Some readers may be acquainted with late historian Howard Zinn, best known for his A People’s History of the United States, who, it recently was revealed, was targeted for censorship in 2010, the same year he died. Mitch Daniels, the then Indiana governor and now President of Purdue University, frantically dispatched emails to his education chief urging that Zinn’s book be banned from the school curriculum because it was “an execrable anti-factual piece of disinformation that misstates American history on every page.” Daniels fretted about impressionable school children being “force-fed a totally false version of our history”, a version that demonstrated that the struggles of ordinary people matter in making history. Imagine that.
Daniels was alarmed that students might encounter a source challenging the corporate fairy tales that the American imperial system needs the public to swallow in order to keep them quiet and docile consumers. This task grows increasingly arduous when most American parents cannot help but notice they are no longer paid enough to consume anything beyond basics, if even that. So one can appreciate the difficult task that big business devotees like Mitch Daniels face. Daniels demanded a statewide review to purge Zinn’s heresy, but it turned out there was nothing much to be worried about. Zinn’s book came to notice not as required reading in Indiana high schools but as one of a bundle of histories cited in a teachers’ summer education course. Yet even to mention an alternative history, written from the viewpoint of underdogs, was too odious for Daniels and the American Right. The jolly reactionary editors of National Review, for example, stated, maybe deluded or deceitfully (or both): “American education is a sewer of left-wing ideology, and Zinn’s work is an especially ripe excretion.” You would need a spaceship to find the universe they are talking about.
Daniels’ intervention is interesting only because it came to light. Censorship of this sort goes on behind the scenes all the time. Who then was this scholarly antichrist Zinn? Zinn was a historian and activist who devoted his life — after a stint as a bombardier over Europe during World War II — to dismantling the ‘great man’ histories by placing their actions in the wider context of the struggles of workers, immigrants, slaves, women and minorities. A letter signed by some 90 Purdue professors rebuffed Daniels thus: “Whatever their political stripe, most experts in the field of US history do not take issue with Howard Zinn’s facts, even when they do take issue with his conclusions.” Since historians necessarily quibble about everything, that is a fairly ringing endorsement. Ironically, in a perfect illustration of the systematic shenanigans Zinn’s book exposes, Daniels was made the president of the Purdue University by a board he largely appointed while he was the governor. That is how things really work in the US today. Daniels and his ilk like it that way but obviously do not want the public to know.
People who forget history are doomed to relive it, so goes an old but ignored saying. Why are Daniels and his cronies afraid of a book, and others like it? Here is why. We picked Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States off a library shelf and opened it randomly to pages (258-259) dealing with the 1880s. When Grover Cleveland, a Democrat, ran for president in 1884, “the general impression of the country was that he opposed the corporations ands trusts” — rather like Barack Obama in 2008. But when Cleveland won, tycoon Jay Gould, who bragged he could hire half the working class to kill the other half, said he felt he was in good hands and, Zinn writes, “He was right.” Cleveland’s key advisors were drawn from the wealthiest corporate strata, just like Obama tapped Goldman Sachs for his economic aides.
Cleveland, with a huge Treasury surplus, refused a hundred thousand dollars relief to Texas farmers suffering drought, claiming that relief would weaken their character. Instead, he raided the surplus to pay bondholders (his financial backers) at 28 percent over face value, a $ 45 million giveaway to tycoons of doubtless sterling character. Obama likewise could have channeled relief to hard-pressed homeowners and into job-creating public works but instead funnels trillions to outright criminals in the banks and brokerage firms responsible for the crash. Cleveland’s Attorney General discreetly informed robber barons that new regulatory agencies were friendly and “entirely nominal”, so as to fool the public. Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder likewise staunchly avoided prosecuting big players who obliterated the economy and still profit handsomely off it.
The next president Benjamin Harrison boasted the ideal qualifications of having been a lawyer for piratical railroads and having commanded a strikebreaker military unit. Cleveland then was re-elected in 1892 and routinely sent troops to crush strikes during another needless depression. Obama today orders an illegal surveillance state to sweep away the street presence of ‘Occupy Wall Street’ (which will return) and to prosecute anyone disclosing nefarious state schemes. The 1880s Supreme Court also carefully perverted laws such as the 14th amendment, originally legislated to help freed blacks, to buttress corporate predators instead. Ring a bell today? Flip to the next page (p. 260) and Zinn quotes a Senator on the need for reforms because “…there were ‘monopolies of old…but never such giants as in our day. You must heed [protestors’] appeal or be ready for the socialist, the communist, the nihilist. Society is now disturbed by forces never felt before…”
Is it any wonder that Mitch Daniels wants to expunge these embarrassing and provocative parallels from textbooks? America’s ruling elites have been shoving America back into 19th century miseries. Still, one encouraging and exquisite consequence of the exposure of this clumsy censorship attempt is that sales of Zinn’s book reportedly doubled.
The writers are the authors of No Clean Hands and Parables of Permanent War