Dave Zirin, a sportswriter on the staff of the Nation, recounts Howard Zinn’s life (1922 to 2010) with vigor and sympathy in his new biography, The People’s Historian: The Outsized Life of Howard Zinn. Zinn was credited by a right-wing critic as the author who “turned a generation against America,” following the phenomenal publishing success of his radical historian’s version of the nation’s past. The purpose of Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States (1980) was quite different from generating systemic repudiation of the national experiment. He wanted to challenge what had once been a patriotic version of assigned textbooks, to offer a commercial alternative that would portray the forgotten. He wanted to honor the abolitionists, the suffragists, the union organizers, the war resisters, and the civil rights activists who hoped that the republic would realize the ideals of the Declaration of Independence. Zinn’s voluminous writing was intended as a corrective to complacency and as a reminder of the richness of historical experience not included in mainstream historical accounts.
The son of Eastern European immigrants, Zinn grew up in Brooklyn amid the grinding poverty from which Jews sought desperately — and often successfully — to escape. He recalled the cramped quarters of the apartment his family shared with innumerable cockroaches. A job in the shipyards helped him ease the misery of the Great Depression. The rank of bombardier on a B‑17 Flying Fortress got him overseas, where Zinn dropped napalm on the residents of the French village of Royan. That atrocity would sear him. A postwar academic career followed, though an unusual one. A prolific writer and a compelling orator, Zinn became a public intellectual who sought to advance the freedom struggle in the South and then to end the Vietnam War. In Atlanta he taught at historically Black Spelman College until he was fired. He taught thereafter at Boston University, which tried in vain to fire him. Zinn became a playwright too, while remaining a fixture on the lecture circuit on behalf of leftist causes.
Zinn managed to combine a conspicuous public life of protest and commitment (including a wartime visit to Hanoi) with a personal warmth that may have neutralized audiences that did not share his politics. Zinn’s books did not pretend to strive for balance, but the partiality of his classroom lectures should be regarded as problematic. Zinn’s secularism was patent; his lifelong opposition to the ugliness of bigotry certainly included antisemitism without prioritizing it. The two primary issues on the postwar agenda of American Jewry — the Holocaust and Israel — did not engage him. Whether in Brooklyn or in Boston, he lived mostly among Jews; but The People’s Historian is right to minimize the role of ethnicity in the choices that Zinn made over the course of a dramatic career.
Stephen Whitfield is Professor of American Studies (Emeritus) at Brandeis University. He is the author of Learning on the Left: Political Profiles of Brandeis University (2020).
