By Jeremy Black
Thursday, September 17, 2026
The
People’s Historian: The Outsized Life of Howard Zinn, by Dave Zirin
(Dutton, 320 pp., $33)
This biography, an apotheosis of Howard Zinn, begins with
the words, “What would Howard say?” Apparently, for each major social or
political event, people want to hear “the analysis of an activist-historian.”
And that is what we are offered: sage as saint, plus Dave Zirin, sports editor
at The Nation, as amanuensis and guardian of the Sacred Flame.
There are various ways to write about historians. For
example, David Hayton’s portrait of the British historian Lewis Namier (who,
rather unlike Zinn, was outside of the establishment), offers possibly the best
combination of personal and intellectual biography; it addresses contexts and
contingencies, the play of professional connection and the role of patronage.
Hence Hayton does a good job of explaining the political reasons why Namier did
not get an academic post for so very long.
And then there is Zirin. All he can say about Zinn’s
academic career is, “Given what we know about the complicity of ‘the Academy’
with the FBI, the Red Scare may have scared away his teaching prospects.”
Zirin’s subject is a hero. The author is fired up not only by his perception of
the past (he did not meet Zinn until the mid-1990s) but also his urgent concern
about the present, directed at “Trump and his cabinet of reality-show
contestants, pro-wrestling executives, and fascist-fanfic authors.” These villains,
Zirin says, “lock away the works of Zinn not because they loathe the historian
but because they fear the history.”
In a scene-setting introduction, Zirin uses the tired
concept of false consciousness to explain why the Black Lives Matter protests
were followed, a few years later, by 77 million voters’ choosing to reelect
President Donald Trump. The book’s prospectus promises engagement but not
necessarily debate or nuance. In other words, exactly what might be anticipated
of a work about Zinn:
Think of this book
as ‘A People’s History of Howard Zinn’: it’s a story about the small acts and
grand struggles of the twentieth century that shaped him and the ways he shaped
those struggles as well. A closer look at his life also provides insight into
how to tough it out during the worst of times and why we can never let the
bastards steal our hope.
And so we start, in “a jungle of terrible odors” where
Zinn was born, Brooklyn in 1922. The author’s emphasis is on the city’s poverty
even though, especially at that time, it was far better to be a Jew born in New
York than in Eastern Europe. Having worked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and
enlisted as a bombardier during World War II, Zinn returns home and becomes
part of a radical milieu that, Zirin argues, resisted paranoia: “Because
Western powers no longer needed the Red Army to fight the Nazis on the Eastern
Front, the USSR was quickly branded an existential, godless enemy.” Tell that
to the Poles. Besides, as Zirin has to note, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s
perception of domestic radicals was widely shared in America.
It is not only Hoover who is criticized but also
“anti-communist liberals.” Zinn in 1948 backs the presidential campaign of
Henry Wallace, candidate of the Progressive Party, against Harry Truman. He
gets a post at Spelman, a historically black women’s college in Atlanta. There,
“intersectionality” (avant la lettre) and “Black feminist activism” play out,
with Zinn as an active participant opposed to the “paternalism” that does not
accept his views. He is dismissed in 1963. In 1964, he joins Boston University.
Old academic quarrels rarely retain their relevance or interest, but Zinn’s
clash with Boston University’s president and later chancellor, John Silber — a
conservative Democrat critical of many left-wing nostrums — provides Zirin with
an opportunity to employ his subtlety to go after Donald Trump. He writes, of
Silber: “The ego on display was truly and even impressively ahead of its time.
The man was born fifty years too soon. And just as with a certain modern, far
more powerful, far less well-read individual, the students knew how to hit him
where it hurt.”
The book makes much of Zinn’s involvement in the “Black
Freedom Struggle,” with an emphasis on his support for “modes of leadership
that didn’t come from the top down, but from the bottom up.” The rest of the
1960s find Zinn occupied with civil rights and the movement against the Vietnam
War. Zirin sees “anti-liberalism” as the common theme that linked the
supporters of the war with those who opposed civil rights: a somewhat warped
presentation. That leads him to a hilarious question: “Why wasn’t the entire
country in the streets?” He also continuously snipes at others who might share
Zinn’s limelight: RAND Corporation whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, for example,
is “a smooth talker” who enjoys fame and is always willing “to go to the press
with bravado.” Alan Dershowitz is “the future publicity-addicted defense
attorney, now disgraced for his association with notorious child sex trafficker
Jeffrey Epstein.” Judgment is absent and histrionic language is spread thick.
Meanwhile, Zinn’s intellectual influence is exaggerated.
Given the great noise that Zinn made relative to his
little insight and nuance, it might be asked why one should bother with a new
biography of the man. The fact is that Zinn would make a worthwhile topic for a
good book: one primarily about the misleading character of so much historical
“analysis” (e.g., as Zirin mentions, “When Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated,
Zinn attempted to theorise the traumatic event by speaking about it in the
context of President Johnson’s war agenda”), the divisions and failures of the
left, and the successes of capitalism — not least in the sales of Zinn’s A
People’s History of the United States. Zirin is incapable of such analysis
and does not appear to understand the questions.
The biographer’s focus is the notion of “this land’s
five-hundred-year ongoing fight between progress and reaction.” So much for
other historical themes. So much for urbanization, economic growth, and
religion: the latter conspicuous for its neglect by both Zinn and Zirin, and a
subject handled far better by Philip Jenkins in A History of the United
States. Indeed, in terms of works that are far better than Zinn’s, Walter
A. McDougall’s Freedom Just Around the Corner and Throes of Democracy,
complemented by his Promised Land, Crusader State, deserve close
attention.
Zinn was, of course, a polemical political scientist
rather than a historian; a master at leaving out of his scholarship what did
not really suit his purposes. He was no Fernand Braudel in his scope and
interests but a shouter, one without particular insight or originality. Read A
People’s History, if you must, but do not bother with Zirin. He does not
illuminate his subject’s problems and deficiencies. He magnifies them many
times over.
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