Of generational confusion and conceptual overlapping:
Remapping the history of US public intellectuals through the
life and work of Howard Zinn
Historians Against the War Conference
Atlanta, Georgia, April 11-13 2008
Ambre Ivol,
La Sorbonne Nouvelle,
Paris, France
Radical historian Howard Zinn is in a contradictory position. He is both popular
as a public intellectual and marginal as a scholar. There is a discrepancy between his
influence in mainstream popular culture and his visibility in the historiography and inside
the academia. What accounts for such a position? What makes for such dissociation
between his public and his scholarly voices? It seems that the conceptual framework
which is used to discuss US intellectual generations is misguiding because it has distorted
the history of US intellectuals over the course of the 20th century. The main gap in the
historiography of the US is the historical amnesia which resulted from the Cold War. To
this day, it impacts our understanding of the past in important ways.
Indeed our understanding of intellectual and political generations is still couched
in an essentially generational vocabulary. This is most obvious in the terminology of the
“old” and “new” left. Primarily chronological, this opposition between two political eras
and two generations is simultaneously ideological. The “old” left refers to “pre-1959”
and is essentially a derogatory term.1 This generational gap is compounded by the
marginalization of a whole generation, Howard Zinn’s generation, and because of this
marginalization a distorted view of the history of US intellectuals has developed which
leaves out – and thus fails to explain – Zinn’s life and work.
This distortion of intellectual history is illustrated by a series of conceptual
frameworks which all both refer to Zinn and all fail to explain him. The most obvious
generational definitions are the “New Left” generation, to which he is usually associated,
as well as the “old left” generation to which he is sometimes connected. But to
complicate the picture, other definitions would also apply to him, such as the “Munich
generation”, the “New York intellectuals” and the so-called “Last intellectuals”. All of
these generational frameworks include at least partly Zinn’s trajectory, but none of them
is sufficient in and of itself.
I Conceptual overlapping in Howard Zinn’s generational trajectory
US historian Peter Novick has warned against any reification of the “new left”
intellectuals. Dealing specifically with historians, he emphasized the complexity of views
among “uncapitalized, new, left historians” which included, among others, Eugene
Genovese, Gabriel Kolko, James Weinstein, William Appleman Williams, Jesse Lemisch,
1
Paul Buhle, The New Left Revisited, p. 141-42.
Staughton Lynd, Eric Foner, Robert Starobin and Howard Zinn. Novick brings out two
subgroups, one including those who received their PhDs in the late 50s and early 60s and
the other including those who arrived thereafter. According to him, the first group was
culturally rather “straight” and had been socialized through ties with the “old” left (the
CP USA and the social-democratic parties of the times), whereas the other had been
radicalized by the countercultural turmoil of the 1960s.2
Biographically speaking, Zinn would belong to the first group, which would
connect him to Weinstein, Williams, Lynd and Kolko. But biographical roots can be
misleading. Ideologically speaking, Zinn was more attuned to the culture of the new left.
Moreover, Zinn (1922- ) is older than Genovese (1930- ), but his political views have
brought him closer to the student new left of the 60s than Genovese. Also, according to
this view, Lynd (1929- ) should belong to Genovese’s cohort, but he is in fact closer to
Zinn in his politics and activism.
But Novick is indeed right to warn against any hard and fast line defining the new
left intellectuals of the era. Lynd added another distinction which became quite relevant
as the 60s developed, arguing that the “white New Left” had followed the lead of the
“black New Left” as the experiences of the black liberation movement fueled other social
movements (mainly the student, antiwar and women liberation movements)3. Himself a
colleague of Zinn at Spelman College in Atlanta in the early 60s, Lynd both witnessed
and contributed to the student activism and to SNCC. Zinn was a key adult figure as an
adviser to the Political Science club at Spelman and especially as an adviser to SNCC
with Ella Baker from 1962 to 1965. Zinn came of age as a public intellectual through his
activism in the South as he became one the first historians of SNCC. In this light, Zinn
could arguably be seen as a key public voice for the “Black New Left”. Thus, his identity
as a public figure seems primarily tied to the 60s, which is at odds with his biographical
2
Peter Novick, That Noble Dream, p. 418-19.
Lynd in Priscilla Long, ed. The New Left: A Collection of Essays (1969, Boston: Porter Sargent Publishers,
1970, 2nd edition), pp. 1-13, esp. 6-9. See also Lynd’s discussion of Howard Zinn and Edward P. Thompson
as organic intellectuals in an article entitled “Reflections on Radical History”, Radical History, 79, 2001,
pp. 104-07. http://muse.jhu.edu/demo/radical_history_review/v079/79.1lynd.html
3
roots and, judging from the literature on the new left, quite exceptional for members of
his generation.4
Now this generational oddity is reinforced by the term “old” left, which refers
derogatorily to any ideological trend previous to1959.5 Zinn does have roots in the “old”
left, as he discusses in his memoirs6. An immigrant youth growing up in New York City
during the Depression was bound to be socialized by the ideological turmoil of his times.7
Within the Jewish community, socialist groups and leftist literature were common, and
though Zinn’s family was not in the least political, street encounters and soapbox
speeches were among some of the many ways one could become radicalized. His
worldview was informed by the growing antifascist sentiment which led one
neighborhood kid to disappear and go fight with the Spanish Republicans and he recalls a
particular demonstration which triggered deeper questions about the nature of US
democracy.8 The experience of exploitation as a junior waiter working with his father,
then as an apprentice working in the Brooklyn Navy Yards, infused with Marxist
literature and novels by Dickens, nourished a particular world view or Weltanschauung.9
This is both confirmed, simplified and distorted by the FBI files on Zinn, files
which unfortunately became the sole reference for historians such as August Meier and
Elliot Rudwick, as well as Peter Novick.10 Thus we are left with the impression that Zinn
was Communist Party member instead as the more complex fellow traveler and union
organizer that he was from the late 30s to the early 50s11. This view is in a way a heritage
of the Cold War, with the FBI’s definition of Communism over-determining the
ideological scene.
4
Michael Kazin and Maurice Isserman, America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s (Oxford University
Press, 2004), pp. 153-70; 173- 77.
5
Andrew Hunt, in Paul Buhle, The New Left Revisited, pp. 141-42.
6
Zinn, You Can’t Be Neutral, pp. 170-80.
7
New York City was then seen as the “most interesting place in the Soviet Union”, meaning that most of
the leftists currents coming out of the Russian Revolution were thriving in the mostly immigrant milieu of
the city. Joseph Dorman, Arguing the World: The New York Jewish Intellectuals in Their Own Words (New
York: The Free Press, 2000), pp. 57-82.
8
Zinn, You Can’t Be Neutral, pp. 171-72..
9
Zinn, You Can’t Be Neutral, pp. 164-65; 169.
10
Historian Davis Joyce has addressed the tautological references in Novik and Meier and Rudwick. Davis
Joyce, Howard Zinn: Radical American Vision (New York, Prometheus Books, 2003), pp. 25-26.
11
Joyce, Radical American Vision, p. 33.
Key to Zinn’s early experiences has been World War Two. It is indeed central, as
Zinn has referred recurrently to this traumatic experience all through his work and in his
public speeches12. He should belong, therefore, to what is termed the “Munich
generation”.13 However this definition is heavily ideological. According to Novick, it
implies a specific way of processing the experience of the war. Applied to diplomatic
historians who were shaped by the “battle against isolationism in 1940 and 1941”, the
definition expressed their attitude towards the war in South East Asia, which was
profoundly shaped by this “generational experience”.14 Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Lawrence
S. Kaplan and H. Stuart Hughes claimed that younger historians who had not experienced
the “feel and taste” of the 1940s could not fully comprehend the Cold War and the
horrors of Stalinism.15 Oscar Handlin claimed that it was wrong to establish a moral
parity in the postwar era between the US and the Soviet Union.16 But how representative
were they of the WWII generation?17
Indeed, the one most important diplomatic historian who reconceptualized
diplomatic history came out of the Munich generation18. William A. Williams was shaped
by his experience of the war, though he referred to Hiroshima as having a greater impact
on him than Munich19. He deplored the dehumanization of combat and the undemocratic
dynamics regulating the armed forces20. Zinn is in fact very similar to him in this way,
denouncing modern warfare and the increasing abstraction of human life.21 As a
bombardier, he saw nothing of the human death toll inflicted below. The bombing of the
small town of Royan on April 14, 1945 was one defining moment in his complete
“Howard Zinn on Democracy and War”, Boston University World of Ideas, November 19, 2006.
Recording in the author’s possession.
13
Novick, Noble Dream, p. 445.
14
Novick, Noble Dream, p. 445.
15
Novick, Noble Dream, p. 452..
16
Novick, Noble Dream, p. 453.
17
Palmer’s book on WWII historians is a key reference here as well.
18
Novick, Noble Dream, p. 446.
19
Paul Buhle & Edward Rice-Maximin, William Appleman Williams: Tragedy of American Empire (New
York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 123-24.
20
Buhle & Maximin, Tragedy, p. 23. This experience was best captured in novels according to both Zinn
and Williams. They cite Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead (1958), Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 (1961)
and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five or the Children’s Crusade (1969) as among the best stories
about the war. But Williams considered that the great WWII novels still had to be written. He himself
failed to complete his own autobiography, Buhle, Tragedy, p. 239.
21
Buhle & Maximin, Tragedy, p. 21-3.
12
rethinking of the ideals of the war.22 This was one of the first uses of napalm by the US,
and the utter violence and sheer uselessness of the bombing led Zinn to conduct specific
research on this action some twenty years later in 1967.23
Zinn volunteered to join the Air Corps in 1943. He could have continued to work
in the Brooklyn Navy Yard for he was thus participating in the war effort.24 But he could
not stand staying out of the fight against fascism. In this sense, his eagerness to fight in
the war could place him squarely in the “Munich generation”. But the reference to
Munich and the strong isolationism of the European states at the time of the rise of
Hitler’s Nazi Germany is too narrowly ideological to render the complexity of the
experience of World War Two. Indeed, the WWII generation could also be called the
“Hiroshima generation”, as Zinn and Williams were equally marked by it. Williams
remembers the ambivalent feeling of relief and uneasiness which overcame him, relief at
being saved but uneasiness at being saved in such a way25. This would lead him to choose
history to seek to understand “what was going on with the war and the way the world was
going with the bomb and all that”. Zinn remembers being overjoyed as the war came to
an end and though he hadn’t yet processed the contradictory experiences of the war, he
still was led to write “almost mechanically, Never again” on his war files holding his
medals and related war material.26
The experience of the war was absolutely central to a whole generation of US
intellectuals. The so-called “New York intellectuals”27 were deeply shaped by it. In fact
generationally speaking, Zinn is surprisingly close to them. They all grew up in
predominantly Jewish, working class communities in New York City and were all
traumatized by poverty and by the rise of fascism. They shared a hunger for ideas and
books, swapped ideological perspectives and explored various trends of socialist thinking.
Irving Howe, Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer and Irving Kristol were all marked by the
triptych of capitalism, fascism and socialism. There is a widely held view about the
Zinn, You Can’t Be Neutral, pp. 152-53.
Zinn, You Can’t Be Neutral, pp. 153-56.
24
Zinn, You Can’t Be Neutral, pp. 175-77; 87-88.
25
Buhle & Maximin, Tragedy, pp. 123-24.
26
Zinn, You Can’t Be Neutral, p. 95. In 1962, as a fellow in East-Asian Studies at Harvard University, Zinn
would conduct some research on the Hiroshima bombing; he would write both an article entitled “A Mess
of War and Documents” and a pamphlet, Zinn in Schiffrin, Cold War, pp. 69-70.
27
Joseph Dorman, Arguing the World: The New York Jewish Intellectuals in Their Own Words (New York:
The Free Press, 2000), p. 25.
22
23
specific generational roots which accounted for the collective identity of the New York
intellectuals.28 However, though these roots are also common to Zinn, he is not seen to
belong to the group. What accounts for this generational marginalization?
One reason has to do with their intellectual development. When most New York
kids went to Brooklyn City College (the “Harvard of the Poor”),29 Zinn decided he had to
earn a living and passed the exam to work in the Brooklyn Navy Yards. Hence he became
a working-class youth at eighteen, whereas the others pursued their studies. City College
was a highly charged political place, where students debated the differences between
Trotskyism and Stalinism and the relative merits of a socialist versus a capitalist country.
Zinn pursued his own political education as a young union organizer, attending meetings
and discussing leftist politics with his fellow-workers. However, his politics came out, as
Noam Chomsky has recently put it, of “the labor movement”.30
When the war came along, they were shaped by it in different ways. Bell (excused
for poor eyesight) and Glazer (still in school at Brooklyn City College) did not serve in
the war. Kristol and Howe enlisted however. Kristol was deeply demoralized by the antiSemitism in the Armed Forces. He enlisted in Chicago where he realized that “to create a
new socialist person, which was our ideal, was probably a utopian enterprise [and] that
the American working class was not what socialists thought it was”. Howe did not see
combat. Located in Alaska, he spent his time reading, removed from the deep
contradictions of the Allies’ military conduct. Removed from the front lines, his time in
the army was “like graduate school” for him.31
Zinn however witnessed racism against African-Americans in the segregated
army and became keenly aware of the class differences and hierarchy inside the armed
forces.32 As a veteran, he benefited the GI Bill to return to college and earn a PhD from
Columbia University in 1958. His intellectual development was thus never shaped by the
Dorman, Arguing, pp. 1-24. See also the generational chart entitled “The ‘Intelligentsia’ in American
Society” and taken from Daniel Bell, The Winding Passage: Sociological Essays and Journeys (New
Brunschwig, Transaction publishers, 1980).
29
Dorman, Arguing, pp. 41-56.
30
Noam Chomsky, interview with Ambre Ivol, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, May 22, 2007.
Recording in the author’s possession. See also Chomsky’s email correspondence with the author, May 9-10,
2007.
31
Irving Howe, Margin of Hope: an Intellectual Biography (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1982),
pp. 91-103; Dorman, Arguing, p. 89-92.
32
Zinn, You Can’t Be Neutral, pp. 91-2.
28
closed, New-York intellectual milieu and its reviews and magazines.33 Zinn was
informed by a working class environment and lifestyle which came to an end as he
reached 33 years old and accepted his first teaching position at Spelman College, already
a married man and a father34.
Hence Zinn can be partly included in these conceptual frameworks, from the
“new left” to its “older” counterpart, from the “Munich generation” to the “New York
intellectuals”. But none of these definitions do justice to the complexity of Zinn’s identity
as a public intellectual. Actually, Zinn’s odd generational posture suggests that a different
reading is needed about dominant trends in the history of intellectual generations.
Historian Russell Jacoby has proposed a larger narrative about US intellectuals.
Voicing a fear that, by the end of the twentieth century, “non-academic intellectuals” had
become an “endangered species”, he argued that the last, transitional generation of
“public intellectuals” were born in the 1920s and had come of age in the 1950s. The
estrangement from the academia was precisely what allowed them to become public
figures. Jacoby sees the trend of specialization in the intellectual field as highly
problematic and he claims that the academic world has increasingly alienated
intellectuals from the general public since the 1970s. Those who came of age before the
postwar boom of the 1950s were free of developing a discourse which was
understandable for, and relevant to, the American people. 35 Surprisingly, though Zinn fits
this description perfectly, he is barely mentioned in the study. The “New York
intellectuals” mentioned previously are however discussed at length, as well as historian
Richard Hofstadter (1916-1970), sociologist C. Wright Mills (1916-1962) and novelist
Norman Mailer (1923-2007).36
This is all the more surprising as Zinn’s links to the academic world have been, to
say the least, fraught with conflict throughout his career. He was fired from Spelman in
1963 for supporting and participating in the civil disobedience spreading on Southern
campuses. Spelman indeed bred activists who joined Snick and became one of the first
33
Partisan Review and Commentary were among the leading New York reviews in the late forties and
fifties.Dorman, Arguing, pp. 83-104. Partisan Review and Commentary were among the leading New York
reviews in the late forties and fifties.
34
Zinn, You Can’t Be Neutral, pp. 15-6; 180.
35
Russell Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals (1987, New York: Basic Books, 2000), p. 6-7; 16-9; 77-8.
36
Jacoby, Last Intellectuals, p. 82; 87-97.
campuses to stage a Free Speech movement in the spring of 1963.37 In the summer of that
year, Zinn’s contract was terminated. The president Albert Manley had become
increasingly critical of the student movements both on and off campus.38 Later at Boston
University, a personal war was engaged between Zinn and BU President John Silber. His
teaching position in the Political Science department was particularly difficult, with no
salary raises and no teaching assistant, despite the fact that his courses drew over 400
students each semester.39 Zinn also participated in a number of BU-based struggles
involving freedom of speech issues for students and economic justice for faculty and
administration workers culminating in a victorious campus-wide strike in 1979.40
Zinn’s trajectory suggests that perhaps a more nuanced view of the relationship
between intellectuals and the academia is needed. As many from his generation (WA
Williams), he came to the academic word relatively late thanks to the GI Bill. But his
social ascension from the working class to the middle class did not entail a change in his
political views. Hence Jacoby’s argument about the absorption of Jewish immigrant
intellectuals into the mainstream deserves to be reconsidered in the light of Zinn’s
trajectory. Indeed, Zinn’s long history of struggle for freedom of speech inside the
academic world suggests an alternative posture to that of accommodation to the
mainstream.41
This difficulty in ascribing a clear intellectual identity to Zinn could lead one to
conclude that Zinn is an exceptional figure. He draws certain characteristics from various
conceptual frameworks. He is both part of the old and new left, both part of the Munich
generation and the generation which produced the last intellectuals. However, I would
argue that Zinn’s odd generational position is rather connected to a broader need to revisit
the history of intellectual generations in the US.
Zinn, You Can’t Be Neutral, pp. 39-40.
Recalling growing disagreement with Manley, Zinn quotes from the diary he then held where he
recorded his last discussion with Manley. Zinn hoped to “turn out students who have something of a
crusader in them” whereas Manley had a more traditional outlook of the purpose of education, summarized
in the phrase “A President in like a Gardener”, weeding out what grows out of place. Zinn, You Can’t Be
Neutral, p. 40-1.
39
Zinn remembers: “Silber had his trees, his buildings, his money and I had 400 students.” Quoted from
Deb Ellis and Dennis Mueller, Howard Zinn: You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train: a Documentary,
Brooklyn, New York, Icarius Films, Run First Features, 2004. Zinn, You Can’t Be Neutral, pp. 184-96.
40
Zinn, You Can’t Be Neutral, pp. 190-96.
41
A longer discussion is needed here about the New York Intellectuals and their political evolution.
Dorman, Arguing, pp. 83-6; 128-29; 130.
37
38
II World War Two: The Invisible Generation
Indeed, Zinn came of age in a transition period, thanks to the GI Bill. His
generational roots are squarely in the 1940s, with the Second World War as a
transformative experience. However the definitions considered up to now and dealing
with that era are too politically charged to allow for Zinn’s experiences and ambivalence
about the war to speak for anyone but himself. In many ways, the history of the World
War Two generation remains to be written.
Ellen Schrecker considers that “an entire generation was jerked off the stage of
history” in the aftermath of the Red scare. 42 Indeed, “a network of causes and
organizations were gone forever” due to the political repression of the late forties and
early fifties. The late forties was a “lost moment of opportunity when in the immediate
aftermath of World War Two the left-labor coalition that McCarthyism destroyed might
have offered an alternative to the rigid pursuit of the Cold War and provided the basis for
an expanded welfare state (…) For a few short years (…) he American people had more
political options that they would ever have again.”43 Zinn’s experiences in the late forties
and early fifties are a testimony of those times of high hopes followed by a sudden
narrowing of the intellectual and political horizons.44
This was indeed part of the collective experience of a generation. Studs Terkel has
provided among the best oral history of the war generation and he titled his book the
“good war”. Insisting on the use of quotation marks, he noted that they were not “a matter
of caprice or editorial comment, but simply because the adjective ‘good’ mated to the
noun ‘war’ is so incongruous”.45 The veterans Terkel interviewed were surprisingly often
uneasy about their personal experiences of the war. Moreover, the world they inherited
was deeply problematic to many of them. Many were actually radicalized by the war.46
42
Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (New York, Little, Brown and Co,
1998), p. 369.
43
Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes, p. 369-70.
44
Zinn became more politically active right after the war.
45
Studs Terkel, The “Good War”: An Oral History of World War Two (New York: Ballantine Boos, 1984),
no page number.
46
Terkel, “Good War”, p. 76-82; 185-89; 199-207; 135-40.
There is an ambivalent heritage of World War Two. Stephen Ambrose refers to
the “citizen soldiers” from that generation.47 But, as the experience of African-Americans
suggests, it was a much more complex story. Franklin is a case in point here as his desire
to serve was turned down twice based on racial discrimination, which led him to change
his mind and decide his country did not “did not deserve” him. He then spent the
remainder of the war “outwitting his draft board”, partly by accepting a teaching position
at North Carolina College, whose president was precisely “on the draft appeal board.”48
Zinn first encountered African American activists from his generation in the Civil Rights
movement. Together with Whitney Young he participated in the desegregation
campaigns of the Atlanta public libraries.49 Then he later took part in the Freedom Vote
campaign with Aaron Henry running with Ed King on the Freedom ticket.50 C. T. Vivien
from Mississippi was another WWII veteran. Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth from
Montgomery was another leading voice in the movement who was radicalized by his
experience on a military base in the South during the war.51
Other historians have recently suggested the centrality of the “good war”
generation in its influence on the next generation of political activists. John Dittmer’s
Local People recounts how the war radicalized a generation of African Americans who,
in the words of WEB Du Bois, “returned from fighting, returned fighting”.52 Medgar
Evers became a leading organizer of the Civil Rights movement in Mississippi, Robert F.
Williams (1925-1996), a WWII Marine veteran, became a leading figure in the
movement as the controversial leader of the NAACP in Monroe, North Carolina and
Amzie Moore became an indispensable community leader for the young Snick people
who started organizing in Mississippi in the early 60s.53 Prominent African-American
47
Stephen Ambrose, Citizens Soldiers: The US Army from the Normandy Beaches to the Bulge to the
Surrender of Germany June 7, 1944-May 7, 1945 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), pp.472-73.
48
Palmer, op. cit., p. 84.
49
Zinn, You Can’t Be Neutral, p. 27-9; General Civil Rights Papers, Howard Zinn Papers, 1956-1970,
State Historical Society of Wisconsin. Copies in the author’s possession.
50
Ransby, Ella Baker, pp. 308-09; SNCC: The New Abolitionists: Research Papers, Mississippi Aaron
Henry Campaign for Governor, 1963, Howard Zinn Papers 1956-1970, WSHS. Copies in the author’s
possession.
51
Andrew M. Manis, A Fire You Can’t Put Out: The Civil Rights’ Life of Birmingham’s Reverend Fred
Shuttlesworth (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999), p. 37.
52
John Dittmer, Local People (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994), p*
53
Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision
(University of North Carolina Press, 2003), p. 301.
intellectuals who became influential in the late 50s such as historian John Hope Franklin
were also shaped by the war in important ways54.
SNCC became a place of reconnection between generations of activists. People
radicalized in the 1930s and 1940s played a central role in the group. Ella Baker is
perhaps the most prominent of all. She served with Zinn as “adult adviser” to Snick and
became a mentor and a “conduit of experiences” for a new generation of activists. Her
own political trajectory brought her from North Carolina to New York in the 1930s. In
the 1940s, radicalized by the Great Depression and the radical politics of Harlem, she
moved to the left. Then during the “Double V campaign”, she became an organizer for
the NAACP and traveled throughout the South to build chapters and networks of
activists.55
However there remains a large historiographical disconnect between AfricanAmerican and white generational trajectories. Hence Zinn’s place in the Civil Rights
movement is still odd, and largely unexplored.56 There are some hints of the importance
of networks which grew out of the radicalization of a generation of veterans. The
American Veterans Committee (AVC) which was created to counter the more
conservative veterans’ organizations was created in 1945. Zinn joined and became a key
organizer of the Brooklyn chapter in the late 40s. His was a radical chapter, among the
largest in the country with 300 members, named after a Chinese war cry, the “Gung Ho”
chapter.57 AVC was later prominent as a supportive network of the southern Civil Rights
movement. Zinn mentions the group in relation to civil disobedience actions in Atlanta in
the late 50s. This points to generational connections and to the importance of the WWII
generation in helping sustain, and being reinvigorated by, the next generation of social
movements. In this sense, Zinn’s personal involvement in the black liberation movement
is a microcosm of a larger story which has yet to be explored.
54
William Palmer, Engagement with the Past: The Lives and Works of the World War Two Generation of
Historians (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001), pp. 83-4.
55
Ransby, Ella Baker, pp. 62-71; 71-91.
56
This is the aspect of Zinn’s life which I am currently exploring and writing about in my dissertation.
57
AVC had around 100 000 members in 1947, a testimony to the politicization of a generation of war
veterans. Robert L. Tyler, “The American Veterans Committee: Out of a Hot War and Into the Cold”,
American Quarterly, Vol. 18, No. 3 (autumn, 1966), p. 429. Howard Zinn, interview with Ambre Ivol,
April 11, 2007. Recording in the author’s possession.
This particular influence of this generation is perhaps best inferred from what
Ellen Schrecker has said about the impact of the Cold War and McCarthyism. The Red
Scare indeed changed the “mental contours” of US society is defining ways. What made
for the social texture of US culture was shattered. Certain worldviews were marginalized.
Internationalist and class perspectives, which had been quite prominent intellectual trends,
almost completely vanished. Hence when new social movements reactivated certain
networks of resistance, most notably with African American communities, individuals
who had been socialized in that previous era came to play a prominent role.
This perhaps explains why Zinn came to write about SNCC, long before the group
was recognized as a key component of the Southern movement.58 Indeed Zinn wrote the
first oral history of SNCC. It is, as all his writings are, more than a “chronicle” of the
movement.59 Zinn saw the group as reviving the left, demonstrating the possibility for a
new form of “radicalism”.60 Together with Ella Baker, he was particularly attentive to the
need to develop a larger perspective, beyond civil rights, addressing economic issues and
issues of foreign policy. As an adult adviser, he defended the need to oppose HUAC and
later the need to oppose the war in Vietnam.61
Hence despite claims to the contrary, Zinn was always more than an “observer
participant” He played a role as a radical formed during a previous era, he served a
purpose due to his generational experience. In his articles, he would cite his experience of
World War Two as central to his understanding of his theory known as “hierarchy of
values”.62 But his identity as a former radical remained undisclosed in the movement,
Zinn’s book on SNCC was first supposed to be a study of the NAACP, as suggested by his editors at
Beacon Press. But Zinn insisted that the real story about the Southern movement was with Snick. Zinn also
sought financial and technical support from the Oral History Project of Columbia University, but his
proposal was turned down. Zinn, You Can’t Be Neutral, p. 69. Later, historians Clayborne Carson and
Barbara Ransby, as well as journalist Joanne Grant, would rehabilitate the place and influence of Snick in
the movement. Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 60s (Cambridge, Harvard
University Press, 1981), p. 1-5; 175-90.
59
Steven F. Lawson, “Freedom Now, Freedom Then: The Historiography of the Civil Rights Movement”,
The American Historical Review, Vol. 96, No. 2. (April 1991), p. 470.
60
Zinn, SNCC, The New Abolitionists (1964, Boston: Beacon Press, 1965), pp. 216-75.
61
Zinn Papers, “SNCC Papers: 1964, Education, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Educational
Program”, Box 3, Folder 2, WSHS. Howard Zinn Papers, “Should the HUAC Be Abolished?”, Debate at
Emory University, February 1963, audio recording, reel to reel tape, non-indexed files, Political Science
department, Boston University. Copies and recordings in the author’s possession. See also Carson for an
analysis of the issues of HUAC and Vietnam, In Struggle, pp. 106-07; 186-90.
62
“The value theory was first suggested to me as an Airforce officer in World War Two.” Zinn, Southern
Mystique, p. 24. “The value theory was first suggested to me as an Air Force officer in World War Two.”
58
thus perhaps suggesting a scar from the McCarthy era. Indeed, Zinn had been questioned
twice by the FBI around 1950 and 1954.63 Though he tends to understate the impact of
those interrogations, his decision, together with his wife, to destroy their war
correspondence to each other because it contained names of Communist friends is a sign
of the overwhelming fear of the times. Ellen Schrecker’s formulation “a good deal of
trauma” certainly applied to Zinn as it did to a whole generation of radical activists.64
Though rarely explicitly acknowledged for their generational identity, other, older
radicals have played key roles in the 1960s. For instance, David Dellinger (1915-2004)
became a leading figure in the movement against the war in Vietnam. Daniel Berrigan
(1921- ) and Philip Berrigan (1923-2002) became inspirational figures for the Catholic
left and beyond as they staged civil disobedience actions to protest the killing in
Vietnam.65 Moreover, if one takes a transnational perspective, Edward Palmer Thompson
(1924-1993) was a key influence on the New Left, with his book, The Making of the
English Working Class.66 Actually the WWII generation is perhaps in essence
transnational. As Eric Hobsbawm (1917- ) said in his famous Age of Extremes:
”For historians of my generation, the past is indestructible (…) because public
events are part of the texture of our lives. (…)Over huge stretches of the globe,
everybody over a certain age, irrespective of his personal background and life-story, has
passed through the same central experiences. These have marked us all, to some extent in
the same ways. (…) [for] instance inasmuch as we got used to think of the modern
industrial economy in terms of binary opposites , “capitalism” and “socialism as
alternatives mutually excluding one another.”67
A study of Zinn’s life and work could add one more piece to the puzzle of the
generational connections and the history of intellectual generations in the United States.
His life suggests a way to rethink, and perhaps redefine the intellectual trends of those
Zinn Papers, FBI File, “Memorandum”, Federal Bureau of Investigation, February 2, 1954, non-indexed
material, pp. 1-5, Political Science department, Boston University. Zinn in André Schiffrin, ed. The Cold
War and the University: Toward an Intellectual History of the Postwar Years (New York: New Press,
1997), p. 38.
64
“A Good Deal of Trauma”, Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes, p. 359. See also the whole chapter, pp. 359415 Andrew E. Hunt, David Dellinger, The Life and Times of a Nonviolent Revolutionary (New York :
New York University Press, 2006), p. 1-6.
65
Murray Polner et Jim O’Grady, Disarmed and Dangerous: The Radical Lives of Daniel and Philip
Berrigan (New York: Basic Books, 1997).
66
EP Thompson, The Making of the British Working Class (New York: Random House, 1963); Novick,
Noble Dream, p. 440-42.
67
Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, A History of the World, 1914-1991 (New York, Vintage Books,
1994), pp. 4-5. See also Palmer on the comparison between English and American WWII historians, op. Cit.
63
years. His work points to a new way of understanding the so-called “good war”
generation. His public voice was informed by the struggles of the 60s but took its roots in
the struggles of the 1940s. His trajectory suggests that division and antagonisms were
perhaps not as central to the new left generation, where individuals shaped by previous
eras of social struggles have actually played a crucial role, especially visible in the Black
liberation movement. McCarthyism weakened a whole generation of radicals as it
dispersed and in some cases destroyed its networks of solidarity. McCarthyism also
disrupted the mental contours of the country, including the shape of its historiography.
Hence the the relative invisibility the “Just War” generation. Zinn’s trajectory could heip
to rehabilitate this forgotten generation and the role it played in the new social
movements of the 60s.