One of the unwritten laws of opinion journalism is to never kick a man when he’s dead, at least, not until an appreciable amount of time has passed. The question is whether this can or should hold true for those who make their living by doing precisely that. The death at the age of 87 of pseudo-historian Howard Zinn raises this issue all over again, since very few academics have made a better living defaming the dead, with everyone from Columbus to Ronald Reagan, and thousands in between, being accused by the jocular old harpy of any number of hideous crimes, not one of whom, needless to say, being alive to answer the charges. It is, of course, the job of the historian to examine the acts of the deceased; and some consider it an equal part of their profession to pass judgement upon them. In the case of Zinn, however, he passed judgment with such slothful ease, and such obvious sadistic pleasure in issuing his condemnations, that one cannot muster up much sympathy at the prospect of the man’s memory dying by his own sword.
There seems to be some awareness of this fact even among his many admirers in the media. The major outlets have proven surprisingly tardy to mark the man’s passing, as if they were at a loss to find a way to describe him and his work without arousing the ire of their readership. This shouldn’t come as much a surprise, since the entire industry of Zinn (and it is an industry) tends to do everything within its power to cover up the man’s anti-Americanism, authoritarianism, and his flagrant abuses of his ostensible profession. Any display of the deceased’s actual beliefs and accomplishments, they seem to fear, might expose the fact that the emperor wore no clothes.
Thus far, the major obituary making the rounds is the generic wire-service report from the AP; itself a model of dissembling and misdirection. It pronounces that Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States “was, fittingly, a people’s best-seller, attracting a wide audience through word of mouth and reaching 1 million sales in 2003.” In fact, as the article goes on to state, “his book was taught in high schools and colleges throughout the country” meaning, for those who can put two and two together, that the book became a bestseller largely because a generation of professors forced their students to buy it — a fitting metaphor for Zinn’s view of “the people.”
These generous and studied falsehoods are to be expected in regard to Zinn. Rewriting history to suit his beliefs was always his finest specialty, a fact he openly acknowledged on numerous occasions; that his eulogists would adopt the same tactics is not a surprise. Unfortunately, as we all know, rewriting history does not necessarily make for good history, or even history at all. Indeed, even in regard to his own work, Zinn was quite incapable of accuracy.
In a 1998 interview with The Associated Press, Professor Zinn acknowledged that he was not trying to write an objective history, or a complete one. He called his book a response to traditional works, the first chapter, not the last, of a new kind of history.
“There’s no such thing as a whole story; every story is incomplete,” Professor Zinn said. “My idea was the orthodox viewpoint has already been done a thousand times.”
One can go on endless arguments about the right of the historian to express his opinions, to pick and choose, to emphasize or minimize as he sees fit; and there is no doubt that revisionism – the right to rewrite – is essential to the historian’s profession. What is striking about Zinn, however, is the utter banality of his ostensible insights. That all histories are incomplete is, in fact, not even an insight, but a statement of the obvious; and his “orthodox viewpoint” is at best a straw man of dubious provenance. Nonetheless, these two statements; empty, pathetic, and juvenile as they may be; essentially formed the basis of Zinn’s entire life’s work. There is perhaps no greater insight into the poverty of the American academy today, no greater testimony to its utter lack of depth or imagination, than the fact that it made this empty charlatan whose watchword was no better than the wisdom of an arrested adolescent one of its heroes.
Indeed, Zinn’s entire outlook on history, the totality of his grasp of the historian’s profession and his art, and the sole justification for his tendentious and consciously biased revisionism, was nothing more than the rusty cliche which holds that history is always written by the powerful, the wealthy, and the victorious. As an ostensibly revolutionary historian, writing a “new kind of history,” it was therefore the duty of the glorious Zinn to write for the powerless, the poor, and the defeated.
This is, put generously, a self-serving fantasy; but this is somewhat beside the point, since what is most striking about it is the extraordinary ignorance it displays of Zinn’s own chosen profession. It is true that the powerful, wealthy and victorious sometimes write history – and that they sometimes write it very well, witness Caesar’s histories of the Gallic war and Churchill’s numerous historical writings – but it is equally true that, from its very origins, history has also been written by the weak, the poor, and the defeated, who somehow managed this feat without the help of Howard Zinn.
Even the most cursory look at the history of the historians art belies Zinn’s ostensible courage and originality: Thucydides was an exile who wrote the history of the Peloponnesian War from the Athenian, that is the losing, side; and he did not spare the powerful and the wealthy his scorn or vituperation. Manetho was an Egyptian living under a Greek empire, who wrote in order to convey the greatness of his conquered nation. Josephus was an exile, a defeated resistance fighter, and a traitor, propped up by the generosity of others, who happily bared the flaws of his own people, whose extremism he blamed for the war with Rome. Tacitus, while wealthy and noble, was writing without apology for a defeated cause, i.e., the Roman republicans who had been demolished by Caesarian imperialism. Indeed, many of the greatest historians of Rome, such as Polybius, were citizens of the Greek city-states the Romans had unceremoniously conquered. More recently, Edward Gibbon spent most of his life poor, much of it as a religious dissenter, and happily took the abuse that came his way for blaming Christianity for Rome’s decline. As for the “lost cause” historians of the American Civil War, they were no less defeated than Josephus before them, and whatever else they can be accused of, writing a “victor’s history” was not one of them.
Needless to say, counter-history, revisionist history, and critical history long preceded Howard Zinn, and will long survive his abuse of them; and there is a simple enough reason for this: The fact is, the poor, the weak, and the defeated need history more than their victorious counterparts; because to write and to engage history is the only means they have to reckon with the depredations of their condition, which is always, as all human conditions are, a product of the past. Despite the claims of his admirers, Zinn did not invent this, and he contributed remarkably little to its tradition.
Indeed, the best that one can say about A People’s History of the United States, besides the fact that Zinn managed to publish nothing else of any significance despite his long career, is that it may be many things, but it is not history. It is not even a revisionist history, since what it sets out to revise is, at best, a figment of Zinn’s imagination. It is something of a chronicle – more medieval than modern in its style – a collection of testimonies, usually presented without criticism and with strikingly little attempt at context or analysis. What analysis does exist is so tendentious that it usually offends the readers intelligence, and to the extent that the book has an overarching theory of the events it recounts, it is frankly a ridiculous one. Zinn’s thesis can be summed up in a single sentence: The “elite” – which is left unnamed and undescribed throughout – is always and everywhere oppressing everybody else.
Needless to say, this is not really a thesis. It is not even really an idea. It is a sentiment, an unfalsifiable article of faith that bears out Karl Popper’s merciless but valuable observation that vast explanatory power is not a virtue but a vice; since any theory that explains everything by definition explains nothing at all. Indeed, Zinn’s “elite” is more akin to a conspiracy theorist’s villain than anything that has ever actually existed or acted upon human history. However, this singular concept does do us the service of making nonsense of Zinn’s claims to Marxism. Many charlatans in search of intellectual respectability have attached themselves to Marx, and Zinn was not the worst of them, but he was perhaps the most amateurish. Indeed, if A People’s History is any indication, Zinn never actually read Marx in the first place. His version of American history has no dialectical materialism, no examination of the means of production, no analysis of class struggle, alienation, or the larger historical and economic forces behind them; there is simply a wicked elite going up and down upon the earth, spreading evil and suffering wherever it goes. This is, at best, vulgar Marxism of the type Marx himself despised and, at worst, a semi-theological form of paranoia. Indeed, the work that A People’s History most resembles in spirit is probably The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
As for Zinn himself, his semi-prophetic status on the left made still less sense. Often, it seemed that everyone on the left was creating the Howard Zinn they required for themselves; and he certainly did the best he could to encourage this phenomenon. He happily exploited the moral and emotional blackmail he could bring to bear through his participation in the civil rights movement, even as he excoriated it as a sellout in his book. He did the same with his military service in World War II, even as he painted the entire endeavor as criminal, forgetting, apparently, that one can be a war hero or a war criminal, but not both. Even the English language did not escape Zinn’s astonishing capacity for incoherence, producing a memoir and companion film entitled You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train, a phrase so fatuous it does not even rise to the dignity of being wrong. It is a debatable proposition, whether one can or cannot stand still on a moving train; but the imagination strains to discover what possible literary significance can attach to a man’s subjective views of that locomotion.
There is, in fact, only one way that A People’s History and, indeed, the entirety of Zinn’s work manages to achieve any coherence whatsoever, and that is as something between a suicide note and a writ of execution. The suicide, I imagine, is Zinn’s own – his suicide as a historian and his suicide as an American; while the execution is unquestionably that of the America which was both his lifelong subject and the hapless object of the fanatical rage boiling just beneath the surface of his pacifist bromides. Ironically, Zinn is now gone, and the America he hated will, in one form or another, eventually write the history of him. His worshippers should hope that, when the time comes, the authors will be more generous than he was with the history of others.
Benjamin Kerstein is Senior Writer for The New Ledger.