The Best Resignation Letter Of All Time

William Faulkner—prior to finding his literary voice—was the postmaster in the campus post office at the University of Mississippi. He was not a good postal worker (spending more time reading on the job than attending to his duties). When confronted about his performance, Faulkner resigned with this memorable letter to his postal superior:

As long as I live under the capitalistic system I expect to have my life influenced by the demands of moneyed people. But I will be damned if I propose to be at the beck and call of every itinerant son-of-a-bitch who has two cents to invest in a postage stamp. This, sir, is my resignation.

That is a resignation. If this is (fair & balanced) admiration, so be it.

[x The Threepenny Review]
William Faulkner on Horseback
by Javier Marías

According to somewhat kitsch literary legend, William Faulkner wrote his novel As I Lay Dying in the space of six weeks and in the most precarious of situations, namely, while he was working on the night shift down a mine, with the pages resting on an upturned wheelbarrow and lit only by the dim rays of the lamp fixed on his own dust-caked helmet. This is a clear attempt on the part of said kitsch legend to enlist Faulkner in the ranks of other poor, self-sacrificing, slightly proletarian writers. The bit about the six weeks is the only true part: six weeks one summer when he made the most of the long, long intervals between feeding spadefuls of coal into the boiler he had been put in charge of in an electricity-generating plant. According to Faulkner, no one bothered him there, the continual hum from the enormous old dynamo was "soothing," and the place itself was otherwise "warm and silent."

There is certainly no doubting his ability to lose himself in his writing or reading. His father had got him the position at the power station after he was dismissed from his previous job as post office clerk at the University of Mississippi. Apparently one of the lecturers there, quite reasonably, complained: the only way he could get his mail was by rummaging around in the rubbish bin at the back door, where the unopened bags of post all too often ended up. Faulkner did not like having his reading interrupted, and the sale of stamps fell alarmingly; by way of explanation, Faulkner told his family that he was not prepared to keep getting up to wait on people at the window and having to be beholden to any son-of-a-bitch who had the two cents to buy a stamp.

Perhaps that is where the seeds were first sown of Faulkner's evident aversion to and scorn for letters. When he died, piles of letters, packages, and manuscripts sent by admirers were found, none of which he had opened. In fact, the only letters he did open were letters from publishers, and then only very cautiously: he would make a tiny slit in the envelope and then shake it to see if a check appeared. If it didn't, then the letter would simply join all those other things that can wait forever.

He always had a keen interest in checks, but one should not deduce from this that he was a greedy man or, indeed, stingy. He was, in fact, something of a spendthrift. He got through any money he earned very quickly, then lived on credit for a while until the next check arrived. He would then pay his debts and start spending again, mostly on horses, cigarettes, and whiskey. He did not have many clothes, but those he had were expensive. When he was nineteen, his affected way of dressing earned him the nickname "The Count." If the fashion was for tight trousers, then his would be the tightest in the whole of Oxford, Mississippi, the town where he lived. He left there in 1916 to go to Toronto to train with the RAF. The Americans had rejected him because he didn't have enough qualifications, and the British didn't want him because he was too short, until, that is, he threatened to go and fly for the Germans instead.

On one occasion, a young man went to visit him and found him standing with his pipe, which had gone out, in one hand and, in the other, the bridle of a pony that his daughter Jill was riding. To break the ice, the young man asked if the little girl had been riding long. Faulkner did not reply at once. Then he said, "Three years," adding: "You know, a woman should know only how to do three things." He paused, then concluded: "Tell the truth, ride a horse, and sign a check."

Jill was not the first daughter Faulkner had with his wife, Estelle, who brought with her two children from a previous marriage. The first daughter they had together died only five days after being born. They called her Alabama. Her mother was still weak and in bed; Faulkner's brothers were out of town at the time and never saw the child. Faulkner could see no point in holding a funeral, since in those five days the little girl had only had time to become a memory, not a person. So her father put her in a tiny coffin and carried her to the cemetery on his lap. Alone, he placed her in her grave, without telling anyone.

When he received the Nobel Prize in 1950, Faulkner was at first reluctant to go to Sweden, but in the end he not only went, but traveled Europe and Asia on "a State Department mission." He did not much enjoy the endless functions to which he was invited. At a party given in his honour by Gallimard, his French publishers, it is said that after each succinct reply to questions put by journalists, he apparently took a backward step. Step by step, he eventually found himself with his back to the wall, and only then did the journalists take pity on him or else give him up as a lost cause. He finally sought refuge in the garden. A few people decided to venture out there too, announcing that they were going to talk to Faulkner, only to come straight back in again, proffering excuses in faltering voices: "It's awfully cold out there." Faulkner was a taciturn man who loved silence, and he had only been to the theater five times in his entire life: he had seen Hamlet three times, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Ben Hur, and that was all. He had not read Freud, either, at least so he said on one occasion: "I have never read him. Neither did Shakespeare. I doubt if Melville did either and I'm sure Moby Dick didn't." He read Don Quixote every year.

But then he also said that he never told the truth. After all, he wasn't a woman, although he did have a woman's love of checks and horse-riding. He always said that he had written Sanctuary, his most commercial novel, for money: "I needed it to buy a good horse." He also said that he didn't visit big cities very often because you couldn't go there on horseback. When he was getting older, and against the advice of both his family and his doctors, he continued going out riding and jumping fences, and kept falling off. The last time he went riding he suffered just such a fall. From the house, his wife saw Faulkner's horse standing by the gate, still with its saddle on and with its reins hanging loose. When she didn't see her husband there with the horse, she called Dr. Felix Linder and they went out looking for him. They found him over half a mile away, limping, almost dragging himself along. The horse had thrown him and he hadn't been able to remount, having fallen on his back. The horse had walked on a few paces, then stopped and looked round. When Faulkner managed to get to his feet, the horse came over to him and touched him with its muzzle. Faulkner had tried to grab the reins, but failed. Then the horse had headed off towards the house.

William Faulkner spent some time in bed, badly injured and in great pain. He had still not fully recovered from the fall when he died. He was in the hospital, where he had been admitted for a check-up on his progress. But legend refuses to accept that the fall from his horse was the cause of his death. He was killed by a thrombosis on July 6th, 1962, when he was not quite sixty-five.

When asked to name the best American writers of his day, he would say that they had all failed, but that Thomas Wolfe had been the finest failure and William Faulkner the second finest failure. He often repeated this over the years, but it is as well to remember that Thomas Wolfe had been dead since 1938, that is, during nearly all the years that Faulkner used to give this answer, the years during which he himself remained alive.

(Translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa)

Javier Marías is the author of A Heart So White, All Souls, Dark Back of Time, and many other works of fiction and nonfiction; he is also the reigning king of Redonda. His translator, Margaret Jull Costa, has also translated José Saramago, Teolinda Gersao, and other Portuguese and Spanish writers.

© Copyright 2004 The Threepenny Review

Chicago Style Isn't Just Pizza

The Chicago Manual of Style, 15e, has been my stylistic Bible since the dawn of time. Most of the non-history teachers I knew—if they paid attention to style—allowed students to use the limp and nonscholarly manual utilized by the members of the Modern Language Association (MLA Manual of Style, 6e). In fact, the MLA manual comes in two flavors: one for high school students and undergradutates and the other for graduate students and scholars. Scholarly work should be scholarly work. Dumbing down for students helps no one. If this is (fair & balanced) snobbery, so be it.

[x Chicago Manual of Style]
New Questions and Answers

Q. I frequently read and hear what I believe is misuse of the first person reflexive pronoun “myself.” For example, someone sent me an e-mail requesting that I send him information. He wrote, “Please forward the information to myself.” Today I read a statement made by President Clinton [in 1997]. He said, “I have no recollection of ordering Trooper Ferguson to arrange a meeting between myself and Ms. Jones.” Is this correct? Or would it have been more correct to say “between me and Ms. Jones” or “between Ms. Jones and me”?

A. “Between Ms. Jones and me” is correct, although the use of “me” as a direct object is beginning to disappear from American speech. You will often hear people say, for instance, “Now she’s really annoyed with John and I.” This mistake falls into the category of “genteelisms,” or constructions that sound proper whether they are correct or not. On the other hand, perhaps in some kind of deplorable compensation, the use of “I” as a subject is also increasingly rare. Young people routinely say, “Me and Rocko went to the gym last night.” As for “myself,” see CMS 5.53: “Compound personal pronouns . . . are used for three purposes: (1) for emphasis (they are then termed intensive pronouns) {I saw Queen Beatrice herself} {I’ll do it myself}; (2) to refer to the subject of the verb (they are then termed reflexive pronouns) {he saved himself the trouble of asking} {we support ourselves}; and (3) to substitute for a simple personal pronoun {this getaway weekend is just for myself}. This third use is the least well established in modern usage. If a simple I or me will suffice, use that word.”


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Q. In the U.S. Army supply system, writers refer to requested supplies as dues-in (more than one due-in not yet received), and dues-out (more than one due-out not yet issued to a requestor). The GPO Style Manual (paragraph 5.7) seems to prescribe due-ins and due-outs as the correct plural form (examples they give are tie-ins, run-ins, come-ons). What do you say about these plural forms? Many thanks for your help!

A. If you are thinking of “due” as an adjective, then I agree that “due-ins” would be correct. If you think of it as a noun, however (see Webster), then “dues-in” would work just fine. In any case, if “dues-in” is the army colloquial, there’s probably no use fighting it. If it annoys you, try to think of it as a charming bit of insiders’ jargon.


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Q. CMS, 14th edition, paragraph 7.19, mentions that titles are commonly lowercase (president of the United States) but that there is an exception with the title of Speaker. There is debate in my office over the titles of archivist of the United States, Smithsonian secretary, and librarian of Congress. If they do not precede a name, do they remain lowercase?

A. Yes, lowercase the titles. After all, how fair would it be to lowercase the president and uppercase the librarian? The Speaker gets special treatment, though, probably because in an institution like the House, where everyone wants to talk and all the talk is recorded for posterity, it has to be clear whether the reference is to the presiding officer (the Speaker) or the person currently blabbing away (the speaker).


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Q. Hi. We are having a debate at work. We live in Madison, the capital city of Wisconsin. We recently moved into a new office space and named the main conference room the Capital Room. Many of us think it should be “Capitol” because it is named after the state capitol. Others think only the capitol building can be spelled with the “o.” Please advise us so we can get back to work. Thank you.

A. If the room is named for the state capital (city), it should be spelled with an a; if it’s named for the capitol building, it’s spelled with an o. I doubt that your state constitution restricts the use of the word “capitol” to the capitol building. In fact, I’d be surprised if it’s not being used by a pub or two.


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Q. Please confirm or contradict the following. The special grammatical role played by the relative pronoun “whoever” leads to a case that few seem to know how to handle: when its role in the main clause appears to be objective, but its role in the subordinate clause is nominative.

For instance, I frequently read things like “We will give the prize to whomever runs the fastest.” This is incorrect; it should be “whoever.” The rule is that the case of the relative pronoun is governed by its role in the subordinate clause, not the main clause. Thus, in this case, it is the subject of “runs” and is therefore nominative. The object of “to” is the entire clause “whoever runs the fastest.”

If you agree with this analysis, please put something on your site about it that I can refer people to. I have some arguments I would like to win :-)

A. We agree—good luck!


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Q. I find that some of my writers start a sentence with the word “Because,” and I am tempted to change it to “Since.” For example, one writes “Because the object is selected, it changes as you move the slider.”

I would prefer to have them use the word “Since”: “Since the object is selected, it changes as you move the slider.”

But, I am not sure of the correct usage . . . I am only going on gut instinct.

A. For editors, like physicians, the primary goal should be “First, do no harm.” If you are not sure of the correct usage, it’s safer not to meddle with the copy. In this case, your writer is correct. In fact, “Since” would be considered incorrect by traditionalists who restrict its meaning to a temporal one.


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Q. Your copy editing leaves something to be desired. In section 8.64, the correct spelling is Baudelaire, not Beaudelaire.

Also, you might want to add a place on the website to suggest corrigenda.

A. Thank you for taking the time to write. We depend on the kindness of our readers—and reader kindness overflowed when this typo made it into print. The error will be corrected in the next printing of the manual. You will find a place to send comments just above the place where you submit questions. Perhaps in future revisions of the Web page we can add a place for corrigenda—and what the heck—while we’re at it, one for chastisement.


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Q. Hello: I am working on writing and editing thank-you letters to faculty and staff participants in a curriculum session for third-year medical students. Should I treat “data” as a singular or a plural noun? I have been looking for a definitive answer to this question in online style manuals and grammar guides. If its answer is already in the CMS and you could refer me to the appropriate part of the Web site where this information is posted, that would be excellent.

A. If you type “data” into the search box on the CMS Web page, it will give you two places where the word is discussed in our Q&A, and you’ll see that it can be either singular or plural. For questions like this, however, I find that a dictionary is a very helpful tool. Judging from the number of queries we receive asking about the meaning or usage of particular words, it seems that people rarely think of using a dictionary, which is surprising, considering that it is much quicker to look up a word than to search through style manuals—or type a question to an online advice column. There are even online dictionaries, if turning paper pages seems too old-fashioned or too big a nuisance. In honor of your question, I’m tempted to create a new category of Q&A column called “You Could Look It Up” (in the hopes that readers will take the hint).


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Q. All my classes have previously used APA format. Now I need to use Chicago. Can you send me the format for my paper and how to cite references from the Internet and class textbook? Thank you.

A. The new edition of CMS is more than 950 pages long, and more than 150 pages concern documentation, so it’s a bit much to convey here or in an e-mail message. But you can find samples of Chicago-style footnotes and reference lists just a couple of clicks away. Choose “Tools” from the menu above this column, which will take you to “Examples of Chicago-Style Documentation.”


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Q. When referring to a movie or book title while posting to Internet newsgroups, it’s generally impossible to indicate with italics or underscoring. I usually use all upper-case letters (THE LORD OF THE RINGS, FIDDLER ON THE ROOF, for example). What does CMS suggest?

A. Notwithstanding the tradition among publishers of presenting book titles in full capitals in industry correspondence, interdepartmental memos, and the like—the practice was popular because it saved time on typewriters that required extra keystrokes for underscoring—we recommend avoiding all capitals to express titles that would otherwise be italicized. Instead, use the underscore key (type Shift plus the hyphen key on standard keyboards) when italic type is unavailable:

When I first read _The History of the Siege of Lisbon_, I was so grateful to discover a book about a proofreader that Saramago’s hypnotic stringing together of sentences nearly sent me into an ecstatic trance.

Sometimes asterisks rather than the underscore key are used to express emphasis (e.g., I can’t *stand* one more day of separation from you), but asterisks can be more strictly interpreted as indicating boldface.


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Q. Which one is correct: “alright” or “all right”?

A. Dictionaries and style manuals still tend to indicate that alright is less legitimate than all right. The quasi- or nonstandard status of alright might be compared to that of the one-word forms of the compounds under way and a lot, both of which, to varying degrees, have had to resist the urge to merge. Context is everything. Alright is all right for rock ’n’ roll, but if you’re concerned about appearing to stand on the favored side of the “sociological divide,” as Fowler’s would have it, you will want to write all right (see the third edition, s.v. “all right,” which notes, among other things, that alright seems to be popular in the personal correspondence of “the moderately educated young”). In the case of all right versus alright, however, all this is plainly rather arbitrary—as may already be altogether obvious.


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Q. Our company has always presented costs to clients in both written and numerical form. For example, “The cost for our services is two thousand one hundred fifty dollars ($2,150).” One client has pointed out that the number in parentheses is negative and therefore we owe him money. How can we present numbers to clients in both written and numerical form without using the parentheses, which may indicate a negative number?

A. Parentheses are occasionally used instead of the minus sign in tabular matter (e.g., spreadsheets) to indicate negative quantities. In most contexts, however, parentheses set off text that explains or qualifies or amplifies the surrounding context—as in your example and often in contracts and other legal documents. Parentheses used in this way have no bearing on any quantities they enclose—monetary or otherwise. Continue presenting your costs as you always have.


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Q. What is the rule for correct usage of “drive” and “ride”? I was trying to explain this difference to a non-English-speaking colleague, but it appears somewhat illogical on the basis of normal usage.

A. Sometimes new technologies force us into analogies. Perhaps people ride bicycles because they rode horses—particularly at the time bicycles first became popular. Likewise, one is said to ride a motorcycle—sometimes called a “steel horse”—more often than one is said to drive it. Cars, which tend not to resemble horses so much, are nonetheless said to marshal the power of multiple horses, and, just as one is said to drive a team of horses (as into a corral), one is said to drive a car. The distinction between drive and ride doesn’t seem consistently to depend on whether the driver or the rider provides any locomotion. There are better (worse?) examples of words that persist on the basis of analogy: how often do we dial a phone or ring up a sale anymore?


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Q. Since the late 1980s, when I got my first copy of CMS, I have understood that verbs associated with a noun used to group plural items should correspond with the singular, grouping noun. For example, “A growing number of reports has revealed . . .” Microsoft Word, however, keeps indicating a grammatical error when I follow this rule and was placated when I changed “has” to “have” in the above example. Can you please clarify who is right? Is it I or the copyeditors consulted by Bill Gates?

A. Microsoft’s grammar-checking software happens to be right in this case. Number as a collective noun takes a singular or plural verb depending on the article (definite the or indefinite a) that precedes it:

The number of pizzas ordered this year has doubled.

but

A number of studies have shown that stuffing a pizza with spinach triples the edibility of that sinewy vegetable.

Most collective nouns do tend to be invariably singular in American English. Those that, like number, vary according to circumstance include words like percentage and any fraction—one-third (or a third), one-half (or half), two-thirds, etc. Like number, these take a singular verb when preceded by the (common for percentage but rare for fractions). Otherwise, the verb agrees with the number of the noun in any prepositional phrase that follows:

After today’s enormously stressful workshop, a third of the attendees have decided to skip the entrée, preferring instead to dine on the wine.

but

Unfortunately, seven-eighths of last year’s vintage was spoiled.


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Q. In your last Q&A section where you addresssed the proper form for names of aircraft, such as the Spirit of St. Louis, the term “Air Force One” came up. This is NOT a proper name for an airplane; it is merely the radio call sign of whichever U.S. Air Force airplane has the president on board. Many airplanes have been used as Air Force One: Ike flew in Columbine; Nixon flew home to California in disgrace in the Spirit of ’76. In each case the radio call sign was “Air Force One.” It is appropriate to capitalize Air Force One (or similarly Marine One or—recently when President Bush landed on the USS Abraham Lincoln—Navy One).

A. Fascinating! Thank you for taking the time to lend your expertise.

© 2004 by The University of Chicago.

Revising THE Revisionist

Wow! Revising revisionist history! Who's on first? What's on second? Yada, yada, yada. If this is (fair & balanced) shibboleth-smashing, so be it.

[x Dissent Magazine]
Howard Zinn's History Lessons
by Michael Kazin

Every work of history, according to Howard Zinn, is a political document. He titled his thick survey "A People's History" (A People's History of the United States, 1492-Present [NY: Perennial Classics, 2003]) so that no potential reader would wonder about his own point of view: "With all its limitations, it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance."

That judgment, Zinn proudly announces, sets his book apart from nearly every other account of their past that most Americans are likely to read. "The mountain of history books under which we all stand leans so heavily in the other direction-so tremblingly respectful of states and statesmen and so disrespectful, by inattention, to people's movements-that we need some counterforce to avoid being crushed into submission."

His message has certainly been heard. A People's History may well be the most popular work of history an American leftist has ever written. First published in 1980, it has gone through five editions and multiple printings, been assigned in thousands of college courses, sold more than a million copies, and made the author something of a celebrity-although one who appears to lack the egomaniacal trappings of the breed. Matt Damon, playing a working-class wunderkind in the 1997 movie "Good Will Hunting," quoted from Zinn's book to show up an arrogant Harvard boy (and impress a Harvard girl). Damon and his buddy Ben Affleck then signed with Fox to produce a ten-hour miniseries based on the book, before Rupert Murdoch's minions backed out of the deal.

But Zinn's big book is quite unworthy of such fame and influence. A People's History is bad history, albeit gilded with virtuous intentions. Zinn reduces the past to a Manichean fable and makes no serious attempt to address the biggest question a leftist can ask about U.S. history: why have most Americans accepted the legitimacy of the capitalist republic in which they live?

His failure is grounded in a premise better suited to a conspiracy-monger's Web site than to a work of scholarship. According to Zinn, "99 percent" of Americans share a "commonality" that is profoundly at odds with the interests of their rulers. And knowledge of that awesome fact is "exactly what the governments of the United States, and the wealthy elite allied to them-from the Founding Fathers to now-have tried their best to prevent."

History for Zinn is thus a painful narrative about ordinary folks who keep struggling to achieve equality, democracy, and a tolerant society, yet somehow are always defeated by a tiny band of rulers whose wiles match their greed. He describes the American Revolution as a clever device to defeat "potential rebellions and create a consensus of popular support for the rule of a new, privileged leadership." His Civil War was another elaborate confidence game. Soldiers who fought to preserve the Union got duped by "an aura of moral crusade" against slavery that "worked effectively to dim class resentments against the rich and powerful, and turn much of the anger against 'the enemy.'"

Nothing of consequence, in his view, changed during the industrial era, notwithstanding the growth of cities, railroads, and mass communications. Zinn views the tens of millions of Europeans and Asians who crossed oceans at the turn of the past century as little more than a mass of surplus labor. He details their miserable jobs in factories and mines and their desperate, often violent strikes at the end of the nineteenth century-most of which failed. The doleful narrative makes one wonder why anyone but the wealthy came to the United States at all and, after working for a spell, why anyone wished to stay.

Zinn does reveal a few moments of democratic glory-occasions when "the people," or at least a politically conscious fraction of them, temporarily broke through the elite's thick web of lies and coercion. Agrarian rebels formed cooperatives, allied with radical unionists, and charted their own financial system, the subtreasury, which they hoped would break the grip of heartless bankers. But, alas, the Populists were seduced in 1896 by William Jennings Bryan, who sold out their movement to the retrograde Democratic Party. During the Great Depression, wage earners across the industrial Midwest staged heroic sit-down strikes that demonstrated their ability to shut down the economy. But, for unexplained reasons, these working-class heroes allowed CIO unions and the New Deal state to smother their discontent within long-term contracts and bureaucratic procedures. Similarly, the civil rights movement toppled the Southern citadel of Jim Crow without taking on the capitalist system that kept the black masses mired in poverty.

This is history as cynicism. Zinn omits the real choices our left ancestors faced and the true pathos, and drama, of their decisions. In fact, most Populists cheered Bryan and voted for him because he shared their enemies and their vision of a producers' republic. Unlike Zinn, they grasped the dilemma of third parties in the American electoral system, which Richard Hofstadter likened to honeybees, "once they have stung, they die." And to bewail the fact that liberal Democrats saw an advantage to supporting rights for unions and minorities is a stunning feat of historical naiveté. Short of revolution, a strategic alliance with one element of "the Establishment" is the only way social movements ever make lasting changes in law and public policy.

Zinn's conception of American elites is akin to the medieval church's image of the Devil. For him, a governing class is motivated solely by its appetite for riches and power-and by its fear of losing them. Numerous historians may regard George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton as astute, if seriously flawed, men who erected a structure for the new nation that has endured for over two centuries. But Zinn curtly dismisses them as "leaders of the new aristocracy" and regards the nation-state itself as a cunning device to lull ordinary folks with "the fanfare of patriotism and unity."

Such phrases may hint of Marxism, but the old Rhinelander never took so static or simplistic a view of history. Zinn's ruling elite is a transhistorical entity, a virtual monolith; neither its interests nor its ideology change markedly from the days when its members owned slaves and wore knee-britches to the era of the Internet and Armani. Zinn thus sees nothing unusual in the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. It simply "meant that another part of the Establishment," albeit "more crass" than its immediate antecedents, was now in charge.

The ironic effect of such portraits of rulers is to rob "the people" of cultural richness and variety, characteristics that might gain the respect and not just the sympathy of contemporary readers. For Zinn, ordinary Americans seem to live only to fight the rich and haughty and, inevitably, to be fooled by them. They are like bobble-head dolls in work-shirts and overalls-ever sanguine about fighting the powers-that-be, always about to fall on their earnest faces. Zinn takes no notice of immigrants who built businesses and churches and craft unions, of women who backed both suffrage and temperance on maternalist grounds, of black Americans who merged the community-building gospel of Booker T. Washington and the militancy of W.E.B. Du Bois, or of wage-earners who took pleasure in the new cars and new houses those awful long-term contracts enabled them to buy.

From the 1960s onward, scholars, most of whom lean leftward, have patiently and empathetically illuminated such topics-and explained how progressive movements succeeded as well as why they fell short of their goals. But Zinn cares only about winners and losers in a class conflict most Americans didn't even know they were fighting. Like most propagandists, he measures individuals according to his own rigid standard of how they should have thought and acted. Thus, he depicts John Brown as an unblemished martyr but sees Lincoln as nothing more than a cautious politician who left slavery alone as long as possible. To explain why the latter's election in 1860 convinced most slaveowners to back secession, Zinn falls back on the old saw, beloved by economic determinists, that the Civil War was "not a clash of peoples…but of elites," Southern planters vs. Northern industrialists. Pity the slaves and their abolitionist allies; in their ignorance, they viewed it as a war of liberation and wept when Lincoln was murdered.

To borrow a phrase from the British historian John Saville, Zinn expects the past to do its duty. He has been active on the left since his youth in the 1930s. During the 1960s, he fought for civil rights and against the war in Vietnam and wrote fine books that sprang directly from those experiences. But to make sense of a nation's entire history, an author has to explain the weight and meaning of worldviews that are not his own and that, as an engaged citizen, he does not favor. Zinn has no taste for such disagreeable tasks.

The fact that his text barely mentions either conservatism or Christianity is telling. The former is nothing but an excuse to grind the poor ("conservatism" itself doesn't even appear in the index), while religion gets a brief mention during Anne Hutchinson's rebellion against the Puritan fathers and then vanishes from the next 370 years of history.

Given his approach to history, Zinn's angry pages about the global reach of U.S. power are about as surprising as his support for Ralph Nader in 2000. Of course, President William McKinley decided to go to war with Spain at "the urging of the business community." Zinn ignores the scholarly verdict that most Americans from all classes and races backed the cause of "Cuba Libre"-but not the later decisions to vassalize the Caribbean island and colonize the Philippines. Of course, as an imperial bully, the United States had no right, in World War II, "to step forward as a defender of helpless countries." Zinn thins the meaning of the biggest war in history down to its meanest components: profits for military industries, racism toward the Japanese, and the senseless destruction of enemy cities-from Dresden to Hiroshima. His chapter on that conflict does ring with a special passion; Zinn served as a bombardier in the European theater and the experience made him a lifelong pacifist. But the idea that Franklin Roosevelt and his aides were motivated both by realpolitik and by an abhorrence of fascism seems not to occur to him.

The latest edition of the book includes a few paragraphs about the attacks of September 11, and they demonstrate how poorly Zinn's view of the past equips him to analyze the present. "It was an unprecedented assault against enormous symbols of American wealth and power," he writes. The nineteen hijackers "were willing to die in order to deliver a deadly blow against what they clearly saw as their enemy, a superpower that had thought itself invulnerable." Zinn then quickly moves on to condemn the United States for killing innocent people in Afghanistan.

Is this an example of how to express the "commonality" of the great majority of U.S. citizens, who believed that the gruesome strike against America's evil empire was aimed at them? Zinn's flat, dualistic view of how U.S. power has been used throughout history omits what is obvious to the most casual observer: al-Qaeda's religious fanaticism and the potential danger it poses to anyone that Osama bin Laden and his disciples deem an enemy of Islam. Surely one can hate imperialism without ignoring the odiousness of killers who mouth the same sentiment.

Not everything in A People's History is so obtuse and dogmatic. Zinn punctuates his narrative with hundreds of quotes from slaves and Populists, anonymous wage-earners and such articulate radicals as Eugene V. Debs, DuBois, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Stokely Carmichael, and Helen Keller. These supply texture and eloquence absent from the author's own predictable renderings. It's satisfying to know that a million readers have encountered the words Debs spoke upon being sentenced to jail for opposing the First World War:

Your honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

Zinn also fills several pages with excerpts from poems by Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen and from the autobiography of Richard Wright. But the richness of these lines doesn't mitigate the poverty of his interpretations. Rage at injustice does not explain why that injustice occurs.

Pointing out what's wrong with Zinn's passionate tome is not difficult for anyone with a smattering of knowledge about the American past. By why has this polemic disguised as history attracted so many enthusiastic readers?

For the majority of reviewers on Amazon.com (381, as of February 2004), A People's History has the force and authority of revelation. "Zinn single-handedly initiated a Copernican revolution in historicism," writes "eco-william" from Oregon. Others rave about his "compassion and eye for detail" and proclaim the survey "a top contender for greatest book ever written." Zinn's admirers have a quick retort to conservatives who claim his work is "biased." Writes "culov" from Anaheim: "The book is purposely meant to be biased. It tells the story of American history from the point of view of 'the losers' because we all know that the winners write history. If you want something written from George Washington's point of view, go buy a textbook . . . those are as biased as possible."

The unqualified directness of Zinn's prose clearly appeals to his readers. Unlike scholars who aspire to add one or two new bricks to an edifice that has been under construction for decades or even centuries, he brings dynamite to the job. "To understand," wrote Frederick Douglass, "one must stand under." Although Zinn doesn't quote that axiom, the sensibility appears on every page of his book. His fans can supply the corollary themselves: only the utterly contemptible stand on top.

Many radicals and some liberals clearly want to hear this moral stated and re-stated. Even Eric Foner, whose splendid scholarship delivers no such easy lessons, praised Zinn's book in the New York Times as "a coherent new version of American history." The Story of American Freedom, Foner's own 1996 attempt to write a survey for non-academic readers, is far more scrupulous-and far less popular.

Zinn fills a need shaped by our recent past. The years since 1980 have not been good ones for the American left. Three Republicans and one centrist Democrat occupied the White House; conservatives captured both houses of Congress; the phantom hope of state socialism vanished almost overnight; and progressive movements spent most of their time struggling to preserve earlier gains instead of daring to envision and fight for new ideas and programs.

In the face of such unrelenting grimness, A People's History offers a certain consolation. "The American system is the most ingenious system of control in world history," writes Zinn. It uses wealth to "turn those in the 99 percent against one another" and employs war, patriotism, and the National Guard to "absorb and divert" the occasional rebellion. So "the people" can never really win, unless and until they make a revolution. But they can comprehend the evil of this four-hundred-year-old order, and that knowledge will, to an extent, set them free.

Thus, a narrative about demonic elites becomes an apology for political failure. By Zinn's account, the modern left made no errors of judgment, rhetoric, or strategy. He never mentions the Communist Party's lockstep praise of Stalin or the New Left's fantasy of guerilla warfare. Radical activists simply failed to muster enough clear-eyed troops to pierce through the enemy's mighty, sophisticated defenses.

Perhaps the greatest flaw of his book is that Zinn encourages readers to view so formidable a force as just a pack of lying bullies. He refuses to acknowledge that when they speak about their ideals, those who hold national power usually mean what they say. If FDR lied to Americans about the threat posed by Japanese-Americans during World War II, why should anyone believe his prattle about the Four Freedoms? So there's no point in debating conservatives who prescribe libertarian economics, Victorian moral values, and preemptive interventions for what ails the United States and the world. All right-wingers really care about is keeping all the resources and power for themselves.

This cynical myopia afflicts an alarming number of people on the left today. The gloom of defeat tends to obscure the landscape of real politics, which has always witnessed a clash of ideologies as well as interests, persuasion as well as buy-offs and sellouts. Zinn fiercely details the outrages committed by America's rulers at home and abroad. But he makes no serious attempt to examine why these rulers kept getting elected, or how economic and social reform improved the lives of millions even if they sapped whatever mass appetite existed for radical change.

No work of history can substitute for a social movement. Yet intelligent, sober studies can make sense of how changing structures of power and ideas provide openings for challenges from below, while also shifting the basis on which a reigning order claims legitimacy for itself. These qualities mark the work of such influential (and widely read) historians on the left as Eric Hobsbawm, E.P. Thompson, Gerda Lerner, C.L.R. James, and the erstwhile populist C. Vann Woodward. Reading their work makes one wiser about the obstacles to change as well as encouraged about the capacity of ordinary men and women to achieve a degree of independence and happiness, even within unjust societies. In contrast, Howard Zinn is an evangelist of little imagination for whom history is one long chain of stark moral dualities. His fatalistic vision can only keep the left just where it is: on the margins of American political life.

Michael Kazin—Professor of History at Georgetown University—has written:

A Godly Hero: William Jennings Bryan and the Rise of Celebrity Politics in America, under contract with Alfred A. Knopf, in progress.

America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s (co-author, Maurice Isserman), Oxford University Press, 1999 (paperback, 2000). Second edition, 2003. Named one of best books of 2000 by Washington Post.

The Populist Persuasion: An American History, Basic Books, 1995 (paperback, 1996). Revised paperback edition, Cornell University Press, 1998.

Barons of Labor: The San Francisco Building Trades and Union Power in the Progressive Era, University of Illinois Press, 1987 (paperback, 1989).

© 2004 Foundation for Study of Independent Ideas, Inc.

But, Mr. President....

I watched this guy on "60 Minutes" last night. I believe him. I don't believe his dismissal of the lazy rich kid description of W, though. If this is (fair & balanced) attack journalism, so be it.

[x Washington Post]
Memoir Criticizes Bush 9/11 Response
By Barton Gellman

On the evening of Sept. 12, 2001, according to a newly published memoir, President Bush wandered alone around the Situation Room in a White House emptied by the previous day's calamitous events.

Spotting Richard A. Clarke, his counterterrorism coordinator, Bush pulled him and a small group of aides into the dark paneled room.

"Go back over everything, everything," Bush said, according to Clarke's account. "See if Saddam did this."

"But Mr. President, al Qaeda did this," Clarke replied.

"I know, I know, but . . . see if Saddam was involved. Just look. I want to know any shred."

Reminded that the CIA, FBI, and White House staffs had sought and found no such link before, Clarke said, Bush spoke "testily." As he left the room, Bush said a third time, "Look into Iraq, Saddam."

For Clarke, then in his 10th year as a top White House official, that day marked the transition from neglect to folly in the Bush administration's stewardship of war with Islamic extremists. His account -- in "Against All Enemies," which reaches bookstores today, and in interviews accompanying publication -- is the first detailed portrait of the Bush administration's wartime performance by a major participant. Acknowledged by foes and friends as a leading figure among career national security officials, Clarke served more than two years in the Bush White House after holding senior posts under Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. He resigned 13 months ago yesterday.

Although expressing points of disagreement with all four presidents, Clarke reserves by far his strongest language for George W. Bush. The president, he said, "failed to act prior to September 11 on the threat from al Qaeda despite repeated warnings and then harvested a political windfall for taking obvious yet insufficient steps after the attacks." The rapid shift of focus to Saddam Hussein, Clarke writes, "launched an unnecessary and costly war in Iraq that strengthened the fundamentalist, radical Islamic terrorist movement worldwide."

Among the motives for the war, Clarke argues, were the politics of the 2002 midterm election. "The crisis was manufactured, and Bush political adviser Karl Rove was telling Republicans to 'run on the war,' " Clarke writes.

Clarke describes his book, in the preface, as "factual, not polemical," and he said in an interview that he was a registered Republican in the 2000 election. But the book arrives amid a general election campaign in which Bush asks to be judged as a wartime president, and Clarke has thrust himself loudly among the critics. Publication also coincides with politically sensitive public testimony this week by Clinton and Bush administration officials -- including Clarke -- before an independent commission investigating the events of Sept. 11.

"I'm sure I'll be criticized for lots of things, and I'm sure they'll launch their dogs on me," Clarke told CBS's "60 Minutes" in an interview broadcast last night. "But frankly I find it outrageous that the president is running for reelection on the grounds that he's done such great things about terrorism."

On the same broadcast, deputy national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley said, "We cannot find evidence that this conversation between Mr. Clarke and the president ever occurred." In interviews for this story, two people who were present confirmed Clarke's account. They said national security adviser Condoleezza Rice witnessed the exchange.

Rice, in an opinion article published opposite The Washington Post editorial page today, writes: "It would have been irresponsible not to ask a question about all possible links, including to Iraq -- a nation that had supported terrorism and had tried to kill a former president. Once advised that there was no evidence that Iraq was responsible for Sept. 11, the president told his National Security Council on Sept. 17 that Iraq was not on the agenda and that the initial U.S. response to Sept. 11 would be to target al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan."

White House and Pentagon officials who spoke only on the condition of anonymity described Clarke's public remarks as self-serving and politically motivated.

Like former Treasury secretary Paul H. O'Neill, who spoke out in January, Clarke said some of Bush's leading advisers arrived in office determined to make war on Iraq. Nearly all of them, he said, believed Clinton had been "overly obsessed with al Qaeda."

During Bush's first week in office, Clarke asked urgently for a Cabinet-level meeting on al Qaeda. He did not get it -- or permission to brief the president directly on the threat -- for nearly eight months. When deputies to the Cabinet officials took up the subject in April, Clarke writes, the meeting "did not go well."

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, Clarke wrote, scowled and asked, "why we are beginning by talking about this one man, bin Laden." When Clarke told him no foe but al Qaeda "poses an immediate and serious threat to the United States," Wolfowitz is said to have replied that Iraqi terrorism posed "at least as much" of a danger. FBI and CIA representatives backed Clarke in saying they had no such evidence.

"I could hardly believe," Clarke writes, that Wolfowitz pressed the "totally discredited" theory that Iraq was behind the 1993 truck bomb at the World Trade Center, "a theory that had been investigated for years and found to be totally untrue."

Wolfowitz, in a telephone interview last night, cited statements by CIA Director George J. Tenet and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell affirming that Iraq once trained al Qaeda operatives in bomb making and document forgery.

"Given what George Tenet and Colin Powell have said publicly about Iraqi links to al Qaeda, I just find it hard to understand how Dick Clarke can be so dismissive of the possibility that there were links between them," Wolfowitz said.

Like Tenet, Clarke was a Clinton holdover who faced initial skepticism from Bush loyalists. But Rice asked him to keep the counterterrorism portfolio and discouraged him from leaving in February 2003.

In the first minutes after hijacked planes struck the World Trade Center towers on Sept. 11, Rice placed Clarke in her chair in the Situation Room and asked him to direct the government's crisis response. The next day, Clarke returned to find the subject changed to Iraq.

"I realized with almost a sharp physical pain that [Defense Secretary Donald H.] Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were going to try to take advantage of this national tragedy to promote their agenda about Iraq," he writes.

In discussions of military strikes, "Secretary Rumsfeld complained that there were no decent targets for bombing in Afghanistan" -- where al Qaeda was based under protection of the Taliban -- "and that we should consider bombing Iraq."

Clarke's disputes with the White House are notable in part because his muscular national security views allied him often over the years with most of the leading figures advising Bush on terrorism and Iraq. As an assistant secretary of state in 1991, Clarke worked closely with Wolfowitz and then-Defense Secretary Richard B. Cheney to marshal the 32-nation coalition that expelled Iraqi forces from Kuwait. Clarke sided with Wolfowitz -- against Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff -- in a losing argument to extend that war long enough to destroy Iraq's Republican Guard. Later, Clarke was principal author of the hawkish U.S. plan to rid Iraq of its nonconventional weapons under threat of further military force.

In his experience, Clarke writes, Bush's description by critics as "a dumb, lazy rich kid" is "somewhat off the mark." Bush has "a results-oriented mind, but he looked for the simple solution, the bumper sticker description of the problem."

"Any leader whom one can imagine as president on September 11 would have declared a 'war on terrorism' and would have ended the Afghan sanctuary [for al Qaeda] by invading," Clarke writes. "What was unique about George Bush's reaction" was the additional choice to invade "not a country that had been engaging in anti-U.S. terrorism but one that had not been, Iraq." In so doing, he estranged allies, enraged potential friends in the Arab and Islamic worlds, and produced "more terrorists than we jail or shoot."

"It was as if Osama bin Laden, hidden in some high mountain redoubt, were engaging in long-range mind control of George Bush, chanting 'invade Iraq, you must invade Iraq,' " Clarke writes.

Copyright © 2004 The Washington Post Company.