[ The historian and activist dedicated his life to showing how,
and helping, working people not only imagine but build a better world.
Working with his partner Alice (Niles) Lynd, he relentlessly sought
out new sources of combat and inspiration.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

STAUGHTON LYND’S RADICALISM FROM BELOW  
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Marcus Rediker
November 23, 2022
The Nation
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_ The historian and activist dedicated his life to showing how, and
helping, working people not only imagine but build a better world.
Working with his partner Alice (Niles) Lynd, he relentlessly sought
out new sources of combat and inspiration. _

Staughton Lynd after State Department a hearing in which he asked for
reinstatement of his passport, which was canceled when he defied the
travel ban and went to North Vietnam, 1966.,

 

When Staughton Lynd, Tom Hayden, and Herbert Aptheker traveled to
Hanoi to declare peace with the Vietnamese people in 1965, they
stopped off in Paris to meet several North Vietnamese officials. After
a long discussion, a small, elderly Vietnamese man pulled Staughton
aside and said to him, “Professor Lynd, you need to understand that
we are going to win this war whether you help us or not. For every
soldier killed by the United States military, two will join the
National Liberation Front.” Staughton enjoyed telling this story
about someone who had knocked him off his savior’s horse and put him
in his place with only two sentences. Staughton would add, recalling
the story: “That’s the kind of dialectical thinker I would like to
become.”

The last line was pure Staughton. He was always becoming, always
changing, always seeking as the times and the movements from below
changed. Working with his partner Alice (Niles) Lynd, he relentlessly
sought out new sources of combat and inspiration.

Staughton’s approach to thinking, writing, and activism was
straightforward: Go to the front line of the struggle, listen, learn,
and make your skills available to the people who are waging the fight.
He wanted to think _with_ people, not for them. Over time he
developed a theory of “accompaniment,” based partly on the ideas
of Oscar Romero, the peoples’ priest in El Salvador who was
assassinated in 1980.

The trip to Vietnam cost Staughton his position in the history
department at Yale, and eventually it cost him his ability to work as
a professional historian, as he was effectively blackballed from the
university system. Staughton was subsequently offered five positions,
all rescinded by deans who were pressured not to hire him.
Staughton’s blacklisting wounded him deeply, for he loved the
practice of history. He was already by this time an essential figure
in what he and others liked to call “history from the bottom up,”
the insurgent history of the New Left that studied working people not
as mere subjects but as makers of history.

But Staughton thought about his career misfortune dialectically: His
firing, he told me on more than one occasion, was “one of the best
things that ever happened to me.” It may have cut him off from the
work he loved, but it freed him from the academic life he was born
into and in which he had already ascended to a high level. He was now
free to think, write, and organize in new ways. He retooled as an
attorney with a simple goal: He wanted to be in a roomful of workers
and activists and when someone asked, “Who is that guy?,” the
answer would be, “He’s our lawyer.”

Anti-vanguardist to the core, Staughton believed that working people
could imagine and build a better world. He continued to write what he
called “guerrilla history,” that is, history from the cutting edge
of the struggle, whether a picket line or a prison cell, for the rest
of his life.

Staughton sought out the unity among various struggles from below. He
campaigned against the Cold War and its nuclear obsession, against
white supremacy, against American imperialism, against the closure of
steel plants in Youngstown and Pittsburgh, against capital punishment
and the prison-industrial complex, against capitalism and its
oppression of workers. He believed with all his heart that the major
political task of our time was to build a movement culture that would,
as he put it, “connect the dots.” It would be hard to find a
radical thinker who made significant contributions to so many
different movements from below.

Staughton loved the religious radicals chronicled by Christopher Hill
in his 1972 classic _The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas
during the English Revolution_—the heretical Levelers, Diggers,
Ranters, Seekers, Quakers, and Muggletonians who proposed their own
revolutionary solutions to the crisis of the 17th century. I once took
Hill to a meeting of the Youngstown Workers’ Solidarity Club. On
arrival, Staughton embraced Christopher and told him that the 15
people in the room were the modern-day Levelers. Staughton and
Christopher shared a deep, knowing laugh about how history is made.

If E.P. Thompson was, as he called himself, a “Muggletonian
Marxist,” referring to the radical Protestant group founded by
Lodowicke Muggleton in 1651, Staughton was, much more literally, a
Quaker Marxist. Or was he a Marxist Quaker? It was hard to know which
of those two bodies of thought was more important to him.

From Marx—as well as from his disciples C.L.R. James and Marty
Glaberman—he took the concept “working-class self-activity” and
built a body of work, agitation, and organizing around it. The impulse
was to study what the working class had done to achieve its own
liberation, with special emphasis on what new forms of
self-organization workers had developed. Shopfloor struggles loomed
large in this formulation. Staughton became a fierce critic of the
top-down, hierarchical model of organizing carried out by the CIO.

At the same time, Quakerism and its values of spiritual equality,
humility, and simplicity were guiding lights throughout his life.
Anyone who visited Staughton and Alice in their small home in Niles,
Ohio, could see immediately that these people did not covet worldly
goods. Property did not mediate their human relationships. They lived
according to the old Quaker phrase, “Let your life speak.” An
exemplary life, Quakers believed, would be an inspiration to others,
as it apparently was to Staughton’s student at Spelman College Alice
Walker, and to so many others. Staughton had a special passion for
young activist workers.

Although committed to Quaker ideals, Staughton might better be
considered a Seeker, another radical group of the English Revolution.
The Seekers were loosely organized, fluid, tolerant, and autonomous.
Seekers of the pure church, they searched endlessly for new sources of
radical thought, action, and organization. Many of them became
Quakers. Staughton, always moving, always seeking out new forms of
resistance, combined the ideas of radical Protestantism, liberation
theology, Marxism, and anarchism. Like the Seekers, he was an
antinomian radical, always placing conscience above the laws rich men
made for their own protection.

The last time I saw Staughton was at an assisted living facility in
Girard, Ohio, this past summer. Our conversation ranged from Quaker
abolitionism to international labor struggles, but the last thing he
said to me captured this spirit. We had worked together on the
Working-Class History Seminar, based at the University of Pittsburgh,
whose members over many years explored in depth the theory and
practice of bottom-up history. He asked, “Maybe we should revive
it?” He was already in a weakened state, moving slowly with a
walker, and unable to travel, but at age 92 Staughton was still
seeking, still becoming.

_[MARCUS REDIKER is Distinguished Professor of Atlantic History at the
University of Pittsburgh. His histories from below have won numerous
awards and appeared in 15 languages. His most recent book is The
Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf who became the First
Revolutionary Abolitionist (Beacon Press, 2017).]_

_Copyright c 2022 The Nation. Reprinted with permission. May not be
reprinted without permission
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Distributed by PARS International Corp
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* Staughton Lynd
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* history from below
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* bottom up history
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* Vietnam War
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* Anti-Vietnam War movement
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* Vietnam
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* Labor Movement
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* Labor History
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* Quakers
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* radicals
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* radical thought
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