book review | Demystifying Howard Zinn: Exposing the False History That Turned a Generation Against America, by Mary Grabar (2023)

The most widely read historian in America today is Howard Zinn, whoseA popular history of the United Statesit sold more than 2.6 million copies. Zinn's vision of American history is seeping into school curricula across the country and, as Mary Grabar warns, becoming the "dominant narrative" in many places. The narrative is stark and blunt - people should be ashamed of their story. The history of the abuse of the weak by the powerful is at the heart of America. The United States is not, as Abraham Lincoln emphasized at Gettysburg, a "free begotten nation committed to the principle that all men are created equal." .

Zinn's influence has been furthered by groups like the Zinn Education Project, which supplement his book with documentaries, dramatizations, workshops for teachers and librarians, and dozens of side volumes. There are graphics settings likebeginner can,dramatic public pewter readings and a pewter book fair. When there is opposition to shrinking the education system, such as when a state legislature considered a bill to keep Zinn's materials out of taxpayer-funded schools, these groups mobilize. You could call it the Militant Tin Industrial Complex

The goal of Grabar's book is to expose the blatant and destructive lies that pervade Howard Zinn's story. As she convincingly sums up, Zinn presents America, the freest nation in world history, as a murderous, tyrannical, imperialist regime. ...he did it by lying, distorting and abusing the evidence, hijacking the work of other historians and falsifying the facts, as we have seen time and time again. The problem is not that she wrote, as Zinn was fond of stating in his own defense, a "people's story," telling the bottom-up story of abandoned and forgotten men and women. The problem is that thefalsificationAmerican History (p. 250, emphasis added).

Zinn's book opens with "Columbus, the Indians and Human Progress," a chapter that clarifies his point: "The history of any country, presented as a family story, hides violent conflicts of interest... between conquerors and vanquished, masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, rulers and ruled by race and sex. And in a world this conflictive, a world of victims and executioners, it is the task of thinking people... not to side with the executioners (Howard Zinn),A Popular History of the United States from 1492 to the Present,New York: HarperCollins, 2003, p. 10). But, as Grabar clearly shows, Zinn was often on the side of the executioners, like the men who ruled the Soviet Union. Correspondingly idyllic, Zinn paints the pre-Columbian New World and downplays even the ritual murder of thousands by the Aztecs because their cruelty...did not extinguish a certain innocence (Zinn, p. 11). A more balanced account would include estimates of more than 80,000 human sacrifices at the "consecration" of the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan, just three decades before Hernán Cortés destroyed that evil empire. Any fair story would not confuse Christopher Columbus with violent and ruthless conquistadors like Cortés. Even an honest history could not draw a straight line from the Spanish conquest of Central and South America to the British colonization of North America. But tin does all these things. (The disparities between Spanish and British actions in the United States are so stark that initial conditions had profound effects on later divergences between their areas of settlement that continue to this day. An influential study is Stanley L. Engerman and Kenneth L Sokoloff, "Factor Endowments: Institutions and Different Growth Paths Among New World Economies: A View of US Economic Historians," in Stephen Haber, ed.,How Latin America fell behind, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. This interpretation demonstrates that the inequality of wealth, human capital, and political power in Latin America arose from the ability of a small elite of Europeans to seize control of areas of high population concentration, such as the Aztecs. and Inca empires or sugar-producing slave colonies. Settlements in the United States and Canada were much more egalitarian because the land was sparsely settled and the native population could not be employed.)

After a brief synopsis of Zinn's upbringing and career (including an episode in which he lost his job after being found late one night in a parked car with a student at a dead end far from his destination), Record focuses on a subset of chapters at Zinnsfolk storythe chapters that mainly focus on race and war. Zinn's enlightened readers have always caught up with the mischaracterizations of him, but the core of Grabar's achievement is simply cataloging and refuting the fabrications of him and demonstrating the vastness of him. For example, Zinn's bizarre claim that George Washington is the richest man in America is bracketed and dropped. Zinn's suggestion that slavery in the capitalist United States was the worst in history is belied by the compelling demographic fact that only a small fraction of the slaves shipped to the New World made it to the United States, but more than a third of the slave population in the Year 1825 lived there. Zinn's suspicion that Malcolm X was likely closer to the mood of the black community than those peacefully marching in Washington, DC is belied when Grabar cites surveys of African-Americans, one of which found that only 6% of blacks believed that Malcolm X did "what is best". ” for black Americans (p. 194). Likewise, Zinn dismisses the achievements of black anti-communist leader A. Philip Randolph and his successful efforts to pressure Franklin Roosevelt to create the Fair Employment Practices Committee to end flagrant discrimination in the defense industry, saying that that has changed little. Grabar rebuts Zinn by citing research by economic historian William Collins. (A few pages later, while chiding Zinn's lack of consternation at the lives lost in the urban riots of the late 1960s, he could have cited additional research by Collins and his co-author Robert Margo showing that these riots were significant and depressing median value of black property.)

I regularly teach in a program designed to teach research in economic history to university professors. Some professors in the program suggested that the forced labor practiced in colonial America was nothing more than slavery in disguise. What is the source of this peculiar reading? A professor referred me to Howard Zinn. Zinn's chapter, People of Vile and Abominable Status, demonstrates the same tactics highlighted by Grabar. He claims that the indentured workers who left Europe for the United States were largely by baiting, promising and lying, by kidnapping...forced to honor their contracts (Zinn, p. 43). It selectively draws on the respected work of Abbot Smith, but ignores Smith's general conclusion that "the fetid reputation that domestic commerce has acquired in most historical accounts is partly undeserved, and stems from the testimonies of those who they see as an attempt to oppress business, those people who were employers in Britain and did not want their labor supply to decline as they searched for opportunities on the other side of the Atlantic (Abbott Emerson Smith,Settlers in Bondage: White Serfdom and Doomed Labor in America, 1607-1776,Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1947, p. 7). Zinn denounced the exploitation of indentured servants, but his main source concluded that the servant felt well protected from capricious and excessive exploitation (Smith, p. 19). By denying the brave men and women who fought in any agency, Zinn refuses to admit that indentured servitude was a win-win solution to the rigid constraints hard-working people faced in all aspects of business.

Zinn suggests that the serfs were loaded onto ships with the same fanatical greed for profit that characterized slave ships. When the weather was bad and the journey took a long time, they ran out of food. the sloopstunned, which sailed from Belfast in 1741, spent 16 weeks at sea, and by the time it reached Boston, 46 of its 106 passengers had starved to death (Zinn, p. 43). With a bit of research, I learned that the problem with thestunnedwas that "death overtook the ship, including the ship's captain together with all but one crew, leaving the passengers adrift in the middle of the passage" and the ship was unable to sail (Pennsylvania Historical Society,An 18th century cannibal immigration ship.). The cause of this tragedy had nothing to do with the mistreatment of these contract employees.

Read other economic chapters on Zinnsfolk history,there are numerous misrepresentations and errors. In the chapter "Robber Barons and Rebels," for example, Zinn tells us that by 1892 "the open country had disappeared." The last acre of available farmland [had] now passed into private or corporate ownership (Zinn, p. 282). The facts contradict this.US historical statistics(Susan Carter et al. New York: Cambridge University Press, Vol. 3, 3-351, series Cf77) show that the peak years for property receipts were between 1900 and World War I. (Technically, Zinn isn't doing this directly. Significantly, he's quoting someone else in context, in this case, a novel, so the error isn't his per se.) Zinn goes on to state that "harvesting wheat is a forced machine." to tie up the wheat... which the farmer had to buy on credit, knowing that in a few years the [money] would be doubly hard to come by. ... In the South the situation was worse than elsewhere - 90 percent of the peasants lived on credit - (Zinn, p. 287). These claims are absolutely silly. Machine prices fell during this time, and interest rates certainly did not double. In fact, data on farmers' terms of trade (crop prices compared to the prices of things farmers buy) show that by the end of the 18th century,A New Economic Perspective on American History,second edition, New York: W. W. Norton, 1994). Likewise, Zinn's claim that 90% of southern farmers live on credit is completely unfounded. And this is where Zinn says that the Supreme Court refused to "break up the monopolies of Standard Oil and American Tobacco" (Zinn, p. 260). Wow...they dismantled Standard and American Tobacco in 1911. More importantly, the chapter makes no mention of the vast and steep rise in labor standards during this period, the magnet that drew so many people to our shores.

My point is that Mary Grabar has only scratched the surface of the inaccuracies and distortions in Zinn's book. Ideally, someone would create a website summarizing all of Zinn's flaws. If you google "Howard Zinn Mistakes" or "Howard Zinn Mistakes" you'll find plenty to work with and Grabar's book tops the list. But a single platform for correcting Zinn's mistakes would be even more helpful, especially to students assigned to Zinn's book who sense his cynical bias and find it "fundamentally and grossly dishonest" (Record, p. xiii). , and notice that you're full of inaccuracies, but you don't have the time or energy to go through all your fabrications. If such a platform existed, students would quickly find it and cite it profusely, forever defying Zinns' infiltration.folk storyin the American education system and stop the tin avalanche. In his absence, Grabar's book is the reader's best defense against Zinn and his minions.