Staughton Lynd 1929-2022

Along with Roslyn and Howard Zinn, and Carol and Noam Chomsky, Alice and Staughton Lynd belonged to a generation of radical married couples in the United States who took controversial, unpopular public stands – on Civil Rights at home, on Vietnam and subsequent wars abroad – regardless of the consequences, and held fast to lifelong commitments. Staughton died last week, at the age of 92, survived by Alice and their three children.

‘I lost my opportunity to make a living as a teacher when I tried to go all-out to stop the Vietnam War,’ Staughton said in 2009:

I took account of all the rules and requirements. I went to Hanoi during Christmas vacation, and practically overturned the world Communist bureaucracy to be back in the States in time for my first scheduled class in the new year. It didn’t make any difference. The president of Yale said I had ‘given aid and comfort to the enemy’, a phrase from the law of treason.

The trip to Vietnam, with Tom Hayden and Herbert Aptheker, made Staughton a household name but ended his academic career.

The son of the sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd, Staughton went to Harvard as an undergraduate, but quit (temporarily) after reading Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution. He went back and graduated though. In 1951 he married Alice Niles and for a while they lived on a commune in Georgia. Back in new York City, Staughton worked as an organiser at the University Settlement House in New York: ‘One day in the subway, it came to me that I did not want to chaperone teenage dances for the indefinite future.’ He got funding through the GI Bill to write an MA thesis at Columbia on land tenure and class struggle in the Hudson Valley during the revolutionary period.

It was published in 1962, by which time he was teaching at Spelman College in Atlanta. Howard Zinn was one of two adult advisers to the Student Non-Violent Co-ordinating Committee, and he recruited Staughton to run the Freedom School programme for the SNCC in 1964. Staughton called the Freedom Summer his ‘most important political experience’. He was with Fannie Lou Hamer and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party at the Democratic Convention in 1964.

Zinn was dismissed from Spelman in 1963 and Staughton left the following year to go to Yale. After Yale sacked and blacklisted him, the Lynds moved to Chicago where he had landed five tenure-track teaching jobs but had them all rescinded. He worked instead as a community organiser for Saul Alinsky.

The Radical Historians’ Caucus tried to get Staughton elected president of the American Historical Association in 1969, to get it to go on record against the war. Eugene Genovese helped foil the plan, and went on to rule the radical historical roost. Lynd outlasted him, though, founding Historians against the War within the AHA (I joined the former but not the latter) to oppose the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Staughton wrote for Liberation, Studies on the Left, Dissent, Socialist Revolution, Science and Society and Radical America, and he and Alice edited a book of primary sources, Nonviolence in America,in 1966. The following year he published Class Conflict, Slavery and the US Constitution, with a preface by E.P. Thompson, and in 1968, Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism, a pioneering social history of ideas. In 1971, he wrote The Resistance, with Michael Ferber, about organising opposition to the draft, and edited Personal Histories of the Early CIO. He coined the phrase ‘guerrilla history’ to describe a new way of relating to working-class people as subjects of history not of their own making, and as historians in potentia. It was a long way from narrow empiricism or consensus history, which Lynd and Zinn had helped to explode. In 1973, he wrote a book with Gar Alperovitz on strategies for socialist revolution in the US.

‘Later,’ in the words of the historian Jeffrey Gould, ‘he placed his intellect, courage and creativity at the service of the labour movement in ways I only wish more of us could emulate.’ Staughton followed Alice into law, taking a JD from the University of Chicago in 1976, and they put down roots in Niles, Ohio, near Youngstown, where they fought for steel mills owned and run by unions and communities, instead of plant shutdowns and capital flight. Staughton wrote about it in The Fight against Shutdowns (1982). Labour Law for the Rank and Filer was published in 1978; Rank and File: Personal Histories by Working-Class Organisers, edited by Alice and Staughton, appeared in 1981.

It is difficult to think of anyone other than Zinn whose scholarship was as fully integrated into his activism. In Accompanying: Pathways to Social Change (2012), Staughton uses a term borrowed from Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador to lay out the ways middle-class intellectuals can engage with struggles from below to democratise society.

When I met the Lynds, 25 years ago, Staughton had recently published three books: an edited volume of oral history of the forgotten working-class radicalism before the New Deal and the formation of the CIO; Living Inside Our Hope: Confessions of a Steadfast Radical, which offered a message to my generation; and Lucasville, about the uprising in the eponymous prison in Ohio on Easter Sunday in 1993. Zinn called it ‘one of the most powerful indictments of our “justice system” I have ever read … The detailed transcripts (yes, oral history!) give great power to the whole story.’

Staughton and Alice were stalwart abolitionists, long before the stance was popular, and well before I met them they had corresponded and visited with prisoners. Staughton said he learned more in one prison than he had in twenty steel mills. Solidarity was not an abstraction: as Solidarity Unionism: Rebuilding the Labour Movement from Below (1991) makes clear, it was a self-critical, concrete practice, anchored in specific places, institutions, and social customs and norms. The Lynds provided something like a compass, with a clear north, in a time of ideological confusion and demoralisation on the left.

In October 1997, Marcus Rediker drove a small group of graduate students – including me, the historian Gabriele Gottlieb and the actor Cornell Womack – from Pittsburgh to Youngstown for a day-long Saturday meeting. Peter Linebaugh had come in the night before from Toledo, and slept in the Lynds’ basement. The meeting had been called by the Workers’ Solidarity Club, designed to combine forces against the death penalty in Ohio and Pennsylvania.

I felt I had joined an antinomian family in which radical ideas were alive and kicking. It wasn’t subcultural, either. I can’t remember what I insisted on discussing with Staughton during a break in the meeting – it’s unlikely to have advanced our common aims, that’s for sure – but he was tolerant, and listened carefully, and responded kindly, encouragingly, with very few words.

After I began to write about Bolivia, where I lived from 2003 to 2005, researching the Federal War of 1899, Staughton and I corresponded briefly via email. Wobblies and Zapatistas: Conversations on Anarchism, Marxism and Radical History – a book of interviews published in 2008, the year he underwent triple bypass surgery – and ‘Toward Another World’, his 2009 Fernand Braudel Center Distinguished Lecture, reflect the evolution of his thought in relation to Indigenous movements for self-government in Latin America. In 2009, both of his history books from the late 1960s were reissued by Cambridge, which he ‘had always considered the historians’ Holy Grail’. The long overdue recognition within the historians’ guild – a ball Marcus Rediker had got rolling – unleashed ‘an overwhelming rush of emotion’. In 2011, Staughton co-authored an essay published in the William and Mary Quarterly – for the first time since the 1960s.

‘Everything we know about learning instructs that people learn by experience’: Staughton came back to this point repeatedly in talks and interviews, even as he continued to read widely and write prolifically in his eighties. He was generous, and his students are legion.

One way into his work might be the pamphlet Staughton and Alice wrote on Quaker Liberation Theology in 2015. Or From Here to There: The Staughton Lynd Reader (2010); or The Essential Staughton Lynd (2013); or The World Is My Country, a collection of speeches and writings against the Vietnam War that will be out in 2023. Or Solidarity Unionism at Starbucks (2011). Or on a picket line in support of Starbucks, Amazon and other workers fighting to form unions.