Last week, Howard Zinn, reigning anti-American historian of America, died of a heart attack. He was 87. Zinn’s gift to posterity was A People’s History of the United States, a book that has done more than any other textbook to instill hatred and contempt of America in the nation’s teachers and their students. No wonder it was such a runaway success. First published in 1980, it has gone on to sell some 2 million copies. And its brief against America was memorialized in “The People Speak” a 4-part mini-series that aired in December.
The outpouring of sentimental pap that Zinn’s passing occasioned was as large as it was nauseating. Typical was Bob Herbert’s emetic eulogy in The New York Times. According to Herbert, Zinn was “a radical treasure” an “inspiration, “ etc. In fact, as my PJM colleague Ron Radosh pointed out, Zinn was chiefly a “propagandist” not an historian. That is, Zinn systematically subordinated historical truth to ideology. Radosh quotes Michael Kazin, an historian at Georgetown University, who noted that Zinn “”educes the past to a Manichean fable and makes no serious attempt to address the biggest question a leftist can ask about U.S. History: why have most Americans accepted the legitimacy of the capitalist republic in which they live?”
My answer to is that Zinn didn’t care about “most Americans.” When it came to contempt, he was an equal-opportunity purveyor. I wrote about this aspect of Zinn’s legacy in a piece for National Review.
During his disreputable tenure as a professor at Boston University, Howard Zinn did everything in his power to subvert the university, partly by subordinating its intellectual mandate to trendy political causes, partly by short-circuiting with malicious levity the high seriousness of a liberal-arts education. He would, for example, pass around his classes a bag containing bits of paper imprinted with the letters “A” or “B.” Whichever token a student picked denominated his grade, no matter what work he did or didn’t do.
The point? It wasn’t merely grade inflation. More insidiously, it was an expression of contempt for the entire enterprise of which he was a privileged beneficiary. Contempt, in fact, was Howard Zinn’s leading characteristic. Its primary focus was America, because that was the biggest game in town. But he had plenty left over for the rest of the world. As Oscar Handlin observed in his review, “It would be a mistake . . . to regard Zinn as merely anti-American. Brendan Behan once observed that whoever hated America hated mankind, and hatred of humanity is the dominant tone of Zinn’s book. No other modern country receives a favorable mention. He speaks well of the Russian and Chinese revolutions, but not of the states they created. He lavishes indiscriminate condemnation upon all the works of man — that is, upon civilization, a word he usually encloses in quotation marks.” Howard Zinn has left us. But his repellent ideas — and even more, the contemptuous nihilism that stands behind and fires those ideas — live on.
Read the whole thing here.
“…why have most Americans accepted the legitimacy of the capitalist republic in which they live?”
Because people strive to be free and will readily embrace a nation and a culture in which freedom is not merely the privilege of the mighty, but a fundamental right guaranteed to even the most meek.
Given the choice between freedom and slavery, only the ignorant or insane would choose the latter.
The absence of comments speaks volumes. No one intelligent enough to read Roger & PM, would have spend precious life minutes reading or thinking about Zinn.
ergo, whatever RK, Radosh, (& whoever else cares that the skunk has died,) says will suffice nicely.
TERRY
“…hatred of humanity is the dominant tone of Zinn’s book”
This phrase could only come from someone who hasn’t read a word Zinn has written.
Thank you, Reverend Phelps, for that heartfelt eulogy.
I haven’t read a word of Howard Zinn, but I can’t help thinking that maybe he was up to that old trick of the Impressionists, upsetting conventional standards to make a name for himself and to get people to think. Or maybe Zinn was just a stinker.
Classy obituary, “I never liked the man and now he’s dead. Dead, dead, DEAD! Ha!”
I looked into Zinn’s book and haven’t gotten past the second chapter.
Although there are good laws, good sausages, and good nations, I grant that it can be distasteful to watch them being made. (So it’s a bad idea to blithely endanger the nation we live in.)
Somebody (C.S. Lewis?) observed that it’s a fashionable modern error to believe that the repellent unseemly dimension of an activity captures its essential nature.
Iirc Heart of Darkness is a snapshot of history in process that emphasizes the tragic but acknowledges the fact of progress.
An astounding article. If this article is based on the author actually having read any of Zinn’s work, then perhaps it’s proof of the right wing’s claims that our education system is a failure: the author cannot compose a coherence argument based on materials he claims to have read.
To: Daryl Smithson (“An astounding article. …the author cannot compose a coherence argument”)
You can’t seem to have aptience for any pro-American POVs. The point as to read the original article in National Review “Professor of Contmept” – that’s the last link in the article. I don’t know you, Smithson, but I’m ready to bet money, you’re a leftie, just like I’d bet money Kimball read Zinn.
I have read this book, and as much as it is maligned by the review above, I think there are elements of it that are quite good, and make a well argued case for change. It’s very easy to criticise because a POV is not shared, but critical thinking has to go beyond that and look to see if there is any merit in a different perspective. I liked it not because I agree with what Zinn has to say, but because he provokes thinking in new directions.
I looked into Zinn’s book and haven’t gotten past the second chapter.
What are you doing man? Okey i am go to the school.What the hell?Come on and go away okey maN?Do you me understand?
He was definitely a smart man but he had a twisted view on the world
The book was still a great read though!
This person is really a history to all of us. Their is a lot of people that did not agree to his book but I salute her for being a good man.