David Dellinger
The Life and Times of a Nonviolent Revolutionary
Andrew H. Hunt
New York University Press, 2007
358 pages • $35
Review by BEN DALBEY
ALTHOUGH I didn’t realize how lucky I was at the time, I had the good fortune to share a beer with David Dellinger in the late 1990s. I drove him to the airport to catch a flight home after his speaking engagement at a D.C. lobbying organization where I worked as an administrative assistant. We had some time to spare, so he suggested that we sit down and chat. In what appears to have been typical fashion, Dellinger had nothing but encouraging words for a young and somewhat naïve radical. We discussed capitalism and strategies for changing this broken system, Dellinger’s commitment to pacifism, and the differences between tactics and principles.
Dellinger described aspects of his own radicalization as a witness to the Spanish Civil War and Nazi Germany. He had not fought in the war against Franco’s fascist army in Spain—he had been traveling in Europe after having graduated from Yale University in 1936. But he was familiar with radical Left parties and politics, and met up with members of the international Lincoln Brigades in Madrid. At the time a self-identified Christian pacifist, he admired these individuals who were on their way to the front, where they would pick up the guns of their fallen comrades. He had a similar experience in Germany, where he met members of the Jewish resistance to the Nazi regime within the ghettos. As he told me that afternoon, those experiences did a great deal to forge his commitment to radical activism, and nothing else he saw in his long and tumultuous life more sharply challenged or shaped his pacifist philosophy.
Andrew E. Hunt’s well-researched and carefully written David Dellinger: The Life and Times of a Nonviolent Revolutionary provides a valuable and compelling portrait of this truly extraordinary individual.
Dellinger was a man who, in his own words and deeds, sought “to forge a creative synthesis of Gandhi and guerrilla.” Before and since his death in 2004, Dellinger remains best known as the elder member of the “Chicago Eight”—eight activists charged with multiple felonies for their alleged roles in the antiwar protests outside the 1968 Democratic Party Convention in Chicago. But unlike most of the thousands who faced the flailing batons and tear gas of the police riot outside the 1968 convention, Dellinger, at fifty-three years old, had already lived a lifetime of active resistance.
After his travels in the 1930s, Dellinger decided to throw away his intended life. Rather than pursue a law degree from Oxford University, Dellinger returned to the to set up a series of communal living experiments modeled on Gandhi’s efforts, and to organize against U.S. involvement in the Second World War and the military draft.
While Dellinger sympathized with those fighting fascism in Europe and described Nazism as “a catastrophic evil that had to be resisted,” he also opposed the calls to patriotic military service coming from the U.S. government—as well as the U.S. Communist Party and existing liberal organizations. As he wrote of that time, “It was also catastrophic for people who believed in human dignity to think that they could resist fascism under the leadership and by the methods of big business, big government, and the military.”
And while many more moderate pacifists and conscientious objectors performed noncombat-related duties in camps set up through cooperation between the Selective Service and the historic peace churches, Dellinger and a few others chose to more actively oppose the draft—and forced the government to put them on trial. They were each sentenced to a year or more in prison. Once inside the federal system, they engaged in hunger strikes and agitated for better living conditions and against racial segregation. These further acts of resistance brought further punishment, including solitary confinement and forced feedings. However, with a concentrated group of committed pacifists inside the relatively small and isolated community of one or two penitentiaries, Dellinger and others won some real reforms within these institutions through their personal sacrifices.
These struggles were at times guided by—and at times conducted in opposition to—the guidance of Left icons of the previous generation, including the omnipresent advocate of nonviolent resistance, A. J. Muste. The experiences emboldened a network of new movement activists, including people like Bayard Rustin, who would go on to become one of the architects of the civil rights movement.
As Hunt’s book well documents, social movements don’t arise from nowhere, and even the most massive and exciting events at the height of an era such as the 1960s depend on the work of small groups of activists—at times even individuals—who developed their organizational skills and political perspectives in the previous years.
In fact, it may be that what Hunt describes as Dellinger’s perennial and at times delusional optimism was simply a result of Dellinger’s own experience of living decades as an embattled “Conchie” (the derisive term used for a conscientious objector), doing his best to live according to his beliefs in relative isolation, only to move in a few short years to the front of a massive movement that questioned the motives of U.S. foreign policy and the nature of our society itself.
While Hunt focuses quite a bit on whether Dellinger was able to keep the major antiwar protests of the 1960s “nonviolent” in the face of police aggression, it is not clear that such a task was Dellinger’s primary goal. As his deeper politics developed into a kind of pacifist and revolutionary anarchism, Dellinger celebrated and strove to create and sustain mass radical movements—within which he sought to provide an example that others might follow. He was committed to building coalitions, but he avoided being a member of any organization with any sort of disciplined cohesion. Thus, as an individual within the massive and diverse movements of the 1960s, he was usually neither willing nor able to actually influence the course of events once they were in motion—beyond what he was able to shout from a single bullhorn or say in his three minutes on a stage, oftentimes in opposition to what leaders of other groups were arguing and carrying out.
These facts never diminished Dellinger’s enthusiastic support for protest, however, and as Hunt describes, Dellinger’s “refusal to condemn the radical Left’s calls for violent self-defense against authorities placed him at odds with the more orthodox pacifists.” As Dellinger wrote after the 1968 protests:
The triumph of Chicago was the triumph of street protesters who displayed courage, imagination, flexibility and fraternal solidarity as they refused to knuckle under to the police.… There is an intoxication that comes from standing up to the police at last.
This does not mean Dellinger was uncritical of other individuals or groups on the left. For example, he wrote the following as a critique of the Weathermen’s so-called “Days of Rage,” carried out in October 1969:
I was there as a disgusted observer and saw that a disproportionately high percentage of the cars wrecked were Volkswagens and other lower-priced cars. Inevitably, the police guarded best the main streets, which housed the swankier establishments. The Weathermen soon swept down an unguarded side street, attacking small shops, proletarian beer halls and lower-middle-class housing.
Dellinger’s own commitment to nonviolence did not prevent him from supporting and forging coalitions with those who did not share all his beliefs. He was a consistent supporter of national liberation and anticolonial struggles in Vietnam and Cuba—traveling to both countries on multiple occasions—and he refused to denounce those fighting imperialism for their use of violence. Dellinger also joined many of the younger generation of activists—and parted ways with some of his older comrades—in his principled commitment to a non-exclusionary policy toward the organized revolutionary Left.
Hunt is careful not to make a hero of Dellinger, perhaps in part because Dellinger clearly never wanted to be a hero, and many of Hunt’s critiques are insightful. In particular, Hunt does not shy away from describing Dellinger’s sexism, which was pervasive in the movements of 1960s and which had an extremely adverse impact, in particular, on Dellinger’s relationship with his wife.
At times, however, Hunt suffers from some of the anti-Left prejudices Dellinger publicly opposed, and the book presents but never explains the apparent contradiction between Dellinger’s belief in nonviolence and his support for some violent actions. Rather than a contradiction, however, it seems clear that Dellinger maintained a consistent and principled support for the resistance of the oppressed, in whatever form, even as he may have disagreed with the strategies and tactics of that resistance.
It was during the Chicago Eight conspiracy trial, the pinnacle of Dellinger’s political career, that his strengths were able to have their most public impact. While codefendants such as Tom Hayden avoided disrupting the proceedings and hoped for leniency and “Yippies” Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin made a mockery of both the court and themselves with their theatrical antics, Dellinger stood out as the most political opponent of the government, taking every opportunity to champion resistance to the war in Vietnam.
Dellinger also emerged as the most serious ally of a man he never met before the trial, who bore the brunt of Judge Julius Hoffman’s wrath: Black Panther Party chairman Bobby Seale. Seale was in no way one of the primary organizers of the 1968 protest, but he was arrested as part of a directive from FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. After Seale denounced Judge Hoffman in the courtroom for his refusal to allow Seale to represent himself, Hoffman had U.S. marshals literally beat, bind, and gag Seale.
For several days—until Hoffman had to declare a mistrial for Seale and separate his case from the other seven defendants—marshals carried the Panther into the courtroom, bound and gagged. In the face of opposition from some codefendants, Dellinger led the efforts to come to Seale’s defense, both by arguing that the other defendants boycott the trial until Seale was released, and by physically defending Seale in the courtroom. As Hunt describes:
Others joined me in trying to protect him,” Dellinger recounted, “but even so he was beaten and hit in the balls and stomach a number of times; some of us were slugged and mauled while trying to protect him.” On one occasion, Dellinger shoved some marshals who were closing in on the chained defendant. “We later asked him how he, a pacifist, could be so rough,” Stew Albert jokingly recalled, “and he said, with a twinkle in his eye, that shoving can be a form of nonviolent resistance if it’s done to stop evil.”
