9-24-07, 9:27 am
Howard Zinn: A Radical American Vision David E. Joyce Amherst, NY, Prometheus Books, 2003.
I must say that I looked forward to reading this book. I have met Howard Zinn many times over the years and have had enormous respect for him. I have used his People's History of the United States as a basic text in a course on the history of American Radicalism for many years (a radicals perspective on all of American history) and know that students both love it and learn much more from it than the texts that they usually read.
The book unfortunately was a major disappointment although it is well worth reading for its presentation of Howard Zinn’s world view and his specific application of that broad left or what C. Wright Mills once called “plain Marxist” world view to U.S. history and society.
My disappointment stems from the author’s extensive description of Zinn’s many works and his extensive rehashing of the academic and popular reviews of Zinn’s work. Although the author is clearly very sympathetic to Zinn’s work and life, the biography often reads more like an academic resume rather than an engaged analysis of a man’s life.
Howard Zinn was never a traditional academic and traditional academics, from the old “end of ideology” crowd of the 1950s whom C. Wright Mills aptly called “NATO Intellectuals” to the contemporary “post-modernist” “post-feminist” “post” you-name-it scribes of peoples' movements language and history, have always kept him at arms length. After all, what would those scholars of class theory, race theory, gender theory, and “queer theory,” want with a scholar who has dedicated his life to the struggle of workers, African Americans and other oppressed minorities, a scholar who sees both the struggles of women and gay men and lesbians in the context of the struggle for equality and social justice.
Howard Zinn deserved a lot better. Born in a working-class Jewish family, he was a bombardier during WWII and saw, through a horrible bombing raid he participated in in France, the injustices in what was from the allied side a just war. The GI Bill, the last major piece of progressive New Deal legislation, gave him higher education and eventually a PhD.
He took a job at Spellman College, an African American college in Atlanta in 1956 because he needed a job, although he was certainly a strong supporter of the Civil Rights movement. His support for militant students eventually cost him his job in 1963 and he went to Boston University in 1964, where he stayed until his retirement. Meanwhile he used his brain and his body to be on the frontlines of Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam War struggles. He also began to write important books that academic establishments ignored and newspaper critics often condemned but progressives praised and young people particularly energized by the Civil Rights and anti-war movements looked for as hungry people search for food. Books like SNCC: The New Abolitionists (1965) Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal (1967) Disobedience and Democracy (1968) and The Politics of History (1970). In 1980, the year Ronald Reagan was elected, he published A People's History of the United States, which has been read over the last 25 years by more people than the combined collected works of the academic establishment writers who have either ignored or attacked him over the years. I am sure that Howard Zinn got handsome royalties from a People's History (which has the added distinction of having been mentioned positively in the popular film Good Will Hunting) and he certainly needed it. Zinn, as the biography makes clear, was targeted by John Silber, Boston University’s mean-spirited president (caudillo or duce might be more accurate) who froze his salary, vilified him continuously in public and private, and denied him teaching assistants for his courses, which drew hundreds of students. At one point, Silber even promised Zinn a teaching assistant if he sharply reduced the number of students in a class—an act that stood the logic of capitalism, a system that Silber believed that he was protecting from Zinn, on its head!
Howard Zinn retired from Boston University in 1988 and kept on writing and speaking and acting. I would suggest that readers interested in his life see his fine memoir. You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times (1994). I would also recommend that people grab any chance they get to hear Howard Zinn lecture and actively seek to develop their own analysis by relating it to his. Finally, I would recommend this biography, as an introduction to the life and work of Howard Zinn, even though it could have and should have been much better than it is.
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