Why
the Feds Fear Thinkers Like Howard Zinn
07 August 2010By Chris Hedges
On Monday I will teach my final American history class
of the semester to prison inmates. We have spent five
weeks reading Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the
United States.” The class is taught in a small room in
the basement of the prison. I pass through a metal
detector, am patted down by a guard and walk through
three pairs of iron gates to get to my students. We
have covered Spain’s genocide of the native
inhabitants in the Caribbean and the Americas, the war
for independence in the United States and the
disgraceful slaughter of Native Americans. We have
examined slavery, the Mexican-American War, the Civil
War, the occupations of Cuba and the Philippines, the
New Deal, two world wars and the legacy of racism,
capitalist exploitation and imperialism that continue
to infect American society.
We have looked at these issues, as Zinn did, through
the eyes of Native Americans, immigrants, slaves,
women, union leaders, persecuted socialists,
anarchists and communists, abolitionists, anti-war
activists, civil rights leaders and the poor. As I was
reading out loud a passage by Sojourner Truth, Chief
Joseph, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B
Du Bois, Randolph Bourne, Malcolm X or Martin Luther
King, I have heard students mutter “Damn” or “We been
lied to.”
The power of Zinn’s scholarship—which I have watched
over the past few weeks open the eyes of young, mostly
African-Americans to their own history and the
structures that perpetuate misery for the poor and
gluttony and privilege for the elite—explains why the
FBI, which released its 423-page file on Zinn on July
30, saw him as a threat.
Zinn, who died in January at the age of 87, did not
advocate violence or support the overthrow of the
government, something he told FBI interrogators on
several occasions. He was rather an example of how
genuine intellectual thought is always subversive. It
always challenges prevailing assumptions as well as
political and economic structures. It is based on a
fierce moral autonomy and personal courage and it is
uniformly branded by the power elite as “political.”
Zinn was a threat not because he was a violent
revolutionary or a communist but because he was
fearless and told the truth.
The cold, dead pages of the FBI file stretch from 1948
to 1974. At one point five agents are assigned to
follow Zinn. Agents make repeated phone calls to
employers, colleagues and landlords seeking
information. The FBI, although Zinn is never suspected
of carrying out a crime, eventually labels Zinn a high
security risk. J. Edgar Hoover, who took a personal
interest in Zinn’s activities, on Jan. 10, 1964, drew
up a memo to include Zinn “in Reserve Index, Section
A,” a classification that permitted agents to
immediately arrest and detain Zinn if there was a
national emergency. Muslim activists, from Dr. Sami
Al-Arian to Fahad Hashmi, can tell you that nothing
has changed.
The file exposes the absurdity, waste and pettiness of
our national security state. And it seems to indicate
that our security agencies prefer to hire those with
mediocre or stunted intelligence, dubious morality and
little common sense. Take for example this gem of a
letter, complete with misspellings, mailed by an
informant to then FBI Director Hoover about something
Zinn wrote.
“While I was visiting my dentist in Michigan City,
Indiana,” the informant wrote. “This pamphlet was left
in my car, and I am mailing it to you, I know is a
DOVE call, and not a HOCK call. We have had a number
of ethnic groups move into our area in the last few
years. We are in a war! And it doesn’t look like this
pamphlet will help our Government objectives.”
Or how about the meeting between an agent and someone
identified as Doris Zinn. Doris Zinn, who the agent
says is Zinn’s sister, is interviewed “under a
suitable pretext.” She admits that her brother is
“employed at the American Labor Party Headquarters in
Brooklyn.” That is all the useful information that is
reported. The fact that Zinn did not have a sister
gives a window into the quality of the investigations
and the caliber of the agents who carried them out.
FBI agents in November 1953 wrote up an account of a
clumsy attempt to recruit Zinn as an informant, an
attempt in which they admitted that Zinn “would not
volunteer information” and that “additional interviews
with ZINN would not turn him from his current
attitude.” A year later, after another interrogation,
an agent wrote that Zinn “concluded the interview by
stating he would not under any circumstances testify
or furnish information concerning the political
opinions of others.”
While Zinn steadfastly refused to cooperate in the
anti-communist witch hunts in the 1950s, principals
and college administrators were busy purging
classrooms of those who, like Zinn, exhibited
intellectual and moral independence. The widespread
dismissals of professors, elementary and high school
teachers and public employees—especially social
workers whose unions had advocated on behalf of their
clients—were carried out quietly. The names of
suspected “Reds” were handed to administrators and
school officials under the FBI’s “Responsibilities
Program.” It was up to the institutions, nearly all of
which complied, to see that those singled out lost
their jobs. There rarely were hearings. The victims
did not see any purported evidence. They were usually
abruptly terminated. Those on the blacklist were
effectively locked out of their professions. The
historian Ellen Schrecker estimates that between
10,000 and 12,000 people were blackballed through this
process.
The FBI spent years following Zinn, and carefully
cutting out newspaper articles about their suspect, to
amass the inane and the banal. One of Zinn’s
neighbors, Mrs. Matthew Grell, on Feb. 22, 1952, told
agents that she considered Zinn and another neighbor,
Mrs. Julius Scheiman, “to be either communists or
communist sympathizers” because, the agents wrote,
Grell “had observed copies of the Daily Workers in
Mrs. Scheiman’s apartment and noted that Mrs. Scheiman
was a good friend of Howard Zinn.”
The FBI, which describes Zinn as a former member of
the Communist Party, something Zinn repeatedly denied,
appears to have picked up its surveillance when Zinn,
who was teaching at Spelman, a historically black
women’s college, became involved in the civil rights
movement. Zinn served on the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee. He took his students out of
the classroom to march for civil rights. Spelman’s
president was not pleased.
“I was fired for insubordination,” Zinn recalled.
“Which happened to be true.”
Zinn in 1962 decried “the clear violations by local
police of Constitutional rights” of blacks and noted
that “the FBI has not made a single arrest on behalf
of Negro citizens.” The agent who reported Zinn’s
words added that Zinn’s position was “slanted and
biased.” Zinn in 1970 was a featured speaker at a
rally for the release of the Black Panther leader
Bobby Seal held in front of the Boston police
headquarters. “It is about time we had a demonstration
at the police station,” Zinn is reported as telling
the crowd by an informant who apparently worked with
him at Boston University. “Police in every nation are
a blight and the United States is no exception.”
“America has been a police state for a long time,”
Zinn went on. “I believe that policemen should not
have guns. I believe they should be disarmed.
Policemen with guns are a danger to the community and
themselves.”
Agents muse in the file about how to help their
unnamed university source mount a campaign to have
Zinn fired from his job as a professor of history at
Boston University.
“[Redacted] indicated [Redacted] intends to call a
meeting of the BU Board of Directors in an effort to
have ZINN removed from BU. Boston proposes under
captioned program with Bureau permission to furnish
[Redacted] with public source data regarding ZINN’s
numerous anti-war activities, including his trip to
Hanoi, 1/31/68, in an effort to back [Redacted’s]
efforts for his removal.”
Zinn and the radical Catholic priest Daniel Berrigan
had traveled together to North Vietnam in January 1968
to bring home three prisoners of war. The trip was
closely monitored by the FBI. Hoover sent a coded
teletype to the president, the secretary of state, the
director of the CIA, the director of the Defense
Intelligence Agency, the Department of the Army, the
Department of the Air Force and the White House
situation room about the trip. And later, after
Berrigan was imprisoned for destroying draft records,
Zinn repeatedly championed the priest’s defense in
public rallies, some of which the FBI noted were
sparsely attended. The FBI monitored Zinn as he
traveled to the Danbury Federal Prison in Connecticut
to visit Berrigan and his brother Philip.
“Mass murders occur, which is what war is,” Zinn, who
was a bombardier in World War II, said in 1972,
according to the file, “because people are split and
don’t think … when the government does not serve the
people, then it doesn’t deserve to be obeyed. … To be
patriotic, you may have to be against your
government.”
Zinn testified at the trial of Daniel Ellsberg, who
gave a copy of the Pentagon Papers to Zinn and Noam
Chomsky. The two academics edited the secret documents
on the Vietnam War, sections of which had appeared in
The New York Times, into the four volumes that were
published in 1971.
“During the Pentagon Papers jury trial, Zinn stated
that the ‘war in Vietnam was a war which involved
special interests, and not the defense of the United
States,’ ” his FBI file reads.
By the end of the file one walks away with a profound
respect for Zinn and a deep distaste for the
buffoonish goons in the FBI who followed and monitored
him. There is no reason, with the massive expansion of
our internal security apparatus, to think that things
have improved. There are today 1,271 government
organizations and 1,931 private companies working on
programs related to counterterrorism, homeland
security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations
across the United States, The Washington Post reported
in an investigation by Dana Priest and William M.
Arkin. These agencies employ an estimated 854,000
people, all of whom hold top-secret security
clearances, the Post found. And in Washington, D.C.,
and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for
top-secret intelligence work are under construction or
have been built since September 2001. Together, the
paper reported, they occupy the equivalent of almost
three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings—about 17
million square feet.
We are amassing unprecedented volumes of secret files,
and carrying out extensive surveillance and
harassment, as stupid and useless as those that were
directed against Zinn. And a few decades from now
maybe we will be able to examine the work of the
latest generation of dimwitted investigators who have
been unleashed upon us in secret by the tens of
thousands. Did any of the agents who followed Zinn
ever realize how they wasted their time? Do those
following us around comprehend how manipulated they
are? Do they understand that their primary purpose, as
it was with Zinn, is not to prevent terrorism but
discredit and destroy social movements as well as
protect the elite from those who would expose them?
Zinn’s book is revered in my cramped classroom. It is
revered because these men intimately know racism,
manipulation, poverty, abuse and the lies peddled by
the powerful. Zinn recorded their voices and the
voices of their ancestors. They respect him for this.
Zinn knew that if we do not listen to the stories of
those without power, those who suffer discrimination
and abuse, those who struggle for justice, we are left
parroting the manufactured myths that serve the
interests of the privileged. Zinn set out to write
history, not myth. And he knew that when these myths
implode it is the beginning of hope.
“If you were a Native American,” one of my students
asked recently, “what would have been the difference
between Columbus and Hitler?”
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