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PATRIOTISM AND OPTIMISMZinn is frequently criticized for not being sufficiently patriotic, particularly for a United States historian. Many conservative historians, in various terms, have “‘characterized A People's History as a “Hate America” book,’ Zinn says. ‘But…while it's true that I take a very critical view of the United States government in history, I take a very positive view toward the mass movements of people in America who have fought to make the country a better place.’” 102 This demonstrates the fundamental distinction Zinn draws between how conservatives define patriotism and how he defines it. There are two primary differences First, Zinn argues that there is a substantial difference between loyalty to the government of a country and loyalty to the country itself. It is hard to imagine how anyone could read Zinn’s articles or book chapters about the civil rights or labor movements without sensing the strong sense of pride he feels in American people. Zinn argued that “the great writers could see through the fog of what was called ‘patriotism,’ what was considered loyalty.’” 103 To demonstrate the distinction, he quoted from the satire A CONNECTICUT YANKEE IN KING ARTHUR'S COURT, by Mark Twain: My kind of loyalty was loyalty to one's country, not to its institutions or its office-holders. The country is the real thing, the substantial thing, the eternal thing; it is the thing to watch over, and care for, and be loyal to; institutions are extraneous, they are its mere clothing, and clothing can wear out, become ragged, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect the body from winter, disease, and death. To be loyal to rags, to shout for rags, to worship rags, to die for rags--that is a loyalty of unreason.104 Similarly, Zinn feels that the real, eternal part of what makes America America is not the government, but the people and the social movements that have fought for justice for all people. The second aspect of Zinn’s redefinition of patriotism is his insistence that criticizing the government, far from being unpatriotic, is actually one of the best ways of being a patriot. As he argues in his examination of civil disobedience, challenging unjust governmental policies is an integral part of being a citizen of a democracy. Only by exercizing the right (and duty) to protest do we as individuals truly participate in democracy. Thus, by protesting we strengthen and engage in the true democratic spirit of America. However, Zinn is not purely critical of the United States government and its leaders. His optimism leads him to take a more balanced approach: “the left hasn't balanced its act very well…. They've done a very good job of illuminating the various bad policies of the American government, but they haven't shown what people have done to resist these policies, often successfully. And that's a critical thing to do, to show people in the present day that they can fight back and win.”105 One important aspect of Zinn’s writing is that it does not, in contrast to the perception of his critics, attempt to describe a world of oppressive futility, in which the government is overwhelmingly bad and cannot be resisted. Instead, he writes history from a perspective which demonstrates the gains that have been made by social movements since the government was established. BIBLIOGRAPHYChurchill, Ward. PACIFISM AS PATHOLOGY : REFLECTIONS ON THE ROLE OF ARMED STRUGGLE IN NORTH AMERICA. Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring Publishing, 1999 Fortas, Abe. CONCERNING DISSENT AND CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE. New York: Signet Books, 1964 FREESPEECH.ORG, Accessed May 17, 2002, http://free.freespeech.org/evolution/articles.htm HOWARD ZINN ONLINE, Accessed May 17, 2002, http://www.howardzinn.org/ HOWARD ZINN’S ZNET HOMEPAGE, Accessed May 17, 2002, http://www.zmag.org/bios/homepage.cfm?authorID=97 Zinn, Howard. A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES: 1492 TO PRESENT. New York: Harper Perennial, 2001 Zinn, Howard. DECLARATIONS OF INDEPENDENCE : CROSS-EXAMINING AMERICAN IDEOLOGY. New York: Harper Perennial, 1991 Zinn, Howard. DISOBEDIENCE AND DEMOCRACY: NINE FALLACIES ON LAW AND ORDER. New York: Vintage Books, 1968 Zinn, Howard. HOWARD ZINN: ON HISTORY. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2000 Zinn, Howard. HOWARD ZINN ON WAR. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2000 Zinn, Howard. TERRORISM AND WAR (OPEN MEDIA PAMPHLET SERIES). New York: Seven Stories Press, 2002 Zinn, Howard, et al. THREE STRIKES: MINERS, MUSICIANS, SALESGIRLS, AND THE FIGHTING SPIRIT OF LABOR'S LAST CENTURY. Boston: Beacon Press, 2001 Zinn, Howard. YOU CAN’T BE NEUTRAL ON A MOVING TRAIN: A PERSONAL HISTORY OF OUR TIMES. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994 Zinn, Howard. THE ZINN READER: WRITINGS ON DISOBEDIENCE AND DEMOCRACY. New York: Seven Stories Press, 1997 CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE IS JUSTIFIED1. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE DENIES THAT LAWS ARE ALWAYS MORAL OR CORRECT Howard Zinn, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Boston University, “Gray Matters Interviews Howard Zinn,” HOWARD ZINN ONLINE, December 3, 1998, accessed May 12, 2002, http://howardzinn.org/index23.htm The principle of civil dissobedience doesn't state as a universal that you must always dissobey the law (laughter). What it does do is refuse the universal principle that you must always obey the law. And what it does is declare a willingness to decide when laws are consonnant with morality and when laws are immoral and support terrible things like war or racism or sexism, injustices of all sorts. And so laws that sustain injustice should be dissobeyed. Sometimes though it's the law itself that's dissobeyed, sometimes the law that is dissobeyed is a law against trespassing or a law against picketing and people will commit civil dissobedience and trespass as the sitdown strikers did in the United States in the 1930s when they took over factories or as the black protesters did in the civil rights movement in the United States when they sat down in lunch counters and refused to move. But the idea of civil dissobedience is that Law is not sacrosanct. 2. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE MAY BE JUSTIFIED BY SPECIFIC CRITERIA Howard Zinn, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Boston University, DISOBEDIENCE AND DEMOCRACY, 1968, p. 48-49. All this is to suggest what criteria need to be kept in mind whenever civil disobedience, in situations of urgency where very vital issues are at stake, and other means have been exhausted, may move from mild actions, to disorder, to overt violence: it would have to guarded, limited, aimed carefully at the source of injustice, and preferably directed against property rather than people. There are two reasons for such criteria. One is the moral reason: that violence is in itself an evil, and so can only be justified in those circumstances where it is a last resort in eliminating a greater evil, or in) self-defense. The other is the reason of effectiveness: The purpose of civil disobedience is to communicate to others, and indiscriminate violence turns people (rightly) away.
Howard Zinn, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Boston University, “Gray Matters Interviews Howard Zinn,” HOWARD ZINN ONLINE, December 3, 1998, accessed May 12, 2002, http://howardzinn.org/index23.htm I think that the history of the United States indicates that when we have had to redress serious grievances, that has not been done by the three branches of government that are always paraded before junior high school students and high school students as the essence of democracy. It hasn't been Congress or the President or the Supreme Court who have initiated acts to remedy racial inequality or tho do something about the goverment going to war or about economic injustice. It's always taken the actions of citizens and actions of civil dissobedience to bring these issues to national attention and finally force the President and Congress and the Supreme Court to begin to move. You were talking about this going on for hundreds of years. If you go back a hundred and fifty years ago to the middle of the nineteenth century, to the 1850s, you'll see that it wasn't Lincoln who caused the anti-slavery sentiment in the country to grow. Lincoln was reacting to the growth of the movement that became stronger and stronger from the 1830s to the outbreak of the civil war. And in the 1850s, manifested itself in many acts of civil dissobedience against the Fugitive Slave Act that had been passed in 1850. The Fugitive Slave Act required the federal government to aid southern slave owners in bringing escaped slaves back to the South. Well people in the North, black people, escaped slaves, free black people, white people, they gathered together in committees. They broke into courthouses and into jailhouses to rescue escaped slaves. And they used certainly acts of civil dissobedience. And in a number of cases, when they were brought up on charges and put on trial, juries acquitted them. Because juries recognized the morality of what they were doing even though they had broken the law.
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