Home » blogs » John Reimann's blog
» Howard Zinn

Howard Zinn

Submitted by John Reimann on Tue, 02/02/2010 - 9:19pm.
Socialists and all fighters for the working class should record the passing last week of Howard Zinn. He was 88 years old. My mother taught at Spelman College for one or two years while Zinn taught there. She always used to talk about how much he was beloved by his students, both for the intellectual stimulation he offered as well as for his kindly attitude. Of course, Zinn will be best remembered for his "A People's History of the United States", and rightly so. This book is an absolute classic as far as a serious history of this country. Zinn was not a Marxist, in fact, he was something of a liberal, but a decent and courageous one as far as possible. "People's History" does not provide a clear analysis of the class forces at work in the United States, but it is a brilliant expose of the real history, of the bloodthirstiness of the US capitalist class and of the resistance to it on the part of many sectors of society, from the native Americans to workers (including slaves) to youth. If the purpose of life is to leave the Earth a slightly better place for our presence here, this one book accomplished that for Zinn, quite aside from his other contributions.

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.
Eleanor Walden Says:
Sat, 02/06/2010 - 3:24pm

Howard Zinn broke the model of liberal just as he broke the model of white being racist. Long before Stokely Carmichael disparaged "liberals", my father, who was a Wobbly, said, "a liberal is a person with both feet planted in mid-air."  

In a letter to me within the last year Howard talked about the need to campaign for another federal project like the WPA. Since my father had been employed as an oral historian in New York City during the 3 short years, 1934 - '37 that it endured ruling class opposition the WPA stimulated the best cultural developments of the century: theater, dance, music, and still the most reliable oral histories of people having experience of Black slavery, because they used Black interviewers. Ah ha!

Facebook has a cause proposed by Quincy Jones as a call for a Federal Secretary of the Arts, if this would lead to any reenactment of a WPA I suggest you look it up and support it. My father's contribution, as a WPA writer, was unique in that he was a working class man who was able to hear the statements and anecdotes of other radicals. We who are the decendents of radical unionists have a hard a time finding our history in the universities and Party renditions of radical history. We can look through some of these reports in the Smithsonian archives, where they languish but, at least, exist.

»