It is interesting that you mention Zinn. I first read his heavily biased work of “great scholarship” sometime in mid-1990. He originally wrote “A People’s History of the United States” in 1980, and has felt it necessary to amend the book four times since. Apparently, he has to keep adding to it against more recent developments in order to stay relevant, including a paean to the Clinton Presidency and a denunciation of the War on Terrorism.

Zinn was (and still is) a big critic of how ‘history is misrepresented in our classrooms’. By this, you might suppose he must be against the liberal indoctrination that has dominated our schools for about 100 years. Instead, Zinn is offended that liberal dominance is not radical enough by half. By ‘misrepresented’, he means the teaching of ‘dead, white Eurocentric’ history. He is an avowed socialist, and much of the book (after telling us how badly we mistreated everyone from the ‘nobly savage’ Indians to black slaves, to late arriving Italians, celestials and slavs, to women and others) is dedicated to tracing the growth and ‘repression’ of socialism, unions, and harmless communists. If you read only this one book on the United States and events leading to it, you would have to believe us the most evil of nations and most rapacious of people. You would also have to believe that the whole history of the United States since the revolution is one of class struggle. Zinn totally ignores the great advances made in the social contract, the sacrifices made to great ideals, and the unmatched freedom that came about here because not all of us are evilly disposed.

The history Zinn reveals is real enough, but he has cherry-picked it to support his own view and to malign that view which credits our founders with any sort of accomplishment. Instead of seeing that, despite starting off on a rocky footing, we have created a nation to be proud of, Zinn only sees injustice. Because it is not the end result he would wish (i.e., a pure socialism), he sees our great experiment as a dismal failure. If Zinn’s objective was merely to restate our history from the viewpoint of ordinary ‘people’ (as he suggests), he would have presented material taken from countless non-entities writing in their private journals, the margins of family bibles, news clippings of marginal events and marginal actors, and the economic and social realities of life for ordinary citizens. Instead, he writes mostly about extraordinary individuals who swam against the mainstream that most people prefer to follow. He writes mainly about his own ‘heroes’, a who’s who of socialism, unionism, pacifism, and liberal education.

The first Europeans to arrive were rapacious for gold and power, but they were not at all representative. Others were just hungry for a fresh start and an opportunity to build something better. Some few murdered or committed crimes for which they never paid, but, as the land became settled and ordered, that grew less and the society that evolved was one that held justice in high esteem. The U.S. and Canada suffered much less of the castes and hierarchies existing south of our border, and were broadly democratic from our beginnings. What there was of racial injustice was largely burned away in our Civil War and Civil Rights movement, and at considerable costs.

‘Class struggle’, where there is little in the way of classes, only serves to alienate us one from another. It is the Zinn-minded who keep the hate-rant going by instilling mistrust in successive generations. Rather than celebrate our near-fusion, they insist we haven’t even begun. Zinn, along with many like-minded teachers infesting our schools, has been spreading this gospel of self-hate long enough.

A similar author is James Loewen who wrote “Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong” (1995). Zinn has much praise for Loewen, enough that Loewen might be Zinn’s protégé. Loewen writes accurately and convincingly about the many distortions and vacancies to be found in school room texts, and of the forces applied to bring about a kind of least-common-denominator of distilled historicity. He makes the case that: everything that may offend, everything that is not politically-correct, anything that reminds us of uncomfortable truths, and everything that stands in the way of the broadest possible marketing has been left out; and that what is put in its place is geared to stultifying the process of understanding. Then, after making his case and arguing for less editorializing in education, he calls for restoring a ‘true’ socialist teaching of history a-la Zinn.

These guys would crack me up if I didn’t know how influential they’ve been with my own kid.

Bob S