Fw: Ninety years and counting (War Resisters League/WIN magazine -- David McReynolds)

Note by Hunter:

While this, on WRL and WIN magazine, is a rather lengthy piece, it is very well worth reading. It has Life.  Its author, David McReynolds, has been with WRL and related groups on the front lines of the social justice fight for essentially the whole of his long life.  This is solid, first-hand, real world stuff -- and will be of interest to the wide range of perspectives that flow into the Save the World river.

(We have always liked the Catholic Worker movement and its sparkplugs -- and we have found it easy to like WRL and WIN magazine.  I first encountered WIN in 1980 or so when a good friend indeed, Clyde Appleton of Tucson and some other places, wrote a fine review in WIN of the first edition of my Jackson Mississippi book.  Clyde, always involved in good causes in Arizona and also in early civil rights struggles in North Carolina, is presently on the BWB list.)


----- Original Message ----- 
From: David McReynolds 
To: [email protected] ; CCDS Members 
Sent: Tuesday, October 08, 2013 12:12 AM
Subject: WRL: Ninety years and counting


Some of you will get this more  than once - it is going to lists where I know there are duplications, not only to fellow pacifists, but also to those in the socialist community.


"WRL 90 Years" - a handsome copy of WIN magazine, the publication of the War Resisters League - is in front of me, It surveys the remarkable ninety years of the secular pacifist movement launched in 1923 by a group of women who were both socialists and pacifists and by men who had just been released from prison, for having refused military service in World War I. Some of you are on the WRL mailing list and will have gotten WIN. Others could get it for, I assume, the $7 on the cover (the address is: WIN, 339 Lafayette St., NYC 10012). These are comments on the issue - which does its best, in 38 pages, to give a sense of the history of WRL.


This is not meant as a critical post. It is a good issue of WIN. There are a few corrections here but mainly additions and comments which will interest those in the pacifist movement - and historians of American radicalism, for the War Resisters League is not simply a pacifist organization, but part of the American left. No other national peace organization had its offices raided and its membership files stolen as happened to the WRL National Office in 1969. The scandal (from Nixon's point of view) of the Pentagon Papers might not have happened if Daniel Ellsberg had not attended the War Resisters International Triennial in Haverford, Pa., in 1969, where he met Randy Kehler, a young member of WRL then slated for prison. In 1974 the WRL took on the burden of confronting the third rail of  Israeli policies when it gave its annual peace award to Father Dan Berrigan, who had come under intense pressure for his comments in support of Palestinians. This was also the time when WRL issued a statement on the Middle East - long enough to be a pamphlet - which, among other things, called for a state for the Palestinians.


Among the minor corrections or items I might have added to the history was an expansion of the mention of the Civil Defense Protests in New York City in 1960 and 1961. Working with Bayard Rustin, we advanced a strategy to build on the moral protests that Dorothy Day and others had held each year since 1955 - and which had resulted in jail terms for the offenders. We said, in 1960, that if people did not believe in civil disobedience but felt the civil defense drills were a conditioning for nuclear war, they should come to City Hall Park on the day of the drill and remain in the park until the sirens sounded, and then take shelter. If  they did believe in civil disobedience but - for whatever reason (a sick child, a job they could not risk, cowardice . . . it didn't matter) - felt they could not be arrested, then stay in the park until the police arrived and gave the order to leave, and then leave. Finally, if people were prepared to join those of us 

who would be arrested, stay. This strategy of "levels" of protest meant you didn't have to be a hero to join in. I take the time to mention this because it may be a useful strategy for others. It is essential to build a movement in which one doesn't have to be a young hero to take part, which makes room for the infirm, the timid, the cowardly. Which is to say - for humanity as a whole.


Bayard and I thought we might get as many as a hundred people, but in the event, 1000 showed up, and 500 stayed for the arrests, which the police couldn't handle (they arrested, I believe, something like fifty people). Most moving to me, as the police moved back and forth through the hundreds who refused to disperse, was the spontaneous singing of patriotic songs - "America the Beautiful", and "God Bless America".


In 1961 we used the same strategy and 2000 people poured into City Hall Park. That year the police arrested over a hundred of us (including the entire staff of WRL itself,which had to declare a 25 day "moratorium" on is work while those of us on staff were in jail). That was the last year New York State had its insane civil defense drills.


The history is off by about ten years in pinning down the date at which WRL took a more radical turn. It had been thought of, at its founding in 1923,  simply as a way of enlisting young men who would pledge not to fight in any war. The hope was that if enough men signed "the pledge" the government would know it could take undertake a war.  But after World War II, as pacifists came out of prison, they were drawn to  Gandhi's ideas, and thought of more militant nonviolence.  These were the "young Turks", and included Roy Finch, Roy Kepler, Dave Dellinger, Bayard Rustin, Igal Roodenko, Ralph di Gia and others. Abe Kaufman, who had been the key person on the national staff during the war, resigned in protest. (It is typical of the pacifist movement that in later years there was a genuine reconciliation with Abe and his wife, Ida). The  article suggests that A.J. Muste resigned from the Executive Committee as result of this "shift to the left" but  in fact that was another matter entirely - Muste felt that Bayard's sometimes reckless sexual encounters (which had led to his arrest in Pasadena in 1953) made him too risky for staff, and he resigned from the Executive Committee for that reason.


Rustin and Muste reconciled, both were involved in launching Liberation magazine in 1956 and remained very close until 1965, when Bayard began his drift to the political right. (Something I hope to write on at another time).


WRL played a central role in the Vietnam peace movement, being the first peace group to hold a demonstration against the war (I think in 1963), holding one of the very first rallies, with Norman Thomas joining A.J. Muste as speakers at a sizable outdoor event in Washington Square Park. Even as I wrote those lines, I realized that so very many were involved in more than ten years of protest that the full range, from the Communist Party through to devout Catholics, Trotskyists, academics, students, artists, that it became  truly "an American movement",  one those of us who took part in can feel were among the best years of our lives.

Two corrections I must make regarding myself. In the 1965 draft card burning I believe the man who thought of the project was Tom Cornell, of the Catholic Worker. There were five of us who burned our cards - the four others all spent six months in prison, and I did not, my assumption being because I was then just past the age of the draft, the government chose not to prosecute. Elsewhere in the magazine there is reference to my being a young peace movement hero for refusing induction during the Korean War. Nonsense. I refused induction alright, and was arrested and tried, but the government moved, on technical grounds, to dismiss the case. The real hero was my friend and comrade in the Socialist Party, the late Vern Davidson, who spent two years in prison. (As did several others whom I knew and worked with in California, including Norman Rush, who became a novelist and winner of the National Book Award). Mind you, I'm happy to take credit but the fact is the longest time I ever spent in jail was 25 days.


I should mention that, to people my age, in 1960 it was a bit intimidating to work for WRL, where the entire staff and several members of the Executive Committee were prison veterans.


Sometime we will need a full article on the remarkable May Days of 1971 - it is mentioned (highlighted in fact) in the WIN history, but the arrest of 13,500 people in three days, with tear gas hazing over part of the nation's capitol like fog, in actions that were almost entirely without violence, does merit fuller treatment. And Jerry Coffin was certainly among those who played a key role.


It is good to see the names of many friends and co-workers who have passed on - William Douthard, Grace Paley, Karl Bissinger, so many others - and particularly of Norma Becker, who was central to the Vietnam Protest movement, who never sought the limelight, never made public speeches, but was a driving  force in those days and years.


A great deal is made - as it should be - about WRL's embrace of feminism, but no realization that the remarkable thing was that an organization which, by the very nature of its mission was aimed at young men, did eventually move toward embracing women's issues, and having such wonderful figures as Joanne Sheehan,  Mandy Carter, Barbara Deming (in addition to Norma Becker and many others). The War Resisters League was, from the beginning, aimed at men, not at women. Men were conscripted, not women. Men went to prison for refusing military service, not women. (It wasn't that women didn't go to prison, as any student of the struggle for women's suffrage knows, but that WRL was fighting conscription as its first goal).


It is worth remembering that our founder, Jesse Wallace Hughan,was so concerned that the WRL might be written off as a "women's movement" that she made sure the founding chair was a man. For the most part the membership and mailing list consisted of men who had refused military service or were committed to doing that. It was a very good thing that women fought to be included, to be part of this movement - but this background should be noted.


(Another interesting shift, which will seem strange to young people, was that while Catholics are now very much part of the membership and leadership, the WRL was, in the beginning, entirely secular, agnostic Jews, atheists, anarchist, socialists. It was not until around the time of Pope John XXIII that Catholics began to turn up in our membership. Of course, WRL always had a special relationship with the Catholic Worker, but Dorothy Day and the CW were, in those days, marginal to the Catholic Church. How remarkable that there is now a move to make her a saint).



And, partly in defense of the memory of men such as Ralph DiGia, Dave Dellinger, Roy Finch, Ira Sandperl, Roy Kepler and others, I want to take up the "gay" issue. Having spent my life in the radical movement I can testify there is nothing about these movements which attracts homosexuals as such. But by accident, there was a time when the national leadership of WRL had three homosexuals - Bayard Rustin and myself on staff, and Igal Roodenko as chair.


There was never a political discussion about this in WRL

It was not until 1969 when WIN magazine had its "gay liberation" issue with articles by Paul Goodman, Allen Ginsberg and myself, that this came into the open. In a few weeks I'll be 84, and realize that it is very hard to give people who are younger a sense of what life was like in 1950 and 1960 for homosexuals. There was not a single public figure - with the exception of Allen Ginsberg - who mentioned being homosexual. Recently, in talking to someone about this, they said "yes, but what about James Baldwin". In fact, in the novels by Baldwin and other homosexuals, the gay characters usually appeared  as straight. To a remarkable extent we hid in plain sight - protected, ironically, by a few figures such as Truman Capote, who was sort of so obviously homosexual that the general public assumed that, unless one behaved like Capote, one was straight.


This is a good point for an excursion into the limits of gay liberation. I felt, years ago, that male homosexuals - unlike lesbians - had a special advantage. We were technically illegal, but we  could walk out of a gay bar into the straight world and were invisible. With the exception of the handful of radical gay men, such as Steve Ault, the gay community didn't really want to change society - gays simply wanted into it. Gays made every effort to give the appearance of fitting in - think of the many artists, writers, musicians, such as Leonard Bernstein, who married in order to "pass". I felt then -  years ago - that lesbians were far more likely to prove radical, because they were never invisible - they were women in a patriarchal society, and thus they were already in trouble, with lower wages, a glass ceiling on how far they could rise, and, if they had children (as a great many lesbians did - often leaving a troubled marriage) they had all the problems of surviving in a society where being a lesbian was almost a "lesser sin" than being a woman.


I think the feminist movement went up many blind alleys (as did the men's wing of the gay movement), but in general it was more perceptive of the need for deeper social change. How easily the gay community has been silenced by being allowed into the killing machine of the American military! (Though even here, do not misunderstand me - in a world where employment is difficult to find, working class youth see in the military one way out of the trap of capitalism where the one job you can easily find - if you pass the physical - is in the military).



It is to the great credit of War Resisters League that in its profound respect for individual rights - for the uniqueness of the individual - it really didn't care what your sexuality was. There has always been, in WRL, a strain of libertarianism which  saved us from the worst excesses of political correctness. (In this respect, I am somewhat of a curmudgeon - not surprising given my age. I have never been convinced that consensus works better than voting and I don't think life style changes, such as veganism, will save the world. In the 1960's, when communes and organic food were the rage, I noted that the capitalist system would happily respond by incorporating organic food into its marketing and that communes would prove too exhausting over the long haul for most people, as they married and had families).


I remember a National Committee meeting of WRL in either Portland or Seattle - not clear which - organized by a politically correct feminist who had decreed that the food would be entirely vegetarian. William Douthard and, I believe, Mandy Carter and I got in a car and drove out to  Colonel Sanders for some fried chicken, which we brought back with us. Two blacks and a white, a straight man, a gay man and a lesbian - just the folks WRL was trying to bring in. That, and another meeting of the NC where we were asked to use no perfume, cologne, or deodorant because one of the women was allergic. 


To shift back to history and away from quibbles, let me note for the record (in case NSA and the FBI had missed it) that the great June 12 mass mobilization in Central Park, 1982, began with meetings the WRL convened more than a year in advance (I'm sure the FBI knew because one of those involved was my friend, Mike Myerson, then of the US Peace Council, a sort of Communist Party front).  I went to Japan more than a year before the rally to enlist Japanese support  - they turned up in large numbers.


And the June 14th civil disobedience actions, largely organized by Ed Hedemann, proved so successful that the police couldn't handle all of us. One bus, carrying a group of us who had been arrested and were headed downtown for booking, stopped along the way and the police told us all to get out and go home.  The booking process had been completely overwhelmed!



I am glad for the notes on the Women's Pentagon Action

- it was a strange. glorious moment for the peace movement. 


The interview of Mandy Carter and Joanne Sheehan was wonderful - I learned things about Mandy I had not known. And all the strong things about Joanne, of which I'm well aware, were documented. Joanne mentioned  the trip she and I made to Santa Barbara to intervene when the Continental Walk for Disarmament and Social Justice ran into such serious problems. Some things stay in one's memory, and I shall never forget the dread I had, as we boarded the plane in New York for the flight to the coast. We knew we would have to intervene, to stop the Walk and reorganize it. It was to prove a deeply painful job. There are many things that can be said in defense of Fred Moore, but it was, for the reasons Joanne gives in the article, a mistake for Fred to think of himself as a feminist. I felt bad when I learned later how much trouble Joanne faced - when I left to return to New York I thought the main problems had been resolved!


But . . . a further word on the Walk, in which Ed Hedemann played so central a role. Our objective had been to bring local activists together and in this we succeeded. While our final rally in Washington DC had barely 1500 people, the Walk had planted seeds, from which grew a number of local peace and justice centers.


Missing from the history was the role WRL played in coalitions, particularly in setting up Mobilization for Survival, set in motion by the late Sid Lens and Norma Becker. This was really a joint project of the AFSC and WRL, but never a "front". We knew there were many people out there who would not call themselves pacifists but who in general agreed with our politics. Mobilization for Survival  was, for several years, a true network of grassroots groups, and I still know some of those who served on the staff - Peter Drucker, Bruce Cronin, Leslie Cagan.  War Resisters League played an important role in the various anti-war coalitions during the darker days of the Cold War - I'm not sure WRL still plays that role, and it is a task that should perhaps be examined as one pacifists have an obligation to undertake.


I was a bit astounded to find, in the book review of Martin Duberman's biography of Barbara Deming and myself, that  we were "both born into families of relative wealth and comfort". It was true of Barbara, however, and as I read the book I realized she came from an entirely different class than myself. (And had a much more complex romantic life!).


Let me turn, finally, to a note on the photos of mine in this issue, and to some closing and controversial comments. I was impressed, looking at the photos taken more than fifty years ago with a good camera, but one without auto-focus, or automatic meter reading. I processed the negatives in my apartment, and made those prints on an old enlarger in my kitchen. Special thanks to Laurie Sandow, Matt Meyer, and Phyllis Eckhaus who have spent hours with me rescuing and sorting the negatives and prints damaged when my apt. was hit by fire. I've got fifty years of negatives, black and white, and color, many of no value - cats, flowers, family and friend - but many of people and events in the socialist and pacifist movement around the world. I have approached Swarthmore, but they are at a bit at a loss. The negatives need to have proof sheets made before one can really know what the photos are of. So if anyone has creative ideas, let me know.


And the controversy. I noted from this special issue the attention paid to radical and revolutionary nonviolence, 

and to the concern with dealing with racism. Decades ago I would have said that I was a "revolutionary nonviolent libertarian democratic socialist" but year by year  I dropped words. Of course socialism is revolutionary, and what kind of socialism is there which isn't democratic? And what kind of revolutionary movement do you have which isn't nonviolent? 

It was a bit like the old joke of the fish monger who wanted a sign for his shop, and thought it should say "Fresh Fish Sold Here Today". When he found the sign maker was charging $10 a word, he realized he didn't need "sold" - clearly the fish weren't free. And "today" was pointless, when else? And "here"? But the shop was open, people could see the fish. Finally he realized he didn't need to pay $10 for "fresh" - who sells fish that aren't fresh?



Do we know what we mean by revolutionary nonviolence? Clearly we are talking about an unarmed society, but surely we should also realize that wars have causes, and one of the primary causes of war in the past two centuries has been capitalism, with its drive for markets. Bad as Soviet communism was, it did not seek colonies - it was not an "imperial power" as Britain had been and as the US is.  In fact, in its relations with Vietnam or Cuba it probably lost money. Nor have China or Vietnam proved "imperial". (I condemn the Chinese occupation of Tibet, but that is something which is part of Chinese history, going back thousands of years).


I have found pacifists very reluctant to accept the concept of class war - which does NOT have to be waged by violence. The middle class really doesn't begin to

understand this - for them (and for the upper class) the police are friends. Example: if you are a white man walking through Harlem late at night and see a cop, you are not afraid, but if you are a black man walking through the expensive part of the Upper East side late at night and see a cop, you worry. 


The reason workers formed unions was entirely for reasons of self-defense and survival, not for the joy of setting up clubs for workingmen.


We have set up words which we alone recognize - casually adding "classism" to the list of bad things, as if consciousness raising could cure us. It isn't "classism" - it is class. And you don't deal with the issue of class by a discussion - anymore than racism can be eliminated without changes in the social structure itself. You and I may break out of the sins of racism and sexism, but our individual change of consciousness does not end those institutions. In the same way, while I do not think we will ever achieve a society without some levels of "class", (the experiments in China after the Revolution, or in North Korea, have not been pleasant), we can, by social struggle, end the enormous power of the upper class over all of us, and we can, through deliberate policies of taxation, achieve a fairly radical re-distribution of wealth. And we can surely discuss the concept of worker's control of the workplace. And we should explore what parts of the corporate structure can be socially owned and democratically controlled.


We can think of forms of economic organization which tackle the true violence of capitalism, which turn human beings into commodities, and try to use our drives for love and companionship into ways of making profit, so that all of our society is driven by the market.


I would not suggest that WRL take an explicit socialist

position, nor would I demand socialists take an explicit pacifist position, but I do urge a greater willingness to look at just what we mean by "revolutionary nonviolence". To what extent can we realize that capitalism, as we have seen it in action, is tied to war, to crime, to poverty, to the oppression of those who can survive only by selling their labor and who see - as we can see all around us - the ruling class drive down the living standards of the great mass of people in order to increase their own share of wealth.


George Orwell said that the purpose of socialism isn't to make people good, but to make it possible for them to be good.


WRL has had problems in its past and will in its future - though I hope we take risks, as we  did when I was on staff. For all the discussion of the struggle against racism, I did not see, at the 90th Anniversary Conference, a notable increase in African Americans, Asians, or Latinos. I do not think we are likely to see that unless our program itself offers something - and here we are in serious trouble. Black youth went into the military not because they wanted to get killed, or to kill, but because jobs were scarce. It is a very hard world for poor black youth. The ghetto is a place of drugs, crime, violence - and high unemployment. (It is also a place of community, love, and, against all odds, music and hope). We are not in a position to offer jobs but we should have a program which talks about jobs, and how to get them.


If we do not have larger numbers of non-white members it is not because we are racist, but because what brings people together are new ways of building institutions. My apartment building on the Lower East Side has as many Blacks, Asians and Latinos in it as it does whites - not because of consciousness raising, but because the apartments are inexpensive, because of the work of Frances Goldin, Valerio Orselli, and many many others who, over the years, fought to provide this area - Cooper Square - with low income coops.


I remember going to Bayard Rustin's 75th Birthday Party - I was furious at Bayard for his shift to the right, but old friends insisted I go, and made sure Igal Roodenko and I got tickets. What impressed me was, in a large audience of several hundred people, there were so many blacks and whites sitting together, chatting, rejoicing, celebrating Bayard - and it was not because they had all been to consciousness raising classes, but because Bayard was head of the A. Philip Randolph Institute which worked with trade unionists, black and white, who had been brought together by common economic concerns. In short, what brought these people together

was a common interest in something greater than their

 "racial consciousness". During World War II, in Los Angeles, there was a huge war program to build ships and aircraft, the workers were blacks who had come from the South, and whites who had come from the dust bowl - they had brought their prejudices with them but, at least for the period of war production, they were bound together by common work, as well as the sense of a common purpose. One lesson for me was that full employment is an essential part of dealing with the institution of racism, (and sexism).


I remember the unhappy experience of WRL with one young staff member from the Asian community who was to help us reach out to other cultures and to youth. Ironically, despite coming from the Indian sub-continent, where the legacy of Gandhi might have inspired him, he felt that the oppressed could be excused if they were not non-violent. How he arrived at this, given the hard reality that the greatest and best examples of nonviolence have come to us from India and from the African American community here, I do not know.


And here a note on hard realism. I believe, deeply, in nonviolence. I am a believer in Gandhi's teachings - absolute honesty, absolute compassion (I find the word
compassion easier to handle than love), absolute non-attachment to material things (death will separate us soon enough), and a willingness to gather all the facts before reaching a conclusion, to always be open to listen, and to go beyond "listening" to actually try to hear.


That I fail in all these things, I know too well. But the reason that I also believe in nonviolence is because I know that the machinery of the ruling class is ruthless, that it will destroy, kill, imprison, and that it was a fatal error for the Black Panthers to think it was wise to carry guns. I chose nonviolence not only because I am (or try to be) a pacifist, but because I do not want the oppressed to suffer still more than they already do, in this struggle for social change and for justice. And also, of course - and this is a Marxist insight, even if so many of my fellow-Marxists never seem to grasp it, in an oppressive society, the oppressor is also oppressed. In a prison, the  guard is also held captive. 


Our task - one held in common by socialists, pacifists, and anarchists, despite all our differences, was stated in an old book:


"The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed". 

- 30 -
HUNTER GRAY [HUNTER BEAR/JOHN R SALTER JR] Mi'kmaq / 
St. Francis Abenaki / St. Regis Mohawk 
Member, National Writers Union AFL-CIO

Check out our massive social justice website
www.hunterbear.org  The site is dedicated to our
one-half Bobcat, Cloudy Gray, and to Sky Gray:
http://hunterbear.org/cloudy_gray.htm

See our very full and substantial COMMUNITY ORGANIZING
page -- with a great deal of practical material:
http://hunterbear.org/my_combined_community_organizing.htm

See my  new expanded/updated "Organizer's Book," 
JACKSON MISSISSIPPI -- with a new substantial 
introduction by me. This page lists many reviews and endorsements.
And this book is also an activist's how-to manual: 
 http://hunterbear.org/jackson.htm   

See the Stormy Adoption of an Indian Child [My Father]:
http://hunterbear.org/James%20and%20Salter%20and%20Dad.htm:
(Many photos.)

Check out our Personal Background Narrative (with much info):
http://hunterbear.org/narrative.htm