through the smoke, PW finds Zinn's work "a vital corrective to triumphalist accounts."
What triumphalist accounts? Where are they in the reading lists of the college students who are assigned Zinn's book? Hell, even the middle school textbooks were purged 20 years ago of the old "march of progress" style. Diane Ravitch, assistant secretary in the Department of Education under Bush père, later serving on the National Assessment Governing Board, writes that students now are reading history books that, to avoid the appearance of "ethnocentrism," eschew the very idea of progress. According to an "L.A. Times" article [4-28-03]:
One middle school textbook that Ravitch describes "lauds every world culture as advanced, complex, and rich with artistic achievements, except for the United States." Textbooks "sugarcoat practices in non-Western cultures that they would condemn if done by Europeans or Americans .... They condemn slavery in the western world but present slavery in Africa and the Middle East as benign ...."
Zinn's vew is the new triumphalism -- the triumph of negativity. And it's now almost triumphant. America is left with a history without heroes. Only the ones who fought against whatever prevailed in America at the time can claim the heroic mantle, in Zinn's world, and then only if they were some sort of approved minority, and only if they never attained any sort of power (and thus became involved in the next crime). His book scorns the Southern slaveholding aristocrat with all the murderous zeal of John Brown, then it turns around and slams the Northern industrialist for mistreating his workers, using the same rhetoric the Southern slavery apologists used.
Here is Zinn's version of the history of the founding of the United States, as quoted in the "Frontpage" article:
“Around 1776,” A People’s History informs, “certain important people in the English colonies made a discovery that would prove enormously useful for the next two hundred years. They found that by creating a nation, a symbol, a legal unity called the United States, they could take over land, profits, and political power from the favorites of the British Empire. In the process, they could hold back a number of potential rebellions and create a consensus of popular support for the rule of a new, privileged leadership.”
Zinn sarcastically adds, “When we look at the American Revolution this way, it was a work of genius, and the Founding Fathers deserve the awed tribute they have received over the centuries. They created the most effective system of national control devised in modern times, and showed future generations of leaders the advantages of combining paternalism with command.” Rather than the spark that lit the fire of freedom and self-government throughout much of the world, the American Founding is portrayed as a diabolically creative way to ensure oppression.
The "Frontpage" writer then goes to the trouble of poking for holes in Zinn's argument, as though the author actually was interested in discussing any of this: "If the Founders wanted a society they could direct, why didn’t they put forth a dictatorship or a monarchy resembling most other governments at the time? Why go through the trouble of devising a constitution guaranteeing rights, mass political participation, jury trials, and checks on power? Zinn doesn’t explain, contending that these freedoms and rights were merely a facade designed to prevent class revolution."
It doesn't matter. People who read Zinn now likely don't read "Frontpage" or anything like it. And the rest of us are increasingly cut off from the complex and heroic character of the great players in America's past. It's in a climate like this that a flaccid history book like Ron Chernow's "Hamilton" can become a popular best-seller.
But if you want to see American history from the point of view of the bitter, coccooned Left, Zinn's book is the place to start. From there, it all begins to make a sad sort of sense.
More Zinn-ful thoughts here.
Labels: Howard Zinn
