
Howard Zinn, May 2009
Photo by Frank Beacham
Howard Zinn was born 100 years ago today.
Zinn was an academic historian, author, playwright and social activist. Before and during his tenure as a political science professor at Boston University from 1964-88, he wrote more than 20 books, which included his best-selling and influential, A People's History of the United States.
Zinn wrote extensively about the civil rights and anti-war movements, as well as of the labor history of the United States. His memoir, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train, was also the title of a 2004 documentary about Zinn's life and work.
Born to a Jewish immigrant family in Brooklyn, Zinn’s father, Eddie Zinn, born in Austria-Hungary, emigrated to the U.S. with his brother Samuel before the outbreak of World War I. Howard's mother, Jenny, emigrated from the Eastern Siberian city of Irkutsk.
Both parents were factory workers with limited education when they met and married, and there were no books or magazines in the series of apartments where they raised their children.
Zinn's parents introduced him to literature by sending 10 cents plus a coupon to the New York Post for each of the 20 volumes of Charles Dickens' collected works. He also studied creative writing at Thomas Jefferson High School in a special program established by poet Elias Lieberman.
Eager to fight fascism, Zinn joined the Army Air Force during World War II and was assigned as a bombardier in the 490th Bombardment Group, bombing targets in Berlin, Czechoslovakia and Hungary.
A U.S. bombardier in April, 1945, Zinn dropped napalm bombs on Royan, a seaside resort in southwestern France. The anti-war stance Zinn developed later was informed, in part, by his experiences.
On a post-doctoral research mission nine years later, Zinn visited the resort near Bordeaux where he interviewed residents, reviewed municipal documents and read wartime newspaper clippings at the local library. In 1966, Zinn returned to Royan after which he gave his fullest account of that research in his book, The Politics of History.
On the ground, Zinn learned that the aerial bombing attacks in which he participated had killed more than 1,000 French civilians as well as some German soldiers hiding near Royan to await the war's end. The events that are described "in all accounts," he found, as "une tragique erreur" that leveled a small but ancient city and "its population that was, at least officially, friend, not foe."
In The Politics of History, Zinn described how the bombing was ordered — three weeks before the war in Europe ended — by military officials who were, in part, motivated more by the desire for their own career advancement than in legitimate military objectives.
He quotes the official history of the U.S. Army Air Forces' brief reference to the Eighth Air Force attack on Royan and also, in the same chapter, to the bombing of Pilsen in what was then Czechoslovakia. The official history stated that the famous Skoda works in Pilsen "received 500 well-placed tons," and that "because of a warning sent out ahead of time the workers were able to escape, except for five persons."
Zinn questioned the justifications for military operations that inflicted massive civilian casualties during the Allied bombing of cities such as Dresden, Royan, Tokyo; and Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II; Hanoi during the War in Vietnam; and Baghdad during the war in Iraq and the civilian casualties during bombings in Afghanistan during the current and nearly decade-old war there.
In his pamphlet, “Hiroshima: Breaking the Silence,” written in 1995, he laid out the case against targeting civilians with aerial bombing.
After World War II, Zinn attended New York University on the GI Bill, graduating with a B.A. in 1951.
At Columbia University, he later earned an M.A. (1952) and a Ph.D. in history with a minor in political science (1958). His masters' thesis examined the Colorado coal strikes of 1914.
In 1964, Zinn accepted a position at Boston University, after writing two books and participating in the Civil Rights movement in the South. His classes in civil liberties were among the most popular at the university with as many as 400 students subscribing each semester to the non-required class. A professor of political science, he taught at Boston University for 24 years and retired in 1988 at age 64.
"He had a deep sense of fairness and justice for the underdog. But he always kept his sense of humor. He was a happy warrior," said Caryl Rivers, journalism professor at Boston University. Rivers and Zinn were among a group of faculty members who in 1979 defended the right of the school's clerical workers to strike and were threatened with dismissal after refusing to cross a picket line.
Zinn came to believe that the point of view expressed in traditional history books was often limited. He wrote a history textbook, A People's History of the United States, to provide other perspectives on American history. The textbook depicts the struggles of Native Americans against European and U.S. conquest and expansion, slaves against slavery, unionists and other workers against capitalists, women against patriarchy, and African-Americans for civil rights.
The book was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1981. In the years since the first edition of A People's History was published in 1980, it has been used as an alternative to standard textbooks in many high school and college history courses, and it is one of the most widely known examples of critical pedagogy.
The New York Times Book Review stated in 2006 that the book "routinely sells more than 100,000 copies a year.” Zinn described himself as "something of an anarchist, something of a socialist. Maybe a democratic socialist.” He suggested looking at socialism in its full historical context as a popular, positive idea that got a bad name from its association with Soviet Communism.
Zinn was swimming in a hotel pool when he died of an apparent heart attack in Santa Monica, California, on January 27, 2010. He was 87.
Here, Zinn appears for an interview with Bill Moyers
