Wrestling with Zinn

Once when I was eleven or twelve, my dad kept my brothers and me at the kitchen table after dinner. In a grim voice, he warned us that there were big changes coming to America’s school system and we would have to be on our guard.

Dad told us that schools were about to start rewriting American history and indoctrinating their students with a politically-correct ideology called Multiculturalism. The goal of this change was to empower other countries and cultures by making us feel ashamed of our Western heritage.

Instead of learning that Christopher Columbus was the heroic discoverer of the New World, we would be told that he was a bad man who murdered the Indians. Instead of learning about the noble ideas of the Founding Fathers, we would be told that they were atheists and slave owners. If we didn’t pay attention, our teachers might trick us into thinking that America is evil and send the quality of education in this country down the drain.

Eighteen years later, I can say with relief and some bemusement that multicultural education has not led me to intellectual ruin. (Though of course that’s exactly what an indoctrinated person would say... Just kidding, Dad.) What it has done is encourage me to rethink old assumptions and work harder to empathise with different points of view. In a lot of ways it’s the driving force behind my love of travel and my curiosity about people.

The latest step in this journey was to read A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn. I knew almost nothing about him when he passed away a little over a year ago, but my progressive friends responded to his death with such emotion that I bought the book that same afternoon. The thick, densely-written paperback sat glaring at me from my bookshelf until this past Christmas, when I set the goal of finishing it by the end of my holiday.

My first impression is complicated. On the one hand, there’s something dizzyingly enjoyable about a book that turns all the old myths and stories upside-down – Columbus as seen by the Indians, the Roaring Twenties as seen by poor factory workers, World War II as seen by Japanese-Americans. It was gratifying to read full chapters on the feminist movement instead of the perfunctory paragraph you get in traditional textbooks; it was downright hilarious to discover that in all the times I studied and idolised Helen Keller in grade school, none of my teachers thought to mention that she was a Socialist.

On the other hand, the picture Zinn paints of the United States – and my identity as a middle-class American – made People’s History difficult to finish. As he describes it, “The American system is the most ingenious system of control in world history.” One percent of the population owns 33% of the wealth, with the middle class used as a buffer to protect the rich from the poor. Coddle just enough people with flag-waving and a little financial well-being and social injustice can be swept under the rug.

It’s a persuasive and well-supported theory, but for all the times I nodded in agreement there were times I found myself digging in my heels. It struck me as odd that every turning point in American history fits into that context - including the Civil War, which Zinn insisted was all about economics and had nothing to do with freeing slaves. It all felt a bit too clear-cut for me, the way the American government always has selfish motives and attacks against the government are always justified. Even Timothy McVeigh’s terrorist attack in Oklahoma City comes across as something America deserved, or at least brought on itself.

Of course, being a self-doubting progressive, I had to step back and ask myself why I felt uncomfortable. Does Zinn actually go too far, or am I going through the same kind of defensiveness my father went through over the multiculturalism debate – resisting the idea that America isn’t the land of justice and democracy that I want it to be?

From a broader standpoint, what about my own interest in politics? Is it pointless to participate in democracy at all? Unless I’m out in the streets trying to pull the whole system down, am I only making things worse?

In the end I decided that I need to read in-depth critiques from a bunch of different perspectives and figure out where I stand on the whole thing. The problem is, this soon after Howard Zinn’s death people are either mourning him as a saint or howling over how much he hated America. I’ll need to find out who the reliable sources are, collect more books on the subject and probably read People’s History again to see if I missed some nuance the first time around.

I have to say, things were a whole lot easier when Columbus was one of the good guys.