Original Zinn

In 1994, Beacon Press published the memoir of Howard Zinn, the professor and radical political activist who is best known as the author of A People’s History of the United States (1980). After Zinn summarily rejected Original Zinn as the title, the editors and the author settled on You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Time. The volume focused on Zinn’s role in the Civil Rights Movement while he was a professor of history at Spelman College in Atlanta from 1956 to 1963 and on his opposition to the war in Vietnam. Zinn had little to say, however, about his personal relationships or his inner life. Repetitious and predictable, the memoir came and went.

In Howard Zinn: A Life on the Left, Martin Duberman (who is Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus at the CUNY Graduate Center, where he founded the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, and biographer of James Russell Lowell, Charles Francis Adams, Paul Robeson, and Lincoln Kirstein) had hoped to lift the veil on his subject’s temperament and character, sexual relationships, married life, parenting, and friendships. He discovered, however, that Zinn had had little interest in exploring any possible connection between his own experiences and his radical views—and had removed virtually all references to his personal life from the archive he gave to the Tamiment Library at New York University.

Duberman faced an additional challenge. Despite his radicalism, Duberman notes, Zinn “wasn’t much of an ideologue” (p. 158). To be sure, he endorsed the Marxist ideas of class struggle and redistributing wealth according to need. But he was attracted as well to the anti-authoritarianism of anarchists and acknowledged on occasion that capitalism had “developed the economy in an enormously impressive way,” increasing “geometrically the number of goods available.” Duberman concludes that Zinn “in fact, wasn’t much interested in political theory, nor did he pretend to have a creative, original contribution to make in that regard” (p. 158).

In this biography, then, Duberman emphasizes—and celebrates—Zinn’s political engagement and the “much needed role” (p. 158) he played in popularizing the ideas of others, including history “from the bottom up” and skepticism about “objective” accounts of the past. Although he is by no means uncritical of Zinn, Duberman makes clear that biographer and subject “held common convictions on a wide range of public issues” (p. xi). He weighs in on those issues early and often, inserting them even at the risk of displacing Zinn from center stage.

A superb stylist and masterful storyteller, Duberman is at his best recreating the climate and the context of desegregation struggles in the 1950s and ‘60s. At Spelman, he tells us, Zinn was faculty adviser to the Social Science Club, which made integrating Atlanta its top priority (much to the consternation of President Albert Manley, who blamed Zinn for stirring the girls up and got rid of him in 1963). Students often met at the Zinn apartment to discuss strategy, forcing young Myla and Jeff Zinn to do their homework in their bedrooms. In 1961, Zinn’s students targeted the largest department store in the city, Rich’s. Howard and Roz Zinn bought coffee and sandwiches at the counter, then moved to a table where they were joined by some black students. Instead of calling the police, Rich’s managers turned off the lights. “In the semi-darkness,” (p. 40) Duberman writes, the students chatted amiably with their professor and his wife until closing time. That fall, Rich’s ended its policy of segregation and nearly two hundred Atlanta restaurants followed suit.

Two years later, they tried the same approach, with less success, at Leb’s delicatessen. When Howard, two whites, and one black seated themselves at a table, the manager came over, indicated that he had his own ideas about segregation but would be fired if he acted on them, and offered to “wrap up some beautiful pastrami sandwiches for them to take...