http://www.hnn.us/articles/129556.html
By Peter N. Kirstein
8-09-10
Peter N. Kirstein is professor of history at St. Xavier University
and Vice President of the American Association of University
Professors (Illinois). He published, "Hiroshima and Spinning the
Atom: America, Britain, and Canada Proclaim the Nuclear Age, August
6, 1945," Historian (Winter 2009): 805-827. The HNN article is from
an address at the "College of Complexes" in Chicago.
Howard Zinn was the quintessential scholar activist at the time of
his death at age eighty-seven in Santa Monica, California on January
27, 2010. He had been the target of a quarter-century long FBI
surveillance operation. Just four years after his return from World
War II in 1945, the FBI opened its investigatory file on Dr. Zinn
(hereafter referred to as the Zinn Files). The 423-page report
monitored his activities as special agents and unscrupulous
informants throughout the country recorded his growing influence in
the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements. His residences,
phone numbers, attendance at meetings and numerous public utterances
were recorded and filed. His spouse, Roslyn Zinn, also came under
FBI scrutiny.
The Zinn Files were declassified and released on July 30,
2010. Reflecting embryonic McCarthyism before Senator Joseph R.
McCarthy's Wheeling address, it established early on a "Communist
Party: Counterintelligence Program" dossier. The FBI repeatedly
accused Howard Zinn of being a Communist Party member from
1949-1953. Special Agent Edward Scheidt requested on March 9, 1949
that FBI director J. Edgar Hoover investigate the "communist" Howard
Zinn. On March 23, 1949, Hoover authorized a "security index card"
that remained active until this unseemly file was closed in
1974. FBI special agents on November 6, 1953 and February 9, 1954
interrogated him outside near his home to intimidate him about his
alleged Communist Party affiliation. Dr. Zinn denied being a CPUSA
party member as if such an association, especially during the
Manichaean Cold War, would not honor and confirm the moral and
ethical rectitude of an American. During both interrogations he
refused to name names or reveal anyone's political ideology or group
association. Shamelessly and without any justification, Hoover
reported annually to the director of the Secret Service from March 7,
1966 through March 7, 1968 that Professor Zinn was a threat to
"[p]residential protection." He was depicted in three memoranda as
"potentially dangerous; or has been identified as member or
participant in [the] communist movement; or has been under active
investigation as member of other group or organization inimical to U.S."
His journey toward greatness as a teacher-activist began with his
first appointment as chair of the Department of History and Social
Sciences at Spelman College. He was fired in 1963 while challenging
the administration of the African American women's college to
actively support academic freedom and the civil rights
movement. While at Spelman, the Zinn Files reveal continuous
surveillance as the "subject of a Communist index card." Boston
University then hired Dr. Zinn, who became a full professor in the
Department of Political Science. While one of the more influential
historians of the postwar period, his enduring academic appointment
was in political science. I majored in government and matriculated
in three of his courses: two in political theory and one on civil
liberties. He was my advisor during senior year.
In 2006 I gave a paper at the Historians Against the War conference
at the University of Texas in Austin. Dr. Zinn was the keynoter and
I reintroduced myself at a reception and indicated he was the
inspiration for my academic career. David Horowitz's latest assault
on academia had appeared with The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous
Academics in America and I informed him of our mutual inclusion. He
exclaimed, "Oh, you are in there too? One of my students also in
that book!" I presume we are the only teacher-student combination on
Horowitz's academic enemies list.
We are what we remember. Professor Zinn was determined to expand the
nation's collective memory. He gave historical voice to African
Americans, labor organizers, Latinos, women, socialists, anarchists,
immigrants, antiwar activists, tenant farmers, the poor, gays and
lesbians, and Native Americans. He resurrected their histories that
shamed our past. This was his mission: a commitment to challenge
elite power with its hauteur of American exceptionalism. The
historian's craft, to Dr. Zinn, must pursue progressive change for
the betterment of society. He eschewed a Bancroftian exultation of
American greatness and emphasized its detritus of proletarian misery
on the streets: sometimes literally, as when 146 burning women
jumped to their deaths during the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in
Manhattan in 1911. (Declarations of Independence: Cross-Examining
American Ideology, 171.)
Howard Zinn's first book, La Guardia in Congress (1959), won
Honorable Mention for the American Historical Association's Albert J.
Beveridge prize. Not surprisingly, Professor Zinn would later
condemn Senator Beveridge's imperialist nationalism during the
Spanish-American War (The Politics of History, 45-6). In 1980 Howard
Zinn published his classic, The People's History Of The United
States: 1492-Present, an accessible, sweeping challenge to fawning
court historiography. He defied the hero worshipping of Columbus,
Jefferson and Jackson. He profiled the courage of dissenters against
an array of evils. Howard Zinn's history was real history, with its
"litany of unfettered power-abusing and exploitation of the poor,
people of color, immigrants, workers, and all the disenfranchised who
had lacked a voice in mainstream histories." (The Independent,
February 5, 2010)
Originally published as an antidote to anodyne textbooks, it
unexpectedly became coffee-table fare for the masses. Movies
celebrated it with stars like Matt Damon reading it; it appeared in
suburban-mall bookstores; it was converted into a comic-book edition,
a History Channel documentary, The People Speak, and it spun off an
abridged version, The Twentieth Century: A People's History.It has
sold over two million copies, including thousands to my students.
Horowitz in an e-mail described People's History as a "prosecutor's
case" and "worthless." Horowitz castigates Dr. Zinn for
"further[ing] the corruption of a profession that is already well
advanced." In People's History, Dr. Zinn notes historiography
entails "that inevitable taking of sides which comes from selection
and emphasis..." (10) The inclusion of facts, movements and outcomes
that demand an accounting of a nation's past is salutary in cleansing
the "corruption" of historical scholarship.
Howard Zinn's commitment to ending racial segregation begins during
the anti-apartheid struggle in the South during the 1950s and
1960s. He recounted his role in the civil rights movement during his
celebrated return as commencement speaker at Spelman in 2005:
Those were the years of the great movement in the South against
racial segregation, and I became involved in that in Atlanta; in
Albany, Georgia; in Selma, Alabama; in Hattiesburg, Mississippi; and
Greenwood and Itta Bena and Jackson. I learned something about
democracy: that it does not come from the government, from on high,
it comes from people getting together and struggling for justice. I
learned about race. I learned something that any intelligent person
realizes at a certain pointthat race is a manufactured thing, an
artificial thing, and while race does matter (as Cornell West has
written), it only matters because certain people want it to
matter...I learned that what really matters is that all of us…are
human beings and should cherish one another.
He joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, founded in
Raleigh, North Carolina in 1960. He served on its Executive Board
and his travails are chronicled in SNCC: The New Abolitionists
(1964). When in Hattiesburg in 1964 at the trial of Robert Moses, a
major civil rights organizer, Judge Mildred W. Norris demanded
courtroom seating be segregated. Dr. Zinn objected: "Your Honor, the
Supreme Court of the United States has ruled that segregated seating
in a courtroom is unconstitutional. Will you please abide by that
ruling." He was "astonished" with her acquiescence in allowing
interracial seating. (SNCC, 117-118)
Years before Bloody Sunday on March 7, 1965, Professor Zinn was in
Selma on Freedom Day in 1963 for a SNCC voter registration drive as
volunteers traversed dangerous country roads throughout the
South. Dr. Zinn was exasperated that Department of Justice officials
passively documented human-rights abuses. He asked a DOJ lawyer to
intervene directly and order state troopers to provide food and water
to arrested activists:
Is there any reason why a representative of the Justice Department
can't go over and talk to the state troopers and say these people are
entitled to food and water…There was a long pause. Then he said, "I
won't do it." He paused again. "I believe they do have the right to
receive food and water. But I won't do it." (SNCC, 162)
In the Zinn Files the FBI created an egregious investigative
category, "Communist infiltration of SNCC," and repeatedly referenced
Dr. Zinn's courageous activism in ending Jim Crow as his "racial
activities." In its release of the Zinn Files, the FBI candidly
conceded that he was surveilled because of "his criticism of the
FBI's civil rights investigations." The Zinn Files detail
extensively Professor Zinn's arrest on April 4, 1970 outside Boston
police headquarters while protesting the incarceration of Bobby
Seale, a founder of the Black Panther Party and one of the original
Chicago Eight defendants. Perhaps more than he knew, Dr. Zinn
declared that "America has been a police state for a long time." He
was arrested and fined $20. He refused to pay the fine and was
sentenced to jail at the rate of three dollars per day until its
equivalent was reached. Reminiscent of Thoreau, he spent a night in
jail and paid the remainder of his fine.
Professor Zinn wanted America to understand the history of
suffering. He was a bombardier in the 490th Bomb Group during World
War II. In The Politics of History he expressed remorse for the
bombing of Royan, France in April 1945, when napalm was first
deployed as a torture weapon. The killing of non-combatant French
civilians with indiscriminate, allied strategic bombing haunted Dr. Zinn.
In Disobedience and Democracy: Nine Fallacies on Law and Order (1968)
he contrasted the rhetoric of the Constitution with the Supreme
Court's frequent evisceration of First Amendment protection of speech
during war. He liberated students and faculty from the hagiography
of founding documents like the Constitution. Eugene Victor Debs,
presidential candidate, union organizer and socialist leader, was
incarcerated for condemning the draft during World War I. Charles
Schenck, general secretary of the Socialist Party, was imprisoned
during the war for distributing antiwar pamphlets. Dr. Zinn
confronts mainstream historiography in challenging Justice Oliver
Wendell Holmes's draconian application of the clear and present
danger doctrine. (Disobedience, 68-87)
He journeyed with Jesuit Father Daniel Berrigan, later of Catonsville
IX glory, on a rescue mission to Hanoi in February 1968. They
secured the first release of American prisoners of war who were shot
down over North Vietnam. They were Air Force Major Norris Miller
Overly, Air Force Captain John David Black and Navy Ensign David Paul
Matheny (Howard Zinn On War, 49-51; Zinn Files memorandum to Hoover,
February 16, 1968). This peace mission was coterminous with the epic
Tet offensive that presaged the withdrawal and defeat of U.S. forces
in 1973. I have a hunch he was selected for this humanitarian
undertaking because of his recently published Vietnam: The Logic of
Withdrawal (1967). Its final chapter, "A Speech for LBJ," was never
delivered and 58,226 Americans died in the war along with two to
three million Vietnamese. This is an excerpt:
We have not run out of planes, nor have we run out of bombs, nor
have we run out of the determination to use them when it is
wise. What we have run out of is the willingness to see more people
die under our bombs...It is time to call a halt...From now on, our
war will be on starvation and disease, on misery and
hopelessness…[H]uman life is sacred, peace is precious. (Emphasis in
original, 123-24)
Ron Kovic returned from Vietnam as a paraplegic. One of three
hundred thousand Americans wounded in this quasi-genocidal war, the
marine joined Vietnam Veterans Against the War and was arrested
during a protest. Professor Zinn cites Kovic's biography, Born on
the Fourth of July, a book that inspired Oliver Stone's Oscar-winning
film in 1989: "What's your name?" the officer behind the desk
says. "Ron Kovic," I say, "Occupation, Vietnam veteran against the
war." (An officer says): "You should have died over there…I'd like
to take this guy and throw him off the roof." (Twentieth Century,
248) Philip Supina, a graduate student in history at Boston
University, wrote his draft board an eloquent letter explaining his
reasons for refusing conscription during the Vietnam War. Signed
"Respectfully yours," Supina quoted Spanish philosopher Miguel
Unamuno: "Sometimes to be Silent is to Lie." He received a
four-year prison sentence. (Postwar America: 1945-1971, 221-22.)
By the late 1960s Howard Zinn was primarily engaged in antiwar
resistance. After Hoover's death President Richard Nixon named L.
Patrick Gray III as acting director of the FBI. Gray informed the
director of the Secret Service five weeks later on June 9, 1972 that
Dr. Zinn was "potentially dangerous because of background, emotional
instability or activity in groups engaged in activities inimical to
U.S." In the summer of 1972, mainly due to his opposition to the
Vietnam debacle, he is classified as "Howard ZinnSubversive." In
1974 this humanitarian is described as a "national militant spokesman
of the New Left." The word "militant" then as now is analogous to "terrorist."
In Twentieth Century, he declares: "The cry of the poor is not
always just, but if you don't listen to it, you will never know what
justice is." (xii) Professor Zinn experienced abject poverty. A
son of immigrants, his father completed the fourth grade and his
mother the seventh. He lived in roach-infested poverty without heat,
refrigerator or shower. Returning from school in the winter, it was
dark due to unpaid utility bills. (Declarations, 148-49) Howard
Zinn opposed interstate war, but supported aggressive class
resistance to growing immiseration in America. The Industrial
Workers of the Worldfounded in Chicago in 1905was marginalized by
liberal historians averse to anarcho-syndicalist, direct action
unionism against Smithian laissez-faire capitalism. Dr. Zinn
rendered spacious treatment to union activists who were imprisoned or
executed, such as the Wobblies' songwriter, organizer Joe Hill who
declared, "Don't waste any time in mourning. Organize." (People's
History, 335) Elizabeth Gurley Flynn's rap sheet is presented as a
panorama of class resistance in America: "Arrested in New York,
1906, free speech case, dismissed;...arrested Missoula, Montana,
1909, in free-speech fight of IWW...Arrested, Duluth, Minnesota,
1917, charged with vagrancy under law passed to stop IWW and pacifist
speakers, case dismissed; Indicted in Chicago IWW case,
1917." (Twentieth Century, 63)
Professor Zinn wrote three plays, each of which were produced: Emma,
after anarchist Emma Goldman; Daughter of Venus, an anti-nuclear
drama; and Marx in Soho: A Play on History (1999). Marx reappears in
New York's Soho district and lectures on classical Marxism's elegant
rejection of unbridled, competitive capitalism. At the end Marx intones:
Let's not speak anymore about capitalism, socialism. Let's just
speak of using the incredible wealth of the earth for human
beings. Give people what they need: food, medicine, clean air, pure
water, trees and grass, pleasant homes to live in, some hours of
work, more hours of leisure. Don't ask who deserves it. Every human
being deserves it. (Marx in Soho, 47)
In his overlooked edited anthology, New Deal Thought (1966),
Professor Zinn declared: "[W]e would like the past to speak wisely
to our present needs." (xv) The Zinn Files unwittingly chronicle a
quarter century of heroic, indefatigable service to humankind that
eloquently speaks to those needs. From his commitment to relieve
working-class misery in the 1940s, to his burgeoning role in the
civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, to his international
fame as antiwar advocate, to his emergence as a preeminent historian
of postwar America, the Zinn Files paradoxically create an extensive
biography of the life and times of an exemplary American.
He was a people's historian who heard the cries and whispers from the
past. But are we listening? If history is reserved for the powerful
and privileged, then past injustices will continue to haunt the
future. It is for us to continue Professor Howard Zinn's commitment
to resist unwarranted governmental intrusion, oppose war, level
devastating economic disparities confront racism and deconstruct the
past for social justice now.
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