Conversations with History: Howard Zinn

Oh [Music] 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's the author of many books including a people's history of the United States the Zen reader and an autobiography called you can't be neutral on a moving train his three plays are Emma daughter of Venus and marks and Soho he's a professor emeritus of history at Boston University Howard welcome to Berkeley thank you you 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 and 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 I was of course a very good question should be asked of all historians and I guess growing up growing up in a working-class family going to work in a shipyard at the age of 18 working for three years and in a shipyard and you know getting into the sweat of an industrial life you know and being aware of the dis difference between the way we lived our lives and the lives of those people we saw on the movie screen or in the magazines the developing kind of class consciousness and and I think you know that had an effect later on my teaching and writing of history that and then joining the Air Force becoming a Bombardier in the Air Force going through a war coming out of the wall 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 at Spelman College my first teaching job teaching in a black women's college and in the South Atlanta Georgia seven years they're going through coming involved in civil rights movement I think all of that shaped my thinking about history let's talk a little about your youth first and then talk about the other things how specifically do you think your parents shaped your character well my parents were not political people at all my parents were just ordinary they were Jewish immigrants worked in garment factories when they came here then my father became a waiter you might say he moved up in the world from being a factory worker at the being a waiter and the never even became a head waiter and so as far as political influence no the only influence that had in my life was my observation of their lives my observation that my father was working very hard of honest hard-working men my mother working very hot reason for sons and yet of course they had nothing to show for it that is they were perfect counter points to the Horatio Alger myth that if you work hard in this country you will get somewhere and I think that that intensified my my feeling about the injustice of an economic system in which there are people all over the country like my parents who worked very very hard had nothing to show for it one of the things that your parents did would would obtain for you a subscription to a collection of Dickens books right and and so reading became very important to you and also offered you insights right oh no doubt yeah reading reading reading at an early age and my parents knew I was a reader even though they were not readers and barely my father was barely literate my mother was somewhat literate but they knew that I was interested in books in reading and so they and they had no idea who Charles Dickens was but they saw this ads they could send away coupons and a dime for each book and so they got me this whole set of Dickens and I made my way through Dickens and what did you learn from Dickens well from from Dickens what I got was this ferocious acknowledgment 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 the kind of justification for the beliefs I was already you know developing yes it so has told me I think what reading very often does for you it tells you you are not alone in these secret thoughts you have I not long ago I read in Kurt Vonnegut's him saying that somebody asked him why do you write and he said well the reason I write is to tell people you're not alone I have this sense as I look through your career you mentioned some of these events in your life your experience in the war at Spelman College but I have the sense that live free and learning for you were never separated that life informs your scholarship and your scholarship informs the way you live your life no I think I think that's true the strong connection we needed to and I 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 as at the age of 27 you know I had already as I say worked in a shipyard I'd been in a war I had worked at various jobs and and so I brought to my reading of history those experiences and then I brought to what I learned from my experiences something broader and that is a historical perspective which actually reinforced the ideas that I gained from my own life when when you were 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 redid 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 a horrible treatment of black people but something rotten at the root we're acquiring an uprooting of the old order the introduction of a new kind of society cooperative peaceful egalitarian so 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 and sometimes it's one very vivid experience and of course it's never just one vivid experience but it's that 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 and I think that's what happened to me at the age of 17 when I was hit by a policeman and knocked unconscious and and woke up and said my god this is America where yes there are bad guys 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 you go on to school working on the docks while you're getting your degree and you do your dissertation on LaGuardia what what attracted you to look were you what did you find there that that was is a really an important theme in all your work well when I found it remember 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 and as I read his papers and I was very conscious that all through my education from elementary school right up through graduate school the 20s was presented as the age of prosperity in here I was reading the letters that laguardia's constituents in East Harlem were writing to him and they were writing saying my husband is out of work my kids are hungry and they're turning off the gas and and so and LaGuardia was the voice of the poor in Congress he was a lone voice in the Congress of the 20s 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 you say that LaGuardia you write dug beneath the surface and held up to public you that which had been hidden yes and what had been hidden is the fact that underneath this veneer of prosperity there were huge numbers of people in this country who were living under desperate circumstances and to me that was important because it was not just a commentary on the 20s but like all history anything you learn about the past also becomes a commentary on your own time and it's 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 know and they suggested me know we always have to look beneath these superficial signs of prosperity to see how people are living your first teaching assignment is at Spelman College a black college for women in Atlanta tell us about that experience in the the amazing events that occurred during your say that is the large historical event well those seven years at Spelman College probably you know 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 the very interesting time the late 50s early 60s just before the onset of the big civil rights movement and then during those years of the early 60s 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 and it looks very different from a black point of view of the heroes the difference and the eras are get different names the progressive era is no longer the progressive era because it's here in which more black people are lynched than in any other period in American history I began reading black historians reading Rayford Logan reading Dubois in reading John Hope Franklin reading he Franklin Frazier and things that weren't on my reading list right up in graduate school Columbia University so there was that was one thing learning about history but the other thing and more important I think was learning by being in the movement by moving out from Atlanta to Albany Georgia demonstrations Selma Alabama Mississippi Hattiesburg Greenwood Greenville Jackson by becoming a kind of participant writer in these in a movement it taught me something very important about democracy about you know that democracy would I I had been taught in junior high school how much people even learn you know in higher education from institutions Constitution checks and balances you know 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 of the United States for a hundred years violated his oath of office by not enforcing the 14th and 15th amendments and what happened that 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 then was heard around the world and 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 and justices it comes alive when people organize and do something about it the southern black movement taught me that you you write in your autobiography biography I began to realize no pitifully small picket line no poorly attended meeting no tossing out of an idea to an audience or and even to an individual should be scorned as insignificant well if I suppose you know that's that's something people learn when they participate in social movements especially if they participate in the movement long enough to see it develop to see it develop into something that at first seems impotent and impossible and and then becomes a force and brings about change and 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 seems as if you're up against forces that cannot be dislodged I mean 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 way with all the only thing they have is their bodies their determination and their unity their willingness to take risks and yes it starts with small things you don't think they're gonna get anywhere nobody really knew in the late 50s or even the first years of the 60s that anything big would happen and yet it did anti-war movement starts off with small anti-war gestures and 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 gradually over several years into an which became powerful enough to cause the government to think twice about continuing the war you you state your philosophy in one place of one part of your philosophy of history and you say I'm convinced of the uncertainty of history of the possibility of surprise of the importance of human action in changing what looks unchangeable and we can actually go to a concrete example in your life you participated in one of the first if not first teachings on the Vietnam War in in the Boston Commons and and you know very early in the game and then it was years later that you were drawing massive crowds to a similar event in the Commons that's right in that very first anti-war meeting on the Washington counters in the spring of 65 when Johnson had begun the real escalation of the war the begun the bombing begun the dispatch of large numbers of troops and we had our first meeting anti-war meeting on the Boston Common taps a hundred people showed up Herbert Marcuse spoke I spoke a few other people spoke and it looked pitiful and this was a 65 and 69 another meeting on the Boston Common a hundred thousand people are there and it in those few years something very important had taken place and I think that showed the possibility of change if you persist your involvement in the anti-war movement was informed in part by your experience as a soldier and I want to talk about one specific incident that you write about it is one of the last bombing missions on the war when you were a bombing ear on a plane that essentially was one of the first uses of napalm on an innocent french village called roll on tell us about that experience in what you learn from it and how it affected your activism in the anti-war movement but also your view of war in general you know you have to understand that I enlisted in the Air Force I volunteered I was the enthusiastic Bombardier it was me was very simple as a war against fascism they were the bad guys we were the good guys and one of the things I learned from that experience was that when you start off with them being the bad guys new being 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 made a decision a long time ago that you're on the right side you don't keep questioning question and questioning and you're not your seryan through questions at a certain age 22 that's right yeah and so what happened with me I was an enthusiastic Bombardier as I say the end the war was over presumably a few weeks from the end everybody knew the war was about to end in Europe I was flying bombing 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 and you know it was just a matter of a few weeks and then we're awake and you know in the wee hours of the morning and told we're going on a mission and the intelligence the so-called intelligence people who briefed us before we go into the plane tell us we're going to bomb this tiny town on the Atlantic coast of France called Wyong near Bordeaux and we're doing it because there are several thousand German soldiers there now doing anything they're not bothering anyone they're waiting for the war to end they've just been bypassed and we are going to bomb them and what's interesting to me later thinking about it was I 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's no need occurred to me I mean ice to this day I understand how trustees are committed how the military mind works you've taught to just mechanically go through the procedures that you have been taught you say and so we went over or I own we draw and they told us in them in the briefing that we're going to drop a different kind of bomb this time instead of the usual demolition bombs were gonna drop carrying our bomb base 30 100 pound canisters what they called jellied gasoline which was napalm the first use of napalm in the European war and so we went over we destroyed the German troops and also destroyed the French town away all friendly fire but that's what bombing does I mean to this day when I hear the leaders of the country say well this is precision bombing and and we are being very careful and we only bombing military you know nonsense and no matter how sophisticated on the bombing technology there's no way you can avoid killing non-military people you know 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 here in chima Nagasaki which at first I had welcomed like everybody at that time did oh yes the war is gonna be over then I read John Hershey's book Hiroshima and for the first time the human consequences of dropping the bomb was brought home to me in a way that I hadn't thought you know when you're dropping bombs from 30,000 feet you don't hear screams you don't see blood and but yeah I suddenly saw what the bomb in Hiroshima did I began to rethink and the whole question of a good war came to the conclusion there's no such thing as a good war they may start off with good intentions at least on the part of people who fight in them and generally not on the part of the people who make the decision I doubt good intentions but they're good there may be good intentions on the part of the GIS who believe yes we're doing this for a good cause but those good intentions are quickly corrupted and the good guys become the bad guys and so I came became convinced that war is not a solution for fundamentally for any serious problem may seem like a solution it's like a quick fix drug you get rid of this dictator or that dictator as we did Hitler and Mussolini but you don't solve fundamental problems in the meantime you've killed tens of millions of people let's talk a little about how you apply this these insights from your own experience to the doing of history and so let's talk a little about your philosophy of history you've argued that the importance of what is selected and who selects the facts for history is very important and 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 sort of focus on this alternative history for example of the United States well 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 and looking for things that I had begun to learn on my own because working in a shipyard and actually organizing young shipyard workers and getting interested in labor history and 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 textual strike of 1912 the Colorado coal strike of 1913 looking from other Jones looking for Emma Goldman bill Haywood they weren't there and so it became clear to me that yes that the the really critical way in which people are deceived by history is not that lies are told but the 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's been omitted and so it may be conscious of the fact that and then looking through history and looking at other things looking at race looking at the treatment of women it made me always ask the question what has been left out of this story and look for look for other things so that when I started out my book which and I have to knew it I knew I had to start out with Columbus because that's so all histories of the United States start off with I said well what is left out the end the end point of view you know so then las casas comes into the picture telling the other side of the story the Jacksonian period are jacksonian democracy arthur schlesinger writes this glowing book about Andrew Jackson and jacksonian democracy what else was going on and I find out that you know Jackson is responsible for the brutal treatment of the Indians in the southeast driving them across the Mississippi thousands of 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 so yes I became conscious of omissions or missions in history and that's what I was determined to try to remedy as you write these accounts of the Forgotten you and and one reads your books you really get inspiration by their courage the courage that has not appeared in the text but on the other hand there is your courage because 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 well what are the roots of that courage in your life do you think it's to call that courage is an exaggeration it's a sad commentary that we think it requires a lot of courage to just speak your mind I'm not gonna be executed you know I'm not even gonna be given a long jail sentence I'm gonna be thrown in jail for a day or two and that has happened to me eight nine times you see I may be fired I may get a salary decrease I mean these are pitiful things compared to what happens to people in the world so it doesn't take much courage to do that I mean 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 and I think after you've been through a war experience and after you've been aware of people dying you and and somebody says well you know are you willing to risk your job are you willing to risk our salary cuts are you willing to risk that you won't get tenure I mean there's a pitiful risks right compared to the risks that people have taken in the world many people though don't have went that little bit of courage so it it makes a difference they need historical perspective yeah personal perspective you seem to be sure let's talk a little about writing because 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 mm-hmm that comes naturally to me maybe if I'd gone straight through college graduate school PhD maybe it would have the same thing happened to me that happens to people who go through the academic mill and that it cripples their ability to write clearly so I grew up reading Upton Sinclair and Jack London and reading reading stuff that that was clear and and lucid and or Dickens Dickens was not a florid writer you know he's 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 upfront about his values and upfront about the emotion that he feels about injustice and I want you to talk about how your writing do you think is affected by the emotion the these these these honesty's about both your values and your emotions is that a plus in making it easier to tell these stories well I know that the there's the kind of conventional wisdom as they put at conventional foolishness you know that if you're passionate about something you can't really write well about it but if of course we've learned in the arts we accept passion we accept that passion and 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 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 nothing more important than being honest about your feelings otherwise you know you you are presenting something that's not yourself and and also there's another element to it and that is in being passionate about something you are giving an intensity to what you write which magnifies its power and in a way you're trying to make up for the fact that the people who have written other things dominate the ideological landscape and because you're a minority voice you have to speak louder more eloquently more vividly more passionately you you have written talking now about history and the importance of education and you've 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 well 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 the the first time to sit in to demonstrate to be arrested in the spring of 1960 I had colleagues at Spelman College my house Atlanta University that complex of black colleges colleagues who've sort of said oh this is bad they're hurting their education one of them wrote a letter to the Atlanta Constitution saying you know I deploy what my students are doing they're cutting class they're 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 gonna learn in books can compare to what they will learn about the world about reality and then they will come back from town they will come back from prison and then when they go into the library they will go into it with an enthusiasm and a curiosity that didn't exist before you all sort I wanted students here I think you're talking about your years at BU to leave my class is 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 and the importance of history to activism well 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 and what history does is give you enough data so that you can question anything that is said from on high and 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 and here's a president who's saying we're going to war for democracy and then you go back through history and see how many times the president said we are 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 duplicity zuv the real world I just happened to have reread your chapter on the Mexican Wars and it's exactly what you're saying as you you hear the issues the themes the the the concerns of that time but which you often don't find in a normal history book it's they resonate so much with the experiences of the Vietnam War yes and I remember the New York Times ran a poll once asking high school students his questions about history and 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 school students are ignorant and that the people who make those polls are smart and and so the question the questions that the New York Times asked what questions like who is the president during the Mexican War that's a really important question they wouldn't ask the question here's the New York Times presumably the ultimate and journalism you know you know you know this is not the the star the National Enquirer this the New York Times and they asking who is 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 so yes I mean that's an example of where somebody at the start of the Vietnam War listening to the claims of our government of 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 one well people who knew that history would not accept blandly what we were being told is it fair to say of you 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 your smile is making I prefer to think of it as a cold irrational this torian's must not be sweet but optimistic well yeah cautious optimism cautious in a sense I'm not positive that things are going to go well again safer we don't know the future is indeterminate but after all the future depends on what we do now and if we are pessimistic now we are doomed in the future that if we if we give 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's historical evidence for the fact that when people act persist get together organize they can bring about changes there haven't been enough changes and so you can look at that and say ah not enough true but the fact that some changes have been made the fact that labor by struggling won the eight-hour a day the fact that blacks in the South got away did away with the signs of segregation you know the fact that women changed the consciousness of this country about sexual equality even though that's those are only beginnings you know they that historical experience suggests reason to think it is possible that other things may change so what then is the link between theory in action do you think that everyone should understand well I think that it's important people read and learn thinking that I'm not doing this just because it's fun or because it will enhance my professional career that the purpose of learning and this goes back to John Dooley Alfred North Whitehead and it purpose of learning is to have an effect on a world in which most of the 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 and so we who can do those things you know have an obligation to create a world in which maybe then people can do learning for fun you know what advice would you give to students who might view this tape read your text the the people's history of the United States what lesson would you suggest that they might learn from your life that they might apply to there's one thing is because I claim there are many things 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 that you don't have to look for some victory in the future that 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 professors in 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 [Music] you

Channel: University of California Television (UCTV)

Views: 137,498

Rating: 4.8362069 out of 5

Keywords: UC, Berkeley, Howard, Zinn, activism, history

Id: IMt7cFFKPeM

Length: 42min 22sec (2542 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 12 2008