The Disgraceful Howard Zinn

Despite many serious scholars’ denunciations, Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States has enjoyed phenomenal success since its publication in 1980: 2.6 million (!) copies sold, incorporation into the curricula of innumerable schools, and the achievement of almost iconic status in popular culture. Mary Grabar’s Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America performs a valuable service by examining Zinn’s polemical volume and revealing “just how distorted, manipulative, and plain dishonest” it truly is.
A tireless left-wing activist with a Ph.D. in history, Zinn (1922–2010) urged fellow historians, as Grabar relates, to eschew “disinterested scholarship” in order to bring about “a revolution in the academy.” Not all radical academics agreed with his anti-capitalist take on history. Eugene Genovese declined to review Zinn’s opus, which he privately described as “incoherent left-wing sloganizing.” Michael Kammen called it “a scissors-and-paste-pot job” that devoted too much attention to “historians, historiography, and historical polemic” and hence provided “little space for the substance of history.” Kammen acknowledged the need for “a people’s history; but not single-minded, simpleminded history, too often of fools, knaves and Robin Hoods.”
Eric Foner disapproved of Zinn’s “deeply pessimistic vision of the American experience” that emphasized how “stirring protests, strikes and rebellions never seem to accomplish anything.” Zinn’s approach to “history from the bottom up” was “necessary as a corrective” but was “as limited in its own way as history from the top down.” Michael Kazin credited Zinn “with virtuous intentions” but concluded that his book was little more than a “Manichean fable” and a “polemic disguised as history,” a book “grounded in a premise better suited to a conspiracy-monger’s website than to a work of scholarship” and “unworthy of [the] fame and influence” it won. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., regarded Zinn as “a polemicist, not a historian.”

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