Happy Howard Zinn’s Birthday!

 Today we celebrate the birthday of a man who gave to us a new lens through which to look at ourselves, our history, the Great American Adventure. With his book A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn showed us the history that took place below the upper crust of the history most of our textbooks showed us. This was the story of the real people who built the country with their blood and guts, not just the few elite individuals who have been singled out to symbolize that history in our textbooks. In Zinn’s version of history, things are not quite so perfect, so clean cut. There are many nuances. Politics, strangely enough, looks very much the same 250 years ago as it does today. There is some difference between what politicians say publicly, and what their actions say about what they really believe.

What did Thomas Jefferson mean when he wrote “all men are created equal” while he was at that very same moment a slaveholder, a man who kept other human beings as prisoners in order to reap the benefits of their labor without having to compensate them, without even having to regard them as human beings? The soaring rhetoric of the elite colonists who led the country in rebellion against the mother country moved the hearts and souls of the rank and file people, the new Americans who came to this country from Europe. It touched the chords in the human heart that ring in harmony with the universal longing for freedom and justice. And it roused those people to fight for the cause, to free the colony from the rule of the most powerful empire in the world. And against all odds, the revolution was a success. The British Crown let it go, let the colonists have their way. Then the colonial elite would have to deal with the rabble themselves.

Jefferson’s moving call for democracy and equality, words borrowed mostly from John Locke, set off more than the colonial elite was quite ready for, and once the proverbial genie was out of the bottle there was no stuffing it back in. The aspirations for a free democratic society were ignited in the hearts of the new Americans, and they continued their struggles to realize those dreams, even when in direct opposition to the aristocrats who came to be known reverently as The Founding Fathers. So begins the story of the Great American Dream, an epic drama that continues to play out today, day by day, as Americans strive for a more perfect union, more democratic indeed than the founding fathers envisioned or would have tolerated.

The history text books of our schools tell us a myth, a collection of many smaller myths. George Washington chopped down a cherry tree and was so honest that when he faced consequences for his act from his angry mother he said, “I cannot tell a lie…” Like the Christ child himself, this man was destined to be a god among men, and to lead his nation to freedom against a tyrannical king. It is a story designed to create reverence, obedience, acceptance of the social order. Our schools train us to be well behaved, “good citizens”. The real story is much greater, much deeper, much more full of passion and drama. It is the story of millions of individual lives, of the legions of unnamed participants in a struggle to achieve the kind of society we were promised in those moving founding documents. Every day the story continues on a million fronts. No one could tell the whole story. Every day could produce enough material for a giant volume. But Howard Zinn did us the service of opening our eyes to that drama, the real drama under the surface of the story we were told, the story of the lives of Americans who were not the rulers, the generals or the politicians. This is the real story of America, of the universal human aspiration for freedom, self-determination and justice.

Today it is fitting to pay tribute to Howard Zinn for his great contribution to our understanding of ourselves as a nation, and beyond that as citizens of the world, members of the human species. He opened the door to a new way of looking at the world, at a history in which we are no longer just bystanders, we are participants. We can be a part of making a new world. Every day we see headlines that show us that we must change our course in history. We need a new chapter in industrialization. One day someone makes an error and the mighty Gulf of Mexico is fouled with millions of gallons of oil, destroying the lives and the habitats of many species and the livelihoods of many people who relied on that ecosystem for their existence. Practically every living system in the world is in decline under the attack of a harsh, predatory industrialization that has run its course and can no longer be sustained. We know we have to change, and yet every morning we get up out of bed and start the day all over behaving just as we did before. After a short period of alarm, the president tells the oil companies they can go back to drilling in the Gulf, come what may. We must continue to drive this economy, keep the wheels spinning, keep Wall Street generating more paper profits. And when another oil disaster happens, we know the CEOs of the giant oil companies will once again say there was nothing they could do to prevent it. Like lemmings we continue our march toward our own self-destruction. We know we have to change, but how? For today we will just place one foot in front of the other and continue as we were. Let someone else deal with it.

But Howard Zinn has given us an alternative view. We are not caught in an inevitable scenario. This world is the product of the actions of millions upon millions of people. The benefits we enjoy are largely the fruits of the work and sacrifices of those who preceded us. These were not just the soldiers we have been trained to admire because they sacrificed themselves to some foreign war or other, but to the regular people, the activists who fought for the rights of laborers for a ten-hour day, then for an eight-hour day and a five-day week, for a salary that would represent a more fair return on the labor that made others rich, so that they may be able to feed their families, even own a home of their own, perhaps even enjoy a bit of leisure in their lives.

We have Zinn to thank for breaking through that myth and helping us to see ourselves for who we really are, for individuals with power to transform our own lives and our world, not just subjects who must stand aside and watch as the world is ruled by the powerful and the privileged. Zinn wrote “A People’s History of the United States” in 1980, just in time to help us in the 21^st Century as we struggle to preserve our democracy against an onslaught against it by the tyrannical powers of our time, the network of massive corporations who now control our world and who are on the march every day to usurp more power, more resources and to reduce individual Americans to slavery. The struggle never ends. As Francis Bacon wrote, “There are never wanting some persons of violent and undertaking natures, who, so they may have power and business, will take it at any cost.” Therefore, the necessity of defending ourselves against the onslaught of would-be tyrants never ends. In honor of Howard Zinn’s name day, let us set ourselves to the task of rebuilding our world, creating a new birth of democracy in the 21^st Century, in honor of those who have built the great democratic institutions that we are heir to. As Ghandi said, let us “be the change you want to see in the world.”

Happy Birthday, Howard Zinn! We love you!

- David Cogswell, Author of Howard Zinn For Beginners and the upcoming Unions For Beginners