David
Dellinger’s career as a nonviolent revolutionary spanned more than
sixty years. During most of that period Dellinger’s message was so
far outside the mainstream of World War II- and Cold War-era America
that he spoke primarily to the small audience of left-wing pacifists.
But with the rise of the anti-Vietnam War movement from the mid-1960s
through the early 1970s, Dellinger’s decades of activism thrust him
into a position of leadership of a mass movement for the first time
in his life. As Andrew E. Hunt’s excellent biography argues, the
successes and failures of Dellinger’s leadership stemmed from his
long experience as a relatively lonely voice against the dominant
tendencies in American society.
Hunt
portrays Dellinger as a man of fascinating contradictions. A
committed opponent of capitalism, he survived much of his life living
off the largesse of his wealthy, Republican father. A proponent of
nonviolence, he alienated many fellow pacifists with his support for
the Cuban Revolution and other armed Third World liberation
movements. Committed to the Gandhian concept of loving one’s
enemies, he often feuded with his allies in the antiwar and social
justice movements. In short, Hunt’s biography shows Dellinger as
all too human.
Raised
in privilege in the Boston suburb of Wakefield, Dellinger was
radicalized as a student at Yale during the Great Depression. Unlike
most Depression-era radicals, Dellinger did not gravitate toward the
Communist Party, but was influenced by such American proselytes of
Gandhi as Richard Gregg and John Haynes Holmes, developing a
commitment to Christian nonviolence and social justice. As a graduate
divinity student at Union Theological Seminary, Dellinger and two
like-minded students created an “egalitarian Christian” commune,
first in Harlem and later in Newark (which they dubbed the “Newark
Ashram”), where they put into practice their commitment to
community service and social activism.
As
American culture and society began to gear up for U.S. entry into
World War II, Dellinger and other advocates of nonviolence faced the
dilemma of what their response should be to the impetus toward war.
Recognizing the evil of Nazism, many American pacifists realized that
traditional notions of nonviolence were inadequate to deal with
modern totalitarianism. The result was the reinvigoration of pacifism
through the introduction of Gandhian concepts of nonviolent direct
action. The first institutional target of this strategy was the
American penal system, where Dellinger served two terms as a
conscientious objector. In prison, Dellinger and other “conchies”
engaged in such actions as work stoppages and hunger strikes against
such policies as segregated dining facilities and the censorship of
prisoners’ mail, winning several reforms in prison policy. In
addition to providing a working laboratory for new direct action
tactics, prison service in World War II brought together
conscientious objectors from all over the country. As one radical
pacifist commented, “The biggest single mistake the government made
was introducing us to each other. They helped us build the pacifist
network.”
From
the end of World War II through the mid-1960s, Dellinger worked to
enlarge this pacifist network and experiment with the forms of direct
action, often in quixotic ways, such as his attempt at a
Paris-to-Moscow bicycle ride for peace. Dellinger built a national
reputation in pacifist circles, although he was overshadowed by the
towering figure of A.J. Muste. The two joined together in 1956 to
create the journal Liberation, which would develop into one of
the country’s most influential leftist journals; its nondoctrinaire
radicalism would be a major intellectual influence on the growth of
the New Left. But Dellinger stretched the limits of Liberation’s
nonviolent philosophy when he visited postrevolutionary Cuba in 1960
and wrote a series of admiring articles on the Castro regime, a
stance that alienated him from some other pacifists. It would not be
the last time, as Dellinger would later write sympathetically about
the Vietnamese revolution.
With
the rise of the anti-Vietnam War movement in the mid-1960s, Dellinger
found himself in the unaccustomed position of being part of a mass
movement, and with Muste’s death in 1967 he was thrust into a
position of leadership. As head of the National Mobilization
Committee to End the War in Vietnam he organized the great 1967 march
on the Pentagon. But Dellinger’s long history of activism was a
mixed blessing, Hunt argues; “his temperament and style were well
suited to the small anti-Korean War and ban-the-bomb picket lines of
the early 1950s but faltered at the Pentagon.” Allowing himself to
be arrested too early in the march, Dellinger left the thousands of
mainly young protesters leaderless and subject to chaos and a violent
crackdown by federal marshals and military police.
Dellinger
learned his lesson and in the chaos of the demonstrations at the 1968
Democratic Convention in Chicago, he worked tirelessly to provide a
calming influence, although the task was increasingly impossible as
he found himself caught between police intent on crushing any dissent
and “antiwar activists [who] believed that whatever they did, it
had to be bold and dramatic or nobody would listen.” The resulting
debacle culminated in Dellinger’s arrest, along with seven other
antiwar activists, for violating federal conspiracy laws. Among the
so-called Chicago Eight, Dellinger was an anomaly: a middle-aged,
conservatively dressed pacifist who represented an older Left than
than his junior codefendants. And within the various factions and
competing egos of the Chicago Eight, Dellinger stood out for his
outspokenness, for example in defending the rights of fellow
defendant Black Panther Bobby Seale, a stance that especially
antagonized the judge and drew Dellinger an inordinately long
contempt sentence.
The
Chicago conspiracy trial represented the high point of Dellinger’s
career in terms of national prominence, but Hunt argues that it had a
profound negative impact on both Dellinger’s activism and private
life. The trial diverted the attention of both the defendants and the
broader Left away from continuing to build the antiwar movement and
identified Dellinger as a highly visible leader, a position with
which he was never comfortable. Hunt traces Dellinger’s career
after the decline of the Left in the post-Vietnam era until his death
in 2004, a period during which he often found himself in the familiar
position of being a lonely voice of conscience against American
militarism and in favor of social justice.
This
is critical biography in the best sense of the term. Hunt is
sympathetic to his subject but never hesitates to hold Dellinger up
to his own highest ideals and point out when he fell short. Dellinger
emerges as a fully developed figure, likable but often prickly,
courageous but occasionally self-righteous. An anarchist
uncomfortable with the very concept of leadership, Dellinger found
himself thrust into a leadership position where he linked the New
Left to an older noncommunist, decentralized, and humane Left.
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