The Admirable Radical

Staughton Lynd and Cold War Dissent, 1945-1970

Carl Mirra

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781612775128

Son of famous sociologists Helen and Robert Lynd, Staughton Lynd was one of the most visible figures of the New Left, a social movement during the 1960s that emphasized participatory democracy. His tireless campaign for social justice prompted his former Spelman College student, Alice Walker, to remember him as "her courageous white teacher" who represented "activism at its most contagious because it was always linked to celebration and joy."

In this first full-length study of Lynd's activist career, author Carl Mirra charts the development of the New Left and traces Lynd's journey into the southern civil rights and anti–Vietnam War movements during the 1960s. He details Lynd's service as a coordinator of the Mississippi Freedom Schools, his famous and controversial peace mission to Hanoi with Tom Hayden, his turbulent academic career, and the legendary attempt by the Radical Historians' Caucus within the American Historical Association to elect him AHA president. The book concludes with Lynd's move in the 1970s to Niles, Ohio, where he assisted in the struggle to keep the steel mills open and where he works as a labor lawyer today.

The Admirable Radical is an important contribution to the study of social history and will interest both social and intellectual historians.

CHAPTER ONE

Premature New Leftist, 1945–1960

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life.

—Henry David Thoreau

[Thoreau’s] going to the pond was an act of social rebellion. It sprang from love of nature, but also from the stubborn conviction that “trade curses everything it handles”; from a refusal to join his Harvard classmates in settling for a conventional career.

—Staughton Lynd

Robert and Helen Lynd had a busy year in 1929. Harcourt and Brace published their study Middletown, which was an instant success, and Helen gave birth on 22 November to Staughton Craig Lynd. To historians, 1929 marks the beginning of the Great Depression, often epitomized by the stock market crash of 24 October, a day forever remembered as Black Tuesday. The crash was more than a single event on a single day, however; the market experienced volatile fluctuations between September and November 1929. The panic of 1929 grew out of the so-called Roaring Twenties. Many Americans experienced prosperity in these “good times,” but countless others confronted hardships in the “bad times.”¹

The Lynds conducted their landmark Middletown study in the 1920s in Muncie, Indiana. Contrary to Jazz Age mythology, the Lynds discovered that roughly one-quarter of Muncie workers were unemployed.² While the Lynds could not link this condition to a broader class conflict in the small city, their study nonetheless challenged the rosy picture of U.S. prosperity. Ironically, the study was commissioned by the John D. Rockefeller Institute of Social and Religious Research (ISRR). The petroleum baron was concerned about class conflict in American society and believed that religion could resolve the tensions of modern capitalist life.³ Popular works of the time, such as Bruce Barton’s The Man Nobody Knows (1925), often conflated religion and business. Barton’s best-seller transformed Jesus’ ministry into entrepreneurial capitalism and sought to sooth any hint of class conflict.

Robert Lynd was an odd choice for a study commissioned by Rockefeller. As a student at Union Theological Seminary in 1922, Robert, required to complete a summer preaching internship, had served as a preacher at one of Rockefeller’s petroleum sites in Elk Basin, Wyoming. As Staughton recounts the story, the local miners did not appreciate a young preacher spending his days with their wives, so Robert Lynd got a job as a pick and shovel laborer. The senior Lynd’s decision to live and work among the working class is one of the things that Staughton Lynd most admired about his father and something that he tried to emulate in his own life. Robert soon published an article about this experience in The Survey Graphic that accused Rockefeller of exploiting the workers. Rockefeller, forced to respond to the bad publicity, admitted that the “twelve-hour day and seven-day week should no longer be tolerated.”⁴

Despite the Elk Basin debacle, the Rockefeller Institute commissioned Middletown—but then refused to publish the manuscript after it was completed. Robert was told that “it wasn’t very good.” Anthropologist Clark Wiggler contributed an introduction and Harcourt and Brace Company eventually published the now-famous and classic work.⁵

Robert and Helen Lynd were college professors, and Staughton was generally shielded from the hardships of the Depression. Robert taught sociology at Columbia University in New York City from 1931 to 1961, although he did not study sociology as a student. The Middletown study served as Robert’s dissertation. He first had to go line by line through the manuscript and cross out the sentences written by Helen so that the doctoral degree could be awarded. It was “an absurdity,” Helen explained.⁶ Helen Lynd also held a Ph.D. from Columbia University and from 1929 to 1964 was a professor at Sarah Lawrence College, located north of New York City. She contributed to the school’s progressive curriculum, and the college maintains a scholarship fund in Helen’s name. Helen was committed to social justice and was a long-time member of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

Since the Lynds were teaching during the day, they hired Mary Bohan to care for Staughton and his sister, Andrea. Bohan had come to the United States from Ireland following the Easter Rising, the failed 1916 Irish rebellion, and was filled with revolutionary songs that she shared with the children. Staughton remembers “My Old Fenian Gun,” in which a father tells his young son how the boy’s mother died fleeing British soldiers on a cold night: “I’ve done my part, I’ll do it still until the fight is won. / When Ireland’s free she’ll bless the man who held the Fenian Gun.”⁷ Perhaps this song planted the first seed in Staughton’s mind of the power and potency of revolutionary ideals.

Two additional experiences inscribed revolutionary ideas on the young Staughton’s mind. Seymour Martin Lipset, the conservative sociologist, was in his younger years a socialist who studied under Robert Lynd at Columbia in the 1940s. Lipset felt it was of paramount importance that Staughton Lynd visit the Socialist Party headquarters. On the subway ride there, Lipset shared a vignette that “changed my life.” During the Spanish Civil War, a famous anarchist was spotted at the end of a food line, awaiting his meal with the people. “‘Comrade,’” a compatriot urged him, “‘come to the front of the line. Your time is too valuable to be wasted this way. Your work is too important for you to stand at the back of the line. Think of the revolution!’ Moving not one inch, the anarchist leader replied: ‘This is the Revolution.’”

Reading C. Wright Mills’s The New Men of Power also roused Lynd. The book explored what was then the relatively new Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Mills suggested that its leadership was comprised of “bureaucrats” at the top of a hierarchical structure. In the early section of the book, and “in contrast to all that was to follow,” Mills quoted a story regarding laborers from the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), called Wobblies, who traveled to Washington to join the free speech fights. When they arrived by boat, the sheriff yelled to them, “Don’t you come no further. Who the hell’s your leader anyhow?” Without pause, the group replied, “We’re all leaders.”⁸

Given the democratic environment of the Lynd home, it is easy to understand Lynd’s appreciation for the general tenor of the Lipset story and Mills quotation. However, his father’s democratic vision was hierarchal, and his mother’s was more individualistic. Lynd’s early fascination with solidarity and fraternity proceeded from the limitations that he perceived in his parents’ radicalism.

Meanwhile, Robert was imparting the importance of education and academe to Staughton. It was his dream to see his son become an Ivy League professor. On a family trip to Boston to watch a baseball game, Robert brought Staughton to Harvard University as a not so subtle reminder of where his son was to attend college. To prepare Staughton for this goal, the Lynds enrolled him at the Ethical Culture Schools at 33 Central Park West in New York City. This institution was originally chartered in 1878 as a free kindergarten for poor children by the New York Society for Ethical Culture, founded by Felix Adler, but its success eventually attracted wealthy families. The school added elementary grades in 1880 and opened at the Central Park West location in 1904. In 1928, it added an upper school, the Fieldston School, in the Riverdale area of the Bronx, which became part of the Ivy Preparatory School League. The Ethical Culture Schools have emphasized moral education for more than a century, along with a progressive, student-centered curriculum. The schools also welcomed Jewish students at a time when anti-Semitic attitudes led to quotas at prestigious institutions such as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. As one alumnus put it, the schools were “havens for secular Jews, who rejected . . . rituals of Judaism, but accepted many of its ethical teachings.” Notable alumni included J. Robert Oppenheimer, New York district attorney Robert Morgenthau, and former poet laureate Howard Nemerov.⁹

Evaluations of Lynd’s work at the Ethical Culture Schools were generally most favorable, as he was “an unusually gifted boy” and a “born leader,” according to a report made in 1939 when Lynd was ten years old. A couple of years later, Lynd ran into some bumps. One report noted bouts of “losing his temper” and a certain “messiness,” with “dirt accumulated on his hands.”¹⁰ Evidently Lynd cleaned up his act. He started several hobby clubs, made the varsity football team at thirteen, served as captain of the baseball team as a senior, and was president of the student government.¹¹

Staughton Lynd left Fieldston in 1946 and entered Harvard University at the age of sixteen. He was already a self-described socialist. There were two thousand students in his entering freshman class, including Robert B. Goodman and Robert Bellah, who later produced influential studies on civil religion. Lynd found his time at Harvard generally unpleasant. Among his few happy memories were trips to the anthropology library across the street from Peabody Museum, which housed Hopi and Navajo oral histories. Meeting his future wife, Alice, was Lynd’s most joyful encounter at Harvard. Alice was a student at Radcliffe, the women’s college associated with Harvard. Radcliffe women were still restricted in their use of Harvard’s libraries and facilities. Alice and Staughton met over the summer when many of these impediments were suspended.¹²

Lynd flirted with a plethora of radical organizations in this period that he believed “were working for a society in which the sort of human relationships I believe in could develop.” The U.S. government thought otherwise and monitored some of these organizations; J. Edgar Hoover mentioned the American Youth for Democracy (AYD) before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), and the president of Brooklyn College worked to rid the campus of its presence. Between 1946 and 1950, Lynd was a member of AYD, as well as of the Young Progressives of America and the John Reed Society at Harvard, all Communist-controlled groups. He also briefly joined certain Trotskyist organizations, including the youth group of the Independent Socialist League and the Socialist Workers Party.¹³ Trotskyism is derived from Leon Trotsky, a Soviet Communist Party leader and war commissar following the Russian Revolution in 1917, who was exiled when he formed the Left Opposition. The U.S.-based Trotskyist movement experienced some significant upheavals in the years preceding Lynd’s arrival at Harvard. The major Trotskyist group, the Communist League of America (CLA), appeared in 1928 after its leaders were expelled from the Communist International. In the 1930s, the CLA and American Workers Party united under the banner of the U.S. Workers Party and eventually merged with the Socialist Party of America. The CLA maintained its autonomy despite the merger, and gained influence within the Young People’s Socialist League (YPSL). This influence disturbed the Socialist Party of America, which ousted the CLA in the late 1930s. Out of this group emerged the Socialist Workers Party as a Trotskyist organization. In 1940, yet another split ensued, in which the newly formed Trotskyist group divided into the Socialist Workers Party, which adhered more strictly to Lenin’s democratic centralism, and the Workers Party, led largely by Max Shachtman. The varied, nuanced debates among these competing groups is beyond the scope of this chapter, and while North American adherents of Trotskyism vary in outlook, they generally promote a vanguard party and view themselves as the most revolutionary organization. Shachtman, however, viewed both Stalinism and capitalism as an obstacle to socialism, a position not at odds with Lynd’s view. Yet over time Trotskyism came to stand, in organizational style and general orientation, in stark contrast to Lynd’s political emphasis on the agency of the working class and poor. The Trotskyist groups were anti-Soviet and Lynd belonged to them when “I had become strongly anti-Soviet.” However, Lynd observed that the Socialist Workers Party and the Independent Socialist League had little contact with real-world workers. His membership in the Trotskyist organizations lasted only a few weeks and he never paid any dues.¹⁴

Staughton Lynd became a member of all these radical organizations principally because they worked for “peace and democracy.”¹⁵ But the Communists at Harvard “gave me a hard time,” Lynd later recalled, because he emphasized ethical principles throughout history rather than class interests.¹⁶ On the opposite end of the spectrum were Lynd’s Harvard professors, who offered little relief from what was a restrictive environment. Lynd recalls that Samuel Eliot Morison, who wrote the official History of U.S. Naval Operations in World War II, an expansive, patriotic, fifteen-volume tome, lectured on colonial history dressed in yachting whites. Most readers will remember Morison’s celebratory Christopher Columbus, Mariner, which Howard Zinn’s popular text A People’s History of the United States dismantled. Zinn sought to explain why mainstream history is biased, and why scholars such as Lynd rail against it. Zinn noted that Morison acknowledged Columbus’s genocidal role, but only in a quick sentence buried in the text, signaling to the reader that “yes, mass murder took place, but it’s not that important . . . it should affect very little what we do in the world.”¹⁷ Lynd was wrestling with how scholarship might serve peace and democracy; Harvard in the 1940s was hardly an incubator for this social examination. In March 1948, Lynd wrote his father a letter that summarizes the intellectual sterility of Harvard. “Our age—alack—is one in which the Man of Thought and the Man of Action have been divorced.”¹⁸ Both the radical ...