Purely Political, By James Buckley
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 suggested that the late Dr. Howard Zinn, the left-wing activist author of “A People’s History of the United States,” could be blamed for many of those feelings of disenchantment with the country and its founders.
Dr. 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 white men out for themselves.
And what really galls is that, according to Dr. 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 Democratic 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,” Dr. Zinn proposes, “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 led by Democrats.
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 Freedmen’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 Democratic 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 Democratic re-election fusion candidate nominated as vice president for the 1864 presidential campaign. 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 — and never — ever — attended school. Johnson didn’t learn to read or write until he was 17 years old.
As a Democrat, Johnson 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 Democratic Party members.
Following this, Dr. 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.
Apparently, 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 Democratic 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 Dr. Zinn’s writing, but it would have been kind of him (he died in 2010) to offer a glimmer of hope, of optimism, even of national glory, once in a while.
Dr. 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,” Dr. 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 …”
Dr. Zinn quickly settles into a discussion of labor disputes within the United States, along with 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),” Dr. Zinn writes of the union formed on the basis of Marxist philosophy.
And maybe he is right. After all, the First World War was a bloody, useless self-inflicted European catastrophe, though on a positive note, it was America’s entry into it that ended it, something Dr. Zinn hardly mentions.
Dr. 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,” Dr. 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?”
Though he does proffer that, “These questions deserve thought,” it’s plain that 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 in bewilderment, wondering what’s so 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.
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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