Zinn, Howard

ZINN, HOWARD (1922-2010). Labor activist, anti-racist activist and historian, Howard Zinn made sweeping contributions to the transformation of US national culture. His life of active involvement in social movements spanned almost a century. His influence as a public intellectual remains extensive both nationally and abroad. At home, his detractors’ repeated attempts to discredit him go well beyond the inner circles of academia. Zinn bears the rare privilege, with Eugene V. Debs, of having been denounced by a sitting President.

Born to Jewish working-class parents and raised with his three brothers in New York City during the Great Depression, he was struck by class division from an early age, especially as it affected his father's struggle to secure decent work. Zinn's interest in left-oriented interpretations of the world developed during his teenage years.

Coming of age in the late 1930s, Zinn became an avid reader of fiction and politics and a close follower of world developments, particularly the rise of European fascism. For insights and arguments, he turned to neighborhood activist friends. His parents noted his interest in writing and gave him a typewriter. At eighteen, seeking to contribute to his family’s income, Zinn passed a highly competitive exam to work in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where he joined other apprentices in learning to build battleships. The harsh working conditions, together with the exclusive craft-based tradition of the American Federation of Labor, led him to seek alternatives. This first substantial experience in class politics was made more exciting by another, no less combative collective initiative also inspired by the Popular Front culture of the time: a Marxist reading group.

By this point his worldview had been shaped by an intense rejection of fascism and a by a beating by New York City police during an anti-war demonstration. After Pearl Harbor, although shielded from conscription as a designated essential worker in shipbuilding, Zinn eagerly joined the military, lying about his age. He underwent aviation training in 1943. Meanwhile, a chance encounter with a neighborhood young woman, Rozlyn Shechter, developed into a romantic correspondence during his military training. They married just before Zinn shipped out overseas. Over the decades, the couple became partners in struggle.

Zinn graduated from flight school as second lieutenant and expert bombardier. He soon realized that the war was not the idealistic struggle of the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War. The small perks granted the officers, he understood, served merely to distance him from his crew, the rank and file of the army. When assigned to oversee the logistics of mealtimes, he also balked at the rigidly enforced racial segregation.

Flying missions over Germany, the Netherlands, France, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, Zinn became aware of some inconsistencies in the Allies’ geopolitical and tactical moves. Although he never questioned his military orders, specific missions stood out as incomprehensible or troubling. One mission in particular, flown over Royan, France on the Atlantic coast in the spring of 1945, was so egregious that he conducted an investigation of the operation twenty years later. Zinn’s final missions were humanitarian in nature. He dropped food over towns in northern Europe and flew POWs back to France. His experience with the mass violence of the conflict would hit him when confronted with the brutality of the Vietnam War.

Zinn returned home with a heavy heart and the disorientation that veterans often described. Soon after, he read John Hersey's account of the Hiroshima bombing. In the short run, his bitterness partly dissipated after he received the educational benefits offered by the GI Bill of Rights that opened the gates of New York University and, later, Columbia University. Zinn joined thousands of veterans determined to understand the world for which they had fought and turned to history and political science.

McCarthyism was already slowly chipping away at the New Deal consensus, but for a few years, as the spirit of the welfare state persisted, Zinn became a Brooklyn county commander for the American Veterans Committee, a progressive, internationalist, and anti-racist group. He supported Henry Wallace's presidential campaign in 1948 and was involved in numerous coalition-building efforts that opposed the Cold War and called for an expansion of democratic rights for ordinary Americans.

As a slightly older graduate student, Zinn had no time for campus activism. Already a father of two and working the evening shifts as a warehouse truck loader, he focused on improving the working conditions of his trade, even launching a successful wildcat strike to demand better protection gear. Cautiously supported by District 65, his initiative tapped the spirit of labor organizing that persisted after the war. Other forms of civic engagement involved a tenants’ council in the low-income housing where the Zinns lived at the time.

Still, for those who felt that the war had been fought to expand the democratic potential of the United States, times were changing for the worse. Zinn witnessed the assaults on pacifists protesting the Korean war. Political marginalization started to affect him personally when he was investigated for publicly supporting Wallace. The FBI questioned him twice about his political beliefs and affiliations. Although refusing to cooperate, he felt intimated enough to hastily destroy his personal war correspondence, which contained information about friends in the Communist or labor movements.

The early 1950s were marked by a shift in tactics to avoid the worst aspects of the second Red Scare. Until then, Zinn’s political and academic choices had been intertwined, leading him to delve into the history of the labor movement for his MA thesis about the Ludlow Massacre (1913-1914). His interest in the working class seemed no longer so easy to pursue. He followed the suggestion of his doctoral adviser, Henry Steele Commager, to scale back his political ambitions until he obtained his degree from Columbia. Instead of studying IWW organizer William D. Haywood, Zinn opted for a safer topic, the congressional career of the progressive New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia, whose papers had just recently been made available to researchers.

In 1956, Zinn accepted a job offer from the historically-Black Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, where he joined the small history department. The Zinns moved out of familiar territory and entered the segregated South and immersed themselves in Black culture, activism, and society. Their apartment, located on campus grounds, became a place of support where numerous meetings were held. As students turned to political organizing and created the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Zinns extended their involvement in the movement to other parts of the South, especially during the summers of 1963 and 1964.

A dedicated teacher, Zinn used his professorial authority to support his students in their quest for social change, both in town and on campus. He also became a valued advisor to the hundreds of student activists who took the lead in the movement and joined SNCC. On temporary leave from Spelman at Harvard’s East Asian Studies program, he was not present at the founding of the group in Raleigh, North Carolina, but was prominent among the adult sponsors, together with Ella Baker, Anne Braden, and Staughton Lynd.

Zinn became an embedded historian of SNCC: he extensively interviewed many of its key organizers, meticulously wrote about excruciating local campaigns, and showed a keen interest in the internal debates and collective strategies. Published by Beacon Press, SNCC: The New Abolitionists (1965) helped shift the dominant civil rights narrative away from older organizations.

The termination of his contract at Spelman in June 1963 forced Zinn to seek another teaching position. He landed in the political science department at Boston University, yet remained deeply involved in the organization of the Mississippi Freedom Summer. He also journeyed South the following year to join the Selma-to-Montgomery March, which he covered for The Nation magazine. As a specialist in constitutional law, he made key strategic interventions on behalf of the movement, pointing to the federal government’s responsibility to protect civil rights workers from racial violence. Zinn dispelled all confusing talk about states’ rights and argued in favor of federal intervention in Southern affairs. He also drew on his own experiences after the Gulf of Tonkin narrative framed another US war. As a historian and a veteran himself, Zinn encouraged SNCC activists to denounce US intervention in South East Asia. He insisted on the necessity of connecting foreign and domestic issues, an approach that many within the civil rights leadership resisted in 1965.

Building mass opposition to the Vietnam war soon became an all-consuming priority. As a Boston University professor, he joined with students, colleagues, and local celebrities in an ever-expanding network that launched local acts of civil disobedience. He participated in numerous days of national action. Trips to Japan, France, and North Vietnam between 1966 and 1968 further enhanced his understanding of the nature of the war and its absolute immorality.

Zinn’s encounters with civilians who endured the horrors of modern US warfare inspired him to write an incisive and unusual critique of the conflict in South East Asia, Vietnam the Logic of Withdrawal (1967). In his assault on the justifications for the war, he framed historical and diplomatic considerations through a series of de-centered perspectives and implored his fellow Americans to challenge their sense of racial and cultural superiority.

Zinn's anti-war commitment branched out in multiple directions. As a historian of civil disobedience, he testified as an expert-witness in many trials in support of whistleblowers, draft resisters, and the so-called ultra-resistance. His own public defiance of the law led to several arrests. Refusing bail to make a political statement from jail, he made issues related to the criminal justice system even more tangible, a topic that he explored in the collaborative project Justice in Every Day Life (1974). Many of the ideological ramifications of these years of intense activism were captured in The Politics of History (1970), for which he wrote or revised essays dealing with the ethical inadequacies of the academic profession and the epistemology of history-writing.

The end of the Vietnam war corresponded with a time of personal transition. Having recently discovered anarchism through the life-trajectory of Emma Goldman, Zinn started to explore new ways of writing, drawing on his love for literature, movies, and especially the theater. His first play, Emma, received a positive response when first produced in Boston in 1977. He went on to write more scripts over the next two decades. Zinn also ambitiously took up writing a social history of the United States since colonial times. Years in the making, frequently pushed aside for speaking engagements and trips, A People's History of the United States from 1492 to the Present was finally published on the eve of the conservative revolution of the Reagan era. Widely read outside academic circles yet surprisingly marginal within the historical profession, the book took on a life of its own. Over the years, the book generated an increasing number of translations and an exponential growth in readership.

Zinn returned to the project numerous times, adding two more chapters, introducing slight changes but without modifying his core arguments. In the early 2000s, a theatrical version was produced. The People Speak brought together numerous Hollywood fans of the book. The critically-acclaimed performances centered on Zinn, by then an elderly historian-narrator whose fame was on a par with other the cultural icons. The play also incorporated the voices of recent participants in social movements, so as to shed post 9/11 protest movements. Such transformations signified the deeply personal dimension of one of the most popular textbooks of US history. Indeed, beyond the aim of capturing five centuries of social movements, Zinn offered a framework for understanding the rise of solidarity in the past and the possibility of its recreation in the future.

Zinn acted on his principles. At Boston University, he frequently clashed with President John Silber over issues related to free speech and union rights. Organizational efforts for better working conditions led to a victorious general strike in 1979, during which he and four other faculty members refused to cross picket-lines and risked dismissal. Nearly a decade later, his parting act upon retiring was to invite his students to join a picket line on the campus. Diminished by the loss of his wife in 2008, weakened by back pain and declining eye sight, Zinn remained energetic well into his late eighties, sharing funny and thoughtful comments in speeches and articles in publications like The Nation and The Progressive.

Zinn interpreted the resurgence of social movements, including the Global Justice and anti-war campaigns, as confirmations of his belief that resistance was both inevitable and unpredictable. Tirelessly drawing lessons from the “Long Sixties,” Zinn retained a deep affection for young people and faith in their capacity to create social change.

During the last years of his life, Zinn struggled against militarism with renewed vigor. He made no exceptions, whatever humanitarian veneer was painted onto US aerial bombing operations. Such was the lesson of his life: his own unquestioned obedience as a World War II bombardier remained a deeply-felt trauma. This formative experience fueled a productive and inspiring life, ultimately leading him to absolute pacifism.

Bird, Stephen, Adam Silver & Joshua C. Yesnowitz, ed. Agitation with a Smile: Howard Zinn and the Future of Activism. New York: Routledge, 2015.

Cohen, Robert ed. Howard Zinn’s Southern Diary: Sit-ins, Civil Rights and Black Women’s Student Activism. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2018.

Dettmer David. Zinnophobia: The Battle over History in Education, Politics and Scholarship. Alresford, UK: Zero Books, 2018.

Duberman, Martin. Howard Zinn: A Life on the Left. NewYork: The New Press, 2011

Joyce, Davis. Howard Zinn: Radical American Vision. New York: Prometheus Books, 2003.
Howard Zinn Papers http://dlib.nyu.edu/findingaids/html/tamwag/tam_542/