A Conversation with Howard Zinn

In His Final Interview, the Historian and Activist Discusses the Country's Economic Turmoil

Howard Zinn died January 27 of an apparent heart attack in Santa Monica, California at the age of 87. I interviewed Zinn twice for Playboy; the final time was shortly before his death. (An edited version of our interview with Zinn will run in the April 2010 issue of Playboy.) I’ve known Zinn since 2001 when I began working at The Progressive, and I met him in 2004 at the magazine’s anniversary celebration, where he had just given one of his typical impassioned and humorous speeches. After the talk he came up to me and gave me a hug. He told me I was a great editor—words I will never forget. Zinn had a gentle way about him, and he was always gracious and humble despite his fame. At the end of our final interview he asked me to send him several issues of Playboy because he was too embarassed to buy them at the store. Plus, he said, it would give him “an excuse to read all of Playboy and not just my interview.”

He will be missed.

PLAYBOY: What’s your take on our jobless recovery?
ZINN: Unfortunately, the jobless situation calls for much bolder measures than anybody has proposed. The Obama administration recognizes the government must play some role in reducing joblessness, but its role isn’t large enough to deal with the unemployment situation. We need something that goes beyond what was done in the New Deal Era of Franklin D. Roosevelt, when the government unabashedly created the Works Progress Administration, which then created 8 million jobs.

The government needs to guarantee jobs to everybody who is willing to work. If private enterprise won’t hire people, the government must hire people. The government hired people in the 1930s. Hundreds of thousands of young people worked in the Civilian Conservation Corps. Instead of drafting them into the Army in order to solve the unemployment problem, it gave these young people a salary. They lived in camps around the country and did enormously useful work restoring forests and cleaning up rivers and building bridges. The WPA itself did a huge amount of good work around the country, and the people worked directly for the government.

We need a federal arts program in which the government will pay musicians, directors, actors, poets, writers to do what they do best: produce operas and murals and plays and books. It would take that kind of a bold program to even begin to solve the problem of unemployment.

PLAYBOY: It doesn’t appear likely Obama would get behind such a plan.
ZINN: The Obama administration has been timid in the face of cries of big government. The administration hasn’t come directly to the American people and said, “There’s nothing wrong with big government.” In fact, the Republicans want big government. The war lovers want big government. There’s no bigger government than what you have when you go to war. The war is a government program, and we’ve always had big government in this country.

The Obama administration could educate the American people about this. Obama has a public platform. The whole idea of the Constitution was to create a government strong enough to do the things the founding fathers wanted it to do. But the big government that exists works on behalf of the elite, of the wealthy classes. When government begins to do things for the poor or for the middle class, the cry goes up, “Oh, this is big government!” Obama needs to meet that accusation head-on and educate the American people about the necessity for government to do things private enterprise will not do, like give free health care to everybody. When you’re intimidated by accusations of big government—as the Obama administration has been—you draw back from what you need, such as true universal free health care, the single-payer system. If you had a very simple plan, which is a single-payer system—the kind of thing they have in Canada and France and Germany and Italy, where people have free health care—the people can understand that. They can’t understand complicated compromises of a public option and private option. If you educate the public, you’d have a public that makes demands to their Congressmen, which would push Congress toward a different way of thinking, or at least a different way of acting.

PLAYBOY: Should the administration frame health care around job creation?
ZINN: When issues are raised about it costing too much money, there’s a simple response: “We’re paying $670 billion on a military budget.” Well, that is big money; that is big spending, and we could cut down on that. One of the problems with taking care of the job situation or taking care of the health situation is that we’re expending our national treasuries on war. You have to go into the delicate area of foreign policy, which the Obama administration has been unwilling to do. It has been unwilling to cut the military budget, unwilling to withdraw troops from the Middle East. You become limited in what you can do in domestic policy.

PLAYBOY: Can our government rebuild our manufacturing base?
ZINN: Well, there’s not much you can do about companies that decide to go overseas because they’re going to get cheap labor and less control over environmental issues. Our government has to take care of people who have lost their jobs, which is why government-guaranteed employment is important.

PLAYBOY: Is globalization here to stay?
ZINN: You can’t stop globalization. You can try to reach international agreements about environmental requirements, and try to reach international agreements about minimum wages for people in other countries. That’s a difficult job, but ultimately countries will stop going overseas when they face regulations they don’t want, or face wage requirements they can’t meet.

PLAYBOY: Is the term jobless recovery an oxymoron?
ZINN: Well, it’s certainly not an economic recovery. The language of economics is based on the stock market. If business people are doing well and stockholders are doing well, and if the Dow Jones average goes up, it’s assumed that we have economic recovery. But you have to measure economic recovery not by how people are doing at the top but how people are doing at the bottom. If people are still unemployed or people are still losing their homes, then you don’t have economic recovery. They ought to stop giving the Dow Jones average every night on television. Instead they should give figures on unemployment and figures on foreclosures.

PLAYBOY: Economists predict foreclosures will continue to climb.
ZINN: That’s another area where the government has to be bold and declare a moratorium. Declare that people are not going to lose their homes if they can’t pay their mortgages. Let the banks suffer, but don’t let people suffer. Instead of giving a trillion dollars to financial institutions and hoping these institutions will make it easier for people to pay their mortgages, the government has to help people directly. The Obama administration has insisted on doing things through the private sector, which is really the trickle-down theory—the idea that if you give people at the top a bailout of $600 billion or $700 billion or a bailout of a $1 trillion, you hope they will use that money to help people in need. But the people at the top won’t use that money to help people because their motive is profit, not humanitarian concerns.

PLAYBOY: There has been some of this resistance to foreclosures at the local level. Local law enforcement has suspended evictions, and nonprofits have engaged in civil disobedience in front of foreclosed properties.
ZINN: That’s exactly what is needed. If the government isn’t going to stop foreclosures, citizens must. This goes back to the Revolutionary period, to Shays’s Rebellion in Massachusetts, when thousands of farmers gathered around courthouses and would not let the courts take away people’s farms. And it goes back to the 1930s when people organized unemployment councils, tenants’ organizations. When people were evicted, they moved the furniture back into the apartments—it was direct action by citizens where the government won’t take action. That is what is needed today. If citizens began to act this way, if people simply will not permit homes to be taken away from their neighbors, then the government will recognize it has to step in and do the same, but do it efficiently and legally.

PLAYBOY: Obama signed the stimulus package into law on February 17, 2009. How do you think it has performed over the past year?
ZINN: Well, the stimulus package is based on getting money to the top, and it’s a very weak beginning of what should be a government program to guarantee jobs and health care and housing protection for people. So the stimulus plan is too little, too late. What is need now is not a little jab of a stimulus. What is needed is a great overhaul of domestic policy that then requires a great overhaul of foreign policy. Obama talked about bringing troops home from Iraq, but then he sends troops to Afghanistan. I don’t think the American people want to maintain a war in Afghanistan. The American people are tired of war, and the administration should recognize that and act upon that. Then there would be an enormous amount of money available to do much more than the small steps that were taken in the stimulus package.

PLAYBOY: Some argue Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernake and former chair Alan Greenspan led us into this mess. Yet Bernake may get a second term, which doesn’t indicate Obama’s campaign motto of “change.”
ZINN: Exactly. He talked about change and then he appointed Lawrence Summers as one of this chief advisors. And Robert Rubin. These are people who participated in all of those activities that led to this financial collapse.

No, we have not seen that kind of change, even on matters of constitutional rights. There could hardly be anything more obvious and flagrant than what happened at Guantánamo and what is continuing to happen at Guantánamo. Here Obama promised to close the base. Well, it’s taking him a long time to do that, and he’s coming up with all sorts of solutions that are inhumane, such as taking these people from Guantánamo—who have not been tried, who have not been found guilty—and proposes sending them to maximum security prisons. We don’t send people to maximum security prisons before they have had a trial, before they have been found guilty of any crime. Obama is presumably a constitutional lawyer, but even on something like civil liberties, civil rights, the things he made strong pledges on, he has failed.

We need a citizens movement in this country that is made up of those people who voted for Obama. This huge number of people voted for what worked for him and these are his constituency, and these are the people whose desires he is ignoring. These are the people he made pledges to, and he’s violating those pledges. These are the people who should now become a force that says to Obama, “We insist you come through on the promises you made.”

PLAYBOY: As a historian and as someone who has lived through many of the nation’s economic ups and downs, how is this economic turmoil different from past ones?
ZINN: People have been reminded of 1929 Depression. It hasn’t gotten that bad. At that time one third of the labor force was unemployed. Now, of course, we have a bigger unemployment rate than the statistics show. When they say “Oh, there’s 10 percent unemployed,” it really means there’s 20 percent unemployed. So it’s not as bad as it was in 1929.

The most accurate way to measure how bad it is not by the superficial signs of how the stock market is doing, but to measure things by how ordinary people are living, and how many of them are losing their homes, and how many are losing their jobs, and how many kids are still going hungry, and how budgets are being cut for education and health. We need to start rethinking our idea of what an economic crisis is.

To put it another way, this country has been in a continual economic crisis from the beginning of its history. What we call economic crisis is when things get very, very bad. But when things are not that bad, in normal times, one out of five kids grows up hungry. In normal times people lose their jobs and people have their homes foreclosed, and people live in terrible housing conditions. That’s normal. And when that situation exists, they don’t call it an economic crisis.

We have to redefine the idea of what is an economic crisis. When you have an economic system in which wealth gravitates to the top and you have a permanent underclass of poor people living in poor homes and without health care, then you are in constant economic crisis.

You have to rethink what kind of economic system you live under and take bold steps to change that.

PLAYBOY: Now that the Democrats are on the cusp of losing their filibuster-proof supermajority in Congress, and what will this mean for financial reform?
ZINN: Well, first of all, the Democrats will blame the fact that the Republicans for the filibuster, but the fact is the Democrats have been so weak on financial reform, so weak on every aspect of the economy that the many problems, not the Republicans or their opportunity to…or their ability of filibuster,

The main problem is the Democratic Party is not a fighting party on economic issues. Its reforms are so modest, so weak, so timid that even if these reforms were passed over the filibuster, they wouldn’t be the fundamental reforms. I don’t put as much stock on the importance of the filibuster as I do in the state of the Democratic Party, which is rather pitiful.

PLAYBOY: What about the jobs that could potentially be created if the Democrats were to maintain their supermajority?
ZINN: Well, what current jobs would be created if the Democrats were to maintain their majority? I haven’t seen them propose a real jobs bill. The economic stimulus that Obama has proposed and that Democrats supported is a very small step in the direction we need to go. We have a serious unemployment problem in this country. The 10 percent unemployment statistic underestimates the real unemployment situation because it doesn’t account for people who have stopped asking for unemployment Insurance and people who have been discouraged from looking for work.

Let’s put it this way, the Obama administration and the Democratic Party have not been willing to go as far as the 70-year-old New Deal jobs program. That program created jobs for 8 million Americans, which in proportion to the population today would mean jobs for at least 15 million Americans. But the Democratic Party is stuck, and Obama is stuck, in the idea of doing things through the market, doing things through private business and depending on private businesses to create jobs. It’s like easing homeowners’ problems by giving money to the banks or giving subsidies or tax benefits to employers in the hope they then will create jobs.

PLAYBOY: So you don’t think there’s a difference between Coakley and Brown in terms of job creation and how it will affect the midterm elections in November?
ZINN: Coakley and Brown are another matter. There’s a bigger difference between Coakley and Brown than there is generally between the Democratic and Republican Party. But even so, the difference is not a fundamental one. As far as I know Coakley doesn’t stand for the kind of bold job creation program I am talking about. There are a few people in Congress who are in favor of such a creative program. I’m thinking of Representative Dennis Kucinich and I’m thinking of Senator Bernie Sanders, but obviously they’re a tiny minority.

The Democratic Party is following the principle of the “trickle down” theory. If you want to help people who are in need, you give the money to people who are not in need and those people who are not in need, namely the business interests the corporations, they will then help the people who are in need. Now, this will not happen; the principle is wrong. The government should be giving direct economic aid to people. The government should be creating jobs for anybody who wants a job and right after World War II the Congress passed a full Employment Act. Well, it was words not action, but the principle was that the government would be responsible, seeing to it, that anybody who wanted a job could get a job.

Well, that principle enunciated the Employment Act of 1946 has never been followed through because of this ideological block of the market system, capitalism, business and a fear of government programs. The Democratic Party should not be afraid of government programs, and Obama should come boldly before the American public—which has been indoctrinated by both parties to think, Oh, government mustn’t do this. Whenever the Democratic Party or Obama are accused of having big government, they retreats from it, instead of saying “Big government can be very good.” Look at Social Security, look at Medicare, look at the post office, look at the G.I. Bill. There is historic precedent for the government doing things that private enterprise will not do, and the Democratic Party has been unwilling to break with this really cautious ideology of doing things through the market system.

PLAYBOY: Coakley losing to Brown, or the Democrats losing seats in the midterms, really doesn’t make that much of a difference, then?
ZINN: Well, we always are in a position of having to elect people who make small differences, and sure, therefore I will vote for Coakley over Brown and urge other people to do so, understanding that the difference is not a huge one. Just as I will vote for the Democratic Party most of the time over the Republican Party knowing that the difference will not be the kind of difference we should have. So it’s too easy to caricature people who think both parties are inadequate, to caricature them as saying…well, they think both parties are exactly the same. No, they’re not exactly the same, but they’re not different enough to solve the fundamental problems that we have in this country.

PLAYBOY: So what can the average American do?
ZINN: Not much alone, individually. The only time citizens can do anything is if they organize, if they create a movement, if they act collectively, if they join their strengths. The trade union movement, of course, is an example of that. The trade union movement is weak, and the trade union movement needs to become stronger. Citizens need to organize in such a way that they can present the members of Congress with demands and say, “We are going to vote for you if you listen to us,” or “We’re not going to vote for you if you don’t listen to us.” In other words, people have to organize to create a citizens movement. We have to think about the 1930s as a model; people organized in the face of economic crisis—organized into tenants’ movements and unemployment councils and of course they organized a new trade union movement, the CIO. So we need people to organize. Of course, this is not easy, and it won’t happen overnight. Because it’s not easy the tendency is to throw up your hands and not do anything, but we have to start at some point, and the starting point is people getting together with other people and creating organizations. For instance, people can get together to stop evictions. Neighbors can get together. This is something that can be done at a local level. This was done in the 1930s when neighbors got together to stop the evictions of people who weren’t able to pay their rent and the 1930s were full of such incidents. Tenants’ councils had been formed and when people were evicted from their tenements, their neighbors gathered and put their furniture back in the house.

Now, today foreclosures are taking place, people are losing their homes. Maybe we should get together and not allow people to be evicted from their homes. They are substituting for a government which is not acting on their behalf because if the government were acting on their behalf, the government would stop foreclosures, just stop it cold. So what people have to do is sort of look around in their community, get together with other people and begin to organize.

PLAYBOY: Well, some may argue too that the formation of Tea Parties——
ZINN: The problem with the Tea Parties is that it’s a very nice idea to have tea parties. That’s a very nice idea for indignant people to get together. What I’ve seen in these Tea Parties is that their program is not a very progressive program.

They’re getting together for what seem to be unprogressive policies. I don’t know a lot about what the Tea Parties stand for, but what I’ve seen suggests that the main object of the Tea Parties seems to be to unseat Obama, and to me that’s not the problem. I know a right-wing radio host promotes the Tea Parties, and that suggest to me that the Tea Parties are kind of right-wing populist movement. We don’t need a right-wing populist movement. It was a right-wing populist movement that put the Nazis into power in Germany.

PLAYBOY: But in terms of people getting together and organizing, they could say they are doing that.
ZINN: Yes, in those terms. We could learn from the tactic of getting people together. That’s what we should be doing: getting together for purposes different than the purposes of the Tea Party.

PLAYBOY: Most of the people who are going to be motivated to organize and assemble are people who have lost their jobs, but there’s so much pressure to constantly look for work that they don’t necessarily have the time or the will to get together with one another.
ZINN: This has always been true. The people who are in trouble must take care of their personal needs and their security. People have always found when they had the incentive, when they had the strong enough motivation, people have always found the time and the energy to get together and organize in spite of their personal difficulties. That’s been a constant all the way through American history.

PLAYBOY: In the past when people have had similar economic problems, they haven’t been in such dire debt, which especially forces a person to find a job and focus on yourself or your family.
ZINN: That’s certainly true, but no matter how they try to find a job, no matter how they are pushed by the fact that they are in debt, the fact is that the jobs are not there, and therefore the solution to their problem is to organize in such a way to demand that the government create jobs for them.

PLAYBOY: Many European countries have steady unemployment hovering around 10 percent. Why is it wrong if the U.S. has the same?
ZINN: The difference is that these other countries have very generous unemployment benefits. France has a high unemployment rate, and the unemployed there get 60 and 75 percent of the salary. Our unemployed get nothing like that. Unemployment benefits in France last several years. The government has a responsibility to make sure that unemployed people have an adequate standard of living by giving generous unemployment benefits over a long enough period of time.

PLAYBOY: And health care is extended too for those who are unemployed.
ZINN: Well, of course, yes. The difference with other countries is whether you’re employed or unemployed you get health care. You get free health care. Health care is not dependent on whether you’re employed or unemployed. In this country it is dependent and this is one of the scandals of the Democratic Party that it has not fought for true universal health care that is free government-organized health care as they have in Canada and France. I mean the United Nations puts ranks the United States about 37th in health care. Here we are, the richest country in the world, and we’re ranked 37th in health care. There are all these other countries that are ahead of us, and the fact that the Democratic Party cannot move boldly and ask for a government health care even when they sort of compromise and compromise and end up with, well, with—— We won’t have public health care, but we’ll have a public option for the possibility of public health care, and even that gets thrown out as we have seen happen. When you start with a compromise, you end up with a compromise of compromise of a compromise, and that’s what has happened to health care in the Obama administration.

PLAYBOY: Circling back to what happens if Brown takes the late Ted Kennedy’s seat, doesn’t that mean good-bye to health care, good-bye to financial reform?
ZINN: Well, it may very well be, but it should be recognized that for the Democrats to so-call “win” on health care reform is a very feeble victory, and so, yes, you take what you can, but you understand what you’re getting, and what we are getting in health care reform is really flagrantly inadequate.

PLAYBOY: To steer back to the economic situation. What will a prolonged unemployment mean?
ZINN: It will mean that the already great gap between the superrich and everybody else will be greater. Maybe the growth in unemployment will finally lead people to organize in a way that they haven’t organized before. I mean if something terrible is happening in the economy, you hope it can at least impel people to become angry and militant and do what was done in the 1930s. But certainly the continuation of unemployment is not going to be a good thing.

PLAYBOY: With Thatcher’s Britain in the early 1980s, the lack of response from the government meant a two-decade-long recovery.
ZINN: England at least has been ahead of us in the matter of social policy, the matter of health care and other social policies despite the Thatcher regime. One thing that happens is when liberal administrations are replaced by conservative administration, the liberal administration has put through reforms that are then very hard to destroy, and so the principles of Roosevelt reforms—even though we’ve had a succession of centrist Democrats and conservative Republicans since Roosevelt—the basic Roosevelt reforms of Social Security and unemployment insurance, they’ve remained. The basic reforms of the 1960s with Medicare, Medicaid they have remained. Well, Clinton preceded over the worst case of the destruction of a New Deal reform, but my point is, if you fight for policy, even if you then lose the election, it’s very hard to dislodge those policies.

I was just talking this afternoon to a group of trade unionists gathered here in Cambridge, and one of them, who is from Australia, pointed out that in Australia there was a socialist prime minister who was not elected for a second term. However, while he was in office, he put through a group of reforms in health care and other economic reforms that were not overturned. I cite this because the argument very often for the Obama administration, and for being so cautious is that it’s important for Obama to win the next election. And my point is no, it’s not important for Obama to win the next election—not as important as putting through economic policies that will then be hard to dislodge no matter who is elected.