Norman Markowitz on Howard Zinn
Here's Norman Markowitz's tribute to Zinn, which I copied from the H-Labor labor history discussion site at H-Net.
http://www.h-net.org/~labor/
From: "norman markowitz"
*I just wrote this tribute to Howard Zinn for the Peoples Weekly World. Asa longtime subscriber to and participant in this discussion list, I amsending it to all who may be interested*
*Norman Markowitz*
*Howard Zinn: Peoples Historian*
Howard Zinn died yesterday but he will live on as futuregenerations read his “ APeoples History of the United States “ and say wowto themselves comparing it to both the old and new conventional wisdoms thatthey are taught to accept.
I knew Howard Zinn, not well but enough to feel sad at hispassing. His world view was that of the broad left ,what the sociologist C.Wright Mills in the 1950s called a “plain Marxist.” He was both a scholarand an activist, an “organic intellectual,” a “public intellectual,” allsorts of things that others write about, build careers on, but rarely are. He was never an end of ideology no value judgments man in the 1950s and1960s. Concepts like “post modernism,” post Marxism, the new idealisms ofsubjectivity and identity, in there own way more difficult to challengebecause of their slippery nature than the old dogmas, never had anything todo with his work
Born into a working class Jewish family, Howard Zinn was abombardier in WWII and experienced the horrors of war—horrors which neverleft him. The GI Bill enabled him to get a higher education, a PhD ingovernment. He came to teach at Spellman College, an African-AmericanCollege in 1956 as the Civil Rights movement was beginning to advance. Hissupport for radical students at Spellman cost him his job and took when atBoston University in 1964, where he would stay until his formal retirement.
There he began to write books and articles for people’smovements, civil rights and anti-war, that establishment academics largelyignored and newspaper critics baited. But progressives realized that therewas something special here, and young people, then energized by the CivilRights and anti-war movements as many today still are by the Obama victory,read these books to give them intellectual nourishment against the processedand predictable intellectual junk food that they were expected to purchaseand digest for the rest of their lives.
These works included* SNCC:The New Abolitionists*(1965) *Vietnam: The Logicof Withdrawal*(1967) * Disobedience and Democracy*(1968) In 1980, Sinnpublished the first edition of *A Peoples History of the UnitedStates*which has been read by millions through the world and has givenpeopleeverywhere a history of social struggle in the U.S. against those whoadvanced slavery in the name of defending freedom, conquest of the West anddestruction of native peoples in the name of manifest destiny, andexploitation working people and the establishment of a global empire in thename of democracy.
Zinn earned handsome royalties from this work, which he needed,since John Silber the tyrannical president of Boston University, himself aleading establishment figure, froze his salary, denied him teachingassistants for courses which students flocked to, and vilified him in publicand private.
Among other things, Zinn had been active in trying to form a union at BostonUniversity, which Silber successfully smashed. I remember being asked a fewdecades ago to go to Boston University and participate in a PhD defense fora student. I did it gladly in part because Howard Zinn, along with a formerprofessor I knew from my days at the University of Michigan were on thecommittee. I was supposed to receive modest compensation for my trip (thecost of gas and the hotel) and papers were prepared for this. Later I wastold that the history department couldn’t process this because PresidentSilber, learning that Zinn was on the committee, vetoed it.
Actually, I was a little flattered. It was perhaps the onlytime in my life where I had been denied something for political reasons(which has happened and continues to happen many times) in which I wasmerely an “innocent bystander”” to the events.
Silber, once the highest paid college president in the U.S. isgone and fortunately forgotten, except as a bad memory to those hehurt HowardZinn will never be forgotten thanks to his work.
Howard Zinn retired from Boston University in 1988 but kept on writing andspeaking. I would specially recommend “You Can’t be Neutral on a MovingTrain: A Personal History of Our Times” (1994). You can also find him onYouTube declaiming against the U.S. empire; or read his later *Terrorismand War* (2002) on post 9/11; you can even read the silly red baitingattacks on him by the pipsqueak pundits of the right, who come from RupeMurdoch’s central casting office at Fox. You can read and maybe see hisplay, * Marx in Soho. * Howard Zinn is here, there and everywhere.
Let me conclude this tribute to Howard with what are the last lines of anold edition of *The Peoples History of the United States*. MarlinFitzwater, George HW Bush’s press secretary responds to reporters whoquestion him about a presidential dinner where huge sums of money were paidby corporations for the “privilege” of attending. Fitzwater says honestly:“It’s buying access to the system. Yes.” When he is questioned about thosewho don’t have money for that kind of access, Fitzwater replies “they willhave to demand access in other ways.
And Zinn’s final comments are: “That may have been a clue to mostAmericans wanting real change. They would have to demand access in theirown way.” And that today, in the face of the monopoly banks, the rapaciousinsurance companies and the still sacred cow of the military industrialcomplex, is exactly what they with the help of the work of Howard Zinn canand must do
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