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Howard Zinn Speaks
Collected Speeches 1963-2009
Howard Zinn, Anthony Arnove
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eBook - ePub
Howard Zinn Speaks
Collected Speeches 1963-2009
Howard Zinn, Anthony Arnove
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About This Book
* This is the first book of Howard's speeches ever put in print.
* Howard Zinn is a multiple New York Times best-selling author. His People's History of the United States sold more than two million copies. He has unparalleled name recognition on the left.
* Anthony Arnove co-edited Voices of Peoples History of the United States with Howard Zinn. His writing has appeared in numerous publications such as O Magazine, The Financial Times and the Nation. He has made appearances on the BBC, Democracy Now! and other major outlets. Anthony is a widely respected editor, producer and author.
* With the Occupy Wall Street movement shaking the globe, Bringing Democracy Alive and Other Speeches is being released at a perfect time. These speeches will inspire and reward activists with the wisdom and experience of a man who turned the peoples's history into a rallying call for social change.
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1
Southern Influence in National Politics
Howard Zinn was an adviser to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and wrote the book SNCC: The New Abolitionists to document their important work. In this speech, delivered at the Third Annual Spring Conference of SNCC, he questions the title of his talk given by the conferenceâs organizers and challenges the audience to ask tough questions about the challenges facing the civil rights and student movements.
Maybe at some point in this talk, if thatâs what it will be, I will get back somewhere and maybe at some point in it there will be some relationship between what I say and the title âSouthern Influence in National Politics.â If so, it will be an accident. But what I really want to talk about is just politics, or maybe just national politics, or maybe a number of other things connected with it. Iâll tell you why I donât like to talk about Southern influence in national politics: because it perpetuates a kind of mythology which I think is very prevalent in American thinking, and probably in foreign thinking about the United States, and that is that we have here a fine, decent, democratic, beautifully structured, lovely country which the South is spoiling. We have some great statesmen in this country, we have a good country, a fine president, a magnificent Supreme Court, a wonderful set of laws, a great constitution, a magnificent heritage, and all of this is being spoiled by a few miserable, evil Southerners. And I donât think this is true. And you know this isnât true.
And the fact is ⊠I was thinking to myself, âI canât tell these people anything that they donât feel in their bones.â But, you know how it is, your job is to talk, you have to talk, so you talk. The thing thatâs wrong with that myth is this: racism is not a Southern characteristic, itâs a national characteristic. Racism is not a Southern problem, itâs a national problem. And this has been a very easy way for us to dispose of the whole situation. Weâve done it all the time. This nation historically, we often forget, has been for most of its existence a slave nation. Well, Iâm counting its existence from the seventeenth century as a social entity. And we have been slave more than we have been free. And if you count our existence from the Declaration of Independence, the years that weâve been a slave nation and the years that weâve been a free nation are pretty close to equal. Itâs not a matter of North or South. We find this out when we go north, and we find this out when Negroes move north. Negroes leave the South and they go north, and they get on an express train which doesnât stop until it gets to Harlem. We like to think that in Missoula, Montana, there is no race problem, that all you have to do is move a hundred Negroes into Missoula, Montana. England found this out. We had great romantic notions about England, and how the English were free from prejudice. And then West Indians moved into certain sections of England, and things began happening.
This is beyond the South. Our problem is not basically that Eastland is vicious, but that Kennedy is timid. And this is something I think we havenât recognized sufficiently. Now, to put it another wayâand here Iâm not trying to take the onus off the Southâthe South has been treating the Negro like a dog, but this has been so because the nation has allowed this. If you look at the position of the Negro in American history, the Negro has always been a minor issue, and I mean that. Heâs always been somewhere on the outskirts of American concern, heâs never been a major issue in the thinking of Americans, and certainly not in the thinking of the American national political structure.
There was one point in history, that period around the Civil War, when the Negro became a hitchhiker on a national train which was moving toward economic development and expansion. Because he was a hitchhiker, when he refused to get off they passed the Thirteenth and Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and this, this was a great thing. But that was one momentary flash in American history. The rest of the time the Negro comes second, third, fourth, or nineteenth on the list of national concerns. And this is true even today, when we think that race and the Negro and all of this is very important to the Kennedy administration. Just take a look at the priority number that civil rights is given and all of the things that the Kennedy administration does and all the things that it speaks about.
I want to say a few things about the Kennedy administration, only because it happens to be in power now and only because it is our natural example for the whole problem ofâis this a Southern crime or is this a national crime? We have too long treated what we have done with the Negro in this country as a kind of an aberration on the part of what is otherwise a normal, healthy American society. And this is completely false. Itâs as if you knew somebody who was a very nice, sweet person most of the time, and just one day a week he went out and found somebody and killed him and ate him. And then, if you had to write a letter of recommendation for this person, you would say, âWell, this personâs very dependable, reliable, conscientious. He has one little fault, which weâre trying to correct.â Now, the Kennedy administration has played this myth of Southern conspiracy, Southern evil, to the hilt, and itâs easy for them to play it because thereâs a basis of truth to it. The worst racism is in the South, the worst acts of violence are in the South, the worst senators come from the South. In fact, I could go further and say they come from Georgia, but there are people here from Mississippi who would have to argue about that. . . .
More than half of the standing committees of the Senate are chaired by Southerners, and the administration says, as every administration has said, Well, you see, this is the problem we face, this is built into the situation. Not quite so. Because outside of this framework, above and beyond it and over it, the administration has had an opportunity to do things it had wanted to which could have nullified this power setup, changed it, and in some way created a possibility for decent civil rights legislation in Congress. When Kennedy was elected, if you can remember, there was some expectation, some hope, in the field of civil rights, and I was expectant like everyone else. He had not yet taken office, he had been elected, he was to be inaugurated, but Congress had convened and Kennedy men were already in power in Congress. Mansfield was majority leader, and the Kennedy machine, that great machine, which had succeeded in winning the election for Kennedy by a magnificent manipulative process, was now operating in the Senate. There was real hope.
So the Senate opened, and the very first thing that happened was that there was a battle on Rule 22, a very important rule for civil rights, because Rule 22 decides when you can shut off a Southern filibuster. And it says you can only shut it off when you have two-thirds of the Senate voting to shut off debate. And liberals have been trying to get rid of Rule 22 for a long time, so they can stop a Southern filibuster, so they can get civil rights legislation through Congress, particularly through the Senate, which has been a big stumbling block and which has been a scene of so many filibusters. So the first battle comes with the opening of the Senate right after Kennedy is elected, and a vote is taken on amendment of Rule 22 to make it easier to stop filibusters, and the vote is 50-48. Two votes made the difference. If two votes had switched there, we would have had a tied vote and Nixon, it was clear, with all the things we say, would have voted to change the rule. Kennedyâand everybody who had observed the political scene at that time, in a sense, agrees pretty well on thisâKennedy could have switched those two votes and didnât. Now we donât know what went on behind the scenes. One man who wrote a book on Kennedy, called Kennedy in Power, says that a deal was made between Kennedy and the South to go slow on civil rights and return to other things. We donât have documentary evidence on this. All we know is that Kennedy did not fight to change the rules at this very crucial point at the opening of the Senate.
And since then, again and again, as the Senate has opened and as opportunities have occurred to change this rule, to create a possibility for civil rights legislation to pass, Kennedy has muffed, has stayed home. There was a time when Kennedy was in Congress, when Kennedy was in the Senateâheâd just written his best-selling book Profiles in Courageâand somebody said about Kennedy, âAs a Senator, he shows lots of profile but very little courage.â And this began to look true for him as a president also.
We face a real problem here because we are the victims of visual power. That is, if somebody looks vigorous, we think he is vigorous. If he looks young and so on and so forth, and he strides the right way, or moves the right way, talks the right way, we get an impression of vigor, of strength, of courage. Yes, of vigor. But, it hasnât worked that way with the Kennedy administration.
At the opening of the 88th Congress, in early â63, there was another opportunity to change the rule. Again, Kennedy stayed out of the fight. Senator Joseph Clark of Pennsylvania, one of the rare men in the Senate, stood up in the Senate on February 19, 1963, and opened his speech in an unusual way for the Senate. I say unusual because senators are very polite to one another. And he stood up and he said, âMr. Presidentââhe was talking to the president of the Senate, Lyndon JohnsonââMr. President, I desire to address the Senate on the subject of the Senate establishment, and how it operates.â And then he proceeded to do something which just isnât done in the higher political circles. He proceeded to name those members of what he called a Senate establishment, the top important powerful senators who decide what goes on in the Senate, who decide what bills go through and what bills donât go through, and most of these turn out to be Southerners. And somewhere there at the top of the list is Richard Russell of Georgia. And another person near the top of the list is a personal friend of Kennedyâs. This is the establishment, these are the people who control the Senate steering committee, and the Senate steering committee is the committee that decides what happens and what doesnât happen. . . .
We have the Senate steering committee, and the steering committee is dominated by Southerners and Mike Mansfield, who is a senator, who is Kennedyâs man, who is majority leader, and who has the power to do something about the steering committee, and is much too courteous to his friends in the South. When Clark got up on the Senate and said this about the Senate establishment, Mansfield was very much disturbed. Heâs a nervous man, he gets disturbed at things like this, because he doesnât like people to say things out loud in public that they are supposed to keep private. And he said . . . in effect, âThere are certain people that are in our party and we must be nice to them no matter what region of the country they come from.â Well, Clark didnât make any headway. Clark pointed out, back in â61, when Congress first convened in the new Kennedy administration, Clark knew that people would argue that Kennedy was impotent when it came to Congress, that Southerners controlled things, there wasnât much Kennedy could do. Clark pointed to an interesting historical fact. He pointed to this because he was able to take the initiative really, to go back into the records of the Senate caucuses. This is really a secret thing, and the secretary of the Senate, as a matter of fact, wouldnât let any member of Clarkâs staff go into the historical records to see what previous caucuses in the Senate had decided. He said only a senator himself may go, thinking that Clark, like the other senators, couldnât get out of his office and go over and pore through the archives. But Clark did. And he came up with something interesting, and that was that in 1913, when Woodrow Wilsonâs first Senate convened, the caucus, the Senate caucus, became a scene of quiet revolution. And about twenty-three committee chairmen were replaced by Wilson at that time in order to put into the chairmanship people who would put through Wilsonâs program. That wasnât a civil rights program. It was mostly a program of economic reform. But Wilson wanted those bills passed, and he made sure that he would put into the committee chairmanships the kind of people who would get those bills passed.
Clark was saying, in effect, âJack, you could have done something like this. It was done in 1913, a long time ago.â Well, Kennedy has not done this sort of thing. Kennedy has played, as you know, a very interesting game. Heâs done just enough to prevent his image from collapsing in the minds of the twenty million American Negroes, just enough. He barely skirts the edge, no more. He invites Martin Luther King Jr. to the White House. He also invites John Patterson of Alabama to the White House. Things even out. He appoints Negroes to fairly high office, but he also appoints as director of the Export-Import Bank of the United Statesâwhich interestingly enough has the job of deciding where money goes to which colored peoples of the world, and most of them areâa guy named Merriweather, who was campaign manager for John Patterson of Alabama, who was also campaign manager for Admiral Crommelin, both of whom areâto say extremely racist doesnât mean anything anymore, no, theyâre beyond extreme racist. But this is a man who gets director of the Export-Import Bank. He appoints and makes a big deal of appointing Thurgood Marshall to the circuit court, but on the other side he appoints four staunch segregationists to federal judgeships in Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas. And since then heâs also appointed a real nice one in Georgia: Elliot. You people from Albany all know your friend Robert Elliot, who when somebody makes a constitutional point in court, Elliot says, first to himself, You know Iâve only been on the bench a short time, and he says, âLet me go home and think about this.â And goes home, and six months later he comes back and, of course, he always rules against. . . .
The Kennedy administration, and people who are not antagonistic to itâas I seem to beâpeople who are, you know, newspapermen who work for nice conservative newspapers, say, âWell, this administration likes to manipulate. It likes power. It doesnât really care about things. You almost give it any job to do, it will do it well. It doesnât care what it has to do. Itâs efficient.â And itâs a strange thing, in the American political system we have come to value efficiency more than we have come to value decency. âHe is able, an able man,â is the greatest thing you can say about anyone. People no longer talk about whoâs a good man and whoâs a bad man, but whoâs an able man. The Kennedy administration is able. What itâs able for is something else, but itâs able.
I wonât say any more about the Kennedy administration, because Iâm afraid you may get the impression that Iâm critical of it. The truth is, and I really want to straighten this out, I have nothing against the Kennedy administration that I donât have against every administration that weâve ever had in the history of this country. And I mean it. When people say, you know, they count them up, and they say, âKennedy has done more for civil rights than any other president,â you know, okay, all right. But donât bother me with that. People who keep scorecards donât really know whatâs happening in the world. And the point is not how much has been done. The point is how much has to be done, and the point is, how much can be done which isnât being done? How much power does Kennedy have which he is not utilizing? Hereâs a man who is in control of the most fantastic aggregate of power that any nation has every held in the history of the world, and he canât do anything with it to protect one or two people in a little town in Mississippi. This is incredible. You see? . . .
No, itâs not Kennedy. It goes beyond Kennedy, and it goes I think to our national history and to our national political structure, to our system and to our values. Itâs much more deep rooted than that. And I suppose the problem is that basically weâve always, even when weâve been fairly liberal at times, itâs been a white liberalism. Racism has been dominant in our history and in our actions throughout. And what Iâm really arguing, I think, is that weâve got to look at our national political structure, and weâve got to recognize that thereâs something about the national political structure itselfâno matter who is in power, whether the Democrats or Republicans are in powerâwhich gets in the way of solving the basic human problems that have to be solved in our time.
So this is important because here we have a whole bunch of people who are going out registering people to vote, doing a great job, and what do you do when you walk up to someone and say, âI think you ought to registerâ? What do you tell these people? Do you tell them, âI want you to register to vote because that really is all thatâs missing, all thatâs neededâ? âYou see, we have a beautiful working democratic mechanism here. The only problem is that you are left out of it. If you would just enter this beautiful democratic mechanism, and join in it, you will then be able to do the things you want to do.â Well, I donât think this is an honest statement. I donât think this is true. I think it would be truer to say, âIf you register, and if you vote, you will then have as much power as the rest of us, which is very little. Very little.â. . .
Iâm not singling out the American democratic system as against other systems. Iâm not saying our system is worse than other systems. Iâm just saying itâs not that much better. And I mean this for this reason: any mammoth social organization in the twentieth century places huge obstacles between peopleâs needs and power. And this is as true of the United States as it is of any other huge political mechanism in the world. And we sort of fool ourselves. We read the Constitution, we recite everything about the separation of powers, and pluralism, and two houses of Congress, and voting, and so onâand everything on paper looks good. But when you get down to it, there is something fundamentally wrong in that we cannot translate what people need into what is done at the top of this political mechanism.
Thereâs a test for whether a political structure works, any political structure. A political structure exists in order to make sureâthis is what we have supposedly set it up forâthat nobody takes advantage of anybody else, because if we didnât have a political structure, people would ride roughshod over other people. And so we set up a political structure to defend us against this. We set it up supposedly so it will prevent people from exploiting others, prevent some people from getting rich and keeping others from getting very poor, to prevent some people from holding all power and denying power to others, to prevent people from discriminating against other people for irrational reasons. And we also set up a political structure to keep the peace, because this is important to people. They donât want to die.
On every one of these counts, most political structures in the world have failed. And on every one of these accounts, the American political structure today, in 1963, is failing. Itâs certainly failing in the area of equality. This I donât have to talk about. Itâs failing also in another important area, in the area of making sure that the wealth of this country, which is incredible, does not get siphoned off into relatively few hands and is not kept away from millions and millions of people.
In the last year or so, poverty has been discovered in America. I mean that. Itâs really been discovered. People have suddenly begun to write about the poor. Theyâve been here all this time, theyâve been all around usâlike the Negro has been around us, you know, but he can be right there but you donât see him. Ellison wrote about the âinvisible man.â Well, the invisible man not only applies to the Negro, but it applies to the poor in America. And we find that there are about 8.5 million families, about forty million people, who earn under $2,000 a year. But the picture that we present to the world, and very often to ourselves, is of an affluent society that is just doing great. Everybody is spending money, going here, going there, living it up.
Forty million people, under $2,000 a year. . . . Look at the concentration of wealth, on the other hand. One percent of the population, 700,000 families, own 25 percent of all of the money, stocks, bonds, real estate, all the tangible assets, in the country. And furthermore, this hasnât changed much over the years. Thereâs been practically no change in the distribution of wealth in the United States in the last thirty or forty years. . . .
You read about a man who jumps off a bridge, you read about a man who shoots his wife, you read about a mother who drowns her children. And behind every one of these, if you look in the small print, you find economic deprivation. Well, this is a probl...