Reel to real history: A conversation with John Sayles and Howard Zinn

Radical Society, Jul 2002 by Neff, Gina

WHEN OUR MOST TRAGIC MOMENTS are widely described as being "like a movie," when life begins to resemble life on the screen, when film history is better known than real history, what hope is there for reclaiming our past? This spring, Radical Society sat down with two heroes of the left, historian Howard Zinn and filmmaker John Sayles, for a conversation about politics and movies, culture and commodities, art and history.

Gina Neff (GN): In the beginning of You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train, Howard, you described a scene that I'm sure is played out across the country: a teacher being investigated for using A People's History of the United States in her class. It reminded me of the scene in Lone Star where there is similar anger about how to teach the history of the Alamo. Do you think that fictionalized accounts can make history-and especially radical and hard-to-hear history-accessible in a way that textbooks can't?

Howard Zinn (HZ): A teacher in San Diego wrote to me saying, "You got me in trouble. I used your book and the parents complained after looking at the first few pages." The school board ordered an investigation, but it worked out in the end, because the school board talked to the kids who said, "Oh, she uses a regular textbook alongside of People's History." There's a certain version of historical events which is sacrosanct and the American Revolution is certainly one of them, and, of course, the Civil War and World War II.

John Sayles (JS): I talked to Eric Foner, a historian at Columbia, a few years ago.1 When he goes to history conferences, he often talks to people who teach history at a high-school level who tell him they like his books but want something more celebratory of our history. The scene that you mentioned in Lone Star came fairly specifically from a particular situation in Texas. Because the people who publish textbooks don't want to make a different version of the textbook for every state, states with a market the size of Texas have a stranglehold on which textbooks are used across the United States. In Texas there was an extremely conservative husband and wife team who had the power to shape what history textbooks were used across the nation.2 Had they been from Rhode Island they wouldn't have had the power; they could have had the same opinions but they wouldn't have had the clout. One of the things that so-called fictionalized accounts can do is bypass that process occasionally. Sometimes not. I don't know if you saw The Patriot, but it seemed very clear to me that a lot of decisions on how history was going to be presented were not even about being politically correct but just about not offending anybody and that was about making more money. For instance, the lead guy, Mel Gibson's character was a planter in South Carolina. It's not likely that he would have had free black people working for him, but somewhere along the line somebody made the decision that showing slavery would either offend people or make them less sympathetic to the main character, so they just fudged it.

HZ: Nobody will say anything that throws the founding fathers into a bad light, per se, but you can imagine a fictionalized version of some events that could be very dramatic indeed. Take Shays's Rebellion. If you did a movie about Shays's Rebellion, inevitably you would be seeing the American Revolution in a different way. What you would have is a story with all these GIs coming back after the Revolutionary War into western Massachusetts and trying to make a living on a piece of land, and rebelling when that land was taken away from them by the rich of Massachusetts. The leaders of the revolution sent in an army to suppress them, and maybe our movie would show the founding fathers, when they got together for the Constitutional Convention, in a panic over Shays's Rebellion. Imagine them saying on the screen, "We mustn't have more rebellions like this. We must set up a nation with a constitution which is strong enough, powerful enough to suppress rebellion." Now that's a version of the founding fathers and the American Revolution that the, makers of The Patriot, they would never go along with.

JS: If you went through the Revolutionary War films that have been made, you'll find George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, but you'll almost never find Thomas Paine, who is the one kind of true radical thinker, almost in the French mold, in the whole bunch and he's just left out, and he's often only a tiny footnote in the history taught in our schools. Certainly he may be called a rabble-rouser and a pamphleteer, but you'll never see the pamphlets in textbooks because the ideas are kind of subversive.

HZ: That's interesting because the same thing happens with the Civil War, where Lincoln and the generals Grant and Sherman play such a big part, but Hollywood films will not deal with the abolition of slavery without which there might not have been a Civil War, without which the Emancipation Proclamation might not have been declared and -