Zinn’s thesis 4:
The government was only moved to reform by the actions of organized citizens.
Opposing view:
This view displays an over-reliance on the “crisis theory” of history. While there is some truth to the thesis, it is hardly the whole story. This criticism is related to Zinn’s point of view about the Bill of Rights, already mentioned (thesis 1), and to labor struggles more generally as well as other popular movements of protest for change.
Zinn attributes nearly all significant change to popular protest while ignoring a large body of evidence that demonstrates how peaceful deliberations within our legislative bodies are equally effective at producing new laws.
Zinn’s thesis ignores the ways in which economic productivity and inventive creativity contribute their fair share to an evolving, dynamic, and always changing society. Instead, Zinn has a tendency to retroactively assign to historical developments the “end result” as having been present at the beginning.
It’s an organic grafting of years of subsequent development back into the embryonic stages of the birth of new movements, as though there was a historical inevitability to all that would transpire. This runs counter to the historian’s creed to chronicle responsibly and fairly what actually transpired but not to read back into history views or ideas from a later period.
If a historian is too strongly wedded to one particular theory of historical development, of one particular explanation of cause and effect, then he runs the risk of “bending the truth”. He will try to make all historical evidence conform to a single theory; he will become overly-selective in one’s choice of facts; he will choose to describe and interpret events to make them more neatly reflect his preconceived interpretation of social development.
If one believes that class struggle is the most important way to look at history, then every event and episode chosen will reflect this belief. If one believes only great individuals make history, then one’s examples will focus on the contributions of selected “great” men and women while ignoring the contributions lesser individuals, of the masses, of the general population.
If one believes social change only comes about through the influence of ideas, then that historian will likely focus almost exclusively on “intellectual history”. He will do so even if it means ignoring the economic engines of society that help create historical transformation, such as occurred during the Industrial Revolution. A “one size fits all” or “one theory explains all” seldom can do full justice to the complexity of human beings and modern society.
Unfortunately, many significant facts and contrary viewpoints are downplayed or omitted entirely whenever historians commit to a single point of view. Radical scholars like Zinn emphasize class conflict and social protest. While doing so they gloss over crucial developments in the cultural, intellectual, and political life of the country.
The latter categories are minimized unless these developments are somehow connected to the class struggle between rich and poor, owner and worker, oppressor and oppressed. His writings then take on a one-sided approach to American history; in his own way, he starts to commit some of the same errors of “one-sidedness” that he so brilliantly exposes in others.
Yes, American history textbooks always have been quite selective in what they approve for students’ consumption, but is Zinn any the less selective? Perhaps it is enough to say he drew attention to the omissions and biases of sanitized history writing. The older texts have left out or covered up too much and allowed rose-colored patriotism to snub the true historical record.
To that extent, readers owe Zinn a great debt of gratitude for his iconoclastic narrative and heightened level of honesty, but there remains the nagging feeling that Zinn adopted a similar literary technique to promote his own distinctive view of American history.
