Stephen Bird - Agitation with a Smile: Howard Zinns Legacies and the Future of Activism

Agitation with a Smile: Howard Zinns Legacies and the Future of Activism — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Agitation with a Smile: Howard Zinns Legacies and the Future of Activism" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

1234567...90

AGITATION WITH A SMILE

AGITATION WITH A SMILE

HOWARD ZINNS LEGACIES
AND THE FUTURE OF ACTIVISM

Edited by
Stephen Bird, Adam Silver, and
Joshua C. Yesnowitz

Permission granted by Hal Leonard and the Woody Guthrie Archive for the use of Ludlow Massacre, lyrics by Woody Guthrie.

First published 2013 by Paradigm Publishers

Published 2016 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright 2013,Taylor & Francis.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Agitation with a smile: Howard Zinns legacies and the future of activism / Stephen Bird, Adam Silver, and Joshua C. Yesnowitz, editors.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-61205-1826 (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. Zinn, Howard, 19222010Political and social views. 2. Zinn, Howard, 19222010Criticism and interpretation. 3. Social movements. I. Bird, Stephen, 1965
E175.5.Z56A45 2013
303.484dc23
2012046511

ISBN 13: 978-1-61205-181-9 (hbk)
ISBN 13: 978-1-61205-182-6 (pbk)

Designed and Typeset by Straight Creek Bookmakers.

Contents

Frances Fox Piven

Stephen Bird, Adam Silver, and Joshua C. Yesnowitz

Song lyrics by Woody Guthrie

Ambre Ivol and Paul Buhle

Ambre Ivol

Paul Reynolds

Eric Boehme

iga Vodovnik

Christopher C. Robinson

A poem by Alix Olson

Patricia Moynagh

Ross Caputi

Alix Olson

A poem by Martn Espada

Edward P. Morgan

Irene Gendzier

Stephen Bird, Adam Silver and Joshua C. Yesnowitz

Noam Chomsky

Frances Fox Piven

Howard Zinn and I became lifelong friends when I took a job in political science at Boston University in 1973. My office on the third foor of 232 Bay State Road was adjacent to his, and across the hall was our mutual pal, the famboyant and outrageous Murray Levin. None of the other faculty were consigned to the third foor, so that corner of the building belonged to us and to our students. We talked and laughed a lot and it was altogether a wonderful arrangement. I left BU, regretfully, ten years later. But I always stayed in close touch with Howard and his wife Roz. For much of my life, Howard has been not only a friend, but part of my very consciousness. Whatever I was thinking or doing, I wanted to run by Howard. I didnt always agree with him. Sometimes I thought he was an impossible romantic, what with his infatuation with Emma Goldman, his poetry, and such. But I always wanted to hear what he thought.

Lots happened during those years at BU. There were continuing demonstrations against the Vietnam War and against ROTC on campus, helping to trigger an unending local war with the president of the university. John Silber had been dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Texas. He was at first welcomed as president of BU because he had been fired at Texas after defending faculty rights. His tenure at BU was entirely different. He seemed to think being president gave him unilateral authority over everythingeven, rumor had it, the contents of our waste baskets. Defiance by those he considered his inferiors and subordinates especially infuriated him, but defiance there certainly was, and Howard became the special target of Silbers rage. In retrospect, the Silber wars seem to me utterly crazy, driven by the arrogance of a possibly deranged personality. And in the end, Silber receded into insignificance, while Howard became a luminous figure in politics and the academy. But that took a long time.

Even so, turmoil and threats notwithstanding, those years were happy for me and, I think, for Howard. Indeed, I think Howards life was always joyous, and that had a lot to do with his almost total immersion in his kind of politics, the politics of resistance and direct action. I know many other veterans of movement politics, but I dont know anyone who so fully imbibed the pleasures of political engagement as Howard did. I think the wonderful smile for which he is famous, the kindness and generosity, and the wry good humor are all owed to the fact that Howard had made such a good life for himself and he knew it. He knew the warmth and pleasure of working with good comrades. He knew the exhilaration of being part of an effort much larger than himself, and larger also than the usual tedium of academic efforts and rewards that preoccupy us. I think that is why Howard never posed as a hero or martyr, and never complainednever whined about the unfairness of John Silber (who froze his salary and tried to stem enrollment in his classes by assigning him smaller rooms), for example. He knew he had a good life, and he showed that in his every gesture.

Enough reminiscing. I want to say something about the main preoccupations of the essays in this book, which try to place Howards work in a broader intellectual context. An obvious approach is to ask about Howards political philosophy. And as these essays show, the answer is not easypartly, I think, because Howard never completely satisfied himself about the big questions of political philosophy. And yet he was, I believe, satisfied to live and work with tentative and incomplete answers, satisfied to continue to try to figure out our political possibilities. Still, some features of his political beliefs are clear.

First, Howards thinking about politics was grounded in moral precepts. I mean by this simply that it was the moral questions about social and political life that preoccupied him, and it was the moral tenets on which he came to rely that animated his activism and his arguments.

The central moral precept that animated his activism and writing was his commitment to social justice. For Howard, the main measure of social justice was the treatment accorded to people who were at the bottom of social hierarchies, who were degraded, denied rights, and marginalized because they were poor, because of their gender or race or ethnicity or nationality or sexual orientation, or because they had fallen into the clutches of the law-enforcement authorities.

The injustices perpetrated by the powerful called for popular resistance, and that was another of Howards core beliefs. Resistance did not mean petitions or voting or assemblies, although it might in the course of events come to include those things. Mainly resistance meant direct action, political activism outside the channels of electoral-representative institutions, and activism that included a willingness not only to break with conventional forms of political participation, but an activism so fueled by indignation that people were ready to break some of the myriad laws that usually ensure quiescence and hopelessness, and that also shield the authorities from the anger of the people. Howard believed in direct action, in protest movements. Indeed he saw such uprisings as the main instrument of such influence as ordinary people have ever achieved or will achieve in the United States.

Next page

1234567...90

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «Agitation with a Smile: Howard Zinns Legacies and the Future of Activism»

Look at similar books to Agitation with a Smile: Howard Zinns Legacies and the Future of Activism. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.

Stephen Valocchi

Social Movements and Activism in the USA

Howard Zinn

The Unraveling of the Bush Presidency

Robert Cohen

Howard Zinns Southern Diary: Sit-Ins, Civil Rights, and Black Womens Student Activism

Spelman College

Howard Zinns Southern diary: sit-ins, civil rights, and black womens student activism

Mary Grabar

20 Aug

Stephen Moss

The Robin: A Biography

Howard Zinn

Howard Zinn on Race

Stephen Moss

Understanding bird behaviour

Zinn

Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal

Stephen Jay Gould

The Flamingo’s Smile: Reflections in Natural History

Stephen Moss

Do Birds Have Knees?: All Your Bird Questions Answered

Howard Zinn

The Zinn Reader: Writings on Disobedience and Democracy

Discussion, reviews of the book Agitation with a Smile: Howard Zinns Legacies and the Future of Activism and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.