DAMNED FACTS (via Rod)

Master of Deceit (Dan Flynn, June 3, 2003, FrontPageMagazine.com)

Who is the most influential historian among young people? Filmmaker Ken Burns? Could it be the Democrats' court historian, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.? Biographer David McCullough? How about the late Stephen Ambrose, whose triumphant view of American history has brought alive such colorful characters as Meriwether Lewis, Crazy Horse, and George Custer?

Though an argument exists for any one of these men (even the ones who lack the proper academic credentials), a strong case could also be made for a decidedly less establishment figure: Howard Zinn. [...]

History is too complicated to find a perfect fit within any theory. For the true believer, this inconvenience can be overcome. When fact and theory clash, the ideologue chooses theory. To the true believer, ideology is truth. Time and again, A People's History of the United States opts to mold the facts to fit the theory, leaving the reader to wonder what "people" he is referring to in the book's title. Dishonest people? Left-wing people? Delusional people?

For instance, Zinn claims that "George Washington was the richest man in America." He wasn't, but it makes for a good story. Perhaps the wealthiest man being rewarded with the run of the government is too compelling a concept for a Marxist to discard--even when it isn't true. Whatever the reason for the inclusion of this falsehood, it's one that can be easily disproved. Despite having substantial debts owed to British moneylenders in the late 1760s and early 1770s, as well as having to borrow money to travel to New York upon his election to the presidency, George Washington certainly rose to accumulate great wealth in his lifetime--even if he was chronically cash-poor. His last will and testament estimates his accumulated wealth at $530,000. That certainly qualified him as rich, but clearly there were men of greater means roaming America during his lifetime. Robert Morris, who eventually lost his wealth, was the Founding era's wealthiest merchant. Moses Brown, whose family's name graces an Ivy League university, was another contemporary of Washington's whose wealth in that era exceeded that of the nation's first president. Zinn is wrong.

"When the Scottsboro case unfolded in the 1930s in Alabama," Zinn writes, "it was the Communist party that had become associated with the defense of these young black men imprisoned, in the early years of the Depression, by southern injustice." Perhaps the Party had become "associated" with the defense of the Scottsboro Boys, but in reality the Communists merely used the embattled youngsters. Richard Gid Powers points out in Not Without Honor that the Communists had raised $250,000 for the Scottsboro Boys’ defense, but had put-up a scant $12,000 for two appeals. At the time, a black columnist quoted a candid Party official who stated, "we don't give a damn about the Scottsboro boys. If they burn it doesn't make any difference. We are only interested in one thing, how we can use the Scottsboro case to bring the Communist movement to the people and win them over to Communism." One might see an analogous situation in Zinn's view of history. He is only interested in it so long as it serves as a weapon of socialist ideology.

"Unemployment grew in the Reagan years," Zinn claims. Statistics show otherwise. Reagan inherited an unemployment rate of 7.5 percent in his first month in office. By January of 1989, the rate had declined to 5.4 percent. Had the Reagan presidency ended in 1982 when unemployment rates exceeded 10 percent, Zinn would have a point. But for the remainder of Reagan's presidency, unemployment declined precipitously. While Zinn teaches history and not mathematics, one needn't be a math whiz to figure out that 5.4 percent is less than 7.5 percent. Despite unleashing an economy that created nearly 20 million new jobs during his tenure, Reagan continues to be smeared by historians--and it's not hard to figure out why. Reagan's free market polices were anathema to Marxists like Zinn. Upset at the pleasant way things turned out--Reagan's policies unleashed an economy that continuously grew from the fall of 1982 until the summer of 1990--historians have preferred to rewrite history.

These are but a few of Howard Zinn’s errors, which curiously seem to always bolster the left-of-center position. No error goes against the grain of the author's general thesis. Every author makes mistakes. Zinn, it seems, would make less of them if he relied on his mind rather than his ideology to do his thinking.

By now one might be thinking: On what evidence does Zinn base his varied proclamations? One can only guess. Despite its scholarly pretensions, the book contains not a single source citation. While a student in Professor Zinn's classes at Boston University or Spelman College might have received an "F" for turning in a paper without documentation, Zinn’s footnote-free book is standard reading in scores of college courses across the country.

As A.E. Housman said: "The house of delusions is cheap to build but drafty to live in." Posted by Orrin Judd at June 4, 2003 8:39 AM