(Transcript is still under revision)
Welcome to a Conversation with History. I'm Harry Kreisler of the Institute of International Studies. Our guest today is Howard Zinn. Howard Zinn is an activist, a historian, a writer, and a playwright. He is the author of many books, including A People's History of the United States, The Zinn Reader, and an autobiography called You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train. His three plays are Emma, Daughter of Venus, and Marx in Soho. He is a Professor Emeritus of History at Boston University.
BACKGROUND
Howard, welcome to Berkeley.
Thank you.
You've described in your autobiography a public lecture at which someone asked you from the audience, "How did you come by the particular ideas you now have?" I want to follow that line of inquiry. How did the circumstances of your youth affect the way you came to see the world?
Well, I think, of course, that was a very good question. It should be asked of all historians. I guess Growing up in a working class family, going to work in a shipyard at the age of 18, working for three years in a shipyard, getting into the sweat of industrial life and being aware of the difference between the way we lived our lives and the lives of those people we saw on the movie screen or in the magazines, developing a kind of class consciousness: I think that had an effect later on my teaching and writing of history. Then joining the Air Force, becoming a bombardier in the Air Force, going through a war, coming out of the war with very, very strong anti-war ideas, even though I was in "the best of wars," as they say -- the "good war." And then, teaching in Spelman College, my first teaching job. Teaching at a black women's college in the South -- Atlanta, Georgia. Seven years there. Going through and becoming involved in the Civil Rights Movement -- I think all of that shaped my thinking about history.
Let's talk a little about your youth, and then talk about the other things. How, specifically, do you think your parents shaped your character?
My parents were not political people at all. My parents were just ordinary. They were Jewish immigrants who worked in garment factories when they came here, and then my father became a waiter. You might say he moved up in the world. He went from being a factory worker to being a waiter, and then he became a head waiter. As far as political influence, no. The only influence they had on my life was my observation of their lives. My observation that my father was working very hard, an honest hard-working man. My mother working very hard, raising four sons. And yet, of course, they had nothing to show for it. That is, they were perfect counterpoints to the Horatio Alger myth that if you work hard in this country, you will get somewhere. I think that intensified my feeling about the injustice of an economic system in which there are people all over the country like my parents who work very, very hard and have nothing to show for it.
One of the things that your parents did was obtain for you a subscription to a collection of Dickens books, and so reading became very important to you and also offered you insights, right?
Oh, no doubt. Reading, reading, reading at an early age. My parents knew I was a reader even though they were not readers. My father was barely literate, my mother was somewhat literate. But they knew that I was interested in books and reading. They had no idea who Charles Dickens was, but they saw this ad, they could send away coupons and a dime for each book. So they got me this whole set of Dickens and I made my way through Dickens.
What did you learn from Dickens?
From Dickens what I got was this ferocious acknowledgement of the modern industrial system and what it does to people, and how poor people live and the way they are victimized, and the way the courts function. The way justice works against the poor. Yes, it was Dickens' class consciousness that reinforced my own. It was a kind of justification for the beliefs I was already developing. Yes; it told me, what reading very often does for you, tells you you are not alone in these secret thoughts you have. Not long ago I read in Kurt Vonnegut, him saying that somebody asked him, "Why do you write?" and he said, "The reason I write is to tell people: You are not alone."
You mentioned some of these events in your life, your experience in the war, Spelman College. I have a sense that life and learning for you are never separated; that life informs your scholarship and your scholarship informs the way you live your life.
I think that's true. There is a strong connection between the two. I think that's probably because I had so many, I think, vivid life experiences before I entered the academic world, before I entered the world of scholarship. By the time I went to college under the GI Bill at the age of 27, I'd already worked in the shipyard, I'd been in a war, I'd worked at various jobs, and so I brought to my reading of history those experiences. And then I brought to what I learned from my experiences something broader, that is, a historical perspective which actually reinforced the ideas that I'd gained from my own life.
Before you were in college you were working on the docks and you were involved in a demonstration at Times Square, and the police attacked. As I read in your autobiography and you write, "Henceforth I was a radical, believing that something fundamental was wrong in this country, not just the existence of poverty amidst great wealth, not just the horrible treatment of black people, but something rotten at the root requiring an uprooting of the old order: the introduction of a new kind of society -- cooperative, peaceful, egalitarian." That is an example of a kind of event that really changed your thinking, and that's an argument that you make in a lot of your history, that people can be changed by things that happen to them and act accordingly.
That's right. Sometimes it's one very vivid experience. Of course, it's never just one vivid experience, but it's that one experience coming on top of maybe a kind of only semi-conscious understanding that's been developed, and then it becomes crystallized by an event, and I think that's what happened to me at the age of 17, when I was hit by a policeman and knocked unconscious. I woke up and said, my God, this is America, where, yes there are bad guys and there are good guys, but the government is neutral. And when I saw that, no, the police are not neutral, the government is not neutral, that was a very radical insight.
Now moving through your life, you went on to school, working on the docks while you got your degree; you did your dissertation on [Fiorello] LaGuardia. What attracted you to LaGuardia? What did you find there that is a real and important theme in all your work?
I wasn't studying LaGuardia as a mayor, I was studying LaGuardia as a congressman in the 1920s, representing a poor district in East Harlem. As I read his papers, and I was very conscious that all through my education, from elementary school right up tu graduate school, the twenties was presented as the age of prosperity, and here I was reading the letters that LaGuardia's constituency in East Harlem were writing to him. They were writing, saying "My husband is out of work, my kids are hungry, and they're turning off the gas." LaGuardia was the voice of the poor in Congress. He was a lone voice in Congress of the twenties, in the jazz age, speaking out for the poor, speaking out against Coolidge's sending Marines to Nicaragua in 1926, speaking out for immigrants. He was a radical in Congress, and that, of course, appealed to me.
You say that LaGuardia, you write, dug beneath the surface and held to the public a view that had been hidden.
Yes, and what had been hidden is the fact that underneath this veneer of prosperity were huge numbers of people in this country who were living under desperate circumstances. To me that was important, because it was not just a commentary of the twenties, but like all history, anything you learn about the past also becomes a commentary on your own time. It suggested to me that in our own time, we must look beneath the statements of political leaders who say, "Ah! We have an economic miracle today! The Dow Jones average has gone up." You always have to look beneath the superficial signs of prosperity to see how people are living.
THE EARLY CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT (10:48)
Your first teaching assignment was at Spelman College, a black college for women in Atlanta. Tell us about that experience and the amazing events that occurred during your stay, that is, the large historical events.
Those seven years at Spelman College are probably the most interesting, exciting, most educational years for me. I learned more from my students than my students learned from me. Living in the South at a very interesting time, the late fifties, early sixties, just before the onset of the big Civil Rights Movement, and then during those years, the early sixties, I learned so much.
For one thing, I began to look at history in a different way. I began to look at history from a black point of view. It looks very different from a black point of view. The heroes are different, and the eras get different names. The Progressive Era is no longer the Progressive Era, because it's the era in which more black people are lynched than in any other period in American history. I began reading black historians. Reading Raford Logan, reading DuBois, reading John Hope Franklin, reading E. Franklin Frasier, and things that weren't on my reading list right up in graduate school, Columbia University.
So that was one thing, learning about history, but the other thing, more important I think, was learning by being in the movement. By moving out from Atlanta to Albany, Georgia, and demonstrations in Selma, Alabama, Mississippi, Hattiesburg, Greenwood, Greenville, Jackson. By becoming a kind of participant writer in the movement, it taught me something very important about democracy, about the democracy that I had been taught in junior high school, and which people even learn in higher education: institutions, constitution, checks and balances, voting, all those things that political scientists concentrate on. Obviously, that was not democracy. Those things had failed to produce equality for black people, had failed, in fact, to enforce the 14th and 15th Amendments. Every president in the United States for a hundred years had violated his oath of office by not enforcing the 14th and 15th Amendments.
And what happened, that democracy came alive finally, when black people took to the streets and demonstrated and sat in and got arrested by the tens of thousands and created a commotion that was heard around the world. So it was an insight, suddenly. It shouldn't have been, I should have known that from before, that democracy comes alive not when government does anything, because government cannot be depended on to rectify serious injustices. It comes alive when people organize and do something about it. The Southern black movement taught me that.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIAL MOVEMENTS (13:59)
You write in your autobiography, "I began to realize no pitifully small picket line, no poorly attended meeting, no tossing out of an idea to an audience or even to an individual should be scorned as insignificant."
I suppose that's something that people learn when they participate in social movements, especially if they participate in the movement long enough to see it develop into something that at first seems impotent and impossible and then becomes a force and brings about change. I saw that in the Civil Rights Movement, and I saw that in the anti-war movement. Because in both cases, you could see little things happen which seemed as if they would get nowhere. It seems as if you are up against forces that cannot be dislodged.
Here, the change takes place in the Civil Rights Movement in the most dangerous parts of the country, in the deep South, where everything is controlled by the white power structure and blacks don't have the wherewithal. The only thing they have is their bodies, their determination, their unity, their willingness to take risks. And, yes, it starts with small things. You don't think they are going to get anywhere. Nobody really knew in the late fifties or even in the first years of the sixties that anything big would happen, and yet it did.
The anti-war movement starts off with small anti-war gestures in little gatherings around the country and it seems impossible. How are you going to stop the greatest military power on earth from continuing a vicious war? And yet, those small meetings, demonstrations, turned gradually, over several years, into a movement which became powerful enough to cause the government to think twice about continuing a war.
You state a part of your philosophy of history: "I'm convinced of the uncertainty of history, of the possibility of surprise, of the importance of human action in changing what looks unchangeable." We can actually go to a concrete example in your life. You participated in one of the first (if not the first) teach-ins on the Vietnam War on the Boston Commons very early in the game. It was years later that you were drawing massive crowds to a similar event on the Commons.
That's right. That very first anti-war meeting on the Boston Commons in the spring of '65, when Johnson had begun the real escalation of the war, begun the bombing, begun the dispatch of large numbers of troops, we had our first anti-war meeting on the Boston Commons, perhaps a hundred people showed up. Herbert Marcuse spoke, I spoke, a few other people spoke. It looked pitiful. This was '65. In '69, another meeting on the Boston Commons, a hundred thousand people are there. In those few years, something very important had taken place. I think that showed the possibility of change if you persist.
EXPERIENCING WAR (17:38)
Your involvement in the anti-war movement was informed, in part, by your experience as a soldier. I want to talk about one specific incident that you write about. In one of the last bombing missions of the war, you were a bombardier on a plane that essentially was one of the first uses of napalm, on an innocent French village called Rohan. Tell us about that experience and what you learned from it, and how it affected your activism in the anti-war movement but also your view of war in general.
You have to understand that I enlisted in the Air Force. I volunteered. I was an enthusiastic bombardier. To me it was very simple: it was a war against fascism. They were the bad guys, we were the good guys. One of the things I learned from that experience was that when you start off with them being the bad guys and you being the good guys, once you've made that one decision, you don't have to think anymore, if you're in the military. From that point on, anything goes. From that point on, you're capable of anything, even atrocities. Because you've made a decision a long time ago that you're on the right side. You don't keep questioning, questioning, questioning. You're not Yossarian, who questions.
The protagonist of Catch-22.
That's right. And so what happened with me, I was an enthusiastic bombardier, as I say. The war was over, presumably -- a few weeks from the end. Everybody knew the war was about to end in Europe. We had been flying bombing missions out of England over the Continent. We didn't think we were flying missions anymore. No reason to fly. We were all through France, into Germany. The Russians and Americans had met on the Elbe. It was just a matter of a few weeks. And then we were awakened in the wee hours of the morning and told we were going on a mission. And the intelligence, the so-called intelligence people, who brief us before we go into a plane, tell us we are going to bomb this tiny town on the Atlantic coast of France called Rohan, near Bordeaux, and we are doing it because there are several thousand German soldiers there. They are not doing anything. They are not bothering anyone. They are waiting for the war to end. They've just been bypassed. And we are going to bomb them.
What's interesting to me later, in thinking about it, is that it didn't occur to me to stand up in the briefing room and say, "What are we doing? Why are we doing this? The war is almost over, there is no need." It didn't occur to me. To this day, I understand how atrocities are committed. How the military mind works. You are taught to just mechanically go through the procedures that you have been taught, you see.
So, we went over Rohan, and they told us in the briefing that we were going to drop a different kind of bomb this time. Instead of the usual demolition bombs, we are going to drop, carry in our bomb bay, thirty 100-pound canisters of what they called jellied gasoline, which was napalm. It was the first use of napalm in the European war. We went over. We destroyed the German troops and also destroyed the French town of Rohan. "Friendly fire." That's what bombing does.
To this day, when I hear the leaders of the country say, "Well, this is precision bombing and we are being very careful, and we are only bombing military ..." -- nonsense. No matter how sophisticated the bombing technology, there is no way you can avoid killing non-military people when you drop bombs. But in any case, it wasn't until after the war that I looked back on that. In fact, it wasn't until after Hiroshima and Nagasaki that I looked back on that. Because after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which at first I had welcomed like everybody at that time did -- "Oh yes, the war is going to be over," -- and then I read John Hershey's book Hiroshima, and for the first time the human consequences of dropping the bomb were brought home to me in a way I hadn't thought of. When you are dropping bombs from 30,000 feet you don't hear screams. You don't see blood.
I suddenly saw what the bomb in Hiroshima did. I began to rethink the whole question of a "good war." I came to the conclusion that there is no such thing as a good war. They may start off with good intentions, at least on the part of the people who fight in them. Generally not on the part of the people who make the decision; I doubt they have good intentions. But there may be good intentions on the part of the GIs who believe, yes, we are doing this for a good cause. But those good intentions are quickly corrupted. The good guys become the bad guys. So I became convinced that war is not a solution, fundamentally, for any serious problem. It may seem like a solution, like a quick fix, a drug. You get rid of this dictator, that dictator, as we did Hitler, Mussolini. But you don't solve fundamental problems. In the meantime, you've killed tens of millions of people.
HISTORY (23:12)
Let's talk a little about how you apply these insights from your own experience to the doing of history. Let's talk about your philosophy of history. You've argued that what is selected and who selects the facts for history is very important. In fact, you quote Orwell, who wrote "Who controls the past controls the future. And who controls the present controls the past." So, I'm curious. What did these life experiences, your insight, how did that lead you to focus on this alternative history, for example, of the United States?
My growing up and going to work and becoming, as I say, class conscious; and then going to school and reading in my history books, looking for things that I had begun to learn on my own. Working in a shipyard and actually organizing young shipyard workers and getting interested in labor history, reading on my own the history of labor struggles in this country, and then looking in the history books that were given me in school, looking for the large textile strike of 1912, the Colorado coal strike of 1913, looking for Mother Jones, looking for Emma Goldman, Bill Haywood. They weren't there.
So it became clear to me that the really critical way in which people are deceived by history is not that lies are told, but that things are omitted. If a lie is told, you can check up on it. If something is omitted, you have no way of knowing it has been omitted. And so maybe I'm conscious of the fact ... looking through history, looking at other things, looking at the treatment of race, looking at the treatment of women; it made me always ask the question: what has been left out of this story? And [it made me] look for other things. So when I started out my book, and I knew I had to start out with Columbus, because that's what all histories of the United States start off with, I said, "What is left out?" The Indian point of view. And then Las Casas comes into the picture, telling the other side of the story.
The Jacksonian period, our Jacksonian democracy: Arthur Schlesinger writes this glowing book about Andrew Jackson and Jacksonian democracy. What else was going on? And then I find out that Jackson is responsible for the brutal treatment of the Indians in the Southeast, driving them across the Mississippi, thousands of them dying. Jackson is a racist. Jackson is a slave owner. Under Jackson, the industrial system begins with the mill girls going to work at the age of 12 and dying at the age of 25. I became conscious of omissions in history, and that's what I was determined to try to remedy.
As you write these accounts of the forgotten, and when one reads your books, you really get inspiration from their courage, the courage that has not appeared in the [standard] texts. But on the other hand, there is your courage, and I'm curious about the roots of that. The courage to take these stands both as a historian in what you write and as an activist. What are the roots of that courage in your life?
It's not a courage to me, it's a sad commentary, that we think it requires a lot of courage just to speak your mind. I'm not going to be executed. I'm not even going to be given a long jail sentence. I may be thrown into jail for a day or two, and that has happened to me eight to nine times. I may be fired, I may get a salary decrease, but these are pitiful things compared to what happens to people in the world. So it doesn't take much courage to do that. I had two friends, my closest friends in the Air Force, both of whom were killed in the last weeks of the war, and I think after you've been through a war experience, and after you've been aware of people dying, and somebody says, "Are you willing to risk your job? Are you willing to risk a salary cut? Are you willing to risk that you won't get tenure?" -- these are pitiful risks compared to the risks that people have taken in the world.
Many people, though, don't have that little bit of courage, so it makes a difference.
They need historical perspective.
Personal perspective, you seem to be saying, too.
Yes.
WRITING HISTORY (28:26)
I'm curious of, let's talk a little about writing. One of the, I think, really important motifs here is finding the story, but then telling the story in a lucid, clear manner. Is it hard for you to write or does it flow easily?
I don't have to struggle to write simply. That comes naturally to me. Maybe if I'd gone straight through college, graduate school, Ph.D., maybe I would have had the same thing happen to me that happens to people who go through the academic mill, in that it cripples their ability to write clearly. Really. I grew up reading Upton Sinclair and Jack London and reading stuff that was clear and lucid. Or Dickens. Dickens was not a florid writer. He's a narrator. And so, yes, I think that writing simply came naturally to me. I would have to struggle to write academic prose.
You're a person who is up front about his values and up front about the emotion that he feels about injustice. I want you to talk about how your writing, do you think, is affected by these honesties about both your values and your emotions. Is that a plus in making it easier to tell these stories?
I know that there is a kind of conventional wisdom, or, as I put it, conventional foolishness, that if you're passionate about something you can't really write well about it. In the arts we accept passion, and we accept that passion in the arts makes the arts come alive. But we don't accept it in scholarship, and therefore we draw a false line between the arts and scholarship. But I believe that being passionate about your scholarly work, being passionate about history is something that needs to be expressed in order to be honest. I think there's nothing more important than being honest about your feelings. Otherwise you are presenting something that is not yourself.
And also there is another element to it, and that is, in being passionate about something, you are giving that intensity to what you write, which magnifies its power. In a way, you're trying to make up for the fact that people who have written other things dominate the ideological landscape. Because you're a minority voice, you have to speak louder, more eloquently, more vividly, more passionately.
You have written, talking now about history and the importance of education, and you said "It confirmed what I learned from my Spelman years, that education becomes most rich and alive when it confronts the reality of moral conflict in the world."
It's interesting that you bring up Spelman College in connection with that, because there's an example of the interaction between education and activism. When my students went into town for the first time to sit in, to demonstrate, to be arrested in spring of 1960, I had colleagues at Spelman College, Morehouse, Atlanta University -- the complex of black colleges -- who said, "This is bad, they are hurting their education." One of them wrote a letter to the Atlanta Constitution saying "I deplore what my students are doing; they are cutting class; they are missing out on their education." And I thought, what a pitiful, narrow, cramped view of education this is. To think that what these students are going to learn in books can compare to what they will learn about the world, about reality. Then they will come from town, they will come back from prison, and then when they will go into the library, they will go into it with an enthusiasm and a curiosity that didn't exist before.
You also wrote, "I wanted students, "I think you are talking about your years at B.U. [Boston University] "to leave my classes not just better informed, but more prepared to relinquish the safety of silence, more prepared to speak up, to act against injustice wherever they saw it." What then is the link in the importance of history to activism?
I think the learning of history is a way of declaring, "I wasn't born yesterday; you can't deceive me." If I don't have any history, then whatever you, the person in authority, the president at the microphone announcing we must bomb here, we must go there, the president has the field all to himself. I cannot counteract, because I don't know any history. I can only believe him. I was born yesterday. What history does is give you enough data so that you can question anything that is said from on high. You can measure the claims that are being made by the people in authority against the reality. And you can look at similar claims that were made before, and see what happened then. Here's a president who's saying we're going to war for democracy. And then you go back through history and say, "How many times have presidents said we're going to war for democracy, and what have those wars really been about?" So yes, the history, I think, can clarify things, prepare you for dealing with the duplicities of the real world.
I just happened to have re-read your chapter on the Mexican Wars, and it's exactly what you're saying. As you hear the issues, the themes, the concerns of that time, which you often don't find in a normal history book, they resonate so much with the experiences of the Vietnam War.
I remember the New York Times ran a poll once, asking high school students questions about history. The idea was to find out how much high school students know. They do this every once in a while, basically to prove that high schools students are ignorant and that the people who make those polls are smart. The questions that the New York Times asked were questions like, "Who was the president during the Mexican War?" A really important question. Here's the New York Times, presumably the ultimate in journalism. This is not the Star, the National Enquirer. This is the New York Times and they're asking "Who was president during the Mexican War?" instead of asking, "How did we get into the Mexican War? How did it start? What was at stake? What lies were told? How much discussion was there in Congress before there was a declaration of war? How much desertion was there in the American army as a result of the American soldiers waking up and asking what are we doing here in this bloody mess?"
It's an example of where somebody at the start of the Vietnam War, listening to the claims of our government and how we must go into Vietnam for this or for that, knowing about the Mexican War, knowing about the Spanish-American War, knowing about the war in the Philippines, knowing about World War I -- well, people who knew that history would not accept blandly what we were being told!
CONCLUSION (37:16)
Is it fair to say of you, and this is the sense I get from reading your work, that you retain a sweet optimism about human nature?
I don't know if I'd use the word sweet.
Okay. Well, your smile is making me add that adjective.
I see. I prefer to think of it as a cold, rational optimism.
Yes. As a historian I would expect that of you.
Of course. Historians must not be sweet. But optimistic ... well, yes, a cautious optimism. Cautious in the sense that I'm not positive that things are going to go well. The future is indeterminate. But after all, the future depends on what we do now. If we are pessimistic now, we are doomed in the future. If we give up at this point then we know nothing good is going to happen. If we act on the assumption that there's a chance that something good may happen, then we have a possibility. Not a certainty, but a possibility. So I believe it's useful, it's pragmatic to be optimistic. But not only that, not simply an act of faith, but also because there is historical evidence for the fact that when people act, persist, get together, organize, they can bring about changes. There haven't been enough changes. So you can look at that and say, not enough. True. But the fact that some changes have been made. The fact that labor, by struggling, won the eight-hour day. The fact that blacks in the South did away with the signs of segregation. The fact that women changed the consciousness of this country about sexual equality. Even though those are only beginnings, that historical experience suggests reason to think it is possible that other things may change.
What, then, is the link between theory and action do you think that everyone should understand?
I think that it's important people read and learn, thinking, "I'm not doing this just because it's fun or because it will enhance my professional career but for the purpose of learning." This goes back to John Dooley, Alfred Lord White, that the purpose of learning is to have an effect on a world in which mostly people don't have the leisure, don't have the opportunity, don't have the breathing space, don't have the physical health even, to read a book or learn. So we who can do those things have an obligation to create a world in which maybe then people can do learning for fun.
What advice would you give to students who might view this tape and read your text, A People's History of the United States? What lesson would you suggest that they might learn from your life, that they might apply to theirs?
One thing is, because I claim there are many things you can learn from me, oh so many things they can learn from me!
One thing is that even if you're engaged in a movement where the future of that movement is uncertain, even if you're trying to achieve an objective which looks very very far away, simply working for it makes life more interesting and more worthwhile. So you don't have to look for some victory in the future. The very engagement with other people in a common struggle for something that you all believe in, that is a victory in itself.
Thank you very much Professor Zinn for being with us today.
Thank you for those good questions.
Thank you and thank you very much for joining us for this Conversation with History.
Welcome to a Conversation with History. I'm Harry Kreisler of the Institute of International Studies. Our guest today is Howard Zinn. Howard Zinn is an activist, a historian, a writer, and a playwright. He is the author of many books, including A People's History of the United States, The Zinn Reader, and an autobiography called You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train. His three plays are Emma, Daughter of Venus, and Marx in Soho. He is a Professor Emeritus of History at Boston University.
BACKGROUND
Howard, welcome to Berkeley.
Thank you.
You've described in your autobiography a public lecture at which someone asked you from the audience, "How did you come by the particular ideas you now have?" I want to follow that line of inquiry. How did the circumstances of your youth affect the way you came to see the world?
Well, I think, of course, that was a very good question. It should be asked of all historians. I guess Growing up in a working class family, going to work in a shipyard at the age of 18, working for three years in a shipyard, getting into the sweat of industrial life and being aware of the difference between the way we lived our lives and the lives of those people we saw on the movie screen or in the magazines, developing a kind of class consciousness: I think that had an effect later on my teaching and writing of history. Then joining the Air Force, becoming a bombardier in the Air Force, going through a war, coming out of the war with very, very strong anti-war ideas, even though I was in "the best of wars," as they say -- the "good war." And then, teaching in Spelman College, my first teaching job. Teaching at a black women's college in the South -- Atlanta, Georgia. Seven years there. Going through and becoming involved in the Civil Rights Movement -- I think all of that shaped my thinking about history.
Let's talk a little about your youth, and then talk about the other things. How, specifically, do you think your parents shaped your character?
My parents were not political people at all. My parents were just ordinary. They were Jewish immigrants who worked in garment factories when they came here, and then my father became a waiter. You might say he moved up in the world. He went from being a factory worker to being a waiter, and then he became a head waiter. As far as political influence, no. The only influence they had on my life was my observation of their lives. My observation that my father was working very hard, an honest hard-working man. My mother working very hard, raising four sons. And yet, of course, they had nothing to show for it. That is, they were perfect counterpoints to the Horatio Alger myth that if you work hard in this country, you will get somewhere. I think that intensified my feeling about the injustice of an economic system in which there are people all over the country like my parents who work very, very hard and have nothing to show for it.
One of the things that your parents did was obtain for you a subscription to a collection of Dickens books, and so reading became very important to you and also offered you insights, right?
Oh, no doubt. Reading, reading, reading at an early age. My parents knew I was a reader even though they were not readers. My father was barely literate, my mother was somewhat literate. But they knew that I was interested in books and reading. They had no idea who Charles Dickens was, but they saw this ad, they could send away coupons and a dime for each book. So they got me this whole set of Dickens and I made my way through Dickens.
What did you learn from Dickens?
From Dickens what I got was this ferocious acknowledgement of the modern industrial system and what it does to people, and how poor people live and the way they are victimized, and the way the courts function. The way justice works against the poor. Yes, it was Dickens' class consciousness that reinforced my own. It was a kind of justification for the beliefs I was already developing. Yes; it told me, what reading very often does for you, tells you you are not alone in these secret thoughts you have. Not long ago I read in Kurt Vonnegut, him saying that somebody asked him, "Why do you write?" and he said, "The reason I write is to tell people: You are not alone."
You mentioned some of these events in your life, your experience in the war, Spelman College. I have a sense that life and learning for you are never separated; that life informs your scholarship and your scholarship informs the way you live your life.
I think that's true. There is a strong connection between the two. I think that's probably because I had so many, I think, vivid life experiences before I entered the academic world, before I entered the world of scholarship. By the time I went to college under the GI Bill at the age of 27, I'd already worked in the shipyard, I'd been in a war, I'd worked at various jobs, and so I brought to my reading of history those experiences. And then I brought to what I learned from my experiences something broader, that is, a historical perspective which actually reinforced the ideas that I'd gained from my own life.
Before you were in college you were working on the docks and you were involved in a demonstration at Times Square, and the police attacked. As I read in your autobiography and you write, "Henceforth I was a radical, believing that something fundamental was wrong in this country, not just the existence of poverty amidst great wealth, not just the horrible treatment of black people, but something rotten at the root requiring an uprooting of the old order: the introduction of a new kind of society -- cooperative, peaceful, egalitarian." That is an example of a kind of event that really changed your thinking, and that's an argument that you make in a lot of your history, that people can be changed by things that happen to them and act accordingly.
That's right. Sometimes it's one very vivid experience. Of course, it's never just one vivid experience, but it's that one experience coming on top of maybe a kind of only semi-conscious understanding that's been developed, and then it becomes crystallized by an event, and I think that's what happened to me at the age of 17, when I was hit by a policeman and knocked unconscious. I woke up and said, my God, this is America, where, yes there are bad guys and there are good guys, but the government is neutral. And when I saw that, no, the police are not neutral, the government is not neutral, that was a very radical insight.
Now moving through your life, you went on to school, working on the docks while you got your degree; you did your dissertation on [Fiorello] LaGuardia. What attracted you to LaGuardia? What did you find there that is a real and important theme in all your work?
I wasn't studying LaGuardia as a mayor, I was studying LaGuardia as a congressman in the 1920s, representing a poor district in East Harlem. As I read his papers, and I was very conscious that all through my education, from elementary school right up tu graduate school, the twenties was presented as the age of prosperity, and here I was reading the letters that LaGuardia's constituency in East Harlem were writing to him. They were writing, saying "My husband is out of work, my kids are hungry, and they're turning off the gas." LaGuardia was the voice of the poor in Congress. He was a lone voice in Congress of the twenties, in the jazz age, speaking out for the poor, speaking out against Coolidge's sending Marines to Nicaragua in 1926, speaking out for immigrants. He was a radical in Congress, and that, of course, appealed to me.
You say that LaGuardia, you write, dug beneath the surface and held to the public a view that had been hidden.
Yes, and what had been hidden is the fact that underneath this veneer of prosperity were huge numbers of people in this country who were living under desperate circumstances. To me that was important, because it was not just a commentary of the twenties, but like all history, anything you learn about the past also becomes a commentary on your own time. It suggested to me that in our own time, we must look beneath the statements of political leaders who say, "Ah! We have an economic miracle today! The Dow Jones average has gone up." You always have to look beneath the superficial signs of prosperity to see how people are living.
THE EARLY CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT (10:48)
Your first teaching assignment was at Spelman College, a black college for women in Atlanta. Tell us about that experience and the amazing events that occurred during your stay, that is, the large historical events.
Those seven years at Spelman College are probably the most interesting, exciting, most educational years for me. I learned more from my students than my students learned from me. Living in the South at a very interesting time, the late fifties, early sixties, just before the onset of the big Civil Rights Movement, and then during those years, the early sixties, I learned so much.
For one thing, I began to look at history in a different way. I began to look at history from a black point of view. It looks very different from a black point of view. The heroes are different, and the eras get different names. The Progressive Era is no longer the Progressive Era, because it's the era in which more black people are lynched than in any other period in American history. I began reading black historians. Reading Raford Logan, reading DuBois, reading John Hope Franklin, reading E. Franklin Frasier, and things that weren't on my reading list right up in graduate school, Columbia University.
So that was one thing, learning about history, but the other thing, more important I think, was learning by being in the movement. By moving out from Atlanta to Albany, Georgia, and demonstrations in Selma, Alabama, Mississippi, Hattiesburg, Greenwood, Greenville, Jackson. By becoming a kind of participant writer in the movement, it taught me something very important about democracy, about the democracy that I had been taught in junior high school, and which people even learn in higher education: institutions, constitution, checks and balances, voting, all those things that political scientists concentrate on. Obviously, that was not democracy. Those things had failed to produce equality for black people, had failed, in fact, to enforce the 14th and 15th Amendments. Every president in the United States for a hundred years had violated his oath of office by not enforcing the 14th and 15th Amendments.
And what happened, that democracy came alive finally, when black people took to the streets and demonstrated and sat in and got arrested by the tens of thousands and created a commotion that was heard around the world. So it was an insight, suddenly. It shouldn't have been, I should have known that from before, that democracy comes alive not when government does anything, because government cannot be depended on to rectify serious injustices. It comes alive when people organize and do something about it. The Southern black movement taught me that.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIAL MOVEMENTS (13:59)
You write in your autobiography, "I began to realize no pitifully small picket line, no poorly attended meeting, no tossing out of an idea to an audience or even to an individual should be scorned as insignificant."
I suppose that's something that people learn when they participate in social movements, especially if they participate in the movement long enough to see it develop into something that at first seems impotent and impossible and then becomes a force and brings about change. I saw that in the Civil Rights Movement, and I saw that in the anti-war movement. Because in both cases, you could see little things happen which seemed as if they would get nowhere. It seems as if you are up against forces that cannot be dislodged.
Here, the change takes place in the Civil Rights Movement in the most dangerous parts of the country, in the deep South, where everything is controlled by the white power structure and blacks don't have the wherewithal. The only thing they have is their bodies, their determination, their unity, their willingness to take risks. And, yes, it starts with small things. You don't think they are going to get anywhere. Nobody really knew in the late fifties or even in the first years of the sixties that anything big would happen, and yet it did.
The anti-war movement starts off with small anti-war gestures in little gatherings around the country and it seems impossible. How are you going to stop the greatest military power on earth from continuing a vicious war? And yet, those small meetings, demonstrations, turned gradually, over several years, into a movement which became powerful enough to cause the government to think twice about continuing a war.
You state a part of your philosophy of history: "I'm convinced of the uncertainty of history, of the possibility of surprise, of the importance of human action in changing what looks unchangeable." We can actually go to a concrete example in your life. You participated in one of the first (if not the first) teach-ins on the Vietnam War on the Boston Commons very early in the game. It was years later that you were drawing massive crowds to a similar event on the Commons.
That's right. That very first anti-war meeting on the Boston Commons in the spring of '65, when Johnson had begun the real escalation of the war, begun the bombing, begun the dispatch of large numbers of troops, we had our first anti-war meeting on the Boston Commons, perhaps a hundred people showed up. Herbert Marcuse spoke, I spoke, a few other people spoke. It looked pitiful. This was '65. In '69, another meeting on the Boston Commons, a hundred thousand people are there. In those few years, something very important had taken place. I think that showed the possibility of change if you persist.
EXPERIENCING WAR (17:38)
Your involvement in the anti-war movement was informed, in part, by your experience as a soldier. I want to talk about one specific incident that you write about. In one of the last bombing missions of the war, you were a bombardier on a plane that essentially was one of the first uses of napalm, on an innocent French village called Rohan. Tell us about that experience and what you learned from it, and how it affected your activism in the anti-war movement but also your view of war in general.
You have to understand that I enlisted in the Air Force. I volunteered. I was an enthusiastic bombardier. To me it was very simple: it was a war against fascism. They were the bad guys, we were the good guys. One of the things I learned from that experience was that when you start off with them being the bad guys and you being the good guys, once you've made that one decision, you don't have to think anymore, if you're in the military. From that point on, anything goes. From that point on, you're capable of anything, even atrocities. Because you've made a decision a long time ago that you're on the right side. You don't keep questioning, questioning, questioning. You're not Yossarian, who questions.
The protagonist of Catch-22.
That's right. And so what happened with me, I was an enthusiastic bombardier, as I say. The war was over, presumably -- a few weeks from the end. Everybody knew the war was about to end in Europe. We had been flying bombing missions out of England over the Continent. We didn't think we were flying missions anymore. No reason to fly. We were all through France, into Germany. The Russians and Americans had met on the Elbe. It was just a matter of a few weeks. And then we were awakened in the wee hours of the morning and told we were going on a mission. And the intelligence, the so-called intelligence people, who brief us before we go into a plane, tell us we are going to bomb this tiny town on the Atlantic coast of France called Rohan, near Bordeaux, and we are doing it because there are several thousand German soldiers there. They are not doing anything. They are not bothering anyone. They are waiting for the war to end. They've just been bypassed. And we are going to bomb them.
What's interesting to me later, in thinking about it, is that it didn't occur to me to stand up in the briefing room and say, "What are we doing? Why are we doing this? The war is almost over, there is no need." It didn't occur to me. To this day, I understand how atrocities are committed. How the military mind works. You are taught to just mechanically go through the procedures that you have been taught, you see.
So, we went over Rohan, and they told us in the briefing that we were going to drop a different kind of bomb this time. Instead of the usual demolition bombs, we are going to drop, carry in our bomb bay, thirty 100-pound canisters of what they called jellied gasoline, which was napalm. It was the first use of napalm in the European war. We went over. We destroyed the German troops and also destroyed the French town of Rohan. "Friendly fire." That's what bombing does.
To this day, when I hear the leaders of the country say, "Well, this is precision bombing and we are being very careful, and we are only bombing military ..." -- nonsense. No matter how sophisticated the bombing technology, there is no way you can avoid killing non-military people when you drop bombs. But in any case, it wasn't until after the war that I looked back on that. In fact, it wasn't until after Hiroshima and Nagasaki that I looked back on that. Because after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which at first I had welcomed like everybody at that time did -- "Oh yes, the war is going to be over," -- and then I read John Hershey's book Hiroshima, and for the first time the human consequences of dropping the bomb were brought home to me in a way I hadn't thought of. When you are dropping bombs from 30,000 feet you don't hear screams. You don't see blood.
I suddenly saw what the bomb in Hiroshima did. I began to rethink the whole question of a "good war." I came to the conclusion that there is no such thing as a good war. They may start off with good intentions, at least on the part of the people who fight in them. Generally not on the part of the people who make the decision; I doubt they have good intentions. But there may be good intentions on the part of the GIs who believe, yes, we are doing this for a good cause. But those good intentions are quickly corrupted. The good guys become the bad guys. So I became convinced that war is not a solution, fundamentally, for any serious problem. It may seem like a solution, like a quick fix, a drug. You get rid of this dictator, that dictator, as we did Hitler, Mussolini. But you don't solve fundamental problems. In the meantime, you've killed tens of millions of people.
HISTORY (23:12)
Let's talk a little about how you apply these insights from your own experience to the doing of history. Let's talk about your philosophy of history. You've argued that what is selected and who selects the facts for history is very important. In fact, you quote Orwell, who wrote "Who controls the past controls the future. And who controls the present controls the past." So, I'm curious. What did these life experiences, your insight, how did that lead you to focus on this alternative history, for example, of the United States?
My growing up and going to work and becoming, as I say, class conscious; and then going to school and reading in my history books, looking for things that I had begun to learn on my own. Working in a shipyard and actually organizing young shipyard workers and getting interested in labor history, reading on my own the history of labor struggles in this country, and then looking in the history books that were given me in school, looking for the large textile strike of 1912, the Colorado coal strike of 1913, looking for Mother Jones, looking for Emma Goldman, Bill Haywood. They weren't there.
So it became clear to me that the really critical way in which people are deceived by history is not that lies are told, but that things are omitted. If a lie is told, you can check up on it. If something is omitted, you have no way of knowing it has been omitted. And so maybe I'm conscious of the fact ... looking through history, looking at other things, looking at the treatment of race, looking at the treatment of women; it made me always ask the question: what has been left out of this story? And [it made me] look for other things. So when I started out my book, and I knew I had to start out with Columbus, because that's what all histories of the United States start off with, I said, "What is left out?" The Indian point of view. And then Las Casas comes into the picture, telling the other side of the story.
The Jacksonian period, our Jacksonian democracy: Arthur Schlesinger writes this glowing book about Andrew Jackson and Jacksonian democracy. What else was going on? And then I find out that Jackson is responsible for the brutal treatment of the Indians in the Southeast, driving them across the Mississippi, thousands of them dying. Jackson is a racist. Jackson is a slave owner. Under Jackson, the industrial system begins with the mill girls going to work at the age of 12 and dying at the age of 25. I became conscious of omissions in history, and that's what I was determined to try to remedy.
As you write these accounts of the forgotten, and when one reads your books, you really get inspiration from their courage, the courage that has not appeared in the [standard] texts. But on the other hand, there is your courage, and I'm curious about the roots of that. The courage to take these stands both as a historian in what you write and as an activist. What are the roots of that courage in your life?
It's not a courage to me, it's a sad commentary, that we think it requires a lot of courage just to speak your mind. I'm not going to be executed. I'm not even going to be given a long jail sentence. I may be thrown into jail for a day or two, and that has happened to me eight to nine times. I may be fired, I may get a salary decrease, but these are pitiful things compared to what happens to people in the world. So it doesn't take much courage to do that. I had two friends, my closest friends in the Air Force, both of whom were killed in the last weeks of the war, and I think after you've been through a war experience, and after you've been aware of people dying, and somebody says, "Are you willing to risk your job? Are you willing to risk a salary cut? Are you willing to risk that you won't get tenure?" -- these are pitiful risks compared to the risks that people have taken in the world.
Many people, though, don't have that little bit of courage, so it makes a difference.
They need historical perspective.
Personal perspective, you seem to be saying, too.
Yes.
WRITING HISTORY (28:26)
I'm curious of, let's talk a little about writing. One of the, I think, really important motifs here is finding the story, but then telling the story in a lucid, clear manner. Is it hard for you to write or does it flow easily?
I don't have to struggle to write simply. That comes naturally to me. Maybe if I'd gone straight through college, graduate school, Ph.D., maybe I would have had the same thing happen to me that happens to people who go through the academic mill, in that it cripples their ability to write clearly. Really. I grew up reading Upton Sinclair and Jack London and reading stuff that was clear and lucid. Or Dickens. Dickens was not a florid writer. He's a narrator. And so, yes, I think that writing simply came naturally to me. I would have to struggle to write academic prose.
You're a person who is up front about his values and up front about the emotion that he feels about injustice. I want you to talk about how your writing, do you think, is affected by these honesties about both your values and your emotions. Is that a plus in making it easier to tell these stories?
I know that there is a kind of conventional wisdom, or, as I put it, conventional foolishness, that if you're passionate about something you can't really write well about it. In the arts we accept passion, and we accept that passion in the arts makes the arts come alive. But we don't accept it in scholarship, and therefore we draw a false line between the arts and scholarship. But I believe that being passionate about your scholarly work, being passionate about history is something that needs to be expressed in order to be honest. I think there's nothing more important than being honest about your feelings. Otherwise you are presenting something that is not yourself.
And also there is another element to it, and that is, in being passionate about something, you are giving that intensity to what you write, which magnifies its power. In a way, you're trying to make up for the fact that people who have written other things dominate the ideological landscape. Because you're a minority voice, you have to speak louder, more eloquently, more vividly, more passionately.
You have written, talking now about history and the importance of education, and you said "It confirmed what I learned from my Spelman years, that education becomes most rich and alive when it confronts the reality of moral conflict in the world."
It's interesting that you bring up Spelman College in connection with that, because there's an example of the interaction between education and activism. When my students went into town for the first time to sit in, to demonstrate, to be arrested in spring of 1960, I had colleagues at Spelman College, Morehouse, Atlanta University -- the complex of black colleges -- who said, "This is bad, they are hurting their education." One of them wrote a letter to the Atlanta Constitution saying "I deplore what my students are doing; they are cutting class; they are missing out on their education." And I thought, what a pitiful, narrow, cramped view of education this is. To think that what these students are going to learn in books can compare to what they will learn about the world, about reality. Then they will come from town, they will come back from prison, and then when they will go into the library, they will go into it with an enthusiasm and a curiosity that didn't exist before.
You also wrote, "I wanted students, "I think you are talking about your years at B.U. [Boston University] "to leave my classes not just better informed, but more prepared to relinquish the safety of silence, more prepared to speak up, to act against injustice wherever they saw it." What then is the link in the importance of history to activism?
I think the learning of history is a way of declaring, "I wasn't born yesterday; you can't deceive me." If I don't have any history, then whatever you, the person in authority, the president at the microphone announcing we must bomb here, we must go there, the president has the field all to himself. I cannot counteract, because I don't know any history. I can only believe him. I was born yesterday. What history does is give you enough data so that you can question anything that is said from on high. You can measure the claims that are being made by the people in authority against the reality. And you can look at similar claims that were made before, and see what happened then. Here's a president who's saying we're going to war for democracy. And then you go back through history and say, "How many times have presidents said we're going to war for democracy, and what have those wars really been about?" So yes, the history, I think, can clarify things, prepare you for dealing with the duplicities of the real world.
I just happened to have re-read your chapter on the Mexican Wars, and it's exactly what you're saying. As you hear the issues, the themes, the concerns of that time, which you often don't find in a normal history book, they resonate so much with the experiences of the Vietnam War.
I remember the New York Times ran a poll once, asking high school students questions about history. The idea was to find out how much high school students know. They do this every once in a while, basically to prove that high schools students are ignorant and that the people who make those polls are smart. The questions that the New York Times asked were questions like, "Who was the president during the Mexican War?" A really important question. Here's the New York Times, presumably the ultimate in journalism. This is not the Star, the National Enquirer. This is the New York Times and they're asking "Who was president during the Mexican War?" instead of asking, "How did we get into the Mexican War? How did it start? What was at stake? What lies were told? How much discussion was there in Congress before there was a declaration of war? How much desertion was there in the American army as a result of the American soldiers waking up and asking what are we doing here in this bloody mess?"
It's an example of where somebody at the start of the Vietnam War, listening to the claims of our government and how we must go into Vietnam for this or for that, knowing about the Mexican War, knowing about the Spanish-American War, knowing about the war in the Philippines, knowing about World War I -- well, people who knew that history would not accept blandly what we were being told!
CONCLUSION (37:16)
Is it fair to say of you, and this is the sense I get from reading your work, that you retain a sweet optimism about human nature?
I don't know if I'd use the word sweet.
Okay. Well, your smile is making me add that adjective.
I see. I prefer to think of it as a cold, rational optimism.
Yes. As a historian I would expect that of you.
Of course. Historians must not be sweet. But optimistic ... well, yes, a cautious optimism. Cautious in the sense that I'm not positive that things are going to go well. The future is indeterminate. But after all, the future depends on what we do now. If we are pessimistic now, we are doomed in the future. If we give up at this point then we know nothing good is going to happen. If we act on the assumption that there's a chance that something good may happen, then we have a possibility. Not a certainty, but a possibility. So I believe it's useful, it's pragmatic to be optimistic. But not only that, not simply an act of faith, but also because there is historical evidence for the fact that when people act, persist, get together, organize, they can bring about changes. There haven't been enough changes. So you can look at that and say, not enough. True. But the fact that some changes have been made. The fact that labor, by struggling, won the eight-hour day. The fact that blacks in the South did away with the signs of segregation. The fact that women changed the consciousness of this country about sexual equality. Even though those are only beginnings, that historical experience suggests reason to think it is possible that other things may change.
What, then, is the link between theory and action do you think that everyone should understand?
I think that it's important people read and learn, thinking, "I'm not doing this just because it's fun or because it will enhance my professional career but for the purpose of learning." This goes back to John Dooley, Alfred Lord White, that the purpose of learning is to have an effect on a world in which mostly people don't have the leisure, don't have the opportunity, don't have the breathing space, don't have the physical health even, to read a book or learn. So we who can do those things have an obligation to create a world in which maybe then people can do learning for fun.
What advice would you give to students who might view this tape and read your text, A People's History of the United States? What lesson would you suggest that they might learn from your life, that they might apply to theirs?
One thing is, because I claim there are many things you can learn from me, oh so many things they can learn from me!
One thing is that even if you're engaged in a movement where the future of that movement is uncertain, even if you're trying to achieve an objective which looks very very far away, simply working for it makes life more interesting and more worthwhile. So you don't have to look for some victory in the future. The very engagement with other people in a common struggle for something that you all believe in, that is a victory in itself.
Thank you very much Professor Zinn for being with us today.
Thank you for those good questions.
Thank you and thank you very much for joining us for this Conversation with History.
