The People Have Spoken

By: Tony Berg | Danielle Levitt | December 02, 2008 | Local Politics Profile

Introduction

On the evening of May 1, 2008 — May Day, of course — a cast of actors and musicians including Sean Penn, Eddie Vedder, Josh Brolin, Taj Mahal, Benjamin Bratt, Jackson Browne, Sandra Oh, X, Don Cheadle, Chris and Rich Robinson of The Black Crowes, Casey Affleck and Rosario Dawson all assembled at the Malibu Performing Arts Center to read and perform songs in an evening devoted to … the teaching of American history! Other celebrities were in the audience: Barbra Streisand, Pink, Diane Lane, members of the Red Hot Chili Peppers along with an enthralled 500 other spectators.
But amid all that glamour, the real star of this improbable evening — in absentia, no less — was the distinguished historian Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States. Zinn has spent his entire adult life committed to uncovering the struggles of America’s dispossessed, and evenings such as this are the embodiment of all he has advocated. Producers Chris Moore, Anthony Arnove and Zinn himself assembled this remarkable cast, all drawn by nothing more glamorous than the eloquence found within America’s history of the oppressed as revealed in Zinn’s opus. The voices of Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, Eugene Debs and Kevin Tillman, among others, along with the songs of the writers who participated (and those of Bob Dylan, whose songs were particularly resonant), overwhelmed an audience more apt to be jaded and blasé. No one could have anticipated the passion delivered and reciprocated on this evening as The People Speak, the film being shot of these performances, celebrated the poetry of dissent.
Five months earlier, a similar evening was held at Boston’s Majestic Theatre. On that occasion, Marisa Tomei, Danny Glover, John Legend, Darryl McDaniels (DMC of Run DMC), David Straithairn, Kerry Washington, Q’orianka Kilcher and Viggo Mortensen, among others, performed in a companion program, which, with a later performance in Malibu featuring Randy Newman, Lupe Fiasco and new disciple Pink, would constitute the balance of The People Speak. This visual companion piece to Zinn’s celebrated tome is directed at a larger audience — those not familiar with the more unsung heroes of America’s disenfranchised who comprise a kind of shadow history to that taught in most of our schools. That book, first published in 1980, with the ambitious title, A People’s History, has not so quietly sold nearly two million copies, opening the eyes of millions of readers to the horrendous genocides, biases and plutocracy that have stained our story and managed somehow to become either white-washed or removed altogether from our standard texts.
Howard Zinn demands that those voices are heard, that the reader understand that Columbus’s magnificent discoveries were the corollaries of horrendous pillaging, subjugation and murder; that Jefferson, the great voice of democracy, was a lifelong slaveholder; that Lincoln, the emancipator, was slow and initially expedient in reaching his greater consciousness; that Wilson, the advocate of self-determination, suffered incongruous bouts of imperialism; that the Kennedys, synonymous with civil rights, were very slow to arrive at those more enlightened views with which they are identified. Zinn’s mission is to encourage us to constantly examine ourselves. So many progressive movements in our past are tempered by our ignominies. How ironic, for instance, that as we celebrate the election of America’s first black president we see what must surely be the “Selmas” and “Montgomerys” of the gay rights movement. Can any of us recall legislation that rescinds a citizen’s rights as California’s Proposition 8 does?
It is his unique blend of the radical and the plainspoken that draws so many to Howard Zinn. His message is proletarian, his delivery unvarnished. A People’s History of the United States and its companion piece Voices of a People’s History of the United States, along with dozens of his other books and plays have informed and emboldened generations of readers, giving them a provocative counterpoint to the academic orthodoxy.

Early life

Howard Zinn was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1922. His father, Eddie, had emigrated from Austria-Hungary, his mother, Jenny, from Siberia, and both had only primary school educations. Theirs was typical of the newly assimilated immigrant New York home — factory jobs, a couple of children, mixed languages: “They spoke English to us (Howard and his brother Phil) and Yiddish to one another. We picked up some words of Yiddish, which I still throw around just to brag.” The house in which he grew up was not literary. There were no books in the house until a young Howard discovered literature by way of a New York Post 25-cent-per-volume sale on a 20-volume Complete Works of Dickens. Nor was the Zinn household political. “They were not interested in politics. The closest they came to an interest in politics was because there was a Depression. I was a kid growing up in the ’30s in the Depression. They were like so many immigrants and so many poor people at the time. They saw Franklin D. Roosevelt as a savior. Roosevelt turned things around. When my father didn’t have any work, Roosevelt created jobs. So, that was their only connection with politics.” Soon though, to the consternation of his parents, this son of immigrant factory workers was developing a healthy inquisitiveness, and becoming exposed and drawn to left-wing politics. “When they saw me getting involved at the age of 17, 18, with young radicals in my neighborhood, they were a little were nervous. Like so many parents, they didn’t want me to get into trouble. And they saw these other young people as trouble, which they were, of course.”
As a young man, Zinn worked in a shipyard for three years. He hadn’t gone to college, but he was reading voraciously — Marx, Upton Sinclair, Jack London — and learning about Socialism and the evils of Fascism. Now a fervently politicized autodidact, the 21-year-old anti-fascist Howard Zinn headed off to fight the Nazis.

War and ...

“No, I wasn’t ambivalent about World War II. I volunteered for the Air Force. I was an eager bombardier.” Zinn describes his enlistment as an act of righteousness, an appropriate response to the atrocities being committed in Europe by the Germans. But something was to occur that would have lifelong consequences. “I participated in this raid, the last bombing raid we were in because the war was almost over. Everybody knew the war was coming to an end, and yet they summoned us to do this bombing raid — which we did — over this little French town of Royan just to really get rid of German soldiers who were hanging out there. They weren’t bothering anybody. It was one of those military things where the momentum of the war carries you into things that you don’t have to do. We didn’t have to bomb this little town. The war was about over, but we were sent out and we dropped napalm. We didn’t know it was napalm. They called it ‘jelly gasoline.’ We knew it was something different. At the time, as I did it, I didn’t even think about it, [but now] I understand how atrocities take place. They take place because soldiers just follow orders and don’t think about what they’re doing. You’ve decided at the beginning of your military service — and maybe it even initiated you into your military service — ‘Oh, we’re the good guys, they’re the bad guys.’ From that point on, you don’t think anymore. That means everything you do is good; everything they do is bad. And so, I didn’t think about dropping these bombs. I didn’t think about what we were doing to people ‘down there.’ In fact, I didn’t see people ‘down there.’ You don’t see people when you’re dropping bombs from a 30,000-foot height.”
Zinn acknowledges that “there are some wars that are easier to create a good aura about. WWII is an example, or the Civil War, or the Revolutionary War.” But his wartime experiences, his reading and his sheer humanism lead him to view war as less nuanced. “I have come to believe that all of these wars — when you re-examine them, when you look at them closely — none of them really solve the problems that they claim to solve. Or if they do, they only solve them temporarily or they solve them at enormous human cost. So, my attitude toward WWII changed — toward all wars — and I became an opponent of war, period!”

Educator/activist

After receiving his master’s and doctorate degrees at Columbia University, Zinn began a seven-year tenure as chairman of the history department at all-black Spelman College in Atlanta in 1956. This period was notable as much for his work with young students such as author Alice Walker and champion of children’s rights Marian Wright Edelman (both of whom speak effusively about Zinn), as for his emergence as the prototypical educator/activist. The Jim Crow laws that had prevailed since the 1870s were successfully challenged by Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954, and thus began in earnest an organized and effective rights movement of organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, along with countless others. Zinn found himself thoroughly engaged in the movement, mentoring his students and marching in the streets himself. This activity won him no favors at Spelman and he was dismissed for his activism in 1963. His acquiescent fellow teachers didn’t really protest the action (“I don’t think they knew”), and aside from a tepid offer by the American Association of University Professors to file a grievance, Zinn was left to fend for himself.
At that point, a distinguished teacher and writer with a reputation — having recently published SNCC: The New Abolitionists and The Southern Mystique — Zinn was able to secure a teaching position in the political science department (as he had created, ironically, too much controversy as a history professor) at Boston University in 1964, where he continued to teach until 1988. Changing nomenclature was surely not going to discourage Zinn from taking a position on conflicts ranging from a strike held by faculty secretaries at BU (in which Zinn and the secretaries prevailed) to the Vietnam War.

… More war

Vietnam would come to present a defining schism for a generation of Americans. Perhaps no issue since the Civil War had torn so violently at our social fabric. Forty years later, it is easy to forget the extent to which that war polarized young from old and left from right. It threatened families and communities as it did, ultimately, the government.
Vietnam also coincided with the nascent “age of information.” For the first time, the kind of information — normally classified — that would be used to justify something as grave as engagement in war was made available, however illicitly, to the public. Ordinary Americans were able to engage in an informed debate. Zinn’s antennae had already been finely tuned to detect anything that might smack of imperialism, and he was very early in feeling the country’s reasons for being in Vietnam were wholly ulterior.
A conviction that a less bellicose policy toward the North Vietnamese could be productive was demonstrated when Zinn, along with anti-war activist Father Daniel Berrigan, traveled to Hanoi in January of 1968 and secured the release of three American POWs. This was no “lefty” showboating. Zinn and Berrigan went with a clear goal in mind: to retrieve captured soldiers, which they achieved. However, Zinn felt an opportunity for America to begin a constructive dialogue with Hanoi was squandered, and he continued his impassioned criticism of the war, ultimately playing a key role in the publishing of The Pentagon Papers and providing persuasive testimony for the defense in the trial of Daniel Ellsberg.

Roz

A trip to Zinn’s home in the Auburndale village of Newton, Mass., is like visiting your beloved grandfather. Every square inch exudes warmth and love — love of art, love of music, love of theater, love of books — lots of books. And love of Roslyn. Roslyn Zinn. Roz. Her paintings line the walls, photographs of her are found all over, the family members’ heights are penciled on a doorjamb and her presence is felt everywhere. In what is hysterically reminiscent of John Alden’s courtship of Priscilla Mullens, Zinn was asked to deliver a letter to Roslyn Shechter by a friend who hoped to date her. What ensued was a 63-year marriage and partnership between the beautiful Brooklyn girl and the delivery boy! An accomplished writer, actress, social worker and teacher herself, Roslyn was also her husband’s preferred editor. She had first crack at her husband’s manuscripts. “I never showed my work to anyone except her because she was such a fine editor. She had such a sensibility about what worked, what read well, what was necessary, what was redundant.”
Activism became and remained a family business for the Zinns. In 1959, when Howard was teaching at Spelman, Roslyn starred in an otherwise all-black production of The King and I. “They wanted a white woman and asked her to do that,” Zinn recalls. “White people came to see it and were taken aback. There was an actual gasp in the audience when the black King of Siam put his arm around her waist to dance. Atlanta in 1959 was like Johannesburg, South Africa; it was so rigidly segregated.” She was at Howard’s side demonstrating against the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, just as she was by his side rooting for the Boston Red Sox. And together they built a family of two children — Myla and Jeff, of whom Zinn speaks proudly and lovingly — and five grandchildren.
After a fight with ovarian cancer, refusing the ravaging effects of chemotherapy, Roslyn Zinn died on May 14 of this year. Howard Zinn’s life remains so busy with lecturing, writing, editing and just keeping informed, that his grief is not immediately apparent. But anything that conjures her presence — the mere mention of a painting on the wall — brings a visible rush of emotion to his face and voice. Zinn himself wrote about her in an article as inspiring as it is heartbreaking.
“My sadness about losing Roz is indescribable, but I keep reminding myself how lucky I am to have been married for sixty-three years to a woman whose beauty, body and soul, always filled me with awe. Our love for one another, our friendship, our passion, never diminished through all those years. From the start we were drawn to one another by some deep spiritual connection, and by our common feeling for oppressed people everywhere. We both longed for a better world….
“Roz was the most selfless person I ever knew. I have a photo of an anti-war demonstration, and it shows a man being dragged into a police car, but you can only see his back. Roz is at the scene, leaning towards it as if wanting to do something, an anguished look on her face. The man might have been me, but it wasn’t. It was not someone Roz knew, but that didn’t matter.”

Disciple

About 12 years ago, a young Brown grad school student named Anthony Arnove (who resembles Anthony Perkins if he were a young Brown grad school student) was working at South End Press, a small progressive house in Boston. His job entailed editing, reading, taking out the trash, and on one particular day, answering the phones. Arnove had read A People’s History of the United States as an undergraduate student at Oberlin College and had been transformed in the process, so he was more than a little starstruck when the phone rang and Howard Zinn was on the line. As Arnove describes it, this was not the usual call from a writer to a publisher. “Howard was calling because a friend of his had been in prison for a number of years — I think more than 15 years. Howard had corresponded with him, visited him in jail, and he had just been released. Howard was calling around to try to find work for him, helping him transition back into the world.” This call didn’t lead to employment for Zinn’s friend — South End Press, after all, didn’t need anyone, they had Arnove and a few others doing everything, but a wonderful relationship between the two men ensued. Arnove shared Zinn’s political, literary and humanist sensibilities, though, as he describes it, one need not pass an ideological litmus test to gain entrée with Howard Zinn, and they have since collaborated on books and the staging of theatrical readings; events which are now being documented as The People Speak.
Arnove shares a similar alliance with America’s other great lion of progressivism, Noam Chomsky, and it makes perfect sense when he explains that “Zinn and Chomsky have a friendship that dates to the ’60s when they both had national profiles in the anti-war movement. So, they started to spend time together politically. Both of them had children who were around the same age and both of them started spending the summer renting out places on Cape Cod. They developed a family connection. Carol Chomsky and Roz became friends. So, it’s been a friendship over many years with many occasions to appear on the same platform, with many friends in common and obviously, [with] very supportive work and collaborations when possible.”
Arnove clearly relishes the partnership and shares an insider’s view of Zinn’s methodology. “He’s gracious… but then the thing I think that people don’t understand is that the guy is funny. The guy is fucking funny. He’s also a very effective public speaker. I remember hearing Howard speak and kind of sitting back and thinking, ‘What is so effective about the way that he speaks? What really allows him to have this power over an audience?’ And I realized two things: One, he’s very quick with jokes, he’s very quick at taking something that has been said spontaneously and turning it around; and two, he knows how to use silence. He knows how to pause. He knows how to dramatically make a point, wait a couple of beats and finish the point. He’s almost like a jazz musician in that respect. I had come from the kind of school of politics where it’s like, ‘OK, I’ve got 15 minutes. How much information can I squeeze in 15 minutes?’ You’re talking 80 miles an hour. Howard says very little but he conveys it, he gets it across, people remember it. He is really effective as an interviewer, as an interviewee, as a speaker and I still feel like I’m constantly learning from him. He has a real gift.”
The people speak

Backstage, Brian Lourd, a managing director of Creative Artists Agency, is watching as his friend and client Sean Penn reads a letter written by Kevin Tillman, anguishing over the death — and its dubious circumstances — of his brother, football star and soldier, Pat Tillman. Jackson Browne and Taj Mahal have interrupted comparing road stories to catch Penn’s understated but wrenching reading. And Eddie Vedder is quietly intense, waiting to perform a set of heavily politicized material by Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs and himself. Vedder, a close friend of the Zinns, has performed at other People Speak evenings such as this. His connection to Zinn is particularly close; obvious in how each speaks of the other. This performance, like the others that preceded it (and those that will follow) has a galvanizing effect on the audience, and Zinn, Arnove and producer Chris Moore have already conceived a touring theatrical company (with flexible casts depending on performers’ availabilities) that will bring our history’s most eloquent words of dissent to the people.
Lourd will later ask to meet with the film’s principals to ask if he can be helpful in securing distribution for the film; hardly an important money-making venture for him, but more evidence of the power of the material and how it resonates. Moore is a very persuasive guy, Harvard-educated, affable and especially persevering — as you have to be to be a successful film producer. Best known for producing Good Will Hunting and the HBO (and later, Bravo Network) production Project Greenlight, he is the driving force behind the filming of The People Speak. His love of Howard Zinn’s work, and for Zinn himself, is deeply rooted and contagious. Somehow, he has wrangled some 50 of the country’s best-known actors and musicians to participate in this labor of love — at once a paean to democracy and a tribute to an 86-year-old champion of people’s rights. Moore’s eagerness to finish the project is only impeded by the cast of artists too late to have participated in any of the scheduled performances but wanting to perform: Bruce Springsteen, Matt Damon, Ben Affleck and a host of others wait in the wings as Moore scrambles to include them in the finished film.
Everyone participating in the project has a sense of being involved in something important, something that matters at a crucial moment in our history. To the argument that some make, including many historians, that Zinn trivializes history by popularizing it, he would argue it was Woody Guthrie who taught him about the Ludlow Massacre (a tragic and bloody reaction by the Colorado National Guard to a community of striking coal workers in which two women and 11 children were killed), that Bob Dylan helped educate a generation of young people about the shame of racism, that John Steinbeck — and even films made from Steinbeck material — help illuminate class struggle. And if those “popularizations” of history serve to fillip further investigation then he would tell you that that is only a good thing. Likewise, this isn’t mere agitprop theater. This legendary educator doesn’t need to defend his credentials, either critically or ideologically. What matters instead is that people become exposed to the information that has been withheld from them, and that they arrive at the larger truths from our past.

Conclusion

Now, we come to the end of a difficult era in American history. The administration of America’s 43rd president closes with George W. Bush suffering the lowest approval rating since there have been approval ratings. He has waged two controversial and discretionary wars, and he has presided over — some would say abetted — our worst financial crisis in 75 years. He leaves an environment scarred by what we’ve done to it and what we haven’t done about it. Just as important, he has cultivated mistrust: mistrust in the government and mistrust of one another. But now we find ourselves with a tremendously charismatic, progressive, black president-elect, albeit a young, untested one.
So how does Howard Zinn, an old iconoclast who has seen it all, react to the pending change? “I’m hopeful. ‘Optimistic’ would suggest too much. (Laughs.) Optimism says ‘Oh, I’m sure things are going to…’ No, I’m not sure, but I’m hopeful … in a way I haven’t been in a long time because I do see an opening. I do see a possibility and I see people around me buoyed up — some of them over-buoyed up, but that’s OK. Put another way, the Obama campaign and the Obama victory have brought into the streets large numbers of people who weren’t in the streets before, and the fact that they are out there means that maybe they can be kept in the streets, maybe they won’t go back into their homes and shut up.”
What is most encouraging is that people in the streets are not there to demonstrate against something, but for something. Perhaps a generation of Americans (including the artists’ community?) was too quiescent. Wars were waged, rights were infringed upon, dissent was misrepresented as treason. But it seems there is renewed attraction to intellectual curiosity and involvement in the affairs of man, precisely where Howard Zinn resides.
And amid this new climate of hope and activism you might miraculously find — playing in a theater near you — Chief Joseph, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, Eugene Debs, Emma Goldman and Cindy Sheehan letting us in on some unfamiliar history.
Our history.

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