Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States is one of the most popular works of history ever written. Zinn thought of his book as a supplement to the traditional school curriculum. Instead of recounting the achievements of titans of politics and industry, he celebrated laborers, the leaders of social movements, those who denounced injustice and faced oppression. Each year between its publication in 1980 and 2010, it sold more copies than the last. It was, its publisher said, “the book that won’t stop selling!” Zinn’s book and its ideas made appearances in Good Will Hunting in 1997 (where Matt Damon’s character tells Robin Williams that it is a real history book that will “knock you on your ass”) and in The Sopranos in 2002, where Tony castigates his son for reading it (“so you finally read a book, and it’s bullshit”) and declares, “In this house, Christopher Columbus is a hero. End of story.” It has been taught in thousands of high school and college classrooms; it has been banned from others.
Zinn’s reputation on the political right is, unsurprisingly, very poor. In 2004, Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen tried to write a counterpart—A Patriot’s History of the United States—titled to imply that it is unpatriotic to be critical of a country’s faults. But Zinn’s most popular work also has an uneven reputation on the left. Many professional historians have found it wanting, even if they share most of Zinn’s political sensibilities. Michael Kazin, writing in Dissent in 2004, called it “bad history … gilded with virtuous intentions” that reduces the past to “a Manichean fable.” History, for Zinn, Kazin writes, “is a painful narrative about ordinary folks who keep struggling to achieve equality, democracy, and a tolerant society, yet somehow are always defeated by a tiny band of rulers whose wiles match their greed.” Kazin thought Zinn opted for an oversimplified morality tale that would, in the end, keep the left “on the margins of American political life.”
Most historians are lucky to have readers. Zinn has fans. A People’s History made him, by the standards of historians at any rate, a celebrity. In the early 2000s, he coordinated stage performances and a film featuring the voices of advocates for social change throughout history, interpreted by actors including Rosario Dawson, Morgan Freeman, Sandra Oh, and Viggo Mortensen. His autobiography was made into a documentary. Before his death in 2010, he toured the country alongside the journalist Dave Zirin, who frequently writes about sports for The Nation, who interviewed him on stage. (I was in the packed audience in what turned out to be Zinn’s final public event, in Chicago in November 2009, on behalf of the Campaign to End the Death Penalty.)
Zirin has now completed a biography of Zinn, The People’s Historian: The Outsized Life of Howard Zinn. It is a tribute to a person that Zirin deeply admires. It has much in common with Zinn’s most popular book. Zinn presented his readers with genuinely admirable dissidents, from Bartolomé de las Casas to Ida Tarbell and Langston Hughes. At a moment when the country needs effective dissidents, Zirin deservedly places Zinn, the scholar-activist, in that pantheon. But The People’s Historian also replicates one of A People’s History’s flaws: It can flatten complex problems and people into apparently simple ones.
Howard Zinn—“Howie” to friends and family—was born in Brooklyn in 1922 to Eastern European Jewish parents (his father immigrated from today’s Ukraine, his mother from Siberia). They were poor throughout his childhood, living in cold-water tenements filled with roaches. “We’d come home and they’d be all over the kitchen table and scatter when we turned on the light. I never got used to them,” Zinn remembered. The four surviving Zinn boys (an older brother died as a baby) slept head-to-toe to make the best use of space. His father worked hard at a series of odd jobs, especially when the Depression hit, but the family never achieved prosperity or even security. From experience, Zinn felt that the “if you work hard, you will get ahead” myth of American advancement was hollow for too many people.
Zinn was the one bookish member of the family. He began reading about politics and spending time with left-wing political organizers. Participating in a peaceful demonstration in 1939, he was beaten by police, which politicized him further. He says—and both Zinn’s previous biographer, Martin Duberman, and Zirin agree—that he never joined the Communist Party. An FBI file filled with inaccuracies (including inventing a nonexistent sister) would later claim that he had. It doesn’t much matter. The politics that he settled into were certainly anti-anti-Communist: defending the civil liberties of radicals of all stripes.
Duberman, whose biography Howard Zinn: A Life on the Left was published in 2012, mentions that an important political influence on the young Zinn was the publications of the Nye Committee. In the mid-1930s, Senator Gerald Nye oversaw an investigation into the causes of World War I, and particularly the claims that U.S. entry into the war had been the result of a conspiracy of arms dealers. The committee found plenty of evidence of profiteering and lobbying, and Nye accused President Woodrow Wilson of having deceived Congress.
Zinn’s historical analysis resembles this populist frame rather than, say, the class politics of Karl Marx. Writing in A People’s History more than 40 years after he read the Nye Committee’s reports, Zinn explains World War I as having arisen from the fact that “American capitalism needed international rivalry—and periodic war—to create an artificial community of interest between rich and poor, supplanting the genuine community of interest among the poor that showed itself in sporadic movements.” A conspiracy of elites. A dishonest government led to catastrophe by business interests seeking profit. The victims: common people, who otherwise are in broad agreement about how the world could be made better. That is the core of Zinn’s historical model, and Nye would have recognized it.
Zirin’s biography tells the story of Zinn’s life in a way that makes clear that many of the most important personal episodes also fit that pattern. Even World War II, for him, was in part a story in which elites took advantage of the goodness of ordinary people for their own gain. For three years, Zinn worked in the Navy Yard in Brooklyn, assembling ships. Pay was better than he had earned before, but conditions were tough, and as the United States entered the war, hours on the job kept increasing. Zinn got a good education in the importance of a union. In this period, he also met Roslyn “Roz” Shechter, who shared his interest in reading and leftist politics. They soon married, and remained partners for more than 60 years, until Roz’s death in 2008.
Though the work in the shipyard was important, and Zinn had initially opposed the war, a 21-year-old Zinn eventually decided that he should join the fight against fascism as an airman. He was trained as a bombardier and deployed to the European theater. He lost friends and flew many missions, dropping bombs over targets he couldn’t see. At the very end of the war, two weeks before Germany’s surrender, he was ordered to bomb the German-occupied French resort town of Royan, using “jellied gasoline”—napalm, as it would be known in Vietnam. Thinking about his experiences, Zinn concluded that there could be just causes, but no just wars. He labeled his box of files on the missions he ran “Never Again.”
At the end of the war, the G.I. Bill made it possible for Zinn to finally enroll in college: at Washington Square College (now NYU). After hearing a song by Woody Guthrie about the Ludlow Massacre—an episode in 1914 in which Colorado militias killed striking workers from a Rockefeller-owned mining operation and their families—Zinn concluded that the teaching of history contained many gaps. He wrote about the episode for his M.A. at Columbia.
In 1956, having earned a Ph.D., Zinn was hired at Spelman College in Atlanta. Spelman’s students were exclusively Black women; the school environment imposed strict curfews and insisted on a high level of decorum. The college president, Albert Manley, was a Black pioneer navigating a hostile white establishment. But in a microcosm of Zinn’s theory of history, Zinn found himself in frequent clashes with Manley, with Zinn supporting student participation in the burgeoning civil rights movement. Zinn was a beloved teacher; his students included Alice Walker and Marian Wright Edelman. He admired it when students protested, picketed, and challenged authority both within and outside of the college, as he did, too. The students’ “urge to organize,” writes Zirin, “shaped Zinn’s expectations about this new pace of social change.” It became too much for Manley, who perceived Zinn as an outside agitator. Although he had tenure, he was fired from Spelman in 1963.
Zinn found a new job at Boston University and moved his family north. In the summers, he went back to the South, continuing his involvement in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, organizing Freedom Schools in 1964 to give young people a more liberatory educational experience. He returned again in 1965 to join the march from Selma to Montgomery. In 1965, he also appeared before a small crowd in Boston Commons, speaking out against growing U.S. involvement in Vietnam. In the years to come, antiwar activism would occupy more and more of his energy.
The atmosphere at Boston University was even more oppressive than that of Spelman, especially after the appointment in 1971 of the conservative John Silber as president, who held the view, “The more democratic a university is, the lousier it is.” He repeatedly clashed with the faculty, but with Zinn most of all. Zinn called him an “intellectual bully”; Silber called Zinn “barbarous” and “uncivilized.” He blocked Zinn’s raises as part of his broader conflicts with the university’s workers. The students were, once again, with Zinn.
Zinn also continued to take admirable personal risks in defense of his political convictions. Zinn helped the Roman Catholic activist Daniel Berrigan hide when he was wanted by the FBI for burning draft cards. He helped the former defense analyst Daniel Ellsberg store the Pentagon Papers, the explosive internal reports that showed that the U.S. government had known for years that it would not win the war in Vietnam. Aware that poor grades were taken into consideration by the military draft, Zinn gave out high marks in his classes. His lectures at BU were regularly attended by between 200 and 300 students.
He shaped those lectures, at the end of the 1970s, into A People’s History of the United States, which launched him to a new level of fame—and controversy. It is easy to understand why A People’s History felt like such an advance to many people over a traditional U.S. history education. More people received then, and many still receive now, a history education that supposes the benevolence of U.S. leadership and U.S. elites. For many readers, A People’s History is a kind of incantation that dispels that illusion, and that is its enduring contribution. If the significance of this achievement is more difficult to perceive in our time, when Zinn’s work has been absorbed, it might be well to remember that the president of the American Historical Association, as late as 1961, declared that “too much self-criticism is weakening to a people.... A great people’s culture ... begins to decay when it commences to examine itself.” Most history teachers and historians reject that view now, and that is part of Zinn’s achievement.
But that is not to say that Zinn’s substitution is without weaknesses of its own. Zinn has a formula: corrupt elites, virtuous activists standing with ordinary people, who, he assumes, have common interests. (There is “common ground for people all over the world…,” Zinn once jotted in a notebook, “All of us want the same thing.”) Zirin’s biography, precisely because it is so influenced by Zinn’s models, helps make clear that it is possible to narrate important parts of Zinn’s life according to that same model, including his time at Spelman and at BU, in the civil rights and antiwar movements. No wonder it made sense to Zinn.
It also leaves a lot out. In any survey text there are inevitable absences. But, for example, A People’s History makes virtually no mention of religion—surely an important part of the national experience. It doesn’t discuss conservatism in any serious way. Geopolitics is scarce. Zinn’s Nye-inflected explanation for World War I, for example, replaces ideology with interests, and assumes them to be the same. If the goal is to understand Woodrow Wilson’s thinking about entry into World War I, for example, A People’s History is a very poor guide.
That same pattern of analysis, shoehorned in again and again, is responsible for what is probably the worst passage in A People’s History: his account of the U.S. Civil War. Zinn calls the Civil War “not a clash of peoples … but of elites.” It was “not over slavery as a moral institution … the northern elite wanted economic expansion … the slave interests opposed all this; they saw Lincoln and the Republicans as making continuation of their pleasant and prosperous way of life impossible in the future.” There are elements of truth here, of course. The North was also racist, it had businessmen with interests, it was not merely waging a war of righteous emancipation. But, again, Zinn is too reductive. There was moral and political outrage about slavery in the North. Troops, Northern and Southern, understood what the war was about. The Thirteenth Wisconsin Infantry, in 1862, declared that it was “as plain as the noon-day sun” that the South’s “infamous rebellion” was “a war of, by, and for Slavery,” and a Confederate Brigade agreed: “any man who pretends to believe that this is not a war for the emancipation of the blacks … is either a fool or a liar.” There are times when Zinn should have listened more to “the people.”
Zinn is at his best when describing the activists and dissidents who recognized the flaws in their own times, and who organized to make the country better. Zirin is at his best when he is presenting the story of Zinn in that same light. But Zirin also replicates some of Zinn’s flaws. Zirin glosses the Cold War, as Zinn does: American elites needed an enemy, they found it in the USSR, and “the war business was booming.” This is too simple; and the problem with this narrative when applied to political action is that it turns hard problems into apparently easy ones. The task of understanding other perspectives, other ways of thinking, perhaps even the reasons that people take pride in traditions other than the dissident one, is not taken seriously.
Zirin’s weakest chapter is the one on A People’s History itself. He has assigned himself the task of defending Zinn from criticisms, even relatively friendly ones. He quotes Duberman’s correct observation that Zinn “wasn’t much interested in political theory” to deem it “dizzying, derisive, and confusing.” (Duberman, who also admires Zinn, is more generous to Zinn’s critics in his biography.) Zirin decries the “cottage industry of vicious critiques” against Zinn. Zirin approvingly quotes Zinn’s friend Anthony Arnove, who says that the critiques are “not based on good-faith political conversation,” but are the result of “guild consciousness.” The Zinn framework repeats itself: The corrupt elite defends its own interests once again.
This sort of argument is where one ends up at an impasse with someone who has used Zinn as a brick in the wall around their historical imagination, rather than as one of a number of ways of opening that imagination up. Praise from the great historian Eric Foner, who shared Zinn’s democratic socialist politics, appears on covers of most copies of A People’s History: “Historians may well view it as a step toward a coherent new version of American history.” But Zirin doesn’t like that Foner also found the book potentially “disempowering,” as when Foner notes that “Blacks, Indians, women, and laborers appear either as rebels or victims,” while “less dramatic but more typical lives … receive little attention.” Foner, by contrast, paid Zinn the ultimate compliment when he wrote his own single-volume history of the United States. The Story of American Freedom, from 1998, does discuss religion and conservatism. It takes the ideas and motives of people Foner disagrees with seriously. It lets people be complex and flawed, rather than good or evil. It lets hard problems be hard problems. As a single-volume survey of U.S. history, I don’t think Foner’s work has been surpassed. That’s not an affront to Zinn, but a tribute.
Duberman notes that Zinn, toward the end of his life, destroyed the elements of his personal archive that reflected on his inner life. He wanted to be known for his public deeds, not his private thoughts. He was not a perfect man. Duberman writes about serial affairs that nonetheless co-existed with real commitment to Roz. Zirin, the journalist, interviewed Zinn’s children and allows them to speak about the challenges of having a famous father. But neither Duberman nor Zirin had access to material that might have allowed them to see any doubts, missteps, or self-criticisms Zinn might have contemplated.
In this focus, too, there is a curious overlap with Zinn’s own historical method: Zinn cares more about where historical actors are on the chessboard than how they are thinking about their next moves. Rendering interiority was not his strength as a historian, and he did not want it for himself. Did he wrestle with the questions that don’t have clear answers? It’s easy to draw a line from his support for the third-party campaign of Henry Wallace in 1948 to that of Ralph Nader in 2000. But were those good strategies for the left? On the predations of U.S. power, Zinn was clear-eyed, and he knew other empires did the same. But what should be done about it? It’s hard to say. Good societies need good social critics; but they are not made of critics alone.
Zinn remains a touchstone for millions of Americans. As a work of scholar-activism, A People’s History is an extraordinary achievement. As historical analysis, it has real flaws. But it connects readers to an inspiring legacy, and that has real value, too. As Zirin’s admiring biography makes clear, it arose from a life of deep and admirable commitment. If you are one of its new readers, you will be shocked, outraged. You will learn. Take that first step. Then take another.
