Howard Zinn: Vision and Voice

By Terrence McNally, AlterNet. Posted October 21, 2005.

I first saw Howard Zinn when I was in college in the Boston area in the late 60s. Along with William Sloane Coffin of Yale and Noam Chomsky of MIT, he was a leader of protests against the Vietnam War. Nearly 40 years later, as Zinn speaks against another misguided foreign adventure, he's still vital at 83 and his voice and vision still vitally important. His classic, A People's History of the United States, has sold over a million copies.

Of his newest book, Voices of a People's History of the United States (co-edited with Anthony Arnove), Zinn has said, "Educators and politicians may say that students ought to learn pure facts, innocent of interpretation, but there's no such thing! Long before I decided to write A People's History, which came out in 1980, my partisanship was shaped by my upbringing in a working-class immigrant family, by my three years as a shipyard worker, by my experience as a bombardier in World War II, and by the civil rights movement in the South and the movement against the war in Vietnam. So I've chosen to emphasize voices of resistance -- to class oppression, racial injustice, sexual inequality, nationalist arrogance -- left out of the orthodox histories."

Terrence McNally: You weren't necessarily destined to be a college professor, were you?

Howard Zinn: No. I wasn't destined to be one, I wasn't prepared to be one, and certainly my parents didn't expect me to be one. I think my parents, like most working-class parents, just hope their kids will survive and be healthy and make a living of some sort. I was a shipyard worker for three years from the age of 18-21, then I was in the Air Force. But somewhere along the line I got interested in reading, in history, in politics. When I was a teenager I read Upton Sinclair and I read Karl Marx -- I'm not supposed to say that!

I think the remarkable thing is that you actually read him.

I did not read Volume Three of Das Kapital, but I read a lot of him. I read Sinclair and Jack London and Lincoln Steffens and all sorts of people who got me excited about the world around us, and interested in things like fascism and socialism and democracy and all of that.

When I got out of the Air Force, I was married and we had a kid and then two kids, and I was knocking around in various jobs and my wife was working. We were sort of a typical struggling young working class family living in a low income housing project in Manhattan, and I just decided to go to college under the G.I. Bill. Marvelous thing the G.I. Bill. Today not just Republicans but Democrats like Clinton say "the era of big government is over, we must get government out of this and government out of that." Well, the government can do marvelous things. Private enterprise was certainly not going to give working class kids an education. You leave things to the free market and the rich will go to college and the poor will go to work.

My dad, also a bombardier in World War II, came back and got an Ivy League education on that G.I. Bill, graduating with three children. Very similar situation. That isn't available today.

No, not at all. In fact, the way tuition has skyrocketed even in the state schools, it's very very difficult now for working-class kids to go to college. College is becoming again more and more a place for the well-to-do. That's just part of what has been a polarization of wealth in this country over these last decades, the rich becoming richer, the poor having children.

Was Spelman College your first teaching gig?

I had a couple of part-time teaching jobs while I was in graduate school, but Spelman was my first real, full-time teaching job. I didn't actually choose Spelman -- a black women's college.

I was thinking that was an odd fit, how did it happen?

Really an accident, I'm not black and I'm not a woman, right? I can't say I was such a socially conscious person that I wanted to teach at a black college in the South. No, not so at all. I was just looking for a job, and the president of Spelman was up north talking to my advisor at Columbia, and my advisors recommended me. So I met with the president of Spelman and he offered me a job as chair of a department. Imagine, my first job as chair of the department! I mean, a small department, but still. Frankly I hadn't even considered teaching at a negro college. I wasn't really even aware of that phenomenon, you see. Though of course at that time I was certainly very conscious of the race question.

How much did that odd turn in the road affect the rest of your life?

Oh, I think that it was critical. Seven years at Spelman, in the South, involved in the movement and involved with SNCC. I went from Atlanta to Albany, Georgia to report on the demonstrations there. Then to Selma, Alabama and Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Those seven years, those years of what is called the movement, were very exciting years and educational years and important years. I'm sure I learned more from that experience than my students learned from me.

Interviewer Terrence McNally hosts Free Forum on KPFK 90.7FM, Los Angeles (streaming at kpfk.org), where he interviews people he believes can help create 'a world that just might work.'

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