Oral History with Staughton and Alice Lynd, January 11th, 2017, Part Two

But I don't see that it's-I don't see that it serves a purpose for me to describe the kinds of difficulties I had as a child.

And at any point, if I ask you question that you don't see a purpose in

Well, I mean, but you might see a purpose in it that I wouldn't, but-but it's not something that I would-would choose to bring out.

I'm-I mean, in this particular instance, I'm not sure I can a purpose either, but

Yeah. If it becomes relevant fine. But yeah, but I-I wouldn't start with that question for me.

That-that sounds that sounds good. So, we'll-I think I'll start with a question for you about how come you didn't run away when he told you you were-he was a socialist. Maybe would that be a good way to start, or? And don't answer that now, think about it. But do not answer that. And certainly we can backtrack, if there's-and feel free to take stories forwards, backwards as you see fit, and I'll just try and bring you back as-as its makes sense in terms of the kind of natural trajectory of the interview but. And whenever you're ready.

I'm ready.

I'm gonna start a new track here.

Yep, I'm ready, I've got to turn down the sensitivity just a tiny bit.

And Catherine, your last name is Murphy is that correct?

Mmm-hmm

Okay, we-it is January 11th, 2017. We are going to interview here with Alice and Staughton Lynd in their homes. This is Daniel Kerr. I'm with Catherine Murphy, who's going to be doing the camera work and also potentially asking questions as well. Our-our interest is essentially in-in documenting the, in particular, the life work of the Lynds as-as their work is related to the field of oral history. But we'll also carry that through further and talk about some of the larger kinds of lessons from their experiences, so moving forward, thinking about movement building.

Can I ask one-one more thing before we start the interview?

Am I too close? Far?

No, I think we should be a little closer to the camera. And, I think it's good to try that they look at you.

Is that good?

Is that good? If they-if you look at Dan-as opposed to looking straight into the camera? Which is, you know, maybe more, it's more conversational, it's more natural, they look at you, and I'm going to be looking and fiddling, so it-anyway, I think it's just, you know

I think that's great, you tell me

It's sort of-so I moved you closer to the lens. So it'll be-does that work for you both?

Yes.

Not that its-but just-got

You're dancing, your dancing, you're telling us through movement.

Ok, we're rolling.

Ok. So the, really, the place I want to start is probably with you Staughton, in terms of your experiences at the-the culture society and how that shaped your larger world view.

Well, I attended a private school system in New York City run by an organization called the Ethical Culture Society from pre-kindergarten through twelfth grade. And I think it was imaginative of my parents to send me there because my father grew up as a presbyterian in Louisville, Kentucky, went to Union Theological Seminary, developed more secular interests. My mother grew up in a congregational family. Not at all well off. They took in boarders, but certainly my folks came from a Christian background and here was an organization, which I've always called that reform, Reform Judaism. Judaism with nothing left but the ethics. And for me, the ethics were expressed in words that were written above the platform of the societies and school's auditorium on 64th Street in New York City. And those words, at the time, we would consider gender insensitive. I think they've been changed in this respect, but they were "the place where men meet to seek the highest is Holy Ground." We did have ethics classes but I don't remember them in particular. I do remember those words. And I graduated sixth grade on that platform, the gentleman administering the ceremony was connected with a settlement house that the Ethical Culture Society had in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York City. And he had the same reputation as Eugene Debs, that whenever he went for a walk in the neighborhood, he had to think about how much money he carried, because he wouldn't have any money when he got back home. And I was also-

Excuse me, not that he spent but that-

Not that he spent it, but he made it available to people who had less than he. And it was on that platform as well, that I was inducted as student body president in the whole school system, and it was just a wonderful experience. I was-was miserable as a student at Harvard and later as a teacher at Yale, but just to suggest the-the flavor of that high school, when I was deep in the pits at Harvard, I went to see a man who'd been my teacher in the English honors class as a 12th grader, a senior, and I told him my distressing story. He said not a word but went to a little piano in his New York apartment and played Bach's Sheep May Safely Graze, which Alice and I now sing together. So, I left high school with a feeling that-that not exactly that the world was my oyster, but more in the spirit of lines at the end of Milton's Paradise Lost that my mother used to quote that Adam and Eve went forth from the Garden of Eden with the whole world before them and para-and paradise, their guide.

Quick question, I'm just trying to figure out on the camera side. Is he-since Staughton's wearing the lavelier, Alice is not, does it make sense to ask Staughton questions? Like, if they're Staughton related first, and then have Alice miked and ask her questions?

I would actually go with the flow of the conversation more. This mike is actually picking up more, higher, better-like more robust audio than the lavalier for some reason we're just sort of taking advantage of the channel, you know, having two audio channels but I would-I think follow the flow of the conversation. You just maybe need to give me a moment when we switch. Like, if you're going to switch to Alice now so I can shift the camera.

Okay, I'm gonna switch to Alice now.

Ok, so let me, give me one second.

I'm changing tact a little bit. But it did strike me that-that the-you you're mutual interesting in Quakerism really is kind of-your mother, perhaps played a significant role in that, in terms of your own personal exposure?

I remember going to Friends Meeting when I was four years old, but my parents did not join the Quakers until much later. I was born at the beginning of the depression, my parents didn't have steady work until I was nine and a half, when my father got a job. So, we moved from place to place. In some of the places, like when we would stay in Baltimore, they would go to the Friends Meeting, or in Rhode Island,when we would spend summers at my grandfather's house, when they were unemployed. So, I had Quaker exposure from a very young age. Staughton and I chose to have a Quaker wedding, but neither one of us were Quakers. He can tell about his cousin who was a Quaker and married someone who I and my family knew from Baltimore, but when we moved to Atlanta and we're living on a Negro College campus, with our two children who were then, when we moved there, Lee was 3 and Barbara was almost six. I just-Lee would have been about three and a half and-and Barbara six. The children, well Barbara in particular had to go to a public school where it was all white, and we were living on a Negro College campus. Lee went to the nursery school on the Spellman Campus but as these children were being exposed to segregation in the South, I or we felt it was very important for them to have contact with other white families, who were not segregationist. We moved to Atlanta within a week of the time that Atlanta began integrating the public schools by taking 10 black children and putting one in each of ten different white schools. Well, the people at Quaker house were very concerned that there be some groundwork done where some of the white children would be-would have gotten to know the black student who would be coming to their school, and would know sort of look out for that person and ease the transition. So during that summer at Quaker house that was going on and we found that at Quaker house we could find other people who were white, other families with children who were white. who were wanting to ease more integration in the city of Atlanta. So, we went to a number of things. We met-very early that fall, I was at Quaker house and met a black couple and came back and told Staughton, you've got to meet these people, Vincent and Rosemary Harding, who had just moved to start Mennonite House and who lived about a block from Martin Luther King, so that Quaker house was a magnet for us to try to relate, not just to the black community where we were living, but also to whites in Atlanta, and it was at Quaker house when Lee was five that he fell out of the second story window onto cement steps and suffered, a skull fracture, tore the artery to his brain, had a gash on his leg. Oh, and was pulled through, but for months members of the Quaker Meeting helped us to take care of Lee. One family gave us all their Bob R. books, another one a whole stack of Dr. Seuss books, and they'd give us crafts that I could do at home with Lee and, you know, the meeting really felt a responsibility for what had happened. And so to a certain point, it just seemed we are members of the meeting might just as well acknowledge it. So that's how that came about. But something I want to be sure to touch on is that the work that we've done with prisoners in the last 20 some years is a very gratifying way of expressing quakerism for me, where the underlying principle is a belief in the inner light, that there is an inner light in every person. It may be hard to find but you have to believe it's there. And I think that our presence with these prisoners, without using those words, has conveyed something to them that they have responded to. That is the, because we believed it was there, they could begin to, to express it and to believe that it was there in themselves. So, I just wanted to be sure to, with regard to Quakerism, to-to add that. Now, I think that there are other things, it was as a result of well, I guess I felt that I was a conscientious objector long before I became a Quaker. My father during WWII, had to face the question of whether or not to register. He's the gentlest man I ever knew. He had had bayonet training in World War 1 and found it extremely difficult. If there ever was a born conscientious objector, he was it, but he felt that in a situation where his family might be under attack that he would try to protect us. So he felt he couldn't, not register. When I later became a draft counselor, I realized there's a difference between defending your family and engaging in premeditated war, you know, where the battles are planned in advance and you know, you're going to invade such and such and so forth and so on. But I didn't know that and he didn't know that but I think I grew up with this sense of-of the kinds of values that I and my parents later found in Quakerism. So that I think that it was indispensable to the work that I did with draft counselors. I mean, as a draft counselor, and that whole impulse, which I think has been expressed in different ways at different times in my life, but the-the honesty and direct speaking, simplicity, just a lot of those, what you might call Quaker testimonies I grew up just instinctively feeling, where the way I wanted when I was in high school and the girls told me I should wear more lipstick I had the feeling of well if I can't please them all, I'll please myself and I won't wear any. I mean, it was that kind of feeling of being different, always being in a minority in any situation. Not-not racially a minority except when we lived at Spelman, I look in the mirror and think, goodness, my face looks terribly pale, but this sense of not expecting to be part of the mainstream of-of what was going on around me and what other people were thinking. That answer your question?

Yeah, it does. I mean, this is maybe a little beyond, I'm just curious. I'm not sure but drew your mother to be interested in Quakerism as I understand it from your memoir your-

Yeah, well my mother met my father, when she was, I guess 16 and he was 17, it would have been in 1917 and they were at some sort of a dance, or dance class something like that. No, a Baltimore variety of trying to get young men and young women to meet each other. And he asked her what she thought of women's suffrage. Well, that's where they started, and they worked as equals throughout my childhood and incredibly so did Staughton's. So that there were a lot of battles that came along for other people that we didn't have.

My mother was very much opposed to war. She-she and my father were trying to find out how they could promote the League of Nations. They they really were just my mother was concerned-when we wanted to go to Nicaragua in the 1980s and expected a negative reaction, no my mother had-had worked against the Marines going into Nicaragua, you know, way way way way back. I mean, she understood, so that some of these things, I think we.re more atmospheric than expressed. My mother and father were both much more influenced by Hinduism and the Far Eastern religions. They were world travelers. Both of them spent a lot of time in India. My mother spent some time in Africa, she and another woman drove across the Sahara desert in a Land Rover. I mean, they they were strong characters. My father spent a lot of time after World War Two trying to get relief for blind children at a-some sort of a-an institution in Poland and bringing refugees to this country. And I would knit sweaters to be sent over there. He-he said, he'd pay for all of the wool I could knit to make-make sweaters to send over to the children in Europe, and I could make a sweater in about four days so that it was very strong motivation towards social service.

Given the topic I was-I-I thought I might ask you a similar question about your mother. As I understand it, again, from your memoirs that her-her work on shame has had a significant influence in terms of your-your-your subsequent conceptualization of work and then I wasn't fully sure I understood her argument, and I was wondering if you might be able to-or her-her kind of thinking about shame and how you found that influential or inspirational.

Well, I think that it was not an early influence because her book did not appear until the 1950s I believe. And when it did appear it, in my opinion, had difficulty because she used the words guilt and shame in a manner opposite to their ordinary usage. We think of shame as something that a person experiences from his or her contemporaries, a-a circle of schoolchildren taunting or giving a hard time to another child, whereas guilt in the conventional perception is something really inward and serious and deep. My mother used the terms in exactly the opposite way. Guilt had to do with conventional understandings of what was good and what was bad, it came from outside. Shame was an inward feeling that one could have even if no one else ever knew. It was a sense of having betrayed, something like moral injury, having betrayed once deepest self. So that if one could look shame in the face, so said, my mother, there was a chance of discovering who you really were. But, perhaps I can can mention my-my dad, who have enormous influence on me in a different way. My father went to Union Theological Seminary, he thought, later abandoned, the aspiration to be a preacher. But between the first and second years at Union, this is the early 1920s, it seems that students who were expected to be associated with some kind of Christian service during the summer. And, so my dad, I don't know whether he picked it out of a hat or how it came about, but he-he was to go to a Rockefeller oil camp, in Elk Basin, Wyoming. He arrived in a stagecoach, he clumped around in the mud that first day, found a boarding house, went to dinner and experienced quite definite but unexplained chill. And, at least as I came to understand it, he perceived with a remarkable insight that people working six days a week for Mr. Rockefeller, were not excited about the idea of a handsome young man from the East, who would spend his week, what else could he do in Elk Basin, visiting their wives. And so this is the best thing my father ever did and the act on which I modeled my entire life. He found the relevant foreman and took a job as a pick and shovel laborer and worked as such throughout the summer and preached in the schoolhouse Sunday night. And there-there were songs, there were stories, there was a gentleman who would stand at the schoolhouse door and this-my father passed the hat for contributions would holler out, lucky to get the hat back. And, I think that not an accurate way to explain my trajectory in life is that I tried to find a way to live not for a summer but for always, as the song says, in the kind of relationship to people that my father experienced with the community of Elk Basin, Wyoming and you know, it's a very difficult thing to find. A dollar and cents are a quantative way of pinning down. But for example, the father of our close friend Sam Bahor, an Arab-American with whom we did oral histories in Palestine. The father said to me, just the other night, he said, you know, you have always made me feel like an equal even though I didn't have the schooling and so forth that you do and can't express myself easily in a language thats not the language I grew up in. I think that my father tended to establish relationships of the same kind. And to me, its-its just been the great prize in life to be in a situation where ordinary people not-not people whose parents were college professors, as was my case, but ordinary people formed a circle of brothers and sisters as we used to say in snake and that Alice and I have in our, whatever it is, 66-67 years of marriage, always sought for-to be part of such a community.

This is maybe just a little aside, but it dawned on me that, when your father was at Union Theological Seminary was the same time that Myles Horton.

No, it wasn't.

Close though.

I don't think so. My dad was there in the 1920s, Myles Horton around 1930.

Okay.

But something I wanted to be sure you knew

Uh Huh

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was there at the same time as Myles Horton.

And was-forgetting his first name, Neebor

Ryan Neebor. Yes.

Was he one of your-did he have any influence on your father?

I-I can't remember. And of course, one would need to find out which Neebor we're talking about. Was he the neighborhood-the Neebor who was a young socialists in Detroit? Or was he the Neebor who was a ridiculous, would be historian of the American Spirit and who I found profoundly uncongenial whenever I tried to open a book he'd written.

And I believe in the Horton's memoir he talks about that transformation, but I would think that if Horton experienced the socialist Neebor then your father would have as well too. Did your father consider himself a socialist or?

I think he did, more explicitly than my mother. My mother wrote her PhD about the emergence of socialism in Great Britain during the 1880s. She was, you know, people used to speak of socialists of the chair, namely academics who sat in their chairs and didn't do very much. I think she was, she was a very outgoing, loving person but as far as socialism, I think she was something of a socialist of the head.

In distinction to your dad, who actually-through his relationships

More involved in-on working class life at least in Elk Basin and also a person, who, you know, befriended folk of all varieties whom he came across.

So, how did you come to see yourself as a ethical Marxist, I think was

Quaker Marxist

Quaker Marxist

Well, the Quaker part came a little later. I'm using the words provocatively, but my parents were part of what are sometimes called Fellow Travelers, people who were not members of the Communist party, as I was not, but in some significant ways were part of its cultural ambience, and that expressed itself particularly in my father's case and a good deal of admiration for the Soviet Union at a time when he should have known better, when the Soviet purge trials who going on and people like John Dooley were trying to call attention to them, but I-I used to have a half hour ride on the subway on my way to high school and I devoured quite a library of left-leaning books that had a lot of influence on me.

And fid you do that on your own? Or did you have friends reading similar?

Different ways. My favorite novel is a novel called Bread and Wine by an Italian author named

Ignazio Silone

Ignazio Silone and I can remember Danny Newman, my best friend, we were-coming home we were always a group in the subway, and I remember his holding it up saying Staughton have you read this and I did over and over.

I'm-so moving towards college, well actually, I want to ask one another question. You do talk about Sam Levingers influences? Well, if I wonder if you-maybe we can talk about that on camera or

You know, I wish I had I think I took his book- see if its.

I'll see, I think you may have put it in the kitchen.

I think I may have. Sam Levinger was the brother of a young woman who was a student of my mother's at Sarah Lawrence College and, in what I think must have been 1936 on May Day, May 1st, which were big left-wing events in those days, Sam Levinger carried me on his shoulders and I was a different shape than I now have. As Sam's sister gently reminded me I was chunky, her brother wasn't that large a person. But, he did that and then something like eight months later, went to Spain as a member of the International Brigade and died. He was wounded three times and when you had been wounded three times, you were required to return to your country of origin and do support work. He slipped out of the hospital and went back to the front, and in September-Alice, you know, where it may be?

Where?

Downstairs, I have a shelf of books that just is friends.

Yes.

It may be there.

Okay is-are they alphabetical?

Yes-yes.

Okay, that'll help.

Levinger.

Yep.

His father was a Columbus Rabbi but he went, he became involved with a battle Levittown called Belchite and I think it was probably one of the many blunders of the commanders of the International Brigade who like their subordinates were inexperienced. Belchite was a medieval town with a kind of catwalk near the roof and that made it possible for the soldiers with whom the International Brigade was contesting the fire down on people just outside the walls and there was-were a plethora of members of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion in very shallow trenches. So Levinger was assigned to the command post doing, I don't know what, but he took it upon himself to carry a box of machine gun ammunition to his friends in the trenches. He was mortally wounded in the groin area. From what I understand, might have survived had there been proper medical Care available, but it was not and he didn't. And I do think it's worth our finding a book written by his niece called Love and Revolutionary, Greetings, which is the way he signed his letters. And speaking of history, apparently Lea the-the woman who wrote the book-sorry Lori Levinger was helping her father moved to a retirement home and there was this one box and after they'd done everything else, she said well Dad, what's this? Oh well, that's-that's just some letters that Sam wrote home from Spain. And so she put together a book to which I wrote a foreword, and I don't know if this is an experience that other people have, but I identified with Sam Levinger, and I thought, well, have you ever seen such a beautiful picture of a young man

That's fantastic

I identified with Sam Levinger and I've always felt that I had the opportunity to live the life that he wasn't able to live.

Did you-and this might pull us beyond the chronological approach but you've obviously embraced non-violence. Did that-was that always the case, was that in your mind or?

Nonviolent?

Yeah.

Well I would have to say that, Alice, wherever she is was the one who raised the question with me: well, Staughton, what are you going to do when you get your Selective Service Notice? And, conscientious objection was not something that my parents talked about, but I had a cousin named David Hartley, who was a conscientious objector and a Quaker. He had run into the Quakers at a so-called Quaker Work Camp, you know, where they painted houses or whatever in a difficult neighborhood. And I think it's a practice that the Quakers abandoned in the 1960s because it was kind of paternalistic for middle-class kids to swoop in and paint your house and then say it's been awfully nice getting to know you, but you know what? That's better than doing nothing. And so David, when he was still alive, and I had a kind of personal project of trying to revive the practice of Quaker work camps. And it was through him that the idea of conscientious objection even occurred to me until Alice began to raise it.

Did it occur to you before I raised it?

I knew he was a conscientious objector?

Yeah, but did you ever think of it for yourself?

I don't know.. I'm not sure.

And I just raise it because obviously Sam Levinger was very influential and obviously

Was not a conscientious objector that's right.

The other person who obviously has had significant influence, I'm wondering if you might be able to talk a little more about him, was Lee Hosford.

Lee was someone I met during a year when I had dropped out of college, and when I went back to Harvard-William Bundy of Vietnam notoriety being Dean and letting me back in after my father wrote a letter, Lee was living in Cambridge at the time. So, I got to know him pretty well already. I already knew him pretty well at the time I met Alice because prior to going back to Cambridge, Lee had spent a summer with me at my parents apartment in New York when my parents were elsewhere. Very, very, very, brave. Very radical but disillusioned with every radical group on the face of the Earth. But he, for example, inscribed on my head the words of Robinson Jeffersons poem: as this America, settles heavily to Empire and protest, like a bubble in a molten mass pops and goes out, shine, perishing Republic. That's early 1950s. And Lee, in addition to having sampled every radical party had sampled every known variety of drugs. And later on when Alice and I were married and living in Chicago, Lee came to live with us for a time and it was very unsatisfactory, he stole money for drugs. Our son had to drag him home one night when Lee was half conscious on the sidewalk, and when I last saw him we had reached a-we thought we had reached an agreement, that he would get more assistance at a rehab facility. And so, I drove him to the bus station. And as he got on the bus, he said to me Staughton, I'm just a lost soul. So, he didn't get off the bus when it reached the location of the rehab facility, he went back to the West Coast and back to whatever kind of drugs. It was in the year or two later when I tried to write him, I got a note from this mother that he had died, but Alice and I named our first two children, after friends, who had, in Alice's-in the case of Alice's friend, committed suicide, in the case of my friend Lee, destroyed himself drugs. He was, he was quite a cynical person. I am a person of childlike innocence. So we were not carbon copies of each other, but he-he just had an enormous influence on me because I came from a middle-class home where, you know, they atmosphere is onward and upward and if anybody asks you how you feel, you always say fine, and Lee just-iy was like someone in a-in an abyss, a black pit into one-which one could look from that sunny world. He had a very great influence on me, to be a person who I guess was able to stand back and, and, without losing the ability to be compassionate or empathetic to be very, very critical indeed of the society around onself.

And while we're talking about this, I-would you mind talking about your friend, who you were also very close to, who you named your daughter after?

Yes, she also was an extremely bright girl. I had a lot of medical problems growing up so that in ninth grade I missed several months where I wasn't able to get out of bed and walk at all, so I missed school there. So when I started 10th grade, it was at a boarding school and I got to know her quite quickly before the end of the school year, we were roommates and she would help me particularly with French, but, you know, in-in classes where I was behind. But we developed a very strong relationship with each other. She was learning the piano and did very well. She wrote poetry. She had a-a very joyous aspect to her along with a very seriously depressed ambience. Oh, did I mention we became roommates. And, I remember walking through the woods to the house where we shared a room and talking about different things and her-her crying and wanting to comfort me about something. I don't even remember what it was, but it was the only close friendship I had ever had. Until you know, it began when I was 15. When it came time to go to college, we applied to the same colleges. Her father was a professor at Harvard, so, she didn't want to go to Radcliffe, which was the women's annex to Harvard. My sister had gone to Swarthmore, so I didn't want to be in her shadow again, but a couple of Bobby's friends were also accepted at Swarthmore. And that group decided to go to Swarthmore, and I went to Radcliffe and I had the feeling that she was with a friend whom she had known since she was a little girl and a classmate of ours from high school, and I figured, well, they would look after her and it would be all right, but she had already made suicide attempts during the years that I knew her. Trying to think where to pick up the thread. So, I was at Radcliffe and when she would come home on vacation, she would come, you know, I might stay an extra day and-and she would come and see me and in our sophomore year she did come at Christmas time, she had gotten to a point where the only clothing she would wear was a dress that I had made for her. It was hard for her to believe that anybody could love her, but she knew that I did and that somehow was a contradiction for her. I hope this isn't too painful for you. She just had this-this beautiful mind and spirit. She, like myself, was not really part of the main stream when we graduated a lot of our classmates went out for, you know a drinking party. I went to her house and we played records. We would write to each other during the summer and-and really keep-keep in close touch. So that when in February of 1950, I received a letter from her mother that she had committed suicide. I went and saw her mother. Her mother gave me some of her clothes and some of her music books, but that was the end of that relationship. It had a profound effect on me for months. I was in a physical state of shock. And any little thing that would remind me of her would make me cry and but I also, well, there was a man from from MIT who was courting me. And I had decided I didn't-I'd rather not get married and marry him. And so I, I felt that I needed to end that relationship as well. So, I was left with no friend, no social life. And I had the field-and I had been studying about 100 hours a week to try to deal with the courses at Radcliffe. And I just had the feeling, okay, summer school, I'm going to go to summer school and I'm going to accept every invitation to do something with other people, because if I can't do that and study, then I'm going to stop this studying but I have to start building some kinds of relationships with other people. And he had a roommate who had previously wanted to go out with me and I didn't really want any kind of relationship with him, but I felt that I owed it to him to tell him. And so he invited me to dinner. He said either come to his apartment or go to a restaurant. I figured if I go to his apartment I could better tell him, I'm not interested in a relationship. But one of his roommates cooked the dinner that night. And so I went to a play with-with Nick afterwards, and where's Staughton, oh, he went to see his friend Lee. So, I found that I've sort of figured out where and when Staughton ate lunch, and I liked the kinds of things that Staughton would talk about. And then there was a day when my uncle, who had been a commander of a destroyer during WWII in the Pacific, and I think who must have been exposed to radiation, developed cancer and was dying. And Staughton asked me a question like nobody had ever asked me before. He said, are you very close to your uncle? Nobody asked me questions like that, you know, that really mattered. And so when there was a Sunday afternoon one time and I'd been practicing piano, I came back to my dormitory and there was a note to call Staughton Lynd. So, I went and got my dime called him and he asked me if I;d like to out with him that night and I did. And he took me to a beer joint where it was smoky, and I didn't have one have anything to do with alcohol, anyway, so I said, well, why don't we go out for a walk? And get out of this joint. This is nice summer evening, let's go for a walk. And that turned into a lifelong relationship. But he pulled me out of that grief for Bobby. I mean, he would hold me in his arms and I would cry by the hour.

And what would were some of the other things that he would tell you or talk about that really clued you in that you wanted to develop a relationship with him?

Well, he was so gentle and caring about what I felt in a way that nobody had ever cared. I mean, well, I guess Bobby cared, but, well, I know she cared. But, you know, in my family, people didn't pass questions like that. It was you know don't be negative, stop thinking negative thoughts, you know, things that were imposed on me that I just didn't know how to deal with. And here was a person who cared about how I felt and who, you know, there was just a gentle quality about him that-I mean it was like magnetism that-that just drew us together and his great concern to comfort me when I, you know, my world was falling apart or had fallen apart.

I have a couple of questions, I'm not sure which is the best to ask first. But, maybe I'll ask this one first, to Staughton and it has to do with kind of idea of kind of gentle masculine And you-you've addressed that in your memoir about how many of your friends in college, I think you said, we're trotskyites who-and some of them are exploring homosexuality and different kinds of relationships and I think you did experience, you talk about some of that with your mother as well too. And I'm wondering it seems from now looking back in terms of the way that history is-are-are written and how that-that was, and this one's a little bit less on your own personal experience, but your analysis of what it would have been like for your friends who were in fact, gay or lesbian and how would they have navigated that historical moment?

I didn't know what lesbian was until years, years later so.

Lee asked me if I was interested in a homosexual relationship and I said no, and that was that. It-it in no way defined are feeling for each other. And as, as you mentioned, and I decided I had to say in the book, my mother developed such a relationship with the number of her students that

I think you felt the impact on your father

Yeah, I did, at the same time, I-I think I saw some of the same things in my father that might have made my mother seek another relationship. I-I have, I think, in a way that's a little difficult in to put into words, always had a style of relating to the world that our culture associates more with being a woman than being a man. Alice keeps mentioning the word gentleness. I'm-I'm not excited about the sub-culture of violence in American men. There isn't the formal, explicit, patriarchlism in American society that there is, for example, in Palestine or Guatemala in my experience, but whether or not its explicit or taken for granted, I hate it.

I think, Staughton, that you wanted a relationship of equality between the two of us. I do remember when we moved to Chicago, you assumed that you could get a better paying job than I could and I ended up getting a better paid job than you did. That was shortly after we we married.

Yeah, and when Alice wanted to be a paralegal I drove in the blinding snowstorm to get to the suburban location where she could take the test to qualify. When she was unexpectedly accepted at Pitt law school, I levitated, and for those three years did an awful lot of driving to try to, on the one hand, continue to receive a paycheck at legal services in Youngstown, while on the other hand, supporting her 1000% in what she was becoming certified for, and I think we both feel, it's interesting, it's important that she became a lawyer and that we can say well, oh, we're both lawyers, both Legal Services lawyers. I do passionately believe in equality, and it meant a great deal to me to discover in my reactions to Alice's progress through the world of work, how-how-how joyful I was that she, she got into law school in the way that she did and went out with honors.

It-it strikes me at least that this-this kind of sense of otherness, of gentleness has kind of been a core part of your identities, moving forward and shaped your kind of interactions and even capacity to enter into different kinds of communities that would have been more difficult if-if you were different kind of people.

Can I also just give a heads up, we have 12 minutes left on the first card, its gonna get full and I don't know if this camera automatically bumbs to B.

It should.

It should, okay.

But, we will maybe have to so we have to keep an eye

What might be good, also we might be wise, so we have 11 minutes now left on the first card, 80 minutes on the other. So, we could just keep rolling, maybe till they're both full and then we could break, we could take that as the break for lunch and download the cards while we're having lunch, okay.

So, I guess what I'm thinking and, this is just in light of your idea, that maybe we could have a conversation to some senses beyond what I should be doing as an interviewer. But I'm, my thinking about if Lee was in fact, feeling this deep sense of shame about being gay or attracted to other men, you were not gay or attracted to other men, but had this gentleness, that, that we don't really know how to define in society, because I've seen as and I don't, I certainly and your friend's name. I'm sorry, her

Her given name was Barbara, but we called her Bobby.

Bobby. And if-and I-this is way beyond the leap of anything I could possibly imagine, but certainly her close intimate relations, as you're talking about were female centric, right? And-and she was torn by something and we don't really know why, but It just strikes me interesting, at this group of people, kind of all found community of outsiders amongst each other, you and your friends who are-and you weren't all the same, but you all were outsiders. Does that make sense? And I don't know if that would have been the same now where-where it's more feasible, I think, and maybe I'm totally wrong about this to come out and to be openly gay and to pursue those relationships, where that-those communities might not have-you and your friends, for example, may have been in different social settings.

Can I just add that just a thought, something on that too. Still-they-it seems that one of the leading causes of teenage suicide today is non-conforming gender identity, you know, either sexual orientation that's, you know, being gay and lesbian or, you know, young people feeling romantically attracted to their same-sex and or just having divergent, gender identities. That's true. Now hopefully starting to change in our society now, but decades earlier would have been all the more intense that people would feel like, if they felt you know, romantic attraction or you know to their same gender, like oh my family's going to reject me, my friends will reject me, my school will reject me, the movements I'm involved in will reject me and it sort of, you know, I hope we're moving forward on that but it's really, it's just a deep thing for a young person to be grappling with, clearly your friend was grappling with that and that may even have been a major motivation in the drug use, you know, cause of emotional pain, which people often try to, you know.

I think-I think although, you know, I was conscious of individuals who were part of that world, I think we're both, Alice myself, it was something I, never felt drawn to. That's all there is to it. And I think she says the same about her relationship with Bobby and other girlfriends in high school. In fact, it's kind of a mystery to us. What that-what is going on in North Carolina, with all of this about bathrooms, I-I

Bobby had a problem with her father who and she had the feeling that, you know, that if she wrote a paper in high school that it should be publishable quality-of publishable quality. Well, that's unrealistic, you know, I think she just felt that-that much too much was expected of her. She was the, the youngest of, I think, four children. And when-when we were in high school, she had a brother who was 35, her mother was extremely intelligent and, Bobby felt, just wasted her time just playing bridge, not doing anything significant. And I mean, Bobby was an intellectual as well as having a great deal of musical ability and-and you know ability with words, I mean writing poetry and so forth, everything she did she did to perfection, but that wasn't, I think she felt that wasn't good enough for her father. That's all I know by way of cues, she wasn't interested in boys - I mean-she there were some boys who were very smart that she had a lot of respect for it wasn't-wasn't anything like that but, and there was no physical relationship. I mean if I was crying she might hug me or something, but neither she nor I were looking for a physical relationship. So, I-I just don't know.

Well, and I think it'-it's, the terminology in that we use today is probably not accurately reflected of of the, of the complexity of the relationship, right? That you -you had, but it was unique, I mean, in some ways or it's intriguing isn't and I, you know, I appreciate, obviously, you're-you're-you're sense that this was not the kind of direction that you were going but the fact that he could ask you that and you would sustain a deep relationship with him and name you're own child after him, that-thst wasn't, it's kind of like when you met and he said he was a socialist that wasn't a deal breaker, that actually, kind of speaks to that kind of unique comradeship that you had been able to develop amongst your-your friends, your peers. At-at the same time, you guys were not quite fitting in, in these models of masculinity, femininity, expectations that were, you know, to some extent, appearing to create deep psychic harm for especially for your two close friends.

Well, and, you know, I was part of a-a group of young man at the high school that I attended, but we climbed mountains together, we went canoeing together, we-sometimes both in the same day, we bicycled together. Maybe if Sigmund were amongst us, he could figure out something more but, I would say that-that my mother was clearly into homosexual relationships. I think it was very destructive to my father. It's not that-that, I, at least, was unaware of such things, but that's not nearly as important as my dad's summer in Elk Basin in the kind of choices, the kind of person I became.

And this will be the last question I ask them.

Yeah, I guess, oh, what, I guess for me, it's sort of interesting, not so much this homosexuality question per say, but the fact that neither you were willing to take on that mainstream masculinity, which is so related to a cultural violence and-and that you are not willing to be limited to the mainstream, sort of confines of what a young woman should be or do or think and that is such a fascinating, I mean, a fascinating and deeply important, foundational element of each of you and then you're, you know, finding each other.

Yeah, exactly. Well, that's a good thing, right? I did want to ask one question just to push this slightly further. This has to do-this-back to this question of shame that your mother was dealing with. It seems at least that-that if I understand it correctly, and I'm still grappling with this, but that this notion of-of shame being this feeling in terms of one-how one has diverged from one's self or expectations and that one holds on to this and is not willing to look deep or inwardly in order to create this sense of personal transformation, right? And I'm wondering if part of that has to do with trying to navigate these expectations of-of kind of externally, foisted understandings of masculinity, femininity.

Before you begin to answer let's just let the cards slip-pop over. So we're down to 0, we have one full card. Our first digital card is full and at any moment it will pop over to the other one, it said, and then we'll have 80 minutes on the second card, let's just get a time.

Are you going to want to wait that long for lunch because I could stop at this point and fix lunch?

What do you think? The rest of you? I could go either way.

Why don't we just do this, why don't we go and just finish this one question while we're still thinking about it because it does seem to me that this idea of personal transformation and of inwardly looking and being able to-to come to a different understanding of oneself is a part of the larger social transformation and-and-and so I did think that that was an intriguing aspect of how personal testimonies, you know, can play a role in larger social structural change and that-that might be one location in which it happens. But and, but in any case, I-I'm not sure, if you don't feel like pursing it we could-Do you, does this makes sense.

Absolutely, it makes a lot of sense to me. I think you could

Well, and that was just unique for me. The fact that you both had experienced friends, who had this deep emotional pain that literally destroys-you said one destroyed himself and one took her life and to some extent weren't survivors. And you guys, you know, had other friends as well to it along the way that probably

My reaction to Bobby's death was to feel, well, now I have to live for both of us, and that lasted until after the breakup of Macedonia, when I felt I didn't want spring to come. You know, I mean, always, I took such joy and at Macedonia to be able to see the same bulbs come up year after year. I know where to look for them. I didn't want spring to come that year. I just, you know, I couldn't see any reason in-in life continuing. After the end of Macedonia, it was like the entire foundation had-had gone. I would have dreams of there being fire under the pasteurs, just burning the land. I mean it, nothing left. And then eventually I pulled out of it with the sense of, well, I know two things: I'm a wife and I'm a mother and that's where I'm going to start in trying to rebuild my life.

Well, let's come back to this after lunch? What-did you want to say anything?

I don't think so. It is a matter-I'm going to the-process of becoming a gentle man otherwise known as a gentleman. Was it challenging? I should add one thing about my conscientious objection to war which is that the way it worked at that time was that you took six months of basic training and then you went to Fort Sam Houston in Texas for more intensive medical training. There was a choice as to whether you're-in the first six months you took weapons training or work in the kitchen. I worked in the kitchen. I think I was the only person who did, although there were several other contentious objectors. The moment I realized that I'd made an awful mistake was that the instructor asked us, well, if on the field of battle, you found a lightly wounded person and a seriously wounded person who would you help first? And I thought that was the dumbest question in world history. What was triage-what was-in any case, the correct answer was who helped the lightly wounded person because he could get back into combat. So, and I thought, you know, let me out of here and then thank goodness they threw me out along with other people whom they thought Senator McCarthy might locate. That was its own trauma and we all got honorable discharges in the end from the Supreme Court, and I fled back to academia.

But you went to Macedonia first right?

Yes.

I'm going to pick up on that-well maybe we can start off just in terms of the initial question about why you didn't leave him when he said he was a socialist and then we'll move into maybe talking about that dishonorable discharge and into Macedonia after lunch.

My father had been to the London School of economics in the early 1920s and had a huge library of Veblen's books. I think Lasky may have been there at the time and so forth.

Tawney

Yeah,

JDH called

But that was not part of the discussion in my family, I do remember my mother was a strong supporter of FDR. She wanted, she voted for him in 1940 and took me to the poll, showed me how the little sample voting machine worked. My father voted for Wilkie, and-but my mother just felt the tremendous importance of what Roosevelt was trying to do to redeem the-the poor. But, I had no nobody ever mentioned socialism. My grandfather used to listen to Fulton Luis Jr. and, you know, there was some tension between my mother and her father, over political things because he was conservative, and to the point of of being racist. So that when I got to college, I, for the first time, was exposed to anything having to do with Socialism or Marxism. I took a class in social studies general education course, where we would spend a month on a topic and one of those topics was socialism, and then in my second year, I took a course in government where we had, you know, the difference between socialism and communism and all of that stuff. So, that I had some exposure to that, but only in the academic setting, I didn't know anybody who was a socialist or at least not that-that talked about it. So that when Staughton said, you know, sort of timidly, he crept up on the subject and said my, my parents are socialists. I said, well, what's wrong with that? And actually the evening we met, I had, for a reading assignment in the spring, just before I met him, had read a book on the, let me think of it

the decline

The Decline and Fall of British capitalism. So I asked at dinner that night, had anybody read it because I thought it was an interesting book and Staughton then thought I must be a socialist, which I wasn't

Not necessarily that, but you don't mean to say that this lovely young woman is part of my universe, not that larger and much more menacing universe over there

But my mother was apprehensive when she was working for the federal government and Staughton was beginning to write articles on China and what not, and she thought that she might lose her job because of his radicalism and that, for a while, was a bit of a source of tension. However, during the Vietnam War, when Staughton went to, you know, was-was really way out there on, well, I guess it was after you'd been to Hanoi. My father organized, the business executives move for Vietnam Peace and he felt that having Staughton way, way, way way out, gave him a lot more room to move between the center and the extremes.

Although he was on, my father-in-law and was on Nixon's enemies list and I was not, so.

Well, that was the thing that my father was most proud of in his entire life, that he made it to Agnew's list of undesirable citizens. He thought that was a real mark of honor.

So, shall we make lunch?