May-June 2004:
A Martyr for Peace in Nigeria
Why the U.S. Keeps Invading Haiti
Forecast: Not So Drafty
David Dellinger, 1915-2004
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David Dellinger, 1915-2004

By Matt Meyer and Judith Mahoney Pasternak

ave Dellinger championed his own brand of militant nonviolence. It was muscular; it was confrontational; it was rigorously nonsectarian; and it bridged movements and generations, reaching far beyond the choir.

Dellinger accepting WRL Peace Award in 1975.

Never wedded to a single organization, Dellinger was a consummate coalition-builder and networker. He was close to the War Resisters League for much of his life, as a member for decades and in the 1940s and 1950s as a member of its Executive Committee. His last appearance at a WRL action was at the 1998 Day Without the Pentagon protest, where he was arrested with members of the Resistance in Brooklyn affinity group, linking the issues of U.S. militarism with U.S. imperial ambitions in Puerto Rico.

WWII: Objection and Resistance
The bare facts of Dellinger’s life need little retelling here. In a nation in which radical pacifism is all but invisible, The New York Times devoted almost a full page to Dellinger’s life two days after he died on May 25. His greatest national prominence was, of course, as the oldest member of the Chicago Seven/Eight, the activists accused of fomenting riots during the Democratic National Convention in 1968. The alternate count of the defendants refers to the separation of Black Panther Party co-founder Bobby Seale from the others after he was muzzled in court and not allowed to speak. Seale, on learning of Dellinger’s death, told The Nonviolent Activist that Dellinger was “a true revolutionary humanist whom I have always admired,” noting that during the trial Dellinger had been “the main co-defendant to support my Sixth Amendment rights.”

By the time of the Chicago trial, Dellinger, then in his fifties—the others were all in their twenties or thirties—had been a radical and a pacifist for more than 30 years. A child of privilege, he had become profoundly critical of capitalism during the Depression; and the brutality of a post-football game riot at Yale had converted him to nonviolence in his college days. After Yale, he went on to Union Theological Seminary, and, as he recounted in his 1993 autobiography, From Yale to Jail, he had no need to apply for conscientious objector status during World War II; he could have sought exemption from the draft as a minister. But believing that such an exemption would amount to a tacit cooperation with war, he sought secular CO status and willingly went to prison when his application was denied. In prison as before, he was an activist, often acting as an advocate for his fellow prisoners.

Pan-Africanist elder Bill Sutherland knew Dellinger from early on. “Dave Dellinger was a major influence in my life,” he said recently, “beginning in the late 1930s when we were both members of the New England Student Christian Movement and continuing during the 1940s when I became a member of the Newark ashram which Dave helped to found with other WWII non-registrants for the military draft. We were together again in federal prison in Lewisburg, PA, and participated in strikes against prison injustices.”

Dellinger’s future ties with WRL were formed in Lewisburg. Ralph DiGia, who has been on the WRL staff or Executive Committee since the late 1940s, was in Lewisburg with Dellinger and Sutherland. DiGia and some other COs had been in prison in Danbury, CT, but when they went on strike to integrate the prison dining room there, they were transferred to Lewisburg, where Dellinger was already serving his sentence. “When we got to Lewisburg,” DiGia recalled, “they put us in with the tough guys, because we had been on strike in Danbury. Some of the really rough guys told us right away that we brought too much attention from the guards and they didn’t like having us around. But the next morning, one of them came up to me and asked, ‘Are you a friend of Dave Dellinger’s?’ I had never met Dave, but I knew who he was, so I said yes. ‘Then you’re okay with us,’ the guy said. ‘Any friend of Dellinger’s is a friend of ours.’

“It was because Dave stuck up for all the prisoners,” DiGia concluded. “All the COs stuck up for each other, but Dave stuck up for any prisoner who got in trouble.”

Lifelong friendships came out of that prison experience. During the war, Dellinger had met and married Elizabeth Peterson, and not long after Dellinger’s release, the couple created a commune in Glen Gardner, NJ, along with DiGia and a few other recently released COs. The commune itself only lasted about five years, but Dellinger and Peterson and their growing family stayed on in Glen Gardner for years, and Dellinger founded the press there that would eventually produce the influential magazine Liberation.

Sutherland and DiGia were with Dellinger on one of their most exuberant postwar actions. “The last project we were together in, before I went to live in Africa,” Sutherland recalled, “was the Peacemakers bicycle trip from New York to Moscow, defying the Iron Curtain in Europe in 1951. I used to grumble that following Dave’s lead always got me into trouble! In truth, his consistent translation of beliefs into action were a constant challenge to me to be the best that I could be.”

“Revolutionary Nonviolence”
The post-WWII years saw Dellinger and his fellow conscientious objectors push for greater direct action and resistance in the peace movement, a position Dellinger later came to term “revolutionary nonviolence.” Its voice was the magazine Liberation, which Dellinger helped found and which he worked for, first as one of an editorial collective, later as editor. At the time, many of the earlier generation criticized this new pacifism as too confrontational. (The charge was repeated during and after the Vietnam War, when the Berrigan brothers and others took direct action a step further with draft-board raids and Plowshares disarmament actions.

Dellinger himself was in the thick of the resistance to the war in Vietnam from the beginning, as an organizer, a polemicist and a protester. He was able, as virtually no one else in the peace movement was, to speak to the Old Left, the New Left and working people who identified with no Left at all.

“Dave was courageous, warm, committed,” remembered David McReynolds, who met Dellinger when McReynolds went to work for Liberation in 1957. (McReynolds himself served on the WRL staff from 1960 to 1999). “When [labor and peace organizer] A.J. Muste died in 1967—he had been the glue for the Vietnam War movement—Dave took on that post, an enormously valuable and difficult task, as the only person who could do it. He had to hold together a range of people who went from the Communist Party to Rennie Davis [and the rest of the Chicago Eight]. Dave and Sid Peck—and in New York, Norma Becker—were absolutely crucial to the Vietnam movement, arranging loans that wouldn’t have to be repaid, balancing forces, holding things together.”

Dellinger also had “a deeper sense of the importance of civil disobedience than a number of people in WRL, certainly more than Women’s Strike for Peace,” said writer-activist Grace Paley, who worked during the Vietnam War with the Greenwich Village Peace Center. In a rueful aside, she noted that the much larger Women’s Strike “had no position on civil disobedience and nonviolence—if they had, the war would have ended sooner.”

As the war dragged on, Dellinger chaired the Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam and the People’s Coalition for Peace and Justice. From both seats he helped to bring together diverse national groups with burgeoning community-based youth and student efforts and with individuals including prominent artists and politicians. Competing factions of the antiwar movement who squabbled with one another could often find a respectful ear with Dellinger, who struggled for principled unity and a multiplicity of approaches. After the war ended, he was one of only a handful of activists who continued his solidarity with the people of Vietnam and Southeast Asia, traveling to the region many times in the 1970s and 80s, eventually chronicling this work in Vietnam Revisited. He also helped found the multi-issue Mobilization for Survival, with the hope that an ongoing peace and justice coalition could better serve the movement than the ad hoc Vietnam-era committees had.

One younger activist who got her start in those years is organizer Leslie Cagan, who, since the 1982 Mobilization-initiated million-person march for disarmament in New York’s Central Park, has held a position analogous to Dellinger’s during the Vietnam years. Now National Coordinator of the United for Peace and Justice coalition, Cagan thinks of Dellinger as a mentor. “In the antiwar war movement of the 1960s,” she told this magazine, “I saw Dave in action long before we met. Without any actual lessons, I probably learned more about coalition work from Dave than anyone else. His ability to bring people together, to find the common ground, to keep everyone focused was unsurpassed. His activism was a model for my generation: Speak the truth, especially when others won’t; challenge power directly and boldly and as much as possible on your terms, not theirs; make the necessary sacrifices but don’t fall into the trap of thinking you are better or more important than others. His political framework was constantly widening and deepening, and I can’t think of another straight white man who so easily and willingly integrated the insights of each new social movement as it found its voice. We live in dangerous and yet hopeful times, times when Dave’s skill and patience and commitment and openness will be deeply missed.”

The Struggle Continues
In the last two decades of his life, as progressive pundits attempted to predict the rise and fall of new movements, Dellinger was steadfast in suggesting to activists that we have, in the words of his second book, “more power than we know.” Traveling across every state, speaking at gatherings large and small, he was fond of pointing out that efforts for peace and justice were larger and more substantive than at the height of the 1960s; they were just more decentralized, locally based, and covered a wider range of issues.

Epitomizing the phrase “think globally, act locally,” Dellinger and Peterson moved to Vermont in 1986, where they worked with many community groups and projects. It was in Vermont that Dellinger’s lifelong commitment to third-party politics (he was a founder with Cagan, Ted Glick and Arthur Kinoy of the National Committee for Independent Political Action) bore fruit in the election of socialist Congressional candidate Bernie Sanders. He worked to found the Vermont-based independent journal Towards Freedom, which continues to publish insightful commentary on events throughout the world.

He also maintained a long-standing commitment to work with the imprisoned population, especially with the more than 100 U.S. political prisoners. A supporter of the American Indian Movement—and of the freedom campaigns for imprisoned AIM leader Leonard Peltier—Dellinger embarked on many lengthy fasts for Native American rights and for Peltier’s release. Peltier himself, incarcerated for close to 30 years at Leavenworth Penitentiary, told the Nonviolent Activist,”I don’t think that there will ever be another person like him.” Noting that Dellinger’s death was a great loss to the movement as a whole and to political prisoners in particular, Peltier suggested that his will be “big shoes to fill.”

Tax Resistance
Finally, Dellinger was a lifelong war tax resister, an outspoken advocate of not paying for the wars we say we don’t support. Veteran war tax resister Juanita Nelson commented that, for her, Dellinger’s most endearing quality was ”his attempt to live his daily life as if he believed what he preached.” Nelson recalled meeting him at his print shop, living out the ideal that one should not work as either a boss or an underling. Echoing a phrase repeated by the many generations of activists who understood the special ways in which Dellinger was able to transcend the age and ideological boundaries that have kept progressive peoples apart, Nelson summed up her appreciation. “Dave kept on growing, both in his public life and in his personal life. May we all learn from his example.”

Grace Paley commented that whenever there was an intra-movement conflict, Dellinger never gave in. “His way of never giving in was to continue the conversation but always maintain his position.” Paley, who has also moved to Vermont (which named her its State Poet in 2003), pointed out that although antiwar vigils in other parts of the state ended when the war in Iraq began, the one in Montpelier—the one Dellinger and Peterson participated in regularly—carries on. “Dave was always present for everything,” she said.

In 1996, at a WRL birthday celebration for DiGia in New York, Dave summed up the challenges we continue to face. It was a moment when all the progressive movements were still wrestling with the meaning of socialism in the face of the collapse of the governments that had called themselves communist. Dellinger articulated a jargon-free assessment that clearly and simply laid out the contrast between capitalism and its rivals. “In the Soviet Union,” he said, “they tried for 70 years to have economic democracy without political democracy, and the verdict is in—it didn’t work. In the United States, we’ve tried for 200 years to have political democracy without economic democracy, and the verdict is in—it doesn’t work.”

David Dellinger struggled his whole life for true democracy and justice for all. His legacy suggests that we must commit to nothing less.

Matt Meyer is a member of the WRL Coordinating Committee, a founder of Resistance in Brooklyn, and co-author, with Bill Sutherland, of Guns and Gandhi in Africa. Judith Mahoney Pasternak is a veteran journalist and the editor of this magazine.