Howard Zinn:The Next Page
Most every protester at this week’s G-20 summit has a dog-eared copy of Howard Zinn’s ‘A People’s History of the United States’ in his or her library. Dmitri Ragano talks to the author — not so much about history, but about the future.
Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” has changed the way millions of Americans think about their country’s past and present. Zinn has been on the front lines of political protest for nearly a century. He is critical of many government and business policies that will dominate G-20 discussions this week.
Zinn is a central inspiration for “The People’s Summit” in Pittsburgh this weekend (Sept. 19, 21, 22). It will offer alternative views and discussions on topics including poverty, labor rights and environmentalism. (See www.peoplessummit.com)
This week Dmitri caught up with Zinn and Pittsburgh-born filmmaker Lisa Smith who are collaborating with a galaxy of Hollywood stars on a Zinn-themed documentary, “The People Speak,” that will air on cable television this year. Zinn and Smith talked about his work, the summits and why Pittsburgh is the perfect place for a debate on how to run the world.
THIS WEEK, we bask in the glow of Pittsburgh’s selection for the G-20 summit. We pontificate on how the outcomes, decisions on free trade and global finance, could influence our country’s future.
In his underground best-selling book “A People’s History of the United States,” Howard Zinn describes a less celebrated event that occurred in our city over a century ago. It too played a decisive factor in how millions of Americans would live and work for decades to come.
It was the Homestead Steel Strike of 1892. The historian chronicles the face-off between Carnegie Steel and its employees over wages and the right to organize. Henry Clay Frick, tasked with running the company while Andrew Carnegie was in Europe, ordered the creation of three miles of barbed wire fence to keep strikers away from the mills. Gun-carrying Pinkerton detectives were brought in to protect company property and introduce of replacement workers.
A bloody siege ensued. Strikers took control of the whole town of Homestead, battling the Pinkertons when they tried to enter the shore from barges on the Monongahela. After killings on both sides of the conflict, the state government intervened to assist Carnegie Steel. Militia reinforcements poured in and arrested resisting workers. The strike was defeated and there were no unions in the mills for the next 40 years until the Great Depression.
The Homestead Strike is one of many episodes in Zinn’s underground classic that show us the rawer, more controversial side of our nation’s past than we may have learned about in our high school curriculum. Zinn says that in writing the book, he wanted to “awaken a great consciousness” in his readers, challenging them to consider controversial issues in our past and present — issues like war, class, inequality and race — so that we’d be inspired to get civically engaged and create a better future.
The tale is also an example of his gift for storytelling that makes “A People’s History” a gripping read and unlikely publishing sensation. Since its initial printing with little fanfare in 1980, “A People’s History” has climbed out of obscurity and sold more than 2 million copies. It is one of the only titles in entire book industry that has consistently increased sales year after year — for almost three decades.
At the age of 87, Zinn is a pivotal source of inspiration for “The People’s Summit,” a series of political and economic discussions that began Saturday and will continue on Monday and Tuesday, preceding the official G-20 summit. Though Zinn will not be able to travel to Pittsburgh for health reasons, he has videotaped a keynote address.
Asked about the success of his writing, Zinn expresses surprise and humility. “It shows that millions of American people are hungry for a new view of our country,” he said over the phone from his home in Boston. They are seeking “a more critical view that examines our economic policy, racial policy, environmental policy.”
For most of Zinn’s life, if he wasn’t writing about history then he was in the middle of it. Growing up as the son of Jewish immigrants in New York, he participated in shipyard strikes of the Great Depression and then served in World War II flying combat missions in Europe.
As a political activist he was on the front lines of the civil rights movement in the South and the anti-war protests of the 1960s. As a white professor at a black woman’s college in the South, Zinn documented the Freedom Rides. As part of his opposition to the Vietnam War, Zinn travelled to Hanoi to lobby for the release of POWs and collaborated with Daniel Ellsberg to get the Pentagon Papers published.
Zinn’s legacy is poised to become more visible in the public mind later this year, when the film “The People Speaks” — a documentary featuring spoken-word performances from the sources of his book — is aired on the History Channel. The film includes performances by many of Zinn’s admirers in the entertainment world, including Matt Damon, Bruce Springsteen, Josh Brolin and Marisa Tomei.
LISA SMITH, a Pittsburgh-native with a background in television and theater, has worked with Zinn the past three years as a producer for the film. She believes that his emphasis on the history and struggles of common people is what endears him to so many in Hollywood.
“As an actor or an artist, you are always trying to speak to something that touches everyone. And in his work, Howard really deals with the things that we all want: security, home, family and dignity.”
Smith grew up in Dormont as the steel industry faded in the 1970s and ’80s before moving to Los Angeles. Working in the television industry, Smith collaborated with Chris Moore, a producer of “Good Will Hunting” who frequently collaborates with Matt Damon. Damon grew up in the neighborhood where Zinn lives in Boston and is a longtime friend and admirer of the historian. For Damon and Moore, it has been a long-running dream to create a film version of Zinn’s work. As the project gained momentum, Smith joined the production team.
Smith, who has worked in Hollywood for over a decade, says she “still doesn’t consider myself an Angeleno, I consider myself a Pittsburgher.” She sees it as perfectly fitting that her hometown should become center stage for the Zinn-inspired forum.
“The people of Pittsburgh create a new future for themselves,” she says. “There’s a spirit of survival there that people can learn from.”
Other cities that hosted gatherings of the G-20 leaders, such as London earlier this year, have been marred by fierce protests and violent clashes. It’s a testament to the raging debate over the modern version of global capitalism that the conference represents, particularly now with the country going through the worst recession since the Great Depression.
“Pittsburgh is representative of what has happened in all the industrial cities in the U.S. today,” Zinn says. “It’s a very different situation now than in the late 19th century when you had the Homestead Strike. There were very intense and violent labor struggles during that time. Laborers had no legal rights … but there was a certain militancy to challenge things.”
And while there has been progress in the past century, Zinn believes that “Many of the fundamentals are the same. What I mean by that is, working people are having a very hard time. Employers have the power. And government is in the thrall of the employer-based class. We still have a class based society with rich and poor.”
FAILURES OF THE global financial system have received lots of attention in the past year, but Zinn insists the hardship for many Americans predates the recent downturn. “The press talks about this particular economic crisis. But for working people there’s always an economic crisis.”
When asked about Obama’s response to the economic challenges since he’s taken office, Zinn expresses disappointment.
“With Obama, you’re hearing some pro-labor rhetoric where it wasn’t before but things basically have not changed much. Obama is taking some steps to help working people but they are small steps. When he was a candidate he seemed ready to endorse labor legislation that would make it easier to organize but not it’s not that certain whether that will happen.”
“He is not taking sufficiently bold steps to address unemployment. During the New Deal, which of course was a much more severe economic situation, Roosevelt took much bolder steps. The WPA created 8 million jobs. That was a massive intrusion of government into the economy. Obama on the other hand seems very much dedicated to the free-market system.”
Zinn cites a recent Harper’s Magazine cover story that compared Obama to Herbert Hoover.
“The point was that Hoover recognized there was a financial crisis and he knew that something had to be done about it. But his philosophy was the government should do very little and even that should be done by way of corporations in the private sector. So his recovery activity was basically bailouts to financial institutions.”
Although Zinn is critical of the Obama’s approach, he is hopeful about the American people, who show their passion and ideals for a better world through events like the People’s Summit and in their many interactions with him and his book.
“It shows that there is something simmering under the surface in America society. … Despite the fact that we are a conservative country in so many ways and despite that fact that we have no fundamental change in domestic or foreign policies even when we go from to a Democratic administration from the Bush administration. There is a potential for change that could some day flame up.”
“I am thinking of what happened in other countries that we had considered tyrannies in what was called the Third World, Latin America or Eastern Europe. And for the longest time we thought the people there had no power and they were oppressed and there was no hope this situation would change.
“And yet there were these currents under the surface we didn’t know about, sparks being generated in ideas and books and conversations and finally it all converged and flamed up. And then the tyrants had to leave. … And all those countries changed. … And the reception of my book is one small symptom of that possibility for change.”
Dmitri Ragano, a Pittsburgh native, lives in California. Last year on The Next Page, he profiled Jerome “Jero” White, the Pittsburgh-born Japanese singing sensation (dmitri_ragano@yahoo.com).
