One of the really stimulating things about writing this column is the fact that I receive scathing critiques from people of differing views on everything from my thoughts and ideas to my personal character and anything else imaginable. Every now and then, somebody puts forth something so ripe for exposition that I can’t resist a response.
In this case, I’m reminded of the scene in “Good Will Hunting” where Matt Damon is upbraiding a condescending, pony-tailed history student in a bar for trying to show others how smart he is by making someone else feel stupid. It was a marvelous scene.
In both that excellent film and the recent diatribe of my latest angry critic, the author Howard Zinn is glowingly cited. Obviously, as an “unenlightened” conservative, I couldn’t possibly know anything of the great Zinn. He is, however, one of my favorite subjects. He’s a progressive hero of great renown and an utter failure as a historian.
Zinn is most famous for his hugely successful volume “A People’s History of the United States”, which has sold more than a million copies and has been taught in countless classrooms in high schools and universities since its original publication in 1980. Most students have probably been exposed to it at some point.
“A People’s History” positively drips with a deep-seated hatred for all things American, placing the country simultaneously at the center of the moral universe while also blaming her for nearly every ailment of humanity since her founding. Naturally, Zinn has been lionized by the radical left for writing what may be the most widely read Marxist indoctrination tract ever circulated.
As an example of what I mean by calling him a failure as a historian, I’ve gathered some of the quotes of his own left-leaning peers regarding his work — actual historians still hewing the mark of facts over agenda.
Of Zinn, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. remarked, “I don’t take him very seriously. He’s a polemicist, not a historian.”
In his review of “‘A People’s History” in “The American Scholar,’” Harvard professor Oscar Handlin denounced “the deranged quality of his fairy tale, in which the incidents are made to fit the legend, no matter how intractable the evidence of American history.”
Even socialist Georgetown historian Michael Kazin declared “‘A People’s History’ is bad history, albeit gilded with virtuous intentions. Zinn reduces the past to a Manichean fable,” while maintaining Zinn’s narrative “is grounded in a premise better suited to a conspiracy-monger’s website than to a work of scholarship.”
Zinn, in his own words, stated, “I got into history because I was already an activist at the age of 18 … So when I began to study history and began to think about being a teacher and writing history, I already understood that I was not going to be a neutral teacher. I was not going to simply be a scholar… I wanted my writing of history and my teaching of history to be a part of social struggle”
Answering accusations of intellectual dishonesty, Zinn declared, “Objectivity is impossible and it is also undesirable.”
While I’m not surprised at this man’s popularity in certain quarters, I take issue with “the great man” being called a historian. Call him what he really was: an activist, dissident and liar.
Apparently, teaching ideology over facts, lying to millions and using patent falsehoods to indoctrinate hatred of one’s own country can net you fortune, fame and a huge celebrity cult following while also providing ample ammo for angry, pony-tailed Alligator letters.
Well, how do you like those apples?
Joshua Fonzi is a microbiology and cell science and entomology and nematology senior at UF. His column appears on Thursdays. You can contact him at opinions@alligator.org.
