In my upcoming book, William Howard Taft and the First Motoring Presidency, I documented the hysteria of the progressives and the socialists and how it was counter-productive to the betterment of life for all Americans. There is not an American of success today who owes his or her success to anything Howard Zinn believes. Those who need Zinn need him because they ignore what gives Americans and America success: the God-given rights of man, the rights of property, and the American Constitution.
In Book III, Chapter 9, “Progressively Unhappy & a Happy Discontent,”I nailed this little toad in footnote no. 12 (numbering may change with the final version of the book):
If they wished, Americans of 1911 could look upon their day as the best of times. The country was never more prosperous, and that prosperity had never reached more Americans.(12) Strikes were numerous but comparatively peaceful and contained to local issues and places. While Paris was shuttered by turmoil, labor strife was not part of the American national dialogue. The spell of anarchy that claimed McKinley was left to the foreigners. The riots were in Budapest, not New York. The 1912 elections in Germany foretold the disorder: the Reichstag was split among seven factions, with socialists taking the largest single slice. Even Merrie England was beset by tumult. While suffragettes threw rocks through the P.M.’s windows, George Bernard Shaw declared Jesus a failure. Was the U.S. immune?No thanks to Zinn or his kind, America avoided the socialist calamity. Zinn, get off my television screen.Footnote no. 12: Without apologies to the Howard Zinn school of populist history: workers were better off in 1911 than at any time before in American history. And things were getting better. Sanitation, health, salary, working conditions and hours, housing, and recreation were in improvement, and not just as a result of agitation -- or automobiles. Prosperity brought it. On December, 25, 1911, the Times took an amazed look around and found that “Wage-earners as well as holders of securities have reason for joy this Christmas. Not since 1907 have there been better times for the good workman... the cost of living has fallen in proportion that wages will buy more...” Not only that, productivity was such that labor’s “improving condition is not due to greater effort, but the reverse” (editorial, 12/25/11). ...