The Influence of Resistance
By Larry Gara
Direct Action: Radical Pacifism From the Union Eight to the Chicago Seven. By James Tracy. University of Chicago Press, 1996; 196 pages, $34.95 hardcover, $10.95 paper.

AT LONG LAST we have a scholarly study calling attention to the many contributions made by advocates of active nonviolence to contemporary U.S. society. James Tracy tells their story from World War II to the end of the Vietnam era and includes the radical pacifists’ communitarian experiments as well as their campaigns for disarmament and civil rights. However, the book’s usefulness might have been enhanced if the author had asked more participants in the movements he wrote about to check his manuscript for accuracy.

Tracy’s narrative begins with the refusal of eight Union Theological Seminary students to register under the Selective Service and Training Act of 1940, an action that took David Dellinger and the rest of the Union Eight to prison even though, as ministerial students, they had absolute exemption from the draft. A quarter of a century later, Dellinger, who had become a leader in the postwar peace movement, was one of the Chicago Seven tried for conspiring to cause a riot at the Democratic Convention in 1968. Indeed, a number of World War II resisters who had been incarcerated drew upon their nonviolent actions in prison to influence the peace movement along more radical lines.

Historic Campaigns
Direct Action gives many examples of that influence, along with accounts of the evolving politics of the groups that grew out of it: the 1947 Journey of Reconciliation that took racially mixed groups into the upper South by bus to test federal public accommodation laws; the civil disobedience campaigns against New York City air raid drills; the voyages of the Golden Rule and the Phoenix into Pacific nuclear testing sites; the founding of Peacemakers, whose members committed themselves to draft refusal and war tax resistance; the many acton projects against nuclear weapons and Polaris submarines; the founding of the Congress of Racial Equality with direct action protests against segregation; the creation of the Committee for Nonviolent Revolution, the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy and the Committee for Nonviolent Action; the mass movement against the Vietnam War; and the emergence of Liberation as a major radical pacifist publication. Among the persons whose lives Tracy discusses are Dorothy Day, a founder of the Catholic Worker movement; Bayard Rustin, who had a noted career as a peace activist before turning to traditional liberal politics within the Democratic Party; Jim Peck, who dedicated his life to pacifist action; A.J. Muste, whose leadership influenced virtually every nonviolent project in the years after World War II until his death in 1967; and Brad Lyttle, who played a vital role in the various peace walks and Committee for Nonviolent Revolution projects. Tracy’s research for Direct Action included interviews with a number of the radical pacifists whose lives and careers the book covers (including WRL’s David McReynolds and Ralph DiGia).

While it is important that the radical pacifist experience be made more visible, some of Tracy’s statements are incorrect and some of his conclusions open to serious question. It was Catholic Worker activist Ammon Hennacy, not Dorothy Day, for example, who first suggested action against the New York air raid dlmut should be added to this list of resisters who participated in the Journey of Reconciliation. Although Tracy discusses tax resistance, he does not call it "war tax resistance," and his treatment of Peacemakers and war tax refusal ignores the important contributions of Marion and Ernest Bromley. In describing the role of the Phoenix, he writes only of its original voyage in 1958, not of its 1967 trip into Haiphong Harbor. (It should also be noted that a one-sentence reference to my own 1949 case contains two minor errors: Tracy has the date I was sentenced wrong, and he erroneously states that the judge ordered me to undergo a psychiatric examination.)

Oversimplifications
Moreover, he somewhat oversimplifies disagreements within peace organizations. The 1951 split in Peacemakers was as much between those who emphasized personal, spiritual pacifism and those who favored action projects as it was,as Tracy claims,between the latter and the communitarians. And while there was some hard feeling between those who pushed WRL into more direct action projects and those who resigned in 1947 in opposition to such tactics, "hostile takeover" seems too strong a term for the change.

The book is dedicated to Tracy’s scholarly mentors and to Bayard Rustin, "who gave as much as any and forgave more than most." Tracy writes sympathetically of Bayard’s departure from the peace movement for more traditional liberal politics. What he did not say, or perhaps did not know, is that in his later years Bayard had second thoughts about his transformation; indeed, Dave Dellinger, in his book From Yale to Jail, describes a weeping Bayard saying in 1981, "I sold out."

Tracy concludes that radical pacifists are skilled at small-scale, direct action projects but incapable of organizing a mass movement. He even charges them with beng a key factor in "the ultimate unraveling of the Left in the late 1960s." Yet radical pacifism was never an either-or approach. Many of the same individuals who violated the Selective Service Law on the basis of individual conscience also participated in prison strikes and later led large-scale civil rights, antinuclear and anti-Vietnam War demonstrations. While Tracy recognizes those actions, he persists in emphasizing the individualistic (he calls it "libertarian") nature of radical pacifism.

To this historian and minor participant in the peace movement, it occurs that the principal contribution of the radical pacifists was the practice and promotion of active nonviolence. Civil disobedience was only a part of it. We tried while in prison to preserve the ideal of nonviolence and, after the war, to nurture and expaetnam-era protests nonviolent, they provided expertise in nonviolence to Martin Luther King and others who were leading the civil rights revolution, and they did much the same for the antinuclear movement. While it may be a stretch to suggest a significant influence of U.S. pacifists on the freedom movements in Eastern Europe, those movements dramatically illustrate the possibilities for nonviolence in revolutionary situations.

The U.S. Left today, concludes the author, is "disjointed, episodic and obsessed with individualistic lifestyle concerns." It hardly seems fair to lay all that on a handful of pacifists who were primarily focused on keeping a few candles lit during a very long darkness. Nevertheless, this is an important book, which all adherents of nonviolence should read. Short and clearly written, it provides much food for thought.

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