America lost two distinctive and important
voices this week, two writers whose works dealt with absolutely vital
but virtually ignored elements of the nation's history and character:
the 'marginal' classes and the ruling class. Without the histories of Howard Zinn and the fiction of Louis Auchincloss, we would have a poorer understanding of the forces that form and move our society, for good and ill.
The more well-known of the two departed, Howard Zinn, was of course the author of A People's History,
which even though "it told an openly left-wing story" (as the New York
Times notes, in mildly scandalized tones) sold more than a million
copies, "was taught in high schools and colleges throughout the
country," and spawned many off-shoots, by both Zinn and historians
inspired by him. (Such as David Williams' remarkable People's History of the Civil War, among many others.)
The NYT obituary, while duly respectful in tone our radical activists are always duly respected when they are safely dead (Martin Luther King,
Woody Guthrie, etc., etc.) also provides a bit of comedy in its
attempt to let readers know that Zinn was not really "serious." To do
this and here's the comedy bit they drag poor old Arthur M.
Schlesinger Jr. out of the grave. The Times exhumes a quote from
Schlesinger best known as one of John F. Kennedy's minor minions to
prove that "even liberal historians" rejected the silly, unserious
Zinn, who, the Times sniffs, "accused Christopher Columbus and other
explorers of committing genocide, picked apart presidents from Andrew
Jackson to Franklin D. Roosevelt and celebrated workers, feminists and
war resisters." Can you even imagine such a man being taken seriously
in the drawing rooms of Georgetown? Schlesinger couldn't:
Even liberal historians were uneasy with Professor Zinn, who taught for many years at Boston University. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. once said: "I know he regards me as a dangerous reactionary. And I don't take him very seriously. He's a polemicist, not a historian."
Coming from a courtier as ever-fawning toward power as Schlesinger who among his many imperial services helped strangle the new democracy of Guyana
in its cradle this is pretty rich. But very much par for the Times'
decorous course. In any event, Zinn's work which he rightly called
"the first chapter, not the last, of a new kind of history" will
continue to reverberate and inspire. (Schlesinger's, not so much.)
The obit, like decades of Auchincloss reviewers, brushes aside
Auchincloss' "chronicles of Manhattan's old-money elite" as quaint and
pretty evocations of a "vanished world." A vanished world! Here we see
once more the Times' diligent adherence to one of the most enduring and
pernicious American myths: that the nation has no ruling class. When
pressed, our chewers and spewers of the cud of conventional wisdom will
sometimes allow that there used to be a ruling class, way back in the
bad old days; but they insist that this "old-money elite" has long
since vanished from power and influence, having been largely dissolved
into the great meritocracy of modern America.
In partial mitigation, however, the Times does
grudgingly offer an opposing viewpoint from Gore Vidal [cribbed from
his 1974 essay, "The Great World and Louis Auchincloss"]:
Like [Edith] Wharton, Mr. Auchincloss was interested in class and morality and in the corrosive effects of money on both. "Of all our novelists, Auchincloss is the only one who tells us how our rulers behave in their banks and their boardrooms, their law offices and their clubs," Gore Vidal once wrote. "Not since Dreiser has an American writer had so much to tell us about the role of money in our lives."
Vidal's essay (available in his remarkable compendium, United States)
has much more to say about the reality of the ruling class and the
deadly myth of its non-existence. It is indeed astonishing that this
deeply disinforming notion continues to be perpetrated even today
when a scion of that very same ruling class has only recently concluded
an eight-year term in the White House, and when we have all witnessed,
with our own eyes, the public treasury being raided to preserve these
elites from the consequences of their own rapacity.
The Times, perhaps to its credit or perhaps because the editors
thought no one would be reading at this point gives the last word to
Auchincloss himself, and so will we:
"Where is this "vanished world' they talk about?" he asked. "I don't think the critics have looked out the window!"
