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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 21st
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 21st 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
