Sun, 31 Jan 2010 11:10:46 +0000

I remember vividly the first time I met Howard Zinn. It was 2005 and the height of the murder and mayhem overtaking Iraq after the US/UK attack. I was studying history for a year at UCLA and had gone over to the East Coast for a week to interview three of the great dissidents in the country – Zinn, Noam Chomsky and Edward S Herman – for the Leeds Student newspaper.

Though a good publication, Leeds Student isn’t exactly the New Yorker, but Zinn agreed to the interview straight away, no questions asked. His only request was that we meet at the Harvard Trade Union Program, so I trundled along there on a cold November morning. His personal warmth was – as Victoria Brittain mentioned – renowned, but the strength of its radiation still struck me when I met him. He smiled and bantered and encouraged. I told him I had just watched the documentary about his life, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train, the night before in my hostel. “I bet you got it free off the internet didn’t you! Everyone does that nowadays,” he joked in the lift (it was true).

Towards the end of the interview our roles reversed and he started to ask me what I thought of the war and the political situation in the UK, something the majority of careerist, conceited academics are rarely wont to do. But this was what made Zinn sui generis: a voracious intellect but, crucially, one deeply immersed in the world around him. He saw everyone as a source from which to learn, and it was this quality that made him such a brilliant historian. He was, in the truest sense of an overused phrase, a man of the people.

It is no surprise, then, that he singlehandedly turned American historiography on its head by adducing the forgotten histories of the marginalised, colonised and abused to weave a work of true brilliance. Published in 1980, A People’s History of the United States, was, for me as an undergraduate history student, a complete revelation. I was growing bored with the stale tutorials on the Annalist school, discussions so abstract as to be dispiritingly divorced from the increasingly mad world we were living in. Then there were the fatuous forums on “What is history?” where we debated objectivity and truth and managed to miss the point of it all.

Zinn’s work saved me though. He provided many of the answers, subverting the “received wisdom” with ease and piercing simplicity. I still remember reading the first chapter of People’s History on Columbus Day in the US after a friend had recommended it. Zinn had carefully laid out the barbarity of the first Spanish colonists led by Columbus in their own words. The history he told made the celebrations for this “great explorer” seem truly sick.

Zinn was also saying explicitly something I had been thinking but never had the confidence to say: “My work, like everyone else’s, is subjective”. He wasn’t afraid to admit it. At university we were taught to revere the great historians who provided the “truthful” account of the past. But, said Zinn, everything was and is subjective, and not benignly subjective either. History had since its inception been skewed in the service of power, status and money. This was explicit in the days of the court historians, paid by the Crown to write their hagiographies, but it continues to this days with elite universities such as Harvard giving their most prestigious history chairs to people such as Niall Ferguson, who has put his mind in the service of entrenched power since the start of his career, while spurning the excavators of real truth such as Zinn.

But while it’s obvious that people will focus on his greatest work, Zinn’s life was indistinguishable from the great struggles that overtook America in the 20th century (at 87, he lived for about a quarter of the entire life of the American Republic). He was a lecturer at Spelman College, the most famous black university in the South, when he joined his students in civil disobedience actions during the civil rights movement and was eventually kicked out. He was one of the leaders of the anti-Vietnam war movement that mobilised a generation, and spoke out against the trophy cabinet of fascist security states the administrations from Nixon to Reagan established and nurtured in Latin America through the back end of the cold war.

Where the American liberal elite were wavering and equivocating in the face of these barbarisms, Zinn could be relied upon to speak up and provide the historical context to the contemporary atrocities. His last article for the Nation last month on Obama’s first year is a good example and should be read by anyone interested in the latest liberal hysteria.

Zinn’s many detractors in the history profession accused him of “propaganda” and “bias”. It is true that his aversion to war was emotional as well as intellectual. But why is that considered a negative?

He had been a bombardier during the Second World War and dropped bombs over France. He was wracked with guilt that he would never know who those munitions had killed. He knew what many pro-war commentators and academics seemingly don’t: War is hell, and there should be an impossibly high burden of proof to unleash this terror.

His closest British analogue was the activist-historian, E.P. Thompson, the author of the seminal The Making of the English Working Class, a man who was similarly involved in contemporary struggles while revolutionizing how we see our past, two pursuits that are inextricably linked.

The intellectual experience I had with Zinn’s ideas is one I know millions of American kids will continue to have. For making us see that history is ours and that its abuse is the first stage along the road to war and injustice he lived a truly valuable life.  Milan Kundera wrote, “The struggle of people against power is the struggle of truth against forgetting”. Zinn made sure we won’t, and they can’t, forget.

Howard Zinn, 87, an activist historian whose “People’s History of the United States” resurrected neglected stories of the country’s past and became a surprise bestseller in the 1980s and beyond, died Jan. 27 of an apparent heart attack in a swimming pool in Santa Monica, Calif., where he was on a speaking tour.

First published in 1980 with a print run of just 5,000 copies, the book sold more than 2 million copies, including condensations such as “The 20th Century” and “A Young People’s History of the United States.” In writing about the economics of the slave trade, the effect of robber barons on ordinary people, the violence against the American labor movement and the long struggles of the women’s movement, Dr. Zinn provided an alternative to the then dominant “dead white male” version of history.

The approach resonated with readers, who by word of mouth drove it to bestseller status. Dr. Zinn, who had taught at Boston University since 1964, focused “not on the achievements of the heroes of traditional history, but on all those people who were the victims of those achievements, who suffered silently or fought back magnificently,” as he said in the preface to one edition.

“His writings have changed the consciousness of a generation, and helped open new paths to understanding and its crucial meaning for our lives,” Noam Chomsky, the left-wing activist and MIT professor, wrote of his friend. “When action has been called for, one could always be confident that he would be on the front lines, an example and trustworthy guide.”

Dr. Zinn’s best-known book became a text in high schools and colleges and was endorsed by a former neighbor, actor Matt Damon, in the Academy Award-winning film “Good Will Hunting.”

But it was not universally appreciated. Historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., generally considered a liberal, called Dr. Zinn a polemicist rather than a scholar. Other critics, though acknowledging his originality, said Dr. Zinn was both too left-wing in his view of history and too selective, leaving religious and technological thinkers out of his synthesis.

He fully agreed. Traditional American history, he noted, had neglected the stories of workers, women, minorities and those who are not considered society’s winners in power or wealth. His work was a starting point to correct that imbalance, he said. Christopher Columbus committed genocide against the Arawak Indians, he wrote, and World War I brought repression and prison to American dissidents. President Franklin D. Roosevelt was not the unalloyed hero of the working man depicted in popular history.

“There is no such thing as impartial history,” he told biographers Deb Ellis and Denis Mueller. “The chief problem in historical honesty isn’t outright lying. It is omission or de-emphasis of important data.”

He was well prepared for the job of documenting and popularizing an alternative version of history. A civil rights agitator since his days as history chairman at Atlanta’s Spelman College, he was one of two adult advisers to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and wrote a 1964 book about the group. He wrote one of the first anti-Vietnam War books, “Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal” (1967), and accompanied radical priest Daniel Berrigan to Hanoi in 1968 to secure the release of three U.S. bomber pilots who had been shot down. Dr. Zinn was jailed more than a half-dozen times for civil disobedience.

Daniel Ellsberg, the former Rand Corp. analyst who leaked a secret history of the Vietnam War to Congress and the press, called Dr. Zinn his hero. In his own book about the Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg noted that Dr. Zinn had hidden copies of the Pentagon Papers for him when the FBI was expected to raid Ellsberg’s apartment.

In December, Dr. Zinn was an executive producer and narrator of a History Channel documentary, “The People Speak,” in which a cast of Hollywood celebrities read first-person historical documents such as Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman” and socialist Eugene Debs’s call to activism. Dr. Zinn, an outspoken opponent of the Iraq war, wrote a short essay for the Nation magazine last week critiquing President Obama’s first year in office.

[Washington Post]