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Pockets of Resistance
By
Denis Mueller
"It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak
the truth and expose lies" Noam Chomsky
There were pockets of resistance. And some people began to question the
whitewashed history being taught, and looked to a movement in England, which would reach the history departments of America,
and told a viewpoint of history from the point of view of those who have been left out. Others, such as the Beats, questioned
the consumerist quality of American life. What really shook things up was the civil rights movement, which forced many to
make a stand.
Some students went down to the south to join the struggle and their participation rocked the halls of
academia. Others, such as Howard Zinn and Staughton Lynd, taught at black universities and became a part of the civil rights
movement.
The energy of the civil rights movement and following opposition to the war in Vietnam fueled the revolution
that was to come in higher learning. The question of power and male supremacy, and how that coincided with the war, was a
topic on campus and would develop into some of the questions, which would lead to creation of women studies groups.. The opposition
intensified and a critique of capitalism developed that was different from the old left. It put thousands of professor and
students in opposition to the university but that opposition did not come without a price.
Staughton Lynd was a young promising historian who resigned after his
colleague Howard Zinn was fired from Spelman College. Lynd was unable to get a job because of his opposition to the Vietnam
War. Faculty, as in the case at Yale University, Chicago State and Northern Illinois University, would approve him, only to
find the trustees refusing him employment. Lynd's trips to North Vietnam did not endure him to the academy but the bravery
of people like Lynd, Chomsky, Sontag and Zinn were changing the debate.
When Arthur Schesinger characterized U.S.
polices in Vietnam by saying it was a "part of our general program of international goodwill." Chomsky wrote: "Unless intended
as irony, this remark shows either a colossal cynicism or an inability, on a scale that defies comment, to comprehend the
elementary phenomena of contemporary history."
Historians and other educators appeared at teach-ins and traveled
to Paris to speak with the North Vietnamese.
Howard Zinn recalls making such a trip with historians Marilyn Young,
George Kahin, Jonathan Mirsky and the economist Douglas Dowd. (footnote 60) Historians by the thousands participated in one
way or another against the war. The war became an issue at the annual meeting of historians (AHA) and members formed a radical
caucus to denounce the war. This had never happened before in the AHA history. Those who opposed the war presented a resolution,
which was opposed by the old guard, including former leftists like Eugene Genovese claiming that it would "politicize" the
AHA. Howard Zinn who was picked to represent the dissidents wrote in return:
"Let us assume the war does not effect us as historians; it only
affects us as citizens. Well, when you do assemble with other citizens to speak on the crucial issues of our timer? What can
democracy possibly mean if not that people assembled whenever and wherever they can, for whatever reason, may express their
preferences on the important issues of the day? If they may not, democracy is a fraud, because it means that the political
leaders make the policies, and the citizens, in 99% of their life, remain silent."
The 1960's saw a movement, which challenged the notion of objective
history. One historian, William Appleman Williams, declared that American relations with other countries subvert our own ideals
and that our worldview was, "Freedom and prosperity depend upon the continued expansions of its economic and ideological system
through the policy of open door." William Williams' view became the basis for the revisionists and Studies on the Left became
an outlet. Books by women, written by a new generation of women scholars, filled the shelves. Books such as Eleanor
Flexner's "A Century of Struggle", Gerda Lerner's "Black Women in White America", among the many. Others such as Gary Nash
looked at the relations of the races and Donald Grindle, and the now famous Ward Churchill, began to reclaim the history of
indigenous people.
Throughout all of this, and because he could find no other book like it, Howard Zinn wrote his
book, "A People's History of the United States", which sought to tell the history of Indians through the view of the Arawaks,
the early day of industrialization through the mill girls, the civil war through the eyes of the Irish, the industrial revolution
through the industrial workers, World War I through the eyes of the socialists, and the Depression through the citizens of
Harlem. The study of history had so changed that Eric Foner stated: "In the course of twenty years, American history has been
remade." This new history, which had arose out of the activism of the 1960s, had changed scholarship but it also re-awoke
the right who viewed these writings as a threat to the existing order. Historian, Gertrude Himmelfarb linked the new history
with post-modernism and claimed it denied "any objective truth about the past... history at the pleasure of the historian"
instead of how it "actually was." Lynn Cheney also condemned the new history claiming it placed too much emphasis on criticism
of the power structure.
It seems that criticism's like Zinn's, about Columbus are not acceptable. It does not matter
that according to Bartholomew de la Cases, who has the only written journal on Columbus, states that he saw horrible unchristian
things done by the men of Columbus, which included rape, murder, mutilation and that the result of their brutality was that
the population of the Ararwks was wiped out. But the neo-conservatives are not concerned with truth but with a view of the
world that is their own, which they fight to preserve. Perhaps, it is work like that of Gar Alperovitz, Atomic Diplomacy,
which stated the decision to drop the bomb on Japan was a political one that rankles them. This is a challenge to their preconceived
notions of official truth and exactly what good scholarship should be doing. The new history raises moral questions that veer
out of the ideas of specialty. It calls on us to reject the notion that other lives are somehow worth less than American lives.
Sources: The University and the Cold War, Howard Zinn
Copyright 2005 by PENN LLC. All rights reserved. Go ahead and forward
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