[In the following review of Zinn's autobiography, Buhle asserts that You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train is not Zinn's best work, but insists that it is nonetheless an engaging and entertaining book.]

I have always imagined that historian Howard Zinn somehow took part in the multitudinous radical movements of the 1840s-50s, campaigning for abolition, women's rights, dress reform and nonviolence. A rare Jew among Yankees and African-Americans, he would have commanded the platform with figures like Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass, held his own against hostile audiences and broadcast the prospects for universal freedom. Something about Zinn's style and bearing suggests the prophetic profile so common to radicals in those days and so rare in our own.

Actually, Zinn grew up in a blue-collar Brooklyn family in the 1920s and '30s, son of a waiter named Eddie and a hard-pressed immigrant mother from Irkutsk, Siberia. At the ripe age of 10, Howard bought a cheap set of Dickens with newspaper coupons, and came to understand poverty in new ways. Almost accidentally he found himself at an antifascist demonstration in Times Square, like Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times picking up a red flag and seeing thousands fall into step behind him. In real life, New York's finest rushed the demonstrators, leaving Zinn with a blurred memory and a lump on the head.

This was Zinn's introduction to the left, along with reading Upton Sinclair, Marx and Engels. He got a job in the Brooklyn Navy Yard and then joined the Army Air Corps at 20, in 1943. Eager to bomb the fascists, he flew missions across Germany, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Educated by a Trotskyist gunner who described the war as an imperialist adventure (Zinn had already read Arthur Koestler's novel of disillusionment with Stalinism, The Yogi and the Commissar), he was pained to realize that he and his colleagues had destroyed the French city of Royan along with the German forces holed up there. This marked the beginning of a deep disillusionment with war.

Mustered out and already married to a political soul-mate, Zinn went to N.Y.U. and then Columbia on the G.I. Bill. Meanwhile his family grew, and he worked nights in a warehouse, joining District 65 of the old Retail, Wholesale and Department Store workers. After he hurt his back he took up adjunct college teaching, determinedly winding up his Ph.D. From here on, the story ceases to be mainly personal: Zinn started work at all-black Spelman College in 1956.

He was just looking for a job, but he found the crusade that he had, perhaps, been preparing himself for. Atlanta was the right place to be, even if few effects of Brown v. Board of Education or the Montgomery bus boycott could yet be seen. Zinn soon took his students and a few others from Morehouse College to visit the Georgia state legislature, where they attempted to sit in the whites-only section, stirring a near-riot. (One of the students from Morehouse was Julian Bond.) By 1959, the faculty adviser of the campus Social Science Club, Zinn found himself prompting the desegregation of the Carnegie Library in Atlanta, as his students asked politely for copies of the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. They won their point. Then came the escalating rounds of sit-ins, jail, appeals, boycotts and still more demonstrations. Almost always Zinn was on hand, offering an apartment for meetings as well as his kindly encouragement and strategic acumen. He modestly takes no credit except for being there. In a book blurb, Marian Wright Edelman (originally Marian Wright, a student of Zinn's at Spelman) describes her teacher as totally inspirational, a formidable influence on the movement spreading around him.

Zinn plunged into the national spotlight when he took an assignment for the Southern Regional Council reporting on the anti-segregation struggle in Albany, Georgia. Zinn's report, condemning the unwillingness of the Kennedy Justice Department to assist the victims, hit the front page of The New York Times. The Nation soon published Zinn's moving essay “Kennedy: The Reluctant Emancipator” (December 1, 1962).

Now SNCC jumped into the act in Albany, with Zinn as one of its two adult advisers (the other was civil rights veteran Ella Baker). Stokely Carmichael, Bob Zellner and Charles Sherrod, along with Bernice Johnson (Reagon) of the Albany SNCC Freedom Singers and later, Sweet Honey in the Rock (Zinn helped her get into Spelman College)—the most spectacular circle of activists since the industrial union movement of the 1930s—soon had a big story to tell.

Zinn decided to tell it, in the book titled SNCC: The New Abolitionists (1964). He had earlier proved himself an able scholar with his prizewinning La Guardia in Congress (1959); now he turned to his real métier, the popular narrative. Hardly a better current history has been written than this instant classic, which combined oral history with a novelistic narrative and a burning sincerity. Zinn had made his mark as an unusual type of scholar, redefining American radicalism while explaining the emergence of a radical generation younger than himself. He says at the end of SNCC that their language and lives “give only a hint of what it is about SNCC that worries traditional liberalism.” The young activists hinted at socialist egalitarianism, “but to put it this way freezes what is really a fluid attitude, directed at ending deprivation and equalizing wealth, but completely open about ways to do this,” a radicalism of mood more than of doctrinal certainty.

One can fairly complain that Zinn did not see the downside to this prospect. Tossed on the seas of youthful expectancy and indifferent to solid organization, SNCC and the rest of the New Left were prone to the ravages of short-term disappointment as much as to the tricks of security agencies and the rhetoric of future neoliberals. But one cannot doubt the poignancy of Zinn's later reflections: “How awful they were, those days in the South, in the movement, and how they were the greatest days of our lives.”

Zinn paid an unexpected price, dismissal from Spelman (Alice Walker, another of his students, left in protest). He headed north, to then-liberal Boston University, in 1964. And once again he placed himself in a political cockpit. By April 1965, Zinn was speaking at the first of the anti-Vietnam War rallies on the Boston Common, sharing a platform with Herbert Marcuse. As a veteran both of the Second World War and the civil rights struggle, Zinn had credibility, a ringing voice and a wonderfully straightforward manner. He projected that public self along with a skillful analysis in a little book, Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal, which sold well at demonstrations and went through eight quick editions. A Cleveland Plain Dealer columnist suggested that the final chapter of Zinn's book, written as a model presidential address, would make a real President giving it “one of the great men of history.” Johnson and his would-be successor, Hubert Humphrey, lacked the courage to try it.

The deepening disappointment in American liberal leaders marks a deep-textual frustration inevitable in You Can't Be Neutral. Zinn offsets the mood with other hopeful and even funny moments, like F.B.I. agents, in hot pursuit of Father Daniel Berrigan, rushing the stage at a 1970 Passover peace ceremony. (The lights immediately went out, and by the time they came on again Berrigan had vanished into a Bread and Puppet Theatre creation.) But the book does not move toward a happy ending. Zinn's popular narrative, A People's History of the United States (1980), indeed, became the standard textbook alternative against the reality of Reagan America.

The new Boston University president (and clown prince of neoconservatism), John Silber, ached to cashier the much-admired radical professor who drew hundreds of enthusiastic students each semester. “The more democratic a university is, the lousier it is,” said Silber, delicately explaining his educational philosophy a few years later in The New York Times. But Zinn already had tenure. And happily for the rest of us, Silber could not convince Massachusetts voters to launch his gubernatorial career from the little corporate kingdom he had created on campus.

Zinn closes his volume with an epilogue, “The Possibility of Hope,” in which he insists that “small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world.” True, no doubt, although the thought seems rather too pious at a moment in which we require a drastic shift of the radical paradigm just to keep up with the multiple human and environmental calamities ahead. We probably need a science-fiction version of Zinn just now, half prophet and half cyberpunk.

Still, he has a point about our underestimation of the trouble we cause our rulers. The sudden and unexpected appearance of social movements at various moments of the past certainly makes elites nervous, when they think of history at all. Meanwhile, a new, sleek-faced brand of writers, from the conservative think tank to the best-seller shelf to PBS documentaries, is indeed hard at work trying to bury that past in hyperbole about free markets and American innocence.

If You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train seems sometimes less than Zinn's best, it is because he has too much modesty to construct a world view out of his own experiences. However, he is a good read, as always. And the casual or intense Zinn-watcher will surely be touched by his urging to “live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us.” These homely phrases remind us of the simple, often disguised promise that remains alive in human decency and in a willingness to learn from history.