Dellinger, David

DELLINGER, DAVID (1915-2004). Editor, activist, and one of the Chicago Seven, David Dellinger has provided continuity in publishing and activism between the pacifist Left of the 1940s and the radical movements spawned in the 1960s. Born to a family with roots in colonial New England, Dellinger graduated from Yale (1936), studied at New College, Oxford (1936–1937), Yale Divinity School (1938), and Union Theological Seminary (1939–1940). This background led him to be active in draft resistance during World War II.

In 1945 Dellinger was the moving force in the founding of Direct Action, a journal of radical pacifism. Three years later, as leader of a faction of the Committee for Nonviolent Revolution, he fostered a merger with Peacemakers, a group enjoying the support of A. J. Muste, Dwight Macdonald, and Milton Mayer. The resulting pacifist current, much influenced by Gandhi, viewed pacifism as an active movement for change, not simply a reactive defense against injustice. Pacifists would not only refuse any cooperation with the armed forces, but they would also attempt to close down missile bases nonviolently, refuse to pay the portion of any tax that went to the military, and hold vigils at factories producing chemical weapons such as poison gas. Concepts such as participatory democracy and civil disobedience were to be at the heart of all activity. To promote such views, Dellinger helped found and became the first editor of Liberation, a journal that influenced many individuals who were to be prominent in the early phases of the New Left. A regular Liberation contributor was anarchist Paul Goodman.

With the advent of the Vietnam War, Dellinger became a well-known public figure. He was a featured speaker at the first teach-in at Berkeley (1965) and was co-chair of the Spring Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam (1966). He also visited Hanoi in 1966 and set up a relationship that would bring numerous anti-war Americans to Vietnam and would lead to the release of some American prisoners of war. Dellinger became especially noted as a reliable debunker of State Department disinformation regarding the war. Following the street riots connected with the Democratic National Convention in 1968, Dellinger and six others were arrested for conspiracy to foment riot in what became the landmark legal battle of the era. The successful defense of the Chicago Seven, or Conspiracy Seven, took on international dimensions and became the subject of several films, Conspiracy: The Trial of the Chicago 8 (1987), The Chicago 8 (2010) and The Trial of the Chicago 7 (2020), in addition to the animated documentary, Chicago 10 (2007).

In the decade of the 1970s Dellinger was involved in the ill-fated attempt to establish Seven Days as a radical slick weekly on the model of Time and Newsweek. In later years, he concentrated his efforts on various aspects of the nuclear energy problem, from preventing nuclear war to closing down nuclear power plants and in protesting the trade agreements of the global elite.

Dellinger, David. Revolutionary Nonviolence. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970.

Dellinger, David. More Power Than We Know. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press, 1975.

Dellinger, David. From Yale to fail: The Life of a Moral Dissenter. New York: Pantheon, 1993.

Hunt, Andrew E. David Dellinger: The Life and Times of a Non-Violent Revolutionary. New York: New York University Press, 2006.