R.I.P. Revolutionary In Peace...

One of my Professors from WMU, Donald Cooney, tuned me into the social philosophy of Noam Chomsky, Eugene Debbs, W.E.B. Dubois, Howard Zinn, and others. I have to admit, I was turned on by the honesty of these writers then and still am now over 10 years later. This interview was part of my independent study for my philosophy degree. So my camera man, Craig Bowman and I set off from Detroit for a Boston adventure. We were also going to interview Chomsky who was also gracious enough to give some time to a couple of college nobodies, but Chomsky got sick and had to cancel the interview. To this day, some of my "right" friends will not give people like Chomsky or Zinn a chance. Which is nonsense - because if you are always turning to the left or always turning to the right, you will just be going in circles and adding to the polarization of the unfortunate two party politics of America.

The Howard Zinn interview took place on May 6, 1998 at Howard’s office at Boston University. Meeting him was an honor. He was extremely friendly, humble, humorous and went out of his way for setting up the interview.

I know you have been labeled as a “Marxist Professor” and a “Radical Historian,” but essentially aren’t you just an iconoclast, one who questions cherished beliefs?

Howard Zinn:
Well I don’t want to diminish myself to an iconoclast because there are all sorts of iconoclasts, to label me as a marxist professor is too rigid a definition for what I would argue is a complex set of beliefs I have about marxism, socialism, capitalism. Marxist professor doesn’t do it, radical historian, that comes a lot closer to it. Well, iconoclast. . . certainly, but then you have to break that down to “what icons am I clasting?” What icons am I trying to break, and I suppose I am trying to break the icons that represent nationalism, patriotism, the narrowness of concern for people in your own country as opposed to people of another country, to break the icon of capitalism, the free market, the so-called free market, private enterprise, and to break the icons of traditional history. That is traditional history that tells the story of the United States from the viewpoint of important people, congressmen, senators and presidents. In other words those who do in history the same thing that the press and the media do today. If Clinton sneezes, it’s news, right? If a thousand people die in Africa, its page fourteen or not at all. There are a number of icons about the history of our country that I guess I try to smash (laughs). The founding fathers is one of those icons, the halo around the founding fathers. Oh, the wonderful people, they produced this marvelous document. In 1987 when there was the 200th anniversary of the making of the constitution bicentennial, Ronald Reagan wrote an essay, if you can believe it, for Parade magazine. . . a “scholarly publication,” and he extolled the constitution. What a wonderful model, so perfect it could have only been written with the guiding hand of God. That was it, the constitution was deified, it has been deified for so long. Interestingly enough, in that same year, 1987, the one dissenting voice from on high in the government in relation to the general acclaim for the founding fathers of the constitution; the one dissenting voice was a voice that came from a member of the supreme court, the one black member of the supreme court, Thurgood Marshall. Thurgood Marshall said, now wait awhile, what are you celebrating here? You’re celebrating the documents that legitimized slavery. You’re celebrating the founding fathers, many of whom were slave owners and who wrote a document that was protecting their interests. So that is one of the many icons in history, in the teaching of history and in the writing of history, that I try to take apart.

Are you bewildered at times from the backlash you receive for your views? You fight for the rights of minorities, working class people, common people. . . The majority of the population.

Howard Zinn:
Yeah, its funny. You would think that, “well, these are the people, these are the American people, congress is not the American people, the president is not the American people,” When we speak out on behalf of black people, native americans, women, working people, we’re accused of pleading for special interests, it is very funny that they talk about the majority of the people as the special interests. Well, after all what do we expect from the media since the media are controlled by those people who have the most money in society and who want to dominate the culture and really who want to tell the people what to think. They dominate the press, they dominate television, they dominate schools and they dominate more and more the publishing industry. At one time the publishing industry, the publishing of books used to be a kind of sacred place where even though the press in general was controlled, the publishing industry was more independent and you could publish books that were iconoclastic books to use your word, and the publishing is harder now as the publishing companies are no longer owned by publishers, they’re owned by Coca-Cola or Disney or Murdock and my friends who show me their rejection letters from publishers, I seem to have a lot of rejected friends and my friends who show me their letters of rejection in the old days used to say “Well this is what we disagree with about your book and this is why we can’t publish it.” The new letters of rejection now in this age of conglomerance say “Oh this is a fine book, but our marketing people tell us that this really isn’t marketable, it won’t sell enough copies, it won’t be commercially viable and so we must regretfully turn down your manuscript.

How did it come about your personal philosophy was formed? Was it empirical, was it scholastic? Was it a culmination of experiences?

Howard Zinn:
I think it starts with experience; it starts with empirical knowledge, in a sense of the life I saw around me as I grew up, working class neighborhoods, working class parents in New York and going to work in the ship yard at the age of eighteen with no thought of going to college for kids in my economic position, the position of my parents and so my first experiences led me to be class conscious. Conscious of the fact that there are a lot of people in the world who work very hard like my father, like my mother too, and who didn’t have anything to show for it, so I never believed for the rest of my life even though later on when I was teaching at Boston University a lot of my students came from successful families and they would say, “oh, in America, its amazing how the Horatio Alger myths (American writer of inspirational adventure books, such as Ragged Dick, featuring impoverished boys who through hard work and virtue achieve great wealth and respect) still persist in America, if you worked hard you will make it, I never believed that. So you might say my first ideas were of class, of status of wealth, and then when I began to read, my reading corroborated it. I mean, here we are in 1998, 150 years after the publication of the communist manifesto. You asked me before about marxism and I said well, I really wouldn’t exactly call myself a marxist professor because the reason I wouldn’t do that is because marxism has been interpreted in so many different ways. There are some terrible, terrible people who have called themselves marxist and I don’t want to be associated with them. But on the other hand, Marx himself, and Engals, they were two of the most brilliant thinkers of modern times. I began to read Marx when I was 18 years old when I was working in a ship yard and I came into contact with a couple of other ship yard workers who were young radicals and we got together once a week to study Marx and Engals and read Das Kapital and things way above our heads, the Communist Manifesto. so I, when you asked were my views shaped by empirical knowledge or theoretical knowledge, well they reverberate back and forth, my experience lead me to read certain things. I began to read about the labor movement, the history of working people, labor struggles in the United States, I began to read about American foreign policy. I left the ship yard to volunteer for the Air Force, became a bombardier in the Air Force. I inevitably became interested in questions of war and peace and American foreign policy and began to study history. I read a lot of the history of American foreign policy, so by the time the Vietnam war came along, my views on war and my views on American foreign policy were already pretty well defined. In short, I was suspicious of the aims declared by our national leaders when they said that we were going to fight for liberty and democracy and self determination and all of that.

There are two books you read that you mentioned in your autobiography, You can’t be neutral on a moving train, Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny got his gun, and Walter Millis’ The Road to War. You expressed those as being very critical of war, and yet you joined the Air Force right after that. Was it out of patriotism you joined or economic reasons?

Howard Zinn:
Not patriotism, I’ve never been a patriot. This shocks some people but to me patriotism is one of the most dangerous concepts in the world... "Wasn’t it Eugene Debs who said, “Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.” (laughs) Yeah, He was quoting an old english literary figure, the last refuge of the scoundrel, right. . . and so, Emma Goldman, the anarchist, one of my heroes said, “what is patriotism anyway?” Is it love of the government? No! If it is love of your country, the grass the trees, the hills, the people, okay, then I believe in it. But if it is love of your government, of its policies, No. I joined the air force because I had been reading about fascism, about Hitler and Mussolini. One of my first influences was a book by George Seldes, a journalist, who was a correspondent for the Chicago Tribune in Italy when Mussolini came to power and he wrote a book about Mussolini called, Sawdust Caesar. It was my first introduction to fascism. It was about how Mussolini began clamping down and destroying freedom of speech and assembly in Italy, and murdering his opponents. And then I read about Hitler and the nazis. I saw what they were doing in Europe, marauding in Italy, bombing Ethiopia in order to make itself an empire with this pitiful little military venture against a helpless country. And so I joined the Air Force out of anti-fascism, not out of patriotism. But, by the end of the war I had pretty much, half consciously. . . it took me a while to become fully conscious of what I had come to believe. By the end of the war I no longer believed in war as a solution to any problem, even the problems of fascism because I could see that the post war world had not really solved the problem of fascism. It got rid of Hitler, got rid of Mussolini, it didn’t get rid of the underlying problems of militarism, of racism, imperialism and yet fifty million people have died of course in world war II, so I became anti-war. I participated, myself in an atrocity, in one of the bombing missions. They were all atrocities, in that they all involved the killing of civilians because it is in the nature of bombing to kill innocent people and I did that and didn’t even think about it. To this day I understand how atrocities are committed by ordinary people, not by monsters. Atrocities are committed by just ordinary guys who get into uniform, are trained, are indoctrinated. . . this is the enemy, they’re the bad guys, we’re the good guys, anything goes, they don’t think about the death until maybe later.

I talked to a marine when I was in Australia. He was telling me about being in the Gulf war, and he said it was just too easy. He said he would shoot Iraqis in the eye with his laser sighted rifle with them never knowing his presence. “You could do what I do with the technology we had,” he kept telling me. Then we got into a conversation about what it is like to take another mans life and the emotional impact. “It’s either you or them.” was his response. Isn’t that just caveman logic though?

Howard Zinn:
Its interesting because when somebody says “its you or them” it implies a kind of stand off, the other person has a gun, he is going to kill you, you have a gun you kill him first. But most war does not consist of that kind of stand off, most of the killing that is done in war is the killing of people who don’t have guns. wars used to be that only a fraction of the people killed in wars are civilians. In WWII that changed and today, since WWII and the wars that have happened since WWII, 90% of the people who are killed are civilians, 90%!

That seems oxymoronic because our technology is supposed to be about pinpoint missiles and accuracy...

Howard Zinn:
Exactly, presumably the technology gets smarter and the killing gets more indiscriminate The technology enables you to destroy large areas. And when you destroy large areas, they inevitably involve more than military installations, but also along with the advanced technology comes a kind of moral surrender in which you no longer have any compunctions about the killing of civilians. Look, in WW II we had more advanced technology. I was a bombardier I used a Norton bombsight. It was supposed to be really accurate, you see, it didn’t matter. We flew to 30,000 feet, it had this very accurate instrument, we dropped bombs all over the place. They bombed Dresden. So we had the Norton bomb site, it didn’t matter, they just destroyed the whole city of Dresden, civilians. Vonnegut, in his book Slaughterhouse Five tells that story very vividly. Vietnam was the perfect example. We had the most advanced technology in Vietnam, but that includes napalm and that includes the bombing of villagers. So actually the technology enables you to bomb more civilians than you ever did before, kill more civilians than you ever did before.

Since we are in the era of “soft war,” where technology allows you more and more distance from your enemy, doesn’t that decrease your compassion because you never see or feel the results?

Howard Zinn:
Exactly, when we drop bombs from 30,000 feet, we didn’t see any human beings. Now if somebody had put these people in front of me and given me a knife and said, “now go around and kill these people one by one with your knife,” that would have been a different story. Now of course, you have to amend that a little by saying if you are indoctrinated enough, you will even do that because the people at My Lai, you know about the My Lai massacre? People at My Lai were shooting women and children point blank. Just firing and killing them, you know, and it wasn’t remote at all. But they had been so indoctrinated and told to follow orders, oh, lieutenant Kalley says kill them, Captain Medina says kill them. They say they are all communists, this little baby is a communist. And so these people, although they are human beings and they are breathing and they may be screaming, they are not really human beings anymore, you don’t see them as human beings and you destroy them. And that is why war must be avoided at any cost. Because once you get into war, no matter how moral your position seems to be at the beginning like Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait -- a moral issue. A country has been invaded therefore we have to go to war with Saddam Hussein. No matter how pure that moral issue seems to be, it quickly becomes corrupted. It probably was corrupted from the beginning because from the beginning you really didn’t go to war because you cared about Kuwait, you went to war because you cared about oil. And then you end up as this marine you met, just killing huge numbers of people. And then there’s the aftermath of the wars of today in Iraq when hundreds of thousands of children have died as a result of the war, the aftermath of the war with the sanctions against iraq and our secretary of state Madeline Albright says, “well, that’s a price we have to pay.”

Just recently did you have a strong inclination that we are going to get into this again with Iraq?

Howard Zinn:
We were very close to it. Clinton seemed hell-bent on bombing Iraq. Talking about weapons of mass destruction, it was almost funny. I say almost funny because Saddams weapons of mass destruction, whatever he has, we don’t know exactly what he has, whatever he has, they are probably 1/100 of the weapons of mass destruction that the United States has. And probably 1/10 or 1/50 of the weapons of mass destruction that are possessed by all the countries surrounding Iraq. And so for Clinton and Madeline Albright to get up there and say, “oh we are doing this because they have weapons of mass destruction” is absurd. If we had a press that was honest, if we had a press that was really critical instead of being obsequious, they would point that out immediately. And it would be obvious to people. I’ve talked to a lot of audiences about that and I’ve talked to an audience right in the middle of the crisis when we thought we would bomb Iraq. I talked to an audience of 500 people in Athens Georgia. I don’t remember it when I lived in Atlanta as the most progressive place in the world. But they could see immediately, these 500 people, unanimously, this doesn’t make sense. So our problem is getting information to people. I think once people are given the information that the media does not give them, then they would will really see a lot of things very clearly.

How do you see the media coverage of the Gulf War compared to Vietnam? I know that the U.S. Military during the Gulf War went as far as not allowing news crews to film the deceased U.S. Soldiers in coffins being unloaded from airplanes.

Howard Zinn:
One of the ideas of the Gulf War was to destroy what they call the Vietnam syndrome. By the Vietnam syndrome they meant, the American public getting aroused against a war, and they were determined not to let that happen and they understood that the american people got aroused against the vietnam war as they learned more and more about what was happening in Vietnam. And the American government was determined not to let the american public know what was really happening in Iraq, and so they really controlled the news. They were angry that there was a CNN reporter in Baghdad reporting from Baghdad, they were angry that reporters went into this air raid shelter in Baghdad which the United States bombed and killed about 500 people, one of the worst atrocities of our time really. And so they tried very hard to control and to a certain extent, succeeded because I am sure that most americans at that time said “oh yes, they’re using smart bombs” you know, limiting civilian casualties. It turned out later that these so called smart bombs were not smart at all, they were quite dumb.

One of my professors mentioned the bunker bombing incident in class and his take on it was that we have either incompetent soldiers or we have war criminals.

Howard Zinn:
Actually the answer to that is pretty clear, because the United States claimed that it deliberately bombed the air raid shelter because they said it was a communications center, and they didn’t say it was an accident. You know, with other bombings very often if they bomb civilians they say “oh we didn’t mean to, it was an accident, inefficient” as you say, But no, in this case they said, “No, we set out to bomb this because it was a communications center, and reporters who went into the wreckage of this shelter immediately after the bombing saw no evidence, no evidence at all of this being anything except an air raid shelter. And so it was, these war criminals, which is the accurate name for those people who planned this bombing. I mean, if there were really war crimes trials today like there was the Nuremburg trials, or the Tokyo war crimes trial. The U.S. government would be on trial for what we have done to the people of Vietnam, to the people of Iraq, and what we allowed to be done by dictators in Latin America to the people of their own countries, by supplying them with arms to do it.

Let’s talk about Daniel Berrigan and how you first met him.

Howard Zinn:
Well, I met Daniel Berrigan when both of us were asked by the anti-war movement in early 1968, to go to Hanoi, North Vietnam. People in the anti-war movement, David Dellinger, Tom Hayden, had received a telegram from North Vietnam asking them to send representatives of the peace movement, of the anti-war movement to North Vietnam to pick up the first three American fliers who had been captured. The North Vietnamese were now going to release them as a kind of gesture because of the Tet holiday. The time in late January early February is the Tet holiday for the Vietnamese, it was also the time of their offensive and they were also observing the holiday by carrying on the surprise offense of the South Vietnam against the American forces. But anyway, so I got a call from David Dellinger asking me if I would go to North Vietnam to pick up three prisoners. He called me out of a seminar right here at Boston University. It had never happened to me before, someone coming to the door and saying “hey come to the phone” I said “hey I’m in a seminar,” “this is very important” they say. So I left the seminar, said I would be right back and there was Dave Dellinger and said, ”well would you go to Vietnam?” I said “when?” He said “tomorrow morning” So I flew to New York and the next morning Daniel Berrigan showed up where he had been teaching at Cornell. He is a poet, a catholic priest, I had never met him. So the two of us spent the next two weeks together, becoming very close friends, flying halfway around the world to Bangkok and finally Laos and waiting around Laos for about a week because this old plane, that special plane that travels six times a month to Hanoi from Saigon, a kind of international control commission plane, had missed its flight from Saigon because of the Tet offensive and Saigon airport being taken over by the rebels in Vietnam. We waited a week in Laos and then flew to Hanoi. Spent a week in Hanoi, picked up those three prisoners, went around Hanoi. Saw bombed out villagers, spoke to Premier Pham Van Dong of North Vietnam. As I say, we became friends. We stayed in an old french hotel in Hanoi, you know a French colonial city, an old French hotel and Dan Berrigan had a room, I had a room. Every night we did a little trapesing around. Dan Berrigan had a little cognac in his bag, we’d have a little shot of cognac, go to sleep, wake up in the morning and he would have a poem, that he wrote, I don’t know when, in the middle of the night, while he was sleeping. Every morning he’d have a little poem that he wrote. Anyway we had been friends all these years and shortly after that when we came back and one of these raids and draft boards that his brother Phil Berrigan and others had begun to do. Dan Berrigan and his brother and seven other people participated in a raid outside of Baltimore, they were called the Catonsville nine, they were arrested, sentenced to prison. Dan Berrigan did not, when their appeals were exhausted a bunch of them surrendered themselves, Dan Berrigan would not do that, he went underground. I helped him during that period, I was sort of the coordinator of his underground activities which were crazy....

Were you afraid because that might put you in jeopardy for harboring a “so-called” criminal?

Howard Zinn:
Well, it was possible, but in those days... people were taking bigger risks than me and so I wasn’t the only one. There were other people I found, people in the Boston area who put him up, I couldn’t put him up because I knew there were people who were watching me because they knew that I had gone to North Vietnam with him. But I found people in the Boston area who would harbor him and he could live there and I would meet with him from time to time. We formed a little protective group that made plans. Where would Dan go tomorrow? Where will he go next week? Should we let him go to the movies? He needs a dentist, where are we going to get a dentist. Stuff like that. You know, so I spent a lot of time with him in that period and I’ve seen him from time to time since then. He has been a consistent battler against war and militarism. He and his brother Phil Berrigan and other people. He’s an extraordinary person.

And Phil Berrigan is still in prison at the age of 74?

Howard Zinn:
Phil Berrigan is in prison right now, he is in federal prison and he participated last year with a group of other people in boarding the destroyer in the Bath Iron works in maine. A destroyer armed with nuclear weapons. This is what these pacifists have been doing. I started to call them christian pacifists, many of them are some of them are not christians but they have been counting out these acts of civil disobedience a little token acts of sabotage, what can you do to a destroyer right? (laughs) What can you do to a battleship, not much. Go up there, you can make your way past the security, you can pour a little blood symbolically on these things you can hammer away on these metal things, that’s all, then they arrest you and you go before a judge and a jury and the judge almost invariably says to the jury, I don’t want you to consider why these people did this, you just treat them as ordinary criminals destroying government property, so they get sentenced to prison. So yeah, he’s serving a prison sentence now of several years. It’s ironic that people who protest against war go to jail and people who carry out war never go to jail, people who plan war will not go to jail.

When was the first time you met Noam Chomsky?

Howard Zinn:
The first time I met Noam Chomsky was in 1965. I had just moved to Boston. But I was still connected to the South, I had spent seven years teaching at Spellmen College in Atlanta. I had been involved with the student movement, with SNCC, the Students Non-violent Coordinating Committee. And so although I had left the South, left my teaching job in 63 but in 64 I went back to Mississippi and I kept going back and forth in the South because I was writing a book actually, 2 books on the South. In the summer of 1965 there was a big demonstration against racial segregation in Jackson Mississippi and they arrested hundreds and hundreds of people and they didn’t have room in the jails so they were keeping them in a big sort of stockade and a little delegation was organized here in boston to fly down to Jackson Mississippi and report on the conditions of the prisoners there. So I was on this delegation, on this plane and sitting next to me was this guy who was a member of this delegation who introduced himself to me as Noam Chomsky. I’d vaguely heard of him. He wasn’t known at that time in political circles, the movement against the Vietnam War had just barely begun but Chomsky was famous in linguistic and philosophical circles and I had heard that he was a famous linguist but other than that, no. But we sat next to one another on this plane ride and we became friendly and after that we became close friends. During the movement against the war we did a lot of things together, we appeared on a lot of platforms together, demonstrations together and we have been good friends down to the present day. There is nobody like him. If this were a just society, if this were a culture that really recognized his heroes, you would hear Noam Chomsky on television on radio all the time. His message would be speaking because hardly anybody knows more about American politics, about American foreign politics, there is hardly anybody who knows more than he does. And in a variety of fields because he has this incredible mind in which he studies a situation for 6 months and he knows more than somebody who has studied it for 20 years. Vietnam comes along, soon he knows more about the history of Southeast Asia than anybody. Crisis in Israel, he learns more about the middle east than anybody. We send arms to Central America, he becomes an expert on Central America. And so here they have all these panels and symposia on television, even on public television which is supposed to be more advanced, but which isn’t, you don’t see him there. They don’t want the truth.

I would even go as far to say that even at a university level, most people do not know who Noam Chomsky is.

Howard Zinn:
It would be as if in England, nobody knew who Bertrand Russell was. It would be as if in France, nobody knew who Jean-Paul Sartre was. But the fact is that most of those european countries are actually freer than the United States in giving voice to their intellectuals. The United States is peculiarly repressive among so-called advanced, industrial, so-called democratic countries, in silencing its dissenters. It doesn’t silence them by putting them in jail, it just silences them by ignoring them.

How closely did you work with Martin Luther King?

Howard Zinn:
I’d be exaggerating if I tried to tell you how close I was to Martin Luther King. I didn’t really work with Martin Luther King, I knew him. I was teaching in Atlanta. He was in Atlanta, his whole family, his sister was a colleague of mine at Spelman, his brother was a graduate student at Atlanta University. And I would meet King at gatherings in Atlanta in early 1960’s. We would cross paths here and there. I met him in Albany Georgia in the big demonstrations in 1961 and 62. I was doing a report on the demonstrations in Albany for the Southern Regional Council in Atlanta and so I went down to Albany and they had arrested a thousand people. A good part of the black population in Albany was in jail. I was interviewing the chief of police, Chief Pritchett and at a certain point after we talked when he said “I’m sorry, I’ve got another appointment,” so he opens the door and there was Martin Luther King, that was who he had the other appointment with and Pritchett was one of these charming police chiefs who would club you 3 minutes after being charming. Or arrest you at least, maybe he won’t club you. The sheriff across the street, the sheriff of Dougherty county would club you, in fact, as he did, with two black lawyers, the only black lawyers in Albany Georgia. He just picked up a cane that was in a basket of canes on his desk, I interviewed the sheriff just before I interviewed the chief of police, he picked up a cane ironically the sign on the basket. . . I saw the basket and I knew that he had used this cane just before that to club this black lawyer and the sign on the basket said “Made by the blind.” These were canes that were made by the blind and the idea was that people would by them and make contributions to the blind. And so he picks up one of these canes and clubs the lawyer with it. But anyway, so King knew me, I knew him. Obviously he was much more important in my life than I was in his. We crossed paths again during the anti-war movement. He and I spoke from the same platform in 1967 when there was a huge anti-war rally in Central Park in New York. I mean, he and I were two of many speakers that day. And when I made my report on Albany Georgia, a report which excoriated the federal government for not protecting the constitutional rights of civil rights workers and black people in Albany, the report made the front page of the New York Times and the reporters went to King and, I said the F.B.I. was racist, they went to King and said, “did you read his report and agree” King said “absolutely, yes,” And J. Edgar Hoover was infuriated. He already had begun watching King and this especially. J. Edgar Hoover didn’t like anybody who was progressive in any way but if you criticized J. Edgar Hoover himself, that was the worst. But anyway, I knew and admired King. I visited the poor people’s encampment, which was after King died. King had planned the poor people’s encampment just before he died which was for people to set up tents across the Potomac River from the capitol to demand that something be done about the poverty among black people. King was assassinated but the encampment went on. I visited that encampment and I was very interested in the fact that King, almost alone among the leaders of the civil rights movement, wanted to move on from racial segregation to economic injustice, to poverty. He saw that was the next step for the civil rights movement and was prepared to just concentrate on that. There were a lot of people in the civil rights movement who, when once the voting rights act was past and the civil rights act was passed, the official segregation began to disappear in the South, a lot of people in the civil rights movement just sort of faded into the shadows. King did not. And he became more of a radical critic of capitalism. He talked to the staff of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and told them that there was something basically rotten about capitalism. Capitalism, militarism, and racism were all intertwined. And he talked about socialism. When they play the “I have a dream” speech every year on Martin Luther King day, that’s all they play. They don’t say anything about his views on capitalism, socialism or economic injustice. That is outside the pail.

Just recently in U.S.A. Today they pulled 10,000 people for person of the century and Gandhi received 8840 of the votes. Who else would you put up there?

Howard Zinn:
Person of the century... I never believed in this type of ranking. “Who are the five greatest presidents?” I would have to put a big zero (laughs) But if you say who are my heroes? There are a number of them, I wouldn’t single one out. Certainly King was one of them, Mandela, Bertrand Russell another, and Eugene Debs, Mother Jones, Emma Goldman, anarchists, radicals, feminists, people who oppose war.

I have admit, I was surprised to see who filled the number five spot in that same poll, Mr. Bill Gates.

Howard Zinn:
We live in a time when all the media are parading financiers, stock market manipulators, billionaires as heroes and they hold them up for young people as models. “You can be a billionaire too,” which is the most horrible kind of education. We should be educating young people to think about changing society, changing the world, eliminating poverty, doing away with the enormous gap between the rich countries and the poor countries, the rich people and the poor people and they should have a different set of heroes. Helen Kellar would rank on my list, although most people when they went to school they learned about her as a handicapped person who overcame a handicap and go on to become a famous writer, but to me Helen Kellar is a hero because she was a socialist, a radical, anti-war, in picket lines. She would be on my list. I would put W.E.B. Dubois, a great, great intellectual of our time on there too.

Last Question. Has play writing been your passion as of late instead of writing about history?

Howard Zinn:
It’s been mine for a long time except I was so busy writing history and political things and so involved in movements I didn’t have time to write plays, but when the war in Vietnam ended and I sort of had a breather, that’s when I sat down and wrote the play on Emma Goldman and now I feel I have written enough history, and book stores are crowded with enough books and now I am more interested in writing plays and screenplays, things like that. One of my plays was published by South End Press called the Playbook which has my play on Emma Goldman in it. My other two plays have not been published. Plays generally are published when they have big productions because there are only certain publishers of plays. The average publisher does not publish plays. Plays are published by Samuel French who specializes in play production. And in order for them to publish it you have to have had a major production. Emma Goldman has had a major production in Japan, London, two small productions in New York, and a fairly big production in Boston.

Thank you so much for your time Mr. Zinn.

Howard Zinn:
My pleasure.

R.I.P. August 24, 1922 – January 27, 2010. Howard Zinn was an American historian and Professor of Political Science at Boston University from 1964 to 1988. He was the author of more than 20 books, including A People's History of the United States. Howard Zinn was active in and wrote extensively about the civil rights, civil liberties and anti-war movements.

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