By intentionally emphasizing facts which support his own deep convictions and suppressing facts which don’t, the historian can, without exactly lying, steer his reader towards an utterly false impression.

Last month, Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States, darling of the political Left and arguably America’s most influential living historian, received a literary smackdown in the Sunday Times Book Review by critic Walter Kirn, who panned Zinn’s latest title, A Young People’s History of the United States. Kirn faulted Zinn mainly on methodological grounds:

. . . as Zinn himself points out about his discipline, telling the truth is not Job 1 for historians. Editing and motivating are. The goal is to ‘pick and choose among facts’ so as to ‘shape the ideas and beliefs’ that will ‘help us imagine new possibilities for the future.’

But, as Kirn notes, a theoretical approach in which beliefs lead to facts, rather than vice versa, amounts to a kind of intellectual nihilism and is irreconcilable with Zinn’s overriding desire to take America down a peg:

If the facts can be massaged at will to serve the interests of the masseuses, why even bother with facts at all, since lies would work well, too? Indeed, if all is sophistry and power, why not just let the best man win? So what if he happens to be rich and white?

Predictably, Zinn did not take Kirn’s impertinence lying down. In a letter to the editor a week later, he went after Kirn:

Most historians, including bright 12-year-olds, understand that there is no such thing as a single ‘objective’ truth, that that there are different truths according to the viewpoint of the historian. Kirn is intent on giving a sinister ring to what is common sense.

You often hear this kind of talk among academics, especially those of a postmodern bent. Indeed, the fundamental tenet of postmodernism is the notion that objective truth is an illusion — and, therefore, one “discourse community” (i.e. set of beliefs) is as good as another. But of course, as Kirn suggests, the position cancels itself out. The assertion that objective truth cannot be had is itself an assertion of objective truth . . . and thus, according to postmodernism, no truer than the assertion that objective truth can indeed be had. Far from being “common sense,” as Zinn asserts, the idea of “different truths according to the viewpoint of the historian” is highly counterintuitive. If one historian claims that the Mets won the World Series in 1986, and another denies it, then common sense tells us that one of them is objectively right and one objectively wrong.

Nevertheless, postmodernists have claimed that Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity proves that all truth is relative, or that Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle proves that nothing is certain. These are howlers — indeed, both the General Theory of Relativity and the Uncertainty Principle are themselves taken as objectively true by physicists — but when a professorial dilettante drops the names Einstein and Heisenberg into a lecture at a social science conference, he can count on an audience just gullible enough to think he’s onto something. Zinn’s song and dance about the fantasy of “objective truth” will thus strike many credentialed academics not as self-negating nonsense but as postmodern sophistication.

To be sure, the word “truth” can be used in several nuanced ways. On the most basic level, however, “the truth” is uncomplicated; it is simply a correspondence between the in-here world of what is thought or said and the out-there world that exists independently of what is thought or said. Rooting interests are irrelevant. My friend Jonathan is a Red Sox fan. But if Jonathan claims the Red Sox beat the Mets in the 1986 World Series, then he’s wrong. No matter how many Red Sox fans concur, and no matter how desperately they believe it, the assertion that the Red Sox won the World Series in 1986 is false . . . and the fact that I’m a Mets fan, and thus not an unbiased observer, doesn’t level my claim with theirs.

But Jonathan is a sensible sort and accepts the truth of the Red Sox 1986 defeat — and points to their triumph in 2004 with great satisfaction. So let’s move from away from hypotheticals and get down to actual cases. During the 2004 presidential campaign, John Kerry twice asserted that “a million” African-Americans had been systematically disenfranchised in the 2000 election. This is an article of faith among many on the political Left, a truth so heartfelt that it seems almost beyond dispute. Yet it’s false. In point of fact, not a single black voter who was registered to vote and eligible to vote in the 2000 election has ever come forward with a credible story of being prevented from voting. Not one . . . and a good faith effort by any would-be historian will reveal that fact. By Zinn’s reasoning, however, no such good faith effort is warranted — since black voter suppression in the 2000 election has been widely, if erroneously, reported in the mainstream media, and since it fits with his particular view of the nefariousness of the American political process.

Likewise, many on the political Left now claim the civilian death toll in Iraq stands at upwards of 600,000. Following Zinn’s logic, left-leaning historians should automatically accept this hyper-inflated number because it supports their belief in the genocidal iniquity of the American invasion. Their job is not to ask why the 600,000 number suddenly appeared in October 2006, when previous high-end estimates put the body count at 75,000 to 100,000 . . . or to scrutinize the methodology of The Lancet study, which first published the number. If they did, in this case, they’d find that the Lancet folks surveyed 1849 randomly selected households, inquired about family deaths immediately before and after the American invasion, tallied the responses and then multiplied out their results by the entire Iraqi population. But how did they know the respondents weren’t exaggerating the death toll? Because, the surveyors insisted, over 90% of the respondents produced death certificates. Except if you multiply out the death certificate numbers, that means over 90% of the 600,000 deaths would have accompanying death certificates — i.e., over 540,000 death certificates. But who issued them? Certainly not the Iraqi government, which currently is still reporting fewer than 75,000 civilian deaths.

The Lancet surveyors, in other words, were either dupes or propagandists. But according to the Zinn Way of History, that shouldn’t concern the professional historian — whose job, after all, is to “pick and choose among facts” so as to “shape the ideas and beliefs” that will “help us imagine new possibilities for the future.”

Not surprisingly, then, miscellaneous falsehoods can be cherry-picked from Zinn’s own writings. The updated edition of his original People’s History, for example, states that, despite President Clinton’s anti-crime legislation, violent crime continued to rise during the Clinton and early Bush administrations. In reality, however, according to the Department of Justice, the violent crime rate was halved during that period. But a rise in violent crime jibes with Zinn’s belief that anti-crime measures are merely veiled attacks on minorities and, more generally, that the American government, regardless of which party is in power, relentlessly works against the interests of the American people. On the foreign policy front, Zinn once claimed that 5,000 Iraqi children were dying every month prior to the current war in Iraq as a result of United Nations sanctions — another hyper-inflated number that is of course difficult to square with his steadfast opposition to the American invasion. The dead Iraqi children were a useful talking point when Zinn’s target was the sanctions regime, for which he held the US responsible. They were conveniently forgotten after Saddam was toppled and the sanctions ended.

Still, it must be conceded that most of the facts Zinn reports in his books are indeed historically accurate — and here we arrive at the more insidious nature of Zinn’s theoretical posture. Truthful context is as important as true facts. For by intentionally emphasizing facts which support his own deep convictions and suppressing facts which don’t, the historian can, without exactly lying, steer his reader towards an utterly false impression. It would be possible, for example, to write a history of America focusing on the cruelty of the Indians towards European settlers and their descendents, citing broken treaties, kidnappings, and assorted massacres of white women and children. Such a book would be factually accurate but would miss the forest for the trees — since the wide angle view cannot avoid the genocidal upheavals visited upon the Indians, intentionally and unintentionally, by whites. What Zinn churns out is ultimately no more truthful than that: His determination to highlight every instance of ethnic minorities and working poor being exploited by wealthy capitalists blinds his readers to the long-term trends in American history towards greater overall health, prosperity and social justice.

The final question to ask is whether Zinn matters. Don’t his readers, however impressionable, eventually outgrow him? Consider, as a tentative answer, the following response from a Maryland schoolteacher which was posted on the Times online message board after Kirn’s review of Zinn’s book first appeared:

At the High School in Maryland where I taught using A People’s History of the United States for decades, Washington Post columnist Coleman McCarthy taught a peace studies class, and featured Zinn as a guest lecturer. No other class and no other book inspired young people to action like McCarthy and Zinn. The students didn’t just talk about protest, they conducted sit-ins. The hope young people respond to in A People’s History of the United States for “possibilities for the future” comes from the example Zinn sets in showing that an alternative history, equally legitimate, can be told. Kirn and the NY Times actually prove Zinn’s point about how the powerful protect their version of history with this review. The reviewer acknowledges that the Young People’s version is well done, accurate, and true to the original, but objects to Zinn’s politics as making “idealism impossible” for young readers. That the NY Times would choose such a reviewer is no surprise.

Those who love the original applaud that a shorter, more accessible version is available. It’s the book many educators have been waiting for. If Kirn had an educator’s experience he would know that his fig leaf of concern for young people’s idealism is no worry. Kirn’s real objection is obviously political.

If a licensed high school teacher actually believes that a review in the New York Times serves to illustrate “how the powerful protect their version of history,” then perhaps Zinn and his minions are already half-way home.