Howard Zinn
Author
of A
People's History of the United States talks with Robert Birnbaum
 Posted:
(Unknown Date), 2001
Copyright 2001 by Robert Birnbaum
All photos by Red Diaz/Duende Publishing
Print this interview
Howard Zinn grew up in a working-class family
in Brooklyn where he became a shipyard laborer and later, in World
War Two, an Air Force bombardier. After the war, he attended Columbia
University under the GI Bill and earned his Ph.D in history. He
has taught at Spelman College in Atlanta and later at Boston University.
He has also been a history fellow at Harvard University and a visiting
professor at the University of Paris and the University of Bolgna.
Professor Zinn has won numerous awards and honors including The
Thomas Merton Award, The Eugene V. Debs Award, The Upton Sinclair
Award and The Lannan Literary Award. In a career that has spanned
over forty years, Howard Zinn, as a professor, radical historian,
progressive political theorist, social activist, playwright and
author, has brought a fresh, thoughtful, humane and common-sensical
approach to the study and teaching of history. Among his twenty
books and plays are La Guardia in Congress, Disobedience
and Democracy, The Politics of History, The Pentagon
Papers: Critical Essays, Declarations of Independence: Cross
Examining American Ideology, You Can't Be Neutral On A Moving
Train (his autobiography), The Zinn Reader, Marx in
Soho and the seminal, highly celebrated A
People's History of the United States: 1492 to the Present.
He lives with his wife, Roslyn, in Auburndale, Massachusetts.
Robert Birnbaum: After years of teaching
at Spelman College in Atlanta, you came to Boston University?
Howard Zinn: Hmmm...
RB: That's a yes?
HZ: It's a yes. [laughs] I had a year in
between. [1960-61]
RB: A significant year?
HZ: Significant because I was fired from
Spelman College. [laughs] And to make up for the fact that they
were firing a person with tenure, who was chair of the department
and who was a full professor, they gave me a check for a year's
salary. $7000. Which was the largest amount of money I had ever
held in my hand. We thought, "What will we do, I have a year and
seven thousand dollars. We'll go to Boston." We had spent a year,
I had been a fellow at Harvard for a year. We loved Boston. So we
decided to come here. And during that year I wrote two books on
the South: My book on SNCC (Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee)
and in that year I kept going back and forth to the South. The other
book was called The Southern Mystique. During that year,
Boston University offered me this job at the political science department,
although I was a historian — but I never paid much
attention to what is called "discipline" in the academic
world — so it was a good year. We lived on Newbury
Street, by the way, right above the Winston Flower shop.
RB: Back then, did people talk about Boston
as the 'Athens of America'?
HZ: [chuckles] Bostonians did. Boston was
considered an intellectual hub — Harvard, MIT...they
didn't talk about Boston University or Northeastern or any other
place. In the year that I spent here in Boston, it certainly was
that for me. There I was at Harvard, and I could have lunch with
Stuart Hughes and be impressed by the way he talked French to the
waiters. [both laugh] He took me to Henri Quaitre. It was on Winthrop
Street. The waiters all spoke French — at least when
they got someone like Stuart Hughes speaking French with them. I
was, you might say — a hick up from the South — he
wanted to talk to me about the civil rights movement — so
he bought me lunch. We loved Boston. We grow up in New York and
in Atlanta we felt landlocked. In Boston we found a city with a
river flowing through it. We almost thought it was Paris and the
Seine...and it's close to the sea and close to New Hampshire...we
loved the city.
RB: You have said that one of the books you
greatly admire is Upton Sinclair's novel Boston?
HZ: It was novel based on the Sacco and Vanzetti
case. It's not even fair to say it was based on it because that
suggests a novel loosely based on fact. Actually, the novel Boston,
though it has a couple of fictional characters, is really a journalistic
account of the Sacco-Vanzetti case. And maybe one of the best non-fiction
accounts — even though it is a work of fiction — of
the case that I have seen. I grew up loving Upton Sinclair, grew
up influenced so much by his work. Not just The Jungle, but
The Brass Check, Oil, King Coal. He wrote so
many. Then a publisher in Boston decided to bring out Boston,
which had been long out of print. And asked me to write an introduction
to it, which I did. The Sacco and Vanzetti Case remains important
in my thinking and it's one of those things that happen in history
which you can't forget. I try to imagine how many people in America
have been affected by that case, by the powerful emotions generated
by that case. There are certain moments in American history that
had that effect on people. Sacco-Vanzetti was one. The Rosenberg
case was another. The Haymarket Affair for an earlier generation...Emma
Goldman, when she was a kid, was influenced by the Haymarket Affair.
RB: How much does the history of Boston — Sacco
& Vanzetti, Salem Witch Trial, Boston Police Riot, Blues Laws — affect
people today? How aware are they?
HZ: Not very much. It's always amazing to
me how people live in a city and don't know the history of that
city. I've been to Lawrence, Massachusetts, and I would bring up
the textile strike of 1912 and nobody would know about it. In Boston,
aside from the Freedom Trail...
RB: Soon to be the Hood Freedom Trail or
the Raytheon Freedom Trail...
HZ: The Revolutionary War and Paul Revere
and the cemeteries, yeah. But other than that, things like the Boston
Police Strike of 1919, people don't know about that.
RB: Were there book burnings or just book
banning here in Boston?
HZ: I don't know if they actually burned
books, but they certainly banned a lot of books. Sometimes it's
a short step from banning to burning. Boston still has that reputation.
Outside of Boston, what Boston is known for is being 'blue', being
sensitive to anything connected with the church, especially Catholicism.
I don't think it deserves that reputation anymore.
RB: What reputation does it deserve? Is it
a distinct place or a generic modern American metropolis?
HZ: For people living in it, yeah. Boston
is distinguishable from other cities, which begin to resemble one
another very much. It does have special character. I talk
to people who come here from other places, and they feel that Boston
has a special character. They connect it with history. They do connect
it with age. Of course, to a European, it’s not very old. But still,
for Americans, they connect it with the American Revolution.
RB: Does it seem like tourists are more conscious
of Boston's place in history than its residents?
HZ: I think that's almost always true, that
tourists read the tourist guide. And they learn things about a city
and the people in the city are not paying any attention to that.
I think that's generally true...
RB: But tourists won't find out about Sacco
and Vanzetti, The Police Strike, etc., in tour literature.
HZ: There is no radical walking tour in Boston
like there is in New York. There is a guy in New York who takes
people to where Emma Goldman lived on 13th Street and this Union
Square where...
RB: What would that feature?
 HZ:
They could say, "This is the spot on the Charles River where a copy
of the Pentagon Papers went from hand to hand and ended up with
the Boston Globe." Think of all those things that happened
during the Vietnam War in Boston. One thing Boston is known for,
in the 60's, Boston became known as a hub of anti-war resistance.
The meetings on the Common, I don't know if anyone has written a
history of the Boston Common as protest place. Or Fanueil Hall.
The Boston Common was a mirror of the growth of the anti-war movement.
I spoke at the first anti-war meeting on the Common in the Spring
of 1965. There were a hundred people there. Then I spoke there again
in the 1969 Mobilization and there were 100,000 people there. So,
many things have happened there. Yeah, Boston is a special place.
RB: Speaking of anti-war protest, Barry
Crimmins — as is his wont — is
outraged at Bush's court-appointed presidency. George Bush seems
to be bringing back the good old days: a new cold war, an economic
downturn and a return to Eisenhower-era morality. What do you think?
HZ: It's really interesting. Here the guy
wins the presidency by the most nefarious of methods and without
a popular mandate. Losing a popular vote by a larger margin than
Hayes lost the popular vote in 1876, but then moves ahead with aplomb,
with total arrogance as if the country is his. My feeling is that
we are living in an occupied country. Really, that we've been taken
over, a junta has taken power and now the problem for the American
people is to do what people do in an occupied country...
RB: Hunker down? Create a black market? Some
resist, many collaborate...In the Spy Plane Incident, commentators
were heartened to see Bush "rise above the politics" and call in
'experts' like his father and Henry Kissinger. Recently Christopher
Hitchens wrote an essay in Harper's about Henry Kissinger's
culpability as a war criminal. Is Henry Kissinger a war criminal?
HZ: It's certainly true that he is a war
criminal. In the sense that he was part of the apparatus and an
a intellectual leader and advisor of that bureaucracy which carried
on the Vietnam War, which carried on the secret illegal bombing
of Cambodia, which helped engineer the coup in Chile in 1973. And
so Kissinger is responsible for much of the atrocious conduct of
American foreign policy. The idea that he received the Nobel Peace
Prize made a number people dismiss that award after that. Christopher
Hitchens' piece was well deserved and it's good to call attention.
I saw a satiric piece in the Washington Post about the Hitchens
essay by a former student of mine, Peter Carlson. He asked, "Why
are they getting excited about Kissinger as a war criminal? He's
a wonderful dinner guest."
RB: The response to the charges against Kissinger
are curious. Some say, "Well, other administrations did comparable
acts." As if that relieved Kissinger of any blame. But whatever
the truth or falsity of the charges isn't there a prima facia
case and therefore a trial would be in order to determine the 'truth.'
HZ: Sure. Let's have a trial. The advantage
of a trial is it brings everything out into the open. It's an educational
opportunity. The South African trials didn't result in people going
to prison. I'm not interested in putting Henry Kissinger in prison,
you see. I mean if we are going to put people in prison, we'd have
to put the whole American establishment in prison for the things
that have been done to people all over the world. But certainly
for calling attention to what's been done, it would be a very useful
thing to do. I didn't want to see Pinochet — for
all his barbaric deeds — put in prison. But to call
attention to what he did. Yes, a very useful thing.
RB: You feel the same way about recently
discovered French collaborators from World War II?
HZ: Yeah. The whole concept of punishment
is foreign to me. And revenge. To me the only useful thing about
bringing these people before the bar of justice is as an education.
In a way, by doing that, we are going back to a very primitive approach
to punishment...some of the Indian tribes and other indigenous peoples
where their idea of punishment is to shame people before the tribe.
They'd exile them or send them out in the forest with a glass of
water.[laughs] But they'd shame them and that's a useful thing to
do...more serious than putting them behind bars. So, Kissinger deserves
to be shamed and the people who have had him as dinner guest deserve
to be shamed. Although we should stop short of putting on trial
anyone who made a dinner for him.
RB: Besides writing plays, what are some
of the other things you are doing?
HZ: I'm doing an awful lot of speaking, going
around the country speaking. That's why I'm not missing my teaching.
RB: Does it seem like people are paying more
attention to you now than when you were actively teaching and publishing?
HZ: No doubt. No question. Almost entirely
because of A People's History of the United States. The reasons
I get these invitations to talk is because of A People's History,
which has now sold 800,000 copies. And it sells more each year than
the year before, which is a very rare thing in publishing.
RB: A popular groundswell...
HZ: Yeah...and so I get all these invitations
to speak because my book is being used by high school and college
classes, community groups, book clubs and discussion groups in communities
here and there. So as a result, I'm very busy. I have to say no
to an awful lot of things now, that I would have been glad to do
years ago when I was hungry for invitations.
RB: What does it suggest to you that your
book, originally published in 1980, grows more and more popular?
 HZ:
What it means, I think, is that there is a very large number of
people who are receptive, even hungry for new ways at looking at
American History and new ways at looking at American society. I
think we are deceived by the attention that media gives to our political
leaders. By that I mean that, because all we see on television are
congressional leaders and the President and the members of the cabinet
and so on, we begin to think that they do represent the thinking
of the country. If you consider that half of the voting population
did not vote and that of that half only half voted for whoever is
president — and this is true in almost every election,
not just in this recent election — there is a huge
number of people who did not vote for the existing president, and
many who did vote voted without enthusiasm only because they didn't
have much of a choice.
RB: You no doubt have heard Michael Moore's
characterization of the Bush-Gore election as one of "The Evil of
Two Lessers"...
HZ: [Laughs] Leave it to Michael Moore. I
love the last line in his last movie, "One evil empire down,
one to go." To me this means...let me put it this way, I think
there is a very large number of people in this country — this
even borne out by public opinion polls which over the last ten or
fifteen years have shown that on issues — the public
is ahead of both major parties. That the public has been consistently
willing to take more money out of the military budget and spend
it for education and housing and human needs. I believe there are
huge numbers of people in this country who would be willing to have
radical changes in our economic and social system in order to make
it a more egalitarian society and do away with homelessness and
hunger and clean up the environment. But these people have no voice.
They have no way of expressing themselves. Elections give them no
way of expressing themselves. I go around the country and I speak
and not to audiences of radicals.
RB: Given your busy schedule, one can assume
that your audience is much larger than the core progressive community...there
aren't that many radicals.
HZ: [laughs] No, there aren't. I go to speak
to California Polytechnic Institute in San Luis Obispo. How many
radicals can there be there? How many liberals can there be there?
Fifteen hundred students show up. And they listen to me and I'm
talking about the economic system and the profit system as being
wrong and inhuman and I talk about the necessity to abolish war
as a means of solving problems and to not have any more military
interventions and to seriously cut down the military budget. I talk
about these things and they...agree. I found this, I talk to audiences
in Oklahoma and Texas and here and there and mostly to audiences
of people who don't really know my work. I certainly don't expect
them to be sympathetic to my ideas. When I express my ideas — and
they are radical ideas — except that I don't start
off by saying, "I'm now going to tell you radical ideas."
Or, "I'm now going to expound ideas of socialism or attack
capitalism." Or, "This is going to be a hate imperialism
talk." None of that. People respond to commonsense ideas about
foreign policy and domestic policy. It encourages me about the potential
in this country, despite who is running it.
RB: Joe Conasen in a recent New York Observer
column characterized Trent Lott as running the Senate like it was
a juke box. To coin a phrase, "Where's the outrage?" Does this get
people thinking?
HZ: I think people are thinking, but they
have no way of expressing their thoughts, no ongoing movement to
connect it with, no movement close to them that they can see. But
if a movement got started in this country — and after
all, that's how movements grow, from small to large. People in the
1950's didn't talk about racial segregation in the South as something
to do anything about. When the first steps were taken, the first
pictures appeared on television of people resisting and people thought
about it — it was an obvious wrong. And there are
so many obvious wrongs going on today.
RB: Can we talk about the irony of the Republicans
accusing their opponents of inciting class warfare?
HZ: [laughs heartily] It's very interesting
to me. When the Democrats are attacked for that they shrink back.
They don't say what obviously should be said, "Yes, there is
class warfare. There has always been class warfare in this country."
The reason the Democrats shrink back is because the Democrats and
the Republicans are on the same side of the class war. They have
slightly different takes. The Democrats are part of the upper class
that is more willing to make concessions to the lower class in order
to maintain their power.
RB: Blacks and minorities can get into Democratic
country clubs.
HZ: Yes. Exactly. Republicans have fund-raisers
where you need $400,000. Democrats only require $300,000. This country
began on the basis of class conflict. The Constitution was set up
to control people like Shay's rebels of Western Massachusetts.
RB: Wouldn’t it be easier to "sell" the
notion of class conflict if it wasn’t an a priori element
of radical analysis?
HZ: Americans are brought up to believe that
we are one country and we are united and we have language to justify
that approach. We have phrases like 'national security,' 'national
interest.' 'National defense.' The implication being that anything
that's done for the 'national interest' is done for everybody. The
'national defense' defends everybody. 'National security' is for
everybody, it's not for somebody's securities. And so there's been
a hesitation — really a fear of allowing the notion
of class to enter into the popular consciousness. And yet when they
ask people — this is shown again and again in public
opinion polls — "Do you believe a small group of
powerful people run the country?" Eighty-five per cent said, "Yes."
People know this.
RB: If you polled the small group of people
who do run the country, what do you think they would say?
HZ: [laughs] It would depend if it was off
the record or not. Maybe some would admit it. Some would be afraid
to admit it.
RB: I would think no one would be afraid
to admit to such glaringly obvious realities. What would the reaction
be? Are people going to resurrect the Wobblies
(Industrial Workers of The World)?
HZ: You mean they really have no need to
be afraid. Although they have no need to be afraid, they are still
very fearful that something small might become something big, you
see. That's why a picket line with three people will suddenly attract
twelve policemen. That's why Nixon went hysterical when one person
was picketing the White House. That's the whole idea of repression.
That's the idea of putting a few people in jail in order to scare
the rest. Even though there is a kind of general recognition that
this true, they would rather not emphasize it by talking about 'class.'
RB: That does point big arrows at the concept
of Hope? The power of a small idea to mushroom into something grand.
HZ: Yeah. You might say that the people who
run the country have more of a sense of history than the masses
of people. And because they have that sense, they keep that history
of struggle and victory over the powerful out of the history books.
RB: I take it you are heartened and hopeful
about the forthcoming film version of A People's History?
 HZ:
Well, I'm half-hopeful [both laugh]. Anybody that deals with Hollywood,
anybody who deals with the film industry has to be very cautious.
I'm not at all sure that the book will be turned into film although
HBO has signed contracts with three writers. Each of whom will write
a two-hour script. Howard Fast to do the revolutionary War, John
Sayles to do something on the Lowell Mill girls, and a Scottish
writer, Paul Laverty, to do something on Columbus and Las Casas.
So HBO has agreed to finance the scripts, and after the scripts
are done they will decide whether they will make a film. That's
standard procedure in Hollywood. They are very often are willing
to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars for the writing of scripts
and then not make a film because the film will cost 5 or 10 million
dollars. So, that's why I say it's still up in the air. Yes, I'm
half-hopeful, especially because we have good writers.
RB: I've been collecting stories about how
long some projects take. Ed Harris' Pollack took 8 years...
HZ: Oh yeah. The bureaucracy in both film
and television is amazing. The films take years to do and in the
meantime the bureaucracy changes hands. All sorts of things happen...
RB: You are listed as an executive producer.
Is that a titular position or are you actively involved?
HZ: No, it's real. There are four executive
producers. They call us the Gang of Four. Matt Damon, Ben Affleck,
me and Chris Moore. Yeah, we will supervise and, of course, HBO
will have final say over things. We have been involved in choosing
the writers, going over the scripts and be involved at every stage
of the process. The idea of us being executive producers is really
to stand guard over the sanctity of the point of view of People's
History so that Howard Fast's story of the mutinies in the Revolutionary
Army doesn't become Mel Gibson's The Patriot.
RB: You are still writing plays?
HZ: Well, yeah. My most recent play, Marx
in Soho, has been done all over the country, San Francisco,
Chicago, here. It's still being done. More recently, I wrote something,
a one-person play. And I don't know if you want to call it a play,
Boston Playwright's Theater insists on calling them Ten-minute plays.
I've never done it before, and this coming Sunday there will be
a whole bunch of them including mine being shown at the Boston Playwright's
Theater.
RB: What's the subject or story?
HZ: Well unlike Marx in Soho, which
is a fun play about Karl Marx as well as having serious things to
say, this a serious play about a hospital situation, a family situation
involving a dying mother...
RB: In ten minutes? When asked to identify
yourself what do you say?
HZ: I call myself a writer. I like it. It's
a more lofty designation than professor. Do you know what I mean?
RB: In Europe anyway. How is it here when
you tell people you are a writer?
HZ: I would rather think of myself as a writer
than as a professor. I refer to think of myself as a historian,
as a writer. I am also working on a screenplay with poet and playwright
Naomi Wallace.
RB: Who is doing good history today?
HZ: Well, there are bunch of relatively young
historians who are doing a new kind of history. Eric Foner wrote
a wonderful book on the Reconstruction period replacing some very
bad books on the Reconstruction. A lot of really good Black history
is being written...Vincent Harding, who was involved in the Civil
Rights movement and is a historian, he's been writing good stuff.
There is a new book out on the American Revolution which is excellent.
It's called The People's History of the American Revolution
by Ray Raphael. And there's a wonderful, funny novel written about
the American Revolution by Paul
Lussier called Last Refuge of Scoundrels (from Samuel
Johnson's "Patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels.")
It'll be interesting to see whether the way he treats the revolution
gets him into trouble. Trouble in the sense of will they make a
film out of this. It's a very funny book.
RB: It's a Warner Book.
HZ: And Warner has an option. Will they do
it? He told me that some people who were going to interview him
on radio programs cancelled because thought it would be troublesome.
To answer your question, yes there is some very good history being
done. And Ray Raphael, a writer on the West Coast, has written on
other subjects and interestingly enough is not a professional expert
but has written a better book than any I've seen on the American
Revolution. You don't have to be an academically trained Ph.D historian
to write a very good book on history.
RB: That seems almost to go without saying.
There seem to be a strong self-interest in the mandarin class to
protect the myth of intellectual expertise...
HZ: Of course, of course. There's always
a little resentment at someone who writes a history book that everybody
reads.
RB: Some people must be very angry at you.
HZ: Some of them are.
RB: You are about as non-dogmatic and ideological
a thinker as I'm familiar with, but are there any Zinnists? Any
disciples?
HZ: Zinnism? There are just people who read
my books, that's all. A lot of people show up at my talks. Big crowds.
Yeah, people who read my books...
RB: Lest you think my question totally absurd,
it has been my experience that when I post my conversations with
writers I invariably am contacted by their official website — the
keepers of the flame...
HZ: There is a website that somebody did
for me which I didn't know about until somebody told me about it.
RB: Do you think about your legacy?
HZ: We all think about our mortality.
RB: Yes, they go hand in hand...
HZ: Yes that's right. Legacy, mortality...I
suppose in preparing myself psychologically for the end I ask, "Do
I feel okay?" "Yeah." There are huge numbers of letters that have
been written to me by people who say, "Your book changed my life."
They say extravagant things. Things I would never say. So I feel
I made a difference in the lives and thinking of a lot of people.
So that's good.
RB: You feel like you've done good work?
HZ: [Chuckles] Yeah, sure.
RB: You laugh as if there is some thing qualifying
that?
HZ: Well, I could have done more. Everybody
probably says they could have done more. But yeah I think I've done...I
feel good about the things I've done. I feel good that I've been
able to do that work and have a family, children and grandchildren
and to wrestle with the tension between the two. Which is always
difficult.
RB: Do you think maybe the real problem facing
advanced societies is the decline in opportunity to do "good work"?
HZ: Well, for instance, the profit motive
in publishing has kept out of bookstores lots of wonderful writing
and lots of wonderful poetry. Poets have such a hard time getting
published.
RB: I was thinking in a broader way. How
it is that economic fluctuations might restrain initiative and adventure
and experimentation...
HZ: I think that pressure exists on young
people who want to be poets, actors and musicians. Both because
their parents are looking in on them and wondering how their kids
will survive and paying huge tuition for them and also thinking
themselves of their own future and decide, "No, I can't be a poet.
I can't be a musician because I won't be able to survive." So yes,
it's a culture so dominated by the need to make money and be successful
in the orthodox sense that it cripples creativity...
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