Howard Zinn

Howard Zinn has never been afraid to say what is on his mind.

“I don’t mind telling people things they already know. We all have to be reminded again and again.”

This philosophy has guided Zinn—79-year-old professor emeritus of history at Boston University and one of the country’s most respected and popular lecturers and activists—into a career comprised of truth-seeking and story-telling. Zinn started out as a shipyard worker and joined the Air Force at 21. Later, he began to ask himself “troubling questions” about the war, and soon became involved in the southern civil rights movement. His People’s History of the United States has become a bestseller for its unique perspective on American praxis. Zinn tells the story not of the winners of history, but of the oppressed, the mistreated, the marginalized, the radicals and the revolutionaries. He gives a vibrant voice to the characters and stories we would otherwise miss.

Zinn spoke on “Writing about Emma Goldman” to about forty attendees at the Murray Center of the Radcliffe Institute as part of their Brown Bag Lunch Series last week. An anarchist and staunch feminist, Goldman herself is arguably more forgotten than she deserves, and mainstream accounts fail to portray the richness of her character. Zinn’s speech was filled with innumerable digressions—often self-deprecating asides tinged with his dry humor—designed to illuminate her life but shaped by his perspective.

Emma Goldman’s journey, described in her autobiography Living My Life, parallels the currents of the radical movement of her time. Filled with fury by the Haymarket Affair of 1886—in which the government arrested several suspects for a bomb attack at the Haymarket labor riots in Chicago with no substantive evidence beyond their union associations—Goldman found herself compelled towards pacifism, a “rethinking of the symbolic violence” that pervaded the era. Her inner strength helped lead to a new mission for anarchists as political organizers—a paradox, since those who oppose governments must frequently turn to them to accomplish political objectives. Violence turned into “direct action”: if you don’t have food, steal the food, rather than kidnap the government official responsible for food supply.

Goldman, as portrayed by Zinn, was more than a political revolutionary. She was a woman with a feel for life’s intensity, a fierce sense of individuality and nearly constant love interests. Her (now published) letters to Ben Reitman, “anarchist among anarchists,” are written in prose erotic and passionate, characterized by controlled ferocity and terror over the loss of independence that comes with devotion:

“You came into my life with such a terrific force, you gripped my soul, my nerves, my thought, my flesh, until all was blotted out, all else was silenced. Theories, considerations, principles, consistency, friends, nay even pride and self-respect. Only one thing remained, a terrible hunger for your love, an insatiable thirst for it. That explains my clinging, my holding on to you, I who never clung to anyone. That explains my agony when every woman would possess you at the exclusion of myself. Oh, please, don’t give me your assurances, I do not believe in them.”

In 1975, Zinn began a playwrighting project, which resulted in Emma, Boston’s longest-running play in 1977, followed by productions in New York, London and Japan. Theater has always been a side-passion of Zinn’s; his wife and son, who directed Emma in its New York run, are both heavily involved in the dramatic world. Theater, Zinn said, is unlike academia because it is collective and honest, devoid of the “extraneous considerations” that pervade university life. In some sense, he turns history into drama with his vivid descriptions: the tale of the past is ultimately more about the characters that shape it than about the dates, facts and events.

Zinn’s real brilliance is his ability to extend history into a narrative of the present moment, to talk about the present and to act in the present, to take a role in the history he tells. His investigations are not academic exercises; they are deeply personal and idealistic. “I can never stay with history because I can never stay in the past,” he said. History is a path towards understanding our present society and towards choosing a course for the future.

And so, about halfway through his speech, Zinn launched into arguments concerning the aftermath of Sept. 11. “Everywhere I go now I have to talk about war. . .or else I’m not doing my duty to myself,” Zinn said.

Goldman wrote that “conceit, arrogance, and egotism are the essentials of patriotism.” In Zinn’s mind, the notions of unity and “unconditional support” that Americans are presented with today are “scary and totalitarian.” Dissenters have always held a great appeal for Zinn in his writing, and in practice, he believes that dissent is critical to a well-functioning society. (He notes a certain irony in the fact that first amendment rights are most limited when they are most necessary.) His arguments against our military intervention in Afghanistan appeal both to our practical sense—the idea that our “war on terrorism” did not succeed in any of its stated goals—and to our moral character—that Afghan civilian deaths have been called “collateral damage,” the same term used by Timothy McVeigh to describe children who died in the Oklahoma City bombings.

Zinn is very much about the power of voices and the need for compassion, and one of his most poignant articles of late was a piece for The Nation. The New York Times had recently finished its “Portraits of Grief” series, devoted to portrayals of the personalities who died in the Sept. 11 attacks and might have otherwise been forgotten. Pain was converted from statistics to individual people who we could connect with and believe in and reach out to; yet the media’s coverage of civilian deaths in Afghanistan was washed out by numbers and blanketed by stereotyped “evil.” Zinn wrote, “What if all those Americans who declare their support for Bush’s ‘war on terrorism’ could see, instead of those elusive symbols—Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda—the real human beings who have died under our bombs? I do believe they would have second thoughts.”

And what might Emma have said, were she alive to see us now? She might, according to Zinn, have pointed to the divides and inequalities within American society and within the world at large. But perhaps it is best to conclude with her own words about the culture of war:

“We Americans claim to be a peace-loving people. We hate bloodshed; we are opposed to violence. Yet we go into spasms of joy over the possibility of projecting dynamite bombs from flying machines upon helpless citizens.”

The Murray Research Center’s Brown Bag Lunch Series takes place every Tuesday at noon in Agassiz House. Talks are free and open to the public.