Dave Dellinger 1915 - 2004
"There
is no moment better than now to remember what Dave has stood for
and to fight for it together, all of us -- for peace and justice."
-- Howard Zinn, author, A People's History of the
United States
"Before reading [his
autobiography], I knew and greatly admired Dave Dellinger. Or so
I thought. After reading his remarkable story, my admiration changed
to something more like awe. There can be few people in the world
who have crafted their lives into something truly inspiring. This
autobiography introduces us to one of them." — Avram
Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is a professor of linguistics
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and creator of the
Chomsky hierarchy, a classification of formal languages. Outside
of his linguistic work, Chomsky describes himself as a libertarian
socialist and is widely known for his left-wing political writings.
In particular, Chomsky is a prominent critic of U.S. foreign policy.
- from the duskjacket of From Yale to Jail
David Dellinger, of Chicago 7, Dies
at 88
By MICHAEL T. KAUFMAN
Published: May 27, 2004
avid Dellinger, whose commitment to nonviolent direct action against
the federal government placed him at the forefront of American radical
pacifism in the 20th century and led, most famously, to a courtroom
in Chicago where he became a leading defendant in the raucous political
conspiracy trial of the Chicago Seven, died Tuesday in a retirement
home in Montpelier, Vt. He was 88.
His death was reported by Peggy Rocque, the administrator of the
home, Heaton Woods.
An avuncular figure among younger and more flamboyant mavericks,
Mr. Dellinger emerged in the 1960's as the leading organizer of
huge antiwar demonstrations, including the encirclement of the Pentagon
that was immortalized in Norman Mailer's account "Armies of
the Night." At the same time, making use of his close contacts
with the North Vietnamese, he was able to organize the release of
several American airmen held as prisoners and to escort them back
from Hanoi.
In the often turbulent world of the American left, Mr. Dellinger
occupied a position of almost stolid consistency. He belonged to
no party, and insisted that American capitalism had provoked racism,
imperial adventures and wars and should be resisted.
A child of patrician privilege, he had since his days at Yale learned
and practiced strategies of civil disobedience in a variety of causes,
steadfastly showing what he called his concern for "the small,
the variant, the unrepresented, the weak," categories he cited
from the writings of William James.
In the federal courtroom in Chicago in 1969, when Judge Julius
J. Hoffman presided over the trial of opponents of the Vietnam War
charged with criminal conspiracy and inciting to riot at the Democratic
National Convention a year earlier, Mr. Dellinger loomed over his
co-defendants in age, experience, heft and gravitas.
The next oldest of the defendants, Abbie Hoffman, was 20 years
his junior. Mr. Hoffman and Jerry Rubin were Yippies who mocked
authority in star-spangled shirts; Mr. Dellinger favored quiet business
suits. Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, John R. Froines and Lee Weiner
had led student movements; Mr. Dellinger had not.
Within this radical bouquet of representatives from what was called
the New Left, Mr. Dellinger stood out as a link to a homegrown pacifist
strain that had its roots within America's Old Left.
Paul Berman, who wrote about the radicals and revolutionaries who
rose to prominence in the years around 1968 in "Tale of Two
Utopias," said that Mr. Dellinger "came of age in one
of the tiniest currents of the American left - the Rev. A. J. Muste's
movement for World War II pacifism, a movement based on radical
Christian values and vaguely anarchist instincts. No rational person
observing that movement during the 1940's would have predicted any
success at all, and yet during the next two or three decades, Mr.
Dellinger and his pacifist allies transformed whole areas of American
life."
Mr. Berman said that they "did it by supplying crucial leadership
in the civil rights revolution and by playing a central role in
the mass movement against the war in Vietnam."
"Dellinger, himself," Mr. Berman said, "became the
single most important leader of the national antiwar movement, at
its height, from 1967 through the early 1970's. You could quarrel
with some of his political judgments, but he was always sober, always
resolute, always selfless and always brave."
If his co-defendants in Chicago captured most of the attention
of the news media, in the eyes of Judge Hoffman, it was Mr. Dellinger
who had been the most guilty. The jury had acquitted all seven on
conspiracy but found all but Mr. Weiner and Mr. Froines guilty of
inciting to riot. Of the convicted, Mr. Dellinger was given the
harshest penalty by Judge Hoffman, five years in jail and a $5,000
fine. He was also sentenced to two years and five months on the
basis of 32 citations of criminal contempt for comments he made
during the five-month trial, which ended in February 1970.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/27/national/27dell.html
