History, less good

I've been postponing this entry. Howard Zinn passed away some years ago. His book A People's History of the United States is interesting and informative, but in my honest opinion it does not raise on the level of Watson's Intellectual History of the 20th Century (see my earlier post).

Here are some of the good bits, interesting facts worth noting:

• The conquistadores practically committed forced labour and genocide "In two years, through murder, mutilation, or suicide, half of the 250,000 Indians on Haiti were dead."
• In the North America, Zinn says the pre-colombian population was 25 million and the tribes were masters of farming the local crop, though the popular assumption is that European colonists were  better farmers with their tools and technology. This was not the case, Zinn states that the colonists were actually starving, and then enslaved Native Americans and brought in slaves from Africa simply to grow crops. "Not able to enslave the Indians, and not able to live with them, the English decided to exterminate them." ..  "The Virginians needed labor, to grow corn for subsistence, to grow tobacco for export." .. "Black slaves were the answer."
• The U.S. government provoked/started the Mexican–American War just to annex land "It was shortly after that, in the summer of 1845, that John O'Sullivan, editor of the Democratic Review, used the phrase that became famous, saying it was 'Our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence..'" The Spanish–American War expanded the U.S. sphere of influence further with the pretext of supporting Cuba.
• There have been strong labour organizations in the U.S. like Knights of Labor. In 1886 to demand 8h working days "350,000 workers in 11,562 establishments all over the country went out on strike". Helen Keller was a labour activist. "When she became active and openly socialist, the Brooklyn Eagle, which had previously treated her as a heroine, wrote that 'her mistakes spring out of the manifest limitations of her development.'"
• In Zinn's view the Viet-Nam war was thoroughly unjustified and the Gulf of Tonkin incident that started it was fabricated. "In early August 1964, President Johnson used a murky set of events in the Gulf of Tonkin ..  It later turned out that the Gulf of Tonkin episode was a fake, that the highest American officials had lied to the public."

Then what's wrong with the book? It's great that high school students get to know about these events (Wikipedia says that A People's History has been assigned as reading in many high schools and colleges across the United States). Zinn even coined the idea of the 99% that should become vocal as they did in the 2011 Occupy movement. Still I had trouble reading it. Zinn's style is good but quite often he forgets to support his argument with statistical data, instead relying on quotes from biographies, leftist newspapers and even letters. For instance:

• "Appeal to Reason, .. had half a million subscribers, and there were many other Socialist newspapers around the country, so that, all together, perhaps a million people read the Socialist press." What were the circulation numbers of mainstream papers?
• Zinn decries that voter enthusiasm in presidential elections fell during the 1970's. That's correct but he fails to mention that it was unusually high in the 1960's.
•  "Some of the New York Radical Women shortly afterward formed WITCH (Women's International terrorist Conspiracy from Hell)". Interesting but isn't this more an artistic act than a people's protest against the privileged class.

Moreover I'm not sure if Zinn's basic premise is correct. Does the ruling 1% really want to keep the 99% poor and uneducated, and use all its political and financial tricks to reach this goal? Maybe, sometimes. But I liked reading Krugman's analysis much better.