Purely Political, By James Buckley
It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention that members of the current generation of twenty-somethings (let’s call them “Gen Z” although more appropriately “Gen Zinn”) do not think highly of the United States, to the point where many, if not most, say they “are not proud” to live in America or to be American.
Here’s why they feel that way.
Howard Zinn, the man who wrote the history book that an entire generation grew up reading and believing, was a left-wing activist. (Dr. Zinn, a history professor, died in 2010 at the age of 87.) For the past 40 years, schoolteachers have been using his “A People’s History of the United States” as reading material in the classroom.
You should know that Dr. Zinn participated in a political rally in Times Square with a group of communist acquaintances (described as a “peaceful rally” on howardzinn.org … where have you heard that before?) when mounted police charged the marchers. Dr. Zinn was hit and knocked unconscious.
He describes this experience as a turning point in his life. “From that moment on,” he writes, “I was no longer a liberal, a believer in the self-correcting character of American democracy.” His stated goal after the incident was “an uprooting of the old order.”
The book was published in 1980. According to its publisher, it has sold over three million copies and continues to be used as a history textbook in public and private schools.
Dr. Zinn’s book is written in easy-to-understand English, unlike most textbooks that are often dry and even more often, boring, especially to students of the computer era whose attention spans are … shorter than students’ of earlier generations.
In the very first chapter, Dr. Zinn introduces young minds to a wholly different Christopher Columbus.
“I am not worried about disillusioning young people,” Dr. Zinn writes. “We should be able to tell the truth about people whom we have been taught to look upon as heroes, but who really don’t deserve that admiration.
“Why should we,” he asks, “think it heroic to do as Columbus did, arrive in this hemisphere and carry on a rampage of violence, in order to find gold?
The fact that Capt. Columbus steered his three small ships across an unknown ocean to an unknown world, with his crew on the verge of mutiny every step of the way, that his bravery and determination to find a direct route to India by heading west rather than east, isn’t mentioned or acknowledged.
Dr. Zinn claims that Columbus, “like other informed people of his time, knew the world was round and he could sail west in order to get to the Far East.”
So, no big deal, smart people already knew one could get to India by sailing west.
Right.
How come no one had done it?
In any case, even if you believed Columbus was a brave and industrious man, the reading of his exploits will quickly disabuse you of any of those notions.
Utilizing Bartolomé de las Casas’s “History of the Indies” (taken from Columbus’s journal accounts), de las Casas notes that “women in Indian society were treated so well as to startle the Spaniards.”
What follows is the description of an Eden-like environment, apparently spoiled and destroyed by the Europeans:
“Marriage laws are non-existent: Men and women alike choose their mates and leave them as they please, without offense, jealousy or anger.
“Pregnant women work to the last minute and give birth almost painlessly; up the next day, they bathe in the river and are as clean and healthy as before giving birth. If they tire of their men, they give themselves abortions with herbs that force stillbirths …”
Really?
“Why should we find it heroic,” Dr. Zinn continues, “for Andrew Jackson to drive Indians out of their land? Why should we think of Theodore Roosevelt as a hero because he fought in the Spanish-American War, driving Spain out of Cuba, but also paving the way for the United States to take control of Cuba?”
Dr. Zinn claims that many U.S. residents use “citizenship, not merely as a legal status but as a narrow vision of who can be considered ‘American,’ (and that vision) is still used as a weapon against Latinos.”
Is it any wonder that younger people don’t care if noncitizens vote in our elections?
Later chapters are filled with slurs against the rule of “the upper class,” which Dr. Zinn claimed was “getting most of the benefits,” while “everywhere the poor were struggling to stay alive, simply to keep from freezing in cold weather.”
Dr. Zinn does throw a bone to the Second Amendment by admitting that “The American victory over the British army was made possible by the existence of an already-armed people. Just about every white male had a gun and could shoot.”
But it was back-handed praise. He goes on in the same paragraph to claim that: “The Revolutionary leadership distrusted the mobs of the poor. But they knew the Revolution had no appeal to slaves and Indians. They would have to woo the armed white population.”
Sigh.
The Civil War too, is handled dismissively by Dr. Zinn. “The Emancipation Proclamation,” he writes, “had all the moral grandeur of a bill of lading.”
Virtually nowhere in the preceding chapters on the Civil War does he reveal that the rebellious slave-owning Southerners were all members of the Democratic Party and that the anti-slavery Northerners were Republicans.
“With the Union army in the South as protection, and a civilian army of officials in the Freedman’s Bureau to help them, southern Negroes came forward, voted, formed political organizations and expressed themselves forcefully on issues important to them. They were hampered in this for several years by Andrew Johnson, Vice President under Lincoln, who became President when Lincoln was assassinated at the close of the war.
“Johnson vetoed bills to help Negroes; he made it easy for Confederate states to come back into the Union without guaranteeing equal rights to blacks. During his presidency, these returned southern states enacted ‘black codes,’ which made the freed slaves like serfs, still working the plantations.”
Nowhere is it mentioned that Johnson, whose constant vetoes led to his impeachment, was a Democrat, and that all the laws to protect and promote blacks that he vetoed were drawn and passed by a Republican Congress.
Next week, we’ll examine Dr. Zinn’s take on the Great Depression and America’s entry into both World War I and World War II.
James Buckley is a longtime Montecito resident. He welcomes questions or comments at jimb@substack.com. Readers are invited to visit jimb.substack.com, where Jim’s Journals are on file. He also invites people to subscribe to Jim’s Journal.
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