I remember well the first time I encountered Howard Zinn through “A People’s History of the United States” in Mr. Brown’s U.S. history class my sophomore year of high school. After years of run-ins with American history, I only had the most superficial and effectively meaningless understanding of what had come before. Like most people, I was taught to regard 1492 as a great year in the history of human progress, to justify World War II as a “good” war and to remember famous men like Andrew Jackson and Theodore Roosevelt as laudable champions of democracy or defenders of human dignity. Those were just some of the incomplete and phony conceptions of our history I had in the fall of 2002. Luckily, with the help of a gifted teacher and Howard Zinn, my many misconceptions of our American origins were obliterated and reformed to reflect the struggle, defeat and occasional victory of working people and the marginalized.
The idea that one man could help millions of young people understand the origins of their nation from a genuinely humanitarian and rigorously critical perspective will remain a lasting testament to Zinn’s success in redefining what it means to be an American.
To describe Howard Zinn as a contrarian would be an understatement. He certainly ruffled more than a few feathers during his long career not least among historians that pretentiously described him as a “polemicist” or “preachy.” Indeed many could not tolerate what they saw as Zinn’s lack of objectivity when describing historical events. After all, shouldn’t history be phrased in dispassionate prose, coolly laying out the facts?
What too many of his critics fail to realize is that history is not a motionless corpse from which, by dissection, morally neutral and scientific conclusions can be drawn. Rather, historical events are a scintillating cohesion of individual accounts, passions and prejudices, which, through conscientious reconstruction, take on a distinct moral character.
Of course, Zinn made a great many people uncomfortable because, equipped with a keen and unpromising sense of justice, he tarnished the sacrosanct depiction of America as “one nation, indivisible with liberty and justice for all.” For example, in a grossly inappropriate and unprecedented obituary rebuttal, NPR invited David Horowitz to give his two cents on Zinn’s life. He spewed, “There is absolutely nothing in Howard Zinn’s intellectual output that is worthy of any kind of respect. Zinn represents a fringe mentality, which has unfortunately seduced millions of people at this point in time. So he did certainly alter the consciousness of millions of younger people for the worse.”
Count me in those millions David! Ravings like these suggest Horowitz’s bile was prompted more by fear than anger. After all, many on the Right have been fighting the emphasis on grassroots mass movements, social justice and pacifism that formed the foundation of much of Zinn’s work. He was no doubt threatened by the renewed interest in Zinn’s life, prompted by his passing.
And what a life it was. Born to poor Jewish immigrants 87 years ago, Zinn went on to participate in several of the 20th century’s defining episodes. He joined the army, eager to defeat the fascists in World War II, but returned from the war shaken, not in his faith in humanity’s fundamentally good and peaceful nature but in the man-made conditions that allowed for so much loss of life. He noted years later, that the Second World War, while necessary, facilitated America’s glorification of subsequent conflicts; “Every enemy becomes Hitler”.
Arriving back in the U.S., he completed masters and doctoral degrees at Columbia University and shortly thereafter filled a teaching position at a historically black women’s college in Georgia near the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement. A persistent agitator for equality, his constant imploring for students to involve themselves in the movement drew the ire of the university president, who eventually fired him for “insubordination.”
Following his civil rights activism in Georgia, he went on to teach at Boston University for the next 22 years where he continued to embrace protest and dissent as tools for furthering the interests of the disenfranchised at home and abroad.
The title of his memoir describes well his approach to history and a life often at the forefront of battling injustice: “You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train.” Those are words of wisdom in a time when a historic progressive mandate and Democratic supermajorities have failed to achieve a single major reform and foreign observers are describing our country as “unstable.”
Zinn will be greatly missed by the millions that have read his work and were inspired to combat historic forces of injustice. Although the most influential contribution might be his sobering depiction of a nation that despite being riveted with chronic injustice and moral failings remains capable of lasting change for the better.
But, as he noted just a few weeks before his death, the people must deliver that change. There is no other way. “[P]eople ought to understand that Obama is going to be a mediocre president — which means, in our time, a dangerous president — unless there is some national movement to push him in a better direction.”
Sam Stevenson ([email protected]) is a graduate student in public health.
