[In the following review of The Politics of History, Sheldon suggests that the strength of Zinn's convictions is reminiscent of those of the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison.]

Millions of Americans ask plaintively, even desperately, why the unnerving turmoil and strife in a land of such great promise?

The answer of Howard Zinn, professor of political science at Boston University, has the searing conviction of Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison who erupted in 1831:

On this subject (slavery) I do not wish to think or speak or write with moderation. No! No! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her baby from the fire into which it has fallen—but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present.

HIDDEN GRIEF

The middle America of comfortable suburbs and homogeneous small towns and cities can best try to understand the Howard Zinns by listening to their words directly:

“One needs,” the professor points out, “to put aside on occasion first-rate newspapers, quality magazines, and other respectable sources of news about American civilization, and pick up the big-city tabloids, to read about the family knifings, the suicides, the drownings of babies by their mothers, and the thousands of other horrors that dramatize the huge (and to middle-class America, invisible) underworld of poverty in the United States. These outbursts of frantic violence induced by economic distress might be dismissed as only isolated and rare incidents, if we were not confronted with the statistics of American poverty, which indicate that for every sensational item in the newspapers there are hundreds of thousands of stories of personal tragedy, grief, misery, being played out behind closed doors all over the country, unnoticed by that two-thirds of the nation which shares somewhat in the shallow prosperity of our ‘affluent society.’”

And further: “We had a race question, but we ‘solved’ it by a war to end slavery, and by papering over the continued degradation of the black population with laws and rhetoric. … The Black Power revolt, the festering of the cities beyond our control, the rebellion of students against the Vietnam war and the draft—all indicate that the United States has run out of time, space, and rhetoric.”

TO EXPOSE

As gripping and provocative as these statements are, they are really not why Professor Zinn wrote this book. His purpose was to stir historians “to earn their keep in this world.”

He would have them use more of their scholarly time and resources to expose inconsistencies and double standards in society.

As members of any minority group—political, social, religious—can testify to, history is not complete nor fair on every occasion. Professor Zinn notes: “There is an underside to every Age about which history does not often speak, because history is written from records left by the privileged. We learn about politics from the political leaders, about economics from the entrepreneurs, about slavery from the plantation owners, about the thinking of an age from its intellectual elite.”

Obviously, if the professor's advice to become intensely involved in today's problems were followed by his compatriots, a very different kind of history would be available for the future. Though Mr. Zinn is of liberal persuasion, as today's political spectrum is judged, he undoubtedly would want individuals of all shades of belief to follow their consciences and stir around brusquely in the market-place of ideas.

Professor Zinn is not certain what such a revolution among scholars would look like. He would not throw away all the tried tools of his profession. He sees reform coming at a slow and uneven pace, and he would speed it up to avoid catastrophic upheavals.

Among both the complacent and the aroused in America, there is fortunately beneath the surface a large degree of shared idealism. As Professor Zinn says, “to start historical enquiry with frank adherence to a small set of ultimate values—that war, poverty, race hatred, prisons, should be abolished; that mankind constitutes a single species; that affection and cooperation should replace violence and hostility—such a set of commitments places no pressure on its advocates to tamper with the truth.”