Howard Zinn

Interview by Sam Adams

At age 75, Howard Zinn has been a mainstay of the American left for nearly a half-century, making his mark as an activist, historian, writer and teacher. He's best known for his book A People's History of the United States (HarperPerennial), which recounts American history from a socialist perspective. In less than two decades this radical revisionist tome has become an accepted part of the historical canon. Zinn first became involved in politics through the civil rights movement of the 1960s, which was also the time he was first incarcerated. Speaking from his home in Boston, Zinn focused on the topic of his upcoming talk in Philadelphia, "Crime and Punishment in the U.S.A.," as well as his experiences as a longtime American radical. His most recent books are You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train (Beacon) and The Zinn Reader (Seven Stories).

You once wrote, "As long as there are prisons, we live in an unjust society." What has been your experience being incarcerated?

I've been in prison for a day or two at a time, and I've been arrested eight or nine times. But you don't have to be in a jail or a prison very long to recognize one immediate fact, and that is as soon as you are inside a jail, you are no longer a human being. There are theoretical rights you read about, but all those things really depend on the arbitrary judgment of whoever is in charge.

You've also visited with prisoners doing hard time. What was that like?

My very first experience with prisoners was when I was teaching in Atlanta at Spelman College, and I decide to take a group of my students to the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. We were escorted around by a very enlightened prison guard. He said to us, "You know 85 percent of the people who are incarcerated here could be let out and society would be in no more danger than it is now… Some other way of dealing with whatever their crime was should be found, other than making them more vicious and more vengeful, more dehumanized by forcing them to serve long periods in this hell."

Do you think that what you've just articulated is a minority viewpoint, or just one that isn't presented to the public in the degree to which it exists?

I don't think it's a minority viewpoint among people who have studied the problem. It's a minority viewpoint in the media because the media are very reluctant to give voice to unorthodox views about crime and punishment. The media are like politicians; they're timid, they're fearful. They themselves have helped create the atmosphere of fear of crime and criminals, a kind of "lock everybody up" paranoia. And having created that atmosphere, they then become victims of it, in the sense that now they must cater to it, and not allow the public to hear the voices of those people who have studied the situation most carefully. [People] certainly aren't allowed to hear the voices of prisoners. While we all talk about the free marketplace of ideas, hearing all sides of the question, the one side of the question that people are not allowed to hear is the side of the prisoner himself or herself.

At the beginning of You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train you talk about the way the civil rights movement provided a common focus for many disparate groups. Do you think there's a possibility that such a movement could arise again and undo some of the factionalism that seems to plague the American left?

I think the possibility is there, and that possibility rests on people who are involved in many, many different causes: racial equality, gender equality, environmental issues, anti-militarism—all of these people could be united around a central problem, which is: What do we do with the enormous wealth which is produced in the U.S., $7 trillion of Gross National Product, which to a great extent is wasted, poured into the military budget, funneled into the top 1 percent of the population. To me, the issue is taking what we have—the enormous human and economic resources—and using them in a rational and human way: to do away with poverty, to house people and to clean up the environment, to create a national health system. We have the wealth to do all of that, but that wealth is being squandered and wasted and hogged by the greedy elements of the population, and everybody who's working on any issue has a stake in the distribution of that wealth. We need a kind of expanded New Deal philosophy that it is the job of government to do what private enterprise has obviously failed to do.

What would that philosophy look like?

One of the requirements for a central issue becoming a mobilizing force is to overcome the mythology that has been perpetuated by the Republican and Democratic parties and by the press: that big government is to be avoided. We really need a lot of education about the history of big government in this country, how government has always acted on behalf of the wealthy classes, from the time of the making of the Constitution down through the present day. Only in the 20th century when the government began passing reforms, especially in the '30s and '60s, only when the government began introducing minimum wages, Social Security, and subsidized housing, only then did the cry go up that big government was terrible. Now I've just said this in five or six minutes, so it only takes a minimum kind of education campaign to get over this psychological obstacle that big government is bad and then go on to talk about the good things that government could do to create a decent society.

Howard Zinn will speak on "Crime and Punishment in the U.S.A.: History and Current Reality" on Wednesday, Jan. 28, at the First Unitarian Church, 2125 Chestnut St. Call 727-1925 for information.