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Howard Zinn is an original thinker, and one of my favorite writers and
historians. His "A People's History of the United States" should, in my opinion, be required reading for ALL
high school students, as a requrement to graduate. All of his books are insightful and present a different point of
view than the cardboard characters found in many history books, especially those written by conservative authers who will
brook no critcism of our nation's "heroes", and who often gloss over our nation's sometimes sordid past. I have selected
a few of Howard Zinn's writings for these pages. Mr. Zinn is an author with a different view of history and patriotism
- more in common with my own iconoclastic views. I am certain that readers will find Howard Zinn's
writings on this site profound, provocative and much more interesting than writers of a more conservative ilk.
Index:
Real democracy comes from waking up!
Beyond Voting
A Kinder, Gentler Patriotism
The Bill of Rights
The Problem is Civil Obedience
Real democracy comes from waking up!
by Howard Zinn and Gary Krane
The political culture of the United States is obsessed with
and dominated by voting. Every election year is accompanied by the media's and the politicians' obsession with persuading
Americans that voting for one candidate or another (and only if they are Democrat or Republican, of course) is the most important
act of citizenship.
Harry Truman was blunt, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were
wily. And Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton were charming. But the first three spent billions and sent armies to
Asia to defend dictators and massacre more than 2 million of the people we claimed to be helping, and the latter three again
spent billions of our taxes to also arm and prop up dictators and oligarchies, and to subvert democratic movements against
those governments in places like Indonesia, El Salvador and Guatemala, ending in murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent
people. John F. Kennedy was witty; Carter was "caring"; George Bush, the elder, was firm; and Reagan said he was against big
government. But all expanded our federal budgets enormously by spending hundreds of billions building up grotesquely huge
nuclear weapons systems (we continue building B-2 bombers at $2 billion apiece) at the expense of providing a great public
education system, health care for all Americans regardless of income, jobs that pay a living wage and mass transit for all
of our cities.
Despite the decimation of the former Soviet Union, Al Gore and
George W. Bush both want to continue this military spending madness, which year after year consumes more than 50 percent of
our discretionary federal budget (the budget that the president and Congress determine). And Bush has the gall to claim he
is against big government.
Nixon was corrupt and Gerald Ford straightforward, Reagan endearing
and Clinton someone who claimed to feel the pain of the poor. But all coldly cut essential benefits for the poor and gave
hundreds of billions of dollars of favors instead to rich corporations and billionaires.
This obsession with voting is made all the worse by corporate
media's obsession with "fine distinctions." The more the media can keep us distracted by this tweedledum-tweedledee horse
race, the more they (and therefore the major candidates themselves) can avoid dealing with the huge issues and solutions being
purposely ignored by both major party candidates: Issues like who in fact owns and controls both houses, universal health
care, full public funding of elections, seriously cutting the defense budget, decriminalizing drugs, returning to labor their
rights to organize, and the frightening concentration of media ownership itself.
Why else did they both make sure Ralph Nader was kept out of
the debates? The tragedy of all this is that this cult of voting and fine distinctions (and often "personality" as well) takes
the energy of ordinary citizens, which, combined, can be a powerful force, and depletes it in the spectator sport of voting.
Today, sadly, our most cherished moment of democratic citizenship
comes when we leave the house once in four years to choose between two mediocre Anglo-Saxon males who have been trundled out
by big corporate and billionaire-run political caucuses, million-dollar primaries and managed conventions for the rigged presidential
debate and multiple choice test we call a "democratic" election.
Presidents come and go, but the 200 top corporations keep increasing
their almost complete control over our elections and the two major parties' candidates (with big corporations and billionaires
funding 90 percent to 98 percent of both parties' budgets), over our work lives by weakening labor's rights, over our health
care rights (43 million uninsured now compared to 32 million when Clinton took office), over our airwaves, and over our legal
and court system, even determining how easily any of us can be sent to prison for victimless "crimes."
To further prove greed knows no boundaries, they now want to
take over public education and social security. No president in this century has stopped the trend. Not even Franklin Delano
Roosevelt. Only when mass movements have galvanized the country have presidents made important reforms, as when strikes and
turmoil throughout the nation in the 1930s pushed FDR into his New Deal measures. Sure, Roosevelt was a sensitive man. But
it took mass protests to sharpen that sensitivity and make it take action. Then and only then did he take huge steps to help
the poor, establish the minimum wage and create Social Security (which had been the Socialist Party's most popular demand).
But that didn't change the basic nature of an unfettered capitalist
system, whose highest priority has always been profits and power and to hell with the rest.
Voting Day 2000 has again come and gone. Sure, one of the presidential
candidates is better than the other. But we will go a long way from spectator democracy to real democracy when we understand
that the future of this country doesn't depend, mainly, on who is our next president. It depends on whether the American citizen,
fed up with the buying off of our Congress and president by the billionaires; fed up with the murderous greed of our health
care system and the pharmaceutical companies; fed up with the planetary self-destructive path of our energy, auto, lumber,
agribusiness and chemical companies; will organize all over the country a clamor for change even greater than the labor uprisings
of the '30s or the black rebellion of the '60s and shake this country out of old paths and falsehood into new paths and the
truth.
Howard Zinn, emeritus professor of history at Boston University,
is the author of "People's History of the United States" and "The Twentieth Century." Gary Krane is the president of David
v Goliath Communications, an organizing and communications firm in Van Nuys, California
Beyond Voting
by Howard Zinn, 1976
from
The Zinn Reader
publisher - Seven Stories Press
632 Broadway, 7th floor
New
York, NY 10012
Gossip is the opium of the American public. We lie back, close
our eyes and happily inhale the stories about Roosevelt's and Kennedy's affairs, Lyndon Johnson's nude swims with unnamed
partners and, now, Nixon's pathetic "final days" in office.
The latest fix is administered by reporters Woodward and Bernstein
and the stuff is Nixon's sex life with Pat, Nixon drunk and weeping, Nixon cradled in the arms of Kissinger (who did it, we
presume, for national security).
So we get high on trivia, and forget that, whether Presidents
have been impotent or oversexed, drunk or sober, they have followed the same basic policies. Whether crooks or Boy Scouts,
handsome or homely, agile or clumsy, they have taxed the poor, subsidized the rich, wasted the wealth of the nation on guns
and bombs, ignored the decay of the cities, and done so little for the children of the ghettos and rural wastelands that these
youth had to join the armed forces to survive-until they were sent overseas to die.
Harry Truman was blunt and Lyndon Johnson wily, but both sent
armies to Asia to defend dictators and massacre the people we claimed to be helping. Eisenhower was dull and Kennedy witty,
but both built up huge nuclear armaments at the expense of schools and health care. Nixon was corrupt and Ford straightforward,
but both coldly cut benefits for the poor and gave favors to rich corporations.
The cult of personality in America is a powerful drug. It
takes the energy of ordinary citizens which, combined, can be a powerful force, and depletes it in the spectator sport of
voting. Our most cherished moment of democratic citizenship comes when we leave the house once in four years to choose between
two mediocre white Anglo-Saxon males who have been trundled out by political caucuses, million dollar primaries and managed
conventions for the rigged multiple choice test we call an election. Presidents come and go. But the FBI is always there,
on the job, sometimes catching criminals, sometimes committing crimes itself, always checking on radicals as secret police
do all over the world. Its latest confession: ninety-two burglaries, 1960-66.
Presidents come and go, but the military budget keeps rising.
It was $74 billion in 1973, is over $100 billion now (the equivalent of $2000 in taxes for every family), and will reach $130
billion in 1980.
Presidents come and go, but the 200 top corporations keep
increasing their control: 45 percent of all manufacturing in 1960, 60 per cent by 1970.
No President in this century has stopped the trend. Not even
FDR.
Yes, Roosevelt took steps to help poor people in the '30s.
Minimum wages. Social security, WPA jobs. Relief. But that didn't change the basic nature of the capitalist system, whose
highest priority has always been profits for the corporations and to hell with the rest.
Roosevelt was humane and wise, but, also, he had to react
to signs of anger and rebellion in the country. He had seen the Bonus March of veterans to Washington under Hoover. In his
first year, mass strikes- 400,000 textile workers out in the South and New England. Longshoremen tied up the whole city of
San Francisco. Teamsters took over Minneapolis. The unemployed were organizing, the bootleg miners taking over coalfields,
tenants gathering in the cities to stop evictions.
Roosevelt was a sensitive man. But something big was happening
in the country to sharpen his sensitivity.
1976: the multiple choice test is here again. Sure, there
are better candidates and worse. But we will go a long way from spectator democracy to real democracy when we understand that
the future of this country doesn't depend, mainly, on who is our next President. It depends on whether the American citizen,
fed up with high taxes, high prices, unemployment, waste, war and corruption, will organize all over the country a clamor
for change even greater than the labor uprisings of the '30s or the black rebellion of the '60s and shake this country out
of old paths into new ones.
A Kinder, Gentler Patriotism
by Howard Zinn
Long Island, NY Newsday, April 13, 2003
At some point soon the United States will declare a military
victory in Iraq. As a patriot, I will not celebrate. I will mourn the dead - the American GIs, and also the Iraqi dead, of
which there will be many, many more. I will mourn the Iraqi children who may not die, but who will be blinded, crippled, disfigured,
or traumatized, like the bombed children of Afghanistan who, as reported by American visitors, lost their power of speech.
We will get precise figures for the American dead, but not
for the Iraqis. Recall Colin Powell after the first Gulf War, when he reported the "small" number of U.S. dead, and when asked
about the Iraqi dead, Powell replied: "That is really not a matter I am terribly interested in."
As a patriot, contemplating the dead GI's, should I comfort
myself (as, understandably, their families do) with the thought: "They died for their country?" But I would be lying to myself.
Those who die in this war will not die for their country. They will die for their government.
The distinction between dying for our country and dying for
your government is crucial in understanding what I believe to be the definition of patriotism in a democracy. According to
the Declaration of Independence - the fundamental document of democracy - governments are artificial creations, established
by the people, "deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed", and charged by the people to ensure the equal
right of all to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Furthermore, as the Declaration says, "Whenever any form of
government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it."
When a government recklessly expends the lives of its young
for crass motives of profit and power (always claiming that its motives are pure and moral ("Operation Just Cause" was the
invasion of Panama and "Operation Iraqi Freedom" in the present instance) it is violating its promise to the country. It is
the country that is primary - the people, the ideals of the sanctity of human life and the promotion of liberty. War is almost
always (one might find rare instances of true self defense) a breaking of those promises. It does not enable the pursuit of
happiness but brings despair and grief.
Mark Twain, having been called a "traitor" for criticizing
the U.S. invasion of the Philippines, derided what he called "monarchical patriotism." He said: "The gospel of the monarchical
patriotism is: 'The King can do no wrong.' We have adopted it with all its servility, with an unimportant change in the wording:
'Our country, right or wrong!' We have thrown away the most valuable asset we had: the individual's right to oppose both flag
and country when he believed them to be in the wrong. We have thrown it away; and with it all that was really respectable
about that grotesque and laughable word, Patriotism."
If patriotism in the best sense (not in the monarchical sense)
is loyalty to the principles of democracy, then who was the true patriot, Theodore Roosevelt, who applauded a massacre by
American soldiers of 600 Filipino men, women and children on a remote Philippine island, or Mark Twain, who denounced it?
With the war in Iraq won, shall we revel in American military
power and - against the history of modern empires - insist that the American empire will be beneficent?
Our own history shows something different. It begins with
what was called, in our high school history classes, "westward expansion" - a euphemism for the annihilation or expulsion
of the Indian tribes inhabiting the continent - all in the name of "progress" and "civilization." It continues with the expansion
of American power into the Caribbean at the turn of the century, then into the Philippines, and then repeated marine invasions
of Central America and long military occupations of Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
After World War II, Henry Luce, owner of Time, Life and Fortune,
spoke of "the American Century", in which this country would organize the world "as we see fit." Indeed, the expansion of
American power continued, too often supporting military dictatorships in Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, because
they were friendly to American corporations and the American government.
The American record does not justify confidence in its boast
that it will bring democracy to Iraq. It will be painful to acknowledge that our GIs in Iraq were fighting not for democracy
but for the expansion of the American empire, for the greed of the oil cartels, for the political ambitions of the president.
And when they come home, they will find that their veterans' benefits have been cut to pay for the machines of war. They will
find the military budget growing at the expense of health, education and the needs of children. The Bush budget even proposes
cutting the number of free school lunches.
I suggest that patriotic Americans who care for their country
might act on behalf of a different vision. Do we want to be feared for our military might or respected for our dedication
to human rights? With the war in Iraq over, if indeed it is really over, we need to ask what kind of a country will we be.
Is it important that we be a military superpower? Is it not exactly that that makes us a target for terrorism? Perhaps we
could become instead a humanitarian superpower.
Should we not begin to redefine patriotism? We need to expand
it beyond that narrow nationalism which has caused so much death and suffering. If national boundaries should not be obstacles
to trade - we call it globalization - should they also not be obstacles to compassion and generosity?
Should we not begin to consider all children, everywhere,
as our own? In that case, war, which in our time is always an assault on children, would be unacceptable as a solution to
the problems of the world. Human ingenuity would have to search for other ways.
Tom Paine used the word "patriot" to describe the rebels resisting
imperial rule. He also enlarged the idea of patriotism when he said: "My country is the world. My countrymen are mankind."
Howard Zinn is a professor emeritus at Boston University
and author of "The People's History of the United States."
The Bill of Rights
by Howard Zinn, 1991
from the Zinn Reader, Seven Stories Press
A few years back, a man high up in the CIA named Ray Cline
was asked if the CIA, by its surveillance of protest organizations in the United States, was violating the free speech provision
of the First Amendment. He smiled and said: "It's only an Amendment."
And when it was disclosed that the FBI was violating citizens'
rights repeatedly, a high official of the FBI was asked if anybody in the FBI questioned the legality of what they were doing.
He replied: "No, we never gave it a thought.
"We clearly cannot expect the Bill of Rights to be defended
by government officials. So it will have to be defended by the people.
If you do a bit of research into the origins of the Bill of
Rights- and I had to do some because it is a job requirement of the historical profession-you will find that when the new
government of the United States adopted the Bill of Rights in 1791, it did not do so with enthusiasm. The Bill of Rights was
a political tool to quiet down critics of the Constitution. A Bill of Rights on paper comforts people. You don't have to take
it seriously. Like that CIA man, you can smile, and say, they're only Amendments.
Well, in 1791, the first ten Amendments-the Bill of Rights-
were added to the Constitution, and the First Amendment says, among other things: "Congress shall make no law...abridging
the freedom of speech, or of the press..." Seven years later, in 1798, Congress passed a law abridging the freedom of speech
and the press. It was the Sedition Act of 1798, and it provided jail sentences for people who criticized the government. A
number of writers and speakers were imprisoned. They appealed to the court. Now we all learned in junior high school about
checks and balances and how if Congress passes a law violating the Constitution, we are very lucky to have the Supreme Court
to check that and declare the law null and void. (I was always proud to know such a fancy phrase, "null and void.")
Well, the members of the Supreme Court, apparently having
skipped junior high school, or perhaps understanding that the phrase "checks and balances" is just intended to satisfy schoolchildren-did
not declare the Sedition Act null and void. Not at all. They said it was constitutional. You may ask: by what legal philosophy
can Supreme Court justices explain how Congress can pass a law abridging the freedom of speech when the Constitution says
Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech? I could tell you how they did that; but it would take a while
and cause indigestion. Let us just say that legal training is a wonderful thing, it enables you to explain the unexplainable,
defend the indefensible, and rationalize the irrational.
It seems that especially in time of war or near-war (and in
1798 it was such a time), the First Amendment is ignored. You may have noticed that the year 1991 did not start with a celebration
of the Bill of Rights, but with a war. And that the government established control over information and the mass media became
tongue-tied with patriotic fervor, and the First Amendment was bombed into oblivion. It is a truism of our political culture:
if you are at war for freedom and democracy, you can't have freedom and democracy. So, exactly when free speech is most needed,
that is, when it is a matter of life and death for the young people about to be sent to the battlefield-exactly at such a
moment the government declares it can be suspended.
In 1917, as armies of young men in Europe were slaughtering
one another in the first World War, and the United States decided to send its own young men into the butchery, Congress passed
the Espionage Act, and the Sedition Act, providing heavy sentences for those criticizing the war. The Supreme Court again
put our junior high school lesson to shame: checks and balances? Not in wartime. Not when you need them. The great liberal
Oliver Wendell Holmes himself wrote the opinions affirming the constitutionality of the Espionage Act, sending a man named
Schenck to jail for distributing a leaflet criticizing the war and the draft. Two thousand people were prosecuted for speaking
or writing against the war, including Eugene Debs, the great labor leader and Socialist.
There were ludicrous episodes in all that. A filmmaker who
made a movie about the American Revolution was sent to prison for ten years because the movie portrayed the British as the
enemy in the American Revolution, and now the British were our allies in the war. The name of the movie was The Spirit of
'76 and the title of the court case against the filmmaker was U.S. v. Spirit of '76. And that case sums up the relationship
of the government to the Bill of Rights: U.S. v. Spirit of '76. It was the President of the United States, Harry Truman, who
instituted loyalty oaths even before Joseph McCarthy waved his lists of Communists in the State Department. It was the Congress
of the United States, Democrats as well as Republicans, that set up the House Un-American Activities Committee, and voted
con tempt citations against people who refused to bow down to that Committee. It was the Supreme Court that affirmed the convictions
of the Hollywood Ten for invoking the First Amendment. It was Republicans and Democrats, it was all three branches of government,
all of them swearing to uphold the Constitution of the United States, and all of them violating that oath.
A word about the Supreme Court. We now have nine conservative
justices, including one conservative woman and one conservative black man. It's called American pluralism. Many people have
been depressed over this. Frankly, I tried to get depressed, but didn't succeed. Sure, it's better to have a liberal Supreme
Court. But the Supreme Court at its most liberal has never been a dependable protector of people's rights. One year it will
say you have a constitutional right to distribute leaflets in front of a supermarket. Another year it will say you can go
to jail for that. One year it will say: high school students have a right to wear black arm bands to protest a war. Another
year it will say: high school students don't have the right to put out their own newspapers without censorship by the school
authorities. The Supreme Court, when it was liberal, affirmed that Japanese-Americans could be put in concentration camps
because we were at war. The Supreme Court, liberal or conservative, sworn to defend the Constitution, has never been a bulwark
against unconstitutional wars.
If it were left to the institutions of government, the Bill
of Rights would be left for dead. But someone breathed life into the Bill of Rights. Ordinary people did it, by doing extraordinary
things. The editors and speakers who, in spite of the Sedition Act of 1798, continued to criticize the government. The black
and white abolitionists who defied the Fugitive Slave Law, defied the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision, who insisted that
black people were human beings, not property, and who broke into courtrooms and police stations to rescue them, to prevent
their return to slavery.
Women, who were arrested again and again as they spoke out
for their right to control their own bodies, or the right to vote. Members of the Industrial Workers of the World, anarchists,
radicals, who filled the jails in California and Idaho and Montana until they were finally allowed to speak to working people.
Socialists and pacifists and anarchists like Helen Keller and Rose Pastor Stokes, and Kate O'Hare and Emma Goldman, who defied
the government and denounced war in 1917 and 1918. The artists and writers and labor organizers and Communists- Dalton Trumbo
and Pete Seeger, and W.E.B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson, who challenged the congressional committees of the 1950s, challenged
the FBI, at the risk of their freedom and their careers.
In the 1960s, the students of Kent State and Jackson State
and hundreds of other campuses, the draft resisters and deserters, the priests and nuns and lay people, all the marchers and
demonstrators and trespassers who demanded that the killing in Vietnam stop, the GIs in the Mekong Delta who refused to go
out on patrol, the B52 pilots who refused to fly in the Christmas bombing of 1972, the Vietnam veterans who gathered in Washington
and threw their Purple Hearts and other medals over a fence in protest against the war.
And after the war, in the '70s and '80s, those courageous
few who carried on, the Berrigans and all like them who continued to demonstrate against the war machine, the Seabrook fence
climbers, the signers of the Pledge of Resistance against U.S. military action in Central America, the gays and lesbians who
marched in the streets for the first time, challenging the country to recognize their humanity, the disabled people who spoke
up, after a long silence, demanding their rights. The Indians, sup posed to be annihilated and gone from the scene, emerging
ghostlike, to occupy a tiny portion of the land that was taken from them, Wounded Knee, South Dakota. Saying: we're not gone,
we're here, and we want you to listen to us.
These are the people, men, women, children, of all colors
and national origins, who gave life to the Bill of Rights.
The Bill of Rights was expanded after the Civil War, with
the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, to apply to the states, to prevent them from keeping slavery, to require
that they give all people, regardless of race or color, the equal protection of the laws. But these amendments were soon ignored,
as blacks were kept in semi-slavery in the South, segregated, humiliated, beaten, Iynched by mobs, unprotected by either the
local police or the national government. For almost a hundred years after the 14th Amendment became law, every President,
whether liberal or conservative, Republican or Democrat, violated his oath of office, his pledge to uphold the Constitution,
by failing to enforce those Amendments. And the Supreme Court interpreted them so as to make them useless.
And so black people in the South, in the most dangerous towns
and cities in the country, decided to give life to the 14th Amendment, at the risk of their own. They boycotted the buses
in Montgomery, Alabama, they sat in at segregated lunch counters, they rode the buses as Freedom Riders, they marched through
the streets of Albany, Georgia and Birmingham, demonstrated in Alabama, were arrested, set upon by dogs, knocked down by water
hoses, beaten bloody by state troopers, and murdered. There were protests in 800 cities in the year 1963. And then the President
acted, then Congress acted, then the Supreme Court acted. The 15th Amendment was now being enforced, only a hundred years
late.
It is good to have a Bill of Rights, good to have a 14th and
15th Amendment. They are useful as standards. But it is disastrous to depend on them. Words have never been enough. Ask the
authors of the Ten Commandments.
For many people there were not even words-not for working
people, women, gays and lesbians, disabled people. The Bill of Rights says nothing about the right to work, to a decent wage,
to housing, to health care, to the rights of women, to the right of privacy in sexual preference, to the rights of people
with disabilities.
But we don't need permission from on high, words approved
by the authorities, to tell us that certain truths are self-evident, as the Declaration of Independence put it. That we are
all created equal, that we all have rights that cannot be taken from us, the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
And so working people went on strike thousands of times, were beaten and killed on the picket line, until they won an eight-hour
day, and a bit of economic security. Women created a nation al movement that changed the consciousness of millions of people.
Gays and lesbians, disabled people, organized, spoke up, declared: we exist, we must be paid attention to. And people began
to pay attention.
We should look beyond the Bill of Rights to the UN's Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, which says that all people, everywhere in the world, are entitled to work and decent wages, to
holidays and vacations, to food and clothing and housing and medical care, to education, to child care and maternal care.
The guarantees of the Bill of Rights have little meaning so
long as we have a class society with enormous differences of wealth and income. The rights of free speech and press depend
on having the resources to use them. The right to legal counsel is different for rich and poor. The right to be free from
unreasonable searches and seizures is different for a family living in a mansion and another living in a housing project,
or out on the street.
In the real world, the fate of human beings is decided every
day not by the courts, but out of court, in the streets, in the workplace, by whoever has the wealth and power. The redistribution
of that wealth and power is necessary if the Bill of Rights, if any rights, are to have meaning.
The novelist Aldous Huxley once said: "Liberties are not given;
they are taken." We are not given our liberties by the Bill of Rights, certainly not by the government which either violates
or ignores those rights. We take our rights, as thinking, acting citizens.
And so we should celebrate today, not the words
of the Bill of Rights, certainly not the political leaders who utter those words and violate them every day. We should celebrate,
honor, all those people who risked their jobs, their freedom, sometimes their lives, to affirm the rights we all have, rights
not limited to some document, but rights our common sense tells us we should all have as human beings. Who should, for example,
we celebrate?
I think of Lillian Gobitis, from Lynn, Massachusetts, a seventh
grade student who, back in 1935, because of her religious convictions, refused to salute the American flag even when she was
suspended from school.
And Mary Beth Tinker, a thirteen-year-old girl in Des Moines,
Iowa, who in 1965 went to school wearing a black armband in protest against the killing of people in Vietnam, and defied the
school authorities even when they suspended her.
An unnamed black boy, nine years old, arrested in Albany,
Georgia, in 1961 for marching in a parade against racial segregation after the police said this was unlawful. He stood in
line to be booked by the police chief, who was startled to see this little boy and asked him: "What's your name?" And he replied:
"Freedom, freedom."
I think of Gordon Hirabayashi, born in Seattle of Japanese
parents, who, at the start of the war between Japan and the United States, refused to obey the curfew directed against all
of Japanese ancestry, and refused to be evacuated to a detention camp, and insisted on his freedom, despite an executive order
by the President and a decision of the Supreme Court.
Demetrio Rodriguez of San Antonio, who in 1968 spoke up and
said his child, living in a poor county, had a right to a good education equal to that of a child living in a rich county.
All those alternative newspapers and alternative radio stations
and struggling organizations that have tried to give meaning to free speech by giving information that the mass media will
not give, revealing information that the government wants kept secret.
All those whistleblowers, who risked their jobs, risked prison,
defying their employers, whether the government or corporations, to tell the truth about nuclear weapons, or chemical poisoning.
Randy Kehler and Betsy Corner, who have refused to pay taxes to support the war machine, and all their neighbors who, when
the government decided to seize and auction their house, refused to bid, and so they are still defending their right.
The 550 people who occupied the JFK Federal Building in Boston
in protest when President Reagan declared a blockade of Nicaragua. I was in that group-I don't mind getting arrested when
I have company-and the official charge against us used the language of the old trespass law: "failure to quit the premises."
On the letter I got dropping the case (because there were too many of us to deal with), they shortened that charge to "failure
to quit."
I think that sums up what it is that has kept the Bill of
Rights alive. Not the President or Congress, or the Supreme Court, or the wealthy media. But all those people who have refused
to quit, who have insisted on their rights and the rights of others, the rights of all human ~t, beings everywhere, whether
Americans or Haitians or Chinese or Russians or Iraqis or Israelis or Palestinians, to equality, to life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness. That is the spirit of the Bill of Rights, and beyond that, the spirit of the Declaration of Independence,
yes, the spirit of '76: refusal to quit.
The Problem is Civil Obedience
by Howard Zinn, 1970
from the Zinn Reader, Seven Stories Press
[By the latter part of May, 1970, feelings about the war in
Vietnam had become almost unbearably intense. In Boston, about a hundred of us decided to sit down at the Boston Army Base
and block the road used by buses carrying draftees off to military duty. We were not so daft that we thought we were stopping
the flow of soldiers to Vietnam; it was a symbolic act, a statement, a piece of guerrilla the after. We were all arrested
and charged, in the quaint language of an old statute, with "sauntering and loitering" in such a way as to obstruct traffic.
Eight of us refused to plead guilty, insisting on trial by jury, hoping we could persuade the members of the jury that ours
was a justified act of civil disobedience. We did not persuade them. We were found guilty, chose jail instead of paying a
fine, but the judge, apparently reluctant to have us in jail, gave us forty-eight hours to change our minds, after which we
should show up in court to either pay the fine or be jailed. In the meantime, I had been invited to go to Johns Hopkins University
to debate with the philosopher Charles Frankel on the issue of civil disobedience. I decided it would be hypocritical for
me, an advocate of civil disobedience, to submit dutifully to the court and thereby skip out on an opportunity to speak to
hundreds of students about civil disobedience. So, on the day I was supposed to show up in court in Boston I flew to Baltimore
and that evening debated with Charles Frankel. Returning to Boston I decided to meet my morning class, but two detectives
were waiting for me, and I was hustled before the court and then spent a couple of days in jail. What follows is the transcript
of my opening statement in the debate at Johns Hopkins. It was included in a book published by Johns Hopkins Press in 1972,
entitled Violence: The Crisis of American Confidence.]
I start from the supposition that the world is topsy-turvy,
that things are all wrong, that the wrong people are in jail and the wrong people are out of jail, that the wrong people are
in power and the wrong people are out of power, that the wealth is distributed in this country and the world in such a way
as not simply to require small reform but to require a drastic reallocation of wealth. I start from the supposition that we
don't have to say too much about this because all we have to do is think about the state of the world today and realize that
things are all upside down. Daniel Berrigan is in jail-A Catholic priest, a poet who opposes the war-and J. Edgar Hoover is
free, you see. David Dellinger, who has opposed war ever since he was this high and who has used all of his energy and passion
against it, is in danger of going to jail. The men who are responsible for the My Lai massacre are not on trial; they are
in Washington serving various functions, primary and subordinate, that have to do with the unleashing of massacres, which
surprise them when they occur. At Kent State University four students were killed by the National Guard and students were
indicted. In every city in this country, when demonstrations take place, the protesters, whether they have demonstrated or
not, whatever they have done, are assaulted and clubbed by police, and then they are arrested for assaulting a police officer.
Now, I have been studying very closely what happens every
day in the courts in Boston, Massachusetts. You would be astounded-maybe you wouldn't, maybe you have been around, maybe you
have lived, maybe you have thought, maybe you have been hit-at how the daily rounds of injustice make their way through this
marvelous thing that we call due process. Well, that is my premise.
All you have to do is read the Soledad letters of George Jackson,
who was sentenced to one year to life, of which he spent ten years, for a seventy-dollar robbery of a filling station. And
then there is the U.S. Senator who is alleged to keep 185,000 dollars a year, or something like that, on the oil depletion
allowance. One is theft; the other is legislation. something is wrong, something is terribly wrong when we ship 10,000 bombs
full of nerve gas across the country, and drop them in somebody else's swimming pool so as not to trouble our own. So you
lose your perspective after a while. If you don't think, if you just listen to TV and read scholarly things, you actually
begin to think that things are not so bad, or that just little things are wrong. But you have to get a little detached, and
then come back and look at the world, and you are horrified. So we have to start from that supposition-that things are really
topsy-turvy.
And our topic is topsy-turvy: civil disobedience. As soon
as you say the topic is civil disobedience, you are saying our problem is civil disobedience. That is not our problem....
Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is the numbers of people all over the world who have obeyed the dictates of the
leaders of their government and have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience. And our problem
is that scene in All Quiet on the Western Front where the schoolboys march off dutifully in a line to war. Our problem is
that people are obedient all over the world, in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war and cruelty. Our
problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while the grand thieves are running
the country. That's our problem. We recognize this for Nazi Germany. We know that the problem there was obedience, that the
people obeyed Hitler. People obeyed; that was wrong. They should have challenged, and they should have resisted; and if we
were only there, we would have showed them. Even in Stalin's Russia we can understand that; people are obedient, all these
herdlike people.
But America is different. That is what we've all been brought
up on. From the time we are this high and I still hear it resounding in Mr. Frankel's statement-you tick off, one, two, three,
four, five lovely things .~ about America that we don't want disturbed very much. But if we have learned anything in the past
ten years, it is that these lovely things about America were never lovely. We have been expansionist and aggressive and mean
to other people from the beginning. And we've been aggressive and mean to people in this country, and we've allocated the
wealth of this country in a very unjust way. We've never had justice in the courts for the poor people, for black people,
for radicals. Now how can we boast that America is a very special place? It is not that special. It really isn't.
Well, that is our topic, that is our problem: civil obedience.
Law is very important. We are talking about obedience to law-law, this marvelous invention of modern times, which we attribute
to Western civilization, and which we talk about proudly. The rule of law, oh, how wonderful, all these courses in Western
civilization all over the land. Remember those bad old days when people were exploited by feudalism? Everything was terrible
in the Middle Ages-but now we have Western civilization, the rule of law. The rule of law has regularized and maximized the
injustice that existed before the rule of law, that is what the rule of law has done. Let us start looking at the rule of
law realistically, not with that metaphysical complacency with which we always examined it before.
When in all the nations of the world the rule of law is the
darling of the leaders and the plague of the people, we ought to begin to recognize this. We have to transcend these national
boundaries in our thinking. Nixon and Brezhnev have much more in common with one another than - we have with Nixon. J. Edgar
Hoover has far more in common with the head of the Soviet secret police than he has with us. It's the international dedication
to law and order that binds the leaders of all countries in a comradely bond. That's why we are always surprised when they
get together -- they smile, they shake hands, they smoke cigars, they really like one another no matter what they say. It's
like the Republican and Democratic parties, who claim that it's going to make a terrible difference if one or the other wins,
yet they are all the same. Basically, it is us against them.
Yossarian was right, remember, in Catch-22? He had been accused
of giving aid and comfort to the enemy, which nobody should ever be accused of, and Yossarian said to his friend Clevinger:
"The enemy is whoever is going to get you killed, whichever side they are on." But that didn't sink in, so he said to Clevinger:
"Now you remember that, or one of these days you'll be dead." And remember? Clevinger, after a while, was dead. And we must
remember that our enemies are not divided along national lines, that enemies are not just people who speak different languages
and occupy different territories. Enemies are people who want to get us killed.
We are asked, "What if everyone disobeyed
the law?" But a better question is, "What if everyone obeyed the law?" And the answer to that question is much easier to come
by, because we have a lot of empirical evidence about what happens if everyone obeys the law, or if even most people obey
the law. What happens is what has happened, what is happening. Why do people revere the law? And we all do; even I have to
fight it, for it was put into my bones at an early age when I was a Cub Scout. One reason we revere the law is its ambivalence.
In the modern world we deal with phrases and words that have multiple meanings, like "national security." Oh, yes, we must
do this for national security! Well, what does that mean? Whose national security? Where? When? Why? We don't bother to answer
those questions, or even to ask them.
The law conceals many things. The law is the Bill of Rights.
;'~ fact, that is what we think of when we develop our reverence for the law. The law is something that protects us; the law
is our right-the law is the Constitution. Bill of Rights Day, essay contests sponsored by the American Legion on our Bill
of Rights, that is the law. And that is good.
But there is another part of the law that doesn't get ballyhooed-
the legislation that has gone through month after month, year after year, from the beginning of the Republic, which allocates
the resources of the country in such a way as to leave some people very rich and other people very poor, and still others
scrambling like mad for what little is left. That is the law. If you go to law school you will see this. You can quantify
it by counting the big, heavy law books that people carry around with them and see how many law books you count that say "Constitutional
Rights" on them and how many that say "Property," "Contracts," "Torts," "Corporation Law." That is what the law is mostly
about. The law is the oil depletion allowance-although we don't have Oil Depletion Allowance Day, we don't have essays written
on behalf of the oil depletion allowance. So there are parts of the law that are publicized and played up to us-oh, this is
the law, the Bill of Rights. And there are other parts of the law that just do their quiet work, and nobody says anything
about them.
It started way back. When the Bill of Rights was first passed,
remember, in the first administration of Washington? Great thing. Bill of Rights passed! Big ballyhoo. At the same time Hamilton's
economic pro gram was passed. Nice, quiet, money to the rich-I'm simplifying it a little, but not too much. Hamilton's economic
program started it off. You can draw a straight line from Hamilton's economic program to the oil depletion allowance to the
tax write-offs for corporations. All the way through-that is the history. The Bill of Rights publicized; economic legislation
unpublicized.
You know the enforcement of different parts of the law is
as important as the publicity attached to the different parts of the law. The Bill of Rights, is it enforced? Not very well.
You'll find that freedom of speech in constitutional law is a very difficult, ambiguous, troubled concept. Nobody really knows
when you can get up and speak and when you can't. Just check all of the Supreme Court decisions. Talk about predictability
in a system-you can't predict what will happen to you when you get up on the street corner and speak. See if you can tell
the difference between the Terminiello case and the Feiner case, and see if you can figure out what is going to happen. By
the way, there is one part of the law that is not very vague, and that involves the right to distribute leaflets on the street.
The Supreme Court has been very clear on that. In decision after decision we are affirmed an absolute right to distribute
leaflets on the street. Try it. Just go out on the street and start distributing leaflets. And a policeman comes up to you
and he says, "Get out of here." And you say, "Aha! Do you know Marsh v. Alabama, 1946?" That is the reality of the Bill of
Rights. That's the reality of the Constitution, that part of the law which is portrayed to us as a beautiful and marvelous
thing. And seven years after the Bill of Rights was passed, which said that "Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom
of speech," Congress made a law abridging the freedom of speech. Remember? The Sedition Act of 1798.
So the Bill of Rights was not enforced. Hamilton's program
was enforced, because when the whisky farmers went out and rebelled you remember, in 1794 in Pennsylvania, Hamilton himself
got on his horse and went out there to suppress the rebellion to make sure that the revenue tax was enforced. And you can
trace the story right down to the present day, what laws are enforced, what laws are not enforced. So you have to be careful
when you say, "I'm for the law, I revere the law." What part of the law are you talking about? I'm not against all law. But
I think we ought to begin to make very important distinctions about what laws do what things to what people.
And there are other problems with the law. It's a strange
thing, we think that law brings order. Law doesn't. How do we know that law does not bring order? Look around us. We live
under the rules of law. Notice how much order we have? People say we have to worry about civil disobedience because it will
lead to anarchy. Take a look at the present world in which the rule of law obtains. This is the closest to what is called
anarchy in the popular mind-confusion, chaos, international banditry. The only order that is really worth anything does not
come through the enforcement ... of law, it comes through the establishment of a society which is just and in which harmonious
relationships are established and in which you need a minimum of regulation to create decent sets of arrangements among people.
But the order based on law and on the force of law is the order of the totalitarian state, and it inevitably leads either
to total injustice or to rebel lion-eventually, in other words, to very great disorder.
We all grow up with the notion that the law is holy. They
asked Daniel Berrigan's mother what she thought of her son's breaking the law. He burned draft records-one of the most violent
acts of this century- to protest the war, for which he was sentenced to prison, as criminals should be. They asked his mother
who is in her eighties, what she thought of her son's breaking the law. And she looked straight into the interviewer's face,
and she said, "It's not God's law." Now we forget that. There is nothing sacred about the law. Think of who makes laws. The
law is not made by God, it is made by Strom Thurmond. If you nave any notion about the sanctity and loveliness and reverence
for the law, look at the legislators around the country who make the laws. Sit in on the sessions of the state legislatures.
Sit in on Congress, for these are the people who make the laws which we are then supposed to revere.
All of this is done with such propriety as to fool us. This
is the problem. In the old days, things were confused; you didn't know. Now you know. It is all down there in the books. Now
we go through due process. Now the same things happen as happened before, except that we've gone through the right procedures.
In Boston a policeman walked into a hospital ward and fired five times at a black man who had snapped a towel at his arm-and
killed him. A hearing was held. The judge decided that the policeman was justified because if he didn't do it, he would lose
the respect of his fellow officers. Well, that is what is known as due process-that is, the guy didn't get away with it. We
went through the proper procedures, and everything was set up. The decorum, the propriety of the law fools us.
The nation then, was founded on disrespect for the law, and
then came the Constitution and the notion of stability which Madison and Hamilton liked. But then we found in certain crucial
times in our history that the legal framework did not suffice, and in order to end slavery we had to go outside the legal
framework, as we had to do at the time of the American Revolution or the Civil War. The union had to go outside the legal
framework in order to establish certain rights in the 1930s. And in this time, which may be more critical than the Revolution
or the Civil War, the problems are so horrendous as to require us to go outside the legal framework in order to make a statement,
to resist, to begin to establish the kind of institutions and relationships which a decent society should have. No, not just
tearing things down; building things up. But even if you build things up that you are not supposed to build up-you try to
build up a people's park, that's not tearing down a system; you are building something up, but you are doing it illegally-the
militia comes in and drives you out. That is the form that civil disobedience is going to take more and more, people trying
to build a new society in the midst of the old.
But what about voting and elections? Civil disobedience-we
don't need that much of it, we are told, because we can go through the electoral system. And by now we should have learned,
but maybe we haven't, for we grew up with the notion that the voting booth is a sacred place, almost like a confessional.
You walk into the voting booth and you come out and they snap your picture and then put it in the papers with a beatific smile
on your face. You've just voted; that is democracy. But if you even read what the political scientists say-although who can?-about
the voting process, you find that the voting process is a sham. Totalitarian states love voting. You get people to the polls
and they register their approval. I know there is a difference-they have one party and we have two parties. We have one more
party than they have, you see.
What we are trying to do, I assume, is really to get back
to the principles and aims and spirit of the Declaration of Independence. This spirit is resistance to illegitimate authority
and to forces that deprive people of their life and liberty and right to pursue happiness, and therefore under these conditions,
it urges the right to alter or abolish their current form of government-and the stress had been on abolish. But to establish
the principles of the Declaration of Independence, we are going to need to go outside the law, to stop obeying the laws that
demand killing or that allocate wealth the way it has been done, or that put people in jail for petty technical offenses and
keep other people out of jail for enormous crimes. My hope is that this kind of spirit will take place not just in this country
but in other countries because they all need it. People in all countries need the spirit of disobedience to the state, which
is not a metaphysical thing but a thing of force and wealth. And we need a kind of declaration of interdependence among people
in all countries of the world who are striving for the same thing.
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