Did Howard Zinn Tell Too Simple a Story About American History?

As a new biography makes clear, A People’s History of the United States arose from a life of deep and admirable commitment, but it has many gaps.

Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States is one of the most popular works of history ever written. Zinn thought of his book as a supplement to the traditional school curriculum. Instead of recounting the achievements of titans of politics and industry, he celebrated laborers, the leaders of social movements, those who denounced injustice and faced oppression. Each year between its publication in 1980 and 2010, it sold more copies than the last. It was, its publisher said, “the book that won’t stop selling!” Zinn’s book and its ideas made appearances in Good Will Hunting in 1997 (where Matt Damon’s character tells Robin Williams that it is a real history book that will “knock you on your ass”) and in The Sopranos in 2002, where Tony castigates his son for reading it (“so you finally read a book, and it’s bullshit”) and declares, “In this house, Christopher Columbus is a hero. End of story.” It has been taught in thousands of high school and college classrooms; it has been banned from others.

Zinn’s reputation on the political right is, unsurprisingly, very poor. In 2004, Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen tried to write a counterpart—A Patriot’s History of the United States—titled to imply that it is unpatriotic to be critical of a country’s faults. But Zinn’s most popular work also has an uneven reputation on the left. Many professional historians have found it wanting, even if they share most of Zinn’s political sensibilities. Michael Kazin, writing in Dissent in 2004, called it “bad history … gilded with virtuous intentions” that reduces the past to “a Manichean fable.” History, for Zinn, Kazin writes, “is a painful narrative about ordinary folks who keep struggling to achieve equality, democracy, and a tolerant society, yet somehow are always defeated by a tiny band of rulers whose wiles match their greed.” Kazin thought Zinn opted for an oversimplified morality tale that would, in the end, keep the left “on the margins of American political life.”

Most historians are lucky to have readers. Zinn has fans. A People’s History made him, by the standards of historians at any rate, a celebrity. In the early 2000s, he coordinated stage performances and a film featuring the voices of advocates for social change throughout history, interpreted by actors including Rosario Dawson, Morgan Freeman, Sandra Oh, and Viggo Mortensen. His autobiography was made into a documentary. Before his death in 2010, he toured the country alongside the journalist Dave Zirin, who frequently writes about sports for The Nation, who interviewed him on stage. (I was in the packed audience in what turned out to be Zinn’s final public event, in Chicago in November 2009, on behalf of the Campaign to End the Death Penalty.)

Zirin has now completed a biography of Zinn, The People’s Historian: The Outsized Life of Howard Zinn. It is a tribute to a person that Zirin deeply admires. It has much in common with Zinn’s most popular book. Zinn presented his readers with genuinely admirable dissidents, from Bartolomé de las Casas to Ida Tarbell and Langston Hughes. At a moment when the country needs effective dissidents, Zirin deservedly places Zinn, the scholar-activist, in that pantheon. But The People’s Historian also replicates one of A People’s History’s flaws: It can flatten complex problems and people into apparently simple ones.

Howard Zinn—“Howie” to friends and family—was born in Brooklyn in 1922 to Eastern European Jewish parents (his father immigrated from today’s Ukraine, his mother from Siberia). They were poor throughout his childhood, living in cold-water tenements filled with roaches. “We’d come home and they’d be all over the kitchen table and scatter when we turned on the light. I never got used to them,” Zinn remembered. The four surviving Zinn boys (an older brother died as a baby) slept head-to-toe to make the best use of space. His father worked hard at a series of odd jobs, especially when the Depression hit, but the family never achieved prosperity or even security. From experience, Zinn felt that the “if you work hard, you will get ahead” myth of American advancement was hollow for too many people.

Zinn was the one bookish member of the family. He began reading about politics and spending time with left-wing political organizers. Participating in a peaceful demonstration in 1939, he was beaten by police, which politicized him further. He says—and both Zinn’s previous biographer, Martin Duberman, and Zirin agree—that he never joined the Communist Party. An FBI file filled with inaccuracies (including inventing a nonexistent sister) would........

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