A People's History of Howard Zinn
1/27/2012
Two years after Howard Zinn's death, Michael Schaffer takes on his legacy. Originally published February 2010 on Obit-Mag.com.
If the Howard Zinn approach to history were applied to the obituary pages, there might be no obits for the left-wing historian. Zinn devoted little attention in his work to the likes of generals, senators, CEOs — or, for that matter, tenured professors at prestigious private universities. A Zinn-style account of modern American history teaching would likely feature the struggles of unionized faculty members, the tribulations of loan-saddled blue-collar students, or perhaps the noxious influence of university trustees, forever silencing any professor who’d speak the truth about society’s vested interests.
Howard Zinn (Wikimedia Commons/Howard_Zinn_at_lectern)
“All those histories of this country centered on the Founding Fathers and the Presidents weigh oppressively on the capacity of the ordinary citizen to act,” Zinn declared in his celebrated A People’s History of the United States. “They suggest that in times of crisis we must look to someone to save us.” For Zinn, it was an article of faith that just about all of those would-be saviors are in fact tricksters, eager to divert our attention away from the real issues by ginning up phony patriotic wars or fratricidal racial animus. Anyone not committed to the relentlessly avaricious goals of our economic elites, the reasoning went, would never be allowed a position of power in the first place.
Which raises a disturbing question about the media’s coverage of Zinn’s death: If America’s elite is so determined to hide from its people the realities of their oppression and the possibilities of real change, how did it happen that this full-throated dissident — whose anti-history of the United States begins with a genocidal Christopher Columbus, carries on through a Revolutionary War designed to distract poorer colonists from their class resentments, a Civil War waged in the name of Northern industrial conquest, and all manner of class, ethnic, racial and political brutality — earned long, respectful coverage in establishmentarian pillars like the New York Times or the Washington Post?
For that matter, how did it happen that A People’s History, first published the same year Ronald Reagan was elected president (in Zinn’s world, his victory was a puny matter, simply bringing “another part of the Establishment” to power), still sells more than 100,000 copies a year? What sort of all-powerful, resistance-crushing overclass allows Zinn’s books to be assigned in high schools, or published in special young readers’ editions? What sort of toadying, corporate-owned Hollywood entertainment machine would interrupt the flood of bread-and-circus distractions to feature Zinn’s book in a Matt Damon movie, or celebrate his friendship in a Pearl Jam song, or chronicle his philosophy in a documentary narrated by Viggo Mortensen?
http://www.legacy.com/ns/news-story.aspx?t=a-peoples-history-of-howard-zinn&id=697
