The former rightwing Republican governor of Indiana, Mitch Daniels,  now President of

Purdue University, has seized upon a “poll” of historians of the American Historical

Association, referring to the late Howard Zinn, whom I had the privilege of knowing, of

coming in “second” as the author of “the least credible history book in print.” Daniels has

demanded  to a state education official that this “truly execrable piece of disinformation”

not be in  use in Indiana schools. 

First,  let’s look at the nonsense poll.  Have the respondents looked at the books that are in print ?  Racist, reactionary works of history portraying slavery in the U.S. as a benign system,  attacking Franklin Roosevelt for being behind the Pearl Harbor attack, hailing Joseph McCarthy has a heroic statesman?  And those are merely a few highlights of works  about  U.S history.  And then there is Patrick Buchanan’s Churchill, Hitler, and the Unecessary  War, whose interpretations of WWII would have won prizes from Hitler’s Reich Ministry of Propaganda seventy years ago.  And there are studies of colonialism that portray its glorious civilizing mission and one can go on and on.  Those who responded to the poll must have a very narrow reading list.

                The historians who are dismissing Howard Zinn today are giving left-handed compliments to the influence of his Peoples History of the United States, which has reached tens of millions through the world. 

Frankly, I have my own interpretative difference with Howard Zinn on his treatment of Columbus, the American revolution, and other issues, but that does not in any way limit my enormous respect for him as both a scholar and an activist, the opposite of many of his critics, the “scholar squirrels” as Gore Vidal called them, who amass great quantities of facts and footnotes and then bury them, either afraid to interpret them outside of conventional wisdoms or really not having any intellectual framework that would enable them to do so.

 As a student at City College and a graduate student at the University of Michigan I learned to read between the lines of such works, taking what I regarded as the honest fair data from them and ignoring the interpretations that often contradicted such data.

                The New York Times  article quotes a number of historians  who have criticized Zinn, who by the way was a political scientist not a historian, defending his “right” to his interpretations.  If this were the 1950s, that would be very important.  Today, I would say, “big deal.”   Some of these writers also have in textbooks and other works written broad interpretive histories of events which have had limited sales and recognition to say the least. 

 It is the influence of Howard Zinn’s work in the U.S and internationally which Daniels and his political associates seek to censor and which some of his critics perhaps envy, along with his remarkable ability to beat the academic system

                John  Silber, the viciously rightwing President of Boston University, denounced Zinn when he was a faculty member and froze his salary.  In 1988,  when I participated in a doctoral dissertation defense in history on a committee on which Zinn was a member(traveling to Boston University) the travel expenses and hotel accommodations  expenses that I was supposed to receive were blocked, I was told, because Silber found out that Zinn was on the committee.  Actually, this was the first time in which I was the victim of a kind of red-baiting where I had not been the target but an “innocent bystander” and I found that amusing.

 Meanwhile, Howard Zinn’s Peoples History of the United States earned him very large sums of money, greater than whole departments of his critics. In our capitalist society today, this is the kind of retribution that the capitalist class most understands

                John Silber(who actually ran as the Democratic candidate for governor  of Massachusetts in 1990 in a bizarre election in which progressive voters voted Republican) died last year.  Howard Zinn died three years ago  Silber is and will continue to be an ugly footnote to history, except perhaps for Mitch Daniels and his ilk 

 Howard Zinn, following the tradition of the founder of  the Progressive School of U.S. history, Charles Beard, wrote a “usable past” for the people, not for the economic/political establishments and their academic and  popular servants

 He understood, unlike his academic critics, that intellectual freedom(which academic

tenure gives those who receive it in the university world) means nothing unless you use it. 

And he used it brilliantly  His diverse work, books, articles essays, plays, audio and video

materials available through the internet, will continue to make history relevant to

contemporary society whereas the work of his critics will  be read and catalogued with the

proper footnotes only be those like themselves