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Dissident author Howard Zinn. |
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Voices of dissent
By Loren King
Banner Correspondent
Historian, teacher, playwright and activist Howard Zinn’s landmark 1980 book, “The People’s History of the United States,” taught academia that history told only from the point of view of winners and conquerors isn’t real history at all. Zinn’s book gave voice to those in the margins and on the fringes and losing sides. These voices of rebellion, opposition and daring are heard even clearer in Zinn’s 2004 companion book, “Voices of a People's History of the United States,” and in a theatrical event spawned by the book: “The People Speak.”
Merging art and action, theater and history, “The People Speak” has toured the country with various actors performing voices of dissent throughout history, such as Frederick Douglass, Mark Twain, Emma Goldman, Helen Keller, Eugene V. Debs, Fannie Lou Hamer, Genova Johnson Dollinger, a striker at General Motors in Flint, Michigan, and James Lawrence Harrington, a Gulf War resister, among others.
“The People Speak” comes to Provincetown Town Hall in a special event in recognition of the sixth anniversary of Sept. 11, 2001. Presented by the Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater, performers include Erin Cherry, Andre Gregory, Laura Esterman, Robert Finch, Cortez Nance, Hubert Point-Du-Jour, John Rothman, Kathy Shorr, Lili Taylor and Jeff Zinn, WHAT artistic director and son of Howard Zinn, who will introduce the excerpts.
Howard Zinn said that what many readers responded to in his original book were the accounts of “11 resisters, including Debs, Keller, Douglass, Sojourner Truth and nuggets of information about them.” He and Anthony Arnove decided, “Let’s do a book documenting their words” via their letters, speeches, poems and essays.
Zinn, 85, knows something about dissent. In the 1950s, while chairman of the department of history and social sciences at Spelman College in Atlanta, he was active in the civil rights and civil liberties movements on campus (recounted in his autobiography “You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times”). Zinn wrote one of the earliest books calling for the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam, “VietNam: The Logic of Withdrawal” published in 1967. His visit to Hanoi with Rev. Daniel Berrigan during the Tet Offensive in January 1968 was chronicled in “Who Spoke Up? American Protest Against the War in Vietnam 1963-1975” by Nancy Zaroulis and Gerald Sullivan.
“We knew then [in 1967] that we were not going to prevail in Vietnam and that we had to get out,” says Zinn, a WW II combat veteran whose opposition to the current occupation of Iraq and war in general is heard regularly in essays, lectures and letters to newspapers. On Aug. 19, The New York Times published a letter from Zinn responding to a book review about terrorism. “The terrorism of the suicide bomber and the terrorism of aerial bombardment are indeed morally equivalent. To say otherwise (as either side might) is to give one moral superiority over the other, and thus serve to perpetuate the horrors of our time,” Zinn wrote.
He does not see the American people as passive about the current war or administration. “There is far more passivity in Congress than in our cities; we just don’t hear about it,” he says, citing 35 town meetings in Vermont that called for the impeachment of President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney.
“It’s typical of the Democrats to go along with an aggressive foreign policy, claiming they were being bi-partisan when what it meant was that both parties were on the same wavelength: taking aggressive actions overseas,” he says. “But unless they’re pushed from below, the Democrats won’t change.”
The famous and not-so-famous dissenters he writes about expressed their opposition to policies and institutions often at great personal cost. “Eugene Debs went to jail for 10 years for speaking out against WW I. Emma Goldman was jailed for years,” he says.
In an era when dissent is often labeled anti-American, Zinn himself has taken flak for his views. “Do you know what flak is?” he answers with a soft chuckle. “Well, I took that when I served in the Air Force. That was real flak. And after taking real flak, verbal flak is easy.”
“The People Speak” by Howard Zinn takes place at 8 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 11, at Provincetown Town Hall, 260 Commercial St. Tickets are $25 for general admission and $50 for reserved seating and an after party with the actors. For details call (508) 349-9428 or visit www.what.org.
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Sep 6th, 2007