The Uruguayan historian Eduardo Galeano’s invaluable website of social movement activism, upsidedownworld.org, has a slogan: “If the world is upside down the way it is now, wouldn’t we have to turn it over to get it to stand up straight?” With Howard Zinn’s death on January 27, we lost the best historical populizer working to turn our violent world right-side up. Zinn was a World War II veteran who became an active supporter of the War Resisters League, a white man who became an antiracist and antisexist activist, a historian who was a brilliant practitioner of both history as activism and activism to change history.
I had the privilege of meeting him only a few times, but as a history teacher and an activist I’m continually drawing on his work. He was justifiably best known for his monumental A People’s History of the United States, but many of his other works, particularly some of his more neglected early works, are quite valuable. Zinn’s SNCC: The New Abolitionists, reflecting his work with the organization while he taught at Spellman, brought the work of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee vibrantly to life and situated the civil rights movement in the sweep of African-American and antiracist history. By calling the civil rights movement the “new abolitionists,” he was not only presciently describing what historians today commonly refer to as the Second Reconstruction but also highlighting neglected Reconstruction–era civil rights laws that were used by the movement to achieve its goals.
In his Logic of Withdrawal, Zinn used a brilliant method to make the case for immediate U.S. military withdrawal from Vietnam. Zinn, anticipating both Phil Ochs’ song “The War Is Over” and the Yes Men’s antics decades later, wrote the “speech that Johnson should make,” announcing the pullout of U.S. troops from Vietnam. He thus contributed, in accessible form, a veritable handbook of how activists could make the case to skeptical audiences.
In A People’s History, Zinn synthesized the work of revisionist and social historians in an attempt to relate a readable narrative history of the United States. Zinn told the story from the moral point of view of resistance to mass violence, economic exploitation, and systematic domination. Zinn was honest about his point of view in a way most historians never are. In the first chapter of A People’s History, he says:
My point is not to grieve for the victims and denounce the executioners. Those tears, that anger, cast into the past, deplete our moral energy for the present. And the lines are not always clear. In the long run, the oppressor is also a victim. In the short run (and so far, human history has consisted only of short runs), the victims, themselves desperate and tainted with the culture that oppresses them, turn on other victims.
I’m not saying that A People’s History always lives up to these high moral standards. I think the aspect of Zinn’s historiography that makes many professional historians most uncomfortable is not his failure to always live up to his ideals but his honest insistence that history is a moral undertaking in the first place.
Despite the condescension of liberal historians in the corporate media, Zinn’s works of popular revisionist social history, designed to fuel nonviolent activism, already serve as a model for several generations of progressive historians and educators.
Let’s give Zinn the penultimate word, again from A People’s History:
If history is to be creative, to anticipate a possible future without denying the past, it should, I believe, emphasize new possibilities by disclosing those hidden episodes of the past when, even if in brief flashes, people showed their ability to resist, to join together, occasionally to win. I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past’s fugitive moments of compassion rather than in its solid centuries of warfare.
Howard Zinn, in his life, his activism, and his work, helped us discover “moments of compassion” to treasure. For that, and so much else, we thank him.
—Sam Diener
