Howard Zinn
 “The rule of law does not do away with the unequal
distribution of wealth and power, but reinforces that
inequality with the authority of law. It allocates
wealth and poverty in such calculated and indirect ways
as to leave the victim bewildered.” American political scientist and historian Howard
Zinn is a leading exponent of the New Left perspective
in scholarship and a political radical known for his
activity in the civil rights and peace movements.
Zinn was born in 1922 in New York.
During World War II, he served from 1943 to 1945 as a
second lieutenant in the
United States Army Air Force and
participated in bombing missions in Europe. He was
awarded an Air Medal and several battle stars. After his
discharge from the service he attended college and was
an instructor at Upsala College in East Orange, N.J., from
1953 to 1956.
Zinn's doctoral dissertation on New York Mayor
Fiorello LaGuardia's congressional career was published
in 1959 as LaGuardia in Congress. Zinn portrayed
LaGuardia as a feisty liberal Republican who fought for
pro-labor legislation and criticized the upper-class
bias of his party's economic policies. Although
LaGuardia would remain one of his heroes, Zinn's own
political views grew much more radical. In Zinn's
introduction to his anthology
New Deal Thought (1965), he argued
that President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his leading
advisers thwarted a possible American social revolution
by pursuing the modest goal of restoring the American
middle class to prosperity and rejecting more radical
social reform.
Events in the late 1950s and early 1960s reinforced
Zinn's disillusionment with American liberalism. In 1956
he moved to Atlanta to accept a post as chairman of
the department of history and social science at
Spelman College, an African-American
women's school. During the seven years he taught there,
Zinn saw and participated in some of the key events of
the civil rights movement. He was shocked by the
violence directed at African-Americans and dismayed by
the federal government's failure to defend their rights
more vigorously. Zinn was critical of President John
Kennedy's administration.
Zinn's
study of one of the major civil rights
organizations, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee, was published as SNCC: The New
Abolitionists (1964). The book was both an
impassioned first-hand description of the civil rights
struggle and a cogent historical analysis of the modern
movement's links with pre-Civil War abolitionism.
Zinn joined
Boston University's Government
Department in 1964 and remained a professor of political
science there the rest of his career. He became well
known in New Left circles for his opposition to United
States military involvement in Vietnam. In his book
Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal (1967), he made a
powerful case for reversing the Lyndon Johnson
administration's policy of escalation.
Zinn's role in the peace movement was not limited to his
scholarly writings. Throughout the mid-1960s he was
active in the American Mobilization Committee's national
drive to bring an end to the United States intervention.
In February 1968, he travelled to North Vietnam with the
radical priest, Father Daniel Berrigan, to secure the
release of three American bomber pilots shot down on air
raids. As he had done earlier with his experiences in
the civil rights movement, Zinn wrote articles that
offered a first-hand account of his trip to Hanoi.
Traditional academics scolded Zinn for being partisan
about his subject matter. In a collection of his essays,
The Politics of History (1970), Zinn rejected the
view that historical scholarship was objective. He
argued that all historical writing was political and
that historians should align themselves with humane
values. To fail to speak out against evil, he warned,
was to be irrelevant and irresponsible. Zinn sought to
illustrate the usefulness of a politically engaged
approach to history in his
essays on World War II, the civil
rights movement, and the Vietnam War. They provided
examples of how his historical approach worked in
practice.
In 1985, Zinn published a play, Daughter of Venus,
which was first performed at New York's Theatre for New
City. In 1990, his book Declarations of Independence
continued his populist approach to American history. In
1999, he published another play, Marx in Soho: A Play
on History, which was a humorous piece about Marx
returning from the dead.
Best known for his book A People’s History of the
United States: 1492-Present, a history of America
through the perspective of “those outside of the
political and economic establishment,” Zinn remains an
active advocate for the underclass, a proponent of world
peace and an articulate critic of corporate power and
greed supported by governmental collusion.
Zinn attended New York University
and received his
bachelor's degree in 1951. He did
graduate work in political science at Columbia
University, completing his master's degree in 1952 and
his doctorate in 1958.
Back to top |
