History vs. A People's History

Howard Zinn died yesterday. In a related development, I spent part of the night examining the CVs of tenured history professors at the University of Virginia, in search of potential graduate advisors. My wanderings took me to an Assistant Professor named Jennifer Burns, whose past, present and future interests apparently consist entirely of an obscure failed writer named Ayn Rand. (Hopefully Burns's many journal articles, books, and recent appearance on the Daily Show will help generate some interest in this heretofore-overlooked philosophe.)

Anyway, despite her obsession, Burns did find the time to post a non-Rand-related question from one of her readers, who said:

I am currently reading A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present (P.S.) by Howard Zinn. Can you please tell me how this book is viewed in the academic world of U. S. history since it is has a very different perspective.

In answer, Burns linked to an article in Dissent that purported to answer this question through one historian's damning critique.

Now, I should begin by saying that I have no idea what your run-of-the-mill history professor thinks of A People's History, but I'm willing to entertain the notion that he or she might consider it one-sided, heavy-handed, intemperate attack on all forms of privilege; that it paints the American elite as a shadowy, omnipotent, monolithic evil; that it leaves out the rags-to-riches stories, the successful immigrant businessmen, the freedom, and that it does not attempt to provide an answer to the question of why the 99% who gain nothing from the capitalist oligarchy continue to passively live here and consume. In fact, it doesn't take a history professor to see this--it's obvious to any of the millions of kids who picked up this book at age 17 and felt, perhaps for the first time, that history had something important to say to them.

Yes, Zinn leaves out a lot. But as is clear from the first page, Zinn was not attempting to write a comprehensive history. Actually that was the precise opposite of his goal--he wanted to expose that chestnut, the idea of true, non-ideological, balanced history always held as the highest ideal for textbook writers, and expose it for the lie it's always been. After all, a completely balanced history is just a list of everything that's ever happened. And that's not possible. So it's up to the historian to omit and to emphasize. Zinn's trick was that he was honest about what he was doing. And in his honesty, of course, he anticipates every one of Kazin's criticisms.

That said, some of Kazin's points are completely bullshit. The first is his standard claim that Zinn sees only a Manichean world of winners and losers, good and bad:

The ironic effect of such portraits of rulers is to rob "the people" of cultural richness and variety, characteristics that might gain the respect and not just the sympathy of contemporary readers. For Zinn, ordinary Americans seem to live only to fight the rich and haughty and, inevitably, to be fooled by them. They are like bobble-head dolls in work-shirts and overalls-ever sanguine about fighting the powers-that-be, always about to fall on their earnest faces.

I don't really understand this passage, because as anyone who has ever picked up A People's History can tell you, you can't read a page before the voices of long dead, long-forgotten people leap off the page and smack you in the face. The righteous anger in the book is not Zinn's--he's really just the impresario. He is not a particularly eloquent writer. His gift instead was an ear for quotation, like a good journalist, or like a historian who sees the past as living and breathing beside him, and, hey, instead of pontificating and contextualizing and placing history into our neat little rows and making sure we cover all the bases, wouldn't it be fun instead to go and talk to some of these people and see what they have to say for themselves?

Most importantly, the people Zinn quotes are not in any tiny little way like "bobble-head dolls in work shirts." Could this description BE any farther from the truth? Zinn's People range from Spanish nobles, presidents and congressmen to illiterate Indians, union organizers, ordinary witnesses, public speakers, and peasants, but an astonishing amount of them display the active, fervent minds of intellectual people trying to understand the truth about the world in which they live. There is no separation between the rabble-rousers and "the people" (that phrase is always thrown around like an epithet against those leftists who Just Don't Get It)--in a People's History, they are one and the same.

To call Zinn an elitist leftist snob with no true appreciation of culture, as Kazin does, is laughable on its face. Perhaps worst of all, he actually labels Howard Zinn a cynic. A cynic! A guy who spent years after WWII tracking down the names of everyone he had killed in his bombing missions, then sealed up his war paraphernalia in a box marked "never again;" who was fired from his job at a black college for organizing and writing about the civil rights movement; who spent his last class period before retirement standing on a picket line; who spent the last 20 years of his life on lecture tours urging students to organize for progressive causes; who supported Ralph Nader in the face of withering public disdain (twice)? A guy whose commencement address at Spelman College in 2005 was entitled "Against Discouragement" based on his belief, grounded in historical understanding and personal experience, in people's ability to enact change from the ground up? Cynical? To quote the immortal Inigo Montoya: I do not think that word means what you think it means.

So maybe Zinn fails according to the careful historian. The noble history professor, apparently, is an elite scientist who loves nothing more than careful, thorough tweaking of theories and models and rendering all possible contexts until it all points towards something he can safely defend as resembling some kind of actual historical truth in the eyes of his thesis advisor/journal editor. (Kazin likens his preferred historians to bricklayers who dutifully lay their own little brick, while that bastard Zinn just strolls along with dynamite and blows it all up.) Obviously Zinn didn't give a shit about any of that: he just wanted to help average Americans understand that there is a different way of looking at history than the way their textbooks describe it, and that they could be far more active participants in their own history than they had been led to believe. He was trying to open the doors to a new kind of history that is participatory and communal, even oral, as a way to keep alive certain ideas that are all but disappearing from public discourse today.

I guess I'm saying that in a country where 49% of the public believes Fox News is the most trusted news network, Zinn's kind of history is a hell of a lot more important, and necessary, than any bricks the careful historians from "the academic world of U.S. history" might lay.