Bob Herbert’s Embarrassing Tribute to Howard Zinn
Last week, radical “historian” Howard Zinn suffered a fatal heart attack while on vacation. I was asked by John Leo, director of The Manhattan Institute’s “Minding the Campus” website, to write a critical obituary of him. You can read it here, or in a slightly different version at The New York Post yesterday.
One of the points I make in my analysis is that while it is easy to show how poor a historian Zinn was; indeed, I argue that it is dubious to even honor him with that title, since he was in reality little more than a leftist propagandist. Yet, I argued that Zinn was important because of the vast influence he had, and how many people took him seriously.
Little did I realize how true this was until I opened up yesterday’s New York Times, and read the incredible fatuous column by one of their regulars, Bob Herbert. Because the paper’s editors think they are publishing an objective and centrist newspaper, they have obviously hired Herbert as their left-wing columnist. Paul Krugman, obviously, is not sufficient for that job. Reading Herbert, if anyone does and even takes him seriously, is an arduous chore.
But in yesterday’s column, Herbert outdid himself. Calling Howard Zinn “A Radical Treasure,” Herbert writes that “His death this week at the age of 87 was a loss that should have drawn much more attention from a press corps that spends an inordinate amount of its time obsessing idiotically over the likes of Tiger Woods and John Edwards.” Leaving aside the truth that at one moment, John Edwards was as much the darling of the Left as Zinn, (indeed, many on the Left saw the first exposes of Edwards’s affairs as cheap right-wing smears orchestrated by The National Enquirer) Herbert’s argument rests on what he considers to have been Zinn’s great importance to America.
Ironically, Herbert’s column proves my main point about Zinn’s influence, one that in fact was entirely spurious and in fact harmful to those who still have some hope that reading good history can serve to inform the American public at large. Herbert, of course, is enamored at the TV and film documentary Zinn and Anthony Arnove had undertaken, “The People Speak.” Like Zinn, Herbert believes whatever change came to America came only from “below,” from the dissent and protest of the poor and the oppressed.
In fact, as Frederick Douglass acknowledged before his death, change came from a combination of what abolitionists had put on the nation’s agenda, and the political system created by the Founding Fathers that led great men like Lincoln to function within the existing system and help create democratic politics that could enact legislation that led to a fairer and more just nation.
I constantly complain about Arthur J. Schlesinger,Jr ’s dubious work regarding the New Deal era. It is my adamant belief that the Ivy League historical establishment disgracefully protected him from serious criticism. Schlesinger’s work suffered because he trapped himself in an echo chamber environment. This was his own fault and he had nobody to blame but himself. Nonetheless, the famous historian possessed a towering intellect next to Howard Zinn’s. Schlesinger also never hated America and even wrote a splendid book taking to task people like him entitled, The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society.
Please note that Zinn’s book, A People’s History of the United States,” was published in 1980. That was roughly five years after the white students jumped on the inflated grades bandwagon. Blacks and other protected minorities were already befitting from the affirmative action policies enacted in the mid to late 1960s. There was no way in hell that Zinn’s book could have been successful in 1960. It would have been ridiculed and quickly forgotten in an era when the academic standards were much higher.
All Howard Zinn ever did was to slander people far better than himself.
I can recall his account of a battle in an uninhabited portion of Vietnam where the number of enemy weapons recovered was less than the number of enemy dead (a frequent occurrence).
According to that lying s.o.b. that meant that we had slaughtered well over a thousand innocent villagers.
Good riddance to bad rubbish.
Howard Zinn believed that getting your facts straight was of secondary importance next to adhering to the “greater truth.” A few years ago, we observed the grandson of Norman Thomas, Evan, saying the facts may not have been accurate concerning the accused Duke University white males—but the narrative was. This disgusting attitude is widely held among the so-called elites. It is inevitable in an era when teachers normally award top grades to their students who merely turned in substandard work. Zinn could have never gotten away his idiocy in a more meritocratic age. He has definitely taken advantage of the lower academic standards that became the norm no later than 1975.
This is the ugly truth about the soft-science grading system in our top universities: affluent white parents hand over a minimum of $200,000 to a school like Harvard and their kid eventually gets a fraudulent credential behind their name. They rationalized the con job initially by awarding inflated grades in the 1960s to blacks and other minorities under the banner of fairness and equality. A relatively short time later, however, the rich brats received the same unearned grades. Gosh, ain’t that John Rawls stuff great? One can get away with a lot of corruption by claiming to be concerned about the oppressed peoples of the world.
part of the popularity of Howard Zinn’s “a peoples history” can be partly explained by the Da Vinci Code phenomenon. While many people around the world profess to being Christian they were ignorant of many of the kernels of historical fact weaved into the storyline of the Da Vinci Code. This knowledge gave people who do not usually study history a sense of being “in the loop” and somehow intellectual. In short, it made people feel smarter than they normally feel about themselves. It’s the same with “a peoples history”, people feel as though they are being brought in on something they were previously excluded from, something that their neighbours probably weren’t a part of. For better or worse, and in a time of general historical myopia, people feel personally smarter for even knowing Howard Zinn.