Teaching Students There is Nothing Special about America
Last week, I suggested that it should come as no surprise that today’s high-school and college students are not proud of their country. I also surmised that the late Dr. Howard Zinn, the left-wing activist author of “A People’s History of the United States” could be blamed for much of those feelings of disenchantment with the country and its founders.
Zinn’s book, which has sold somewhere near three million copies according to its publisher, has been used as part (and sometimes the entire) of the history course in high schools in the U.S. for decades. Dr. Zinn’s follow-up textbook for elementary school students, “A Young People’s History of the United States,” has also become prevalent throughout the public education system. It is used in many private schools as well.
And, it's worse than I thought. According to Dr. Zinn, there was never anything uplifting about the United States.
Nothing.
Ever.
Virtually all its presidents, senators, representatives, generals, Supreme Court Justices, law enforcement agencies, businessmen, inventors and entrepreneurs, were evil… men, virtually all were white men out for themselves.
And what really galls is that, according to Zinn, “Republicans” are at fault nearly all the time. The Republican Party’s formation as an anti-slave party is ignored. The pro-slavery party – the Democrat Party –, while not held up as a paragon of virtue, hardly gets any blame whatsoever.
For example:
“The American government had set out to fight the slave states in 1861, not to end slavery,” Zinn proffers, “but to retain the enormous national territory and market and resources.” He could have at least mentioned that “The American government” was the anti-slavery Republican administration of Abraham Lincoln, and that the “slave states” were Democrat led.
He goes on:
“Yet victory required a crusade, and the momentum of that crusade brought new forces into national politics: more blacks determined to make their freedom mean something: more whites – whether Freedman’s Bureau officials, or teachers in the Sea Islands, or ‘carpetbaggers’ with various mixtures of humanitarianism and personal ambition – concerned with racial equality. There was also the powerful interest of the Republican party in maintaining control over the national government, with the prospect of southern black votes to accomplish this. Northern businessmen, seeing Republican policies as beneficial to them, went along for a while.”
What the Democrat party cared about and “went along for” he doesn’t say.
After all, Andrew Johnson wasn’t just “Lincoln’s Vice President,” he was Lincoln’s Democrat re-election fusion candidate nominated as Vice-President for the 1864 presidential campaign in the hope that Johnson’s presence on the ticket would persuade some of the more recalcitrant states that the Union was worth healing. Senator Johnson came from South Carolina, though his family moved to Tennessee when he was in his teens. Johnson, like Lincoln, was born in a log cabin – dirt poor as it were (most log cabins featured dirt floors) – and never – ever – attended school. Johnson didn’t learn to read or write until he was seventeen years old.
As a Democrat, he was also in favor of slavery but, because he objected to the Southern states’ actions of seceding from the Union, he retained his U.S. Senate seat when Tennessee joined the Confederacy.
According to Dr. Zinn, “the southern white oligarchy used its economic power to organize the Ku Klux Klan and other terrorist groups.” He excludes the information that the “southern white oligarchy” was made up entirely of Democrat Party members.
Following this, Zinn recounts a series of horrors perpetrated upon southern blacks, mostly committed either by organized mobs or the Ku Klux Klan.
It was horrific and it did happen.
But according to Dr. Zinn, that’s all that ever occurred both in the north and the south in the United States: egregious acts of cruelty throughout the land, orchestrated solely, I can only surmise, by white Republican men, as white Democrat men are never castigated or included.
To give you an idea of the unrelenting negative and gloomy appraisal of this nation one is taught in this history, here’s a short list of some of the chapters:
“Persons of Mean and Vile Condition”
“Tyranny is Tyranny”
“The Intimately Oppressed”
“Slavery Without Submission, Emancipation Without Freedom”
“Robber Barons and Rebels”
“The Socialist Challenge”
“War Is the Health of the State”
I don’t doubt the veracity of Zinn’s writing, but it would have been kind of him (his book was published in 1980; he died in 2010) to offer a glimmer of hope, a scent of optimism, even of national pride if not glory, at least once in a while.
Zinn’s descriptions of the First World War, the Great War, are vivid and thorough. The bloodshed was enormous and tragic.
“Into this pit of death and deception came the United States, in the spring of 1917,” Zinn writes.
America was drawn into the war by President Woodrow Wilson (a Democrat) after the Germans sank the British liner HMS Lusitania. On board were 124 Americans and President Wilson, defending his action, declared that he couldn’t “consent to any abridgement of the rights of American citizens in any respect…”
Once war is declared, Dr. Zinn quickly segues into a discussion of labor disputes within the United States, along with tales of anarchists, union strife against management, opposition to the draft, and socialist and communist agitation. “The war gave the government its opportunity to destroy the IWW [Industrial Workers of the World],” Zinn writes of the union, which was created and formed on the basis of Marxist philosophy.
The First World War was a bloody, useless self-inflicted European catastrophe, as Dr. Zinn sees it, though on a positive note, it was America’s entry into the war that ended it, something Zinn hardly mentions.
Zinn describes World War II as “the most popular war the United States had ever fought.” He concedes that “It was a war against an enemy of unspeakable evil. Hitler’s Germany,” he writes, “was extending totalitarianism, racism, militarism, and overt aggressive warfare beyond what an already cynical world had experienced. And yet,” Zinn adds, “did the governments conducting this war – England, the United States, the Soviet Union – represent something significantly different, so that their victory would be a blow to imperialism, racism, totalitarianism, militarism in the world?”
One would think so, but though he does suggest “these questions deserve thought,” it’s plain he doesn’t believe there was or is a significant difference between the governance of Nazi Germany and the United States.
Which is a shame because Dr. Zinn’s research and animation serve his subjects well. It’s just that he leaves no room for heroism (other than that of former slaves, union members, and women), optimism, or for, well, love of country. After reading “A People’s History of the United States” students are left to wonder why anyone would think there was something good, something special, about America.
And that’s no way to begin life as a citizen of the most profound – and successful – experiment in self-government ever devised.
Certainly.. I plan (maybe?) to follow up with more review of subsequent chapters, which I'll forward. I am doing this for my own greater understanding of the problems we face. THX
I have the 14th edition, from 2010. I re-read the first chapter which goes over the Americas up to the late 18th century, primarily focused on the Spanish influence. The bias is subtle. It is the use of adjectives. The Native Americans are spoken of in a respectful and admiring manner. Harsher terms are used for Europeans. The Spanish were "brutal" and "glorying" in their power. The native populations were "innocent" and "unsuspecting." They had developed "advanced civilizations" in harmony with the environment. Columbus was a "successful failure" and he approached America in "cockleshell craft" with a "motley crew" of "superstitious men." The introduction of syphilis into Europe was "poetic justice." The Conquistadors, such as the "ironfisted Pizarro" were a "clinking cavalcade" "brutally mistreating" the natives. Indigenous people were "a wealth of souls to be harvested for the Christian religion." And of course, slavery was fundamental to the success of all who came. Ironic to me is that the chapter ends with praise of the Spanish influence in that they were "cultural innovators" and they paid the "Native Americans the high compliment of fusing with them through marriage and incorporating indigenous culture into their own, rather than shunning and eventually isolating the Indians as their English adversaries would do."
This all passes fact-checking but the slant is obvious.
One could characterize the Spanish influence as raping, pillaging and obliterating the cultures of the future Latin America. However, the authors are setting the stage for the next chapter which introduces the perhaps darker English into North America.
In the intro to Part One of the textbook, it is stated that "The American colonists in fact had little reason to complain about Britain."