Zinn
I certainly believe that Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States is a deeply flawed book. It’s way too simplistic and polemical. Zinn was not much of a scholar and wrote his book for the explicit point of countering dominant narratives of American history without much of a concern for nuance. This doesn’t bother me all that much because it serves an audience that may not read much history in their lifetimes. Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America serves the same useful function for Latin American history. There’s room for this kind of book in our society, even though I would not call it a good history book.
However, David Greenberg’s hatchet job of Zinn is kind of awful. Other than red-baiting Zinn in a classic Cold War liberal way, Greenberg completely misrepresents left-leaning history and modern historiography. As a historian, this bothers me a lot more than the bog-standard red-baiting:
While excellent work is done by self-identified leftists, too much academic work today assumes such dubious premises as (to name but a few) the superiority of socialism to a mixed economy, the inherent malignancy of American intervention abroad, and the signal virtue of the left itself. Franklin Roosevelt’s rescue of capitalism is routinely treated as a disappointment because he did not go all the way to socialism. Truman’s suspicion of Stalin is treated as short-sightedness or war-mongering. Anti-Communism of even the most discerning sort is lumped in with McCarthyism as an expression of mass paranoia. Labor’s mid-century decisions to work with management to secure good wages and benefits are seen as selling out. And too seldom is it acknowledged that throughout its history the left has operated from low motives as well as high ones, and has caused social harm as well as social improvement, and has destroyed as well as created.
Um, citations please? What recent work of history has said that FDR is disappointing because he didn’t embrace socialism? Instead, I think of nuanced recent works on the New Deal like Jennifer Klein’s For All These Rights, Lizabeth Cohen’s 1990 masterpiece Making a New Deal or Neil Maher’s Nature’s New Deal. All of these books, and so many more, have deepened our understanding of the New Deal from a left-leaning perspective (broadly defined) in useful ways and none of them argue anything close to Greenberg’s characterization of New Deal historiography.
What respectable book on the early Cold War says that Truman’s suspicions of Stalin were misguided. It’s one thing to say that Truman’s belligerence didn’t help matters. Historians do say that. The historiography I am most familiar with is of course that of labor’s mid-20th century shift to business unionism. But Greenberg typically misrepresents these arguments. Some radical historians might call labor’s decisions to work with management a “sell-out” but the real criticism is that it turned out to be disastrous in the long-run for labor. These contracts absolutely secured short-term gains for working-class people that cannot be ignored. However, the shunning of communist organizers and embrace of business unionism also created a staid movement that could not then adjust when corporations began eliminating union jobs through capital mobility in the 1960s. Business leaders knew this and took advantage of it. This is all far more complicated than Greenberg describes.
The real crux of this is Greenberg’s discussion of anti-communism throughout the essay. Essentially, that’s Greenberg’s real interest here. Zinn was a Red and needs to be shunned. Why Greenberg has this axe to grind in 2013 and not, say, 1984, I do not know. But his own intellectual blinders are just as powerful as Zinn’s. A little self-recognition of that would go a long way here.
I’m fine with a critique of Howard Zinn that accuses him of misrepresenting the past. However, such a critique should not then misrepresent Zinn’s influence and the state of the historical profession.
….Rebuttals from radical historians Jesse Lemisch, Staughton Lynd, and Robert Cohen.
Indeed. The biggest problem with the left is that the left is never critical enough of the left to suit journamalists. Such a familiar refrain.
Meet the new TNR, same as the old TNR.
The sad thing is that TNR has been a lot better since Hughes took over. This is a throwback to the Peretz regime. My understanding is that TNR wasn’t real happy with publishing it on the online edition and delayed by several days.
“The sad thing is that TNR has been a lot better since Hughes took over.”
Yeah, now they’re slightly less contrarian than Slate.
Hey, smelly hippie! Let’s you and that other smelly hippie over there fight!
Which is weird, because in my experience, the left spends so much time and energy on infighting and criticism that it derails movements. Have these people ever been to a leftist anything?
The quoted paragraph would have to do a lot more work to raise it to the level of actual ‘baiting’ of anything. At the moment it’s down there in the ‘not even wrong’ corner.
First, the quoted paragraph is to demonstrate the misrepresentation of the historiography. Read the whole article for the redbaiting.
Second, are you saying that Greenberg is correct? If so, please provide citations.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong
Dude, he’s agreeing with you. He’s saying the argument is so lazy that he’s not even putting the work necessary to actually red-bait.
When the chip on your shoulder becomes the beam in your eye…
I wasn’t sure what you were getting at, which is why I put it as a question.
The hell? Granted, I’m far from an academic, but I doubt you could find many academics in Vietnam advocating for pure socialism over a mixed economy let alone here. It’s just that leftists today think the mix should be more like Scandinavian-style social democracy instead of the sink-or-swim, infrastructure-crumbling-around-us system we have now.
“I doubt you could find many academics in Vietnam advocating for pure socialism over a mixed economy let alone here.”
This is a strain of journalistic hippie punching that always seems to come back to “somebody handed me a poorly xeroxed pamphlet when I was in undergrad and I’ve assumed that it speaks for The Left ever since”. It’s not even hacktacular enough to be a strawman.
In my day, they would have been poorly mimeographed.
I have to put in one good word for Zinn. While I defer to you on the quality of his scholarship, and definitely concede his obvious slant, I must say it was reading him that got me to go back and re-read a lot of history. I really think you need to consider how little any student gets of actual history beyond the horrid textbooks used in high schools. To have someone look at history from a completely different angle can lead to some real engagement.
He did that for a lot of people, and I think that being a good instigator is a quality that’s easy to under-appreciate.
I like the formulation I once read, that Zinn is good to read about the people he admires. For the rest of the story, go elsewhere.
For me, that was reading James Loewen when I was in high school, who was certainly influenced by Zinn. Or at least Loewen’s publisher for Lies My Teacher Told Me was probably influenced by Zinn’s sales.
In the third of the rebuttals that Erik linked to, Cohen points out that a lot of good historians have gotten into history through reading Zinn — including, by his own testimony in the review, Greenberg himself.
Point noted. Cohen says it much better than I did. I should have read the links first.
I have no problem with Zinn the activist, and that includes his book, when taken from an activist perspective.
Greenberg’s statement seems like a reasonably fair (if pointed) summary of the views of the old Cold War revisionists of the 60s and 70s. I’m not sure why he thinks that it has any relevance to current scholarly debates.
And you know, Stalin was a monster, but if the specifc question asked is whether Truman was right think that Stalin had embarked on a program of world conquest, in some sense other than a conventional Marxist belief in the inevitable triumph of communism–well, that’s somewhat debatable.
I think it’s fairly clear that in the immediate aftermath of World War II, Stalin was most concerned with establishing a reliable buffer of satellite states in central Europe and not with renewed aggression. There’s pretty good reason to believe, also, that communist insurrections in places like China, Indochina, and Greece were basically independent of central control from Moscow.
At the same time, I think the Americans were not too far off in believing that Stalin would basically push as far as he could until he encountered opposition. His tentative bullying of Iran and Turkey, for instance, seems to be a pretty good example of this. I don’t think any of that was part of a general campaign for world domination, but it was something worth meeting with firm opposition.
Hell Moscow had already stabbed the Chinese Communists in the back once before already before WWII.
Stalin made a deal with Churchill during WWII to let Britain “keep” Greece,
and at the end of WWII when Ho Chi Minh gave a speech declaring an independent Vietnam, the two westerners on the platform with him were OSS agents (We were all prepared to recognize his government until the French got all snippy about it…)
Loomis, I’m kind of curious if you’ve ever seen the Crash Course World History series on YouTube by John Green. I’ve been enjoying it a lot, and wondering if it would be a good recommendation as a pop history survey.
No, I am terrible at following things like that, which also includes podcasts, even though I know there are great things out there.
Fair enough. Thanks for your time. :)
Erik–You are deluding yourself if you think Greenberg’s assessment of New Deal historiography, and really political history in general, is wrong. Historians of American politics implicitly cheer for socialist-leaning policies; the whole project since the 1950s has been driven by the question, “Why don’t we have democratic socialism like Europe?” Even when liberal historians have tackled the rise of convervatism in recent years, there is an air of opposition research to it: “how did they succeed and what can we do about it?” I’m sympathetic to this perspective myself, but it is disingenuous to say that it is not an accurate description.
Europe has social democracy.
That’s a different thing. Postwar, NONE of the countries of western Europe have been actually socialist. Period.
Right. Definitely meant to type “social democracy.”
Then it seems that historians are not assuming the superiority of socialism over mixed economies, because social democracies are mixed economies.
Greenberg’s statement may have been inartful, but his basic point that historians have favored socialistic outcomes is accurate.
I don’t agree; I think Greenberg is engaging in the same lack of nuance of which he accuses Zinn.
I suspect it’s probably true that most (but certainly not all) historians are somewhere on the left side of the political spectrum. But even that left side encompasses discernable differences. Greenberg knows that.
Right–if Greenberg means “European-style social democracy” that’s a very different thing than socialism. If he is equating the two, that’s quite telling about Greenberg’s own leanings.
Words have meaning.
I don’t know what you mean by “socialistic outcomes.” And if that’s what Greenberg had indeed meant, he should have said so. Socialism is a specific thing and if he didn’t actually MEAN it he shouldn’t have used the word.
The problem is that a big chunk of the new left wasn’t down with social democracy, who were in their eyes squares and sellouts.
And a lot of those guys wrote serious, mainstream histories, did they? Or became influential in politics?
Of course there were a whole bunch of people who were all for state socialism. But to pretend they ever wielded significant power in the US after the second world war is preposterous.
Yes, if they were influential when I was in college in the late 70s, I’d have taken up a professors’ invitation to go to a local DSOC meeting, because, chicks, you know.
DH,
At least since the publication of Hall et. al. Like a Family, labor historians and just about everybody else stopped asking the “Why is there no Socialism in the US?” because it’s just not a historically productive question. Kloppenberg turned the question around in the early 90s with Uncertain Victory. So it’s been 25 to 30 years of people not pursuing that question. Get over it.
Eh. I have the impression that many people who accuse Zinn of lacking “concern for nuance” read him without much nuance themselves. The accusations against A People’s History in that review you link are pretty vague, and so are Eric’s in the linked LGM post. Perhaps its obligatory among lefty historians to distance oneself from Zinn. But what does Zinn actually get wrong?
So there are questions he doesn’t answer – this is true of every work of history ever. So he takes sides. So his most famous book just popularizes other people’s research – clearly it does so effectively.
The problem with Zinn’s work is that it is completely uninterested in analyzing why people did what they did in the past or how they were enabled or constrained by their institutional and cultural environment, the basic task of a historian no matter what his/her politics. There’s only victims and their victimizers and a parade of horribles.
Increasingly, yes. Not that Zinn is beyond criticism by any means, but it seems to be a way of establishing polite liberal credentials.
“A parade of horribles” is actually a reasonable description of much of human history.
Popular American History, of the sort that gets pushed in popular culture and high school history courses could be reasonably described as “a parade of wonderfuls.” And this was even more true when Zinn originally wrote the damn book. If you never learned any history but high school, you’d be grossly misinformed. If you learned high school, plus Zinn, you’d still be misinformed, but less so. Or in different ways.
Now, that’s not what I remember. But I read the book as an 8th grader, so maybe I’m wrong. Perhaps you can be, I dunno, specific?
“how they were enabled or constrained by their institutional and cultural environment, the basic task of a historian no matter what his/her politics”
Sorry, but no!
For example WWI didn’t “just happen” choices were made, by people with agendas
A historian’s basic task is not to whitewash those choices by blaming cultural forces for those choices
Were there external forces pushing the Czar to mobilize? Sure, but it was the Czar who chose to do so
Would the Kaiser be taking a big risk if he didn’t mobilize in return? Sure, but it was still the Kaiser who gave the order
This.
The thing with Zinn is that his work was supposed to be an accessible introductory volume of popular history. I’m a big fan of nuance. But just about every course I took in college that had a number like ’100′ or ’101′ did not have a whole lot of nuance in the subject matter, because they needed to establish a firm groundwork and/or correct common misconceptions so we could GET to the nuance.
Zinn, himself, took that position, and was, if I recall correctly utterly dismayed by some of the enthusiasts of his own work. I’m reminded of a story, possibly apocryphal… Zinn was once approached at an event by an eager young man gushing about People’s History, how he’d read it five times and was about to read it again. Zinn gently made the point that, perhaps, he had gotten everything he could out of it at this point, and that there was a bibliography in the back he had worked very hard on; perhaps the young man would want to read some of his sources instead?
You are remembering SEK’s story about meeting Zinn, which he discusses here.
So I am! I had forgotten where I’d heard it, which is why all my details were vague.
I am glad it was here.
The once yearly Zinn denunciation is an internet tradition!
Next week: Noam Chomsky!
Chomsky has declared that the PPACA seems marginally better than the status quo. For the right, this is just further proof that Obamacare is pure socialism. For the leftier-than-thou internet set, it demonstrates that even Chomsky is a centrist O-bot. It would be one-stop shopping for denunciations.
Sorry, but … How does this work? For example, what is the acceptable flawed (out of date?)/interesting ratio.
I dunno, ask Eric Hobsbawm.
With a Ouija board.
Michael Kazin wrote a very good critical review of “People’ History” back in 2004.
http://hnn.us/articles/4370.htmlv
I picked up Zinn at an AHA years ago. I read the section on World War One and put the book down. It was garbage. The Beards had a more nuanced view of the war than Zinn. His account of US History is as reliable, and as honest, as David Barton’s.
That review basically says nothing except that the author disagrees with Zinn’s politics. “He refuses to acknowledge that when they speak about their ideals, those who hold national power usually mean what they say.”
Zinn “refuses to acknowledge” that obvious truth! How dare he!?
What I found odd was that had Greenberg been more accurate about recent historiography, it would have bolstered a critical view of Zinn’s work: I know on the New Deal, for example, these days Zinn is up there with Schlesinger as someone who’s only cited to be disagreed with.
Sure, I think it’s accurate to say that at one time historians criticized the New Deal for rescuing capitalism, but that was thirty years ago.
I’d be interested in how many historians Greenberg has in his JSTOR shelf that routinely treat “Franklin Roosevelt’s rescue of capitalism… as a disappointment because he did not go all the way to socialism.” 57? 205? Maybe he and Ted Cruz could get together and compare notes.
One can certainly make an argument about the contradictions and limitations of the New Deal, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that one is disappointed that the New Deal didn’t go all the way to socialism. It would the very kind of nuanced take that Greenberg ostensibly favors.
Zinn’s a populizer. Arguably one should expect more from a tenured historian, but it’s not as if The New Republic regularly challenged centrist popularizers. It’s not as if Harry Truman hagiography was stretched out on the wheel, and as for Israel…
We also need an annual denunciation of Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
It wouldn’t be fair to just punch left.
When I was in high school, my American studies teacher used Eric Foner’s Give Me Liberty!, which, from what I can remember, nearly exploded the brains of the rich kids that populated my prep school.
When I matriculated into college, I found that a lot of kids educated in public school had actually been way less exposed to a more radical, bottom-up version of American history. When I finally read some of Zinn’s famous book, I thought that it was sort of old hat. But, if you had never been exposed to anything besides the typical textbook history, I could see how it could open your eyes up.
And this was at a school that was dominated by Republican families.
Calling “A People’s History…” a “deeply flawed book” is like calling a wrench “a deeply flawed hammer.”
No, the book is clearly inadequate as a stand-alone overview of American history, but it isn’t meant to be. As a companion piece to a comprehensive overview text, it’s excellent.
The deep flaw is in how it is used.
I’m not sure. As a companion piece to an old-school textbook, perhaps. As a companion piece to the major textbooks used in most college classrooms in 2013, including by Eric Foner, I’m not so sure that it does have much use.
You’ve got a point there. There really has been a change in how history was taught.
Once, when I’d first started teaching, I was assigned to sub in an eighth-grade U.S. History class. I thought I’d give the class another perspective by talking about how the Revolutionary War was a civil war within colonial-American society, just as much as a war between colonial America and Britain. Everything was going great, until one of the kids showed me the passage in their text book that made that point.
OK, uh…get into groups and discuss the questions on page 42.
Where I went to school, that was code for ‘shit, I’m behind in my grading. Okay, uh, let’s have the kids teach themselves while I get stuff done. I can grade twenty essays in 45 minutes, right?’
(This isn’t to disparage my high school teachers, who were excellent, but had to deal with over privileged kids from the upper middle class and their very, very involved parents all the time without entirely adequate resources.)
It’s pretty hard to find a textbook for high school students that isn’t revisionist in most of the ways that Zinn would recognize and approve at this point (and I’ve read about 10 texts commonly used in HS before picking one or two to use over the years). The problem with hs texts is that in addition to the revisionist elements, (mostly there because of the California state standards), textbooks also want to be sold in Texas, so they have a bunch of crapola too and the kids get very confused trying to parse out the difference. I now use a textbook made for college audiences (Keene et. al. Envisioning America). It’s quite beautiful with lots of good visual sources integrated into the text and break outs on analyzing visual sources.
The first left-leaning history of the New Deal that I read was Colin Gordon’s 1994 New Deals and from it, as well as subsequent histories written in the same mold, the only argument regarding FDR and socialism that I took was “FDR didn’t embrace socialism because he wasn’t a socialist.” The only political purpose such an argument has is to dispel the myth that FDR was a darling of 1930s leftism.
In fact, the most interesting parts of these histories don’t touch on FDR at all; they deal predominantly with the political interests, beyond the Democratic Party establishment, that were involved in shaping the New Deal.
As for Zinn: the most important purpose of A People’s History was to popularize, and therefor make palatable to general audiences, left-leaning histories. Whether that’s still necessary is an interesting question… I guess… but the answer will mostly depend on where you live. We don’t do much Throne and Altar history around where I live, so Zinn isn’t particularly useful. But the people I’ve met who told me that A People’s History was the most eye-opening book they’ve ever read don’t live where I live, so it still has utility.
Hey, I followed the link in the TNR article to the JSTOR article by John Higham (actually, I followed the link, then logged in to JSTOR, through a public library, then re-opened the TNR article in a second tab, clicked through to JSTOR again, and copied the article’s author and title into the first tab), and absolutely could not read the PDF. It was like random pixels had been removed from it. I could read the “page view” version, kind of. The print was small, and zooming in randomly changed the size, smaller, smaller, larger, REALLY large, but not helpfully, and the interface is kind of annoying.
I’m sure the PDFs were readable last time I logged in. What gives?
I am trying to figure out what is the good side of the jailing of Debs that I would know about if I were very well read.