David Dellinger, the son
of a lawyer, was born in Wakefield, Massachusetts, on 22nd August,
1915. While studying economics at Yale University
he became involved in politics. He was arrested during one demonstration
in support of the trade union movement.
After graduating in 1936
Dellinger spent a year working in a factory in Maine. He then went
travelling with his friend Walt Rostow.
Dellinger rejected Rostow's communist ideas and instead became a radical
pacifist.
Dellinger
won a fellowship to Oxford University.
While in England he visited Nazi Germany.
A supporter of the Popular Front Government
in Spain and drove an ambulance during
the Spanish Civil War.
On his arrival back in
the United States Dellinger enrolled at the
Union Theological Seminary in New York.
In 1940 Dellinger refused to register for conscription. He was arrested
and sentenced to a year in prison in Danbury. While in prison he organized
protests against the segregated seating arrangements in the jail.
This resulted in being placed in solitary confinement.
Dellinger
was eventually released but was arrested once again when he refused
to join the armed forces when the United States entered the Second
World War and spent another two years in prison.
After the war Dellinger
joined with Abraham Muste and Dorothy
Day to establish the Direct Action
magazine in 1945. Dellinger once again upset the political establishment
when he criticised the use of atomic bombs
on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Dellinger also became the editor of Liberation.
A post he was to hold for over twenty years.
Dellinger
also played a prominent role in opposition to the Vietnam
War. He organised the 1967 protest march on the Pentagon. He also
visited North Vietnam and as a result of meeting Ho
Chi Minh helped secure the release of captured American servicemen.
In 1968 Dellinger was one
of the radicals charged with conspiring to incite riots around the
Democratic Party Convention which
endorsed Hubert Humphrey as its presidential
candidate to take on Richard Nixon. Dellinger's
fellow defendants included Bobby Seale
(Black Panthers) Tom Hayden (Students
for a Democratic Society), Rennie Davis (National Mobilisation Committee)
and Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin of the Youth International Party).
Seale, who repeatedly interrupted court proceedings, was found guilty
and sentenced to four years in prison for 16 counts of contempt of
court. in 1970 the Chicago Seven were eventually all acquitted on
conspiracy charges.
Chicago Seven
Dellinger was the author
of several books including Beyond Survival:
New Directions for the Disarmament Movement
(1985), Vietnam Revisited: From Covert Action
to Invasion to Reconstruction (1986) and his autobiography,
From Yale to Jail: The Life Story of a Moral
Dissenter (1993).
Dellinger continued to
be active in politics and in 1996 said that "evils in society
today are greater than they were in 1968" and even in his eighties
continued to take part in protest marches. This included the demonstration
against the North American Free Trade Agreement in Quebec City in
2001. He also held regular fasts in an effort to change the name of
"Columbus Day" to "Native American Day."
David Dellinger died at
Montpelier, Vermont, on 25th May, 2004.
Open
Debate on the Kennedy Assassination
(1)
Michael
Carlson, The
Guardian (28th May, 2004)
As a radical pacifist,
the American-born David Dellinger, who has died aged 88, spent his
life involved in non-violent action against war and oppression. But
his most prominent role was as elder statesman of the Chicago Eight,
the disparate group of radicals who were charged with conspiring to
incite riots around the 1968 US Democratic party convention which
endorsed Hubert Humphrey's nomination as presidential candidate after
President Lyndon Johnson withdrew from the race at the height of the
Vietnam war.
Dellinger's
principled stand and commitment to non-violence belied Washington's
accusations against him, and, for many involved in the anti-Vietnam
movement, served as an inspiration.
By the time
he graduated from Yale University in 1936, with honours in economics
and as captain of the cross-country team, Dellinger was already being
radicalised. He had been arrested while marching to support unionisation
at Yale; he spent a summer working in a factory in Maine, and another
travelling with hoboes. His friends included the young Walt Rostow
(obituary, February 17 2003), who then argued the virtues of communism,
which Dellinger found lacked a "spiritual dimension". Rostow
went on to become an architect of Vietnam policy under US presidents
Kennedy and Johnson.
Dellinger discovered his
pacifism when, during a brawl at a Yale football game, he punched
a New Haven "townie". As his victim fell, stunned, he later
wrote, "the lesson I learned was as simple, direct and unarguable
as the lesson a child learns the first time it puts its hand on a
red-hot stove. Don't ever do it again!"
(2)
Ron
Jacobs, CounterPunch
(26th May, 2004)
I'm in shock. I
just received an email from a very good friend here in Vermont telling
me that David Dellinger died the afternoon of May 25th. Dave was a
lifelong antiwar activist who refused to fight in World War Two and
actively opposed every US war since then. He was 88 years old and
had been suffering from worsening health. Indeed, he had just been
moved to a nursing home not more than two or three months ago.
Although I only met Dave
five years ago when a group of us sat in on Representative Bernie
Sanders' office in opposition to his support of the bombing of Yugoslavia,
he has been an influence on my life and thought ever since I first
heard about him in junior high. As a young peacenik who found the
militancy and flamboyance of activists and groups like the Black Panthers
and Yippies quite appealing, it was David Dellinger's thoughtful,
yet militant antiwar stance that provided me (and millions of others,
it seems) with a fundamental belief that what I was doing was worthwhile.
After all, this man had devoted his entire adult life to opposing
imperialism and the wars that system demands without ever even throwing
a brick at a cop. Like the Berrigan brothers and Martin Luther King,
Jr., his commitment to nonviolence was total. At the same time, he
understood that pacifism was not passivism.
(3)
CNN
News, Wednesday, 25th May, 2004.
Peace activist David
Dellinger, one of the Chicago Seven arrested and tried for their part
in the violent anti-war protests outside the 1968 Democratic National
Convention, has died at 88.
Dellinger died Tuesday,
said Peggy Rocque, administrator of Heaton Woods, the Montpelier retirement
home where the activist had been living.
Dellinger was a pacifist
who devoted much of his life to protesting. A member of the Old Left
whose first arrest came in the 1930s during a union-organizing protest
at Yale, he was a generation older than his Yippie co-defendants in
the Chicago Seven case.
"Mainly I think he'll
be remembered as a pacifist who meant business," said Tom Hayden,
a fellow '60s radical and member of the Chicago Seven who went on
to become a California legislator. "His pacifism was very forceful.
He didn't mind interjecting himself between armed federal marshals
and someone they were pushing around."
At the Chicago Seven trial
in 1969 and 1970, Dellinger and four co-defendants - Hayden, Jerry
Rubin, Abbie Hoffman and Rennie Davis - were convicted of conspiracy
to incite a riot at the 1968 convention. Those convictions were overturned
by a federal appeals court, which cited errors by U.S. District Judge
Julius Hoffman.
When Hoffman invited Dellinger
to address the court during sentencing, he continued to speak after
the judge ordered him to stop.
"You want us to be
like good Germans, supporting the evils of our decade, and then when
we refused to be good Germans and came to Chicago and demonstrated,
now you want us to be like good Jews, going quietly and politely to
the concentration camps while you and this court suppress freedom
and the truth," Dellinger told the judge. "And the fact
is, I am not prepared to do that."
Greg Guma, editor of the
political magazine Toward Freedom, called Dellinger "one
of the major figures in terms of peace and social justice of the last
half century."
(4)
Michael Kaufman, New
York Times (
27th May, 2004)
David 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,
Vermont. He was 88.
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.
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