by Mary Grabar
It is only for being the champion of “the blacks, the Indians, the very poor whites,” and other victim groups that Zinn’s history has made him enemies and critics—according to Zinn. But is Zinn’s advocacy for the downtrodden really the sole reason that anyone might object to the radically jaundiced view of American history on display in A People’s History? In his defense of his magnum opus, Zinn continually deflects attention away from criticism of the inaccuracies and distortions of the history he tells by suggesting that every critique of his work is really just a masked critique of his life and political activism.
For “some people,” Zinn maintained in his autobiography, “not only was my book out of order, my whole life was out of order.” Thus, Zinn attempted to move the battle to the venue where he clearly thought he had the best chance of victory: he was much more comfortable defending his political activism than defending his history.14
The last questioner at the event in Kalamazoo asked, “Given the depressing news of what is happening in the world, you seem surprisingly optimistic. What gives you hope?” Zinn’s immediate answer was his activist creed: “I said I could understand being depressed by the state of the world, but the questioner had caught my mood accurately. To him and to others, mine seemed an absurdly cheerful approach to a violent and unjust world. But to me what is often disdained as romantic idealism, as wishful thinking, is justified if it prompts action to fulfill those wishes, to bring to life those ideals [emphasis in the original].”15
But in order to fully answer the questioner in Kalamazoo, Zinn wrote, “I would have had to go back over my life.” Here ensues a catalogue of events from the life of Zinn that justify his hope. Here Zinn employs the literary device known as anaphora—note the repetition at the beginning of the lines:
I would have to tell about going to work in a shipyard at the age of eighteen and spending three years working on the docks, in the cold and heat, amid deafening noise and poisonous fumes, building battleships and landing ships in the early years of the Second World War.
I would have to tell about enlisting in the Air Force at twenty-one, being trained as a bombardier, flying combat missions in Europe, and later asking myself troubling questions about what I had done in the war.
And about getting married, becoming a father, going to college under the G.I. Bill while loading trucks in a warehouse, with my wife working and our two children in a charity day-care center, and all of us living in a low-income housing project on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
And about getting my Ph.D. from Columbia and my first real teaching job (I had a number of unreal teaching jobs), going to live and teach in a black community in the Deep South for seven years. And about the students at Spelman College who one day decided to climb over a symbolic and actual stone wall surrounding the campus to make history in the early years of the civil rights movement.
And about my experiences in that movement, in Atlanta, in Albany, Georgia, and Selma, Alabama, in Hattiesburg and Jackson and Greenwood, Mississippi.
I would have to tell about moving north to teach in Boston, and joining the protests against the war in Vietnam, and being arrested a half-dozen times. . . .
I would have to recapture the scenes in a dozen courtrooms where I testified in the 1970s and 1980s. I would have to tell about the prisoners I have known. . . .16
Like Walt Whitman, who employed anaphora to good effect as he swept the vast multitudes and diverse scenes of a young democratic republic in the mid-nineteenth century into his Song of Myself, Howard Zinn, too, “contains multitudes.” He is the worker, the brave civil rights activist, the popular professor leading the young social justice warriors. It was an image that he cultivated through the decades. But what did Zinn leave out?
Let’s start with one of the “unreal” teaching jobs that he doesn’t give the details of. Zinn’s first “real”—full-time—teaching position was at Spelman College, beginning in 1956, when he was appointed as “acting chairman of the department of history and social sciences.”17 Before then, while still working on his degree in the early 1950s, Zinn was a part-time instructor at Brooklyn College and Upsala College in New Jersey.18 During those years, though, in 1951, Zinn also taught a class in Marxism at the Communist Party headquarters in Brooklyn. That’s according to his FBI file. Zinn’s Communist activities came to the attention of the FBI beginning in 1948 when an informant reported that Zinn had told him that he was a member of the Communist Party and attended meetings five nights a week. According to the file, Zinn was “a delegate to the New York State Communist Party Convention.” The memo in Zinn’s FBI file lists a number of Communist-affiliated groups with which Zinn was working, including the Henry Wallace for President campaign. A different informant told the FBI that Zinn had been a member of the CPUSA (Communist Party USA) from at least 1949 to mid-1953. While teaching at Spelman, Zinn picketed against the quarantine of Cuba with other known Communists. At the loading dock where he had worked, he had had a reputation as a Communist.19
Charges of Communist Party membership dogged Zinn throughout his life, but he continued to deny those charges from 1953 when FBI agents confronted him on that subject to the end of his life. He admitted only to tangential involvement with the party—activities such as attending the Paul Robeson concert in Peekskill in 1949 and being involved in the American Labor Party and the Veterans Committee Against the Mundt-Nixon Bill (later the McCarran Act), and to being a “leftist.”20
In his autobiography, Zinn recounts how his youthful quest for justice—as he witnessed his parents’ inability to reach the American dream—drew him in the direction of “radical” politics. The Zinns owned candy stores that failed, and Zinn worked alongside his father as a waiter, delivery boy, and caddy. He recalls the summer when he was seventeen. At that time, his family was living in a four-room apartment above a candy store on Bushwick Avenue when some “regular guys”—in fact, Communists—who were a few years older than he was came into the neighborhood distributing Marxist literature and discussing politics “with whoever was interested.” Zinn argued with them about the Russian invasion of Finland, but found himself agreeing with them “on lots of things,” such as the “contrasts of wealth and poverty in America.” He admired their courage and their willingness to “defy the local policeman.” So, the teenage Zinn went with them to “a demonstration” in Times Square. They strolled around until ten o’clock in the evening, when suddenly “banners were unfurled, and people, perhaps a thousand or more,” formed up on sidewalks “chanting slogans about peace and justice” in “nonviolent lines.”21
The scene quickly changed. There were sirens and screams and “hundreds of policemen, mounted on horses and on foot, charging into the lines of marchers, smashing people with their clubs.” Zinn recalls waking up in a doorway with both a painful lump on his head and a “painful thought” inside it: “Those young Communists on the block were right! The state and its police were not neutral referees in a society of contending interests. They were on the side of the rich and powerful.” From that moment on he was “no longer a liberal, a believer in the self-correcting character of American democracy,” but “a radical, believing that something fundamental was wrong in this country. . . . the situation required . . . an uprooting of the old order, the introduction of a new kind of society—cooperative, peaceful, egalitarian.”22
It’s impossible to be sure what event Zinn was describing here, but on October 1, 1938, when Zinn was sixteen years old, “5,000 boys and girls of high school age, members of the Young Communist League,” marching two and three abreast, “invaded Times Square” at about nine o’clock in the evening, according to the New York Times. After they snarled vehicular and pedestrian traffic for fifteen minutes, police broke up the “demonstration.”23
Zinn denied that he was a Communist Party member, but he avowed his belief in the statement by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the hist
ory of class struggle.” That principle was, for the young Zinn, “undeniably true, verifiable in any reading of history. Certainly true for the United States, despite all the promises of the Constitution. . . .” He believed that what he called the “socialist vision” of Marx and Engels would lead to a “rational, just economic system [that] would allow a short work day and leave everyone freedom and time to do as they liked—to write poetry, to be in nature, to play sports, to be truly human. Nationalism would be a thing of the past. People all over the world, of whatever race, of whatever continent, would live in peace and cooperation.”24
Howard Zinn’s formative years were spent at the epicenter of the American Communist Movement at the time when the Communists were making their biggest inroads into Americans’ hearts and minds: New York City in the 1930s, when the Depression seemed to show the failure of capitalism. “By 1938 the Party counted 38,000 members in New York State, about half its national membership, and most of those lived in New York City,” according to Maurice Isserman in his New York Times article on the occasion of the one-hundred-year anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Up to twenty thousand participants attended party-organized mass meetings in the old Madison Square Garden and tens of thousands went to annual May Day parades. Howard Zinn, whose family lived in Brooklyn, was close to the action. Neighborhoods in the Bronx, East Harlem, the Lower East Side, and Brooklyn formed a kind of “red belt,” according to Isserman. Thousands of students at Brooklyn College, City College, and Columbia University, where Zinn earned his Ph.D., joined Communist front groups such as the American Youth Congress.25 The Young Communist League had organized the October 1, 1938, “demonstration” in Times Square. In 1994, Zinn received a letter from Phil, a Young Communist League member who remembered seeing Zinn at a meeting “somewhat more than fifty years [previously]” and said that they had both probably “participated in Times Square demonstrations.”26
According to John Earl Haynes, the CPUSA’s “greatest success” was in “the labor movement where it dominated the leadership of unions with a quarter of the CIO’s membership.” But acting covertly through front groups and auxiliary organizations, the party also gained “toeholds among immigrant groups, in the civil rights movement, on college campuses, and in Hollywood.” The years “just before and just after World War II” represented the party’s “peak membership of 65,000 to 70,000.”27 Although the party failed in national politics, namely with the 1948 Henry Wallace presidential campaign, its support for campaigns “coat[ed] the party with a veneer of respectability and insinuate[d] Soviet themes into American political discourse.” That was at least part of the reason for Communist support for the 1938 Illinois senatorial campaign of Morris Childs before he left the party, according to his biographer.28
Ron Radosh—who was a Communist for a year or two in college, and whose father was a fellow traveler—has stated categorically that Zinn was a Communist. In 1949, when Zinn’s FBI file was opened, he was vice chairman of a Brooklyn branch of the American Labor Party (ALP), “by then a group run and dominated by Communists.” In the 1948 presidential election, the ALP backed Henry Wallace, who had been dismissed by President Harry Truman as secretary of commerce; Wallace’s campaign was run “entirely by the CPUSA.” Radosh also explains, “Zinn’s lifelong silence about his membership fits the profile of most American Communists of that era. . . . most members were covert and were told to infiltrate liberal groups, pretend to be regular Progressives, and try to get the gullible to adopt pro-Soviet positions.” Radosh’s experience in working with FBI dossiers (including his own, at five hundred pages) shows that informants who, like most of those who informed on Zinn, were former party members or had infiltrated Communist groups were usually accurate.
Besides the ALP, Communist front groups Zinn belonged to or worked with included the American Veterans Committee, the American Peace Mobilization, and the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee. His memberships, Radosh says, “appear to be a party assignment.” By the time the New Left and the Civil Rights Movement came on the scene, Zinn had left the party’s ranks, but he was toying with the Maoist Progressive Labor Party and the Trotskyist Socialist Workers party and “gave his support to young black militants” of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Black Panthers.29 Actually, Zinn radicalized the students, turned them into militants, and helped found and guide the radical SNCC.
And how did Howard Zinn, a doctoral candidate from Brooklyn who was heavily involved in Communist activities, end up teaching at Spelman—a Christian college for black women in Atlanta, Georgia? According to friendly biographer Duberman, Zinn was interviewed by Spelman College president Albert Manley, the first black and first male president of the college, after a placement bureau contacted Zinn, who was hired after negotiating for an additional five hundred dollars to the proffered “midrange” yearly salary of four thousand dollars. According to Duberman, “Howard hadn’t given the slightest thought to teaching in a black college,” even though his “sympathies were decisively with the black struggle.”30
The year 1956, when Zinn began teaching at Spelman, was significant for the worldwide Communist Movement. Zygmund Dobbs, the anti-communist who had been raised in a Communist household and been a Trotskyite in his youth, warned about the encroachment of the Communists. In his 1958 pamphlet “Red Intrigue and Race Turmoil,” Dobbs described how the Communist Party was infiltrating the NAACP and warned about “the left-wing white support that the NAACP has in the South.”31 The year 1956 marked a low point for the CPUSA. In February, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s speech denouncing Stalin for his ideological deviance had encouraged uprisings in Poland and Hungary, and then brutal suppressions, especially in Hungary. As Maurice Isserman recounts, these events helped lead to a crisis in CPUSA leadership and a further decline in membership. Disillusioned with the party, but still adhering to socialist principles, former Communist Party members found a new outlet for their activism in the Civil Rights Movement. Tom Kahn, a white socialist, enrolled in 1960 at Howard University, where he radicalized black students “who would soon play leading roles in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.”32
Zinn told biographer Davis Joyce in a December 3, 1996, email message that he had moved South when “McCarthyism was plaguing colleges and universities throughout the country . . . and it may be that black colleges were a kind of refuge (although I did not consciously seek out Spelman for that reason!) for white radicals.” As Zinn explained, “radical whites (me, Staughton Lynd, others) were especially welcome, and since our radicalism was expressed mostly in our views on race relations, well, that fitted in with the black community quite well.”33
In fact, Zinn’s radicalism was not a good fit for Spelman College, where he must have stood out like a sore thumb. Spelman was a conservative Christian school that had been founded in 1881 by eleven ex-slaves who met in Friendship Baptist Church, wanting to read the Bible.34 It became Atlanta Baptist Female Seminary and then, in 1924, Spelman College. Karen Vanlandingham in her 1985 master’s thesis, “In Pursuit of a Changing Dream: Spelman College Students and the Civil Rights Movement, 1955–1962,” explains that the “religious tradition inherent in Spelman’s founding endured as a part of the school’s educational philosophy.” The 1958–1959 college catalogue asserted, “Spelman College is emphatically Christian. The attitude toward life exemplified by the life and teachings of Jesus is the ideal which governs the institution.”35 College life there included mandatory daily chapel attendance and adherence to a strict curfew and dress code.
Howard Zinn, however, felt it was his mission and his right to change the college. In the August 6, 1960, Nation, he observed: “ ‘You can always tell a Spelman girl,’ ” alumni and friends of the college have boasted for years. The ‘Spelman girl’ walked gracefully, talked properly, went to church every Sunday, poured tea elegantly and, in general, had all the attributes of the product of a fine finishing school. If intellect and ta
lent and social consciousness happened to develop also, they were, to an alarming extent, by-products.”36
Zinn set out to transform the “finishing school” into a “school for protest.”
As if surprised, Zinn writes in his autobiography, “I learned that President Manley resented the article for its criticism of the college as it was.”37
Manley, who had been born to parents of Jamaican descent in Honduras, had come to the United States for his education and been appalled by the segregation he encountered on the journey and after he arrived, as he describes in his memoir A Legacy Continues: The Manley Years at Spelman College, 1953–1976. Once he assumed the reins at Spelman in 1953, he began an effort to upgrade the college’s academic standing by hiring more professors with Ph.D.’s.38 Manley was a proponent of black civil rights, but also of maintaining high academic standards and an orderly atmosphere for learning.
Zinn must have appeared to be a good candidate. A World War II veteran holding a master’s degree from Columbia University with a major in history and minor in economics, he was about to get a Ph.D. from the same institution. As Joyce points out in his biography, Zinn had “studied under some of the great names in the profession at the time, including Henry Steele Commager, David Donald, Richard B. Morris, Jacques Barzun, William Leuchtenburg, and Richard Hofstadter.” His dissertation on the congressional career of Fiorello LaGuardia was submitted by his adviser, Leuchtenburg, to the Beveridge Award competition of the American Historical Association. It won second place and was published in 1959 by Cornell University Press as LaGuardia in Congress.39
Campus minister Norman Rates told Vanlandingham that Zinn “quickly became one of the most important white adults involved with the student movement in Atlanta. Fellow professors tended to label him a ‘rabble rouser.’ ”40 According to Rates, Manley was in a tricky position after Zinn started his direct-action civil rights campaigns. The college president “had to be sensitive to the demands of the leaders of the black and white communities who were upset with the student activists, but he did not want to alienate his students.’ ” He also “had to answer to angry or concerned parents who wanted to know why the school was allowing their daughters to be involved in such risky activities.”41