Undue Certainty Where Howard Zinn’s A People’s History Falls Short By Sam Wineburg on Amazon’s bestseller list—not too shabby for a book first pub- lished in 1980. H oward Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States Once considered radical, A People’s History has gone main- has few peers among contemporary historical works. stream. By 2002, Will Hunting had been replaced by A. J. Soprano, With more than 2 million copies in print, A People’s of the HBO hit The Sopranos. Doing his homework at the kitchen History is more than a book. It is a cultural icon. “You counter, A. J. tells his parents that his history teacher compared wanna read a real history book?” Matt Damon asks his therapist Christopher Columbus to Slobodan Milosevic. When Tony fumes in the 1997 movie Good Will Hunting. “Read Howard Zinn’s “Your teacher said that?” A. J. responds, “It’s not just my teacher— People’s History of the United States. That book’ll ... knock you on it’s the truth. It’s in my history book.” The camera pans to A. J. your ass.” holding a copy of A People’s History. The book’s original gray cover was painted red, white, and blue History, for Zinn, is looked at from “the bottom up”: a view “of for its Harper Perennial Modern Classics edition in 2003, and it is the Constitution from the standpoint of the slaves, of Andrew now marketed with special displays in suburban megastores. A Jackson as seen by the Cherokees, of the Civil War as seen by the week after Zinn’s death in 2010, A People’s History was number 7 New York Irish, of the Mexican war as seen by the deserting sol- c VI diers of Scott’s army.”1 Decades before we thought in such terms, KESE Sam Wineburg is the Margaret Jacks Professor of Education and a professor Zinn provided a history for the 99 percent. d JA of history (by courtesy) at Stanford University, and the director of the Stan- Many teachers view A People’s History as an anti-textbook, a NA ford History Education Group, which conducts research to improve history corrective to the narratives of progress dispensed by the state. Y NE instruction (to learn about the group’s work, see http://sheg.stanford.edu). This is undoubtedly true on a topical level. When learning about ONS B HHmeiisd itsdo tlrheie cs acahlu Thothooiln ra konifdn d gho iazgenhnd ss cOohft oshcoehlr ot Uelaanrclnhya eatrru.tricalle As actnsd. Hthee baewgaarnd h-wisi ncanrineegr b aoso ak tRhoeo Sspevaenlits chh-Aarmgienrgic uapn SWaanr ,J ustaund Heniltls. Idnosnte’ta rde,a tdh eayb ofoultl oTwed thdye ILLUSTRATI AmERIcAN EdUcATOR | WINTER 2012–2013 27 plight of foot soldiers sweltering in the Cuban tropics, clutching evidence to conclusion, to convince readers that his interpreta- their stomachs not from Spanish bullets but from food poisoning tions are right. More is at stake in naming and making explicit caused by rancid meat sold to the army by Armour and Company. these moves than an exercise in rhetoric. For when students Such stories acquaint students with a history too often hidden and encounter Zinn’s A People’s History, they undoubtedly take away too quickly brushed aside by traditional textbooks. more than new facts about the Homestead Strike or Eugene V. But in other ways—ways that strike at the very heart of what it Debs. They are exposed to and absorb an entire way of asking means to learn history as a discipline—A People’s History is closer questions about the past and a way of using evidence to advance to students’ state-approved texts than its advocates are wont to historical argument. For many students, A People’s History will be admit. Like traditional textbooks, A People’s History relies almost the first full-length history book they read, and for some, it will be entirely on secondary sources, with no archival research to the only one. Beyond what they learn about Shays’ Rebellion or thicken its narrative. Like traditional textbooks, the book is naked the loopholes in the Sherman Antitrust Act, what does A People’s of footnotes, thwarting inquisitive readers who seek to retrace the History teach these young people about what it means to think author’s interpretative steps. And, like students’ textbooks, when historically? A People’s History draws on primary sources, these documents A People’s History stretches across 729 pages and embraces 500 serve to prop up the main text, but never provide an alternative years of human history. To examine in detail the book’s moves and view or open up a new field of vision. strategies, what I refer to as its interpretive circuitry, I train my sights on a key chapter, one of the most pivotal and controversial in the book. Chapter 16, “A People’s War?,” covers the period from the mid-1930s to the beginning of the Cold War. Unlike chapters in which Zinn introduces readers to hidden aspects of American his- What does A People’s History teach tory—such as the Flour Riot of 1837—the stakes here are much higher. This is not the first time we’ve heard about Pearl Harbor or young people about what it means the Holocaust or the decision to drop the atomic bomb. But Zinn’s to think historically? goal is to turn everything we know—or think we do—on its head. Anecdotes as Evidence Consider the question of whether World War II was “a people’s war.” On one level, as Zinn has to admit, it was. Thousands suited up in uniform, and millions handed over hard-earned dollars to Initially, A People’s History drew little scholarly attention (nei- buy war bonds. But Zinn asks us to consider whether such support ther of the two premier historical journals, the American Historical was “manufactured.” Was there, in fact, widespread resentment Review and the Journal of American History, reviewed the book). and resistance to the war that was hidden from the masses? Among historians who did take notice, the verdict was mixed. Among the military, Zinn says, it is “hard to know” how much Some, like Harvard’s Oscar Handlin and Cornell’s Michael Kam- resentment soldiers felt because “no one recorded the bitterness men, panned the book; others, like Columbia’s Eric Foner, were of enlisted men.” Zinn instead focuses on a community in which more favorable.2 But in the last 30 years, during which A People’s he can readily locate resentment: black Americans. History has arguably had a greater influence on how Americans The claim stands to reason. Domestically, Jim Crow laws were understand their past than any other single book, normally volu- thriving in the North and the South, and overseas in the segre- ble scholars have gone silent. When Michael Kazin, a coeditor of gated armed forces. To fight for freedom abroad when basic free- Dissent and a scholar with impeccable leftist credentials, reviewed doms were denied at home was a bitter contradiction. In fact, the the 2003 edition (concluding that the book was “unworthy of such black press wrote about the “Double V”—victory over fascism in fame and influence”), it was the first time that A People’s History Europe, victory over racism at home. had captured a historian’s gaze in nearly 20 years.3 But Zinn argues something else. He asserts that black Ameri- The original assessments, and Kazin’s retrospective, have cans restricted their support to a single V: the victory over racism. largely focused on the substance of Zinn’s book, pointing out As for the second V, victory on the battlefields of Europe and Asia, blind spots and suggesting alternatives. My own view is that How- Zinn claims that an attitude of “widespread indifference, even ard Zinn has the same right as any author to choose one interpre- hostility,” typified African Americans’ stance toward the war.4 tation over another, to select which topics to include or ignore. I Zinn hangs his claim on three pieces of evidence: (1) a quote find myself agreeing with A People’s History in some places (such from a black journalist that “the Negro ... is angry, resentful, and as Indian Removal, and the duplicity and racism of the Wilson utterly apathetic about the war”; (2) a quote from a student at a administration) and shaking my head in disbelief at others (e.g., black college who told his teacher that “the Army jim-crows us. Zinn’s conflation of the Party of Lincoln with the Democratic Party The Navy lets us serve only as messmen. The Red Cross refuses of Jefferson Davis). Yet, where my proclivities align with or depart our blood. Employers and labor unions shut us out. Lynchings from Zinn’s is beside the point. continue”; and (3) a poem called the “Draftee’s Prayer,” published I am less concerned here with what Zinn says than his warrant in the black press: “Dear Lord, today / I go to war: / To fight, to for saying it, less interested in the words that meet the eye than die, / Tell me what for? / Dear Lord, I'll fight, / I do not fear, / Ger- with the book’s interpretive circuitry that doesn’t. Largely invisible mans or Japs; / My fears are here. / America!”5 to the casual reader are the moves and strategies Zinn uses to tie These items seethe with hostility. Many readers will likely con- 28 AmERIcAN EdUcATOR | WINTER 2012–2013 clude that they represented broad trends in the black community. prisingly few black men became C.O.’s.”12 But just as we can find instances that embody resentment, so too The form of reasoning that Zinn relies on here is known as ask- can we find expressions of African American patriotism and sup- ing “yes-type” questions.13 According to historian Aileen S. Kradi- port for the war. Nor do we have to go very far. In the same journal tor, yes-type questions send the historian into the past armed with that voiced the resentment of the black college student, one finds a wish list. Because a hallmark of modernity is to save everything the words of Horace Mann Bond, president of Georgia’s Fort Valley (and this was certainly the case by the mid-20th century), those State College and the father of civil rights leader Julian Bond, who who ask yes-type questions always end up getting what they want. was asked by the editors to address the question, “Should the Kraditor explains: “If one historian asks, ‘Do the sources provide Negro care who wins the war?”6 evidence of militant struggles among workers and slaves?’ the Bond bristled at the query’s implicit racism—the insinuation sources will reply, ‘Certainly.’ And if another asks, ‘Do the sources that blacks were apathetic to America’s fate: “If a white person provide evidence of widespread acquiescence in the established believes that a Negro in the United States is indifferent to the out- order among the American population throughout the past two come of a great national struggle, that white person conceives of centuries?’ the sources will reply, ‘Of course.’ ”14 that Negro as divested of statehood.... The Negro who is indifferent So it is here: will we find pockets of resistance and reluctance to the outcome of the struggle has stripped himself of allegiance among blacks—or, for that matter, among whites, Hispanics, Ital- ians, gays, and lesbians—no matter how just the cause of any war? The answer is “Certainly.” To objections that it is biased to ask yes-type questions, Zinn might respond (and did, often) that all history is biased, that every historian chooses which facts to high- light or discard.15 Fine and good, provided that a crucial condition is satisfied, a condition again specified by Kraditor: that “the data the historian omits must not be essential to the understanding of the data included.” To generalize to nearly 13 million people by citing three anecdotes, while at the same time ignoring data about 2,427,495 eligible black registrants, is a yes-type question in its purest form. Questions Answered, Then Asked Questions are what distinguish the history encountered in college seminars from the sanitized versions often taught in lower grades. At their best, questions signal the unfinished nature of historical knowledge, the way its fragments can never be wholly put together. A People’s History parts company with other historical inqui- to the state of which he is a native.”7 ries by being as radical in its rhetoric as in its politics. For Zinn, To array dueling anecdotes—three for hostility, three against— questions are not shoulder-shrugging admissions of the histori- is not a very sophisticated way to make claims about a community an’s epistemological quandary so much as devices that shock that, to quote Bond, numbered “nearly thirteen million human readers into considering the past anew. beings of every variety of opinion, intelligence, and sensitivity.”8 Twenty-nine questions give shape to chapter 16, a question on The three anecdotes Zinn draws on come not from digging in an nearly every page. Big, in-your-face questions with no postmod- archive or reading microfiche from the black press. Everything he ern shilly-shallying: cites was drawn from a single secondary source, Lawrence Wittner’s Rebels Against War (1969).9 • Would America’s behavior during the Second World War “be The evidence Zinn uses appears on two adjoining pages in in keeping with a ‘people’s war’?” Wittner’s 239-page book. Also appearing on these pages is key • Would the Allies’ victory deliver a “blow to imperialism, rac- information Zinn omits. Wittner lists the total number of regis- ism, totalitarianism, [and] militarism,” and “represent some- trants eligible for the war as 10,022,367 males between the ages of thing significantly different” from their Axis foes? 18 and 37. Of these, 2,427,495, about 24 percent, were black. • Would America’s wartime policies “respect the rights of ordi- Wittner then lists the number of conscientious objectors enrolled nary people everywhere to life, liberty, and the pursuit of by the Selective Service: 42,973. If the number of conscientious happiness?” objectors were proportional for both blacks and whites, there • “Would postwar America, in its policies at home and overseas, would have been over 10,000 African American conscientious exemplify the values for which the war was supposed to have objectors—even more if there was as much hostility to the war been fought?”16 among blacks as Zinn claims. No, no, no, and no. When questions aren’t rattled off as yes-no What we learn instead is that the total number of black consci- binaries, they’re delivered in a stark either-or, a rhetorical turn entious objectors was a mere 400.10 “Even draft evasion remained almost never encountered in professional historical writing: low,” Wittner adds, “with Negro registrants comprising only 4.4 per cent of the Justice Department cases.”11 He concludes: “Sur- • “Did the behavior of the United States show that her war aims AmERIcAN EdUcATOR | WINTER 2012–2013 29 were humanitarian, or centered on power and profit?”17 pilots were seasoned veterans with hundreds of sorties under • “Was she fighting the war to end the control by some nations their belts. That’s because the war had begun over a year earlier, over others or to make sure the controlling nations were friends on September 1, 1939, when Hitler invaded Poland. of the United States?”18 Eight months before striking Rotterdam and fourteen months • With the defeat of the Axis, were fascism’s “essential ele- before bombing Coventry, the Nazis unleashed Operation Was- ments—militarism, racism, imperialism—now gone? Or were serkante, the decimation of Warsaw. Never before in the history they absorbed into the already poisoned bones of the of warfare had such a massive force taken to the skies, an assault victors?”19 that made Rotterdam look like a walk in the park. In a single day, September 25, 1939 (“Black Monday”), the Luftwaffe flew 1,150 Facing the abyss of indeterminacy and multiple causality, most sorties over Warsaw, dropping 560 tons of high explosives and 72 historians would flee the narrow straits of “either-or” for the tons of incendiary bombs with the singular goal of turning the city calmer port of “both-and.” Not Zinn. Whether phrased as yes-no into an inferno. They succeeded. Smoke billowed 10,000 feet into or either-or, his questions always have a single right answer. the sky, and fires could be seen from as far as 70 miles away. When A Slippery Timeline In his lead-up to a discussion of the atomic bomb, Zinn makes this claim: “At the start of World War II German planes dropped bombs on Rotterdam in Holland, Cov- Facing the abyss of multiple causality, entry in England, and elsewhere. Roosevelt had described these as ‘inhuman barbarism that has pro- most historians flee the narrow straits foundly shocked the conscience of humanity.’ ”20 Zinn then adds: “These German bombings [of Rotterdam and of “either-or.” Not Zinn. his questions Coventry] were very small compared with the British and always have a single right answer. American bombings of German cities.”21 He then lists the names of some of the most devastating Allied bombing campaigns, including the most notorious, the firebomb- ing of Dresden. In a technical sense, Zinn is on solid ground. In the bombing of Rotterdam on May 14, 1940, there was an estimated doomed Polish troops surrendered on September 27, more than loss of a thousand lives, and in the bombing of Coventry on half of Warsaw’s buildings had been damaged or destroyed, a November 14, 1940, there were approximately 550 deaths.22 In small number compared with the toll in human life. Forty thou- Dresden, by comparison, somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 sand Poles perished in the attack.25 people lost their lives.23 Zinn’s point is clear: before we wag an But the Nazis’ aims went far beyond forcing a Polish surrender. accusing finger at the Nazis, we should take a long hard look in Their explicit goal was to terrorize—a policy known as Schreck- the mirror. lichkeit (“frightfulness”). They outfitted their dive-bombers with But in order to make this point, Zinn plays fast and loose with screechers, swooping down with ear-piercing ferocity and strafing historical context. He achieves his desired effect in two stages. First, dazed refugees as they fled the blazing city. On the eve of the Pol- he begins his claim with the phrase “at the start of World War II,” ish assault, Hitler explained that war on Poland did not fit tradi- but the Dresden raid occurred five years later, in February 1945, tional categories such as reaching a certain destination or when all bets were off and long-standing distinctions between establishing a fixed line. The goal was the “elimination of living military targets (“strategic bombing”) and civilian targets (“satura- forces,” and Hitler told his commanders to wage war with “the tion bombing”) had been rendered irrelevant. If the start of the war greatest brutality and without mercy.”26 As General Max von is the point of comparison, we should focus on the activities of the Schenckendorff put it, “Germans are the masters and Poles are Royal Air Force (the United States did not declare war on Germany slaves.”27 until December 11, 1941, four days after Pearl Harbor). During the Zinn is silent about Poland. Instead, he approvingly cites Sim- early months of the war, the RAF Bomber Command was restricted one Weil, the French philosopher and social activist. At a time to dropping propaganda leaflets over Germany and trying, inef- when the Einsatzgruppen were herding Polish Jews into the forest fectually, to disable the German fleet docked at Wilhelmshaven, and mowing them down before open pits, Weil compared the off Germany’s northern coast.24 In other words, despite the phrase difference between Nazi fascism and the democratic principles “at the start of World War II,” Zinn’s point only derives its force by of England and the United States to a mask hiding the true char- violating chronology and sequence. acter of both. Once we see through this mask, Weil argued, we will A closer look at the claim shows a second mechanism at work, understand that the enemy is not “the one facing us across the one even more slippery than this chronological bait and switch. The frontier or the battlelines, which is not so much our enemy as our claim ultimately derives its power from a single source: the expected brothers’ enemy,” but the “Apparatus,” the one “that calls itself our ignorance of the reader. People familiar with the chronology of protector and makes us its slaves.” Zinn adds that the real struggle World War II immediately sense a disjuncture between the phrase of World War II was not between nations, but rather that the “real “at the start of World War II” and the date of the Coventry raid. war was inside each nation.”28 Given his stance, it’s no wonder that By the time the Luftwaffe’s Stukas dive-bombed Coventry, Nazi Zinn chooses to begin the war not in 1939, but a full year later. 30 AmERIcAN EdUcATOR | WINTER 2012–2013 Undue Certainty Lozovsky, was more blunt. The Japanese offer rang hollow with The story that Zinn tells about the atomic bomb is familiar to “mere generalities and no concrete proposal.”34 The Soviets anyone who has paid attention to the debates surrounding this snubbed the emperor’s request to send his special emissary, event during the past 50 years. His goal is to demolish the narra- Fumimaro Konoe, to Moscow because Tokyo’s surrender condi- tive learned in high school: that faced with the prospect of the tions remained too “opaque.”35 Readers of Zinn’s account learn entire Japanese nation hunkered down in underground bunkers nothing of this broader context. and holed up in caves, the United States dropped the bomb with Anyone who raises the possibility of a negotiated peace versus profound remorse and only then as a last resort. Without the an unconditional surrender is playing the game that historians bomb, so the story goes, the war would have dragged on for call the counterfactual, a thought experiment about how the past months, if not years, and the United States would have suffered might have turned out had things not happened as they did. Its incalculable losses. game pieces are if, may, and might. Consider this gambit by John Zinn will have none of it. For him, the bomb was more about Dower, one of the deans of Japanese studies and the author of the the hydraulics of capitalism than the saving of lives, more about cowing the Soviets than subduing the Japanese. The reader again encounters a couplet of rhetorical questions: Was “too much money and effort ... invested in the atomic bomb not to drop it?” Or was it because “the United States was anxious to drop the bomb before the Russians entered the war against Japan?”29 To make his argument, Zinn draws on the two defining texts of the revisionist school, Gar Alperovitz’s Atomic Diplomacy (1967) and Martin Sherwin’s A World Destroyed (1975).30 Their narrative goes something like this: in a conflict distinguished by war crimes, the atomic bomb tops the list, as the slaughter and destruction it inflicted was wholly unnecessary in bringing the war to an end. With Allied victories at Saipan, Luzon, and Iwo Jima, and the establishment of a beachhead at Okinawa, and following the relentless saturation bombing of Tokyo by conventional B-29s during May of 1945, the Japanese were already on their knees. The real reason for the bomb had little to do with Japanese capitula- tion and everything to do with the flexing of American muscle. Accordingly, the atomic bomb did not so much end World War II as initiate the first round in yet another conflict: the Cold War. The linchpin of Zinn’s case is an intercepted cable sent by the Pulitzer Prize–winning Embracing Defeat: “Perhaps an American Japanese Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo to his ambassador in guarantee of the imperial system might have prodded the Japa- Moscow on July 13, 1945. The cable ostensibly shows the Japanese nese militarists to capitulate before the bombs were dropped. We desire to capitulate to the Americans. Zinn writes: “It was known will never know.” Or this by Japan’s Sadao Asada, professor of the Japanese had instructed their ambassador in Moscow to work history at Kyoto’s Doshisha University: “Perhaps no account of on peace negotiations with the Allies.... Foreign Minister Shig- Japan’s surrender decision is complete without counterfactuals, enori Togo wired his ambassador in Moscow: ‘Unconditional however risky they may be.... Without the use of the atomic bomb, surrender is the only obstacle to peace.’ ” The only condition—a but with Soviet entry and with continued strategic bombing and minor one for Zinn—called for allowing Emperor Hirohito to naval blockade, would Japan have surrendered before November remain as a figurehead.31 1—the day scheduled for the U.S. invasion of Kyushu? Available A smoking gun? Not necessarily. Sending a cable is only half Japanese data do not provide a conclusive answer.” Or this formu- the story. What happened when the cable was received at the lation by Stanford University’s Barton J. Bernstein: “These alterna- other end? On this point Zinn is mum. tives—promising to retain the Japanese monarchy, awaiting the The Japanese had been courting the still-neutral Soviets for Soviets’ entry, and even more conventional bombing—very prob- months, with airy proposals containing scant details about sur- ably could have ended the war before the dreaded invasion. Still, render terms. In fact, as late as June 1945, their backs to the wall the evidence—to borrow a phrase from F.D.R.—is somewhat ‘iffy,’ and all hope seemingly lost, the Japanese were still trying to barter and no one who looks at the intransigence of the Japanese mili- with the Soviets, going so far as to offer Manchuria and southern tarists should have full confidence in those other strategies.”36 Karafuto in exchange for the oil needed to stave off an American The counterfactuals’ qualifiers and second-guesses convey the invasion.32 The Japanese dilly-dallying had worn the Soviets’ modesty one is obliged to adopt when conjuring up a past that did patience thin. After receiving his foreign minister’s cable, Naotake not occur. But when Zinn plies the counterfactual, he seems to Sato, Japan’s ambassador in Moscow, wired back to his superiors know something no one else knows—including historians who’ve that the latest proposal would mean little to the Soviets, limited given their professional lives to the topic: “If only the Americans as it was to “an enumeration of previous abstractions, lacking in had not insisted on unconditional surrender—that is, if they were concreteness.”33 The Soviet deputy foreign minister, Solomon A. willing to accept one condition to the surrender, that the Emperor, AmERIcAN EdUcATOR | WINTER 2012–2013 31 a holy figure to the Japanese, remain in place—the Japanese dant Julius Rosenberg as well. Three days later, in the wake of would have agreed to stop the war.”37 Not might have, not may Sobell’s admission, the Rosenbergs’ two sons also concluded with have, not could have. But “would have agreed to stop the war.” Not regret that their father had been a spy.40 Yet, when the same New only is Zinn certain about the history that’s happened. He’s certain York Times reporter contacted Zinn for a reaction, he was only about the history that didn’t. “mildly surprised,” adding, “To me it didn’t matter whether they From where might Zinn have derived such certainty? It seems were guilty or not. The most important thing was they did not get that once he made up his mind, nothing—not new evidence, not a fair trial in the atmosphere of cold war hysteria.”41 new scholarship, not the discovery of previously unknown docu- Undue Popularity ments, not the revelations of historical actors on their death- beds—could shake it. In the 20-plus years between the book’s In the 32 years since its original publication, A People’s History has original publication and the 2003 Harper Perennial Modern Clas- gone from a book that buzzed about the ear of the dominant nar- sics edition, Zinn’s narrative remained virtually untouched by rative to its current status where, in many circles, it has become decades of prodigious scholarship. the dominant narrative. The book appears on university reading For example, in the wake of Hirohito’s death in 1989, a veil of lists in economics, political science, anthropology, cultural stud- silence lifted, and Japan experienced an outpouring of memoirs, ies, women’s studies, ethnic studies, Chicano studies, and African American studies, in addition to history. A People’s History remains a perennial favorite in courses for future teachers, and in some, it is the only history book on the syllabus.42 In 2008, the National Council for the Social Studies invited Zinn to address its annual conference—the largest gathering of social Not only is Zinn certain about the studies teachers in the country. Zinn’s speech met with raucous applause, after which copies of A People’s History were given out to history that’s happened. he’s certain attendees courtesy of HarperCollins. Writing in the organization’s about the history that didn’t. newsletter, its president Syd Golston hailed Zinn as “an inspiration to many of us.”43 Back in 1980, who could have predicted that a book that cast the Founding Fathers as a shadowy cabal who foisted on the American people “the most effective system of national control devised in modern times” would one day be featured on the National History Education Clearinghouse’s website, an initiative diaries, and tell-all exposés about the war years, some by the funded by the US Department of Education?44 emperor’s inner coterie.38 These works, as well as previously In many ways, A People’s History and traditional textbooks are untranslated Japanese documents, have transformed historians’ mirror images that relegate students to similar roles as absorb- understanding of the war’s last days. Yet not a single new reference ers—not analysts—of information, except from different points to these works finds its way into Zinn’s narrative. Despite a 2003 on the political spectrum. In a study examining features of histori- copyright, chapter 16, “A People’s War?,” remains the same, word- cal writing, linguist Avon Crismore found that historians fre- for-word, as the original 1980 edition, save for one new reference quently used qualifying language to signal the soft underbelly of (to a book published in 1981) and two new sentences, one about historical certainty. But when Crismore looked at the writing the Haitian Revolution and the other about the War Resisters historians do in textbooks, these linguistic markers disappeared.45 League.39 A search in A People’s History for qualifiers mostly comes up Nor is chapter 16 an exception. The 20 original chapters in the empty. Instead, the seams of history are concealed by the pres- book constitute 575 of its 729 pages. From 1980 to 2003, A People’s ence of an author who speaks with thunderous certainty. History went through four editions, each time adding new mate- To be sure, A People’s History brings together material from rial on contemporary history, right up through the 9/11 terrorist movements that rocked the discipline during the 1960s and attacks. As for the original 20 chapters, spanning a half millen- 1970s—working-class history, feminist history, black history, and nium of human history, only four new references spruce up its various ethnic histories. Together, these perspectives blew apart original 1980 bibliography—with three of the four by the same the consensus school of the 1950s by showing the validity of inter- author, Blanche Wiesen Cook. pretations that arose from varied “positionalities” toward historical On occasions when Zinn was asked if a quarter century of new events. However, while A People’s History draws liberally from this historical scholarship had shed light on his original formulations, work, the book resolutely preserves that old-time, objectivist epis- he seemed mostly unfazed. Consider his response to questions temology. It substitutes one monolithic reading of the past for about the espionage trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. A People’s another, albeit one that claims to be morally superior and promises History devotes nearly two and a half pages to the case, casting to better position students to take action in the present. doubt on the legitimacy of the Rosenbergs’ convictions as well as There is, however, one way that A People’s History differs from that of their accomplice, Morton Sobell. Sobell escaped the elec- traditional history textbooks. It is written by a skilled stylist. Zinn’s tric chair but served 19 years in Alcatraz and other federal prisons, muscular presence makes for brisk reading compared with the maintaining innocence the entire time. However, in September turgid prose of the textbook. 2008, Sobell, age 91, admitted to a New York Times reporter that It’s no surprise then that, for many readers, A People’s History he had indeed been a Russian spy, implicating his fellow defen- becomes not a way to view the past but the way. Such is the 32 AmERIcAN EdUcATOR | WINTER 2012–2013 impression one gets from scanning reviews of the book on Ama- nized that what might have been common knowledge among zon. To some readers, A People’s History takes on, as Michael subscribers to the Radical History Review was largely invisible to Kazin puts it, “the force and authority of revelation.”46 Reader the broader reading public. gmt903 recommends the book to “any history teacher or anyone Americans like their narratives clean. It took Zinn’s brilliance to just interested in American history” because “TRUTH is the core draw a direct line from the rapier Columbus used to hack off the of this book.” Malcolm from New York writes, “This book tells the hands of the Arawaks, to the rifles aimed by Andrew Jackson to give truth, whether it tells the ‘patriotic’ truth or not.” For Knowitall the Creek Nation no quarter, and to the 9,000-pound “Little Boy” from Santa Monica, A People’s History simply provides “the plain, that Paul Tibbets fatefully released over Hiroshima in August 1945. unvarnished truth.”47 Zinn’s charisma as a speaker apparently For many, seeing these disparate events as part of a single unbroken evoked similar reactions. In You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving narrative had a transformative effect. Sportswriter Dave Zirin Train, a documentary film that loosely follows Zinn’s autobiogra- recalled encountering A People’s History as a teenager: “I thought phy of the same name, an aspiring teacher, sporting a shock of red history was about learning that the Magna Carta was signed in 1215. hair and a three-day scruff, explains why he came to hear Zinn I couldn’t tell you what the Magna Carta was, but I knew it was lecture: “I want to teach the truth to my students someday so that’s signed in 1215. Howard took this history of great men ... and turned why I am here.”48 it on its pompous head ... speaking to a desire so many share: to actually make history instead of being history’s victim.”49 In his 2004 Dissent review, Michael Kazin suggested that the major reason behind Zinn’s success was the timeliness of his nar- rative: “Zinn fills a need shaped by our recent past. The years since 1980 have not been good ones for the American left.... A People’s History offers a certain consolation.”50 Kazin often hits the mark, but on this score he’s way off. Zinn remains popular not because he is timely but precisely because he’s not. A People’s History speaks directly to our inner Holden Caulfield. Our heroes are shameless frauds, our parents and teachers conniving liars, our textbooks propagandistic slop. Long before we could Google accounts of a politician’s latest indiscre- tion, Zinn offered a national “gotcha.” They’re all phonies is a mes- sage that never goes out of style. It was only a matter of time before A People’s History spawned no-qualification narratives from the other side of the political aisle, their pages full of swagger and, like their inspiration, best- A History with No Hands sellers. Some commentators are not terribly bothered by these Howard Zinn lived an admirable life, never veering from the feisty one-sided blockbusters. At the height of the 2010 Texas cur- things he believed in. But the man himself is not the issue when riculum controversy, Jonathan Zimmerman, a tireless editorialist a teacher conducts a lesson on the atomic bomb using an account and a historian of education at New York University, suggested based on two secondary works written more than 40 years ago; or that teachers pair A People’s History with one of its conservative conflates the Nazi bombing campaign with the Allies, ignoring counterparts and teach both. Students would then learn “that Hitler’s assault on Poland; or places Jim Crow and the Holocaust Americans disagree—vehemently—about the making and the on the same footing, without explaining that as color barriers were meaning of their nation. And it would require the kids to sort out being dismantled in the United States, the bricks were being laid the differences on their own.”51 for the crematoria at Auschwitz. I shudder to think about the implications of Zimmerman’s It is here that Zinn’s undeniable charisma becomes education- recipe for intellectual alchemy. Pitting two monolithic narratives, ally dangerous, especially when we become attached to his pas- each strident, immodest, and unyielding in its position, against sionate concern for the underdog. The danger mounts when we are one another turns history into a European soccer match where talking about how we educate the young, those who do not yet get fans set fires in the stands and taunt the opposition with scurrilous the interpretive game, who are just learning that claims must be epithets. Instead of encouraging us to think, such a history teaches judged not for their alignment with current issues of social justice, us how to jeer. but for the data they present and their ability to account for the In criticizing Harvard history professor Oscar Handlin, who unruly fibers of evidence that stubbornly jut out from any interpre- reviewed A People’s History when it first came out, Zinn said, “He tative frame. It is here that Zinn’s power of persuasion extinguishes hated my book.... Whether historians liked or disliked my book students’ ability to think and speaks directly to their hearts. depended really on their point of view.”52 Many reasons account for A People’s History’s preternatural Admittedly, this happens frequently. Too often, whether or not shelf life. Historians may have known about Columbus’s atrocities we like someone’s politics determines whether or not we like their since 1552, when Bartolomé de las Casas laid them out in grisly history. Many of us find ourselves reading the present onto the detail. But for Americans raised on textbooks with names like The past, especially with issues we care about deeply. I know I do American Pageant or Triumph of the American Nation, such it, and I don’t consider it a source of pride. Instead of entering descriptions came as shocking revelations. Zinn shrewdly recog- the past with a wish list, shouldn’t our goal instead be open- AmERIcAN EdUcATOR | WINTER 2012–2013 33 mindedness? Shouldn’t we welcome—at least sometimes—new Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial (New York: Basic Books, 2002). 24. Alan J. Levine, The Strategic Bombing of Germany, 1940–1945 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1992). facts or interpretations that lead to surprise, disquiet, doubt, or 25. Walter J. Boyne, The Influence of Air Power upon History (Gretna, Louisiana: Pelican, 2003), 198; even a wholesale change of mind? and E. R. Hooton, Phoenix Triumphant: The Rise and Rise of the Luftwaffe (London: Arms and Armour, 1994), 188. When history, in the words of British historian John Saville, is 26. Alexander B. Rossino, Hitler Strikes Poland: Blitzkrieg, Ideology, and Atrocity (Lawrence: expected to “do its duty,” we sap it of autonomy and drain it of University Press of Kansas, 2003), 9. Rossino is citing from the Nuremberg war trials, Trials of War Criminals before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals, vol. 10 (Washington, DC: Government Printing vitality.53 Everything fits. The question mark falls victim to the Office, 1951), “Fuehrer’s Speech to Commanders in Chief, 22 August 1939,” 698ff. exclamation point. 27. Rossino, Hitler Strikes Poland, 141. A history of unalloyed certainties is dangerous because it 28. Zinn, A People’s History, 420. invites a slide into intellectual fascism. History as truth, issued 29. Zinn, A People’s History, 423. 30. Gar Alperovitz, Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam; The Use of the Atomic Bomb and from the left or from the right, abhors shades of gray. It seeks to the American Confrontation with Soviet Power (New York: Vintage, 1967); and Martin J. Sherwin, A stamp out the democratic insight that people of good will can see World Destroyed: The Atomic Bomb and the Grand Alliance (New York: Knopf, 1975). the same thing and come to different conclusions. It imputes the 31. Zinn, A People’s History, 423. Zinn’s source is Sherwin’s A World Destroyed, 235. However, a cable containing these words is a chimera with astonishing longevity, for this quotation can be basest of motives to those who view the world from a different found nowhere in the record of decrypted Japanese communiqués. Zinn recapitulates a blunder made by Sherwin, who falsely attributed these words to a cable sent by Shigenori Togo. But perch. It detests equivocation and extinguishes perhaps, maybe, Sherwin’s footnote shows his source to be not a decoded Japanese cable, but Robert J. C. Butow’s Japan’s Decision to Surrender (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1954). The plot gets murkier, might, and the most execrable of them all, on the other hand. For as Butow’s source is not an actual cable, either. Rather, Butow drew on a diary entry by Secretary of the truth has no hands. the Navy James Forrestal, in which Forrestal jotted down his impressions of the meaning of the Japanese intercept. To add insult to injury, rather than quoting Forrestal’s actual words, Butow Such a history atrophies our tolerance for complexity. It makes paraphrased. In other words, Zinn’s intercepted “cable” is actually Sherwin’s interpretation of Butow’s interpretation of Forrestal’s interpretation of a War Department briefing that, over time and us allergic to exceptions to the rule. Worst of all, it depletes the an endless number of repetitions, has turned into the supposed cable (a document now easily moral courage we need to revise our beliefs in the face of new accessible on the Internet, as it has been declassified for over 30 years; http://digital.library.wisc. edu/1711.dl/FRUS.FRUS1945Berlinv01). For the broader context of the Shigenori Togo-Naotake Sato evidence. It ensures, ultimately, that tomorrow we will think exchanges, which show that Japanese demands went well beyond retaining the emperor, see Robert Maddox, “American Prometheus: Beating the Dead Horse of Hiroshima Revisionism,” Passport: The exactly as we thought yesterday—and the day before, and the day Newsletter of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (December 2007), www.shafr. org/passport/2007/december/Maddox.pdf; and Richard B. Frank, Downfall: The End of the Imperial before that. Japanese Empire (New York: Penguin, 1999), 221–232. For Forrestal’s original diary entry, see The Is that what we want for our students? ☐ Forrestal Diaries, ed. Walter Millis (New York: Viking, 1951), 74–76. 32. Herbert P. Bix, “Japan’s Delayed Surrender: A Reinterpretation,” Diplomatic History 19, no. 2 (Spring 1995): 214. Endnotes 33. Sato Naotake cited in Bix, “Japan’s Delayed Surrender,” 215. 1. Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 10. In this 34. Solomon Lozovsky cited in Sadao Asada, “The Shock of the Atomic Bomb and Japan’s Decision article, all references to Howard Zinn’s A People’s History are drawn from the Harper Perennial to Surrender: A Reconsideration,” Pacific Historical Review 67, no. 4 (November 1998): 502. Modern Classics edition. 35. Asada, “The Shock of the Atomic Bomb.” 2. Michael Kammen, “How the Other Half Lived,” Washington Post Book World, March 23, 1980, 7; 36. John W. Dower, “Three Narratives of Our Humanity,” in History Wars: The Enola Gay and Other Oscar Handlin, “Arawaks,” review of A People’s History of the United States, by Howard Zinn, Battles for the American Past, ed. Edward T. Linenthal and Tom Engelhardt (New York: Henry Holt, American Scholar 49, no. 4 (Autumn 1980): 546–550; and Eric Foner, “Majority Report,” New York 1996), 84–85; Asada, “The Shock of the Atomic Bomb,” 510; and Barton J. Bernstein, “The Atomic Times, March 2, 1980, BR3–BR4. Bombings Reconsidered,” Foreign Affairs 74, no. 1 (January/February 1995): 150. 3. Michael Kazin, “Howard Zinn’s History Lessons,” Dissent 51, no. 2 (Spring 2004): 81–85. 37. Zinn, A People’s History, 423. 4. Zinn, A People’s History, 418–419 (emphasis added). 38. See Herbert P. Bix, “Emperor Hirohito’s War,” History Today 41, no. 12 (December 1991): 12–19. 5. Zinn, A People’s History, 418–419. 39. The new reference is to Blanche Wiesen Cook, The Declassified Eisenhower (New York: 6. Horace Mann Bond, “Should the Negro Care Who Wins the War?” Annals of the American Doubleday, 1981). Academy of Political and Social Science 223, no. 1 (1942): 81–84. 40. Sam Roberts, “Figure in Rosenberg Case Admits to Soviet Spying,” New York Times, September 7. Bond, “Should the Negro Care Who Wins the War?” 81. 12, 2008; and Sam Roberts, “Father Was a Spy, Sons Conclude with Regret,” New York Times, September 17, 2008. 8. Bond, “Should the Negro Care Who Wins the War?” 81. 41. Sam Roberts, “Podcast: Rosenberg Case Open and Shut?” New York Times, September 18, 9. Lawrence S. Wittner, Rebels Against War: The American Peace Movement, 1941–1960 (New 2008. Zinn’s attitude toward new scholarship seems to have characterized his talks to teachers as York: Columbia University Press, 1969). well. The chief historian of the JFK Library, Sheldon Stern, invited Zinn to speak several times at 10. Wittner, Rebels Against War, 47. summer institutes for local teachers, where Zinn was “always a big hit.” Stern, however, recalls being struck by the fact that Zinn “invariably placed a folder of handwritten, yellowed, dog-eared, 11. Wittner, Rebels Against War, 47. and clearly decades-old notes on the podium before he spoke. Not surprisingly, he never referred to 12. Wittner, Rebels Against War, 46. recent studies, interpretations, or evidence.” Sheldon M. Stern, “Howard Zinn Briefly Recalled,” 13. Aileen S. Kraditor, “American Radical Historians on Their Heritage,” Past & Present 56, no. 1 History News Network, February 9, 2010. (1972): 137. 42. See, for example, EDU 514, “Teaching Elementary Social Studies,” at the State University of New 14. Kraditor, “American Radical Historians.” York College at Cortland; SS ED 430W, “Teaching Social Studies in the Elementary Grades,” at the Pennsylvania State University, Altoona; EDUC M442, “Teaching Secondary Social Studies,” at Indiana 15. See, for example, “Why Students Should Study History: An Interview with Howard Zinn,” in University-Purdue University Indianapolis; and Education 342/542, “Critical Approaches to Teaching Rethinking Schools: An Agenda for Change, ed. David Levine, Robert Lowe, Bob Peterson, and Rita High School English and Social Studies (Social Studies Specialization),” at Occidental College. Tenorio (New York: New Press, 1995), 97. 43. Syd Golston, The Social Studies Professional (March/April 2010), 4. 16. Zinn, A People’s History, 408. 44. Zinn, A People’s History, 59; and Lee Ann Ghajar, “The People Speak: To Zinn or Not to Zinn,” 17. Zinn, A People’s History, 412 (emphasis added). TeachingHistory.org, January 5, 2010. Although I was executive director of the National History 18. Zinn, A People’s History, 412 (emphasis added). Education Clearinghouse from 2007–2009, this blog entry was posted after my tenure. 19. Zinn, A People’s History, 424 (emphasis added). 45. Avon Crismore, “The Rhetoric of Textbooks: Metadiscourse,” Journal of Curriculum Studies 16, no. 3 (1984): 279–296. 20. Zinn, A People’s History, 421. 46. Kazin, “Howard Zinn’s History Lessons,” 84. 21. Zinn, A People’s History, 421. 47. Amazon.com customer reviews of A People's History: gmt903, “Great Ideas for the Classroom!” 22. British National Archives, “Heroes & Villains: Winston Churchill and the Bombing of Dresden,” January 17, 2007; Malcolm Tramm, “Zinn Has Given Research a New Meaning,” December 25, www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/heroesvillains/g1/cs1/g1cs1s1a.htm. 2003; and Mr. Knowitall, “Some Things Never Change,” May 28, 2007. 23. Zinn lists the number of deaths at Dresden as “more than 100,000” (page 421), citing David 48. Howard Zinn: You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train, directed by Deb Ellis and Denis Mueller, Irving’s 1965 book, The Destruction of Dresden. With purposes that have become easier to discern narrated by Matt Damon (First Run Features, 2004), DVD, minute 1:08. with time, Irving credulously (or calculatingly) drew on mortality figures provided by the Nazis for propagandistic purposes. More recently, a commission of 13 prominent German historians led by 49. Dave Zirin, “Howard Zinn: The Historian Who Made History,” ColdType (March 2010), www. Rolf-Dieter Müller, scientific director of the German Armed Forces Military History Research Institute coldtype.net/Assets.10/Pdfs/0210.Zinn.pdf. in Potsdam, conducted an exhaustive examination of the city’s birth records, comparing them to lists 50. Kazin, “Howard Zinn’s History Lessons,” 84. of refugees from the firebombing. The commission identified 18,000 victims of the raids, with “a maximum of 25,000,” once and for all debunking the claims long favored by Nazi sympathizers who 51. Jonathan Zimmerman, “American History—Right and Left: Liberals and Conservatives Have held up the Allies’ bombing of Dresden as tantamount to Nazi atrocities at Auschwitz. See Differing Views; Why Not Give Students Both Sides and Let Them Decide?” Los Angeles Times, Rolf-Dieter Müller, cited in Bojan Pancevski, “Dresden Bombing Death Toll Lower Than Thought,” March 17, 2010. The Telegraph (London), October, 2, 2008. See also Rolf-Dieter Müller, Nicole Schönherr, and 52. Howard Zinn: You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train, DVD, minute 56:30. Thomas Widera, eds., Die Zerstörung Dresden [The Destruction of Dresden] (Germany: V&R 53. John Saville, “The Radical Left Expects the Past to Do Its Duty,” Labor History 18, no. 2 (1977): Unipress, 2010). On David Irving’s mendacity, see Richard J. Evans, Lying about Hitler: History, 267–274. 34 AmERIcAN EdUcATOR | WINTER 2012–2013