General Interest Review 00021

Howard Zinn

Howard Zinn is a historian and activist who died today. As one of the leading voices on the Leftmost side of the national conscience over the past 50 years, Zinn's life is the rare snapshot of the public intellectual, so scarce in the recent American past. His obituary did not appear in the print edition of The New York Times on Jan. 28, 2009. Customarily, obituaries of major figures appear in newspapers the day following their death. (The paper of record featured obituaries of an astronomer, and, perhaps fittingly, a man known for chronicling New York's high society)

He gained fame from a book, "A People's History of the United States," which presented American history from the point of view of its most marginalized and oppressed. When people learned about these other characters in history, they began to question the motives of the leaders who were so frequently held up as heroes in the history normally taught in school. They were no longer hapless bystanders to injustice, nor were they saviors from oppression. Instead, they were willing participants in both enterprises. Like Zinn, people began to feel uneasy about leaders' actions. It presented an entirely new and different way of looking at the world. People were inspired.

Zinn looked through the lens of the oppressed often during his life. In the 1950s, he taught at Spelman College, a historically black women's college in Alabama. Around this time, the civil rights movement cropped up. And in the 1960s, he traveled to Hanoi during the Tet Offensive to negotiate the release of the first three American prisoners in the war. At this time, American officials refused to negotiate with The Enemy for the release of the prisoners. While Zinn talked, they ordered carpet bombing raids in the countryside. During this time, Zinn also spoke out against the war around the country and helped edit Daniel Ellsberg's leaked copy of the secret history of the Vietnam War known as the Pentagon Papers prior to publication.

The volume of activity is notable, but what made the tenacity of Zinn's actions somehow more forceful were that they came from a man who could easily be imagined as an unquestioning beneficiary of the postwar boom. Like your grandfather, he was a veteran, and was possessed of charm, a keen smile, and self-depecrating humor. But he could turn around and deliver a magnetic, impassioned speech that would bring lesser intellectual foes to their knees. People drew strength from Zinn because he believed what he said -- even though it was so radically different from anything else that other people say -- with every fiber of his being. Why else would such a nice guy spend so much time worrying about such depressing stuff?

On the Left, only a few leaders exist like him, and they are all getting on in years. And nice guys have always been hard to come by in the political/intellectual world. When you're able to simultaneously change the consciousness of people and inspire them through words and deeds, you're carrying a heavy load. The Left is hardly even a movement at this point, and people who want peace and an end to systemic injustice that have been marginalized by their own actions (worrying about 9/11 truth), and sheer dismissal from a mainstream that pays no attention to a peace mach but laps up every move of the other side's "extreme" wing. But Zinn was never all that popular with the mainstream press, and he never believed in conspiracies. Yet somehow there was still room for him in The Discourse. In the huge void left by Zinn's passing, the continuation of his project seems very much a possibility, as long as people he inspired are willing to take up the cause.