I'm not in favor of any book banning...it's a slippery slope
Howard Zinn was teaching a class, but he wasn’t yet a professor and his classroom wasn’t at a university. It was late 1951, and the students who gathered for Zinn’s lessons in Brooklyn were his fellow members of the Communist Party USA.
One of Zinn’s comrades described him as “a person with some authority” within the local CPUSA section and said that Zinn’s class was on “basic Marxism,” the theme being “that the basic teachings of Marx and Lenin were sound and should be adhered to by those present.”
That description, furnished to the Federal Bureau of Investigation by a former Communist in 1957, is included in more than 400 pages of Zinn’s
FBI file made public last week.
The FBI files demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt that Zinn — author of
A People’s History of the United States, widely used as a textbook or supplement in many of our nation’s high schools and universities — was a card-carrying Communist at a time when the Soviet Union was America’s most dreaded enemy.
File No. 100-360217 was begun in March 1949 in response to an order from FBI director J. Edgar Hoover to Edward Scheidt, special agent in charge of the Bureau’s New York office. Zinn’s name had previously surfaced in connection with other FBI investigations of Communist Party activities, but a new report from an unnamed agent marked Zinn as a subject of special interest.
In 1948, an FBI confidential informant had spoken to Zinn at a protest in front of the White House and reported that, during the course of their conversation, “Zinn indicated that he is a member of the Communist Party and that he attends Party meetings five nights a week in Brooklyn.” Zinn, who was then a 26-year-old Army Air Force veteran attending New York University, expressed to the informant his support for Henry Wallace’s third-party “Progressive” presidential campaign, “indicating that the Communist Party was 100% behind this Movement,” according to the FBI file.
Additional investigation showed that Zinn was active in several Communist-dominated “front groups,” and that in 1947 Zinn was a delegate to a conference of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, which had been designated a subversive organization by the Attorney General pursuant to a 1947 executive order of President Truman. Furthermore, according to another informant, Zinn’s Brooklyn address “appeared on a list of addressograph stencils at Communist Party Headquarters” in New York.
The Case Against Howard Zinn
