Howard Zinn is discussed across three episodes of The Bob Zadek Show, in each case as a reference point in arguments about historical narrative and political influence rather than as a guest. The excerpts present him through his book A People’s History of the United States, through his influence on screenwriters, and through his presence in a state curriculum document.
Competing narratives of American history
In the April 4, 2010 episode, Bob Zadek opened with a New York Times story about a controversy in Texas, and described Zinn as a writer who had recently died and whom he characterized as progressive. Zadek said that in A People’s History of the United States, Zinn depicts the United States as oppressive, in which the privileged abuse the downtrodden, and that this was Zinn’s philosophy, which he substantiated with lots of facts. He paired Zinn’s book with Larry Schweikart’s A Patriot’s History of the US, which Zadek said describes the New Deal as a calamity that wrecked havoc on the American economy, and noted an ongoing debate over whether the New Deal exacerbated the Depression or cured it Best of: Changing the Face of History (2010).
Zadek framed both books as bestsellers with profoundly different points of view that were not trying to revise history but putting a different spin on it. He then posed the question of how a textbook publisher would choose between them, asking whether a publisher would adopt whichever philosophy was more consistent with its own worldview, and who should decide what students are taught. He contrasted both with historians he named as more classic — Daniel Boorstin and Gordon S. Wood — whose descriptions of America, the writing of the Constitution, the battle of ideas and the founding he said gave him goosebumps, and asked whether tomorrow’s students would learn that view or be denied it. Zadek called the question of who decides what America is profoundly important and described it as culture wars writ large Best of: Changing the Face of History (2010).
Zinn as an influence in entertainment
The August 27, 2011 episode featured Ben Shapiro, author of Primetime Propaganda: The True Story of How the Left Took Over Your TV. Shapiro described his research method as calling up people in Hollywood, big names, and asking to interview them, and said he spoke with somewhere between 75 and 100 people, most of them major names and most of whom he quotes in the book Hollywood: Obama’s Ministry of Propaganda (2011).
In discussing whether creative people in television proselytize or simply write about the world as they see it, Shapiro said he thought there was some of both, that in some cases it is unconscious, and that the majority are smarter than that and have real disdain for traditional American values. He cited Good Will Hunting as a great example: he said Matt Damon was basically a nobody before the film came out and so was Ben Affleck, and that if you watch the movie it is an ode to Howard Zinn, with the whole thing centered around the theories of Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn and very, very far-left material. Shapiro said that for the most part the writers were trying to reflect the world they lived in, and that there is a lot of natural osmosis between people’s politics and their writing Hollywood: Obama’s Ministry of Propaganda (2011).
Shapiro also argued that artists tend to be rebels against the status quo and outcast types, that they are generally not used to making a lot of money, and that once someone bases the concept that their success is based on luck, that is pretty quickly going to drive them toward a socialistic point of view. He said network television writers make $30,000 per episode at union scale, that a full season of comedy is 22 episodes, and that writing a full season yields $660,000 leaving aside residuals, which he said can bring another several hundred thousand dollars. Shapiro said most of these people are socialists who are uncomfortable with how much they make and who justify it by standing up for the downtrodden Hollywood: Obama’s Ministry of Propaganda (2011).
Zinn in the California ethnic studies curriculum
In the October 1, 2020 episode, Williamson M. Evers gave Bob Zadek a concrete example from what he described as a 2020 proposal for a model curriculum for high school students in California, which he said was also coming in Oregon and Washington and throughout the country. Evers said the curriculum relies on the socialist historian Howard Zinn’s narrative of American history and cites him 19 times. He said it mentions Malcolm X twice as often as Martin Luther King, recommends that students study the Nation of Islam as an exemplary philosophy, which he described as a racist and anti-Semitic group headed by Louis Farrakhan, and lists cop killer Mumia’s website as a resource in a class on resistance California’s Ethnic Studies Curriculum vs. Trump’s Patriotic Education (2020).
Evers described how instructional materials come into existence through publishers writing what they think public schools want, with the buyers being government entities rather than individual parents, and said that because of the heavy burden of government regulation there are only a few companies, so that most independent companies that used to do this 20 years ago are gone and there is a cartelization of the textbook publishing industry that is not a natural process but a result of government regulation. He listed what developers look at: testing, what competing companies are doing, academic content standards and curriculum frameworks in the different states. Evers said the California history curriculum framework is riddled with the same material — capitalism oppressing everybody, racial theories, America as nothing but a country of conquest — and that while critical views of the United States government are not wrong in themselves, this is a very doctrinaire ideological view that goes down to the lowest grade California’s Ethnic Studies Curriculum vs. Trump’s Patriotic Education (2020).
Evers also described adoption structures: some states use statewide adoption and some use local school district adoption, with California a mixture in which kindergarten through eighth grade is statewide and high school is district-level, Oregon having state-level adoption through all grades, and Washington having local adoption throughout. He said that for state-level adoption the State Board of Education makes the decision and may delegate aspects to a curriculum commission, and that local districts put together a textbook review committee of administrators, teachers and usually some parents or community leaders. He said people who believe in radical political views make an effort to capture this at each level. Evers added that at every level there is sensitivity review, which he called explicit political direction, that the named textbook author probably did not write even that much of it, that sales reps influence the development group, and he cited Diane Ravitch’s book The Language Police on this subject California’s Ethnic Studies Curriculum vs. Trump’s Patriotic Education (2020).
Bob Zadek responded that it is not that complicated, and that what you learn is how few people — unelected bureaucrats — get to make the most profound decisions about what the children of parents will learn California’s Ethnic Studies Curriculum vs. Trump’s Patriotic Education (2020).
Across episodes
Three episodes touch on Howard Zinn, and the treatment shifts in emphasis rather than in argument. In the 2010 episode Bob Zadek treated Zinn as one pole of a pair of competing bestsellers and asked who should decide what students are taught; in the 2011 episode Ben Shapiro treated Zinn as an influence embedded in Hollywood screenwriting, extending the question from textbooks to entertainment; in the 2020 episode Williamson M. Evers treated Zinn as a named source cited 19 times in a California model curriculum, extending the question to the mechanics of textbook publishing and state adoption. The excerpts show no development in the underlying question, only a widening of the settings in which it is raised.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not present Zinn as a guest on the program or record any statement by him. They do not give his date of death beyond Zadek’s remark that he had recently died at the time of the 2010 broadcast, nor any biographical detail beyond his book and Zadek’s characterization of him as progressive and Evers’s description of him as a socialist historian. No excerpt describes the contents of A People’s History of the United States beyond the general characterization Zadek offers, and no excerpt states what became of the California model curriculum after the 2020 proposal.