The People’s Champion: Howard Zinn
Go to school, but don’t become an educated dummy.
— Eddie Zinn to son Howard when he was a boy, Howard Zinn: A Life on the Left
Labor Day is a good time to pay tribute to the late Howard Zinn, a rebel historian who broke with the tedious orthodoxy of “patriotic” history to tell the tale of those consigned to the bottom of the social pyramid: Indians, slaves, factory workers, indentured servants, sharecroppers, farmers, immigrants, political prisoners, soldiers, socialists, pacifists and other anti-war protesters. His most famous work, A People’s History of the United States, has by now surpassed four million in sales, an unheard of success record for a history book.
Raised in grinding poverty, Howard grew up resenting smug media commentators, politicians, and corporate executives who talked of how in America riches were the inevitable reward of hard work. No matter how well this lie was told, it implied with insulting clarity that people who had not become rich could only blame themselves for lack of effort. Howard knew better from personal experience, that hard labor was the least rewarded, and certainly no ticket out of poverty. His father carried trays of food at weddings and restaurants for decades until a sudden heart attack ended his life at 67. He frequently had to borrow to make the rent and never had the means to retire.
Eager to rid the world of poverty for everyone, Zinn urged his students and readers to not only read history but also make it. He flatly refused to lead an uncommitted life, eagerly participating in protests, marches, and civil disobedience campaigns concerned with civil rights, economic and social justice, imperial war, and exploitation. In his early career he was a teacher at Spelman College, an all-black women’s school, where he was fired for his anti-Jim Crow politics; later he taught at Boston University, where his classes were so popular and so subversive of orthodoxy that president John Silber sought to limit participation in them, while denying Zinn salary increases at every opportunity.
Unlike the vast majority of professors, Zinn was more comfortable on a picket line than in most academic settings, where the urgency of class conflict was easily ignored or dismissed, though not by Zinn.
A revealing anecdote captures the spirit of the people’s historian better than any ponderous essay could even hope to. The year was 1970 and professor Zinn was due to appear in court in Boston for an act of protest he had engaged in. He chose to ignore his court obligation and participate in a Baltimore debate entitled, “The Problem of Disobedience,” which he had been invited to do. During the debate Zinn argued that the problem wasn’t civil disobedience, but obedience: “Our problem is the number of people across the world who have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their governments and have gone to war, and millions have died from that obedience. Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and famine and stupidity and war and cruelty. That is our problem.” When he returned to Boston, two police detectives arrested him outside his classroom for violating his court date.
The anecdote reveals what Zinn thought about history, that it had much more to do with how we act than what we think, a conviction that encouraged his conclusion that change comes when masses of people realize this and mobilize to resolve their grievances directly. Elections and politicians don’t produce change, they react to it.
It shouldn’t surprise anyone to learn, therefore, that during the early days of Obama-mania a skeptical Zinn sounded a discordant note, warning that Obama would not implement change unless surrounded by a sufficiently powerful and persistent social movement forcing him to. “Our time and energy should be dedicated to educating, agitating, and organizing our fellow citizens at the workplace, in the streets, and at school,” Zinn said, pointing out that the great changes in the time of Lincoln, FDR, and the 1960s came about precisely because the American people rose up and took such responsibilities seriously in those years.
Unfortunately, these waves of popular agitation can’t last forever, although the next one is always already on the way. Zinn regularly reminded us of that, showing that history is made up of fortuitous surprises only detectable in retrospect. He liked to point out that when his colleagues in the 1950s used to lament the apparent lack of prospects for racial change due to the failure of Americans to mobilize, just in those moments small and isolated acts of rebellion and disobedience were occurring in the South, eventually converging and exploding into the Civil Rights Movement.
Given the way change actually happens, Zinn thought, progress should not rightly be seen as a gift handed down from above, but rather, as the hard fought reward for popular education and organizing over a period of years. Strikes, boycotts, soldiers refusing to fight, multitudes renouncing injustice and war, these signal the arrival of a better world.
Given his commitment to social change, Howard could not be satisfied with transmission of knowledge as a measure of his teaching success. “I wanted students to leave my classes not just better informed, but more prepared to relinquish the safety of silence, more prepared to speak up, to act against injustice wherever they saw it,” he said.
He rejected academic neutrality as a false standard. He believed in being as scrupulous as possible in adducing the facts, but did not feel objectivity was actually attainable. This was clearly a recipe for trouble, but submission to injustice was everywhere a permanent disaster.
Economic security for its own sake never interested Howard, who lived by the maxim that “risking your job is a price you pay if you want to be a free person.”
Daniel Ellsberg called Zinn “my hero,” while dissident intellectual Noam Chomsky held him in similarly high esteem: “There are people whose words have been highly influential, and others whose actions have been an inspiration to many. It is a rare achievement to have interwoven both of these strands in one’s life, as Howard Zinn has done. His writings have changed the consciousness of a generation, and helped open new paths to understanding history and its crucial meaning for our lives. He has always been on call, everywhere, a marvel to observe. When action has been called for, one could always be confident that he would be in the front lines, an example and trustworthy guide.”
Chomsky was also impressed by Zinn’s remarkable performance on the speaker’s platform: “What has always been startling to me . . . is Howard’s astonishing ability to speak in exactly the right terms to any audience on any occasion, whether it is a rally at a demonstration, a seminar (maybe quite hostile, at least initially) at an academic policy-oriented graduate institution, an inner-city meeting, whatever. He has a magical ability to strike just the right tone, to get people thinking about matters that are important, to escape from stereotypes and question internalized assumptions, and to grasp the need for engagement, not just talk. With a sense of hopefulness, no matter how grim the objective circumstances. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Zinn had no use for history written without a social conscience behind it; or merely as a professional duty, if it was done only to get something published or get a university position, tenure, a promotion, or to earn prestige. He saw the profit system behind such shallow motives, making private gain the key to what gets produced while leaving a lot of valuable things unproduced, and many stupid things produced in great abundance. Most historians just play it safe and cash history in for their personal advantage. Howard refused to do that.
He knew that courting controversy went with the territory of being a good teacher, honest writer, and decent citizen. In an interview with David Barsamian he noted that long before the Nazis there was a European holocaust in the Americas, that “perhaps 50 million indigenous people or more died as a result of enslavement, overwork, direct execution and disease. A much higher toll even than the genocide of Hitler.”
Were Howard Zinn still with us today, there can be little doubt that he would be reminding us that the spectacle of two million Gazans being massacred or starved to death grotesquely insults any pretense of there being a human civilization in the world, and especially not in the United States and Israel, the countries most directly responsible for the unrestrained barbarism.
He would be on the front lines of the struggle to liberate Palestine.
Sources:
Howard Zinn, The Future of History – Interviews with David Barsamian, (Common Courage, 1999)
Howard Zinn (with David Barsamian), Original Zinn – Conversations on History and Politics, (Harper, 2006)
Howard Zinn, The Zinn Reader – Writings On Disobedience and Democracy, (Seven Stories, 1997)
David Detmer, Zinnophobia – The Battle Over History in Education, Politics, and Scholarship, (Zero Books, 2018)
Howard Zinn, You Can’t Be Neutral On A Moving Train – A Personal History, (Beacon, 2022)
Martin Duberman, Howard Zinn – A Life on the Left, (New Press, 2012)
Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, (HarperCollins, 2003)
“American curios / El historiador rebelde,” La Jornada (Spanish), August 29, 2022
