Remembering Howard Zinn

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Socialist Action march 2010 11 Howard Zinn, historian and author of the renowned “A People’s History of the United States” and other books and essays, died on Jan. 27. I trudged anxiously up the stairs of Boston Uni- n 1971, I was a nervous 19-year-old who versity’s Political Science Department on Bay State Road for a meeting with Howard Zinn. My task was to obtain his agreement to serve as faculty advisor for the newly formed Young Socialist Alliance (YSA) chapter at B.U. I had prepared what I hoped would be a compelling series of arguments with someone who I feared might not be friendly, considering our political differences. Zinn’s political outlook was a mix of Marxism, New Left theory, and anarchism, which often did not align with the Trotskyist views of the YSA. Nonetheless, he was the professor we counted on to help us even though he did not share our perspectives. Zinn’s official signature that day on a BU form would do him no good with the administration, of course. He must have realized it. After all, in the 1960s, when he insisted that Atlanta’s Spelman College take a role in the struggle for civil rights, he was fired for “insubordination.” Later, in Boston, his willingness, his compulsion, to speak up on issues that confronted the campus and the country at large would make him a target for the local police and college bureaucrats. Before too long, university president John Silber would freeze the salary (denying pay raises) of Zinn and a handful of his colleagues as a matter of course.

None of these risks were of any concern to Professor Zinn. Nor was there any need for my well-rehearsed appeals. He agreed cheerfully and readily to help us with his signature, which enabled our YSA chapter to make use of BU facilities for a variety of activities. That we would be trying mightily to recruit to an organization with which he had some disagreement made not a bit of difference. The important point for Zinn was that we were on the same side of the struggle against the Vietnam War; we called for an end to class oppression, for socialism—that was agreement enough. We were, in the larger sense of the term, comrades. Zinn acted on one of his core principles: nonsectarian support to people motivated to act against a powerful, corrupt, and dehumanizing social system. And so, Zinn was glad to assist us as a step in aiding the larger struggle for political and economic justice. Zinn always supported that larger struggle. He walked picket lines, he sat-in, he got arrested. He was often a keynote speaker at antiwar rallies and teach-ins, large or small. His speaking style was personal, conversational, and quite effective. He could address thousands as if he were chatting with a few friends. He used humor frequently to drive home the principled points about which he was deadly serious.

After his retirement from BU, Zinn became Boston ’s “professor-at-large,” writing even more frequently and speaking even more often. He was a featured speaker at a Harvard University rally in support of the P-9 union in its strike against the Hormel meatpacking company. There, Zinn situated the strike in the context of American labor history, linking it to past victories and even more recent defeats. Above all, he counseled the audience to listen to the stories that the P-9 workers brought of their struggle. It was in the accounts of everyday people, he said, where history was really being made.

Zinn also spoke to high school students throughout the country, especially after the publication of “A People’s History of the United States,” which was taken up by secondary school teachers everywhere.

Twenty years after he agreed to help the YSA at BU, Zinn agreed to speak to a class of my high school students. The history teacher and I had worked out a special assignment together. Students would read three conflicting historical accounts of the Columbus discovery of the New World, including one from Zinn. Students would then write an analysis of these accounts, explaining why they felt one version of history to be more accurate than the others. The finished assignments were sent to Professor Zinn, who read them and came to speak with the class about their essays.

As expected, Zinn’s talk was conversational, friendly, and humorous as well as insightful. It was no trouble for him to connect with a teen-age audience. I was also, struck, though, by his generosity. When one young woman, eager to impress, cited Hobbes on human nature, she mispronounced his name as “Hobbies.” This error drew the immediate and predictable response from classmates: derisive laughter.

Zinn did not ignore the situation or even chastise the students. There was no condescending smile from him. He simply told the young woman, “It’s okay. He’s not alive and he won’t mind how we pronounce his name.” Then he encouraged her to continue with her question. In this unscripted moment, Zinn’s kind response countered the sarcasm of her classmates and gave her the encouragement she needed to continue. It was a simple gesture, humane, and profoundly right. So much that is essential to good teaching spontaneously revealed itself in that brief exchange.

No wonder, then, that when I recently found myself writing a polemic for Socialist Action newspaper against Zinn’s critical endorsement of Barack Obama’s candidacy, my criticisms were presented in a tone that was respectful and comradely. After all, I was following Zinn’s own example.

Now that Howard Zinn has died, now that the voice of an outstanding public intellectual who nourished the spirit of opposition in the United States is finally silenced, it still seems like a good idea to follow his example. Some instances immediately spring to mind. Zinn wrote often about the Constitution and especially the First Amendment. His fundamental idea, expressed in his 1968 book, “Disobedience and Democracy,” was that “the law is congealed injustice.”

As he said in a speech delivered in Boston’s Faneuil Hall, “The guarantees of the Bill of Rights” have little meaning as long as we have a class society with enormous differences of wealth and income. The rights of free speech and press depend on having the resources to use them” (“Failure to Quit,” p. 65).

Zinn surely would have had a lot to say about the recent Supreme Court decision that increased free speech for corporations at the expense of everyday people. He would, simply and effectively, have pointed out the difference between law as an abstraction in the courtroom and law as it affected people in real life.

That article remains to be written; arguments in the cause of justice still need to be made. Those who do so will be following in the tradition of social critics like Howard Zinn. The best way to honor our fallen heroes is to continue their work. n pressed to find any station nowadays that plays music popular amongst younger people. Most of them have gone to classic rock (don’t get me wrong, I love the classics as well) or nineties pop or to ranting right-wing radio fascists (did I say that out loud?).

This phenomenon of music “retreating” to the underground has caused every music snob to raise the alarm of music’s death. “Music is dead and we have killed it!” scream the Nietzsche complex of reviewers and musicians alike.

It’s all underground, there is no commonality in music, there are no legendary labels like Mercury records staying afloat.

But music is far from dead. Music is not a corporate record label—it is an art form. Music is not a multi-milliondollar firework-spewing glam concert; it is how sound adds vibrancy to our culture.

The condemners of music are the true enemies of music, not the raging undergrounds. Some of us like punk, some metal, some bubble-gum pop, some all and none of the above. What we all have in common is that we give music its immortal breath every single day, and cursed be those who will oppose us.

This is what Amon Amarth’s Twilight of the Thunder God will do for a listener like your reviewer. So what if it is obscure European metal? It breathes life, and that makes all the difference. n Amon Amarth will be touring the United States and Canada in April. See www. amonamarth.com.