Cons: This book's covers are, in general, too far apart
The Bottom Line: Read this book if you must on slavery and are very educated in U.S. history. For the rest, the book a hopelessly biased waster of time.
buffoonery's Full Review: Howard Zinn - A People's History of the United Sta...
Howard Zinn is a fellow traveler socialist historian who, in A People’s History of the United States, purports to write American history from the perspective of those whose voices he claims are seldom heard—black slaves, poor whites, women, immigrants, Native Americans, trade unionists, conscientious objectors, etc. This is an extremely important book, as important for what it does not say as what it says. On the one hand, it reveals a terrible underside to American history, albeit one that is much more widely known than Zinn would care to admit (such an admission, of course, would undercut his rage). On the other hand, it is an incoherent, self-contradictory, self-righteous mess that often relies on obsolete research and steadfastly ignores evidence that might undercut the author's positions. In short, much of it is bad history.
Zinn makes no bones about his socialist bias, a belief that he holds with all the passion of a charter member of the Ptolemaic Society for the Advancement of Astronomical Knowledge. He argues repeatedly throughout the book that the U.S. system is the "most ingenious system of control in world history", without providing any evidence for this contention and certainly ignoring the practices of leftis totalitarianism in places like the Soviet Union. He excoriates "traditional" historians who either ignore or downplay the brutal facts of American history. Page after page drips with contempt.
So let’s begin with a TRUTH IN PACKAGING ALERT: This book was first published in 1980. The edition here reviewed is the 1995 paperback version, the cover of which cover advertises that it is "Revised and Updated”. That claim is questionable at best. While several new chapters update this book through the early 90’s—the “Updated” part-- the first twenty chapters show no evidence of revision—no “Revised'--as is clear from a review of the bibliography to those chapters, none of which cite a source more recent than the late 1970's. This sort of penny ante stuff usually doesn’t bother me, but a guy like Zinn, who is so eager to attack those with whom he disagrees, should be more careful to deliver on a promise made.
Zinn discusses at length the European "invasion" of the Americas, slavery, treatment of the Native Americans (or Siberian-Americans, depending on your perspective), the problems of industrialization and the plight of the poor. Much of what he says here is disturbing if not terrifying. He relies extensively on quotations from the persons involved. In particular, the treatment of slavery and the Native-American experience is sometimes good. But even when Zinn is putting points on the board--as he often does-- his writing is choppy and he flits about from subject to subject, often without any analysis.
He mercilessly treats virtually every major American political figure. The left will be delighted at the way he castigates Nixon and Reagan. It will be less enamored of his remarks regarding FDR and JFK. George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt get their share of vituperation. There are no holds barred regarding his thoughts on U.S. foreign policy in general and the Spanish-American and Vietnam wars in particular. Typically, he is blind to both sides of the equation: My Lai gets lots of discussion but the NV massacre at Hue in 1968 is unmentioned.
Leftists, on the other hand, are treated with kid gloves. The Wobblies are singled out for praise and the Communist Party of the United States gets some nice words as well. Regarding Zinn's thoughts on murderers such as, say, Stalin or Mao (both of whom had important roles to play in American history), well, one must look elsewhere.
So what you have here prima facie is a typical socialist critique of American history, heavy on the down side. However, there are major problems with this book that speak more eloquently about its author than American history. Zinn's reason for writing the book--that these stories are untold--was nonsense from the get-go; as an example, the very first course I took as an undergraduate at Northwestern in the mid-70's (long before this book was first published) was a survey class on minority American history in which assigned readings included DuBois, Washington, and Gary Nash's "Red, White and Black" (on which Zinn heavily relies). Any one who has a passing acquaintance with public education (I have children who have attended public grade schools so I know what I am talking about) today cannot help but realize that our schools are hip deep in a backwash of political correctness in which history and literature are being taught from precisely the perspective that Zinn claims is missing. So much for not being in the mainstream.
Second, the book is completely unreliable on economic and military issues. Sticking to economics, Zinn is dead wrong on his contentions that the causes of the American Civil War and World War I were primarily economic. His views on imperialism are wholly based on propaganda written by Hobson and Lenin along with that eminent economic historian, W.E.B. DuBois. His descriptions of the "robber baron" era are similarly derivative, based mainly on obsolete journalism written by Josephson, et al. His socialist critique of the Great Depression and capitalist economics is laughable. There is virtually no discussion of economic development under American capitalism and a manifest refusal to engage in what would certainly be an embarrassing comparison of American performance vis a vis its socialist competitors. In short, his work in this arena borders on the incompetent. It certainly is not serious history.
Military issues are almost wholly ignored. Take World War II, for example--as a dedicated anti-fascist, one might think that Zinn would spend some time on this. But NOOOOOO, he looks primarily at the conscientious objector movement. One suspects that Zinn would rather not say anything remotely complimentary about the United States, so best not to comment on its half million plus battle casualties in the war, not too mention having to confront, say, the Soviet execution of 15,000 Polish POW's at Katyn. When Zinn does discuss military issues--well, a guy who is so outraged about the war in Vietnam ought to at least get the year of the Christmas bombings right. (It was 1972.)
Self-contradictions abound. When attacking the "separate-but-equal" holding of Plessy v. Ferguson, Zinn quotes with delight Justice Harlan's famous statement that "our Constitution is color-blind", but has no problem with race discrimination when it benefits racial groups that he favors in the guise of affirmative action. He is opposed to the death penalty for convicted murderers but has no problem with aborting innocent unborn babies. He condemns the "control" system of American capitalism, but cannot fathom that the system he wishes to install--one that would make us dependent upon the government for the very necessities of life--could not be better designed to stifle dissent and freedom (as Friedman, Hayek, and grim reality proved long ago).
But where this book goes over the top is in its extraordinary selection of facts. Examples abound:
--He rips the Spanish conquerors of the Aztecs, and to make sure that the reader is sympathetic to his viewpoint doesn't bother to mention that the Aztecs were a militarized imperialistic society that, in the fashionable cant of the left, exercised hegemony over local peoples and stilled their voices.
--Zinn's lengthy paean to the American labor movement spends barely two paragraphs talking about the major unions' exclusion of women and minorities--in the 1910's! The curious reader might have liked to read more about organized labor's long and hallowed history of race, ethnic and sex discrimination, corruption, mob control, blackmail, violence, and collusion with management, but maybe I'm wrong.
--Zinn is happy to discuss the Civil War draft riots in the North, but doesn't mention that Union soldiers reenlisted in droves in 1864 when their three-year terms expired, and then in the fall election voted heavily for Lincoln and the continuation of the war. (He even cites a little known book by Bruce Catton on industrial policy in World War II, but makes no citations to Catton's extensive and famous work on the war in which this issue is discussed.)
--Zinn argues that the Hiroshima bombing was pointless because the U.S. had intercepted a message to Japan's ambassador to Moscow instructing him to open peace negotiations. He does not discuss the large number of intercepted messages in which Japanese military leaders indicated their strong desire to continue the war, as well as a plethora of evidence regarding Japanese military buildups in anticipation of the American invasion.
--He happily notes that the American Communist party was an early supporter of racial equality, but has nothing to say about the recently-revealed facts that it was funded by and taking its orders directly from Moscow.
--He rejects any notion that the American military build-up in the 1980's was the primary contributor to the Soviet collapse, disregarding ample testimony to the contrary from ex-Soviet political and military leaders.
In reviewing Paul Johnson's competing work, "A History of the American People", I ripped Johnson for making sophomoric errors of fact (compounded by an occasional tendency to rely on dated sources). Johnson, however, is at least willing to discuss both sides of the coin. Zinn, on the other hand . . . .
The supreme irony of Zinn's assault on America is, of course, that as a flat-earth-society socialist he is inextricably allied to a system which, in the Soviet Union, in the PRC, in Vietnam and the killing fields of Cambodia, in North Korea and sub-Saharan Africa, has been responsible this century for the murder of tens of millions of people and the imprisonment and impoverishment of hundreds of millions more.
When Zinn can say more about the Soviet Union besides its "false socialism", and when he has the guts to call the Chinese Communists the murderers they are rather than a "people's government", when he can admit that Vietnam is one of the most oppressive, corrupt governments in the world, then he'll be entitled to be viewed as something other than just another drunk-the-kool-aid radical.
I am delighted to have read and reviewed this book if for no other reason than to have offered up the exercise as a penance for my sins. And despite--or rather because of--the aforesaid myriad problems (which are not exhaustive), I recommend this book to the reader who has a thorough (and I mean THOROUGH) background in American history and who can figure out when, where and just how badly he is being conned. For every one else: I told you so.
Anyway, one star: two for a decent coverage of slavery, negative two for being obstusely hypocritical, and one star because it doesn't argue that Alger Hiss was innocent.
Readers who enjoy this book will also like the pages of The Nation magazine, the works of Walter Duranty, and the magisterial "History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union: Short Course" (New York: 1939). Then turn to the "Black Book of Communism" for the real deal.
PS. Anyone who uses this book as a history text should receive the treatment that Zinn's pal Stalin gave his ex-colleagues.
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