The Ever Popular Howard Zinn

I became a “disciple” of historian Howard Zinn a little late in my history career. I say late, because I always think of my “history career” beginning in 2nd grade when I was homebound in the body cast, and I fell in love with history books. It was only in the mid-1990s that I discovered the point of view of Howard Zinn.

Howard Zinn is an American and a historian of America. His name and ethos figures prominently in Matt Damon’s movie Good Will Hunting and he has long had a following with a certain college crowd and activist group. I didn’t know him for so long, I guess, because for a good, long time I had a “disdain” for United States History. Ah, pretension.

As a senior in high school I took Jean Michaels’ AP European History class and was forever changed—I decided I just had to be a historian, and it must be European history. I think I took one history class in college that covered the US (a great course on “The Old South”) When I went to Brown to get a Phd, I still hadn’t decided what area in which I would specialize. Ugh. That always reminds me of my second night at Brown, out to dinner with some fellow new-Phd students, trying to make great conversation at this Wendy’s in Providence. The group with whom I dined was incredulous at my lack of decision. One guy said, “I am a Europeanist for sure. The French Revolution.” Another guy leaned toward U.S. history. The first scholar turned to him, and said, “I don’t even know what I would have to say to an Americanist.”

Good grief.

That anecdote does not really matter to my musings about Howard Zinn. Just remembering that exchange shows how early on in the Brown experience, I knew I was around some dolts. It always gives me a hearty chuckle. I digress…

When I joined the history department at Hackley, I was assigned to 3 Modern European history classes, and 1 U.S. History class. I tried to change Walter Schneller’s mind! I probably sounded as remote and ridiculous as the Wendy’s diner had years before as I said to the venerable chairman, “I really don’t do American history.” But he guessed I would now!

So that summer of 1996 I read tons of U.S. history to polish up on what I had missed.
I discovered Howard Zinn. What I loved about Howard Zinn was his desire to look at the history through a different lens—not the lens of the presidents and leaders, the men I had studied and loved as an elementary school historian, but the lens of the “common man,” the people who worked and struggled to create this American citizenry. Zinn looked at why history had been written about as it had been, and found some flaws and, well, lies in standard history texts. It wasn’t the flaws that really interested me, but it was the myths of history he hoped to explore. Zinn didn’t just expose historical lies, he made you want to see why those myths might have been created and embraced. He made me think in a way I had not considered before. He made me re-think all of United States history. His work made me develop into the kind of independent historian I probably had not been before.

All of that is background to this last week as I assigned the preface to Zinn’s memoirs, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train to my history-phobic 9th graders. I wanted to see how they handled the reading and the discussion of the book—and it has long been a favorite assignment of mine in the beginning of a history course. I first read this book right around the time I invited Zinn to speak at Hackley in the spring of 2000. That visit was one of the highlights of my Hackley tenure. I remember that Zinn began his talk before the student body with the line, “I wanted to change the world, so I became a history teacher.”

A sizable number of students laughed, but Zinn waited for the laughter to fade so he could explain what he meant. By the end of his talk, students understood how a history teacher could possibly reach a sizable audience, and how that work and openminded thinking could possibly change the world. After his talk about 50 students vied for his attention and clamored for him to sign their copies of his book. My students really enjoyed talking with him, grilling him, and Zinn stayed much longer than his contract had stipulated so he could participate in a genuinely thrilling dialogue.

I wanted to see how Howard Zinn would work here at KA. I assigned the preface. Some students told me they had never had to read 12 pages in one night before. They were not sure they would, or could, or, I guess they might explode or something. I explained how the book was a memoir, and not a textbook. I gave them a little background about his life (“he’s that old?” “why should I know about him?” “what is this Kalamazoo on the first page??") and asked them to turn to page 9.

On page 9 we learn that Zinn wrote this memoir in the summer of 1993—I waited—many of the students got excited…I thought this might strike a chord…95% of these teen-agers in the class were born in 1993. He wrote the book in 1993, and wrote of the despair he felt permeating the world. The class liked that this was not ancient history, but the year in which they first danced upon the world’s stage. I wanted them to find a passage they found the most “literary” (that was a challenge explaining that word) the most “historical” and the most “important.” They couldn’t believe there were no right answers or wrong answers, as long as they explained their choices. I read them a choice I liked as the most literary. They were a little, a little, more interested.

That night in study hall, two students asked, “Is this book in our library?” and another said, “I’d like to borrow your copy of that book.” And one even dared to suggest, “I’d like to read the whole thing!”

As I walked around the study hall, almost half had liked the reading. One boy said, “he really made me think about taking action. He gets you thinking.” But the best moment came when Jadallah came up to me and said, “Howard Zinn has a MySpace page! That is so cool. You know his birthday was last week?” Jadallah and Sarah then went and googled some more things about Howard Zinn. I gotta admit—this was going well.

The following day in class, we had good conversations about how Zinn led his history classes in Atlanta, and then in Boston on marches for what changes they wanted in American society. Jadallah proudly announced that he had stopped the headmaster that morning at breakfast and asked him if we could invite Howard Zinn to speak at KA. Wow!

That night in the dorm, my night of duty, there was a loud group sound, so I went and discovered a group of about 10 boys marching through the dorm, “We want AC now! We want AC now!” I wondered what they were doing, and one guy said, “It’s just like Howard Zinn, we are marching for what we want.”

Would that some marches around the dorm would grant us air conditioning!

In class I shared that my friend, Mrs. Anne, doesn’t really like the title of Zinn’s memoir. Bright Rashed said, “But Mr. John, does this Mrs. Anne know what neutral on a car means—it means you are not moving. Howard Zinn does not want us to be neutral! We need to be acting!”

Not everyone cared for Howard Zinn—some didn’t know what the big deal was. But the sharing of the passages allowed for me to finally have everyone turn to page 12 so I could share what I think is most important in that preface.

Zinn had talked about the horrors of fighting in WWII, and how some of his buddies died. But he had come to treasure his gift of life, and he writes in reaction to his mood of despair with which he felt burdened in 1993: “I have no right to despair. I insist on hope.”

We talked about how great that verb, insist is. They knew it meant, demand.

We talked about this quote in light of their birth year, 1993, and this quote in light of the founding of our school, for 2007. We turned this quote into a prism for the political struggles plaguing our world now, and how this school aims to act as a place where, as others have so eloquently said, compassion, sacrifice, courage and kindness might shine.

The fact that Howard Zinn might capture some minds here says something to me. Remember, these students hate history, and regard it as their least important/favorite subject. But when Jadallah urged our headmaster that we need to fly Howard Zinn here, it must have tickled him too.

At the conclusion of this school year, we will read the end of the Zinn memoir, and hopefully even more might be engaged in this insistence on hope:

“What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we only see the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.”

I’ll have to ask Jadallah on Sunday if he has invited Professor Zinn yet. I think he’d get a kick out of a trip to Jordan.