Review, Howard Zinn, Failure to Quit: Reflections of an Optimistic Historian (Common Courage Press, 1993)

Columbia Missourian, September 5, 1993

During the past forty years, few people have combined the roles of scholar and activist as effectively as Howard Zinn. As a professor at Spelman College—a black women’s college in Atlanta—during the 1950s, Zinn worked with his students in the struggle for civil rights, later writing a history of the movement. As a professor at Boston University in the 1960s, he was a leading intellectual in the anti-war movement. More recently, he was an outspoken critic of the Persian Gulf War.

Zinn never has seen his roles as being in conflict, but rather as reinforcing each other. Using as a guide George Orwell’s dictum, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past,” Zinn has sought to open American history to powerless groups as the fist step to empowerment. Most notably in his myth-debunking A People’s History of the United States (1980), Zinn has sketched history from the bottom up, reinterpreting such staples of American mythology as the European “discovery” of America by viewing it from the perspective of the American Indians (and thus transforming the “discovery” into an “invasion”).

Failure to Quit, which collects some of Zinn’s articles and lectures from the past 20 years, draws lessons from history for contemporary activists. “As this century draws to a close,” he writes, “a century packed with history, what leaps out from that history is its utter unpredictability.” Although this uncertainty might be disconcerting, it also can offer solace to activists battling against great odds. Pointing to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of democracy movements in many Eastern European countries, Zinn says the first lesson one might draw from the history of the twentieth century is “that the struggle for justice should never be abandoned because of the apparent overwhelming power of those who have the guns and the money and who seem invincible in their determination to hold on to it.”

A second lesson to be drawn from this history of ambiguity, Zinn says, is that no justification for war is adequate. “Massive violence, whether in war or internal upheaval, cannot be justified by any end, however noble, because no outcome is sure. . . . If the ends, however desirable, are uncertain, and the means are horrible and certain, those means must not be employed.”

Repeatedly, Zinn argues that the impetus for social change throughout American history usually has come not from government, but from ordinary people. The Bill of Rights, for instance, has been enforced and expanded only because common people have insisted on taking its words literally, while government officials normally have felt little compunction about violating the stated rights. “If it were left to the institutions of government,” Zinn comments, “the Bill of Rights would be left for dead. But someone breathed life into the Bill of Rights. Ordinary people did it, by doing extraordinary things. The editors and speakers who in spite of the Sedition Act of 1798 continued to criticize the government. The black and white abolitionists who defied the Fugitive Slave Law, defied the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision, who insisted that black people were human beings, not property, and broke into courtrooms and police stations to rescue them, to prevent their return to slavery.”

Democracy, in Zinn’s view, is not the result of Congressional debates, Supreme Court decisions or presidential directives. Democracy originates with grass-roots movements that force those in power into changing the status quo. Pointing to the sit-ins in the early years of the civil rights movement, Zinn argues that had the students stayed within the law, no fundamental change would have occurred. Only by violating the law on a mass scale could demonstrators marshal enough power—moral, economic and political—to change the law. “Because what the movement did,” Zinn says, “was to create a countervailing power to the policeman with a club and a gun. That’s essentially what movements do: They create countervailing powers to counter the power which is much more important than what is written down in the Constitution or the laws.”

An understanding of history is essential, Zinn says, for Americans to assess the actions and rationales of their government. The government controls the present and future by controlling the images most Americans form of the nation’s past. This notion of American history is crucial, for instance, in justifying U.S. involvement in war. As Zinn argues, “one of the elements that goes into this process of persuasion is the starting point that the U.S. is a good society. Since we’re a good society, our wars are good. If we’re a good society, we’re going to do good things. We do good things at home. We have a Bill of Rights and color television. There are lots of good things you can say if you leave out enough.”

With a firm grasp of history, though, Americans can see through claims such as the one former President Bush made to justify war against Iraq. Bush sought to establish America’s claim to the moral high ground by arguing that the United States stood against aggression. But as Zinn says, “The record of the U.S. in dealing with naked aggression in the world . . . is so shocking, so abysmal, that nobody with any sense of history could possibly accept the argument that we were now sending troops into the Middle East because the U.S. government is morally outraged at the invasion of another country.” Pointing out that American history is filled with instances of military aggression, from the white settlers’ first encounter with Native Americans to the history of U.S. relations with Latin America and more recent acts of aggression committed by the United States and its allies during the Cold War period, Zinn effectively argues that official U.S. outrage against military aggression is applied only selectively.

Zinn is one of the handful of scholars who write primarily not for other academics, but for a wider audience. His conviction that history offers necessary lessons for the present and enables people to see through the official falsification that constitutes so much of our current political culture should inspire teachers, students, activists and others with a healthy sense of skepticism toward those in power. If my own view of the uncertainty of history is, as my students complain, more pessimistic than Zinn’s, I am nonetheless glad Zinn is there with his optimistic vision. As he says, “The future is not certain, but it is possible.”