Howard Zinn (1922-2010) writes the most widely read radical history in American life and spends fifty years arguing that the historian’s job includes taking sides. He grows up poor, fights in a world war, drops napalm on a French town, and turns the memory of that mission into a career-long indictment of organized violence. His book A People’s History of the United States sells millions of copies, enters thousands of classrooms, and makes him a symbol in the nation’s fight over its own story. Professional historians attack his methods. Readers keep buying the book. The gap between those two facts defines his place in American letters.
Zinn is born on August 24, 1922, in Brooklyn to Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. His father waits tables, works in factories, and pushes a fruit cart. His mother sews. The family moves from tenement to tenement through the Great Depression, sometimes a step ahead of the landlord. There are no books in the home until his parents clip coupons from the New York Post and assemble, volume by volume, the collected works of Charles Dickens. The boy reads all of them. Dickens gives him his first picture of class as a moral fact, of poverty as something done to people rather than something they deserve.
His political education starts on the street. As a teenager he attends a Communist-organized rally in Times Square. Mounted police charge the crowd. An officer clubs him unconscious. He wakes on the pavement with a new conviction that the state does not stand neutral between the powerful and the powerless. He never joins the romance of Soviet communism for long, but the lesson of the nightstick stays with him for the rest of his life.
From 1940 to 1943 he works as an apprentice shipfitter at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, one of the largest industrial plants in wartime America. The established unions exclude the young apprentices, so Zinn and three friends organize the Apprentice Association to win them a voice. He learns labor politics from the inside, with cold hands and a rivet gun, years before he reads about it in graduate school. At the Navy Yard he also meets Roslyn Shechter (1922-2008), whom he marries in 1944. The marriage lasts until her death.
In 1943 he enlists in the Army Air Forces and trains as a bombardier on B-17s. He volunteers; he believes in the war against fascism and wants to fight it. He flies combat missions over Europe and earns an Air Medal. Then, in April 1945, with the German army collapsing and the war in Europe weeks from its end, his squadron bombs Royan, a French coastal town where a small German garrison sits cut off and strategically spent. The raid uses napalm, then a new weapon. Hundreds of French civilians die alongside the German troops. From thirty thousand feet Zinn sees only flashes in the landscape. He thinks little of it at the time.
The mission works on him slowly. In 1966 he travels back to Royan, reads the local archives, and interviews survivors. His essay The Bomb argues that large military bureaucracies acquire momentum of their own, that the machinery of destruction keeps running after its purpose has expired, and that the men inside the machine, himself included, stop asking why. Royan becomes the moral foundation of everything he later writes about war. When he opposes Vietnam, he opposes it as a man who has dropped the bombs himself.
After the war he studies at New York University on the GI Bill while loading trucks at night, then completes a doctorate at Columbia University under Richard Hofstadter (1916-1970). His dissertation on Fiorello LaGuardia’s congressional career wins recognition from the American Historical Association and becomes his first book, LaGuardia in Congress. Hofstadter prizes irony and detachment. Zinn concludes the opposite: that detachment in scholarship serves whoever holds power, and that the historian who claims neutrality has chosen a side without admitting it. The disagreement between teacher and student previews the fight that follows Zinn for the rest of his career.
In 1956 he takes the chairmanship of the history department at Spelman College, a school for Black women in Atlanta. He arrives as the civil rights movement gathers force, and his students walk into the middle of it. They sit in at lunch counters, march, and register voters. Among them are Alice Walker (b. 1944) and Marian Wright Edelman (b. 1939). Zinn does more than approve from his office. He drives students to demonstrations, serves as an adviser to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and documents the movement in his 1964 book SNCC: The New Abolitionists. He also pushes his students to challenge the paternal rules of Spelman, and the administration decides he has pushed enough. President Albert Manley fires him in 1963, tenure notwithstanding. Spelman grants him an honorary degree in 2005, an apology four decades late.
The Spelman years fix his central historical conviction. He watches sharecroppers’ daughters and student organizers move a nation that presidents and courts had declined to move. He concludes that political change rises from below, from ordinary people acting together at risk to themselves, and that the official story crediting enlightened leaders gets the causation backward. Abolitionists, suffragists, strikers, and protesters occupy the center of every narrative he writes afterward.
In 1964 he joins the political science department at Boston University and stays for the rest of his teaching life. He becomes one of the country’s most visible academic opponents of the Vietnam War. His 1967 book Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal makes the case, then heterodox, for leaving at once rather than negotiating a slow exit. In 1968 he flies to Hanoi with the Jesuit priest Daniel Berrigan (1921-2016) to receive three American prisoners of war released by North Vietnam. The trip makes international news. Later he testifies at the trial of Daniel Ellsberg (1931-2023) and helps hide and edit the Pentagon Papers before their publication.
His defense of lawbreaking gets its fullest statement in Disobedience and Democracy: Nine Fallacies on Law and Order, published in 1968 as an answer to Justice Abe Fortas (1010-1982). Fortas argues that citizens must obey even unjust laws while working through legal channels for reform. Zinn answers that law and justice are different things, that legal institutions tend to protect entrenched power, and that citizens hold a right and sometimes a duty to break unjust laws. Courts, he writes, cannot serve as the final judges of morality. The argument scandalizes legal scholars and becomes a handbook for a generation of protesters.
At Boston University he wages a twenty-year war with president John Silber (1926-2012), a combative conservative who regards Zinn as a fraud and says so in public. Zinn leads faculty union organizing, helps direct the strike of 1979, and keeps his job because tenure protects him. Silber freezes his salary and blocks his raises. The feud becomes the most famous in American academic life, two stubborn men sharing one campus and despising each other across it. Zinn retires in 1988, teaching his last class half an hour short so he can join a picket line.
A People’s History of the United States appears in 1980 with a first printing of a few thousand copies. The book retells American history from the deck of Columbus’s ship as the Arawaks see it, from the slave quarters, the textile mills, the reservations, the tenements, and the picket lines. Conquest, slavery, class war, and empire move to the center of the story. The familiar heroes shrink. The book finds readers no academic monograph reaches: union halls, high schools, prisons, rock musicians, and eventually a scene in the film Good Will Hunting where Matt Damon (b. 1970) tells his therapist to read it. Sales pass two million copies in Zinn’s lifetime and three million after. No work of American history written by a professional historian in the late twentieth century reaches so many people or angers so many colleagues.
The criticism comes from the left as well as the right, and the strongest of it comes from historians who share many of Zinn’s politics. Michael Kazin (b. 1948) argues that Zinn reduces ordinary Americans to victims and rebels and cannot explain why so many workers vote for conservatives, attend church, and love the country he describes as a machine of oppression. A history of the people that cannot account for what the people believe, Kazin argues, fails on its own terms. Michael Kammen (1936-2013) calls the book a mirror image of the elite histories it attacks, a new cast of heroes and villains inside the same selective frame. Sam Wineburg (b. 1958) studies the book’s use in classrooms and argues that it hands students conclusions instead of teaching them to weigh evidence, replacing one catechism with another. Zinn’s defenders answer that every survey selects, that the standard textbooks had selected in favor of power for a century, and that Zinn merely made his selection visible.
Zinn concedes the premise of the attack and denies that it is an attack. He rejects the ideal of neutrality as a pretense. All history, he argues in his 1970 collection The Politics of History, makes choices about emphasis and significance, and the historian who hides his choices behind a rhetoric of objectivity has smuggled in a politics of the status quo. Better, he says, to declare your commitments and let the reader judge. His memoir title states the creed: You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train.
He writes plays as well as history. Emma dramatizes the life of Emma Goldman (1869-1940). Marx in Soho brings Karl Marx (1818-1883) back from the dead to defend his ideas against the capitalists who dismiss him and the dictators who claimed him. The plays run in small theaters for decades and show the same instinct that drives the history: the past as argument, staged for the present.
He dies of a heart attack on January 27, 2010, in Santa Monica, swimming on a trip to California, eighty-seven years old and still lecturing. The fights over his work grow after his death. In 2013, released emails show that Mitch Daniels (b. 1949), as governor of Indiana, had sought to purge A People’s History from the state’s teacher training programs, calling the book a fraud; historians across the spectrum condemn the move as censorship even while many of them dislike the book. In 2021 the 1776 Commission names Zinn a chief source of what it regards as a distorted and corrosive account of the American past. A historian dead a decade remains a live combatant in the curriculum wars, which might have pleased him.
The professional verdict on Zinn stays divided. Most academic historians fault his evidence, his selection, and his refusal of complexity. Few deny his effect. He moves labor history, Indian history, Black history, and women’s history from the margins of public consciousness toward its center. He proves that a work of history can carry a radical argument to a mass audience. He forces a question that American education had long declined to ask: whose experience defines the national story? His critics answer the question differently than he does. That they now must answer it at all is his doing.
Zinn cares less about how power operates than about how people resist it. That choice gives his work its energy and its blind spots. He writes history as moral intervention, scholarship as a weapon handed to the living. Whether that makes him the great democratizer of the American past or an activist who dissolved the line between history and advocacy, the verdict depends on what the reader thinks history is for. Zinn thought he knew, and he never wavered, and millions of readers took his answer as their own.
Yale sociologist Jeffrey Alexander (b. 1947) argues that events do not traumatize collectivities. Representations do. Trauma is a socially mediated attribution, a claim made by carrier groups who possess the discursive talent to convince a wider audience that some injury has struck at the core of collective identity. Slavery, he writes, did not produce national trauma by its nature. Traumatic status had to be achieved through meaning work. Read through this frame, Howard Zinn stops looking like a historian in the conventional sense and starts looking like the most successful trauma entrepreneur in modern American letters. A People’s History of the United States is a machine for the social production of cultural trauma, and Zinn’s whole career enacts the process Alexander theorizes.
Start with Royan, because Royan shows the theory working on Zinn himself before Zinn works it on the nation. In April 1945 he drops napalm on a French town and feels nothing. For twenty years the event sits inert in his memory, a mission among missions. Alexander’s naturalistic fallacy holds that traumatizing power emerges from events themselves; Royan refutes the fallacy in one biography. The bombing does not traumatize the bombardier. Only in 1966, when Zinn returns to the town, reads the archives, interviews survivors, and writes the essay, does Royan acquire its wound. He performs on his own past what Alexander calls the trauma process: he bridges the gap between event and representation, names the pain, identifies the victims, and assigns responsibility to the bureaucratic momentum of military institutions. The attribution comes twenty-one years late, which on Alexander’s account is no anomaly. Attribution can come in real time, as adumbration, or as post hoc reconstruction. Royan is reconstruction. Zinn learns there that an event tells nothing until someone tells it, and he spends the rest of his life telling.
Alexander borrows the term carrier group from Weber (1864-1920). Carrier groups hold ideal and material interests, occupy positions in the social structure, and command the rhetorical skill to project trauma claims into the public sphere. They can be elites or pariahs. Zinn fits the specification with eerie exactness. He comes from the margins, the Brooklyn tenements and the Navy Yard, and rises into the academy, which gives him institutional position without making him an insider. His material interests ride on the claims: books, lectures, a public. His ideal interests are everything he marched for. And his discursive talent is the rarest kind, the ability to compress an archive into narrative that ordinary readers feel. The trauma process, Alexander says, resembles a speech act: speaker, audience, situation. Zinn is the speaker. The situation is post-sixties America, a society whose movements had cracked the official story without yet replacing it. The audience begins as Zinn’s own collectivity, the activist left, and Alexander notes that illocutionary success must come first at home. It does. The book becomes scripture in movement circles. Then the audience broadens, through classrooms, through paperback editions, through a Hollywood scene, to publics that never attended a demonstration. That broadening, from originating collectivity to society at large, is the exact trajectory Alexander maps for successful trauma claims.
Alexander specifies four representational questions a new master narrative must answer, and A People’s History answers all four on every page. The nature of the pain: conquest, slavery, and exploitation were fundamental injuries, horrors at the foundation, the profanation of sacred values, never incidents or growing pains. Where revisionist historians had described slavery as a profitable labor system, Zinn insists on the lash and the auction block, which in Alexander’s scheme is a fight over whether trauma occurred at all. The nature of the victim: the people, a category Zinn constructs to bind Arawaks, slaves, millworkers, and Vietnamese peasants into a single suffering subject. The relation of victim to audience: here Zinn does his subtlest work, because he must persuade readers who descend from the perpetrators, or from bystanders, to identify with the victims. He does it by presenting the victims as bearers of the qualities Americans already hold sacred, courage, dignity, the love of freedom, so that the reader can make the tragic past his own. Alexander writes that audiences participate in distant suffering only when victims appear clothed in the audience’s own valued qualities. Zinn dresses every striker and runaway in the costume of the founding ideals. And the attribution of responsibility: the establishment, the governing class, the alliance of government and capital. Zinn keeps the perpetrator abstract enough to survive across four centuries of narrative, which gives his trauma drama a single continuous antagonist.
The Watergate essay deepens the reading. Alexander analyzes Watergate through Durkheim (1858-1917): a profane burglary becomes a sacred crisis only through generalization, the upward shift of public attention from goals to norms to values. In June 1972 the break-in is just politics. By 1974 it threatens the civil religion, and the threat gets processed through ritual, hearings as liminal events, pollution spreading toward the center, Richard Nixon (1913-1994) expelled as liquid impurity. The crucial point: the facts barely change. The telling changes. Zinn’s method is permanent, willed generalization. He refuses to let any episode of American history rest at the profane level of interest and policy. The Ludlow massacre is never a labor dispute, the Mexican War never a boundary quarrel, Hiroshima never a strategic decision. Each gets lifted to the level of sacred values violated, which is the move Alexander says converts routine politics into crisis. Where Watergate generalized once, over two years, under unrepeatable conditions, Zinn writes four hundred years of American history as if the generalization had already occurred everywhere, for every event, and the reader need only see it.
His relation to the binary code of American civil discourse follows the same pattern. Alexander’s Watergate tables sort persons and institutions into pure and polluted columns beneath stable sacred codes: democracy, law, honesty against communism, crime, corruption. The Watergate process moved Nixon and his staff from the pure column to the polluted one while leaving the codes untouched. Zinn performs the identical operation at the scale of the whole national past. He never attacks the codes. Liberty, equality, and democracy remain sacred in his text; he wields them. What he relocates are the occupants of the columns. The great presidents migrate toward pollution, Columbus first of all, then Jackson, Lincoln qualified, Roosevelt qualified, Kennedy diminished. The dissidents, deserters, and strikers migrate toward purity. The senators at the Ervin hearings purified themselves by association with the Constitution and polluted the conspirators by association with sectarian self-interest; Zinn runs the same purification ritual for Eugene Debs and the same pollution ritual for Woodrow Wilson. His book sells because it speaks the civil religion fluently while reassigning its saints and demons. A reader can absorb the whole inversion without surrendering one sacred value, which lowers the cost of conversion to almost nothing.
Yet the Watergate essay also measures what Zinn never achieves. Alexander lists five conditions for a full societal ritual: consensus, perceived threat to the center, institutional social control, struggle by autonomous elites forming countercenters, and symbolic interpretation through ritual purification. Watergate met all five, and Alexander stresses how rare the alignment is. Zinn’s trauma claims meet perhaps two. He builds a countercenter, a durable one, in the classrooms and movements that carry his narrative. He supplies symbolic interpretation in industrial quantities. But consensus never forms. The polarization that blocked Watergate’s generalization for two years blocks Zinn’s for fifty. Institutional social control never engages; no court, commission, or congress takes up his indictment of the national past as Watergate’s courts took up the indictment of Nixon. America never convenes the truth commission his book implies, no national hearing on conquest and slavery with the legal and dramaturgical force Alexander attributes to the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. A People’s History functions instead like the unofficial Tokyo tribunal on the comfort women, a proceeding of moral authority without state sanction, persuasive to its audience, binding on no one. Zinn’s trauma process stalls at the stage Alexander finds in Japan and at Nanking: claims made, carriers active, persuasion partial, the perpetrator collective never compelled to take the suffering on board.
The backlash confirms the analysis. Alexander writes that groups can refuse to participate in trauma creation, and that refusal restricts solidarity and projects responsibility back onto the victims. Mitch Daniels moving to purge the book from Indiana classrooms, and the 1776 Commission naming Zinn the chief vandal of national memory, enact refusal through the state bureaucratic arena Alexander describes, the blue ribbon commission that channels the spiral of signification and narrows the factual basis for civic repair. The 1776 Commission is a counter-carrier group running the trauma process in reverse, constructing a trauma narrative whose injury is the teaching of Zinn. In Alexander’s terms the country now hosts two competing master narratives of suffering, each with its carriers, arenas, and audiences, fighting over which pain defines the collective identity. Zinn built one of the two. Dead, he serves as a pollution symbol within the other, his name doing the work Nixon’s name once did, contact with it believed to corrupt.
Alexander brackets ontology and morality; his concern is epistemology, how claims get made and with what results, never whether the suffering was real or the cause just. Zinn refuses the bracket. He writes as a lay trauma theorist of the Enlightenment type Alexander criticizes: the events themselves wound, the rational response is outrage, the outcome is progress. He believes slavery carries its trauma within it, needing only honest narration. His own career disproves him. Slavery sat in the American record for two centuries, documented, known, and untraumatic to the White majority, until carrier groups did the meaning work, and Zinn ranks among the most effective of those carriers. The wound he thought he was uncovering, he was helping to make. Alexander might say this takes nothing from him. The construction of trauma, on this theory, is how societies expand the circle of the we, take responsibility for the suffering of others, and build solidarity wider than the tribe. By that measure Zinn’s meaning work enlarged the American we more than any official commission ever attempted. He just misdescribed his own achievement. He believed he was reporting a trauma. He was creating one.
Howard Zinn rides in the plexiglass nose of a B-17 at thirty thousand feet over the French coast. It is April 1945. The war in Europe will end within weeks. Below him sits Royan, a town where a cut-off German garrison waits for an end already certain. The bomb bay carries napalm, a new thing. He sets the sight, calls the drop, and watches small flashes open in the green country far below. Hundreds of French civilians die in those flashes with the German troops. The bombardier feels nothing. He files the mission, flies home, and thinks about dinner.
Ernest Becker (1924-1974) has a theory for the man in that nose. Man alone among the animals knows he will die, Becker holds, and the knowledge runs past what he can carry, so he builds a hero system, a set of sacred values that lets him feel he counts toward something larger than his own short body. The system tells him how to be good, how to earn significance, how to outlast his death by serving what does not die. The bombardier at thirty thousand feet has no hero system equal to the moment. The machine has supplied the meaning, and the machine’s meaning is the mission, so a man drops fire on a town and feels nothing, because the frame that makes him feel something has not yet been built. Becker’s claim runs deeper than guilt. A man who feels nothing over a burning town carries an emptiness he cannot name, and he spends the rest of his life building a frame that makes him feel everything.
Two terrors shape Zinn before the bomb and after it.
The first arrives on a sidewalk. He is seventeen, at a rally in Times Square, when mounted police charge the crowd and an officer’s club takes him down. He wakes on the pavement. The men on the horses did not hate him. They did not see him. To them he was an obstacle in the road, and they ride through him without slowing. He learns there that the world holds forces that can erase a small person without malice and without memory, and that the state, when it moves, does not look down. Call it the terror of the nightstick, annihilation by indifference.
The second arrives at Royan and takes twenty years to ripen. It is not the fear that he might die. It is the discovery that he might kill, and feel nothing, and never know, a working part inside a machine pointed at the wrong target by men he never met. Becker names this the deeper fear, deeper than death, the fear of insignificance, that a man lives as a function and dies as a function and the cosmos closes over him without a ripple. At Royan Zinn tasted both terrors in one cup. He was the small thing power does not see, and he was the instrument power uses without telling.
He has also, before he begins, subtracted God. There are no books in the Brooklyn tenement but the Dickens his parents assemble from newspaper coupons, and there is no shul, and there is no world to come. Most hero systems keep a second ledger, an elsewhere where the accounts finally come right. Heaven holds one. Karma holds one. The providence that bends the long arc holds one. Zinn keeps only the first ledger, the earthly one, this life and this history and nothing after. So every wrong must find its answer here or go unanswered into the dark forever. The loss of eternity loads the entire weight of cosmic justice onto human time. That pressure drives everything. A man who believes God will sort it can wait. A man who believes the next life balances the books can wait. Zinn cannot wait, because for Zinn there is no later, and the refusal to wait becomes the signature of his life.
The sacred word at the center of his hero system is justice, and under it, the people. Justice draws more combatants than any word in the language, because every hero system claims it, and each means by it something the others cannot accept. Walk the word through a few rooms.
A Marine staff sergeant sits in a VFW hall with the names of four men inked on his forearm. He buried them in a country most of his neighbors cannot find on a map. Ask him about justice and he sets down his coffee. “Justice is when the men who did it stop breathing,” he says. His hero system is the unit, the Corps, the flag folded into a triangle and handed to a mother, the brotherhood that outlives the man and gathers him into something that does not die. Zinn’s justice weeps for the enemy’s civilians, for the dead of Royan and Hiroshima and My Lai, and to the sergeant that grief reads as a betrayal of his own dead, a thumb pressed on the scale against the brothers he carries on his arm.
A trial judge takes the bench in a paneled courtroom where the clerk calls all to rise and the order of the room is the order the judge serves. For him justice is procedure, the law applied without fear or favor, the same rule for the pauper and the senator. “The question before this court is not whether the law is just,” he tells a young attorney who has grown passionate. “The question is whether the law was followed.” His hero system is the law, an edifice raised over centuries that stands after he is gone, and his name rests in the reports as a man who applied it as written. Zinn says law protects entrenched power, that law and justice are different things, that a man holds a right and sometimes a duty to break an unjust law. To the judge that doctrine dissolves the foundation of everything he serves.
A Reformed pastor climbs to a high plain pulpit in a church without images. For him justice is the righteous wrath of God, earned by every man, paid at the cross or paid in hell. “There is none righteous, no, not one,” he tells the congregation. “The justice you cry for in the street fell on Christ, or it falls on you.” His hero system is the glory of God and the company of the elect and an eternity beside the throne. Zinn’s demand that justice arrive now, on earth, by human hands, strikes the pastor as the oldest sin, man reaching for the seat of God, claiming in time what belongs to eternity, building Babel one strike and one march at a time.
In a study hall a scholar rocks over an open volume and argues a point of law with a partner he has fought beside for thirty years. For him justice is tzedek, the right ruling drawn from the text, the din softened by mercy, the verse that commands a man to pursue righteousness twice over. He pursues it by reading. His hero system is the chain of transmission that runs from Sinai through his teachers to his students, the tradition that carries his name in its learning after his body lies in the ground. Zinn’s justice floats free of any text, bound to no tradition, answerable to no commentary. To the scholar, justice cut from the text answers to nothing and so destroys everything.
A devout householder rises before dawn before the small shrine in his home and offers the morning rite. For him justice is the long ledger settled across lifetimes, no cruelty ever unpaid, no kindness ever lost, the beggar working off an old debt and the king accruing a new one. “No injustice goes unanswered,” he says. “It waits for the next life.” His hero system is release from the wheel, the soul’s slow climb across many births toward the end of birth. Zinn’s furious insistence that the scales balance now, by force, in a single lifetime, looks to him like the panic of a man who has never understood that the books always close, given world enough and time.
A founder paces a glass office in a vest with his company’s logo on the chest, a term sheet open on the standing desk. For him justice is the market clearing, value flowing to value created, the deserving lifted and the rest instructed by their losses. “The market is the fairest judge there is,” he says. “It doesn’t care who your father was.” His hero system is the company and the product and the dent he means to leave in the world, the thing with his fingerprints that runs after he stops. Zinn calls the winners thieves and the market a rigged train. To the founder that is the resentment of men the contest sorted to the bottom, dressed up as conscience.
Set Zinn in the room with these six men and he agrees with none of them, and the disagreement runs to the bottom, because his justice has nowhere to defer. He has no God to pour out wrath at the end of days. He has no wheel to balance the books across lives. He has no market he trusts to sort the deserving, since the market is the train. He has no law above the fight, since the law is the timetable the powerful wrote. There is the moving train, and it carries every passenger toward a station chosen by whoever holds the controls, and a man who keeps his seat and reads his paper has not stayed neutral. He has consented. So justice, for Zinn, is the act of the powerless rising to seize the controls, here, in the only life there is. The people make justice or no one does, and they make it now or never.
Becker explains why these men cannot hear one another, and the explanation is not that any of them is stupid. To grant another man his justice is to admit that your own is one justice among many, local, sized to a particular tribe, and not the cosmic truth your whole life has been staked on. That admission unmakes the immortality project. The sergeant cannot honor the enemy’s dead without dishonoring the brotherhood that redeems his losses. The judge cannot concede that law serves power without watching the edifice that was to outlast him crumble. The pastor cannot grant earthly justice its full claim without lowering God a notch. The scholar cannot cut justice from the text without snapping the chain that carries his name. The householder cannot demand the scales balance now without forfeiting the patience the wheel requires. The founder cannot call the winners thieves without indicting the dent he means to leave. Each man defends his justice with the energy a man spends on his own salvation, because that is what he defends. They talk past each other to stay alive in the only way that counts.
Zinn believes his justice is the true one and the others mere ideology, a fog the powerful pump out to hide the controls. He cannot see that his own justice is a hero system too, furnished with its own saints and its own salvation. The saints are the strikers and the runaways and the resisters, the deserters and the suffragists and the boys who sat at the lunch counter. The salvation is the people’s march, a procession that never arrives and never stops, always advancing toward a justice forever one generation off. When Zinn writes himself into that march as its chronicler and its partisan, he buys what the pastor buys from the elect and the founder buys from the company, a share in something that outlives the body. A People’s History of the United States is his bid for cosmic significance, and it works. The boy the horses rode through becomes the voice of everyone the horses ever rode through. The bombardier who felt nothing becomes the man who feels everything and teaches three million readers to feel it with him. The terror does not die. It changes form, and the new form is a life’s work.
The shape of it shows in his long war at Boston University with John Silber (1926-2012), a combative philosopher who runs the campus and calls Zinn a fraud to his face and in the papers. Silber freezes the salary, blocks the raises, and watches the man he despises keep his chair behind the wall of tenure. Two men share one campus for twenty years and cannot stand the sight of each other, and the reason runs deeper than politics. Silber serves a hero system of excellence and hierarchy and standards, the university as a fortress against the mob. Zinn serves the union and the strike and the picket line, the university as one more place the people press their claim. Each man is the other’s heresy. When Zinn teaches his last class half an hour short so he can join a picket line, he makes no point about labor relations. He performs his creed at the door, choosing the people over the institution one final time, in front of witnesses, the way a man wants to be seen choosing as he goes.
Three things to carry away from this.
First, the reason Zinn outsells the historians who refute him. Michael Kazin (b. 1948) and the others offer complexity, and complexity comforts no one and saves no one. Zinn offers a hero system, a place to stand and a side to take and a way for a high school student or a prisoner or a man on a loading dock to feel his small life join a great and righteous current. The professionals answer the question of what happened. Zinn answers the question of how to matter. A man reaching for significance reaches past the footnotes every time.
Second, the cost of the frame. A hero system that hands all virtue to the people and all vice to the powerful cannot explain the worker who votes for the boss, the churchgoer who loves the country, the man who is at once a victim and a bystander. The same subtraction that loads justice onto this one life also strips the human actors down to victims and oppressors, because a clean fight needs clean sides. Zinn buys urgency with simplicity. The price of a usable past is a flattened one, and his sharpest critics are the historians who share his politics and cannot follow him there.
Third, where to look if you want to find a man’s hero system. Watch what he cannot forgive. Zinn cannot forgive neutrality. He can dissect cruelty and he can dissect power. The passenger who keeps his seat and claims to stand outside the fight he cannot forgive. To Zinn the neutral man has refused to be a hero, and in refusing has chosen the destination the powerful picked while pretending he chose nothing. A man who builds his significance on taking sides must hold that the refusal to take sides is the one unforgivable thing, because if a safe seat existed on the train, his own life of marching and striking and standing might have been unnecessary. And an unnecessary life is the one verdict, Becker says, that no man can bear to hear passed on his own.
David Pinsof argues that intellectuals share one faith: everything wrong in the world comes from misunderstanding. Polarization, bigotry, war, inequality, unhappiness, all of it traces back to people who do not know enough, and the cure is always more knowledge, supplied by the people whose trade is knowledge. The faith flatters its holders. If misunderstanding causes the world’s troubles, then the men who clear up misunderstandings save the world by doing their jobs. Pinsof calls this the misunderstanding myth, and he says it is false. The trouble is not bad beliefs. The trouble is bad motives. Humans understand what they have an incentive to understand. Stupidity is usually strategic. We are savvy animals, built by natural selection to climb hierarchies, derogate rivals, and seize resources, and we hide these aims behind mission statements about love and truth and the good of all.
Howard Zinn’s career depended on this myth.
A People’s History of the United States rests on a single premise: the people have been lied to. The textbooks hid the conquest, the slave quarters, the mill floor, the picket line. Tell the true story, Zinn holds, and the people will see what was done to them and rise. The villain is deception. The cure is truth. Behind the book sits the oldest article of the left’s version of the myth, the one Pinsof names without naming Zinn, false consciousness. The workers do not unite because they do not yet know how the bosses rob them. Lift the veil and they unite. Zinn never signs the Communist program, and he leaves the romance of Moscow early, but his method keeps the premise. The people are good. The people are deceived. A historian can undeceive them.
Pinsof hands Zinn the answer to the question Zinn’s own critics pressed and Zinn could not field. Michael Kazin asked why a people’s history cannot explain the people, the worker who votes for the boss, the believer who loves the country Zinn describes as a machine of theft. Zinn had no answer that did not insult the worker. The worker had been fooled. Pinsof answers without insult. The worker is not fooled. The worker understands his incentives. He wants a coalition that will hold, a church that will seat him, a flag that lets him stand with his neighbors against the next town’s claim. He understands all of it. The clearest proof sits in Zinn’s own subject. Slavery lay in the American record for two centuries, documented, printed, known, and it did not move the White majority to act. The majority did not misunderstand. The facts were not hidden, and the majority had no incentive to care, and so it did not, and no quantity of true history changed that until the incentives changed.
Here the frame turns on the man holding it. Pinsof says we confuse stated motives with actual ones, the way a man confuses a corporation’s mission statement with its drive for profit. Zinn’s stated motive is truth and justice and the voiceless. His actual motive, on Pinsof’s reading, is the one that runs under every chapter of his book: who holds what Pinsof calls the coercive apparatus of the state, the power that puts men in cages at gunpoint. Read the chapters and the prize never changes. Whose army, whose courts, whose prisons, whose police, on whose side. Zinn wants to flip the hand on the controls. The history is the recruiting poster for that fight, and a recruiting poster does its work by showing the recruit a clean enemy and a righteous flag.
Zinn saw half of this, and the half he saw he aimed at his rivals. His sharpest claim holds that no history stands neutral, that the scholar who poses as objective has chosen the side of the established order and hidden the choice behind a rhetoric of detachment. Strip the sentence of its politics and it is Pinsof’s point exactly: the stated motive, objectivity, covers the actual motive, the defense of power. Zinn caught the gap in Richard Hofstadter’s irony, in the textbook’s bland neutrality, in John Silber’s talk of standards. He never caught it in his own glass. He demystified every historian who claimed to stand above the fight and kept his own standing above suspicion. The partisan in the mirror told the truth. The partisans across campus ran propaganda. A man who built a career on the claim that everyone takes a side somehow exempted his own side from the cynical reading he gave the rest.
This is not a charge that Zinn lied. Pinsof’s frame works the other way, and Zinn shows why. We are self-deceiving primates, and the sincere believer carries propaganda further than the cynic ever could. A man who knows he peddles a weapon persuades no one. A man certain he reveals a buried truth sells three million copies and lands in a scene in a Hollywood film. Zinn believed every word. He carried Royan for twenty years, he marched with the students in Georgia, he meant it. The sincerity was the savvy. Natural selection does not hand a man a speech about justice and a wink to go with it. It hands him the speech and the conviction together, because the conviction sells the speech, and the man who feels his cause in his chest recruits the army that a calculating man never could.
Pinsof explains the shape of the conviction too. Cynics read as cruel, so we signal our decency with idealism, and the signal pays. Zinn’s idealism about the people, their goodness, their wisdom, their long march toward a justice always one generation off, signaled his own goodness and gathered his coalition around him. To say what Pinsof says, that the people are coalitional, self-serving, status-hungry animals who understand their interests too well, would have cost Zinn the halo and the readership at once. The misunderstanding myth let him keep both. It located the rot in the elites, his rivals for the seat of moral authority, and left the people clean, and left the man who spoke for the people cleaner still. A belief that pays its holder this well does not need to be true to spread.
Pinsof jokes that the highest praise an intellectual wants is not that his work is insightful but that it carries policy implications, that it arms the cause. Zinn is the case carried to its end. He said in plain words that history is a weapon, that scholarship hands the living a tool, that the train moves and no rider stays neutral. Among intellectuals this honesty is rare, and it earns him a measure of credit Pinsof allows. Zinn admitted the weapon. He kept only the last illusion, that the weapon liberates rather than arms, that he handed the deceived their freedom rather than handing one coalition a sharper blade against another.
Pinsof ends his case with a few questions for the intellectual who dreams of saving the world. What if people understand what they have an incentive to understand? What if the capitalists and warmongers and bigots and the masses all grasp their own game too well? What if our troubles come from what we want, and the wanting cannot be argued away? Put these questions to Zinn and the project collapses. The men who dropped the napalm understood the mission. The presidents who took the country to war understood the stakes. The voters who cheered them understood their side. The readers who made A People’s History scripture wanted what it gave them, a coalition, a flag, a clean enemy, a place to stand and a status to hold. They did not come for a misunderstanding cleared away. Zinn spent fifty years in the hole, mapping who dug it and who profits, certain that the map would free the diggers. The diggers were never lost. They knew the hole. They had reasons to keep digging that no true history could touch.
In the end the misunderstanding runs one way only. It is Zinn’s, and it is the belief that there was one.