Patrick Iber (a historian and Dissent co-editor) reviews Dave Zirin’s The People’s Historian: The Outsized Life of Howard Zinn — an admiring biography that mirrors both the strengths and the flattening habits of A People’s History of the United States.
The life is genuinely admirable:
- Born 1922 in Brooklyn to poor Eastern European Jewish immigrants; beaten by police at a peaceful 1939 demonstration; learned the importance of unions in the Brooklyn Navy Yard
- Served as a bombardier in WWII — bombed Royan with napalm two weeks before Germany’s surrender, then concluded “there could be just causes, but no just wars” and labeled his mission files “Never Again”
- A Woody Guthrie song about the 1914 Ludlow Massacre (strikers’ families killed by Colorado militias at a Rockefeller mine) convinced him the teaching of history was full of gaps
- At Spelman College his students included Alice Walker and Marian Wright Edelman; he was fired despite tenure for backing civil-rights activism
- Sheltered Daniel Berrigan, helped Daniel Ellsberg store the Pentagon Papers, and gave high grades to keep students out of the Vietnam draft
But Iber presses the left critique of A People’s History (1980–2010: sold more copies every year; in Good Will Hunting and The Sopranos):
- Zinn’s frame owes more to the 1930s Nye Committee’s WWI profiteering hearings than to Marx — history as corrupt elites versus virtuous activists
- The book ignores religion and conservatism, and its Civil War as “not a clash of peoples… but of elites” is, Iber argues, its worst passage — troops on both sides knew it was a war over slavery
- Zirin inherits the same blind spots, dismissing even friendly critics like Eric Foner
“Good societies need good social critics; but they are not made of critics alone.” A fair-minded look at the people’s historian — his antiwar courage is real, and so are the limits of the formula.