Howard Zinn is one of the most polarizing figures in American academia
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1Henry Maar Graduate student History Department California State University, Northridge HRMaar@aol.com
1In American academia, there are few figures both as influential and as controversial as historian Howard Zinn. His most widely read book, A People’s History of The United States, has run through five editions, selling more copies each year than the year prior since its initial publication in 1980. But with success has come an unending array of critics. Zinn’s work has been condemned by critics as overtly Marxist. He has been labeled anti-American, and was named by David Horowitz as one of the “most dangerous academics in America.”1 On the other hand, Zinn’s passion has won him many fans and has allowed him to remain relevant over several generations while the works of other revisionists remain largely obscure to the general reading public. The intent of this biography will be to look at Zinn’s major writings, his vision as a historian, his life in academia, and his life as a dissident both within and outside of academia. This paper concludes that it is Zinn’s activism–which is entwined with his academic work so much so that the two cannot be distinguished–that separates him from liberal academics such as Herbert J. Muller and distinguishes him from other revisionist historians such as Walter LaFeber and William Appleman Williams. 1Though Zinn’s approach to the writing of history can be traced to the influence of Charles and Mary Beard, to truly understand his approach to history, one must understand how his views came to be. Howard Zinn was born on August 24, 1922 in the slums of Brooklyn, New York, to immigrants Eddie and Jenny Zinn. Though his father Eddie had worked hard his entire life, he made very little. This led to Howard’s resentment of those who claimed that in America, if you worked hard, you would become rich. In the case of Howard’s father and millions of others, this was a lie which implied that “if you were poor it was because you hadn’t worked hard enough.” Howard’s mother Jenny was a Russian immigrant with a seventh grade education who was the backbone of the Zinn household. Despite her lack of education, Howard considered his mother to be the “brains of the family” and the “strength” because, despite financial uncertainty, the family always had food on the table. But because of this financial uncertainty, much of Howard’s childhood was spent moving–staying “one step ahead of the landlord.” The family had no books in the house and much of Howard’s time was spent in the streets playing games. But it was on the streets where he picked up his first book–Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar. Though half the pages were torn out, Howard devoured it and grew to enjoy reading. Despite the family’s poverty, Howard’s parents recognized his enjoyment of reading and purchased for him a collection of Charles Dickens’ writings through an offer in the New York Post. Dickens’s novels aroused in Zinn “an anger at arbitrary power puffed up with wealth and kept in place by law.” Growing up in and surrounded by poverty himself, Zinn would empathize with the characters and settings in Charles Dickens’ novels, instilling in him a “profound compassion for the poor.”2 In his late teenage years, Zinn became politically conscious. Through Communist friends, Zinn came across Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto. In addition, books by Upton Sinclair, John Steinbeck, and Dalton Trumbo, as well as contemporary works about the rise of fascism in Europe were a staple of Zinn’s reading interests. One event, however, so impacted Howard, that it moved him from liberal to radical; that event was his first demonstration in Times Square. The demonstration, Zinn observed, was “exciting” but also “nonthreatening” as participants kept to the sidewalks, did not block traffic, and were “walking in orderly, non-violent lines through Times Square.” Then the sirens began blaring. To Zinn’s shock, the police, on foot and mounted, charged the crowd, clubbing and breaking up the lines, leaving Howard astonished and bewildered by the whole scene: “This was America, a country where. . .people could speak, write assemble, demonstrate without fear. . . . We were a democracy.” As he absorbed the scene, Howard was hit on the back of the head and knocked unconscious. When he awoke, the demonstration was over, and Times Square was back to normal, as if the entire event had been a dream. But Howard knew from the painful lump on the side of his head that this was not a dream, but the reality that the Communists on his block were right: the police and the state were not neutral, but on the side of the rich and powerful. “Free speech? Try it and the police will be there with their horses, their guns, to stop you.” From that moment on, Zinn was a radical. No longer did he believe in the “self-correcting character of American democracy.” Something was fundamentally wrong with the country, something more than just the extreme poverty amidst great wealth, more than the reprehensible treatment of black people–“something rotten at the root.” “The situation,” Zinn writes in his memoir, “required not just a new president or new laws, but an uprooting of the old order, the introduction of a new kind of society–cooperative, peaceful, egalitarian.”33 As Zinn became more radicalized, he was also taking jobs to try to help out the family financially. In his late teenage years, Howard took a job with the Brooklyn Navy Stockyard building ships that were being used in the war. At a time when Unions were exclusive and young people were not allowed to join, Zinn, along with three other radicals, founded the Young Shipyard Workers Union. Working in the shipyard with the U.S. Navy secured him exemption from military service. However, in early 1943, without his parents’ knowledge, a twenty year old Howard Zinn enlisted in the Army Air Corps Air Force. As Zinn put it, he was “eager to get into combat against the Nazis,” viewing World War II as a “noble crusade against racial superiority, militarism, fanatic nationalism, expansionism.” Zinn would go on to graduate from bombing school with the gold bars of a second lieutenant and bombardier’s wings pinned on his chest. Before departing for Europe, however, Howard married the love of his life, Roslyn; together, they would have two children, Myla and Jeff. But before they were even married a month, Howard was leaving to fight in World War II–a war both Howard and Roslyn were very enthusiastic about at the outset. In World War II, Lieutenant Howard Zinn flew a B-17, conducting bombing runs in the European theater. Of his most visible memories of the war, two events stood out to him. One was his friendship with an aerial gunner. The gunner made Zinn question and think deeply about his views of the allies’ aims, leaving him disillusioned with the Soviet Union after learning of the fraud they perpetuated as socialism. But, on the second point, it was Zinn’s participation in a bombing run late in the war effort that would ultimately change his views concerning “just war.”4 The event took place just three weeks prior to the German surrender in 1945. Zinn’s squad bombed the town of Royan, France, occupied by Nazis holding out until the war’s end. Zinn recalls it being the first use of “jellied gasoline”–or napalm–dropped from 25,000 feet above, “not precisely directed at German installations,” but “dropped in the general vicinity. . .where there were also civilians.” By the end of the war, when collecting his awards, he placed them in a folder and, without thinking, wrote across it, “never again.” Throughout the coming decades, Zinn would struggle to find the balance in his hatred for war with his un-acceptance of total pacifism. It would also lead him to complete opposition to the Vietnam War from the start.5 After the war, Howard took a number of low end jobs to help keep his family afloat. 1 However, with his first child born and a second one on the way, and the family still living in a (literally) rat-infested basement apartment, Howard took advantage of the GI bill, entering New York University as a freshman at the age of twenty-seven. The GI bill allowed Zinn to move his family to a rat-free, roach-free, low income housing project in Manhattan, while also paying for him to attend school. Zinn would go on to graduate with his B.A. in history in 1951. The following year, he attended Columbia University where he completed his Masters in 1952 and Ph.D. in 1958.6 Attracted to labor history, Zinn prepared his Master’s thesis on the Colorado coal strike of 1913-1914 and had originally elected to prepare his doctoral dissertation on the labor leader, “Big Bill” Haywood. But since the Department of Justice had burned Haywood’s papers, the topic was no longer viable. Zinn eventually discovered a “decrepit old building marked ‘municipal archives’” which housed the papers of former New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia. These papers became the basis for his dissertation on LaGuardia, which would go on to win second place in the American Historical Association’s Albert J. Beveridge award. (The prize for which was publication through Cornell University Press.) LaGuardia in Congress was Zinn’s first major academic work; by no accident, however, it was also to be Zinn’s last purely academic work.7 While working on his Ph.D., Zinn taught at a number of universities, but by 1956, was hired as the Department Chair at a historically black, all female college in Atlanta: Spelman. Though well aware of the racial oppression that took place in the South, he did not move to Atlanta with the intent of starting a revolution, encouraging youth rebellion against the system of segregation, or even to “do good”–he needed a job, and Spelman was hiring. Thus, in the racially segregated city of Atlanta, Zinn began his career at a college where the fence was built not so much to keep intruders from coming in, but to keep students from getting out. Within three years of his appointment at Spelman, Zinn would begin to transform his students from a timid group who backed away and sat in the “colored” section, to nonviolent acts of civil disobedience designed to break down the barriers of social change little by little. An example of this was when members of Spelman’s Social Science Club, to which Zinn advised, decided to walk into Atlanta’s segregated Carnegie Library and ask for books such as John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty and Tom Paine’s Common Sense, as well as requesting the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and “other choices designed to make sensitive librarians uneasy.” When they were turned down, they would not give up, but return and continue to request books. Eventually, with the threat of a law suit, the pressure got to the librarians and the Librarian Board ended the policy of racial segregation. Though a small act, it was one of many acts of defiance that would eventually lead to the movement to end segregation.8 Zinn’s encouragement for disobedience and social change continued throughout his tenure at Spelman. He was arrested in early 1959 for “disorderly conduct”–that is, he was giving a ride home to a student who incidentally was black. A year later, Zinn and that same student would help organize massive sit-ins across downtown Atlanta cafeterias leading to the arrests of over seventy-seven, including fourteen students from Spelman. Protests, boycotts, and demonstrations were now a fundamental part of life for the girls at Spelman College. Many deplored this, insisting that the girls were missing classes and, thus, hurting their education. Not surprisingly, however, Zinn had a different view. According to Zinn, “these students were furthering their education in a way more than could be matched in a dozen political science classes.” Throughout his time at Spelman, Zinn’s apartment was not so much a home by normal standards, but a workshop where students would come to plan out their next moves. Zinn would help plan and participate in sit-ins, boycotts, and mass arrests, little by little, breaking down the barriers of segregation throughout Atlanta and proving that, “What seemed fixed could change, what had seemed immovable could move.” As Zinn would find out, that also applied to his tenure.9 In the Spring of 1963, the defiance of the Spelman girls was seen by the President of Spelman as a direct result of Zinn’s influence. Throughout his years at Spelman, Zinn had encouraged his students to speak their minds about what troubled them on campus. Over the years, Zinn’s students criticized their campus in the school newspaper and wrote petitions to the administration challenging Spelman’s traditional “productive past” because it did not prepare “. . .today’s woman to assume the responsibilities of today’s rapidly changing world. . . .” Zinn himself had written in The Nation in 1960 about the changing role of Spelman students from “young ladies” to women who could be found “on the picket line, or in jail.” The article was resented by Spelman College President Albert Manley. It all came to a head that Spring when Howard attended a Social Science Club meeting; the agenda for that night: “on liberty at Spelman.” The meeting was attended by students, faculty, and administrators (with the notable absence of President Manley). A packed room listened as students voiced their concerns over the indignities they had experienced at Spelman. At a faculty conference meeting shortly thereafter, Zinn asked to play a tape recording of the Social Science Club meeting so that faculty and administration could gain a sense of the students’ grievances. President Manley refused. After the faculty meeting Zinn approached Manley with the intent of easing a growing tension between the two. It was to no avail. By the end of the semester, Zinn would receive a letter from the Office of the President informing him that “the college does not intend to renew your employment. . . .” Enclosed was a check for $7,000–or one years pay. In a shocking turn of events, Zinn, his contract assuredly terminated wrongfully, was now out of a job with $7,000 to show for it. With a “year to write,” Zinn would work on two books, both published after his firing from Spelman. Zinn’s second book, The Southern Mystique, based on his experiences in the South, was Howard’s attempt to demystify the South and show how real change is made in history. Zinn would spend the summer of 1964 in Mississippi, working with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Out of his efforts as an adult advisor to SNCC, came his third book, SNCC: The New Abolitionists, about the efforts of SNCC in the South to end segregation. By the Fall, Zinn had moved north to Boston where he did postdoctoral work on East Asia at Harvard University under the tutelage of John Fairbank.10 After being fired from Spelman, Zinn quipped in his memoir, “Being fired has all the advantages of dying without its supreme disadvantage. People say extra-nice things about you, and you get to hear them.”11 Despite the outpouring of sympathy for Zinn, he was moving on, having accepted an offer from Boston University (BU) to teach Political Science. Though he was a trained Historian, to Howard it did not matter: “They invited me to join the political science department. They apparently didn’t care that I was really a historian, but I didn’t care really what department I was in, ‘cause I knew I was going to teach the way I was going to teach anyway. I always believed in playing a kind of guerilla warfare with administration. No matter what the title of the course, no matter what the description in the catalog was, I would teach what I wanted to teach.”12 Despite having lost his previous job, essentially having alienated the administration at Spelman, at BU, Zinn showed what one police arrest record would later call his “failure to quit.” Almost from the beginning Zinn was causing controversy. At a reception for new faculty members, Zinn was talking to a new faculty member from the philosophy department. When Zinn was asked by the philosopher what his political philosophy was, he was a bit baffled, but responded, “I guess I’m an anarchist.”13 It was 1965, and while Zinn’s new contract offered him tenure after one year, he did not receive it. A “secretarial error,” he was told. Meanwhile, the war in Vietnam had escalated after the dubious Gulf of Tonkin incident. As the war escalated so too did Zinn’s activism. Zinn was holding teach-ins, attending rallies and demonstrations, and wrote an article for The Nation arguing for withdrawal. In one advertisement that appeared in The New York
Committee for Federal Protection in Alabama.” The ad demanded in bold writing that President Johnson send a federal force into Selma to “protect the lives and constitutional liberties of all Americans.” The ad was cosigned by a number of academics from various north east institutions and departments.14 By early 1967, BU decided to vote on Zinn’s tenure. On the one hand, a number of Professors opposed granting Zinn tenure calling his activism “embarrassing to the department.” On the other hand, Zinn received excellent marks from student evaluations and was publishing his fifth book that Spring. On the day the trustee’s were voting for Zinn’s tenure, he had been invited by students to speak against the Vietnam War in a protest against the trustee’s annual meeting and, particularly, their honored guest for the evening, Secretary of State Dean Rusk (one of the strategists of the Vietnam War). Zinn agreed, but not with absolute courage, hoping instead that he would be one of many speakers, thus, blending in. Instead, when Zinn arrived, he found out he was to be the only speaker the group had for the evening. As the limo’s pulled up, one-by-one, guests arrived and took in the spectacle. A few days later, Zinn would receive a letter from the President of the University. Recalling his experience at Spelman, he expected the worse. Instead, Zinn found out that the trustee’s had granted him tenure in the afternoon, just hours before his antiwar talk to the demonstrators. As Zinn summed it up, “. . .[T]he trustee’s had voted me tenure in the afternoon, then arrived in the evening. . .to find their newly tenured faculty member denouncing their honored guest.”15 In the Spring of 1967 Zinn took his antiwar stance further. Expanding upon his article in The Nation, Zinn wrote his fifth book, Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal, dedicating it to the people of Vietnam. The book was well ahead of its time, arguing for the U.S. withdrawal of troops from Vietnam long before it became popular in public, and certainly well before Nixon and Kissinger caught on. According to Noam Chomsky, Zinn’s book “opened the doors for others” by “formulating the words clearly and [giving] a sound argument for them. . . .”16 Ultimately, The Logic of Withdrawal must be viewed as the tip of the iceberg concerning the anti-Vietnam War movement. At the beginning of 1967, at the time The Logic of Withdrawal was published, the antiwar movement was small. But, within a year, the majority of Americans became opposed to the war, with Zinn’s book going through eight editions. Zinn begins his case for withdrawal by presenting a clear set of absurd and obscene facts: for instance, the Pentagon paid an average of $34 to Vietnamese families in condolence money for every relative killed accidentally in a U.S. air strike, while at the same time, the U.S. Air Force paid $87 for each rubber tree accidentally destroyed.17 Zinn also provides different perspectives of the war, giving the reader a “view from afar”–the view of the Japanese people, the vast of whom were opposed to the war in Vietnam, drawing from their recent experiences as aggressive imperialists in World War II.18 Zinn also gives us the perspective of “the Negro,” drawing from his own first hand experiences in the South and his work with SNCC, to discuss the oppression of blacks and the paradox of why so many, while delighted with Johnson’s Great Society program, were disgusted with the Johnson administration’s rank hypocrisy of bringing freedom to the Vietnamese people, as blacks in the South continued to suffer from violence and poverty.19 In addition to these view points, Zinn gives us the view of history, arguing that Vietnam is a war of empire and demonstrating the disconnect between freedom at home and freedom for others abroad.20 Zinn uses the next three chapters to debunk the major arguments for the U.S. presence in Vietnam, demonstrating through example after example, how the U.S. was not in Vietnam to “defend” against Communist infiltration, but was committing extreme violence to put down a revolutionary movement. Furthermore, Zinn refutes the governments arguments for “staying the course” in Vietnam, showing that the war is not “fundamentally due to ‘aggression from the North.’” Regarding the Domino Theory and the Munich analogy, Zinn shows the U.S. to be, in George Keenan’s words, “the victim of its own propaganda.”21 Zinn concludes Vietnam with a memorable chapter that was reprinted in several places. “A Speech For LBJ,” was a fictitious speech Zinn wrote up for Lyndon Johnson to deliver to bring an end to the war in Vietnam. The speech had Johnson declaring an end to the Vietnam War based on the, “. . .fundamental American belief that human life is sacred, that peace is precious, and that true power does not consist in the brute force of guns and bombs, but in the economic well being of people.” 1Channeling LBJ, Zinn concludes the fictitious speech with Johnson declaring, “My fellow Americans, good night and sleep well. We are no longer at war with Vietnam.”22 Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal was Zinn’s most widely reviewed book at that time. It received a number of very positive reviews, including a very positive review from The New York Times. But, much like the Vietnam War, reviews were divisive. One particularly derisive review came from the Times Literary Supplement, where it was suggested that Zinn’s experience Yüklə 163 Kb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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