Bob Herbert’s Embarrassing Tribute to Howard Zinn
Herbert, like Zinn, thinks that “our tendency is to give these true American heroes short shrift, just as we gave Howard Zinn short shrift.” Neither is true. The true heroes of whom Herbert speaks—the abolitionists, the civil rights movement, the labor movement, etc.- have in fact been given their just due in all of our contemporary textbooks. Indeed, they are often given the only credit for change and growth to the exclusion of presidents, political leaders, businessmen and the like. As for Zinn, as his own column reveals, the late propagandist (what I prefer to call Zinn) has been given far too much attention. That is especially the case for his forthcoming DVD and the TV special aired two weeks ago.
Herbert likes him and thinks Zinn was not a radical, because all he did was to “peel back the rosy veneer of much of American history to reveal sordid realities that had remained hidden for too long.” The problem is what Zinn often saw as a rosy veneer was to deprecate those who thought the US was fighting for freedom in efforts such as World War II, which Zinn essentially argued that even that would-be “good war” was one featuring Western atrocities against the innocent of Europe. In that, his critique echoed that of right-wing isolationists like Pat Buchanan.
For Zinn and Herbert it is all black or white. Andrew Jackson was not to be heralded as a good leader, frontiersman, or man of the people, but rather, as a “slaveholder, land speculator, executioner of dissident soldiers, exterminator of Indians.” Rather than try to put someone like Jackson in the context of his times, and to reveal the complexity of his story- as writer Jon Meacham or a historian like Sean Wilentz have sought to do-Zinn preferred to denigrate and paint all of America’s greatest leaders as part of a long list of warlike oppressors of those who were ground down.
So Herbert thinks that Howard Zinn was not only “a treasure and an inspiration,” but that Zinn was thought of as somewhat of a radical “says way more about this society that it does about him.” If radical is defined as “going to the root,” then it is certainly true that Zinn was not a radical. He did not go to the root. What he did is consciously distort America’s past as part of his effort to mine our history to promote extreme left-wing solutions today.
Herbert approves of those solutions. That is the answer as to why he thinks Zinn must be favorably remembered, and why he offers his readers a one-sided and inaccurate appraisal of Howard Zinn, who was anything but a great historian.
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.