Howard Zinn, ¡Presente!

Long before Howard wrote A People's History of the United States he had already accomplished more in the decade of the Vietnam anti-war movement than anyone could hope for in a full life. There have been many great social movements in the Boston area. But there was nothing like the the energy and power and commitment to each other we experienced during the Vietnam movement. Imagine over 100,000 people, not in Washington DC, but on the Boston Common. (I think you can guess who was one of the speakers). Imagine 8,000 people in 1971 and 3,000 more again in 1972 completely surrounding the JFK building and shutting it down in an act of mass civil disobedience. These kinds of things as well as all kinds of other exciting, courageous, painful and sometimes crazy things happened all the time.

 

Howard Zinn, then in his mid and late forties, was the heart and soul of that movement. He nourished that movement for us. He interpreted that movement for us. He encouraged us. Like he would do much later with his Peoples History, he gave us the information we needed to sustain and expand that movement. He made it possible for thousands, just starting to break with the propaganda machine of cold war America, to take their first steps into a whole new way of looking at themselves and their posibilities as human beings. In 1966, he did the unthinkable in those days of American triumphalism and anti-communist hysteria. He wrote the book, Vietnam: the Logic of Withdrawal (published in 1967 and dedicated "To the People of Vietnam"). Unlike most anti-war critics of the day, he called for immediate withdrawal from Vietnam and backed up that bold demand with the historical record. And mountains began to move. Zinn, Gordon Zahn, Noam Chomsky and George Wald. In those pre-feminism days, these were the 4 intellectual pillars of the Boston area antiwar movement. Tens of thousands flocked to hear them as they spoke and opposed the war everywhere, encouraging mass mobilization in their wake.

 

But, as in more recent years, Howard stood out as the one who offered us the most hope and optimism and humor as he assured us that what we were doing was not only right, but that by doing it we could very well change the world.   When the Afghanistan and Iraq wars started, Howard brought all his experience and commitment to peace into our movement against the Iraq War.   He moved us and inspired us to carry on in dark times until we had helped turn the country against the criminal Iraq war, and as we continue to struggle to do so against the Afghanistan war.

 

I'd like to think that, of all his great accomplishments before and since, that the movement around Vietnam has a unique place in his heart. Howard himself gives one of the most moving accounts of those days in Chapter 18 of A Peoples' History, "The Impossible Victory: Vietnam": "....In the course of that war, there developed in the United States the greatest antiwar movement the nation had ever experienced, a movement that played a critical part in bringing the war to and end. It was another startling fact of the sixties."

 

Yes, many of us have been dreading this day. And now it's here. And now it's up to us to make sure that Howard stays with us and that the twinkle in his eye and his love for all of us that lay behind it cannot be extinguished.

 

 

Howard Zinn, an author, teacher and political activist whose leftist A People's History of the United States became a million-selling alternative to mainstream texts and a favorite of such celebrities as Bruce Springsteen and Ben Affleck, died Wednesday. He was 87.

 

Zinn died of a heart attack in Santa Monica, Calif., daughter Myla Kabat-Zinn said. The historian was a resident of Auburndale, Mass.

 

Published in 1980 with little promotion and a first printing of 5,000, A People's History was — fittingly — a people's best-seller, attracting a wide audience through word of mouth and reaching 1 million sales in 2003. Although Zinn was writing for a general readership, his book was taught in high schools and colleges throughout the country, and numerous companion editions were published, including Voices of a People's History, a volume for young people and a graphic novel.

 

At a time when few politicians dared even call themselves liberal, A People's History told an openly left-wing story. Zinn charged Christopher Columbus and other explorers with genocide, picked apart presidents from Andrew Jackson to Franklin D. Roosevelt and celebrated workers, feminists and war resisters.

 

Even liberal historians were uneasy with Zinn. 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."

 

In a 1998 interview with The Associated Press, Zinn acknowledged he was not trying to write an objective history, or a complete one. He called his book a response to traditional works, the first chapter — not the last — of a new kind of history.

 

"There's no such thing as a whole story; every story is incomplete," Zinn said. "My idea was the orthodox viewpoint has already been done a thousand times."

 

"A People's History" had some famous admirers, including Matt Damon and Affleck. The two grew up near Zinn, were family friends and gave the book a plug in their Academy Award-winning screenplay for Good Will Hunting. When Affleck nearly married Jennifer Lopez, Zinn was on the guest list.

 

Oliver Stone was a fan, as well as Springsteen, whose bleak Nebraska album was inspired in part by A People's History. The book was the basis of a 2007 documentary, Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind, and even showed up on The Sopranos, in the hand of Tony's son, A.J.

 

Zinn himself was an impressive-looking man, tall and rugged with wavy hair. An experienced public speaker, he was modest and engaging in person, more interested in persuasion than in confrontation.

 

Born in New York in 1922, Zinn was the son of Jewish immigrants who as a child lived in a rundown area in Brooklyn and responded strongly to the novels of Charles Dickens. At age 17, urged on by some young Communists in his neighborhood, he attended a political rally in Times Square.

 

"Suddenly, I heard the sirens sound, and I looked around and saw the policemen on horses galloping into the crowd and beating people. I couldn't believe that," he told the AP.

 

"And then I was hit. I turned around and I was knocked unconscious. I woke up sometime later in a doorway, with Times Square quiet again, eerie, dreamlike, as if nothing had transpired. I was ferociously indignant. ... It was a very shocking lesson for me."

 

War continued his education. Eager to help wipe out the Nazis, Zinn joined the Army Air Corps in 1943 and even persuaded the local draft board to let him mail his own induction notice. He flew missions throughout Europe, receiving an Air Medal, but he found himself questioning what it all meant. Back home, he gathered his medals and papers, put them in a folder and wrote on top: "Never again."

 

He attended New York University and Columbia University, where he received a doctorate in history. In 1956, he was offered the chairmanship of the history and social sciences department at Spelman College, an all-black women's school in then-segregated Atlanta.

 

During the civil rights movement, Zinn encouraged his students to request books from the segregated public libraries and helped coordinate sit-ins at downtown cafeterias. Zinn also published several articles, including a then-rare attack on the Kennedy administration for being too slow to protect blacks.

 

He was loved by students — among them a young Alice Walker, who later wrote The Color Purple — but not by administrators. In 1963, Spelman fired him for "insubordination." (Zinn was a critic of the school's non-participation in the civil rights movement.) His years at Boston University were marked by opposition to the Vietnam War and by feuds with the school's president, John Silber.

 

Zinn retired in 1988, spending his last day of class on the picket line with students in support of an on-campus nurses' strike. Over the years, he continued to lecture at schools and to appear at rallies and on picket lines.

 

Besides A People's History, Zinn wrote several books, including The Southern Mystique, LaGuardia in Congress and the memoir, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train, the title of a 2004 documentary about Zinn that Damon narrated. He also wrote three plays.

 

One of Zinn's last public writings was a brief essay, published last week in The Nation, about the first year of the Obama administration.

"I've been searching hard for a highlight," he wrote, adding that he wasn't disappointed because he never expected a lot from Obama.

"I think people are dazzled by Obama's rhetoric, and that people ought to begin 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."

Zinn's longtime wife and collaborator, Roslyn, died in 2008. They had two children, Myla and Jeff.

 

Associated Press Writer Rodrique Ngowi contributed to this report from Boston.