- In general, Zinn’s approach lacks a credible way to include positive social developments in U.S. history, whether economic, intellectual, or political.
- Zinn’s book also lacks a commitment to including material dealing with major events and personalities in American history other than those which introduce or reinforce notions of class struggle, discrimination, exploitation, oppression, and racism.
It is an understatement-bordering-on-cliché to note that many “negative aspects” of American history have been left out of traditional textbooks. Many scholars and teachers have recognized this fact for years but appeared baffled by how to mount a counter-challenge. Not so Zinn: the desire and ability to write a different kind of textbook came naturally to him.
He is committed to challenging the omissions and reinserting them in the nation’s story: discrimination, exploitation, class and racial violence: all of it–yet that approach by itself does not justify ignoring positive developments in American history.
In a sense, Zinn is catering to a very specific audience who is eager to lap up all he has to say without necessarily having the time or inclination to pursue American history more thoroughly. At last! A historian who takes the gloves off and tells it like it is! Certainly, for members of oppressed groups treated like second class citizens, Zinn becomes their hero.
Unfortunately, one book by one author–no matter how well-written–can seldom succeed in telling the whole story of America. We risk raising a generation of readers who will treat Zinn’s book like a bible—especially college students who believe he has uncovered and revealed “the real and only truth” about American history.
Many of these readers may lack the opportunity, time, or desire needed to deepen their understanding of historical events by investigating other writers and sources of material that would provide an effective counter-balance to Zinn’s single-minded approach. He is “telling it like it is” but is he telling the whole story?
Many readers love what he writes: this includes liberal-left thinkers (“radicals”) ethnic minorities, and people who sympathize with the poor and downtrodden or have suffered poverty themselves: any group that has faced discrimination and prejudice due to ethnicity, race, religion or gender as well as large sections of the working class in general.
This is a considerable percentage of the population, to be sure, but it is not the whole population—and by catering to only their preconceived notions of right and wrong and their eagerness to blame government or the wealthy for all the ills and injustices of the nation both past and present, we end up with an author “preaching to the choir”.
Once on a roll, Zinn’s words start to sing a magical tune, a siren song which becomes virtually impossible to resist:
Here is the real truth! Here is an x-ray of America that the wealthy and powerful have tried to keep hidden! Here are the closets where the skeletons are kept, the graveyards where the bodies are buried! Here are found the true stories of class warfare!
The approach is startling and ground-breaking. A People’s History is amazing in the amount of ground it covers, the multitude of examples it provides, and the way in which the author amplifies and reinforces his themes through so many interlocking examples. Nevertheless, Zinn’s writing can and must in turn face criticism of its own for being one-sided. He, too, forces facts to conform to his own preconceived notions and desired conclusions.
It is also true, and only fair to note, that many students have stated to me that Zinn’s book “opened their eyes” to American history explained in a new way—and there is no denying the efficacy of his writings in that sense. Yet scholars and students should also remain aware that the book’s narrative comes with a built-in limitation. One can concede its popularity and positive achievements so long as we are free to engage in the next higher round of critique and counter-argument.
Zinn’s book, and others like it, created a strong alternative to older textbooks that tended to gloss over “the ugly” in U.S. history. Such new writings were long overdue when Zinn published A People’s History in 1980. However, Zinn’s book is not necessarily the first or only book to do so: the works of labor historians (John R. Commons, Philip Foner, and others had already delved deep into the miserable conditions of workers in many areas.
A select but powerful group of scholars focused on Black History (Carter Woodson, W.E.B. DuBois, John Hope Franklin, Herbert Aptheker) or “Women’s History” or “Native American Studies”; as specialists they covered much of this ground long before Zinn’s book first appeared. (In his bibliography, Zinn acknowledges his debt to earlier scholars who preceded him.)
Zinn, however, integrates and illustrates all such expert scholarship with a purpose and verve all his own. He succeeded in writing a highly engrossing narrative that covers a wide range of topics with sufficient details and quotations to establish his views clearly and concisely. One of the best attributes of his book is the writing style itself—for while some few of my students found it challenging to understand (particularly among second language learners) many others enjoyed its narrative story-based rhythms. Students often expressed the opinion how much they enjoyed reading it, especially when compared to “the other kind” of regular textbook.
It is also true that Zinn is more than willing to admit at the outset that he has a “bias” in that he specifically wishes to focus on the voices of the unheard: the ever-present underclass doing the hard physical labor, suffering from exploitation and discrimination, and yet whose voices are left out of mainstream textbooks. This is a noble and lofty undertaking for any historian to attempt and no one wishes to downplay its importance or the success he achieved.
Nevertheless, the end product of Zinn’s work is open to the same critique as that which he (and others) aimed at an earlier generation of textbooks; he, too, has focused on certain subsets of the population–like oppressed minorities–to the exclusion of others and therefore created a book that is not a well-balanced presentation of American history.
For an individual freely choosing to read Zinn’s book that is fine—“it’s a free country”–but for teachers and professors, serious issues of academic obligation remain. For instructors of American history, using Zinn’s book poses a dilemma. They can use it “to awaken students” and “to open their eyes” to this record of exploitation and prejudice that seemingly colors the American landscape in every age and region.
At the same time, it behooves them to find ways to balance Zinn’s text with the political and economic progress that our country has made even during the darkest hours of its national history. Is a book virtually without coverage of presidencies and Congressional acts of legislation sufficient for teaching American history to our students?
If we are still inclined to use Zinn, how do we as instructors include a patriotic strand that does justice to a nation born in revolution in 1776? While examining Zinn’s stories of slavery and Native American oppression, when and how do instructors cover the higher living standards made possible by the Industrial Revolution and the Age of Technology?
What of the moral and intellectual progress made throughout the years despite racial injustice, or, sometimes, because of it?
To describe a historical work as factually accurate is always a compliment but it is not always the whole story. Zinn’s book is factually a good narrative but his work also demonstrates that a careful selection of facts can create too narrow an interpretation of a country’s overall historical development. Those events and personalities which do not fit within his general paradigm of an underclass constantly oppressed and victimized end up having only a marginal role in his book, if indeed mentioned at all.
Even those momentous historical moments, such as the Emancipation Proclamation, tend to be undermined when viewed within Zinn’s left-leaning radicalism, one generally peppered with cynicism and varying amounts of skepticism: i.e., Lincoln didn’t want to free the slaves and he only did so out of military necessity.
While there are often intriguing truths to be found within Zinn’s criticisms of Lincoln, he so emphasizes one particular viewpoint that he misses the bigger picture: the abolition of slavery itself! Of course Zinn can point out that the Emancipation did not free all slaves since four border states were not included, but that was corrected by the Thirteenth Amendment passed just two years later and which Lincoln supported, working for its passage. No president’s signature other than Lincoln’s is on the document that began the final destruction of chattel slavery.
Much of what Zinn says is not exactly new; historians have long understood Lincoln’s views on slavery and abolition changed over time; part of the appeal of Lincoln’s story was his ability to grow and adapt to changing circumstances. The personal and political path he took was never one-dimensional and inflexible; rather, the chapters of his life should be measured by how he matured over time. In part, Zinn succeeds as well as he does because he can attack head on a popularization of Lincoln that made him bigger than life and which perhaps both exaggerated and simplified “the real Lincoln”.
Numerous scholars can find prejudiced remarks that Lincoln made at one time or another. But there, too, Zinn seems to lack feeling for how Lincoln came to occupy the place of honor that he earned in the hearts and minds of millions of Americans and of people all over the world. Since Zinn is writing “a people’s history” he might be wise to consider the reasons why people continue to admire and respect, even revere, Abraham Lincoln.
Knocking Lincoln from his pedestal serves no useful purpose. Replacing the typically admiring, even reverential, view of Lincoln with one that is cynically disrespectful hardly seems useful to the historian’s craft as a way to explore new ground or to improve historical dialogue between past and present generations of Americans.
