The Shaping of America/A People's History of the United States:
O'Brien, David J
Out of anger, out of hope THE SHAPING OF AMERICA A People's History of the Young Republic, Vol. Ill Page Smith McGraw Hill, $20, 870 pp. A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES Howard...
...A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES Howard Zinn Harper & Row, $20, 610 pp...
...Equally committed to the redemption of the American promise, he is less directly political than Zinn, more inclined to "tell the story of our past as fairly and accurately as possible...
...Like them, he cares for the people, and knows their enemies even if sometimes they do not...
...Touched by the sight of poverty, horrified by war, revolted by racism, indignant at the stran- ' gling of dissent, he has nevertheless tried his best to keep his tie straight, his voice unruffled, and his emotions to himself...
...This substitution of a therapy of adaptation for responsible politics as the outcome of historical study betrays the great tradition of U.S...
...and he has the audacity to celebrate, in a history book about the United States, the victory of the people of Vietnam...
...A People's History of the United States is a fitting expression of its author: committed, angry, onesided, polemical, and profoundly true...
...George, Bancroft, Frederick Jackson Turner, Vernon Louis Parrington, Charles A. Beard, Carl Becker, all cared deeply about the fate of American democracy, each tried to see America whole, to find the key to the entire history of the nation in order to call the American people to action to redeem the promise of American life, a promise in which they all obviously, and passionately, believed...
...he tells of the wars of the twentieth century in terms of the soldiers once again...
...Yet he admits to a pessimistic sense of decline, a fear that Americans are gradually becoming, may already be, what they once thought the English had become, "a reproach and byword among the nations...
...Radical education reformers like Jonathan Kozol and historians like Howard Zinn have spent lifetimes combating the attitude that "history always happens to somebody else, in some other time and some other place," an attitude that lies at the, very heart of America's cultural and political paralysis...
...The word 'progress' has been replaced by the word 'change': children, the modern texts insist, should learn history so that they can adapt to the rapid changes taking place around them...
...their ultimate triumph will be its vindication...
...historical writing...
...Smith's populism is a fuller and richer contribution to Zinn's longed-for day of liberation, because it reminds us that modern history, and the liberal credo which informed it, contains elements of permanent significance and undying value...
...The New Age Now Begins, his two-volume history of the Revolution, was a bicentennial event written in the spirit of Jeremy Rif-kin's Peoples Bicentennial Commission...
...More than that, he believes in the people and the eventual unification of their power to the truth...
...Zinn and Page Smith believe that their colleagues among professional historians have contributed to this debasement of American historical scholarship...
...they are its subjects, its heroes and heroines...
...It is two centuries since Jefferson substituted "the pursuit of happiness" for Locke's protection of property...
...History textbooks, Frances Fitzgerald contrasts today's school history with that of our youth: The past is no highway to the present...
...It risks distorting both past and future...
...He writes of the revolution from the point of view of the soldiers, poor, hungry, cold, frightened, and later forgotten...
...Zinn's history is politicized history: it is designed to forward the work of liberation...
...of slavery from the point of view of the slaves, struggling against impossible odds to preserve their dignity and humanity in families, hating the system fastened upon them by greed and the corrupting power of racism...
...The anger and bitterness of Zinn's radicals, the heroism of the oppressed, arose not out of some abstract rebellion against greed and tyranny but out of an always American rebellion against the dream deferred and betrayed...
...If we dismantle as we must the machinery of our warfare state, we will do so not to end the American dream and inter the American promise, but precisely to help construct that "new order," to usher in that "new age," when all men and women will know the joy of freedom and share the tasks of self-government.sks of self-government...
...without the hope, and the faith on which it rests, the anger can become demonic...
...True, he has often slyly attuned his research to his feelings, but so slyly, and with such scholarly skill, that only close friends and investigators for congressional committees might suspect him of compassion...
...Like Zinn, Smith sees the oppression, but he also sees, perhaps more clearly, the joy of freedom for so many and the power of the American dream of material advancement...
...Everyone who has observed Zinn's long struggle for justice from a distance, and follows his current battle with Boston University President John Silber, knows that his tie is never straight, his voice is always ruffled, and he seldom keeps his emotions to himself...
...Revolutions are made from protest against injustice and affirmation of new possibilities, out of anger and out of hope...
...Ever the heretic, Zinn dares to imagine (again, in a history book) that "history which keeps alive the memory of people's resistance" may preserve the possibility that someday the "guards" may join the "prisoners" in creating "a different and marvelous world...
...Their heroic struggle to make our history a shared human project has been overwhelmed by images of "change" and "adaptation" propagated by bureaucracies and their intellecutal hirelings...
...It is also religious history, for it rests upon a deep faith that men and women are of ultimate worth...
...There is Utopian anticipation throughout the book, a yearning for the moment when the truth will finally be clear, the leaders all exposed, the people fully empowered, and a new socialist community born in the liberation of the oppressed at home and abroad...
...enabling all persons to take command of, and responsibility for, their history as the goal of all worthwhile intellectual endeavor...
...But it is not the full story of the American people, and not a full history/or the American people...
...he describes the "intimate" oppression of women and the impersonal oppression of men and women who work in factories and live in slums...
...Zinn is an intellectual, and he celebrates radical reformers from Paine to Garrison to Daniel Berrigan...
...A decade ago Zinn was even more direct...
...Hope for a better life, the revolutionary possibility of economic security, personal liberty, and popular self-government given form and concreteness in the United States Constitution, these promises and symbols transformed the whole universe of human expectation...
...Our history should remind us not only of our responsibility for the promises betrayed by institutions and their leaders, but of promises vindicated in daily struggle by people like ourselves, promises of dignity and decency to be carried forward in our generation, made universal by our own history...
...Similarly, a people's history of the United States which describes hurts and oppressions, and reminds us of heroic resistance and occasional rebellion, is a useful antidote to the complacent seamlessness of the establishment historiography which angers Frances Fitz Gerald...
...Now he carries the story through the first quarter of the nineteenth century, a pace that allows for more leisurely, dispassionate reflection on the experience of the American people...
...During those two centuries a lot of people worked very hard so that those who came later might be better and happier, and more than a few found in that hope the meaning of the pursuit...
...It is history about the American people intended to be read by the people...
...Page Smith sets himself at once a less and more ambitious task...
...it is a collection of issues and events that do not fit together and that lead in no single direction...
...For a long time, the historian has been embarrassed by his own humanity...
...They struggle, yesterday and today, against leaders who, from the very start, have consistently proven unworthy: slaveholders and greedy merchants, industrialists and, yes university presidents, establishmentarians all, frightened by the disorder and violence which accompany the industrialization they have themselves unleashed, but can hardly control...
...Somewhere along the way of recent experience that tradition of historical memory as a basis of political and social action has given way to an agonized doubt that the world "out there," the American world, with its "problems" and "crises" is, after all, our world, for whose history and whose destiny we are in any way responsible...
...It results in alienation, or an existential gesture, rather than in serious democratic and socialist politics...
...Most of all, Zinn wants to communicate the suffering and the courage of history's victims...
...David O'Brien IN her recent study of U.S...
...History is 'proceeding in spite of us...
...To make the people's history accessible, Smith hopes to write a multi-volume survey of popular experience, the first of this century...
...According to Smith, specialization, overemphasis on objectivity and a misplaced passion for the social sciences have all contributed to the absence of readable, meaningful general history by professional scholars, leaving a vacuum to be filled by propagandists and commercial interests...
Vol. 108 • January 1981 • No. 1
