In Memoriam<br>A Man Who Didn't Obey
In Memoriam
A Man Who Didn't Obey
A Man Who Didn't Obey
by Colman McCarthy
Shortly before Memorial Day, when those sixteen million Americans who obeyed Presidential orders in 1941 to kill or be killed in World War II had a national monument dedicated to them, David Dellinger died. He didn't obey. He saw no goodness in the "good war." As a pacifist, Dellinger's type of moral bravery in the early 1940s was not hailed on Memorial Day. For his dissent, he spent nearly four years in federal prison.
At the time of his conviction, Dellinger was twenty-five years old and studying at Union Theological Seminary in New York. As a divinity student, he was exempt from the draft. "All I had to do was register [as a conscientious objector]," he wrote in his 1993 biography From Yale to Jail. "But I saw the draft both as a coercive militaristic intrusion into the lives of the country's young males and as a calculated preparation for U.S. entry into a war that I didn't believe in."
Dellinger adhered to this choice of conscience over conformity his whole life. Although he said his dissent against World War II was "the most controversial stand I have ever taken," it was his five-month trial as part of the Chicago 7 in 1968-'69 that earned him the most national attention. There he was, a 1936 Yale graduate charged with inciting a street riot during the Democratic Convention in August 1968. Not only did Dellinger have to deal with a screwy and hostile judge, but his co-defendants were anything but a dream team. On tactics, he frequently tangled with the headstrong Tom Hayden, who dismissively said of Dellinger: "Dave's a pacifist, and pacifists don't have much sense of reality. So he can do what he wants, but the rest of us have to act more responsibly."
Dellinger's Chicago 7 celebrity did go to his head at times, but the irresponsible Dellinger kept on. I saw his grit in 1987 in a District of Columbia courtroom. Dellinger, with seventeen others in a five-week trial, would be given suspended sentences for unlawfully demonstrating in the U.S. Capitol. In the rotunda where Ronald Reagan recently lay in state, the group was protesting Reagan's support of the killing the Contras were doing in Nicaragua.
During the trial recess, Dellinger, smiling, told me that he was assuredly a recidivist. How many jailings? "Oh, about fifty times, I've lost count." He thought the peace movement of the 1980s was vibrant: "More people are arrested every year for nonviolent resistance to the country's military insanities and domestic cruelties than during any year in the '60s."
Dellinger's books include Revolutionary Nonviolence, More Power than We Know, and Vietnam Revisited, but he didn't dedicate all of his life to the movement. Unlike some other, more famous peace activists in the twentieth century, who were often cruel to their spouses, Dellinger maintained a long and caring marriage.
When Dellinger's Yale class of 1936 held its fiftieth reunion, the reunion book carried the thoughts of the class's leading rebel. "Lest my way of life sounds puritanical or austere," he wrote, "I always emphasize that in the long run one can't satisfactorily say no to war, violence, and injustice unless one is simultaneously saying yes to life, love, and laughter."
-- Colman McCarthy, a former Washington Post columnist, directs the Center for Teaching Peace in Washington, D.C.
Tags:
About The Progressive
On January 9, 1909, Senator Robert M. La Follette Sr. of Wisconsin founded La Follette's Weekly to be "a magazine of progress, social, intellectual, institutional." The goal, he wrote, was "winning back for the people the complete power over government — national, state, and municipal — which has been lost to them." He attacked private greed in the form of corporate monopolies that hoarded power. He championed the public interest, campaigning for social and economic justice. And he urged the United States not to entangle itself in foreign wars.
In 1929, La Follette's Weekly changed its name to The Progressive, but the views of the magazine have remained remarkably consistent over the years. The Progressive, a monthly since 1948, has steadfastly stood against militarism, the concentration of power in corporate hands, and the disenfranchisement of the citizenry. It has continued to champion peace, social and economic justice, civil rights, civil liberties, human rights, a preserved environment, and a reinvigorated democracy. Its bedrock values remain nonviolence and freedom of speech.
In 2009, The Progressive celebrated its centennial by publishing its anthology, Democracy in Print: The Best of The Progressive Magazine, 1909-2009 (Univ. of Wisconsin Press). And the April 2009 issue of The Progressive was a special commemorative one. Devoting a single page to each year of The Progressive, this issue served up kernels of wisdom from the archives. It's a walk through 100 years of U.S. history and progressive history. And it includes quotations from Jane Addams, James Baldwin, Louis Brandeis, Theodore Dreiser, Sen. Russ Feingold, Molly Ivins, June Jordan, Helen Keller, Martin Luther King, Jr., Sinclair Lewis, Milton Mayer, Arundhati Roy, Bertrand Russell, Edward Said, Cindy Sheehan, Upton Sinclair, Terry Tempest Williams, Gore Vidal, Paul Wellstone, and Howard Zinn.
Today, The Progressive publishes great writers and social critics such as: Wendell Berry, Edwidge Danticat, Barbara Ehrenreich, Eduardo Galeano, Jim Hightower, Luis Rodriguez, Dave Zirin, and Howard Zinn. It also provides comic relief with columns by humorists Kate Clinton and Will Durst. Some of America's leading poets—Adrienne Rich, Martín Espada, C.K. Williams, and Rita Dove—publish original work in The Progressive. The magazine also publishes a monthly interview with an activist, artist, writer, scholar, or political figure. Here are some of the people we've interviewed in the last decade: Howard Dean, Ani DiFranco, Steve Earle, Janeane Garofalo, Danny Glover, Amy Goodman, Mikhail Gorbachev, Seymour Hersh, Naomi Klein, Bill McKibben, Barack Obama, Michael Pollan, Robert Redford, Martin Sheen, Joseph Stiglitz, Helen Thomas, Alice Walker, and Elizabeth Warren.
The Progressive, in every issue, highlights the work of grassroots activists.
Meet the Editors
Matthew Rothschild, Editor
Matthew Rothschild is the editor of The Progressive magazine, which is one of the leading voices for peace and social justice in this country. Rothschild has appeared on Nightline, C-SPAN, The O'Reilly Factor, and NPR, and his newspaper commentaries have run in the Chicago Tribune, the L.A. Times, the Miami Herald, and a host of other newspapers. Rothschild is also the author of a book entitled You Have No Rights: Stories of America in Our Repressive Age (New Press, 2007). A graduate of Harvard University, Rothschild prior to coming to The Progressive worked as the editor of Multinational Monitor, a magazine founded by Ralph Nader. Rothschild came to The Progressive in 1983, and has worked for the magazine in many different capacities, first as associate editor, then managing editor, then publisher, and since 1994 as editor. Rothschild brought on distinguished social critics as columnists, including Barbara Ehrenreich, Eduardo Galeano, and Howard Zinn. He added monthly original poetry from the likes of Martín Espada and Adrienne Rich, and he added the humorists Kate Clinton and Will Durst. On the magazine's website, Rothschild contributes several times a week with his "This Just In" commentaries. And he keeps a running tally of civil liberties infringements in his "McCarthyism Watch." Rothschild writes monthly in The Progressive. He has interviewed Senator Russ Feingold, singer Ani DiFranco, Robert Redford, and the journalist Robert Fisk. He also hosts Progressive Radio, a syndicated weekly half-hour program, and he does radio commentaries Monday through Friday. Rothschild is also the co-founder and director of The Progressive Media Project, which since 1993 has been distributing opinion pieces to newspapers around the country in an effort to diversify and democratize the national debate. In 2007, Rothschild published his first book, You Have No Rights: Stories of America in an Age of Repression (The New Press). In 2009, he edited Democracy in Print: The Best of The Progressive, 1909-2009 (Univ. of Wisconsin Press).
Amitabh Pal, Managing Editor
Amitabh Pal came to the Progressive Media Project, an affiliate of The Progressive magazine, in 1997 as the associate editor. A few years later, he became the managing editor of The Progressive magazine. And for the last several years, he has served both in that capacity and as the co-editor of the Progressive Media Project. For The Progressive, Pal has written several articles on nonviolence, including a profile of Badshah Khan, the Frontier Gandhi. For The Progressive, he has interviewed Jimmy Carter, Mikhail Gorbachev, the Dalai Lama, and Joseph Stiglitz. He also is finishing up his first book about nonviolent activism in Muslim societies, forthcoming from Praeger.
Ruth Conniff, Political Editor
Ruth Conniff covers national politics for The Progressive and is a voice of The Progressive on many TV and radio programs. Conniff was a regular on CNN's Sunday Capital Gang and is now a regular on PBS's To the Contrary. She also has appeared frequently on C-SPAN's Washington Journal and on NPR and Pacifica. Conniff's op-ed commentaries have appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. She also contributes regularly to Isthmus, Madison's weekly newspaper. Conniff became The Progressive's Associate Editor in 1991, and Managing Editor in January 1997. In recent years, she has interviewed William Greider, Rep. Marcy Kaptur, and Elizabeth Warren.
Elizabeth DiNovella, Culture Editor
Elizabeth DiNovella is Culture Editor of The Progressive magazine. She writes about activism, politics, music, books, and film. She also produces Progressive Radio, a thirty-minute public affairs program hosted by Matthew Rothschild.
In recent years, she has interviewed Amy Goodman, Linton Kwesi Johnson, and Elena Poniatoska for The Progressive.
DiNovella joined The Progressive staff in 2001. She became Associate Editor in 2002 and Culture Editor in 2003.
Before working for The Progressive, DiNovella was the News and Public Affairs Director at WORT-FM, the community radio station of Madison, Wisconsin. She now volunteers in the news department at WORT-FM.
Subscribe!
To subscribe to The Progressive, click here.
Receive a full year of the print and digital versions of The Progressive magazine for only $14.97.
