[In the following review of A People's History, Handlin refutes the accuracy of many of the historical facts presented in Zinn's book.]

This is a book about Arawaks.

Once upon a time, people remarkable for their belief in sharing and for their hospitality lived blissfully without commerce; they relied exclusively on the natural environment for sustenance. They valued the arts, and accorded each sex freedom and dignity. Ages before the Arawaks, the Mound Builders, also devoted to the arts, had occupied the same continent. And from across the ocean came blacks out of such idyllic communal groups that they hardly needed law; even slavery was benign. Then the destructive white strangers arrived—and after that it was downhill all the way.

Such is the story Zinn purports to unfold. He ascribes the topsy-turvy quality of his description to its perspective—the Constitution viewed by the slaves, Andrew Jackson by the Cherokees, the Civil War by the New York Irish, the Spanish-American War by Cubans, the New Deal by Harlem blacks, and the recent American empire by Latin-American peons. Alas, he can produce little proof that the people he names, from slaves to peons, saw matters as he does. Hence the deranged quality of his fairy tale, in which the incidents are made to fit the legend, no matter how intractable the evidence of American history.

It may be unfair to expose to critical scrutiny a work patched together from secondary sources, many used uncritically (Jennings, Williams), others ravaged for material torn out of context (Young, Pike). Any careful reader will perceive that Zinn is a stranger to evidence bearing upon the peoples about whom he purports to write. But only critics who know the sources will recognize the complex array of devices that pervert his pages.

This book pays only casual regard to factual accuracy. It simply is not true that “what Columbus did to the Arawaks of the Bahamas, Cortez did to the Aztecs of Mexico, Pizarro to the Incas of Peru, and the English settlers of Virginia and Massachusetts to the Powhatans and the Pequots.” It simply is not true that the farmers of the Chesapeake colonies in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries avidly desired the importation of black slaves, or that the gap between rich and poor widened in the eighteenth-century colonies. Zinn gulps down as literally true the proven hoax of Polly Baker and the improbable Plough Jogger, and he repeats uncritically the old charge that President Lincoln altered his views to suit his audience. The Geneva assembly of 1954 did not agree on elections in a unified Vietnam; that was simply the hope expressed by the British chairman when the parties concerned could not agree. The United States did not back Batista in 1959; it had ended aid to Cuba and washed its hands of him well before then. “Tet” was not evidence of the unpopularity of the Saigon government, but a resounding rejection of the northern invaders.

Since Zinn does not comprehend the simple meaning of words, he labels John Adams an aristocrat and Theodore Parker a racist, and turns free trade into imperialism. Talk of liberty and country Zinn considers a rhetorical device to conceal rule by the rich few, and the Revolution of 1776 he describes as just the creation of a legal entity to take over land, profits, and power. Woman, in status, was “akin to a house slave.”

Zinn does not scruple to use insidious rhetorical questions to convey affirmations he is too shy to make openly. “Could patriotic fervor and the military spirit cover up class struggle? Unemployment, hard times, were growing in 1914. Could guns divert attention and create some national consensus against an external enemy?” Thereupon the First World War becomes an effort by the American elite to divert attention from its internal problems. Other paragraphs sprinkled with question marks reveal the Supreme Court “doing its bit for the ruling elite,” almost justify the attack on Pearl Harbor, and distort the internment of the Japanese Americans.

Biased selections falsify events. A chapter entitled “The Other Civil War,” for instance, covers the years between 1837 and 1877. It includes anti-rent riots in New York State, the Astor Place riot in New York City, Dorr's War in Rhode Island, and the railroad strikes of 1877—thus bracketing quite dissimilar and unrelated outbreaks of violence to give the impression of a country torn by ceaseless civil conflict.

On the other hand, the book conveniently omits whatever does not fit its overriding thesis. In view of the epilogue, it is startling to find no notice taken of the long series of communal experiments stretching from the eighteenth-century Moravians down through Brook Farm and on to Oneida. Humanitarianism, benevolence, idealism would not jibe with the portrayal of a totally materialistic nation. For the same reason, there is no explanation of why the discontent that welled up in Shays' Rebellion subsided as quickly as it did. But then Zinn freely tears evidence out of context and distorts it—for example, in the discussion of the period down to 1941 when imperial ambitions led the United States into war. American aggression continued after Vietnam, rearranged but pursuing the same vile military and economic goals. Not a word about the Soviet Union, of course.

Focusing upon the dimly known Arawaks of the past, whose shadowy shapes can take any form, the book cannot do justice to the great variety of actual people who inhabited the United States. The blacks and whites, immigrants and natives, laborers and farmers, merchants and manufacturers cannot be known when treated as lay figures to be manipulated according to the author's fantasies. The description of how the eighteenth-century population understood the First Amendment is pure invention. Reactions to the Mexican War are scarcely more substantial. Nor can Zinn understand the men and women, indiscriminately labeled the elite, who helped shape American society and its institutions. By his account, only one motive moved them: greed—from Columbus rapacious in the quest for gold to Carnegie lusting for profit. Hence the blank incomprehensibility of those who acted contrary to their interests. Why did John Marshall come to the aid of the Cherokees? Why did the Grimkés turn against slavery? Why was Andrew Carnegie an active anti-imperialist? To answer such questions would have called for an examination of intellectual and social forces beyond Zinn's ken. Indeed, since the dominant tradition of liberal reform in the United States was staunchly pro-American, he must interpret it as only a device by which the elite protected its own interests.

It would be a mistake, however, to regard Zinn as merely anti-American. Brendan Behan once observed that whoever hated America hated mankind, and hatred of humanity is the dominant tone of Zinn's book. No other modern country receives a favorable mention. He speaks well of the Russian and Chinese revolutions, but not of the states they created. He lavishes indiscriminate condemnation upon all the works of man—that is, upon civilization, a word he usually encloses in quotation marks.

Against it, in the epilogue he juxtaposes a loving community of neighbors who cooperated without coercion—a community exemplified by the Arawaks, who are fit objects for fantasy because nothing is known about them. Early in the book, Zinn quotes a Spaniard's description of other pre-invasion Indians who lived in peace and amity, six hundred in a conical hut. Life may have been carefree, even idyllic, but it could not have been easy under those circumstances. No doubt a twentieth-century American would find the actuality of six hundred people to a hut difficult to imagine. And perhaps the events in Guyana show what can happen to such numbers cooped up together, driven in upon one another in their loving community.

Few such societies are driven to suicide, as was that in Jonestown. But rarely are any of them capable of dealing with the crises and contingencies of human experience.

And in that regard we can learn something from the Arawaks, although Zinn is too obtuse to do so. What discussion ensued among those Indians who greeted Columbus or Cortez we shall never know. Perhaps they hoped by friendly gestures to propitiate the strangers and persuade them to leave. Perhaps, already aware of their own helplessness, they thought to stave off attack by appeasement. Perhaps internal dissension, or lack of organization, or will weakened by ease prevented them from following another course. Lacking evidence, we cannot know. But the outcome we do know, and from it we can learn. From Montezuma to Tecumseh, people who lacked the political means to defend themselves were helpless to resist the invaders animated by a vision of what they wanted and driven by the will to seize it.

The American people of actuality—whom Zinn does not discuss—were not Arawaks in the past. Nor are many likely now to respond to his invitation to share the fate either of Jonestown or of the Aztecs.