Debunking Howard Zinn

by Mary Grabar

There is a line in the film Sophie's Choice, and no doubt some similar reference in the book as well, that stayed with me long after the movie: "Ah, the truth, the truth, ah, the truth, I don't even know what is the truth, after all the lies I have told." 

For purposes of reviewing this book, I'd change that to "...after all the lies I have been told," and there you'd have it when it comes to history.

Not that I am suggesting that all history is a lie, nor even that if it was a "lie" it was intentional. As at least a couple of my high school history teachers taught me: go to original sources, look at the art, listen to the music, examine the public buildings and homes, and you will learn more about what people thought, and did, than many (if not most) recountings of history. Because, as we know, history is written by the victors. 

Of course that famous quote's origin is also in dispute; some have suggested it belongs to Winston Churchill, and others argue no, it was Hermann Göring, and in fact, I don't know, though I've certainly quoted it often enough. And perhaps that's the point - Churchill's team won WWII, so to him belongs a clever quote, though it may have been his enemy who originated something similar.

You've heard of the Mandela Effect, correct? It's a "memory" you have of some popular image, phrase, or idea that simply isn't real. A story, usually popular culture, is repeated incorrectly often enough that we "remember" it in its incorrect form. Is it "Looney Toons" or "Looney Tunes?"

And of course, there's Nineteen Eighty-Four, often "remembered" as being titled "1984," in which there is a thing called the "memory hole," into which are dropped memories, or information, no longer deemed appropriate. All traces of it are removed, rewritten, and replaced. 

These days, we have "Photoshop," and now the equivalent in video form, which alters an image so successfully that we might not notice it's not real. We can't believe our eyes any more, or at least we have to be suspicious.

But even my sagacious teachers were only doing the best they could in sending us to look for material created in the period, because in many cases, art and music is created to inspire, not to reflect, and our inferences can only be partial. My mom used to rely on the phrase, "Was you there, Charlie?" as a way of saying, unless you lived through something, you can't really know it, or recall it. Yet the most honest among us will admit that our memories are colored by our emotional state, circumstances, age, and point of view. Have you ever read your diaries from when you were, say, 15? Enough said.

I approached Mary Gabor's book about Howard Zinn, and his "A People's History of the United States" with great interest. The world of information today, with more available in an instant, yet less reliability than perhaps ever before, is confounding. When I was young and interested in medicine, I'd spend an afternoon in the medical library simply reading up on a topic. It was time consuming, and I had to have a medical dictionary with me at all times to define the terms. But I was reasonably sure when I finished that I'd at least gotten the latest information on a very specific subject, in a fairly unbiased fashion. After all, nobody gained relevance because a textbook got a "click" by being pulled down from the shelf. Now, ten minutes looking up Howard Zinn on the internet will assure you that he was a brilliant historian and charismatic man who finally told the truth about American History, and also that he was a dilettante, a Communist, and a sexual predator who was having a relationship with a female student while he was married.

Lately, a lot of controversy has been swirling around statues of famous figures of times past - should they be left as markers of a period in time, or torn down if the person depicted proves to have some clouds over his (or her) history, or to represent a period or sentiment of which we're no longer proud? Columbus comes to mind: do we remember the man who bravely navigated towards what he thought would be China and India to create a sea route to those profitable trade centers (there was certainly no thought of going to war with either well-armed kingdom), and successfully landed in the New World, opening it to settlement (and conquest)? Or do we see him as Zinn portrays him, a cruel, barbarous rapist and murderer, bent upon stealing gold and destroying an innocent but sophisticated culture of kindly indigenous people?

Grabar argues that Zinn glosses over, or never mentions, the less savory aspects of the many native cultures (which differed considerably from north to south, east to west - Columbus himself being ignorant of the vast expanse of North America and the many different people living there), and portrays those living here as a sort of ideal: communal, at one with nature, woman-powered, and friendly to a fault. While acknowledging their power, he doesn't dwell on the bloodier aspects of Aztec culture, or spend a lot of time on inter-tribal warfare, slave-taking, or brutality. 

Where slavery is concerned, Zinn is convinced that slavery was an accepted part of America's founding - that it was not just an accident of timing, but that America set out to be a slave-driven economy in a way unique in all of history. Grabar argues that slavery pre-existed the "discovery" of the Americas, and that complicit in it were not only the Arab slavers (who also captured slaves up and down the coasts of Europe and the British Isles, and well into the Caucasus) but the African tribes themselves, who either took slaves as prizes of war, or captured them for trade. This argument has been much discussed with the launch of the "1619 Project" and its advance into school curricula - what might have happened had the ancient institution of slavery not reached the shores of North America? 

Are you feeling angry yet? 

I was more confused than angry, both when I read Zinn's book, and reading Grabar's. And the reason is what ended up making me feel a measure of frustrated, if not angry: how do I know where the truth is? The sections in which Grabar deals with especially World War II (in which Zinn fought, and dropped bombs - making him feel, no doubt, a heavy burden of guilt when he discovered that some of his missions may very well have killed civilians) were particularly difficult reading, as this war has always seemed to me to have many unanswered questions. The same holds true for Capitalism vs. Socialism - these days the terms are difficult to define without immediately descending into a disagreement about which is a "better" system for human growth and happiness, and that neither system as lived is its "true embodiment." 

There are huge questions occupying more and more of American discourse these days: what do we teach kids about history? How can you talk to a seven year old about checking sources and consulting multiple original documents when the kid is really more interested in bikes, super heroes, and what kind of yucky food people ate 500 years ago? Are heroes (other than super) even appropriate to childhood - should they be eliminated from our culture completely, as, after all, even the best of them were just people, warts and all (as Cromwell, no saint he, is reported to have told his portraitist to depict him)?

Certainly, by the time a young person has reached high school, history can be shared with a more "warts and all" approach, reminding the student all the while what was common at the time as a way of evaluating actions at the time. And, no doubt, that's the lesson of reading both "A People's History" and  "Debunking." Very likely neither scholar has it absolutely right, nor definitely wrong - but exposing our thinking to both sets of ideas is the best we can do when addressing events of the past. We weren't there, Charlie.  So we read history widely, and with "healthy skepticism."