Mitch Daniels’s covert war on Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States.
Photo Credit: By
Jared and Corin (Howard Zinn Uploaded by zro) [CC-BY-SA-2.0
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
August 8, 2013
|
A recent Associated Press expose—drawing on e-mails obtained under
the Freedom of Information Act—revealed that in 2010, Mitch Daniels,
then Indiana’s Republican governor, covertly set out to ban Howard
Zinn’s best-selling
A People’s History of the United States from
Indiana’s classrooms. Daniels had privately responded to Zinn’s death
that year with unseemly glee; “This terrible anti-American academic has
finally passed away,” he crowed. Daniels attempted to banish Zinn’s book
on the grounds that it was “a truly execrable, anti-factual piece of
disinformation that misstates American history on every page…. How do we
get rid of it before more young people are force-fed a totally false
version of our history?” When Daniels’s education adviser replied that
A People’s History was
being used in a social movements course for teachers at Indiana
University, the governor insisted that “this crap should not be accepted
for any credit by the state,” sparking a proposed statewide review of
university courses designed to “disqualify propaganda” from Indiana’s
curriculum.
This view of
A People’s History as propaganda
was not shared by the historians who named it a finalist for the
American Book Award in 1981—an honor virtually never accorded to
historical surveys—or by the more than 2 million readers who made
A People’s History the most popular radical history in the United States during the last three decades.
As
governor, Daniels seemed unconcerned that purging Zinn from Indiana’s
educational system constituted a violation of academic freedom. But this
issue emerged in the political storm unleashed by the AP story, in part
because Daniels is currently president of Purdue University. Aware that
trampling academic freedom is incompatible with leadership in higher
education, Daniels sought to evade the issue by claiming (falsely) that
he had respected academic freedom at the university level and only
sought to keep Zinn out of the K-12 educational curriculum.
Upset
by Daniels’s refusal to admit last week that he had erred in seeking to
ban Zinn, dozens of Purdue’s faculty, including some of its most
prominent historians, wrote an open letter explaining how “troubled”
they were by his failure either to stand up for “academic inquiry and
exchange” or to realize that “academic freedom is essential to all
levels of education.” The American Historical Association condemned
Daniels’s war on Zinn as “inappropriate and a violation of academic
freedom,” and championed “open discussion of controversial books,” which
“benefits students, historians, and the general public alike.”
“Attempts to single out particular texts for suppression from a school
or university curriculum,” the AHA wrote, “have no place in a democratic
society.”
Governor Daniels assumed, without evidence, that
teachers “inflicted” Zinn’s book on their students and “force-fed” them
Zinn’s radical view of the American past, indoctrinating them with
leftist “propaganda.” But the way that
A People’s History has
most commonly been used in history classes bears no resemblance to
Daniels’s overheated, ideological imaginings. For example, the Indiana
University professor, Carl Weinberg, whose use of
A People’s History so
angered Daniels in 2010, assigned the book’s civil rights movement
chapter, along with conflicting accounts of the movement, in order to
explore competing theories about how social movements arise—just what
one would expect and hope for in a class on mass protest.
Innovative history teachers across the United States have for decades used
A People’s History at
the high school level in similarly comparative and rigorous ways. High
school teachers desperate to breathe some life into their classes have
distributed Xerox copies of Zinn’s most provocative chapters to offer a
contrast to state-mandated textbooks, seeking to engage students in
historical debate so they learn that history involves sorting out
competing interpretations of the past rather than mere memorization of
names and dates. These teachers have been drawn to Zinn because he
offered their students a uniquely accessible introduction to the new
social history, which revolutionized historical scholarship beginning in
the 1960s. As its title indicates,
A People’s History presented
American history “from the bottom up” focusing on the experience of
workers, women, African-Americans and Native Americans; it brought a New
Left sensibility to the analysis of foreign policy and was profoundly
critical of the US tendencies towards violence, expansionism, racism and
militarism from the Indian Wars up through Vietnam.
Extensive
evidence in the Zinn archives at NYU’s Tamiment Library, including
student and teacher letters, shows that students develop their
historical thinking skills when their teachers have them compare Zinn’s
radical history with conventional textbook history. For example, more
than 100 Oregon high school students wrote Zinn in the 1980s and 1990s
as part of their class work comparing their textbook’s account of
Columbus, Andrew Jackson, the Progressive era and various wars in which
the US engaged with Zinn’s treatment of those topics in
A People’s History. Most
of the students were startled to learn that Columbus, who their
textbook depicted as a heroic explorer, can also be seen as a
greed-driven imperialist who was cruel to the indigenous people of the
“New World.” They were shocked to learn that Andrew Jackson, a
democratic icon of textbook history, was an Indian killer and
slave-owner.
Some students admired Zinn’s iconoclasm, while others
challenged his version of the past. But whether or not they found his
radical view of the American past convincing, most students found it
liberating to learn that there was more than one way to think about
history. As one student wrote Zinn, “American history has been entirely
one-sided for too long. Your work showed me another side of history I
never knew existed.”
Another wrote that he “really enjoyed reading
your work and value it much when it comes to discussing our history….
Our history books should be rewritten, told, and questioned from more
than one perspective.”
A student who told Zinn he disagreed with
his negative portrayal of President Jackson’s Indian removal policies
was still glad to have access to Zinn’s telling of US history: “It was
incredible to read something so extremely different than the account
given in history [text] books.” “I rather enjoy your writings and it
gives a different point of view other than the fairy tale history
books,” explained a student who challenged some of Zinn’s conclusions.
Even
a conservative student came to appreciate Zinn, writing, “I’m still a
conservative, and I still love America, but your articles make me take a
look at America from a different angle.” Some right-wing students did
display Mitch Daniels–type intolerance towards Zinn’s radicalism by
suggesting he was unpatriotic. In response, a number of their classmates
wrote to Zinn to describe refutations of such attacks. “On the
contrary, I feel that you are one who is tired of people lying to
themselves about the ‘greatness’ of our country, and only dwelling on
positive achievements,” wrote one such student, “So if people with our
thoughts and opinions are to be thought of as ‘Anti-Americans,” then let
us be known that way. I’ll stand by that name proudly.”
Some of
the most memorable letters to Zinn might even leave Mitch Daniels
embarrassed about his ugly characterization of Zinn as “an anti-American
academic.” There is the letter from a teacher on a South Dakota Indian
reservation who reported that one of her students was so moved by
A People’s History that
he had “stayed up all night…and could not put the book down.” A
Japanese-American student wrote that she was “part of a minority called
the ‘Quiet Americans;’” her parents had “as young children been sent to
the concentration camps,” and she told Zinn that he was the first
historian she’d read who “tells the side of the minority…. It’s really
nice to know that there is someone our there that doesn’t go with the
flow and follow the majority.”
These letters attest that, unlike Daniels, students are not afraid of radical history, but thrive by reading and debating it.
Remembering Howard Zinn.
No comments:
Post a Comment