[ Staughton Lynd seemed like a personal force almost more than a
person within the antiwar movement of the 1960s. My Country Is the
World largely and usefully recounts the controversies that came with
his rise in the peace movement of the middle 1960s]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

STAUGHTON LYND: THE PERILS OF SAINTHOOD  
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Paul Buhle
March 29, 2023
Portside
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_ Staughton Lynd seemed like a personal force almost more than a
person within the antiwar movement of the 1960s. My Country Is the
World largely and usefully recounts the controversies that came with
his rise in the peace movement of the middle 1960s _

Staughton Lynd was spattered with paint during an antiwar protest in
Washington in 1965. He was among the first of about 350 people
arrested during the demonstration., New York Times photo

 

Anyone who followed the discussions about the burgeoning war protests
would place him in the midst of a controversy that transcended the
usual lines of the Left or the very structure of how protest had
happened since at least the 1930s. A half-generation older than most
of the campus antiwar activists of the day, he offered his words and
his personal courage as an example to emulate. He also articulated the
urgency of peace in ways banned or forgotten during the Cold War
era.       

    

At close range, Lynd reinforced the persona, in the most modest ways
imaginable. There was something about the way he spoke and held
himself. Staughton actually picked me up at the Army Pre-Induction
Center in New Haven, and drove me out to meet and stay on a chicken
farm of older generation progressives. He talked with me about the
rising draft resistance movement in New England, but also about the
exciting but chaotic history of the American Left that he and others
had begun to discover. His own heart, historically speaking, was with
the Industrial Workers of the World, and with their long-ago invention
of the sitdown strike, that magnificent peaceful refusal to go along
with what the powerful had in mind. Ordinary people with the requisite
courage could make that decision, collectively and effectively.
 

My Country is the World: Staughton Lynd’s Writing, Speeches and
Statements Against the Vietnam War
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Staughton Lynd; Edited by Luke Stewart
Haymarket Books;  386 pages
Paperback:  $29.95;  E-book:  $9.99 (On Sale from publisher - 30%
off)
March 7, 2023
ISBN: 9781642598476

 

Haymarket Books
_My Country Is the World _largely and usefully recounts the
controversies that came with his rise in the peace movement of the
middle 1960s and in important ways, actually shaped the strategies of
the movement. Editor Luke Stewart has arranged the documentation of
controversy and Lynd’s crucial role, creating the text with
extensive, helpful introductions to the documents.

           

Lynd, the young, widely admired history professor at Yale who spent
the previous summer as Director of the Mississippi Freedom Schools,
was asked in Fall, 1965, to join a handful of prestigious academics,
civil rights activists and occasional liberal politicians in debates
and discussions about the War.  For Lynd,  this engagement with
intellectuals turned swifty into a seemingly endless addresses to
growing audiences, on the campuses and off, for what to do about the
machinations of the powerful.

           

_Liberation_ magazine, with an influence far exceeding its modest
circulation of 10,000 or so, had a well-established reputation for
returning the ideas and strategies of pacifism from political
obscurity to wide attention. Young people, in larger numbers, were
listening, and not only to pacifists. At a moment viewed as a high
point of post-New Deal American, actual opposition to Lyndon
Johnson’s gung-ho war policy was considered heretical,  not only
because opposition to any war sounded like sympathy for Communism,
but  because any criticism of Johnson seemingly threatened liberal
momentum at large.

           

The rage directed at Lynd escalated when he joined with SDS activist
Tom Hayden and Communist functionary Herbert Aptheker in visiting
Vietnam in December, 1965, without permission of the US government.
Arthur Schlesinger,  Jr., a close advisor in the Kennedy
administration, condemned this as a kind of disloyalty, and the
prospect of the US actually being compelled to “lose” a war to the
other side, as unthinkable. Actual efforts by the Vietnamese to
negotiate before the vast escalation of US troop presence had
meanwhile been quietly scuttled. US leaders might, and did
strategically “pause” the bombings of Vietnamese cities while
building up US military occupation of Vietnam, because they believed
the other side would weaken into acceptance of a Korean-style
solution. This could all be managed—with the carefully-managed
support of the US public.

           

One of the high points of the book include a transcript of Lynd’s
television appearance on William Buckley’s “Firing Line” show in
May, 1966. There, Lynd brilliantly brushes aside the Cold War cliches
shared by liberals and conservative like Buckley: that the Vietnam war
was a “conspiracy” rather than recognize that support for
Communist movements in the global South had arisen across the world,
among millions of ordinary people, to face the criminal practices of
colonialism and neocolonialism. Lynd explains the decisions of the
Nuremburg Trials of Nazi leaders after the Second World War, and the
current-day existential cruelty in the killing fields of Vietnam and
the segregationist bastions of the American South. Buckley sputters,
then curses: he has never seen a “guest” like this, evidently a
dupe or an agent.

           

Lynd’s leading role in the “Peace Offensive” in 1966, with
wonderful speeches and testimony reprinted here, would cost him tenure
at Yale, and poison his hopes for a college teaching job anywhere. In
a public address at Yale, in January, 1966, he intuited all this: he
declined to resign, even in the face of rightwing demonization,
knowing that the high-flown academics had already set themselves to
get rid of him. By the Fall of that year, Lynd was in the midst of a
student movement declaring “We Won’t Go” to the War.  Step by
step, argument by argument, Lynd explains the perfect legitimacy,
moral and political, of refusing service. 

           

By the following year, Lynd was among those spearheading “protest to
resistance” against the war and the draft.  J. Edgar Hoover
assigns dozens of agents to follow Lynd, to make sure he will not be
hired for another permanent teaching job, and presumably prepare the
way for his arrest and prosecution. History stands in the way. A _New
York Times_ columnist notes in 1967 that one of every four male
undergraduates will simply but absolutely refuse service, exactly as I
did, with Lynd’s advice, only a year earlier.    

       

Space does not allow the quotation of Lynd’s incredibly articulate
and emotive arguments and appeals. But in January, 1968, joining his
support to the new movement group Resist, we can hear Lynd’s voice
at a press conference. He begins, “There is an old tradition that
when a friend is jailed or shot, you go to where it happened and take
his place. The Wobblies won their free speech fights by filling the
jails until it became more burdensome for the authorities to feed them
than to let them talk on street corners…Repression is frightening.
Many of us may be in jail soon. Some may be killed. But repression is
also an opportunity.” (p.291). He suggests a page or so later that
“those old days of singing, and holding hands, and talking about
love are [not] out of date,” and that  militancy demands both
courage and grace under fire.        

   

Leading liberals and even liberal-socialists lambasted Lynd because, I
think, he infuriated them but also because they literally could not
understand him. He came from a different place—but very much the
same place as millions of young people. 

 

_[PAUL BUHLE was declared I-Y by Selective Service in 1966 and went
on, a few months later, to found the magazine Radical America.]_

* Staughton Lynd
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* Anti-Vietnam War movement
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* peace movement
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* 1960s
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* Anti-War Movement
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* draft resisters
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* Civil Disobedience
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* Cold War
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* McCarthy Period
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* civil rights movement
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* Anti-Communism
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* Vietnam
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* the Left
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* Labor Movement
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