In a classic episode of the Sopranos, Tony tries to excite his two children about their Italian-American ancestry and the upcoming Columbus Day parade. Tony’s son A.J., eager to show up his fuddy-duddy dad, invokes Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States as proof that Christopher Columbus was bad. “My teacher told us that. It must be true,” he says. “You finally read a book,” Tony fires back, “and it’s all [baloney].” Only he didn’t say “baloney.”
What Tony Soprano knows the History Channel doesn’t. Howard Zinn isn’t a great historian. He’s not even a good one.
How, then, to explain his widespread popularity, and the History Channel’s willingness this weekend to give Zinn an even larger megaphone? After having visited scores of K-12 schools and working with thousands of history and social studies teachers in national civic education programs, one of which I direct for Hillsdale College, I have concluded that Zinn is popular because he tells a great story. The only problem is that his story is not true. This inconvenience has not stopped school administrators from commending Zinn to their teachers.
Several years ago, in a meeting of the Ann Arbor public school system, home to Michigan’s largest high school, the superintendent, distressed at his district’s lack of progress in closing the racial “achievement gap,” held up a copy of A People’s History. “Have you heard of Howard Zinn?” he asked the throng of thousands of district teachers and employees, gathered for a large “in-service” assembly. In fact, they had, and many teachers already taught from the text the administrator prescribed as the cure for what ailed the district. Instead of helping, many teachers told me, the book had contributed to the malady, for Zinn’s basic message is one of division, not unity.
“Guns and greed”–that’s how Zinn characterizes America’s story. “The American system is the most ingenious system of control in world history,” he writes in his magnum opus, A People’s History of the United States. America’s founders were not fighting for liberty or justice; rather, they overthrew the British so that they could aggrandize themselves, empower later elites, and set the new nation on a path to empire that continues to this day.
With a much-hyped Zinn-inspired film, “The People Speak,” slated to air tonight, the History Channel will give voice to self-described “radical” historian whose “scholarly” outpouring over the last half century amounts to a sustained denunciation of America. Zinn himself describes his work as “history as a political act” with the purpose of starting a “quiet revolution.”
Already considered a living legend by many Progressives, Comrade Zinn, as he was called by the Eugene V. Debs Foundation, has been credited by his ideological twin, Noam Chomsky, for changing the “consciousness of a generation.”
In reality, Zinn’s enormous impact upon American students and citizens now spans several generations. His considerable presence is felt well beyond anarchist bookstores and anti-war rallies. What once was radical now is mainstream.
A People’s History, first published in 1980, continues to grow in popularity and influence. Every year since 1981 the anti-American tome has increased its sales. In 2003 cumulative sales for the book topped the one million mark. Zinn has added to that moutainous sales figure a steady stream of curriculum add-ons, companion volumes, and multimedia spin-offs. A two-volume “young people’s” history was published in 2007 (sample paragraph: “Many Americans have seen the Constitution as a work of genius, put together by wise men who created a legal framework for democracy and equality. But there is another way to look at it.”) In 2008 a graphic novel version, titled A People’s History of American Empire, was added to the Zinn oevre. If you’re a teacher and want a wall chart depicting history, Howard-style, you can even find one for sale, a bargain at $19.99.
Especially popular in Advanced Placement courses at private prep academies and wealthy suburban public schools, A People’s History also is found frequently in inner-city classrooms, where Zinn’s narratives of oppression appeal to ideologically-driven administrators and teachers.
Teaching history should not be confused with fomenting revolution. Dissatisfied with the American Revolution, Zinn wants to inspire his own, Marxist version. Still, in the process of condemning capitalism he’s built Zinn, Inc. Sadly, its product is propaganda, not sound history. Its end result is a bankrupt ideology. Kind of fitting, isn’t it, that the History Channel is partly owned by NBC?