by Howard Zinn
democracy that neither the commissars of the Soviet Union nor the corporate executives of
the United States and often not even the trade union leaders in these countries al ow today.
To make national decisions directly is not workable, but it is conceivable that a network of
direct democracy groups could register their opinions in a way that would result in some
national consensus. Lively participation and discussion of the issues by the citizenry would
be a better, more democratic, more reliable way of representing the population than the
present stiff, control ed system of electoral politics.
There is already experience with special democratic procedures. Many states have
provisions for initiatives and referenda. Citizens, by petition, can initiate legislation, cal for general referenda, change the laws and the Constitution. That leads to a lively discussion
among the public and something close to a real democratic decision. Except that so long as
there are wealthy corporations dominating the media with their money, they can virtual y
buy a referendum the way they now buy elections.
There is also the idea of proportional representation, so that instead of the two-party
system of Democrats and Republicans monopolizing power (after al , a two-party system is
only one party more than a one-party system), Socialists and Prohibitionists and
Environmentalists and Anarchists and Libertarians and others would have seats in
proportion to their fol owing. National television debates would show six points of view
instead of two.
The people who control wealth and power today do not want any real changes in the
system. For instance, when proportional representation was tried in New York City after
World War II and one or two Communists were elected to the City Council the system was
ended.) Also, when one radical congressman, Vito Marcantonio, kept voting against military
budgets at the start of the cold war era, but kept getting elected by his district time after
time, the rules were changed so that his opponent could run on three different tickets and
final y beat him.
206
Someone once put a sign on a bridge over the Charles River in Boston: If Voting Could Change Things, It Would Be Il egal. That suggests a reality. Tinkering with voting
procedures—proportional representation, initiatives, etc.—may be a bit helpful. But stil , in a
society so unequal in wealth, the rich wil dominate any procedure. It wil take fundamental
changes in the economic system and in the distribution of wealth to create an atmosphere
in which councils of people in workplaces and neighborhoods can meet and talk and make
something approximating democratic decisions.43
No changes in procedures, in structures, can make a society democratic. This is a hard thing
for us to accept, because we grow up in a technological culture where we think: If we can
only find the right mechanism, everything wil be okay, then we can relax. But we can't
relax. The experience of black people in America (also Indians, women, Hispanics, and the
poor) instructs us al . No Constitution, no Bil of Rights, no voting procedures, no piece of
legislation can assure us of peace or justice or equality. That requires a constant struggle, a continuous discussion among citizens, an endless series of organizations and movements,
creating a pressure on whatever procedures there are.
The black movement, like the labor movement, the women's movement, and the antiwar
movement, has taught us a simple truth: The official channels, the formal procedures of
representative government have been sometimes useful, but never sufficient, and have
often been obstacles, to the achievement of crucial human rights. What has worked in
history has been direct action by people engaged together, sacrificing, risking together, in a worthwhile cause.
Those who have had the experience know that, unlike the puny act of voting, being with
others in a great movement for social justice not only makes democracy come alive—it
makes the people engaged in it come alive. It is satisfying, it is pleasurable. Change is
difficult, but if it comes, that wil most likely be the way.
1 James Michener, "The Secret of America," Parade, Sept. 15, 1985.
2 "Remarks of Thurgood Marshal at the Annual Seminar of the San Francisco Patent and
Trademark Law Association in Maui, Hawai ," May 6, 1087.
3 Leon Litwack, "Trouble in Mind: The Bicentennial and the Afro-American Experience,"
Journal of American History (Sept. 1087).
4 John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, of which there are many editions. One of
them is Peter Laslett, ed., Locke's "Two Treatises of Government" (Cambridge University Press, 1969).
5 The political philosopher C. B. Macpherson analyzed Locke as a theorist of bourgeois
property rights in his book The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (Oxford
University Press, 1962).
6 This point is made in John Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke (Cambridge
University Press, 1969).
7 Federalist #10.
8 Federalist #63.
9 See Leon Litwack, North of Slavery (University of Chicago Press, 1961).
10 Various statements of black defiance in this and other periods of American history can be
found in Herbert Aptheker, A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States
(Citadel, 1973).
207
11 Ableman v. Booth, 21 Howard 506.
12 For excel ent accounts of the resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act, see James McPherson,
Battle Cry of Freedom, (Oxford University Press, 1988), 82-83.
13 Quoted by Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition (Vintage, 1974), 148.
14 Ibid., 169-170.
15 Alden Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement (The Free Press, 1985), traces the complex and fascinating roots of the civil rights movement.
16 Article on W. E. B. DuBois by Bob Hayden, Bay State Banner, Oct. 18, 1979.
17 For the description of DeLaine and the story of the Brown case, see Richard Kluger,
Simple Justice (Knopf, 1976). See also Wil iam Strickland, "The Road Since Brown," The Black Scholar, (Sept.-Oct. 1979).
18 Quoted by John Hope Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom (Knopf, 1967), 556. Also in
Strickland, "The Road Since Brown."
19 Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education, 396 U.S. 19 (1969). The Nixon
administration had tried to delay court-ordered desegregation of thirty-three Mississippi
school districts, and the Supreme Court was unanimous in insisting that segregation must
be ended "at once."
20 This was reported by Martin Luther King, Jr. The phrase became the title of an excel ent
volume of oral histories of participants in the civil rights movement by Howel Raines, My
Soul Is Rested (Putnam, 1977).
21 Browder v. Gayle 352 U.S. 903 (1956).
22 Wil iam H. Chafe, in his book Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina, and
the Black Struggle for Freedom (Oxford University Press, 1080), makes clear how "civility"
was not enough to change racial practices in Greensboro, how protest brought some
progress (by the spring of 1063 approximately 2,000 Greensboro blacks were marching in
the streets; at one point 1,400 were in jail).
23 Civil Rights Cases 109 U.S. 3 (1883).
24 Ralph McGil , The South and the Southerner (Little, Brown, 1964).
25 See the ch
apter "Out of the Sit-ins" in Howard Zinn, SNCC: The New Abolitionists
(Greenwood Press, 1985).
26 Howard Zinn, Albany: A Study in National Responsibility (Southern Regional Council,
1962).
27 Howard Zinn, "Registration in Alabama," New Republic, Oct. 26, 1963.
28 In their account of the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, The Longest Debate (Seven
Locks Press, 1985), Charles and Barbara Whalen make clear that these demonstrations
played a crucial role in changing Kennedy's mind about the need for a new civil rights law.
29 Post Mortem Examination Report of the Body of James Cbaney, by David Spain, M.D. (in
my personal files).
30 See Seth Cagin and Philip Dray, We Are Not Afraid: The Story of Goodman, Scbwerner,
and Cbaney and the Civil Rights Campaign for Mississippi (Macmil an, 1988).
31 Mary King, Freedom Song (Wil iam Morrow, 1987), 377-398.
208
32 Quoted by David Garrow, Protest at Selma: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Voting Rights
Act of 1965 (Yale University Press, 1978), 61.
33 Ibid., 236.
34 Ibid., 235.
35 On the Watts riots, see Robert Conot, Rivers of Blood, Years of Darkness (Wil iam Morrow, 1968). On the 1967 and 1968 uprisings, see the report of the National Advisory Committee
on Civil Disorders. (Bantam, 1968).
36 Conor Cruise O'Brien, "Virtue and Terror," New York Review of Books, Sept. 26, 1985.
37 Robert Michels, Political Parties (Free Press, 1966).
38 From the election of 1060 (Kennedy v. Nixon) to the election of 1988 (Dukakis v. Bush),
there was a steady decline in voting, from 63 percent of the eligible voters, to exactly 50
percent.
39 See Philip M. Stern, The Best Congress Money Can Buy (Pantheon, 1988).
40 Emma Goldman, "Woman Suffrage," in Anarchism and Other Essays (Dover, 1969), 195-211.
41 Philip Foner, ed., Helen Hel er: Her Socialist Years (International Publishers, 1967).
42 Her approach is evaluated, pro and con, in John F. Sitton, "Hannah Arendt's Argument for
Council Democracy," Polity (Fal 1987).
43 It is the anarchists (Kropotkin, Bakunin, Emma Goldman, and Alexander Berkman) who
have been the most eloquent critics of traditional representative government as fal ing short
of democracy and who have been the strongest advocates of direct action. Note Goldman's
dismissal of the Woman's Suffrage Amendment and her insistence that women have to
achieve equality by asserting themselves directly in every immediate situation—family,
work, society—they find themselves in.
Marx himself, I believe, would agree with the anarchist critique, and be dismayed by what
so-cal ed socialist societies have instituted as methods of government—representative
assemblies that are many steps removed from direct popular rule. Marx's most interesting
writing in this area is in his Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right. His language is
somewhat difficult: Political life "is the scholasticism of a people's life… . The republic is the negation of alienation within alienation." But he clearly wants to end "political life" as a separate sphere, wants what he cal s "civil society" to merge with "the political state." He speaks of "the greatest possible universalization of voting, of active as wel as passive
suffrage."
209
Ten
Communism and Anti-communism
In 1948 a series of pamphlets was distributed by the House Committee on Un-American
Activities titled: One Hundred Things You Should Know about Communism. There were 100
questions and answers.
Question 1: "What is Communism?"
Answer: "A system by which one smal group seeks to rule the world."
When I came across this in my files (the committee probably had files on me, so it seemed
to me I should have files on them), I thought these men had taken an advanced course in
political theory, also in expository writing, to be able to sum up such a complicated theory in
so few words.
Skipping a number of questions, we come to:
Question 76: "Where can a Communist be found in everyday life?" (This
question interested me because there had been times when I was in need of a
Communist, and didn't know where to find one.)
Answer: "Look for him in your school, your labor union, your church, or your
civic club (Real y, everywhere.)"
Question 86: "Is the YMCA a Communist target?"
Answer: "Yes, so is the YWCA."
Anti-communism is part of the dominant American ideology. I am not speaking of a rational
critique of communism or of countries that are cal ed Communist. I mean by
anticommunism a hysterical fear that has led the United States to spy on its own citizens, to invade other countries, to tax the hard-earned salaries of Americans to pay for tril ions of
dol ars of monstrous weapons.
That hysteria is not just historical fact, going back to the 1950s and what is cal ed
"McCarthyism." It continues. In 1987 Robert McFarlane, national security adviser to
President Reagan, said that he was opposed to sending arms il egal y to the contras, but
"where I was wrong was not having the guts to stand up and tel the President that… .
Because if I'd done that, Bil Casey (CIA director), Jeane Kirkpatrick (ambassador to the
United Nations), and Cap Weinberger (secretary of defense) would have said I was some
kind of commie, you know."1
The national security adviser to President Reagan "some kind of commie"? A bizarre idea.
But perhaps McFarlane knew the extent of his boss's paranoia. Reagan, campaigning for the
presidency in 1980, summed up the world situation: "Let us not delude ourselves. The
Soviet Union underlies al the unrest that is going on. If they weren't engaged in this game
of dominoes, there wouldn't be any hot spots in the world."
Twenty years earlier, in 1960, ex-President Harry Truman reacted to the lunch counter sit-
ins of black students in the South by tel ing an audience at Cornel University that they were
inspired by Communists. When he was asked for proof of this, Truman said he had none.
"But I know that usual y when trouble hits the country the Kremlin is behind it."
Anti-communism goes back at least to the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. But it became very
intense after World War II, when another huge country, China, had a Communist revolution,
and when the cold war with the Soviet Union was taking the form of a reckless buildup of
weapons on both sides.
210
In that time, we came to expect bizarre things. For instance, Congressman Harold Velde of Il inois, a former FBI man and later chair of the House Un-American Activities Committee,
spoke in the House in March 1950 opposing mobile library service in rural areas because, he
said; "Educating Americans through the means of the library service could bring about a
change of their political attitude quicker than any other method. The basis of Communism
and socialistic influence is education of the people."
It was not just the junior senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy, who was spreading wild
fears about communism. The young congressman from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy,
reacted to the Communist victory in China by saying; "The House must now assume the
responsibility of preventing the onrushing tide of Communism from engulfing al of Asia."2
Talk of spies and traitors fil ed the air in the 1950s. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were
/>
executed, found guilty of passing atomic secrets to Russian agents, although it is clear that
even if they did the data were of minor value and the death sentence viciously cruel. There
is on the record an extraordinary statement made after their deaths by General Leslie
Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, to a secret meeting of the Atomic Energy
Commission. Groves said; "I think that the data that went out in the case of the Rosenbergs
was of minor value. I would never say that publicly … . I should think it should be kept very
quiet, because … the Rosenbergs deserved to hang."3
It also appears, on the basis of FBI documents subpoenaed in the 1970s, that the death
sentence was prepared for them in advance by col usion between the judge and the
prosecution, and that the chief justice of the Supreme Court assured the attorney general
he would cal a ful court session to override any single justice's stay of execution (which is
what happened, after Justice Wil iam O. Douglas granted a last-minute stay).
The atmosphere of anti-communism spawned al sorts of odd incidents. A navy ensign was
refused a commission in the naval reserve because he continued "closely to associate" with a former Communist—his mother. A young music teacher in Washington, D.C., was refused
a license to sel secondhand pianos because he had pleaded the Fifth Amendment before the
House Un-American Activities Committee.4
In 1947 an art exhibition, "Advancing American Art," which opened in Europe to rave
reviews, was canceled by the State Department on the grounds that it was "un-American"
and "radical." The artists Georgia O'Keeffe, Ben Shahn, and Robert Motherwel were among
those whose work was in the exhibit. Michigan Congressman George Dondero said, "Modern
art is Communistic because it is distorted and ugly, because it does not glorify our beautiful
country… . [It] breeds dissatisfaction … and those who create and promote it are our
enemies."
The textbook commissioner of Indianapolis said the story of Robin Hood (who stole from the
rich and gave to the poor) should be removed from schools because, as she put it: "There is
a Communist directive now to stress the story of Robin Hood."5
Hol ywood actors were threatened with blacklisting if they did not give the names of people
