People's History of the United States_ 1492 to Present, A - Zinn, Howard [408]
When I set out to write the book, I had been teaching history and what is grandiosely called “political science” for twenty years. Half of that time I was involved in the civil rights movement in the South (mostly while teaching at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia). And then there were ten years of activity against the war in Vietnam. These experiences were hardly a recipe for neutrality in the teaching and writing of history.
But my partisanship was undoubtedly shaped even earlier, by my upbringing in a family of working-class immigrants in New York, by my three years as a shipyard worker, and by my Air Force duty as a bombardier in the European theater (a strange word for that—“theater”) in the second World War. That was all before I went to college under the GI Bill of Rights and began to study history.
By the time I began teaching and writing, I had no illusions about “objectivity,” if that meant avoiding a point of view. I knew that a historian (or a journalist, or anyone telling a story) was forced to choose, out of an infinite number of facts, what to present, what to omit. And that decision inevitably would reflect, whether consciously or not, the interests of the historian.
There is a certain drumbeat of scolding one hears these days, about the need for students to learn facts. “Our young people are not being taught facts,” said presidential candidate Robert Dole (and candidates are always so scrupulous about facts) to a gathering of American Legionnaires. I was reminded of the character in Dickens’ Hard Times, the pedant Gradgrind, who admonished a younger teacher: “Teach nothing but facts, facts, facts.”
But there is no such thing as a pure fact, innocent of interpretation. Behind every fact presented to the world—by a teacher, a writer, anyone—is a judgment. The judgment that has been made is that this fact is important, and that other facts, omitted, are not important.
There were themes of profound importance to me which I found missing in the orthodox histories that dominated American culture. The consequence of those omissions has been not simply to give a distorted view of the past but, more important, to mislead us all about the present.
For instance, there is the issue of class. It is pretended that, as in the Preamble to the Constitution, it is “we the people” who wrote that document, rather than fifty-five privileged white males whose class interest required a strong central government. That use of government for class purposes, to serve the needs of the wealthy and powerful, has continued throughout American history, down to the present day. It is disguised by language that suggests all of us—rich and poor and middle class—have a common interest.
Thus, the state of the nation is described in universal terms. The novelist Kurt Vonnegut invented the term “granfalloon” to describe a great bubble that must be punctured to see the complexity inside. When the president declares happily that “our economy is sound,” he will not acknowledge that it is not at all sound for 40 or 50 million people who are struggling to survive, although it may be moderately sound for many in the middle class, and extremely sound for the richest 1 percent of the nation who own 40 percent of the nation’s wealth.
Labels are given to periods in our history which reflect the well-being of one class and ignore the rest. When I was going through the files of Fiorello LaGuardia, who as a Congressman in the twenties represented East Harlem, I read the letters of desperate housewives, their husbands out of work, their children hungry, unable to pay their rent—all this in that period known as “the Jazz Age,” the “Roaring Twenties.”
What we learn about the past does not give us absolute truth about the present, but it may cause us to look deeper than the glib statements made by political leaders and the “experts