Howard Zinn and the Academic Gatekeepers

It is called “A People’s History” because, at last, we are all there! – Alice Walker

I don’t say that you’re self-censoring. I’m sure you believe everything you’re saying...if you believed something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you are sitting. – Noam Chomsky

When my book Madness at the Gates of the City: The Myth of American Innocence, with its generous blurb from Howard Zinn, was first published, I did a series of promotional email blasts to academics. I received many positive responses, including several requests for review copies.

I also received a few negative responses, such as this one, from a Yale history professor: “Howard Zinn was a joke in academia”.

I’d like to unpack his comment, because it tells us much about the stories we tell ourselves about other people, stories which are actually about ourselves. His assessment of Zinn could have arisen from at least four positions.

1 – Perhaps he felt that Zinn did no original research in primary texts (well, he did).

2 – This academic’s politics, as with most public intellectuals, were likely to be conservative. As I write in greater detail here, professors at elite universities have always served as gatekeepers, setting the boundaries of who (by ethnicity, religion, politics, race or gender) is allowed within the pale, as well as the limits of free speech on campus. Hundreds of liberal teachers were accused of being communists and fired during the Cold War. More recently, many (such as Norman Finkelstein and Steven Salaita) have lost their jobs for speaking in support of Palestine, as Zinn consistently did. He has long been singled out by right-wing politicians, who have attempted to ban his works, and by tenured historians, who express what Abdaljawad Omar calls “moral stupidity”:

The Western intellectual who parrots Israeli talking points does not experience themselves as evading the truth (but) as being on the side of reason, of complexity, of responsible restraint ...The stupidity is not felt from the inside as stupidity. It presents itself as judgement...When a liberal commentator reaches for both-sidesism (or false equivalences), when an intellectual who would never tolerate such reasoning in any other domain suddenly discovers the irreducible nuance of Israeli security concerns – thought has rushed past the obstacle entirely.

...This foreclosure...shelters within institutions, within the ‘we’ of professional consensus, and within the shared horizons of what can be uttered in a given editorial room or faculty common room...the ambient condition of belonging to a particular class of professional knowledge. It is how the anonymous, averaging force of institutional life decides in advance what can be heard and what must be redirected.

No wonder the gatekeepers demonized Zinn. He was willing to accept the consequences of his activism, for which he was fired by Spelman College. Later, when he was nominated for tenure at Boston University, it was understood that if a department faculty voted to extend tenure, the rest of the bureaucracy would rubber-stamp the decision. Zinn was placed on the fast track for tenure, which would be confirmed at the annual Founders Day banquet. But that event was still months away. Meanwhile, some students asked him to speak at an anti-Viet Nam War rally in Boston. At that time, the war was still popular, and dissenters were considered communists and traitors. Zinn agreed to speak, but didn’t ask for any details.

It turned out that the protest was focused on Secretary of State Dean Rusk, who was scheduled to speak at that same Founders Day banquet. Zinn recalled, “Well, I slowly figured out my academic future was in serious jeopardy.” On the day of the speech, he asked who else was speaking. “We’ve had a lot of cancellations, Howard, so you’re it...can you stretch your talk to 45 minutes?” At that point, Zinn knew he was in trouble, so, in his words, he decided to go all out. “I was in great form that day. I denounced the war, I denounced the secretary of state, the president...I even denounced the founders.”

The Boston elites, including the BU trustees, had turned up in black tie, horrified to discover one of their own attacking them. Zinn wondered where he would be teaching next. A few days later, a letter arrived. It told him that the Trustees had extended tenure – on the morning of the Founders Day event, prior to his speech. Zinn had spoken out without knowing that he had already been granted tenure. He was a warrior. Have I mentioned that he was a decorated WW II veteran? Here is his account of the “useless” (his word) violence he participated in, which made him a pacifist.

3 – Academics, who often know nothing about anything outside their narrow specialties, hate their brethren who write in plain English for the general public, especially when they inspire other books that reconstruct history from marginalized peoples’ perspectives, such as:

– A People’s History of the Supreme Court by Peter Irons

– A People’s History of Sports in the United States by Dave Zirin

– The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World by Vijay Prashad

– A People’s History of the American Revolution by Ray Raphael

– A People’s History of the Civil War by David Williams

– A People’s History of the Vietnam War by Jonathan Neale

– The Mexican Revolution: A People’s History by Adolfo Gilly

– A People’s History of Australia by Verity Burgmann

– A People’s History of Science by Clifford D Connor

– A People’s History of the World by Chris Harman

– A People’s History of Christianity by Diana Butler Bass

– The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People’s History of Ancient Rome by Michael Parenti

– A People’s History of Modern Europe by William Pelz

– A People’s History of Poland by Adam Leszczyński

– An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

– A People’s History of Florida by Adam Wasserman

– American Exceptionalism and American Innocence: A People’s History of Fake News by Roberto Sirvent and Danny Haiphong

– Worn: A People’s History of Clothing by Sofi Thanhauser

– A People’s History of the Supreme Court by Peter Irons

– It Did Happen Here: An Antifascist People’s History by Moe Bowstern

– A Young People’s History of the United States by Zinn

– Voices of a People’s History of the United States by Zinn

– A People’s History of American Empire by Zinn

– The Twentieth Century: A People’s History by Zinn

– A People’s History of Quebec by Jacques Lacoursiere

– A People’s History of World War II by Marc Favreau

– A People’s History of Soccer by Mickael Correia

– A People’s History of Psychoanalysis by Daniel Gaztambide

– Taiwan: A People’s History by Evan Dawley

– A People’s Art History of the United States by Nicholas Lampert

– When Crack Was King: A People’s History of a Misunderstood Era by Donovan Ramsey

– Hearts and Minds: A People’s History of Counterinsurgency by Hannah Gurman

– A People’s History of the U.S. Military by Michael Bellesiles

– Women of the Irish Rising: A People’s History by Michael Higan

His admirers were so ubiquitous that they even provoked an adorable right-wing book: A Patriot’s History of the United States.

4 – Was Zinn’s detractor simply being envious? A People’s History of the United States has sold over 3.6 million copies and has been assigned in many high schools and college courses. Over 100,000 teachers have registered with the Zinn Education Project.

This commentary is really about the myth of American Innocence. Throughout our history, from slavery to our imperial aggressions against Mexico, Spain, Haiti, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Iran, Viet Nam, Chile, Iraq, Afghanistan, Venezuela and countless other countries, the media and the intellectuals have been its strongest supporters. As I write in Chapter Seven:

Violent thugs were not the only whites to perpetuate these conditions; respected intellectuals have always done their part. The “Dunning School” of racist historians dominated the writing of post-Civil War history well into the 1950s. William Dunning, founder of the American Historical Association, taught Columbia students that blacks were incapable of self-government. Yale’s Ulrich Phillips claimed that slaveholders did much to civilize the slaves. Henry Commager and (Harvard’s) Samuel Morison’s The Growth of the American Republic, required reading for generations of college freshmen, perpetuated the myth of the plantation and claimed that slaves “suffered less than any other class in the South...The majority...were apparently happy.” Daniel Boorstin’s The Americans: The Colonial Experience doesn’t mention slavery at all. Similarly, Arthur Schlesinger’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Age of Jackson never mentions the Trail of Tears.

The process of initiation into higher education (and the careers it opens one to) nearly guarantees that those admitted within the pale are already thinking within very narrow boundaries. Zinn’s friend Noam Chomsky wrote that academia is a system of “imposed ignorance” in which the most highly educated people are the most highly indoctrinated. “A good education instills in you the intuitive comprehension – it becomes unconscious and reflexive – that you just don’t think certain things…that are threatening to power interests.”

The universities are dependent on outside sources of support, such as private wealth, big corporations with grants, and the government (which is so closely interlinked with corporate power you can barely distinguish them)...People within them who don’t adjust to that structure, who don’t accept it and internalize it (you can’t really work with it unless you internalize it, and believe it); people who don’t do that are likely to be weeded out along the way...There are all sorts of filtering devices to get rid of people who are a pain in the neck and think independently...the educational system is very highly geared to rewarding conformity and obedience; if you don’t do that, you are a troublemaker. So, it is kind of a filtering device which ends up with people who really, honestly (they aren’t lying) internalize the framework of belief and attitudes of the surrounding power system in the society. The elite institutions...are very much geared to socialization...most of what goes on there is teaching manners; how to behave like a member of the upper classes, how to think the right thoughts, and so on.

Polls clearly indicate the results: the higher one’s education, the more one is likely to unquestioningly support America’s wars of aggression – and the reverse is also true. That means that you, even if you live in Berkeley, may be among a distinct minority. You are among the minority of well-educated people who – like many young and working-class people – can still perceive the obvious in a world where most of your “teachers” have been dedicated to misleading you. It’s a world in which the gatekeepers have created an online list of “Famous American Historians” that names 269 people, but not Zinn, who, late in life, wrote:

Anyone can throw a wrench into the machinery...We must ​act on what we feel and think, here, now, for human flesh and sense, against the abstractions of duty and obedience.

All praises and gratitude to real, courageous teachers like Howard Zinn. We need them now more than ever.