councilor.org
| Source | Dave Anderson |
| Date | 99/05/01/22:41 |
| /* Written 12:42 AM Dec 29, 1998 by jdoug@ix.netcom.com in igc:labr.all */ /* ---------- "'Howard Zinn'" ---------- */ Date: Mon, 28 Dec 1998 19:42:06 -0700 (MST) From: ANDERSON DAVID PROFILE: Howard Zinn, historian on the left By HILLEL ITALIE CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (December 28, 1998 12:15 p.m. EST http://www.nandotimes.com) - As the teacher talks to his students, his hands tell a story. They rise above his ears and point like knives. They chop the air in straight, swift lines, as if cutting through a wall of lies. At a public high school near the Harvard campus, Larry Aaronson is calling for a relatively unconventional way of thinking about the Civil War. "The war was not fought to free the slaves!" he insists, hands coming down on every word. "The war was fought to destroy the planters' control over the Southern states because the planters have taken the Southern states out of the Union!" Seated before his class at the Pilot School, Aaronson talks about class conflict in the South and racism in the North. He emphasizes that the Emancipation Proclamation did not free all slaves and that it was late in the war before Lincoln's reasons for fighting changed. "Only THEN it becomes a fight about ending slavery," he says. "Lincoln sees there's only one way to get out of this: `I'm going to mobilize the entire black population. I'm going to overcome a lot of my resistance and I'm going to allow blacks into the military."' Aaronson is not departing from the text; he is teaching it. The students in this U.S. history course have been reading Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States," a left-wing interpretation that has made some wonder how much they really knew. "It makes me sort of question everything else I've learned because I've only learned one side before, the conqueror's point of view," said one student, Rowena Potts. "In principle, I am sort of against having biased history books," said another student, Santiago Rohenes. "But the chance of getting to read the other side of the story is important and unbiased books are sort of impossible to have." Published in 1980 with little promotion, "A People's History" has sold more than half a million copies and sales have accelerated over the years. Although Zinn was writing for a general readership, his book is taught in high schools and colleges throughout the country. Thanks to a couple of famous admirers, it may reach an even wider audience. Matt Damon, the star and co-writer of the movie "Good Will Hunting," is a family friend of Zinn's and a former student of Aaronson's. Damon gives Zinn's book a plug in the film - his character calls it a "REAL history book" - and now he and co-star Ben Affleck are working on a television dramatization of "A People's History" for the Fox network. "It's all serendipity," said Aaronson, a former civil rights activist who has used Zinn's book in his classroom for several years. "Both Matt's and Ben's moms are educators, progressive educators. And Matt's family used to live next door to Howard and his wife. Everyone shares similar ideals. "Before I had Matt as a student, I had Matt's older brother, Kyle. I was teaching Howard's book. And he said, `Oh, my God. We know who this guy is.' And they were all excited and they got all excited about the book." At a time when few politicians dare even call themselves liberal, "A People's History" offers an openly anti-establishment narrative. It charges Christopher Columbus and other explorers with genocide and picks apart presidents from Andrew Jackson to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It celebrates workers and feminists and war resisters. "`People's History' was a really important historical event," said the linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky, a longtime friend of Zinn's whose book "Manufacturing Consent" also receives a compliment in Damon's film. "It brought an alternative perspective about American history to a really substantial number of people." "Before Howard's book there was nothing like it," said Bill Bigelow, a history teacher at Franklin High School in Portland, Ore., and co-editor of the educational guide "Rethinking Our Classrooms: Teaching for Equity and Justice." "So much of what is in traditional U.S. history textbooks start from the standpoint that this is the greatest country in the world, everything is fine and let's see how it got that way. Zinn's book starts from the premise, `Let's see what this country's history is really about."' In Aaronson's class, the book has influenced not only students, but parents. Rowena Potts said when she first told her mother what she had learned about Columbus, her mother refused to believe it. "But now she's much more interested," Rowena said. "She said there's so many facts that nobody had even told her. I thought it was kind of distressing, how she reacted at first, but now she's much more open to these ideas. She wants to read the book now. My father has started reading it." "It happens every single time," Aaronson said. "Parents have gotten intrigued by the book and have actually gone out and bought it." Zinn's book has caused little controversy in schools. Some historians, however, have objected. "I know he regards me as a dangerous reactionary," said Arthur Schlesinger Jr., a family friend of the Kennedys. "And I don't take him very seriously. He's a polemicist, not a historian." Added Oscar Handlin, a Pulitzer Prize-winner and professor emeritus at Harvard University: "He doesn't know anything. Scholarship? I wouldn't use that word for what he does." An admirer of Zinn's, Columbia University professor Eric Foner, has praised "A People's History" for its "vivid descriptions of events that are usually ignored" and called it "a step toward a coherent new version of American history." But only a step. Reviewing the book in 1980 for The New York Times, Foner also criticized Zinn for a "bottom up" view of history that was as limited as history written from the top down. "What is needed," wrote Foner, "is an integrated account incorporating both Thomas Jefferson and his slaves, Andrew Jackson and the Indians, Woodrow Wilson and the Wobblies, in a continuing historical process, in which each group's experience is shaped in large measure by its relation to others." Zinn, who lives in nearby Auburndale with his wife, Rosyln, agrees with his critics on a couple of points. He was not trying to write an objective history and he was not trying to write a complete one. He calls his book a response to traditional texts, the first chapter - not the last - of a new kind of history. "There's no such thing as a whole story; every story is incomplete," Zinn said during an interview at a coffee shop near Harvard Square. "My idea was the orthodox viewpoint has already been done a thousand times. If we're going to have a free marketplace of ideas then we ought to look at the market and who's dominated it. "I'm not writing it for people who are blank slates. Everybody in the United States who goes through junior high school, or even elementary school, gets some American history. So all I'm doing is wheeling my pushcart into the marketplace." The 76-year-old Zinn is an impressive looking man, tall and rugged with wavy silver-gray hair. An experienced public speaker, he is modest and engaging in person, more interested in persuasion than in confrontation. P> He has always been a different kind of historian, one who has lived history as well as written it. He grew up poor during the Depression, flew bombing missions in World War II and taught in the South, at a black women's college, during the Civil Rights era. He helped Daniel Ellsberg leak copies to the press of the top-secret Pentagon Papers and helped anti-war activist Father Daniel Berrigan hide from the FBI. Although retired from Boston University, where he taught political science for more than 20 years, Zinn continues to lecture at schools and to appear at rallies and on picket lines. "He's been involved in everything," says Chomsky, who met Zinn in the 1960s. "He's right in front, directly in the action." Born in New York in 1922, Zinn is the son of Jewish immigrants who as a child lived in a rundown area in Brooklyn and responded strongly to the novels of Charles Dickens. At age 17, urged on by some young Communists in his neighborhood, he attended his first political rally. "There were all these people in Times Square, marching around with their banners. I think they were calling for an end to war," he said. "Suddenly, I heard the sirens sound and I looked around and saw the policemen on horses galloping into the crowd and beating people. I couldn't believe that. And then I was hit. I turned around and I was knocked unconscious. I woke up sometime later in a doorway, with Times Square quiet again, eerie, dreamlike, as if nothing had transpired. "I was ferociously indignant - that here we were, in America, and I had been told and believed that we had the right to free assembly and freedom of speech and here were these people peacefully protesting and they were attacked violently by the police. It was a very shocking lesson for me." War was his next lesson. Eager to help wipe out the Nazis, Zinn joined the Army Air Corps in 1943 and even persuaded the local draft board to let him mail his own induction notice. He flew missions throughout Europe, receiving an Air Medal, but he found himself questioning what he was doing. Back home, he gathered all his medals and papers, put them in a folder and wrote on the folder: "Never again." He had married Roslyn in 1944 and after the war they settled in lower Manhattan. Taking advantage of the G.I. Bill, which offered veterans government aid for education, he attended New York University and Columbia University, where he received a doctorate in history. His first permanent teaching job came in 1956, in a place where history would soon violently arrive: He was offered the chairmanship of the history and social sciences department at Spelman College, an all-black women's school in the then-segregated city of Atlanta. One of his students was a confident, "ironically polite" Georgian named Alice Walker. "He made us laugh at a time when so much made us cry," said the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, who remains friends with Zinn. "Eventually, nobody cared if Howie was white and we even wondered if he really was. He treated us with such kindness and thoughtfulness. "He was so funny. I remember he was addressing some very staid students and administrators at Agnes Scott College (in nearby Decatur, Ga.)," Walker added with a laugh. "Here he is, Jewish, and there we were, black, and there they are, trying hard not to think about all the big changes going on. And he gets up and starts out by saying, `I stand to the left of Mao Tse-tung!"' With the Civil Rights movement growing, Zinn thought the best education was happening outside of the classroom. He encouraged his students to request books from the segregated public libraries and helped coordinate sit-ins at downtown cafeterias. Zinn also published several articles, including a then-rare attack on the Kennedy administration for being too slow to protect blacks. He was loved by students but not by administrators. In 1963, Spelman fired him for "insubordination" (Zinn was a critic of the school's non-participation in the civil rights movement). His years at Boston University were marked by active opposition to the Vietnam War and by feuds with the school's outspoken president, John Silber. Zinn retired in 1988, spending his last day of class on the picket line with students in support of an on-campus nurses' strike. "It seemed a fitting way to end my teacher career," he later said. Besides "A People's History," Zinn has written several books, including "The Southern Mystique," the acclaimed "LaGuardia in Congress" and the memoir "You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train." He also has written three plays, including "Marx in Soho" and "Emma," a piece about the anarchist-feminist Emma Goldman that has been performed all over the world. Zinn is a socialist who opposed the "narrow nationalism" of the Soviet Union, but still believes the United States needs a radical redistribution of wealth. Although he sees both major American political parties as controlled by the rich, he confesses to voting for President Clinton in 1992. "I thought there might have been a chance he would turn out to be more decent than the others," Zinn said with an embarrassed smile. "But that turned out to be wrong, very quickly." Despite all he has seen, he thinks people are basically good and that today's students are no less concerned about the world than the students of the Sixties: They just need a great cause to unite them. And he still sees himself as a rebel, even if the establishment has sometimes treated him otherwise. "That's the American system, one of the ways it sustains itself. If it fired everyone who was a subversive it would be a totalitarian state. ... It's a mildly liberal state which allows just enough openings and gives awards to just enough people to make the argument, `You see, we're not a totalitarian state. "So here I am," he said, leaning back in his chair at the coffee house off Harvard Square, "prosperous, drinking cappuccino. But when I read in the morning paper that a bunch of people were arrested at the state house for protesting welfare cuts, I become intensely involved. I wished I had been there." ______________________________________________________________________ Copyright © 1998 Nando Media |
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