New York Review of Books Review

THE colonial upper classes had a problem: keeping the lower classes down. They solved it by hypnotizing the middle class with "the language of liberty and equality." This trick caused the middle class to ignore the plights of black slaves, poor whites and Indians and to fight King George. Our nation was born. Is history really this simple? Yes. Yes, according to Howard Zinn, whose "Young People's History of the United States" is a condensation and simplification of his already quite condensed and simple "People's History of the United States." The original work, which came out in 1980, has, according to its publishers, sold one and a half million copies. Its intention (as clear an intention as there could be, and carried out with sincerity and skill) was to provide a populist antidote to the "telling of history from the standpoint of the conquerors and leaders of Western civilization." The new book's intention is to repeat that feat in fewer pages and shorter, punchier sentences for the benefit of a younger audience. Because there was little in the first bcok that a teenager couldn't understand, the new book is not a dumbing down but, if anything, a summing up. Zinn's tale of exploitation by the haves of the have-nots begins, as it did the first time, with Columbus, whom Zinn portrays as a greedy, pious maniac who not only killed and subjugated the natives but fibbed to his masters on the Spanish throne about sighting land before one of his sailors did in order to steal a large reward. The purpose of preserving this detail in an otherwise boiled-down version of Zinn's book appears to be to show that the man who discovered the New World wasn't merely the incarnation of a destructive economic system but a jerk. Worse - and perhaps most outrageously to young folks, with their keen sense of fairness and budding love of irony - the native peoples whom he destroyed were nice. They "believed in hospitality and in sharing." These terrible things may all be true - and indeed they are supported by Columbus's own account and other primary sources that Zinn extensively quotes. But as Zinn himself points out about his discipline, telling the truth is not Job 1 for historians. Editing and motivating are. The goal is to "pick and choose among facts" so as to "shape the ideas and beliefs" that will "help us imagine new possibilities for the future." Zinn, a professor emeritus at Boston University, holds these notions to be self-evident, much as the founding fathers whom he deplores held justice and freedom (those cruel illusions) to be. Bright 12-year-olds may find this matter confounding. If the writing of history is, by definition, a crafty manipulation of people's minds meant to sway them, then why should the writers of constitutions be expected to operate any differently? And if the facts can be massaged at will to serve the interests of the masseuses, why even bother with facts at all, since lies would work well, too? Indeed, if all is sophistry and power, why not just let the best man win? So what if he happens to be rich and white? Although Zinn's book is surely meant to inspire idealism in the young, it seems as likely that its effect will be to render idealism impossible. "In the history of the world, there is no country where racism has been more important than in the United States," Zinn writes in the opening of his second chapter. Besides letting Nazi Germany off the hook, this categorical pronouncement discourages the reader from thinking through the material that follows it. All a stricken sixth grader can do is surrender to numbness as Zinn asserts that "everything that happened to the first white settlers pushed them toward the enslavement of blacks." Circumstances appear to change decades and chapters later, during the Lincoln administration, but it makes little difference in the rotten scheme of things. By the time Zinn calls Lincoln "the perfect figure to bring about the end of slavery," we're familiar enough with his methods to know he isn't paying Abe a compliment. The term "figure" is a tip-off. It suggests that Lincoln was a tool, like that genocidal old weasel Columbus. "Lincoln," Zinn continues, stripping more flesh from the profile on the penny, "understood the needs of business. He shared the political ambition of the new Republican political party. Finally, he spoke the language of doing good, and he could argue with passion against slavery on moral grounds." Here is the president famed above all others for the vigor and genius of his oratory and it turns out his stuff was mere ad copy, just "language." How much of a total bummer is that? Writing about abolitionism, Zinn leaves the impression that freeing the slaves was not enough - they had to be freed in the right way. And since giving grand speeches and waging a civil war wasn't the right way, apparently, it shouldn't surprise us that blacks slipped backward again a few years later - and most whites slipped with them. That's because the real trouble was "capitalism," which is the system that Lincoln was a tool of and which, as the 19th century progressed (predictably, ineluctably worsened, that is), made tools of nearly everyone. Though not Thomas Edison. Edison was cunning. He "didn't just invent electrical equipment," Zinn reminds us, "he marketed it as well." Though the light bulb has worked out fairly well for all of us - male and female, black and white, Republican and Democrat - Zinn's depressive progressivism doesn't include this fact, but instead leaves us with the impression that every dime that landed in Edison's pocket would have been better off staying in someone else's. Teenagers who are lazy or bad at science may find this message comforting. Don't bother to invent things, kids, and certainly don't market them. America will be a better place. That America is not a better place - that it finds itself almost globally despised, mired in war, self-doubt and random violence - is also a fact, of course, but not one that Zinn's brand of history seems equal to. His stick-figure pageant of capitalist cupidity can account, in its fashion, for terrorism - as when, in the second volume, subtitled "Class Struggle to the War on Terror," he notes that Sept. 11 was an assault on "symbols of American wealth and power" but it doesn't address the themes of religious zealotry, technological change and cultural confusion that animate what I was taught in high school to label "current events" but that contemporary students may as well just call "the weirdness." The line from Columbus to Columbine, from the first Independence Day to the Internet, and from the Boston Tea Party to Baghdad is a wandering line, not a party line. As for the "new possibilities" it points to, I can't see them clearly. Walter Kirn is a regular contributor to the Book Review. His latest novel is "The Unbinding."