by Howard Zinn
In Minneapolis that same year, seven "trespassers" protesting at the Honeywell Corporation were acquitted. In 1985, men and women blocked the Great Lakes Training Station in Illinois, others blocked the South African Embassy in Chicago, nineteen people in the state of Washington halted trains carrying warheads, and all these won acquittals in court. Last year in western Massachusetts, where a protest against the CIA took place, there was another surprising acquittal. One of the jurors, Donna L. Moody, told a reporter: "All the expert testimony against the CIA was alarming. It was very educational."
Over the past six years, eighteen "Plowshares" actions, involving symbolic sabotage of nuclear weaponry, have resulted mostly in guilty verdicts. In the latest case, involving two Catholic priests and two others who broke into a naval air station near Philadelphia and damaged three aircraft, the judge refused the defense of "necessity" but allowed the jury to hear the defendants' reasons for their actions. The jury was unable to reach a verdict.
Several years ago, when Reagan announced the blockade of Nicaragua, 550 of us sat-in at the federal building in Boston to protest, and were arrested. It seemed too big a group of dissidents to deal with, and charges were dropped. When I received my letter, I saw for the first time what the official complaint against all of us was: "Failure to Quit." That is, surely, the critical fact about the continuing movement for human rights here and all over the world.
We hear many glib dismissals of today's college students as being totally preoccupied with money and self. In fact, there is much concern among students with their economic futures—evidence of the failure of the economic system to provide for the young, more than a sign of their indifference to social injustice. But the past few years have seen political actions on campuses all over the country. For 1986 alone, a partial list shows: 182 students, calling for divestment from South Africa, arrested at the University of Texas; a black-tie dinner for alumni at Harvard called off after a protest on South African holdings; charges dropped against 49 Wellesley protesters after half the campus boycotted classes in support; and more protests recorded at Yale, Wisconsin, Louisville, San Jose, Columbia.
But what about the others, the non-protesting students? Among the liberal arts students, business majors, and ROTC cadets who sit in my classes, there are super-patriots and enthusiasts of capitalism, but also others, whose thoughts deserve some attention:
Writing in his class journal, one ROTC student, whose father was a navy flier, his brother a navy commander: "This one class made me go out and read up on South Africa. What I learned made me sick. My entire semester has been a paradox. I go to your class and I see a Vietnam vet named Joe Bangert tell of his experiences in the war. I was enthralled by his talk...By the end of that hour and a half I hated the Vietnam war as much as he did. The only problem is that three hours after that class I am marching around in my uniform...and feeling great about it. Is there something wrong with me? Am I being hypocritical? Sometimes I don't know..."
Young woman in ROTC: "What really stuck in my mind was the ignorance some people displayed at the end of class. We were discussing welfare. Some students stated that people on welfare were lazy, that if they really wanted to, they could find jobs. Argg! These rich kids (or middle class or whatever) who have all they need and think they're so superior make me angry..."
The same student, after seeing the film Hearts and Minds: "General Westmoreland said 'Orientals don't value lives.' I was incredulous. And then they showed the little boy holding the picture of his father and he was crying and crying and crying...I must admit I started crying. What's worse was that I was wearing my Army uniform that day and I had to make a conscious effort not to disappear in my seat."
Young woman in the School of Management: "North broke the law, but will he be punished?... If he is let off the hook then all of America is punished. Every inner-city kid who is sent to jail for stealing food to feed his brothers and sisters is punished. Every elderly person who has to fight just to keep warm on a winter night will be punished.... The law is supposed to be on the common bond—the peace making body. Yet it only serves the function selectively—just when the people in control wish it to."
Surely history does not start anew with each decade. The roots of one era branch and flower in subsequent eras. Human beings, writings, invisible transmitters of all kinds, carry messages across the generations. I try to be pessimistic, to keep up with some of my friends. But I think back over the decades, and look around. And then, it seems to me that the future is not certain, but it is possible.
Suggestions for Further Reading
Some suggestions for further reading (I am not giving a formal listing of publishers, dates, and places because public libraries can easily locate books by title and/or author):
On Race:
I believe the most useful things to read on what Cornel West calls "race matters" (while making the point that race matters) are the writings of African-Americans themselves. My own first experience as a teenager, was with Richard Wright's Native Son, a startling introduction to the connection between two kinds of crime: those committed by black people out of desperation; those committed by a system of racial and class injustice. Years later, I read Richard Wright's Black Boy. That belongs to a group of books that takes you inside the growing-up experiences of black people, revealed in their autobiographical writings. You can go back to slave experiences, as in The Autobiography of Frederick Douglass, and then on to this century: W.E.B. Du Bois' Souls of Black Folk, Zora Neale Hurston's Dust Tracks on a Road; Alice Walker's essays, In Search of Our Mothers Gardens, Langston Hughes' The Big Sea and I Wonder as I Wander, and Malcolm X's Autobiography. Bringing it into the civil rights era, James Farmer's Lay Bare the Heart. African-American poetry should be read, not only that by Langston Hughes, but by Countee Cullen, Alice Walker, and others (Arna Bontemps' collection, American Negro Poetry, is excellent). There are the novels of Toni Morrison and Octavia Butler, the extraordinary stories and novels of Toni Cade Bambara, the plays of Leroi Jones and August Wilson.
There are many histories of the civil rights movement. I would recommend the oral histories collected by Henry Hampton and Steve Fayer (of the great television series Eyes on the Prize), Voices of Freedom, as well as those in Howell Raines' My Soul is Rested. Also, the interviews of their parents and grandparents done by Mississippi schoolchildren, Minds Stayed on Freedom. There is a wonderful photographic memoir by Danny Lyon, Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement.
Two splendid biographies stand out: David Levering Lewis' W.E.B. Du Bois (though it only goes up to 1919), and Martin Duberman's Paul Robeson. And a collection of documents ranging through American history, Gerda Lerner's Black Women in White America.
For a general history of African-Americans, there is an indispensable reference work: the three volumes of Herbert Aptheker's A Documentary History of the Negro People in the U.S. John Hope Franklin's From Slavery to Freedom is a classic.
For the history of Latino people, I would recommend the remarkable dual-language book, photos and text by Elizabeth Martinez, 500 Years of Chicano History. And Ronald Takaki's multicultural history, A Different Mirror.
On Class:
Perhaps the first book I read that spoke to my own working class upbringing was by Upton Sinclair: The Jungle. Then, John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, which, years later, gave my students a better feel for the depression than any non-fiction account of the Thirties. Studs Terkel's Hard Times is a fascinating set of interviews with people who remember the depression years. When I began to study American history, I came across Charles Beard's An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution, which gave me a powerful insight into the class character of the American Revolution. For that period, I would also recommend Gary Nash's Class and Society in Early America. There is a set of essays by American scholars, The American Revolution, edited by Alfred Young, which contributes to this approach.
Matthew Josephson's books, The Robber Barons and The Politicos, expose
the close ties between corporate power and political power in the late nineteenth century. Douglas Dowd gives us a charming, radical economic history from 1919 to the 1990s in his memoir, Blues for America. One of the first books I read that gave me an idea of the rich complexity and drama of labor history, from the great railroad strikes of 1877 to the San Francisco general strike of 1934, was Samuel Yellen's American Labor Struggles.
Important to me, as I was becoming conscious of the crucial question of class, was to read Karl Marx's The Communist Manifesto, as well as the first volume of Capital (I did read the second and third volumes, but mercy requires that I not push them). Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy's Monopoly Capital, applies Marxian analysis to the United States after World War II.
Without presenting itself explicitly as a class analysis of American history, Richard Hofstadter's The American Political Tradition made clear how behind the sparring of the major political parties throughout the country's history there was a basic consensus around the capitalist system.
On War:
The first blow to my youthful awe of martial heroism came when I was eighteen or so and read Walter Millis' The Road to War, a devastating critique of our nation's entrance into World War I. But probably the most powerful influences that, for me, turned the glamour of war into unmitigated horror were novels: Henry Barbusse's Under Fire, Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, and even more, Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun, all part of the revulsion that came after the first World War.
Despite my enthusiastic participation in World War II as an Air Force bombardier, it did not take long after the war to begin to reconsider the question of whether any war, even that "best of wars" (as I termed it, ironically, in one of my essays later) was justified. Probably the first piece of writing that turned me in that direction was John Hersey'sHiroshima. Later, the novels Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, and Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, fit perfectly into my now-cynical view of that war.
My studies and teaching in American history, giving me a close look at U.S. foreign policy, persuaded me that our military interventions abroad, in Latin America, in the Pacific, were part of the empire-building among the Western nations, for reasons of political power and corporate profit. William Appleman Williams' The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, was an early influence. For books on Vietnam, I would recommend Marilyn Young's vibrant, powerful history, The Vietnam Wars. On U.S. foreign policy since the inception of the cold war, there is no better guide than the writings of Noam Chomsky. I will just mention a few of his books: Necessary Illusions, Deterring Democracy, and Manufacturing Consent (the latter written with Edward Herman).
For alternatives to war, there are a number of books by Gene Sharp, especially The Politics of Non-Violent Direct Action.
On Law:
I became aware of the injustice built into our legal system— against the poor, against blacks, against foreigners, against radicals—for the first time about the case of Sacco & Vanzetti. Indeed, it was a novel by Upton Sinclair, Boston, which introduced me to that dramatic moment in our history. Then I read a fascinating book by Louis Joughin and Edmund Morgan, The Legacy of Sacco and Vanzetti. I was introduced to the trial of the eight anarchists in the Haymarket Affair of 1886 by reading the novel by Howard Fast, The American. That led me to a book on the Haymarket events by Henry David, The Haymarket Affair. The name Clarence Darrow came up again and again in the trials of radicals and labor leaders, and I would recommend a collection of his addresses to the jury, Clarence Darrow for the Defense.
To get a picture of how American law, through the 19th century, began more and more to benefit the rich and powerful, one should read Harvard law professor Morton Hurwitz's The Transformation of American Law. On the trials of anti-war protesters in World War I, there is the classic by Zecchariah Chafee, Free Speech in the United States. A good survey of the anti-Communist hysteria of the cold war period is in David Caute's The Great Fear.
On issues of civil disobedience, there is the classic essay by Henry David Thoreau, On Civil Disobedience. Also, the writings of Tolstoy on this subject, when he had decided to stop writing novels and turn his attention to social issues, are collected in On Civil Disobedience and Nonviolence. I found philosophical grounding for ideas on civil disobedience in Albert Camus' The Rebel. Martin Luther King's Letter from the Birmingham City Jail is a passionate defense of civil disobedience.
On History:
I had not thought much about the social role of the historian until I read Robert Lynd's Knowledge for What? Alfred North Whitehead's The Aims of Education explores such questions too. Another thoughtful book about the problems of writing history (objectivity, morality, science, etc.) is the book by the British historian E.H. Carr, What is History?
In the early 20th century, an American writer, James Harvey Robinson, wrote a provocative book on this subject, The New History. There is an excellent collection of essays by Hans Meyerhoff, The Philosophy of History in Our Time. And a superb book by Peter Novick on the issue of objectivity among historians, That Noble Dream.
In the Sixties, Jesse Lemisch, a young radical historian, wrote a biting critique of the historical profession: On Active Service in War and Peace. There are certain historians who represent for me the ideal joining of impeccable research and social conscience. One is the British historian E.P. Thompson, who wrote The Making of the English Working Class. Another is an American, Richard Drinnon, as in his brilliant book about American expansionism, Facing West.
On Means and Ends:
I became interested in anarchist thought in the Sixties, when I read Richard Drinnon's biography of Emma Goldman, Rebel in Paradise. This led me to her own marvelous autobiography, Living My Life, and to her essays and speeches, collected in Anarchism and Other Essays. Her lifelong friend Alexander Berkman, after spending fourteen years in prison for the attempted murder of the industrialist Henry Clay Frick, wrote the classic Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist. He also wrote one of the best short explanations of anarchism in his pamphlet-book The ABC of Anarchism. Selections from these books and from his letters can be found in the volume edited by Gene Fellner, Life of an Anarchist. The Russian anarchistanthropologist Peter Kropotkin has had a group of his essays printed in Revolutionary Pamphlets.
George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia gives a fascinating account of what happened in Barcelona at the start of the Spanish Civil War when anarchists took over the city. This suggested a possible model of what a good society would be like, and I found an earlier possible model in the Paris Commune of 1871. There is a first person account of that remarkable event by Lissagaray, History of the Commune of 1871, and a later analysis by Frank Jellinek, The Paris Commune of 1871.
Staughton and Alice Lynd have put together an extraordinary collection, Non-Violence in America, which traces non-violent thought and action from the earliest days to the present. There is an older collection on this subject, international in scope, edited by Mulford Sibley, The Quiet Battle.
Also by Howard Zinn:
LaGuardia in Congress (Cornell University Press, 1959)
The Southern Mystique (Alfred Knopf, 1964)
SNCC: The New Abolitionists (Beacon Press, 1964)
New Deal Thought, ed. (Bobbs Merrill, 1965)
Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal (Beacon Press, 1967)
Disobedience and Democracy (Random House, 1968)
The Politics of History (Beacon Press, 1970)
The Pentagon Papers: Critical Essays, ed. with Noam Chomsky (Beacon Press, 1972)
Postwar America (Bobbs Merrill, 1973)
Justice in Everyday Life, ed. (William Morrow, 1974)
A People's History of the United States (Harper & Row, 1980)
The Twentieth Century: A Peoples History (HarperCollins, 1984)
Declarations of Independence: Cross-Examining American Ideology (HarperCollins, 1990)
Failure to Quit: Reflections of an Optimistic Historian (Common Courage Press, 1993)
You Can't Be N
eutral on a Moving Train (Beacon Press, 1994)
HOWARD ZINN grew up in the immigrant slums of Brooklyn where he worked in shipyards in his late teens. He saw combat duty as an air force bombardier in World War II, and afterward received his doctorate in history from Columbia University and was a postdoctoral Fellow in East Asian Studies at Harvard University. His first book, La Guardia in Congress, was an Albert Beveridge Prize winner. In 1956, he moved with his wife and children to Atlanta to become chairman of the history department of Spelman College. His experiences there led to his second book, The Southern Mystique. As a participant-observer in the founding activities of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, he spent time in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, and wrote SNCC: The New Abolitionists. As part of the American Heritage series, he edited New Deal Thought, an anthology. His fifth and six books, Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal, and Disobedience and Democracy, were written in the midst of his participation in intense antiwar activity. In 1968, he flew to Hanoi with Father Daniel Berrigan to receive the first three American fliers released by North Vietnam. Two years later came The Politics of History. In 1972 he edited, with Noam Chomsky, The Pentagon Papers: Critical Essays. In 1973 appeared Postwar America. In 1974 he edited Justice in Everyday Life. In 1980 came his epic masterpiece, A People's History of the United States, "a brilliant and moving history of the American people from the point of view of those who have been exploited politically and economically and whose plight has been largely omitted from most histories" (Library Journal). Recent books by Zinn include Declarations of Independence: Cross-Examining American Ideology and You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times. Professor emeritus of political science at Boston University, Zinn has also written three plays, Emma, Daughter of Venus, and Marx in Soho. He lives with his wife Roslyn in the Boston area, near their children and grandchildren.
