From Here to There

The Staughton Lynd Reader

Staughton Lynd, Andrej Grubačić

• Publisher: PM Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781604862157
• eBook ISBN: 9781604863536
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Didattica della storia

From Here to There collects unpublished talks and hard-to-find essays from legendary activist historian Staughton Lynd.

The first section of the Reader collects reminiscences and analyses of the 1960s. A second section offers a vision of how historians might immerse themselves in popular movements while maintaining their obligation to tell the truth. In the last section Lynd explores what nonviolence, resistance to empire as a way of life, and working class self-activity might mean in the twenty-first century. Together, they provide a sweeping overview of the life, and work—to date—of Staughton Lynd.

Both a definitive introduction and further exploration, it is bound to educate, enlighten, and inspire those new to his work and those who have been following it for decades. In a wide-ranging Introduction, anarchist scholar Andrej Gruba?i? considers how Lynd's persistent concerns relate to traditional anarchism.

THE SIXTIES

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FOREWORD

What caused “the Sixties”? How did the uprising of African Americans, students, and ultimately, women, soldiers in Vietnam, and prisoners, come about? Remember that the movement to be explained was international, and outside the United States—as in France in 1968—involved workers, too.

No one appears to have an adequate answer. Perhaps the explanation that came closest was Paul Goodman’s in his book Growing Up Absurd.

And why did the organizations of the Sixties, like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), crash and burn before the decade ended? This, too, is a mystery demanding its historian.

As we await comprehensive accounts, perhaps we can seize and hold particular patches of historical terrain.

Henry Thoreau, whom Ralph Waldo Emerson called an “admirable radical,” was the patron saint of all those who resisted arbitrary authority in the Sixties. He was the man who retreated for a year to Walden Pond and who called together fellow residents of Concord, Massachusetts to hear him speak in praise of Captain John Brown. Students who sat-in at segregated lunch counters and war objectors who tried to climb aboard nuclear submarines invoked Thoreau. “Henry Thoreau: The Admirable Radical” appeared in Liberation magazine in February 1963.

In my first year as a graduate student in history I wrote “How the Cold War Began,” a review essay that drew on several books that had been recently published. Although SNCC and SDS were repeatedly denounced as Communist, in fact, as this essay shows, we kept our distance from both sides in the Cold War. “How the Cold War Began” was published in Commentary in November 1960. It is reprinted with the permission of Commentary, Inc.

The Sixties are rightly remembered for particular achievements, such as winning the right to vote for African Americans in the South and helping to end the Vietnam War. However, we were always multi-issue. Indeed we knew, early on, that the many single issues we confronted were products of an economic system. Speaking to the first mass protest against the Vietnam War, in Washington, D.C. in April 1965, Paul Potter, president of SDS, said that we must “name that system.” But as was generally true in the Sixties, he did not name it. I tried to fill in the blank with “Socialism, the Forbidden Word,” published by Studies on the Left in Summer 1963.

The signature campaign of the Sixties was Mississippi Freedom Summer in 1964. I was coordinator of Freedom Schools, improvised summer high schools for African American young people. Every one seemed to take pride in the Freedom Schools and in “Every School A Freedom School” I try to say why. “Every School A Freedom School” was an address to an organization of radical teachers called the Rouge Forum in May 2009, and is reprinted with permission.

In “Remembering SNCC,” I commented on the strategy underlying the summer, which was to seat delegates from the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) in place of delegates from the all-white state party at the Democratic National Convention. “Remembering SNCC” was a talk to the Organization of American Historians in March 2003. It was delivered at the motel in Memphis where Dr. King was murdered, which has been made over into a museum.

The words “participatory democracy” appeared in the SDS founding manifesto, the Port Huron Statement (1962). Like the song “We Shall Overcome” the term has spread all over the world. Wherever ordinary people demand accountability from their representatives, as throughout Latin America today, they often use the polysyllabic mantra bequeathed by SDS.

SDS published “The New Radicals and Participatory Democracy” as a pamphlet, reprinted from the Summer 1965 issue of Dissent.

The last two pieces in this section address the question: What can we learn from the Sixties so that, if given another chance, we can do better? “The Cold War Expulsions” was an address to an extraordinary gathering of the Pennsylvania Labor History Society at the Community College of Allegheny County in September 1998. The occasion brought together Catholics who had tried to expel Communists from the new unions of the CIO and members of the United Electrical Workers (UE) who had fought the expulsions.

“Weatherman” is a somewhat expanded version of a review of Mark Rudd’s book that was previously published in The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture, v.2, no.2 (September 2009), and is used with permission.

1. HENRY THOREAU: THE ADMIRABLE RADICAL

Henry Thoreau has become the patron saint of new radicals and of all unadjusted Americans. The existentialist doctrine of committed action, Martin Buber’s concept of “encounter,” and of course Gandhi’s practice of civil disobedience, were all clearly anticipated by the retiring Concord surveyor. Like the young men of Concord in the 1840s, we find it natural to ask regarding this or that question of the day, What does Henry Thoreau think? Still more is he an oracle for those who, in choosing a life-work, turn aside from some “good thing” to launch out by dead reckoning on a wild course impossible to justify to friends and relatives. And for those drawn to direct confrontation with the Slave Powers and Mexican Wars of our own times, Thoreau’s spare sentences, driven like nails into the heart of the matter, are Gospel and Baedeker for these forbidding regions.

Emerson, in his essay “The Transcendentalist,” called “admirable radicals” those “intelligent and religious persons [who] withdraw themselves from the common labors and competitions of the market and the caucus, and betake themselves to a certain solitary and critical way of living.” Emerson described their motives with his friend Thoreau in mind: “They are striking work, and crying out for something worthy to do! [Their attitude is:] If I cannot work, at least I need not lie.” The weak soul among them, Emerson continued, uses up his strength in denial: “It is well if he can keep from lying, injustice, and suicide.” But the strong spirits “overpower those around them without effort. Their thought and emotion comes in like a flood, [they] lose no time, but take the right road at first.”

Thoreau appeals today to those who in greater or less degree feel driven to withdraw themselves from the common labors and competition of the market and the caucus, as he did. In the retrospect of the century since his death, he seems a strong spirit who, without wasting his strength on denial, chose the right road at first. Society as he found it, with its anxious competition and soul-exhausting materialism, repelled him. Institutionalized reform, full of talk without action, repelled him no less. He said “no” to both the Establishment and its organized opponents, and found his own way through to say “yes” before his God.

I

Yet the nature of Thoreau’s dissent remains unclear. He is usually regarded as both a pacifist and an anarchist. In fact he was neither.

Thoreau is commonly considered a pacifist because Gandhi acknowledged the impact of “Civil Disobedience” on the shaping of satyagraha. Thoreau’s actual position, however, was the one he imputed to John Brown: a resolve that “he would never have anything to do with any war, unless it were a war for liberty.” In 1854, Thoreau wrote: “Show me a free state, and a court truly of justice, and I will fight for them, if need be.” In 1859, he said:

It was his [John Brown’s] peculiar doctrine that a man has a perfect right to interfere by force with the slaveholder, in order to rescue the slave. I agree with him.... I shall not be forward to think him mistaken in his method who quickest succeeds to liberate the slave. I speak for the slave when I say, that I prefer the philanthropy of Captain Brown to that philanthropy which neither shoots me nor liberates me.

All of us, Thoreau continued, are protected by violence every day in the form of the jail, the gallows, the handcuffs and billy of the policeman. “So we defend ourselves and our hen-roosts, and maintain slavery.” Why shrink from violence when for once it is employed in a righteous cause? “I do not wish to kill nor to be killed, but I can foresee circumstances in which both these things would be by me unavoidable.” Nor was this attitude toward violence a late development in contradiction to an earlier Thoreau: while in all his writings the regular soldier stands for conscienceless servility, the embattled soldier at Concord Bridge always stands for manly independence. What Gandhi took from Thoreau was not pacifism (this influence came rather from Tolstoy), but the concept of civil disobedience.

Thoreau was not an anarchist, either. He wrote in “Civil Disobedience”: “to speak practically and as a citizen, unlike those who call themselves no-government men, I ask, not at once no government, but at once a better government.” “The only government that I recognize,” he repeated in “A Plea For Captain John Brown,” “—and it matters not how few are at the head of it, or how small its army—is that power that establishes justice in the land.” True, Thoreau was not content to wait on the usual political methods of voting and petition. He felt contempt for the politician’s tendency to avoid fundamental questions: “The available candidate,” Thoreau observed, “is invariably the Devil.” However, Thoreau’s decision to sever allegiance from the United States Government sprang not from a contempt for government in general, but from the conviction that this particular government was inherently corrupt because its very constitution (Article I, Section 2 and Article 4, Section 2) sanctioned slavery. Petitioning might be well, but “the State has provided no way; its very Constitution is the evil.” In an America that was a “slave-ship,” in a Massachusetts that was one of the “confederated overseers,” the just man had no choice but total opposition.

As Thoreau himself made clear, this was not anarchism but revolution. “All men recognize the right of revolution,” he writes in “Civil Disobedience,” but they say that while it was right to revolt over a tax on tea, it is wrong to revolt over slavery. “I think,” rebuts Thoreau, “that it is not too soon for honest men to revolt and revolutionize.”

Thoreau’s position in the late 1840s and 1850s was similar to Garrison’s, who publicly burned the Fugitive Slave Law and the Constitution of the United States. These were the days when Congress required every citizen of the North to assist in capturing fugitive slaves, on pain of imprisonment; when the Supreme Court (in the Dred Scott case, 1857) ruled that a Negro could not be a United States citizen; when pro-Southern Presidents openly connived in extending the area of slavery. Thoreau was only one of many who, under these circumstances, resolved to transfer allegiance from the United States Constitution to a still “higher law” of universal morality. Sumner, Seward or Wendell Phillips could have said, as Thoreau did:

I would remind my countrymen that they are to be men first, and Americans only at a late and convenient hour. No matter how valuable law may be to protect your property, even to keep body and soul together, if it do not keep you and humanity together [then break the law].

In rejecting the government of the hour, Thoreau appealed, in the classical manner of revolutionaries, to the people at large. “When, in some obscure country town, the farmers come together to a special town-meeting, to express their opinion on some subject which is vexing the land, that, I think, is the true Congress.” Of the Mexican War which occasioned “Civil Disobedience,” Thoreau remarked that it was “the work of a comparatively few individuals using the standing government as their tool; for, in the outset, the people would not have consented to this measure.” Just how deeply-felt was Thoreau’s sense of involvement in his country is suggested by a passage from “Slavery in Massachusetts.” Here the occasion was the forcible return to slavery of the fugitive Anthony Burns in 1854. “I have lived for the last month,” Thoreau wrote,

—and I think that every man in Massachusetts capable of the sentiment of patriotism must have had a similar experience—with the sense of having suffered a vast and indefinite loss. I did not know at first what ailed me. At last it occurred to me that what I had lost was a country.

“I had never respected the government near to which I lived,” Thoreau continued, “but ... I have found that hollow which even I had relied on for solid.”

I am surprised to see men going about their business as if nothing had happened. I say to myself, “Unfortunate! They have not heard the news.” ... No prudent man will build a stone house under these circumstances, or engage in any peaceful enterprise which it requires a long time to accomplish.... It is not an era of repose. We have used up all our inherited freedom. If we would save our lives, we must fight for them.

Five years earlier, in “Civil Disobedience,” Thoreau had said: “If I devote myself to other pursuits and contemplations, I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue them sitting on another man’s shoulders.” Now the author of Walden cried out: “I walk toward one of our ponds; but what signifies the beauty of nature when men are base? ... The remembrance of my country spoils my walk.”

In short, this gentle man was ready to resort to violence rather than live with the organized violence of slavery; this patriot (like Martin Luther King today) was ready to break the law to make the law more just. Neither a pacifist nor an anarchist, then, but—what? A revolutionary? Of course, but what sort of revolutionary? Let us approach this question a little more at our leisure.

II

Two broad approaches have dominated Thoreau criticism. One sees in Thoreau the poet-naturalist, the bridegroom of nature, the Concord recluse, the solitary whittler, the self-appointed inspector of swamps and snowstorms This view takes as its texts Walden and A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers, the two books Thoreau published in his lifetime. The other approach to Thoreau views him as a social radical increasingly drawn to abandon the study of nature for the emancipation of man. This view finds its point of departure in the reform essays already copiously quoted.

It will be obvious from the foregoing that, in my opinion, Thoreau’s radicalism must not be regarded as something incidental or peripheral in his life. On the other hand, those who approach Thoreau by way of his concern for nature are quite right in saying that he often regarded public affairs as an irritating diversion from his principal business. Consider how, in Walden, Thoreau speaks of the night he spent in jail for refusing to pay a tax to support the Mexican War. The incident had occurred while he was living at the pond. “I had gone down the woods for other purposes. But, wherever a man goes, men will pursue and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society.” His response is not so much resistance as indifference. Let the state come after him if it will. “It is true, I might have resisted forcibly with more or less effect, might have run ‘amok’ against society; but I preferred that society should run ‘amok’ against me, it being the desperate party.” When Thoreau emerged from his night in Concord jail, he did not go to the nearest soapbox, he went huckleberry-picking.

An adequate conception of Thoreau’s life and mind must do more than either the botanical or the political approaches can do. It must set the man in a framework which holds together his passion for the water-lily and his concern for the auction-block. It must leave him, as he certainly was, whole.

Thoreau’s writing testifies to this wholeness. He used the same words and images to express what he wanted to say about both nature and social justice. “I went to the woods,” begins the best-known paragraph he ever wrote, “because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life.” The sin of politics, similarly, was that “those who have been bred in the school of politics fail now and always to face the facts.... The fact which the politician faces is merely, that there was less honor among thieves than was supposed, and not the fact that they a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Praise for FROM HERE TO THERE: THE STAUGHTON LYND READER
• PREFACE STAUGHTON LYND
• INTRODUCTION: LIBERTARIAN SOCIALISM FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
• THE SIXTIES
• HISTORY
• POSSIBILITIES
• CONCLUSION
• ALSO AVAILABLE FROM PM PRESS
• INDEX