The People’s Historian

Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States, has found the perfect biographer in Dave Zirin.

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Magazine

It was one of the joys of my professional life to publish Howard Zinn in The Progressive during the last twelve years of his life. So reading Dave Zirin’s The People’s Historian: The Outsized Life of Howard Zinn—a warm, perceptive, and timely biography—and finding in it some quotes from those columns Zinn wrote for us was a thrill.

But most of all, it was sheer delight just to hear Zinn’s voice again, to feel the depth of his insights, and to catch the updraft of his optimism.

Zinn, who died in 2010, is most famous for writing A People’s History of the United States: 1492 to Present. Now he has found the perfect biographer in Dave Zirin, the author of eleven books on the politics of sports, and a regular columnist for The Progressive and The Nation.

Zirin sums up Zinn nicely: “He was an unafraid, joyful champion of the unheard.”

Zirin tells how Zinn grew up poor in Brooklyn, New York, with his Jewish immigrant parents. Seeing how hard his father toiled, Zinn saw right through the American myth that if you work hard, you’ll get ahead. That observation, along with reading Charles Dickens and Upton Sinclair, helped lead him to his involvement in leftwing politics.

When he graduated from high school, Zinn went to work as a shipfitter in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. It was a union job, and there was a lot of Communist organizing within the union, which furthered his education.

During World War II, Zinn enlisted as an airman, and he became a bombardier. Just weeks before the end of the war, Zinn and other airmen dropped jellied gas bombs (an early version of napalm) on the French resort town of Royan, where a small group of Nazis were holding out. The bombing “killed 3,000 civilians and just twenty-three German soldiers,” Zirin writes. “Zinn wrestled with what he did in Royan—how his superiors could order the bombing, and why he obeyed—for the rest of his life.”

When he returned from the war, Zinn “threw himself into activism.” He decided to use the G.I. Bill to attend Washington Square College, which is now part of New York University.

After college, he went to graduate school in history at Columbia University, and his first teaching job was at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia. One of Zirin’s best chapters covers Zinn’s years there as a history professor and activist mentor. Among Zinn’s students were Alice Walker, Marian Wright Edelman, and Bernice Johnson Reagon, and they all sing Zinn’s praises in this book.

Zinn also played a crucial role as a senior adviser, with Ella Baker, to the young activists of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. An admirer of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., Zinn would urge the activists to adhere to nonviolence. But he insisted on direct action and civil disobedience—the more disobedient, the better.

That same attitude informed Zinn’s opposition to the Vietnam War, which came early and often, and Zirin provides a fascinating account of Zinn’s trip to Hanoi in 1968 with Daniel Berrigan to free three captured American pilots.

The only time Zirin’s narrative slows is when he discusses Zinn’s tumultuous time at Boston University and his interminable battles with the school’s reactionary president, John Silber.

But it picks right up again when Zirin gets to A People’s History. “It was a gutsy ambition: to take all he had written, learned, and lectured and create a counternarrative to the entirety of U.S. history,” he explains.

This biography is a great gift for you and your political friends—not least for the classic Zinn quotes it contains, including this chestnut, which has adorned many an office wall, including my own: “To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness . . . . And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future . . . . To live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”

This is a lovely and inspiring biography about a lovely and inspiring man. Zinn and Zirin belong together, so it’s fitting that they’ll be rubbing shoulders on so many alphabetized bookshelves for years to come.