History Lite
We must protect our press, our academics, our historical records, and our founding principles
For generations, American historians have written accounts of the United States that go beyond the founding fathers and war heroes and the general economic and cultural touchpoints we were taught in school.
For my generation, it was the late Howard Zinn who turned our heads by writing a popular U.S. history from the points of view of those who did not “win” — detailing the lives and work of those who struggled, who were shunned, who were kept from prosperity and who could not find a pathway to a semblance of the American Dream.
When Zinn’s “People’s History of the United States: 1492–Present” first appeared, in 1980 (in a printing of 4,000), not much was expected. But it became a watershed event. After the tumultuous 1960s — a period during which conservatives and the Trilateral Commission saw what they termed “an excess of democracy” — a new conservative focus was placed on limiting education and making universities fall back in line with orthodoxy in the teaching of “Western Civilization.”
Sound familiar?
Zinn, who had his own battles as a university professor (Spelman College, in Atlanta, and Boston University), wrote that the push was for colleges to produce loyal workers and consumers who wouldn’t worry themselves with politics. As he put it:
[T]he loss of allegiance extended far beyond the campus, into the workplaces and homes of ordinary Americans, into the Army ranks where working-class GIs turned against the war. Still, with twelve million young people in college, the fear of a working-class–professional-class coalition for social change makes it especially important to educate for obedience.
Educate for obedience — now, there’s a phrase worth repeating today. As we know from their current attacks on education — history in particular, but (sliding down that slippery slope conservatives often talk about) also science, literature, and, now, gender studies — many conservatives believe that history lessons lessen a citizen’s willingness to go along to get along. An educated citizen gets riled up, “woke” and — worse — all votey.
Since the late Sixties, the right has fulminated about the liberal education of college students — which, of course, was the whole point of education, to create citizens with specific skills, yes, but also a broader understanding of culture, ethics, and civics. Republicans continue to try to make it difficult for college students to vote.
But now Republicans are also coming hard for those hippie grade-schoolers. The claim, as always, is that if you teach a history that attempts to detail some unvarnished truths about the founding of the country and includes the points of view of people who have been systematically mistreated or who have otherwise struggled, well, you are “hating on America” or making people feel uncomfortable.
“…the fear of a working-class–professional-class coalition for social change makes it especially important to educate for obedience.” — Howard Zinn
When one hears this kind of assertion, one wonders just who the children really are. Will we ever get past this puerile argument? Apparently not, because the toddlers who dress up and otherwise pretend to be “big boy” and “big girl” grown-ups — school board members, governors, and members of Congress — are now legislating to suppress any history that causes discomfort, to allow anyone to challenge what teachers are presenting to students. You can get a bounty if you report a teacher. As with their anti–abortion rights law in Texas, the right is using the Stasi secret police maneuver of encouraging citizens to surveil and inform on their fellow citizens.
Should I not mention the history of East Germany under Soviet control? Does that make you uncomfortable? If I remind you about the very recent history of the praise former president Trump ladled out for Vladimir Putin’s moves in Ukraine, would you feel shame and demand I not mention it?
In the opening chapter of his historical account of America, Zinn expressed his aim in this way:
I don’t want to invent victories for people’s movements. But to think that history-writing must aim simply to recapitulate the failures that dominate the past is to make historians collaborators in an endless cycle of defeat. If history is to be creative, to anticipate a possible future without denying the past, it should, I believe, emphasize new possibilities by disclosing those hidden episodes of the past when, even if in brief flashes, people showed their ability to resist, to join together, occasionally to win. I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past’s fugitive moments of compassion rather than in its solid centuries of warfare.
Zinn’s work has itself since been taken down a few notches by critics and other historians who questioned both his methods and his omissions. Zinn, who died in 2010 at the age of 87, would likely have viewed the criticism with equanimity; after all, his nemesis, the Establishment, would logically work to deny tenure even to his reputation. (If he were around now, one of today’s ultra-corporate college presidents might offer him a sweet adjunct role and enjoy watching him figure out how to manage with a minuscule paycheck with no paid vacation or health insurance.)
In any case, he made his mark. The book became a bestseller.
Like the novelist Kurt Vonnegut, Zinn had served his country in World War II — in the Army, as a bombardier — and had come away from that harrowing experience with a strong view on the whole enterprise of war and of the mythologies of nations. As a historian, his intentions were good — and were made abundantly clear to readers. He would bring into the conversation many people and events that had been ignored or glossed over, such as the genocide of native Americans, first by the Spanish and Portuguese, then the English settlers; the delivery by a Dutch ship of 20 slaves to the Jamestown, Virginia, colony in — warning: trigger alert — 1619; labor movements attempting to improve the lives of immigrants; and farmers and women and people of color speaking up for their rights and a fair shot at the American Dream.
Zinn noted that historical accounts typically are “romantic mythology,” in which anything and everything was justified by a simple invoking the concept of “progress”:
[E]vidence from European travelers in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries….is enough to make us question, for that time and ours, the excuse of progress in the annihilation of races, and the telling of history from the standpoint of the conquerors and leaders of Western Civilization.
His work may have been considered outré or even close to propaganda by some at the time of its publication, but it opened the door to other historians who would not give short shrift to the stories of the poor and the working class, of women and people of color. A perhaps more balanced, but still unflinching, recent one-volume history of the United States is Jill Lepore’s “These Truths: A History of the United States,” published in 2018.
Conservatives also want their mythologies to remain intact. They want to continue fearmongering about any number of things that have never existed, such as liberals “taking away” Christmas traditions or “destroying” their bonds of marriage by expanding its definition. As Zinn put it,
The fundamentalists of politics — the Reagans and Bushes and Helmses — want to pull the strings of control tighter on the distribution of wealth and power and civil liberties. The fundamentalists of law, the Borks and Rehnquists, want to interpret the Constitution so as to put strict limits on the legal possibilities for social reform. The fundamentalists of education fear the possibilities inherent in the unique freedom of discussion that we find in higher education.
And now, in grade-school education, in order to keep anyone from “feeling uncomfortable.” (I don’t need to suggest you take a moment and update the names that Zinn called out above because you’ve no doubt already done that.)
Can “wokeness” go too far? Sure. I would hazard to guess that for many liberals it is one thing to remove a public memorial to a Confederate general and another altogether to take down a founding father. One flawed human being decided to fight to dismantle the Union to preserve slavery; the other flawed human being (who may have personally participated in that cruel and inhumane system) at least worked for and spoke to the promise of the new nation, including the concept that all men are created equal. And we should also always bear in mind — difficult as it may be to do so — that both human beings lived in and made their decisions in the context of their own eras, not ours.
As Martin Luther King, Jr. said (paraphrasing 19th-century Unitarian minister and abolitionist Theodore Parker), “We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Perhaps if one views that arc from pretty far out in that universe, you can see it bending toward a more just world; here on earth, it is not going to happen without a lot of struggle and commitment. Plenty of conservatives today have made it abundantly clear that they would dismantle our union sooner than see it become a more just and multicultural society. They want to quash any talk of our blemished history (lately under the guise of “parents’ rights”), and some continue to whitewash what happened on Jan. 6 and speak openly of violence as a solution.
One thinks of the most quoted lines in Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming,”
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
People of goodwill have plenty of conviction (and often are quite energetic), but they also are given pause by considering nuance and complexities, by feeling a level of empathy; they tend not to be indefatigable zealots.
As American documentarian Ken Burns has noted, “History is malleable. A new cache of diaries can shed new light, and archeological evidence can challenge our popular assumptions.” In that way, history is like the scientific method; it is self-correcting. But are we?
In his “Slapstick, or Lonesome No More!” Vonnegut quipped:
‘History is merely a list of surprises,’ I said. ‘It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again. Please write that down.’
But we should not be surprised that when narcissists and white supremacists are defeated, they still expect to control the narrative — obscure it, paper it over, or create a patently false history (as about voter fraud and the results of the 2020 election or, say, Putin’s pushing of an old false history of Russia creating Ukraine), written by total losers who assert they are winners.
Earlier popular historians Will and Ariel Durant had attempted a more synthesized history, bringing in more of other cultures and philosophy and the stories of common people in their 11-volume “The Story of Civilization.” In their final book, “The Lessons of History,” the Durants note that the writer of history can never be completely objective: “Even the historian who thinks to rise above partiality for his country, race, creed, or class betrays his secret predilection in his choice of materials, and in nuances of his adjectives.”
In a passage comparing the work of mapmaking and history writing, Zinn put it this way:
My argument cannot be against selection, simplification, emphasis, which are inevitable for both cartographers and historians. But the mapmaker’s distortion is a technical necessity for a common purpose shared by all people who need maps. The historian’s distortion is more than technical, it is ideological; it is released into a world of contending interests, where any chosen emphasis supports (whether the historian means to or not) some kind of interest, whether economic or political or racial or national or sexual.
If the writing of history is fraught with bias (down to the selection of adjectives), many people still want to read a history of this country that doesn’t obscure our realities and that lives up to the transcendent ideals of our democracy, fraught as it has been. That is the point: that because we are free, we are free to be courageous in our assessments of our past.
In that history, public servants the likes of Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger and Fiona Hill and Brad Raffensperger will be remembered for doing, with much personally on the line, what was best for their country.
Authoritarians, we know, embrace propaganda and write not a synthesized but a synthetic (as in imitation) history. We can count on them — including many of the disloyal opposition in Putin’s employ in Congress — to be indefatigable in their attacks on democracy. We must protect our press and our academics and our historical records and our founding principles — not fall into the trap of denigrating them. Knowing as much as we can about all the complex history of our country, we must stand up for both the good-faith seeking of truth — even if it stings — and of a stronger democracy than we have today.
As journalist Dan Rather recently wrote in his Steady newsletter:
Those who seek to keep our history classes the realm of comfortable fairy tales rather than hard truths are not trying to wrestle with the past in good faith. They don’t care about what really happened. They don’t want to know about it. And they don’t want anyone else to know about it either.
If we don’t stand up for truth now, it could well happen that our children and grandchildren will one day read and hear of the “courageous and self-sacrificing deeds” of the likes of Ted Cruz and Marjorie Taylor Greene and Josh Hawley and all the other “patriots” who denied certifying a stolen election and stormed the Capitol to “save a nation.”
