II The Breakdown of the Consensus— the Case of Howard Zinn

Writing only two years later, in 2004, the University of Georgia historian Peter Charles Hoffer, focusing on college-level American history textbooks, saw a somewhat different situation. In college classrooms around the country, according to Hoffer, the big change came in the 1980s, and it was a genuine change, as consensus history—the triumphant story of peace, justice, freedom, and the American Way—gave way to what he calls "the new history."

The "new history," as we have seen, was the name adopted for their revisionist movement, the first in American historiography, by James Harvey Robinson and Charles Beard of Columbia University in the 1890s. What set that earlier New History apart from its consensus competitors was the enthusiasm with which the New Historians drew on social sciences like economics and sociology to revise the historical record as needed. The new "new history" that arose in the 1960s and began affecting public school textbooks late in that decade was similarly enthralled by the contributions the social sciences could make to historical understanding. More importantly, the new "new history" had two distinct "wings" or "branches." As Hoffer puts it, there were the "historians who focused on major public events, political and military figures"—the New Left Historians already familiar to readers of Chapter 3, many of them products of the Beard-saturated history department of the University of Wisconsin—and there were the historians "who thought that the everyday life of ordinary people—birth, marriage, child rearing, and other demographic issues—was more important."

The latter group, the social historians, enjoyed their first successes working as consultants to ethnic and racial pressure groups like the NAACP, agitating for the removal of racist passages and the inclusion of accurate historical accounts of the African-American experience in this country in public school textbooks—or writing the new textbooks that would be needed to address the concerns of the pressure groups in question. It wasn't long before the New Left Historians focused on political, military, and diplomatic history found that their fellow "new historians" had begun "radically shifting the angle of repose of all history in the direction of social and cultural life. The two sides in this debate—the major-events group and the everyday-life group—began to struggle for control of the programs at the major conventions, each accusing the other of intellectual imperialism."⁴²³

Divided though they were, however, the purveyors of the new "new history" were able to conquer their opponents, the consensus historians, with little difficulty. Hoffer reports that "by the middle of the 1980s," a number of "major textbook publishers scrambled to assemble groups of authors who would focus on the new-history perspective—stressing social as well as political history and inclusiveness and diversity." And "[b]y the end of the 1980s, the purveyors of the new history were buoyed by their apparent triumph in the classroom and the textbooks." It was, as Hoffer describes it, a "sweeping victory, in which consensus history was left to the popular historians (and a few notable academics of the old school)."⁴²⁴

On the other hand, the triumphant new historians were visibly squabbling among themselves even as they emerged victorious in the classrooms and in the college textbooks—which showed that historians could violently disagree with each other about what should be included in the national narrative, something consensus historians had never done. By conducting this squabbling in public as they did, and by explaining in detail the errors and misdemeanors of the consensus historians who had preceded them, the new New Historians "required all of us to think about the way history was constructed. [The new "new history"] fostered critical, and self-critical, thought. But in so doing, it undermined the intellectual authority that consensus historians had claimed and, until the rise of the new history, had routinely exercised."⁴²⁵

If the consensus historians had really been as full of it as the newly dominant New Historians claimed, and if the New Historians themselves could not reach agreement about the Truth in at least certain cases, then why, more and more students and teachers of history began asking, should we pay any more attention to the pronouncements of the New Historians than we apparently erroneously paid to the pronouncements of their predecessors? Why not study history on our own and reach our own conclusions?

And so they did. And so it is that today, for the first time in American history, we see textbook wars in which the competing textbooks do not all tell the same story—textbook wars in which, for the first time, there is true diversity of opinion about our nation's past. It is instructive to examine a sample of today's college-level American history textbooks and reflect on the situation this latest development in left liberal revisionism has brought about.

The Twentieth Anniversary Edition of A People's History of the United States: 1492-Present by Howard Zinn, published in 1999 by HarperCollins, enjoys a special status among current college-level American history texts. It was the first text to blend successfully the two strains of the new "new history"—"the major-events group and the everyday-life group"—and it was the first such text to enjoy widespread adoption and use on American college and university campuses. According to Michael Kazin, A People's History "has gone through five editions and multiple printings, been assigned in thousands of college courses, sold more than a million copies, and made the author something of a celebrity." ⁴²⁶ According to Zinn, whose Ph.D. in history was awarded by the ubiquitous Columbia University, he wrote his People's History because "the circumstances of my own life [...] demanded of me that I try to fashion a new kind of history [...] a history different from what I had learned in college and in graduate school and from what I saw in the history texts given to students all over the country."

By the "circumstances of [his] own life," Zinn referred to his "upbringing in a family of working-class immigrants in New York," his "three years as a shipyard worker," his service in the U.S. Air Force "as a bombardier in the European theater [...] in the second World War," and his twenty years of experience "teaching history and what is grandiosely called 'political science'" in American colleges and universities. These experiences had made it clear to Zinn that "[t]here were themes of profound importance to me which I found missing in the orthodox histories that dominated American culture." One case in point was

the issue of class. It is pretended that, as in the Preamble to the Constitution, it is "we the people" who wrote that document, rather than fifty-five privileged white males whose class interest required a strong central government. The use of government for class purposes, to serve the needs of the wealthy and powerful, has continued throughout American history, down to the present day. It is disguised by language that suggests all of us—rich and poor and middle class— have a common interest.⁴²⁷

Another case in point was the issue of U.S. foreign policy. "My own war experience," Zinn wrote,

and the history of all those military interventions in which the United States was engaged, made me skeptical when I heard people in high political office invoke "the national interest" or "national security" to justify their policies. It was with such justifications that Truman initiated a "police action" in Korea that killed several million people, that Johnson and Nixon carried out a war in Indochina in which perhaps 3 million people died[...].

Zinn wonders

how the foreign policies of the United States would look if we wiped out the national boundaries of the world, at least in our minds, and thought of all children everywhere as our own. Then we could never drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, or napalm on Vietnam, or wage war anywhere, because wars, especially in our time, are always wars against children, indeed our children.

Nor was this all that Zinn found wanting in consensus history. There was also the issue of "how badly twisted was the teaching and writing of history by its submersion of nonwhite people"—and, for that matter, of women and gays.⁴²⁸ In writing his People's History, Zinn was not planning to retell the venerable old tale of America's inexorable evolution toward greatness as an international beacon of peace, prosperity, and freedom. Zinn had something very different in mind. "I wanted," he says, "to awaken a greater consciousness of class conflict, racial injustice, sexual inequality, and national arrogance." His vision of the American past was one of "continuing horrors: violence, war, prejudices against those who are different, [...] political power in the hands of liars and murderers [...]."⁴²⁹ Not a pretty picture.

It is instructive to examine Zinn's treatment, in his People's History of the United States, of the three topics in U.S. political, military, and diplomatic history which we have already traced through the pages of Gore Vidal's American Chronicle novels and through the works of the revisionist historians—namely, the nature and significance of the U.S. Civil War, the role of the United States in the two world wars of the first half of the 20^th Century, and the origins and significance of the Cold War.

Like Vidal and the revisionists, Zinn regards the U.S. Civil War as having been touched off by something other than slavery.

Behind the secession of the South from the Union, after Lincoln was elected President in the fall of 1860 as candidate of the new Republican party, was a long series of policy clashes between South and North. The clash was not over slavery as a moral institution—most northerners did not care enough about slavery to make sacrifices for it, certainly not the sacrifice of war.

Among the "policy clashes" Zinn names are "free land" (Southerners believed public lands being opened to settlement should be sold, not given away), "a high protective tariff for manufacturers," and "a bank of the United States" (both rejected by Southerners as not in their economic interest). He quotes Lincoln's statement to Horace Greeley that "[m]y paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or destroy Slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it [...]." And he comments: "The American government had set out to fight the slave states in 1861, not to end slavery, but to retain the enormous national territory and market and resources."⁴³⁰

Like Vidal and the revisionists, Zinn regards Lincoln as having been something of a tyrant. The Civil War, he writes "was a war proclaimed as a war for liberty, but working people would be attacked by soldiers if they dared to strike, Indians would be massacred in Colorado by the U.S. army, and those daring to criticize Lincoln's policies would be put in jail without trial—perhaps thirty thousand political prisoners." Like Vidal and the revisionists, Zinn regards Lincoln's reputation as the "Great Emancipator" as something of a joke. He approvingly quotes the London Spectator: "The principle [behind the Emancipation Proclamation] is not that a human being cannot justly own another, but that he cannot own him unless he is loyal to the United States."⁴³¹

Like Vidal and the revisionists, Zinn sees Woodrow Wilson as having led the United States into another useless, destructive war (World War I), while using his power as chief executive, in defiance of the First Amendment, to silence all dissent and all criticism of his policies. "Congress passed and Wilson signed, in June of 1917, the Espionage Act," Zinn writes, a law that "was used to imprison Americans who spoke or wrote against the war." When Charles Schenck was convicted under the law and sentenced to six months in jail for the "crime" of having "denounced the draft law and the war," he appealed his conviction—one of "the shortest sentences given in such cases," Zinn reminds us—all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. There Schenck fell victim to the dubious "justice" of Oliver Wendell Holmes, who ruled, rather irrelevantly, that "[t]he most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic." Schenck went to jail.⁴³²

As for World War II, Zinn observes that "if the entrance of the United States into" that conflict "was (as so many Americans believed at the time, observing the Nazi invasions) to defend the principle of nonintervention in the affairs of other countries, the nation's record cast doubt on its ability to uphold that principle." After all, Zinn reminds us, the United States

had opposed the Haitian revolution for independence from France at the start of the nineteenth century. It had instigated a war with Mexico and taken half of that country. It had pretended to help Cuba win freedom from Spain, and then planted itself in Cuba with a military base, investments, and rights of intervention. It had seized Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam, and fought a brutal war to subjugate the Filipinos.

The United States had, moreover,

engineered a revolution against Colombia and created the "independent" state of Panama in order to build and control the Canal.[...] Between 1900 and 1933, the United States intervened in Cuba four times, in Nicaragua twice, in Panama six times, in Guatemala once, in Honduras seven times. By 1924 the finances of half of the twenty Latin American states were being directed to some extent by the United States.

And these interventions sometimes lasted for years, even decades. The United States, Zinn notes,

sent five thousand Marines to Nicaragua in 1926 to counter a revolution, and kept a force there for seven years. It intervened in the Dominican Republic for the fourth time in 1916 and kept troops there for eight years. It intervened for the second time in Haiti in 1915 and kept troops there for nineteen years.⁴³³

In short, whatever its pretensions, the United States was an imperial power, and its "main interest" in entering World War II "was not stopping Fascism but advancing the imperial interests of the United States [...] Roosevelt was as much concerned to end the oppression of Jews as Lincoln was to end slavery during the Civil War; their priority in policy [...] was not minority rights, but national power." In fact, as Zinn sees it, there was precious little evidence of any concern at all for minority rights on the part of the Roosevelt administration. He particularly takes the president to task for

calmly sign[ing] Executive Order 9066, in February 1942, giving the army the power, without warrants or indictments or hearings, to arrest every Japanese-American on the West Coast—110,000 men, women, and children—to take them from their homes, transport them to camps far into the interior, and keep them there under prison conditions. Three-fourths of these were[...] American citizens.

They "remained in those camps," Zinn laments, "for over three years."⁴³⁴

Like Vidal and the revisionists, Zinn looks upon Harry Truman's decision to drop the new atomic bomb on a pair of Japanese cities in 1945 as both unnecessary and inexcusable. He refers to the bombing of Hiroshima on August 6 and the bombing of Nagasaki three days later as "atrocities." He quotes the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, which "reported just after the war" that "Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped," and sneers at President Truman's argument that the only alternative to the bombing—an invasion of Japan—could cost half a million American lives. "These estimates of invasion losses," Zinn writes, "were not realistic and seem to have been pulled out of the air to justify bombings, which, as their effects became known, horrified more and more people."⁴³⁵

In defense of the United States Bombing Survey's conclusion that Japanese surrender was already imminent when President Truman ordered the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Zinn points out that

[t]he Japanese code had been broken, and Japan's messages were being intercepted. It was known the Japanese had instructed their ambassador in Moscow to work on peace negotiations with the Allies. Japanese leaders had begun talking of surrender a year before this, and the Emperor himself had begun to suggest, in June 1945, that alternatives to fighting to the end be considered. On July 13, Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo wired his ambassador in Moscow: "Unconditional surrender is the only obstacle to peace...."

The Truman administration ignored all this, Zinn argues. Instead of working toward peace through diplomatic channels, the administration insisted on unconditional surrender, used the Japanese rejection of those terms as an excuse to murder more than 150,000 Japanese outright (to say nothing of the "tens of thousands more slowly dying from radiation poisoning"), then turned around and accepted Japanese surrender with one condition—"that the Emperor, a holy figure to the Japanese, remain in place[...]."

Since this was the only condition the Japanese had requested in the first place, Zinn contends, it is absurd to believe the Truman administration's contention that the bombings were necessary to avoid an invasion the administration already knew full well was utterly unnecessary. Why, then, did Truman order the bombing? Zinn believes, with the Nobel Prize-winning British physicist Sir Patrick M. S. Blackett (1887-1974)— and with Vidal and the revisionists—that Truman "was anxious to drop the bomb before the Russians entered the War against Japan," thus insuring that "the Japanese would surrender to the United States, not the Russians, and the United States would be the occupier of postwar Japan. In other words, Blackett says, the dropping of the bomb was 'the first major operation of the cold diplomatic war with Russia....'"⁴³⁶

This Cold War is another war Zinn is inclined to think needn't have been fought, and here again he is in agreement with Vidal and the revisionists. "United States foreign policy was not simply based on the existence of the Soviet Union" during the Cold War years, he writes, "but was motivated by fear of revolution in various parts of the world." He approvingly quotes Noam Chomsky's declaration that "the appeal to security" as a rationale for the Cold War "was largely fraudulent, the Cold War framework having been employed as a device to justify the suppression of independent nationalism—whether in Europe, Japan, or the Third World." And he opines further that what the U.S. government feared about this "independent nationalism" was its potential to

jeopardize powerful American economic interests. Revolutions in Nicaragua or Cuba or El Salvador or Chile were threats to United Fruit, Anaconda Copper, International Telephone and Telegraph, and others. Thus, foreign interventions presented to the public as "in the national interest" were really undertaken for special interests, for which the American people were asked to sacrifice their sons and their tax dollars.⁴³⁷