Lynd Staughton and Alice Lynd

LYND, STAUGHTON (1929-2022) and ALICE LYND (1930-n.d.). Widely admired and influential as leaders of peace movements, later as supporters of blue-collar struggles in post-industrial communities, the Lynds inspired activists to think differently about social change. They also frequently frustrated those more concerned with leading liberal and labor institutions. Altogether, they injected a visionary quality into the writing and interpretation of US history.

Famously the son of Helen Merrell Lynd and Robert S. Lynd, authors of the pioneering sociological study of Depression-era Muncie, Indiana, Middletown USA (1929), Staughton Craig Lynd grew up in New York City. His mother and father taught at Sarah Lawrence College and Columbian University, respectively. He experienced an elite education, at the Ethical Culture School, the Fieldston School, and Harvard University, where he briefly joined the John Reed Club (close to the Communist Party) and took part in activities led by Trotskyist students. During a summer session, Staughton Lynd met Alice Niles, a Radcliffe student and daughter of Quaker peace activists, and they married in 1951. Two years after graduating, in1953, he was drafted, filed for Conscientious Objector status, and obtained a noncombat status. He was, however, dishonorably discharged based on past political activities. A few years later, a legal victory for himself and others, allowed him to use the GI Bill to attend graduate school.

During the 1950s, Staughton and Alice Lynd joined an experiment in communal living at the Macedonia Cooperative Community in the hills of northeast Georgia. Shifting to a parallel community in New Jersey after several years, the Lynds met young David Dellinger, who would ask Staughton to join him on the board of Liberation Magazine, founded in 1957. The couple returned to New York, where he enrolled in Columbia University and plunged into a campaign for tenants’ rights in the impoverished Lower East Side.

Staughton Lynd completed his academic work, focused on the Revolutionary War era in New York state, in 1962. His revised dissertation, Anti-Federalism in Duchess Country (1962), and another monograph inspired by related themes, Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism (1968), served as the basis the basis for an apparently promising academic career. The civil rights movement and the war in Vietnam set his path other directions.

In 1962, hired by Howard Zinn to teach US history at Spelman College in Atlanta, Staughton Lynd proved to be a charismatic mentor, with Alice Walker his prize student. In 1964, he accepted a position in the history department at Yale University. But in the summer before joining the faculty, he became the director of the Freedom Schools in Mississippi as proposed by the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. There, he and Alice Lynd shared the vision of Bob Moses, John Lewis, and others to create a “beloved community” of non-violent warriors for political rights and social justice.

On the Yale campus and in the pages of Liberation, Staughton Lynd’s presence and writing made him a highly controversial figure. Over the next several years, he resisted the continuing Cold War and offered stinging criticism of leading liberals’ support of the US invasion of Vietnam. In April1965, Lynd chaired the first major march in Washington D.C. against the war in Vietnam, sponsored by the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). The same year, he traveled with Tom Hayden and Herbert Aptheker to Hanoi to explore the terms that the Vietnamese would accept to end hostilities. The controversy that followed prompted the Yale administration to deny tenure to this hugely popular teacher and effectively blacklisted him as an academic historian.

In 1965, during the twentieth anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Assembly of Unrepresented People, with Staughton Lynd as a prominent participant, declared peace with the people of Vietnam. At a workshop convened by the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors that year, Alice Lynd discovered draft counseling as a means to act against war consistent with her role of wife, mother, and teacher of young children. Pregnant with her third child, she began collecting stories that would be later published as We Won’t Go, Personal Accounts of War Objectors (1968), listed by the American Library Associations as one of the Best Books of the Year for Young Adults.

By 1967, southern Black civil rights workers called upon white activists to go north and work with the white working class. In response, the Lynd family moved to Chicago. Lynd accepted a staff position with the Industrial Areas Foundation Training School, led by Saul Alinsky, but also sought a permanent academic position. With Staughton barred from a secure position even at small area schools such as Columbia College, the Lynds resolved to go into the legal profession. Staughton obtained a law degree from the University of Chicago, and Alice completed a program for legal assistants at Roosevelt University.

Staughton Lynd shared a passionate interest in the newer struggles in blue collar communities, struggles often as much against the existing labor bureaucracy as against the corporate employers. In this context, he became deeply involved in the movement of radical historians known as “history from the bottom up,” most particularly in relation to recent working-class history. In 1971, he organized, with Charles McCollester, a series of labor forums at St. Joseph’s Calumet College in East Chicago, Indiana, gathering testimony about the CIO uprising of the 1930s, the repression of radicals during the 1940s-1950s, and the contemporary struggles within unions. In the journal Radical America and other venues, he popularized the use of working-class oral history as a way of making history vividly alive and popular.

The Lynds moved to Youngstown, Ohio, in 1976, drawn by encounters with radical steelworker union anti-war activists in the deindustrializing Mahoning Valley. Fired by a local law firm after writing Labor Law for the Rank and Filer (2008), Staughton Lynd went to work for the Northeast Ohio Legal Services, where he practiced law for eighteen years until retirement. Alice Lynd first worked primarily on disability cases, then obtained her law degree in 1985 at the University of Pittsburgh. She studied the termination of retiree pension and medical benefits and became deeply involved in international human rights law. Together, the Lynds organized Workers Against Toxic Chemical Hazards and induced the United Auto Workers to conduct a proportional mortality study at the General Motors plant in Lordstown, Ohio.

The Lynds arrived in time to advise and support the first great plant anti-shutdown movements in Youngstown, drawn by militant resistance including the forced entry and several non-violent occupations of the corporate headquarters in Pittsburgh and a longer takeover of the headquarters of the US Steel’s Ohio Works. Staughton Lynd developed a legal theory supporting community rights to abandoned industrial property. With Ecumenical Coalition religious leaders in Youngstown and Pittsburgh, he advanced the idea of community-worker ownership, leading to the formation of a broad coalition, the Tri-State Conference on Steel. An intense campaign around steel factories in Pittsburgh followed, seeking to create worker-community entities to operate abandoned mills, drew wide attention but failed. The Lynds meanwhile continued to be active in international movements, including the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and the Zapatistas in Mexico, the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, and struggles elsewhere. The Lynds also became involved in the fight against the death penalty and supported the prisoners’ efforts of to improve conditions, including the abolition of solitary confinement.

The pair’s final collaboration, Moral Injury and Nonviolent Resistance: Breaking the Cycle of Violence in the Military and Behind Bars (2017), describes impact on the individual of trying but failing in their efforts to prevent war or other acts of violence. Staughton Lynd’s many other books include Doing History from the Bottom Up: On E.P. Thompson, Howard Zinn (2014) and Living Inside Our Hope: Rebuilding the Labor Movement from Below: A Steadfast Radical’s Thoughts on Rebuilding the Movement (1997).

Lynd, Staughton and Alice, Stepping Stones: Memoir of a Life Together. Blue Ridge Summit, PA: Lexington Books, 2009.

Grubacic, Andrej, ed. The Staughton Lynd Reader. Oakland: PM Press 2010.

Mirra, Carl. Admirable Radical: Staughton Lynd and Cold War Dissent. Kent OH: Kent State University Press, 2010.

Webber, Mark and Stephen Paschen, Side by Side: Alice and Staughton Lynd, the Ohio Years. Kent, OH: Kent State University, 2014.

Alice and Staughton Lynd Collection. Special Collections and Archives. University Libraries. Kent State University. https://www.library.kent.edu/staughton-and-alice-lynd-collection