Oral History with Staughton and Alice Lynd, January 12th, 2017, Part Three

Okay, February-or-February, I'm changing months, I'm losing-January 12, 2017.

Let me just, I'm sorry, I wasn't rolling, could you say the date again? January 12, 2017.

think so.

Interviewing Staughton Lynd and-Dan Kerr and Catherine Murphy. So, I think, maybe what we can do, is pick up where we-we left off. We were addressing this kind of question about the preferential option for the poor and thinking about how that might play a role in terms of thinking about communities, in which you-you've worked with over the course of your-your life's work. So, do you want to pick it up from there? Should I ask you a more-?

I'll do my best. I think the preferential option for the poor is a somewhat ambiguous concept, because I think it implies persons of middle class privilege, whether or not they're part of a church or not, will make a significant effort to be of service to those who are less fortunate, and I think that that motivation is somewhat questionable. I realize that Jesus asked the young ruler to give up all his wealth to the poor. On the other hand, it was also his experience with the two sisters on his way to Jerusalem that at least, as his words were remembered, he said the poor ye have will always have with you. So, I think it might be useful just as an exercise, at least, to set aside those words about a preferential option for the poor and just to talk about how to change the world so that there are not extremes of poverty and well-being. At least, I don't find myself using the term preferential option for the poor any longer, I'd rather speak of people of different backgrounds accompanying one another.

Do you have any kinds of advice for somebody now who's interested in-in addressing economic inequality and oppression, is interested in working with oral histories. testimony stories, and just really not sure who to work with. There's so many, so many places where one could start and issues that are of significance and report. Do you have any advice on how one might consider, you know, which, communities to engage with.

Well, first of all, I think I would advise finding a skill if you don't already have it that poor people need. I think that's the key to everything else that absent the label of lawyer, I wouldn't have gotten very far seeking a shot in a chaser in Youngstown bars. Whereas, with that skill and are-even the advertised skill, oh, he's our lawyer, all doors sprang open. Now, that may not be the only way for people to create a comfortable relationship of accompaniment, but it's the way that has worked for Alice and myself and that I think would be useful to many others.

Did you find in your work in rank-and-file before you were a lawyer, did you feel like you had a skill to offer?

Well that's an interesting question, because I think our focus was always on what the interviewee had to offer. And, I go back to a question that you've raised several times. What about the criticism that you don't check up on the reliability of the facts that you're given? And the-the most dramatic example in-in my experience is the testimony of John Sergeant, that the little steel strike was for himself and his 18,000 colleagues at Enlin Steel, a quote victory of great proportions. Whereas the entire scholarly world and even radicals like Marty Gleiberman, go along with the idea that yeah, the little steel strike was a catastrophe, it was lost and lost in a demoralizing manner. And the problem with that judgment, is that people still haven't confronted the fact that John Eldora, an fisted dictator in the United Mine Workers, imposed on the incipient, industrial unions of the CIO, the formula that it worked for him. Copied in community organizing by Saul Alinsky. And that formula was and is, until you reach a satisfactory settlement, you call the other side all sorts of names, you pound your chest and emphasized the hair there on, you act in a very militant manner. Once you reach a settlement with the other side, everybody puts their feet up on the table and you get out the liquor. And you put into effect, I mean, just imagine this for a moment, an arrangement where the employer, your erstwhile adversary deducts from the workers paycheck what you tell him is the dues, he owes, or she owes, the union and-and forward that check every month to the union. Doesn't that suggest that union and employer are, to some degree, cahoots. They're part of a bureaucratic arrangement which doesn't-which makes it unnecessary for the union to get your continuing approbation in any meaningful way because you have sewed up that dues money from now until the end of time. And it was so interesting to me the when we asked people, people who would suffered great sacrifices, years of going without an income because they'd been discharge, sometimes crippling injuries. What happened? What was this-this glorious, glittering movement to set things, right in a capitalist economy, what went wrong? Over and over again, majority answer was, the dues check off, because the dues check off freed the union bureaucracy from any day-to-day accountability, and moreover there was a pool of money there. Why in the world should you go back to that hot and dusty mill when you can think of some title for yourself at union headquarters and wear a suit and tie for the rest of your life.

So if I'm understanding you correctly, the argument you're making, is that John Sergeant took-he created and presented his own historical interpretation of what happened and that was, in fact, him engaging in-hist being a historian himself?

I mean, that's a mild way of saying, I ran into this man in 1969 or 1970 when I was just getting into labor matters, and I created the occasion together with colleagues in which at the end of a long, hot evening and they narrow crowded University Hall, I saw this poor man who died of a heart attack not long after sweating as he rapped out these paragraphs of what he'd learned. And now it's 50 years later and I wouldn't change a comma. I think he nailed it and the academic world still hasn't a clue. Hasn't a clue. And it's sad.

What, what do you think is the role of the academic historian?

Depends who you're talking about.

Maybe I should revisit, what do you think should be the role?

Well, I think, I'm terrible on names and I can fill that in inthe transcript at a later time, but for the moment I'm-I'm forgetting the name of the historian Christian Appy. A.P.P.Y. I believe, University of Amherst, retired. Who's written a series of books about the Vietnam War, the first one I think is called A Working Class War and the last one just blasts the idea of American exceptionalism and he does it in a very interesting way. Two things. Number one, he says it wasn't because the United States needed rubber or tin or tungsten or some other raw material that may or may not have been in Southeast Asia, but what the United States, or the people running the United States, did need was the preservation of capitalism as a system in a significant part of the world, such a critical distinction. And he has a page on which he talks about the Ivy League people. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., The Bundy Brothers, the Rostovs, who made themselves purported experts on United States foreign policy, although most of them are not at all. And who, as Appy portrays it, were really interested in showing that in the same way their fathers and uncles came forward and earned a Victor's Laurels for themselves in WWII. So, they too had in their War to preserve the system, done the same. And all sorts of sub-themes of masculinity and the need for an elite. Parenthetically Margaret Mead, called me at one point and said, didn't I agree that it was good that really bright people were exempted from the draft because they were needed to run things. And then my halting manner, I-we knew her only because where she went in the summer and where my parents went for many summers were near to one another, in my halting manner, I said, no, I don't agree. It's like, Mr. Trump saying that his Vietnam was creating all the businesses that he brought into being around the world.

Do you-we-we've talked about this a little before, not on record, but we've established that history at it's very core is about oral transmission of knowledge and understanding the past and that there's these deep traditions that go way back and form, really, history throughout time. With that understood, I want to think through about the early 1960s and with your cohort of historians that were coming through and most of you not working on periods within living memory, how did you come to embrace oral history as a method? Both you and your cohort?

I think it would prove itself justified to approach people one by one. I don't think it was the same for everyone in the same way at the same time. so I can only speak for myself and, I'm launching myself into space as I say this, it was somehow connected with the notion that was at the core of the new left. That everyone's obligation was to engage in whatever form of self activity made sense to that particular person and his or her particular circumstances. That you put your money where your mouth was. And that lent itself, I think, to the notion of-of, well, who fought and died in the war? Working class people who had no knowledge of what another, doing their best to kill each other. As-there's a scene in my favorite movie Grand Illusion, where the peasant woman, in whose home the escaped prisoners have found a refuge, are shown by the lady of the house a series of photographs. They're all men. Her husband, her sons, other relatives, ones who are (*unintelligible*) and see that our greatest victories. And, this, of course, was a theme sounded perhaps more eloquently than by anyone other before or since by Eugene Debs in the language he used to-to condemn participation in the first World War. Not sure I answered the question but at least I expressed something that I feel strongly.

Well and-and so, back to the question, did you-so this idea of self activity-

Yeah

Is kind of at the core of-of where you are taking this. And does that suggest that in order to really address, let's say we want to understand steel workers and the history of-of the labor history of the steel industry or just the history of the steel industry, right? That one needs to understand that through the perspective of those who created it or-I'm just trying to put this together.

Well understand that it wasn't by some expert, ratiocination of my own that I went to talk to John Sergeant. Because there happened to be a steel worker from Gary in the Alinsky training process when I became involved in late, 1968 and 1969. And he said, well, I don't know if he'll talk with you, but the person you need to talk with is John Sergeant. In other words, I was led to a person whom I was told would have a deep understanding and perspective on what was needed.

And what was the question that that that brought him to bring you to him? Well, how did he know to lead you to him?

Well, because I-I suppose, by that point in time, where were we, as a movement? We-we had learned that simply being an outrage student wasn't quite enough you needed more of a base in the world outside academia. I don't know if I'd put it quite in the same way today, but I think for the time it was correct. How do we understand that that strange world from which some people had come, but many people are not. And even those who had come from that world had come from only one version of it, from the kitchen table discussions in their home, and, I mean, you talk about, you know, these Zen Buddhist stories of how you travel over snowy mountain ranges, to-to meet the Zen master and he whacks you with a broom on the face, that you come to the realization that it's either there in the present moment are it ain't there. I-I-I was so amateurish, so unschooled, so shy in approaching John Sergeant and I remember we-he invited us to our-his home for a meal and the very first thing he did was to take our little daughter by the hand, go out behind his house to show her the little pool that he had with his fish, and it was as if he took me by the hand, and with-with a series of people of whom John was, I feel, the-the most insightful and the most humble in the sense that if he ran for office and lost he would go back to work in the mill. It's amazing how many defeated union persons-defeated in union elections avoid going back to work with their hands. It was, I don't want to speak of discipleship because he-he never-he never laid a whatever the equivalent is of laying a hand on-he never tried to bend my mind, to use Alice's phrase, he really didn't. It was more an attitude of well, I've done this ever since 1936. It's the bulk of my adult life, but for what it's worth, here's what I think I've learned, and you know, for such a person as I felt, to some extent here in Youngstown, with a couple of other men, you know, you were-you're ready to tell academic colleagues, you mean to say, you never talked with John Sergeant. You don't know who Ed Man is and you're writing books about Labor history? Give me a break.

You've talked in in your memoirs about a period of dealing with post-traumatic stress as the movement kind of went through schisms, and I don't purport to understand the traumas and stresses you went through and I'm actually not going to ask about those right now, we maybe should, but-

I think they're easy enough to imagine about academic insecurity, a slowly increasing family without a slowly increasing income. And also, you know, when I came back from Hanoi, the president of Yale University said I had given an a aid and comfort to the enemy, which is a phrase from the law of treason, which carries the death penalty. So, I mean, these suckers weren't weren't playing pool. They-they saw me with all my imperfections as-as nevertheless, some kind of threat. And I hope I was. But, I mean, living through all of that, Alice had several miscarriages, the-the lack of contact between myself and-and Ivy League expectations was just colossal both as an undergraduate at Harvard and as a faculty member at Yale, and the-the student handbook said I was a rising star. They thought that I was neat, but I was miserable even before going to Hanoi. I mean, I-it just wasn't my world and it's hard to put into words what I mean when I say that, I understand the difficulty and asking questions but, when push come to shove, maybe it's the attitude-I mentioned several times Ed Morgan, who was a lovely man, and a very good historian and absolutely mistaken in his fundamental assumptions about things. He once wrote a review, it wasn't something I'd written, but I think it was one of Professor Nash's books on, you know, the people of the bottom, and my-my memory of-of Ed's review is he said, well, this about religion and that about the urban situation and so on. But then he said, none of it mattered, they didn't make the decisions, they were the people who made things run, and that's what I was up against. And-and it was very difficult because clearly, my status changed in a very few years in New Haven, from being at least distantly related to Middletown. The fact that my fact that my father was given a tenured position in sociology without ever having taken a sociology course, the fact that my dad was allowed to use Middletown as his PhD dissertation provided he first went through it and crossed out everything my mother had written. And he purported to do that even though, as she pointed out, it was ridiculous because they would exchange drafts and every word and in the books was written by them both. Something about Jesse Lemish that we haven't touched is that he wrote a book called On Active Service in Peace and War, which was an absolutely devastating critique of the unthinking patriotism of senior academics and the way they used that and followed that in their own work and then presumed to pass judgment on those of us who didn't share that fundamental assumption. It was-it was all very difficult.

One-one side of this that you-I don't think I've talked about, and I'm wondering if it maybe was even more difficult was the splits going on within the movement and that was painful as well too.

Well, yes, because you know, you're like the gambler who puts-who knows that he can't anywhere-get anywhere playing the red ball and puts all his chips on the black one, or I should say vice versa and then that too just goes completely astray. It was devastating. I mean we moved to Chicago, not because Yale had yet denied me tenure, although I knew they were going to, but because the STS National Headquarters within Chicago and Rudy Davis talked to me about organizing schools and-and all of this happened the year before the riots in Newark and Detroit, which just made it completely impossible for black and white people to work together. And, I have often times sort of stood back and-and thought about those years and wondered how in the world did I get from one day to the next cause it was like all of the-you were trying to cross a river on a bridge, and-and the planks in the bridge were being shot away ahead of you. And, of course, I was only one of many. Howard Zinn, who was beloved of the Spelman College student faculty, who had created this program and that program for the whole of Atlanta University, who by any reasonable interpretation of academic practice had tenure, was discharged like that the day in 1963 after the day-the day after all the students left campus and were no longer in protest, no longer in a position to protest meaningfully. And, our son Lee had his almost fatal fall at just that time, and Alice remembers being in the hospital room with me and-and how the phone call came about Howie and how I rose from my chair as if at a military command and went forth to do what battle I could for Howard. I applied to something like six universities in the Chicago area. Northern Illinois, University of Chicago, Roosevelt University, Loyola University, and at every single one of them the history department chairman wrote me offering me a job and at every single one, higher administration vetoed that opportunity for livelihood, including a very modest institution, Chicago State, where I had a signed contract that they just they refused to approve it. And, I don't know, I mean there wa-, of course, people who-who-who got the rough end of McCarthyism, had a still more difficult time, I think, but it was an experience of constantly being driven back to ones romantic assumptions about what-what was possible in life, you know. One-one sang the words of William Blake's Jerusalem over and over, I will not cease from mental fight. Not quite sure why I'm talking about all this, but I guess it's because someone else might have been abused as a child, forced to attend an execrable school, etc. But it is as if there was a comradeship of suffering, I had suffered in a different way but it was like, I forget what, oh you're being able to talk about what you had experienced on the Lower East Side to people who were going through homelessness in downtown Cleveland. It's very important, and Alice and I, I mean I think you'll see this perhaps on display for, maybe it's only one of you, with-with Arab-Americans in town. There's nothing we need or could ask for that-that won't be forthcoming. In the probable be to try gracefully to-to push some of it away because it-it's too much, it's not appropriate. It's a different kind of inequality. But-but I think that, you know, students at Spellman would see-I hadn't yet gone through any of my experiences at Yale, but I had been thrown out of the army and so on. I think they sensed some sort of equivalent between what Howard Zinn and Staughton Lynd had experienced and what they and their families were going through.

I'm-Im'-I hope you're aware, and I-I think maybe you are, but that Rank-and-File is probably one of the most pivotal books in the field of oral history in terms of setting the stage for work that came later and this is-I don't think just my estimation, but it is my estimation. I think Jim Green wrote about this in the 70s in his review for History Workshop. But to me, I don't think it's-and perhaps, and you tell me this, I'm going to put out a statement that the fact that you in this moment of despair transforms what-the way in which people do oral history, I don't think it's coincidental. It was-maybe it's just me talking, less of a question, but it just seemed to me that that inward-lookingness, and maybe that's what speaking back to that conversation we had yesterday about your mother, but that inward lookingness that created, that perhaps capacity, or enhanced that capacity, not say it wasn't there, for building that second pillar or as you framed it, of empathy.

Well, I think biography, whether committed to paper or only between ones ears, is a very tricky business. I-I went through such agony about, I mean, we arrived at Spelman College in a used Cadillac that Alice's parents had given us, first car we ever owned. Edson Laoskey, I carried to him the question, of a general strike against the war, and you may not know he was a leading dissident in the steelworkers union and his home was in Chicago. And, he, at the time, I think wrote me off as a limousine liberal who had all sorts of bright ideas about what other people should do. So, whether in the-in the Ivy league setting or the working class setting, there was plenty of opportunity to-to feel-feel ones inability to fit in one's amateurishness, ones kind of one-sided predilections, but recently, last couple of years, I think especially beginning with-with the idea of accompaniment and and the book Accompanying that I wrote, I've felt a certain quality of coming out on the other side, and, you know, perceiving that our different enthusiasms are-are paths up one mountain, and-and I know the value of what I've written about the Northwest Ordinance and the no-strike clause in CIO contracts, even if that's not where the academic world is at the moment. So, yeah, I-I know what you talking about.

Do you-one person we haven't talked about at all this is just a little bit off that, but we-closely related chronologically is David Dellinger.

Mmm.

Can you tell us anything about your relationship with him and-?

Well, David, had an unimpressive, intentional community in New Jersey, that was particularly hard on Alice and caused her to return to the evangelical community we had just left. But I-I did-David and Howard, each of whom, was maybe half a dozen years older than myself, each of whom died at the age I now am, were the two people I most admired in the whole of this adventure. And David has a spectacular description in his autobiography From Yale to Jail, of being at Lewisburg and another conscientious objector, who was younger and frailer, David was a star athlete, chunky kind of left guard type of physique, and this young man came to him and told him that he'd been informed that a group of prisoners had decided that he would be their sexual boy and that they were coming for him that evening, and David describes how first of all he wangled a way to get out of his cell at night and then he went to his friend's cell and stood in front of it. And sure enough here came a group of four, and David, for what seems like, it must have seemed an eternity to him, but a substantial length of time could have made conversation with them about this and that, but they became restless and made it known that they had come for a reason, but somehow, David, behavior, all of this superficial preliminary-or not so superficial, but this reaching out, made an impression such that all of the group except for one left, and the one who remained was a man named Steel. And David said, had the most threatening being and-and voice of anyone he had ever known. And, this man finally said to him, with an abundance of expletives, you're telling me that you would let us put a shiv in yourself before you let us into the cell, with whatever the other man's name was. He said, holy fucking Christ. And after that, according to David, he and David were the best of friends. David said he went back to his cell feeling kind of cocky and as if he carried something off and once he was inside just began to sob uncontrollably. And that in the rest of his life, he was never able to speak about it publicly that once or twice he tried but he would always break down. And he says, in his autobiography, I am crying as I write. And David, for anyone who knew him, when-when AJ Musty died after his trip to Hanoi, I think I could have fulfilled the role and I wanted to or felt I would be good at it, but David became the coordinator of the peace movement. And then one of the accused after the 1968 Democratic Convention, and he was just a very solid person, and something that-that has meant a great deal to me is-I'm not interested in going to occasions after people die. I prefer to have interaction while they're still living, and in the case of Dave Dellinger, there were two opportunities, one, we Alice and I, went to see him in Northern Vermont, and I said David, I know that after we moved to Chicago, you were involved in a series of situations, including with Tom Hayden and the 1968 Democratic Party Convention protest where you asked me to take part and I didn't. I had too much on my plate in one way or another, and I'd like to find out what you felt about that. I assumed you were very angry and he said no, Staughton, I didn't feel anger, I felt abandoned. And then, there was an occasion for him in-in Burlington Vermont, which was kind of the movement saying goodbye to him. And I had the opportunity, David could barely make it up to the speaker's platform at that point, and I had the opportunity to turn toward him and tell him, well, what I told him about was an incident and it was in August 1965 at what we called the Assembly of Unrepresented People, when I felt, not without reason, that if there weren't some sort of protest before young people came back to college, you know, it might become impossible to protest because the feeling was very strong that the presence of American troops in Vietnam was escalating very rapidly, and in any event we planned to assemble on the steps of Congress and say that somebody else might be at war with the people of Vietnam, but we were not. And we got as far as the-the slope leading up to the halls of Congress and there were, I think, three lines of District of Columbia policeman awaiting us. And I very self-consciously ask myself, now, let's see, how do I make myself through that barricade non-violently. And I was, Bob Moses and I, were immediately arrested and as the paddy wagon pulled away, I saw what David had done. He invited the protesters not to try to make their way through the police line but just to sit on the grass in a semi circle and to pass from hand to hand, what was our manifesto of the moment, a-a document called a Declaration of Conscience with Respect to the War in Vietnam, or something close to that. Each person would read a sentence and then pass it to the next person. And David had somehow managed to sit with his back to the police and sent them a silent message. His lack of respect for the-not for them, but for the position they were taking-and I told-I was able, in this assemblage of people who would come together to honor him before his death, I was able to say that I thought it was the most spectacular example of teaching that I thought I had ever encountered. And, he once or twice in all the time I knew him, and I was close to him for a number of years, only once or twice he used the word god. He was basically a humanist, but a person of great persistence and patience and simply an inspiring man to have known.

We have 10 minutes left on this card.

10 minutes. Are there any things that you might want to say about doing oral history? Advice regarding the method?

I-I don't know about oral history in particular, but it-it-it did make me angry when people tried to character myself and others as cheap propagandists because I spent a summer at the New York Historical Society reading through every paper published in New York City, between the end of the War for Independence and the adoption of the Constitution trying to understand why the artisan class of New York City had supported a constitution written by their class enemies. And, I mean, it just was-nd no one who has written about it since has departed from that way of looking at things. The urban artisan and class of people wanted a strong tariff to keep British manufactured goods out of the American market. And similarly, with regard to the Northwest Ordinance, I mean I know a couple of, I-I-meant a great-there's a big new book about the strategy of the abolitionist movement. And somehow it came into my hands. And I was reading through it, and I looked at the bibliography-bibliographical essay, and it began something like this, there is an enormous literature on the adoption of the Constitution and its relationship to slavery. Among titles to be consulted are, and my essay on the Northwest Ordinance was the first one listed, so, I'm reasonably confident that as to that and as to the analysis of the CIO on the modern American labor movement, that in time, my work on those particular topics, which I think are the two most important that I tackled, will be recognized, and of course, when you write about the late 18th century and the middle of the 20th century, you-academia doesn't know what to do with you, and I mean, what's your period and-I mean I can't even say, oh well, it's oral history because it wasn't what people recognized as oral history. Sergeant, more than the other, but they were both, as I saw them, questions of oral history, but I didn't want to get into another imbroglio pushing that thesis. Can't even remember the question, but I'm trying to describe my-my state of mind. I did good work as a historian but, it-it's not the most important thing I've done with my life. And, I've come to realize that, Alice and I, are of value to younger people simply as examples of lives lived, rather than for anything in particular written or done. At the same time. I don't want to leave this conversation without saying that both my notions about the Northwest Ordinance and about John Sergeant are, from my point of view, examples of oral history, and maybe that-I-I've been feeling, I mean this was my reaction to the whole Minneapolis possibility, maybe that's in the end where-where I hang my hat. That is to say, how do you approach ordinary people in a way that most respects and values their contribution to not just to our knowledge, but to our understanding of certain critical issues, and not only issues in the interpretation of American history but issues in how do we change the world, how do we deal with the procession of Donald Trumps that will no doubt present themselves as American capitalism slowly loses its grip of the rest of the planet. Maybe oral history is as good a way of tasting a label on on that as any.

I think that's-I'm not gonna ask another question. There's only two minutes left and that's the perfect way to end it.

Good. Well, I think what we all really need is a glass of wine.

I think we do too! Well, thank you once again, I think this was a really really, well I shouldn't say once again because we're just at the end but this-I think we were able to get some really great material with both you and Alice and-