It also leaves a lot out. In any survey text there are inevitable absences. But, for example, A People’s History makes virtually no mention of religion—surely an important part of the national experience. It doesn’t discuss conservatism in any serious way. Geopolitics is scarce. Zinn’s Nye-inflected explanation for World War I, for example, replaces ideology with interests, and assumes them to be the same. If the goal is to understand Woodrow Wilson’s thinking about entry into World War I, for example, A People’s History is a very poor guide.
That same pattern of analysis, shoehorned in again and again, is responsible for what is probably the worst passage in A People’s History: his account of the U.S. Civil War. Zinn calls the Civil War “not a clash of peoples … but of elites.” It was “not over slavery as a moral institution … the northern elite wanted economic expansion … the slave interests opposed all this; they saw Lincoln and the Republicans as making continuation of their pleasant and prosperous way of life impossible in the future.” There are elements of truth here, of course. The North was also racist, it had businessmen with interests, it was not merely waging a war of righteous emancipation. But, again, Zinn is too reductive. There was moral and political outrage about slavery in the North. Troops, Northern and Southern, understood what the war was about. The Thirteenth Wisconsin Infantry, in 1862, declared that it was “as plain as the noon-day sun” that the South’s “infamous rebellion” was “a war of, by, and for Slavery,” and a Confederate Brigade agreed: “any man who pretends to believe that this is not a war for the emancipation of the blacks … is either a fool or a liar.” There are times when Zinn should have listened more to “the people.”
Zinn is at his best when describing the activists and dissidents who recognized the flaws in their own times, and who organized to make the country better. Zirin is at his best when he is presenting the story of Zinn in that same light. But Zirin also replicates some of Zinn’s flaws. Zirin glosses the Cold War, as Zinn does: American elites needed an enemy, they found it in the USSR, and “the war business was booming.” This is too simple; and the problem with this narrative when applied to political action is that it turns hard problems into apparently easy ones. The task of understanding other perspectives, other ways of thinking, perhaps even the reasons that people take pride in traditions other than the dissident one, is not taken seriously.
