Howard Zinn

Howard Zinn: The Bombardier Who Rewrote America

In the closing weeks of the Second World War, a twenty-two-year-old B-17 bombardier dropped napalm on Royan, a French coastal town of no strategic consequence. He had believed the war was just. Years later he went back to the records to count the civilians his own bomb runs had killed, and put his medals in an envelope marked "Never Again." Everything Howard Zinn subsequently wrote about American history proceeds from that envelope.

Brooklyn, and an Education in Class

Zinn was born on 24 August 1922 in Brooklyn to Jewish immigrant parents. His father dug ditches, cleaned windows and waited tables; his mother worked in factories. The family was poor enough to move house to stay ahead of eviction, and there were no books in it. Zinn read anyway, compulsively, working his way through accounts of fascism and political theory that gave him a framework before he had a vocabulary.

At eighteen he became a shipfitter's apprentice at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where he spent three years. He called it "an education about work, and about class," and he did not mean it passively — he and fellow apprentices organised the Apprentice Association to press for safer conditions. There he met Roslyn Shechter, a Brooklyn progressive he married in October 1944.

Royan

He enlisted in the Army Air Corps in 1943. What the war taught him was not pacifism at first but a delayed and specific horror: that the machinery of a righteous cause kills people who are not in it, and that the men operating the machinery are given no reason to find out.

Afterwards he and Roslyn lived in a rat-infested basement while raising Myla, born 1947, and Jeff, born 1949. On the G.I. Bill he took a bachelor's degree at New York University while loading warehouses, then a doctorate in history at Columbia. His first book, *La Guardia in Congress*, appeared in 1959 and earned an honourable mention for the American Historical Association's Beveridge Award — an entirely conventional start.

Spelman

From 1956 to 1963 Zinn chaired the history department at Spelman College, the historically Black women's college in Atlanta, and the conventional career ended there. He taught students who included Alice Walker, Marian Wright Edelman and Bernice Johnson Reagon. He served as an adult adviser to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee alongside Ella Baker, tipped off newspapers before sit-ins, interviewed Bob Moses and Stokely Carmichael, and worked voter registration in Selma and Mississippi.

Spelman's administration came to regard him, as Boston University later put it, as an instigator rather than a supporter. On 4 June 1963 the college's president fired him for insubordination, despite his tenure. Zinn conceded the charge was accurate. Students campaigned for his reinstatement and lost. Forty-two years later Spelman invited him back to give the 2005 commencement address.

Boston University

He joined Boston University's political science department and taught there for twenty-four years, retiring in 1988. His lectures filled halls; he brought activists in as guest speakers and told students to learn history in the classroom and make it in the public square. BU's president John Silber, who did not care for him, reportedly called him a "sterling example" of those poisoning "the well of academe."

The antiwar record is dense. He went to Japan in 1966 with the SNCC organiser Ralph Featherstone to speak against Vietnam, then wrote *Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal* in 1967 out of frustration that no prominent figure would call for immediate withdrawal. In 1968 he flew to Hanoi with Daniel Berrigan to receive American pilots released by North Vietnam. *Disobedience and Democracy: Nine Fallacies of Law and Order* followed. He testified for the defence at Daniel Ellsberg's 1973 Pentagon Papers trial and at the Camden 28 trial, co-chaired BU's faculty strike committee in 1979, and ended his final class early so he could join a nursing school picket line.

A People's History

He wrote *A People's History of the United States* because he could not find a bottom-up textbook to assign. Published in 1980 in a first printing of 4,000 copies, it told the national story from the vantage of the people it was done to rather than the people who did it — Britannica's summary is that it focuses on "those who were acted upon by the heroes of the more usual" narratives. It has since sold more than three million copies and become one of the most widely translated American history books ever written, helped along by a scene in *Good Will Hunting*. Its governing premise, in Zinn's phrasing, was that American history "is not the exclusive province of senators and generals or... historians. It belongs to everyone."

The Historian as Participant

Zinn never confined himself to prose. He wrote three plays — *Daughter of Venus*, *Emma* about Emma Goldman, and *Marx in Soho*, still staged internationally. With Anthony Arnove he assembled *Voices of a People's History of the United States* in 2004, which became staged readings and then the 2009 History Channel film *The People Speak*. He corresponded with prisoners, testified for protesters, and in 2008 helped launch the Zinn Education Project to get people's history into schools.

Why Howard Is Called a Genius

It is worth stating plainly that the word does not appear in the tributes. Colleagues reached for other things. Caryl Rivers called him "such a righteous man" and "a wonderful scholar." The writer James Carroll, who sat in on his lectures uninvited, said: "I heard a language... an ethical argument that defined the feelings I was having." Righteous, wonderful, clarifying — not brilliant.

That is the correct register, because Zinn's gift was not analytical horsepower or archival discovery. It was a decision about where to stand, held with unusual discipline and executed in prose plain enough that a seventeen-year-old could follow it without help. Thousands of historians knew the facts in *A People's History*; almost none had thought to make the vantage point itself the argument. Doing that required a kind of imaginative stubbornness — the willingness to be told for thirty years that you were doing history wrong and to keep doing it, having concluded that the alternative was doing it dishonestly.

The counter-case is serious and comes from within his own political camp. The historian Robert Norrell observed that Zinn's worldview had "little room for workers who wouldn't join unions, or black people who were not on the front lines of protest." Even sympathetic obituaries conceded he flattened the past into exploitation versus resistance and lost the nuance of how systems survive their opponents. *A People's History* is a work of synthesis and polemic rather than research, and Zinn made no secret of it: he thought neutrality was a pose and said so. Whether that is intellectual courage or a licence to select depends entirely on what you think history is for — which is the argument he wanted, and got.

Legacy

Zinn's wife Roslyn died in 2008; he said she had been "a more rounded person than I was." He died of a heart attack in Santa Monica on 27 January 2010, aged eighty-seven. His summary of his own position outlasts most of his critics' objections: "We don't have to wait for some grand utopian future... to live now as we think humans should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory."

Achievements

• Notable work: A People's History of the United States
• Affiliated with Harvard University and Boston University
• Educated at New York University, Columbia University and Thomas Jefferson High School
• Worked as playwright, political scientist and historian