The People's History is A Misnomer: One Example How Revisionism History Cuts bOTH Ways

 

 

I’ve read quite a bit – too much, one might say of Howard Zinn’s work over the years. And I have to say his biggest trick came with his title. By naming all of his books some variation on The People’s History, he is just as good at grabbing the audience as the conservatives would be when they countered his writings by titling them: The Patriot’s History.

At some point, what actually is in either volume is irrelevant. Neither version is about history so much as pushing a narrative: one for the right, one for the left. That one might be closer to actual history is not truly the point of anyone who writes either version of it: neither is interesting in present facts so much as spinning them to make sure it mirrors their version of the world. Both sides will cherry pick any data they want to prove this point, sometimes to a ridiculous extent. To give one of the more obvious version of that on the left when Oliver Stone was telling his ridiculous version of ‘The Untold History of the United States’, he talked over Stalin’s role in manipulating events at Yalta by arguing that Stalin was trustworthy. Now I realize the lion’s share of Stone’s narrative is based on the idea that America essentially manufactured the Cold War and that every President that followed FDR was more or less acting out some version of American imperialism writ large.  I’m even willing to acknowledge that one of the major causes of the Cold War was the fact that every American President thought every Soviet leader after Stalin was just another version of him. None of this, however, alleviates one iota how much Stalin did to cause the Cold War or that he was as evil as history says he was,  something that even American Communists at the time admitting was a major flaw in their thinking.

 To let Stalin off the hook takes a lot of balls, something one could never accuse Stone of having a shortage of. Staggeringly, a lot of the so-called People’s Histories are willing to do just that to further their narrative of America being a horrible nation of many evils.

I don’t fundamentally disagree with the goals of so much of these histories, to be clear. I have been aware, having been fortunate to grow up in a house of historians, that the history I was being told in my education omitted far too much and prettied up America far too much. When I tried to point out some of these flaws in my junior high class, this did not endear me to either my fellow students or my teachers. And I knew then, even as I do now, how deeply flawed my native country is. I know that we are a nation build on the foundation of genocide of the native population and the enslavement of another continent. I have accepted that American exceptionalism is a myth. What I have a problem with is the idea the recent issue to put one side’s version of history over the other as if the choice between the two was binary, rather than actually being somewhere in the middle.

And as much as progressives will argue in their books and magazines and in their columns that their version of history is ‘real’, in truth it is no purer or less cherry-picked than the ‘great man’ version of history they despise. Which is why the title ‘the people’s history’ is just as much a falsehood as the ‘great man’, because the people don’t enter into it one iota.

 Zinn, Stone, and his fellow scholars want to make many points in their narratives: that the so-called elected officials, judges and ‘other great men’ were monsters who violated the will of the people by putting forth a view of white supremacy, capitalism, and the subjugation of the average person for government by the few.  What they seem to conveniently leave out of this narrative is the role the people played: they elected them. The fact that it was only a very small number of the population is not for debate: they were still chosen by people who agreed with their point of view.  These historians will always overlook this in their narrative or try to argue that these great men did not have ‘humanity’s best interest at heart.’ This is code for “the values of the last twenty years”. And it is one of things that galls me the most about these so-called historians. They seem to think that people who lived hundreds of years ago should have had the advantage of hindsight from the current day. That the best system of education of the times gave them the values they had doesn’t enter in to it. The historian knows what the right thing was, therefore, it should have been obvious three hundred years earlier.

I could write a book of my own showing just how foolish these historians are, but I’ll deal with one of the clearest examples: Abraham Lincoln. More than once I’ve read a lot of articles basically shitting on Lincoln, and I have to think that part of this is based on a fundamental progressive prejudice. All Republicans are evil incarnate and have been since time began. Therefore, Lincoln must have been monstrous too.

To be clear, there are many things Lincoln did that historians have been upset by.  He suspended the writ of habeas corpus until it was overturned by the Supreme Court. He had journalists and dissenters imprisoned for the duration of the war. Many of the elections that were held during the wars may very well have been manipulated in favor of the Republicans, and while Lincoln wasn’t directly responsible for that he certainly was aware of it. All of these are legitimate grievances that many historians have raised about him – but that is not what so many progressive are upset about. No, the major thing that seems to irk so many of them is that even though Lincoln freed the slaves, he was somehow still a bigot because he didn’t believe in full equality between the races and even if he did free the slaves, he doddered too much at it.

Let’s try and unpack this. First of all, Lincoln believed slavery was a moral wrong. By the standards of mid-19^th century politicians – including quite a few of his fellow Republicans – that was a very dangerous position to take. Before the 1860 election, many people thought he was not a viable political candidate because he had gone so far out on the issue of slavery. Nor was this a position held by the majority of the country – he received less than forty percent of the popular vote and only won because of the radical split in the Democrats. The South essentially seceded because of his election and since everyone makes it clear the Confederacy was formed to protect slavery and white supremacy, it was clearly a reaction to Lincoln and his views. I don’t think they would have been quite so quick to secede had a Seward or Salmon Chase become President, both of whom were more moderate on the subject.

Then there’s the statement that so many of these amateur historians hold over us – Lincoln’s desire to preserve the union ‘if it meant not freeing a single slave.’ None of these so-called  historians take this statement to the obvious conclusion: do they think the Union was worth preserving? This is a rhetorical question because I’ve read more than enough columns at this blog where some take the ‘moderate’ position that the South has ever been worthy of salvation and one columnist actually thinks splitting the country in two doesn’t go far enough anymore. (Seriously. He wrote a column before the last election advocating for the governor of Oregon because he believed Oregon, California and Washington were going to form their own country after the midterms and his candidate was the best choice to lead it. I guess he’s disappointed the red wave never materialized, either.)

But on a larger context: what would these historians rather have had Lincoln do in that case? Let the country exist half slave and half free, as if somehow that was a better solution than the status quo?  As if somehow having a country where all black people were slaves and one where the blacks were so small part of the population they were insignificant would have been better? How would that have been better for black people if no one else?

Lincoln had a tricky course to navigate, not just with the war but he was still President of a country where his party was in the minority in the legislature. His own Republicans were divided among the more conservatives, led by Francis Blair and his ilk, and the Radicals, led most prominently by Thaddeus Stevens. Stevens, for the record, did believe in full equality for blacks and spent all of Lincoln’s presidency telling him he wasn’t going far enough. (The portrayal of him by Tommy Lee Jones in Spielberg’s film is, if anything, more accurate than the portrayal of Lincoln.) Lincoln was President of the entire country had a tricky course to navigate. As he tells Stevens in a key scene: “If it had been up to you, I should have freed the slaves the minute after Fort Sumter was fired upon. Then the border states would have seceded, the War would have been lost and we’d be watching slavery proceed to South America.” (He also means by extension the Caribbean.) That was a very real possibility.

But even if Lincoln didn’t believe in full equality the same way that the Radical Republicans did, does that make his achievement any less significant? Does the Thirteenth Amendment somehow not count because he didn’t believe in it? Laws do not work that way. And yet that seems to be the underlying message of so many of those who want to play down what Lincoln did. Lincoln was one of the most far-sighted and enlightened men of his century. Are we supposed to blame him because he didn’t have the values of this one?

And before you answer that, may I remind you that weeks after the Thirteenth Amendment was signed into law, Lincoln was assassinated. Nor was  he the only target: The conspirators tried – and nearly did – kill Seward that night, and it was only sheer luck that Andrew Johnson, his vice president wasn’t killed that night too. John Wilkes Booth and his band were Confederates who were trying to change the course of history that night. Lee might have surrendered, but the fighting wasn’t over. The conspirators did not like how things were ending and they were hoping by crippling the government they could extend the war to the point that a Confederate peace  - or maybe even independence – might still be achieved. Lincoln did not put a target on his back by signing the Thirteen Amendment into law, but he sure as hell didn’t make it any smaller by doing so.

Man has always learned from the past, a lesser Disney film once told us. The progressives who criticize so much of our history fundamentally seem only to nominally have accepted this lesson but they do so by blaming those from the past for not learning from the future. This is, as I have said, as foolish as those who believe that were absolutely perfect in the past and that we don’t have to adapt one bit from those lessons in the present. Understanding history means understanding all of history, not just picking and choosing the parts that support your point of view and discarding the ones that contradict it as part of propaganda from the other side. That’s a lesson that both sides would do well to learn, even though I have heavy doubts in either’s ability to do so.