Chapter 1
"A Jungle of Terrible Odors"The Brooklyn of Howard Zinn's youth was a place of hardscrabble poverty, crowded tenements, rats, and roaches. Zinn was never nostalgic about being raised poor. With a faraway look, his trademark smile falling, he once said, "The roaches. Never absent, where we lived. We'd come home and they'd be all over the kitchen table and scatter when we turned on the light. I never got used to them." The poverty of his youth was always there in the back of his mind, especially when he was confronted with narratives about how just "working harder" would have solved all the problems his family faced. He once wrote, "I always feel some rage when I hear the voice of the arrogant and affluent: we have a wonderful system; if you work hard, you will make it. How hard my parents worked. How brave they were just to keep four sons alive in the cold-water tenements of Brooklyn."
Watercolored memories were also difficult to conjure because the Brooklyn of Zinn's 1922 birth was in a state of dirty, cacophonous, rapidly changing industrialization. By the early 1920s, it had recently transformed into one of the top manufacturing hubs in the country. Brooklyn's largest industry, sugar refining, produced more than half the sugar consumed in the United States. In addition, the borough had shipyards, slaughterhouses, and an archipelago of sweatshops. For countless waves of Jewish and Eastern European immigrants, this made Brooklyn a place where they could speak the language and be brought in by people from their villages or shtetls. The growth of jobs and absence of an explicitly legal Jim Crow also made it a stop on the Great Migration north by Black laborers and an early destination for the people of Puerto Rico ready to leave an indelible imprint on the city. Almost half of the people in Brooklyn had not in fact been born there. The work available in Brooklyn might have been arduous, but there was at this time, until the 1929 Great Depression, ample work to be found.
Then, when Zinn was two years old, a law was passed that would have kept his parents from even entering the United States, the 1924 Immigration Restriction Act. This bill was lobbied for by an increasingly vocal and visible Ku Klux Klan, and when President Coolidge signed it, he used a widely known Klan phrase, "America for Americans." It was passed with more than 80 percent of Congress fulsomely voting in the affirmative. The foundations of today's barbaric immigration system, from ICE raids to the label "illegal alien," come from this bill. The bill was also supported by the segregated American Federation of Labor making common cause with the Klan. It was most of all a naked attack on the people of Asian descent already in the United States who had for decades played a critical role in constructing the nation's infrastructure, often paying with their lives (think of the racist phrase "not a Chinaman's chance," which originated in the idea that their high rates of deaths while building the railroads was a mockable inevitability). Not only was their path to citizenship stymied, but the bill invoked a total barring of Chinese immigration. It also dramatically prioritized Western and Northern European Christian immigrants, shutting out the Jews of Southern and Eastern Europe, along with people from Italy. The Jews turned away after 1924 either entered the country illegally or were sent back. In the Jewish community, this law was applied most infamously in 1939 when a boatload of Jewish political refugees on the SS St. Louis was turned away and returned home, where they were killed in Nazi concentration camps. They were described by one congressman as "hordes of inferior stock." Jews were "filthy, un-American, and often dangerous in their habits." Today's rhetoric of immigrants "poisoning our blood" and the way that white Afrikaners have been welcomed to emigrate while non-white immigrants have been criminalized have roots in the law and rhetoric of 1920s America.
The Zinns were part of a massive wave of those early Jewish immigrants who were able to enter legally before 1924. The family on his mother's side, like so many Eastern European Jewish families came over in stages. In 1909 at the age of fifteen, Zinn's mother, Jenny Rabinowitz, traveled from the Siberian shtetl of Irkutsk to join her father and grandmother. They lived in the back of a barbershop in what was then the decidedly untrendy land of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Jenny couldn't go to school because she had to support her family by working as a seamstress, sewing eleven hours a day and six days a week before she met Eddie Zinn and they started a family. Even with four sons, she never stopped working. It was a hard life, but both Jenny and Eddie made Brooklyn their new home, claiming the mantle of "American" from a country that did not want them there.
Quickly, that Dutch word "Brooklyn" and Jews became practically synonymous. By 1920, almost one-third of New York City was Jewish, the majority calling Brooklyn home. The opening of the Brooklyn Bridge in 1883 had made the area a magnet for immigrants who could live in Brooklyn tenements, but-if employment was scarce in the sugar factories and sweatshops-find work in Manhattan. In 1920, the establishment of a new Brooklyn-Manhattan subway line made the borough even more attractive. Brooklyn became less the new-world shtetl and more a jumping-off point to the wonders of "the city." Howard Zinn's family fit this narrative: arriving with next to nothing, working hard, and, if nothing else, relieved that there was work to be done and an unleaking roof over their heads.
Fittingly, as Brooklyn immigrant labor, Eddie Zinn and Jenny Rabinowitz met while working at the same factory and married, creating a life that had them hopping from cramped apartment to apartment, one step ahead of angry landlords and bill collectors. As Zinn remembered. "I lived in all of Brooklyn's best slums." When the Depression hit, Eddie, a long way from the Austria-Hungary of his youth, worked as a ditchdigger and window cleaner. Jenny, never looking backward after a childhood in Siberia, took odd jobs and did piecework whenever possible. Later, Eddie Zinn found more stability in the waiters' union, working banquets, weddings, and Bar Mitzvahs. Sometimes he'd bring his impossibly tall eldest son to take some shifts with him, although finding a uniform that could make it to his ankles and wrists was never an easy task. "I hated every moment of it," recalled Zinn. "The ill-fitting waiters' tuxedo borrowed from my father on my lanky body; the sleeves absurdly short. My father was five-foot-five and I was already a six footer."
Howard held an early interest in reading despite growing up without books. It started when he saw a torn volume littering the street like trash and officially started the Zinn family library. It was Tarzan and the Jewels of Opal. "There were no books in our house," Zinn recalled. "[My parents] knew little about politics, except that Franklin Roosevelt was a good man because he helped the poor."
Jenny and Eddie, however, seeing that thirst for learning, aimed to quench it. Although they had never heard of Charles Dickens, the Zinns would mail a coupon with a dime each month to the New York Post so their son could read one of what would ultimately be twenty volumes of Dickens' complete works. The family library required an expansion. Reading Dickens, particularly his writings on social class, connected with the young Howard Zinn. Even with the London settings, he saw in Dickens' politics a way to understand the world. He quickly moved on to other socially conscious writings like The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, a book he would return to and teach throughout his life. When The Jungle is remembered today, it is for its influence in inspiring federal legislation over the country's slaughterhouses. Descriptions in The Jungle of the killing floor brought even the stouthearted to nausea. The response to Sinclair's book is why we have the Food and Drug Administration. But from The Jungle's publication in 1905 and its revival in popularity during the Great Depression, readers were engaging in text more radical than just a treatise on food preparation.
In The Jungle Zinn avidly read lines like "Into this wild-beast tangle these men had been born without their consent, they had taken part in it because they could not help it; that they were in jail was no disgrace to them, for the game had never been fair, the dice were loaded. They were swindlers and thieves of pennies and dimes, and they had been trapped and put out of the way by the swindlers and thieves of millions of dollars."
It is not difficult to imagine this having a profound effect on the young teen known to all as "Howie." In particular, the line in The Jungle where Sinclair writes, "The great corporation which employed you lied to you and lied to the whole country-from top to bottom it was nothing but one gigantic lie." This sounds extremely similar to Zinn's maxim about power: "Governments lie all the time. . . . If they told people the truth they wouldn't last very long."
This novel was followed by Richard Wright's short stories and books about racism and class, like Uncle Tom's Children and Native Son, which caused the young Zinn to see from an early age "race and class oppression as intertwined." These writings also pushed Zinn to think about the Black people who now lived in Brooklyn in "their own" neighborhoods. "Black people lived under the Myrtle Avenue El," he recalled. . . . "They lived in darkness all the time. Then they left their living place during the day to go to work as janitors or whatever menial jobs in the white neighborhoods. It was very much like Johannesburg, South Africa. Which many, many years later I visited, and you could see the blacks lived in their little black shanty towns and come into Johannesburg to work during the day and then go back to their little black townships at night. And that's the way it was in Brooklyn."
Between World War I and the 1930s, thousands of Southern Black individuals and families filtered into Brooklyn's neighborhoods. They were among the hundreds of thousands who moved to Northern cities during the aforementioned Great Migration, and by 1930, more than 60 percent of the African Americans in Brooklyn had been born outside the borough. When the A train was extended from Harlem to Brooklyn in 1936, thousands of African Americans left Harlem in search of better lives and less expensive housing.
At Thomas Jefferson High School, Zinn joined a creative writing program, and his intelligence caught the eye of the school's principal, Elias Lieberman. In addition to being an esteemed educator, Lieberman was a Jewish immigrant who had come to this country at the age of seven from St. Petersburg, Russia. He was also an esteemed poet-nicknamed the Poet Principal-and the author of the 1916 poem "I Am an American." There is certainly irony in Lieberman heading Zinn's high school and penning a patriotic opus, with verses like:
"See," said my father, pointing to the flag that fluttered near,
"That flag of stars and stripes is yours;
It is the emblem of the promised land.
It means, my son, the hope of humanity.
Live for it-die for it!"
One of Zinn's favorite poems that he referenced often was Langston Hughes' "Let America Be America Again," which can be read as a critique of Lieberman's work with lines like:
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath-
America will be!
Zinn then moved to what would become his lifetime love: the use of history as a guide to action. He read about fascism in Europe, particularly journalist George Seldes' Sawdust Caesar and The Brown Book of Hitler Terror. These books and the intensifying Brooklyn poverty of the Great Depression pushed Zinn toward activism and sent him on a journey looking for answers as to why poverty, racism, and fascism had to exist at all. He began engaging in debates with the young communists he would see "among the basketball players and street talkers" selling newspapers and organizing Depression-era campaigns like the "unemployed councils" of New York City. Tall for his times, Zinn played basketball with a sweet set shot (according to him), so the interaction was regular. While never a member of the Communist Party (despite the fervent wishes of his detractors), Zinn sought their members out to better understand the world and find ways to be part of what appeared to him to be an increasingly growing revolt against Depression-era poverty.
He was invited to attend a demonstration in Union Square, a peaceful gathering against fascism and war. Those aims were dashed when mounted police charged the crowd. A bewildered and frozen Zinn took a hit on the side of the head and was concussed, losing consciousness. This was a major turning point. He later spoke about the experience, saying,
"Exactly at 10:00, banners unfurled, people started chanting. It was fantastic. So my friend and I relieved two women holding a banner and then we heard sirens. And before I knew it, cops with clubs began beating the demonstrators. I was spun around and got hit on the side of my head. I was out. I woke up in a doorway. The demonstration was being scattered. And it was an absolute shocking experience because I had no idea the police would react like this to an innocent demonstration. That an innocent group of people could be perceived as that menacing. From that moment on, I was no longer a liberal, a believer in the self-correcting character of American democracy. I was a radical, believing that something fundamental was wrong in this country-not just the existence of poverty amidst great wealth, not just the horrible treatment of black and brown people, but something rotten at the root. Since then, I've come to understand, we need not just a new president or new laws, but an uprooting of the old order, the introduction of a new kind of society-cooperative, peaceful, egalitarian."
Copyright © 2026 by Dave Zirin. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
