Two of the contributors to the first edition of this book, and whose essays are reprinted here, died recently. They were well known, there is a good biography about each of them, and they each wrote several books themselves, so there is little I can say about them that is new, but I I am much in their debt, and would like to pay tribute to them here.
When I arrived as a freshman at Swarthmore College in September 1962 I immediately met the boy across the hall in my dorm, “Patch” Dellinger. Patch was a tall, blond, handsome, crewcutted, athletic, and cheerful soul who came from a farm in New Jersey and was majoring in engineering while hoping to pledge at a fraternity. I was inclined toward the bohemian and artsy set, so the signs were not auspicious, but he was so good-natured and outgoing I couldn’t resist him, and we were soon friends. Sitting in his room one day I noticed his small collection of books: engineering, physics, calculus, etc., plus Thoreau’s On Civil Disobedience, Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God is Within You, Camus’ Neither Victims nor Executioners, Gandhi’s autobiography, and an anthology of prison memoirs of World War II draft resisters, beside a stack of Liberation magazines. “Patch!” I cried. “Are these your favorite books?” Yup, he said, they were.
Patch turned out to be the eldest child of David Dellinger, editor of Liberation, which he edited and printed on his farm, an early friend and supporter of Martin Luther King, a colleague of A.J. Muste and Bayard Rustin in New York, a two-term federal prison inmate during World War II, a dedicated pacifist and a patient and indefatigable organizer. In a few years he would become the key coordinator of the massive marches against the Vietnam War in New York and Washington. “Patch” was short for Patchen, his middle name, after Kenneth Patchen, the poet, a friend of the Dellinger family.
Within a month or so the family visited Patch, and I was invited across the hall to meet them all: Dave and Betty (later she preferred to be called Elizabeth Peterson) and four more children. They seemed a typical wholesome rural American family, friendly and unassuming, nothing like the somewhat exotic Communists and Trotskyists I knew while in high school in Buffalo; a nice, somewhat poor farm family from New Jersey, the father of which happened to run a radical press in the barn and had a habit of marching to Moscow calling for nuclear disarmament and getting himself arrested. Needless to say I took to them as I had to Patch, and as I heard more about Dave I grew in awe of his quiet, unflinching determination, his great courage, his experiences and stories. I began reading Liberation and made Dave into my political mentor.
When I remember the ideological pressure-cooker of the late sixties and early seventies, when the Vietnam War, the police attacks on black organizers, the renascent women’s movement, and the hippie counter-culture were driving young people like me into extreme and ideologically rigid stances, I count myself lucky that I was inoculated against the worst of these while I still had the leisure to think. Some of this happened while I was a high-school student, when friends got me reading the anarchists, existentialists, and pacifists rather than Marx, Lenin, and Mao, but it was confirmed and made real for me in the person of Dave Dellinger. I was fascinated to learn that Paul Goodman, whose books I knew, was on the board of Liberation and a friend of Dellinger’s, and that the magazine had published the great essay by Albert Camus, whom I admired, “Neither Victims nor Executioners.” From Dave I heard stories of Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement in the south, where Dave had already served time in jail and gone on hunger strikes. I learned of the draft refusers during the Second World War and their work camps, and of Federal prison, where Dave spent several years, some of it in solitary confinement for trying to organize within the prison. I wasn’t sure I would have refused to fight in that war, but I was awestruck at Dave’s absolute stance and his quiet courage. He told me that the harder decision for him was to decline to fight in Spain against the Fascists–he even went to Spain to see things for himself; he was far less torn morally about whether to join the US Army a few years later. Dave had gone to Yale, but turned his back on the respectable careers Yale would have launched him on. He was so sincere and brave that he served for many years as a standard against which to measure my own convictions and commitments, though of course they always fell far short of his own. Had he been my only guide or older friend it might have been too much–I’m glad he wasn’t my father–but as a “regulative ideal” in Kant’s sense he inspired and directed me, and preserved me from too shallow a sense of what it means to be “radical.” He was the real thing.
Soon I was involved with the sizeable Swarthmore-student auxiliary to the black activist group in Chester, Pennsylvania, which created quite a ruckus when a couple hundred black residents (and about fifty of us students) held a sit-in in city hall over the disparities between white and black public schools. At Dave’s urging I wrote a story about it for Liberation, my first published article, and then another a year later. Probably no more than a couple of thousand people read Liberation, but it was a big step for me to appear in it, and I even heard from a few readers. It was a remarkable magazine; if he had done nothing else but bring it out, Dave would deserve our gratitude.
Meanwhile Patch and I went to New York City once or twice and hung out with his father’s circle of friends, who all seemed to live in the Bowery in crummy flats but whose hospitality and great stories more than made up for them. I met Ralph DiGia, Dave McReynolds, A. J. Muste, and (briefly) Bayard Rustin, whose names I already knew from the magazine and Dave’s and Patch’s tales. It was a time when these souls, the saving remnant from the non-Communist left of the thirties, and who had also resisted the anti-Communism of many avowed socialists in the present Cold War climate, were again taking the lead, gaining notice, attracting a following among my generation. There was excitement in the air, along with the aromas of ink and acetone and lentil soup.
It was from this group, too, that I absorbed a fuller sense of the role religious belief has played in the American left. I don’t mean, of course, the faith of Communist Party members in the wisdom of the Comintern or the destiny of the Soviet Union, nor the New England Unitarian and Transcendentalist tradition of simple living, high thinking, and principled social reform that I had grown up with, nor even the Quaker tradition of the inner light and pacifism that I was taking in at Swarthmore. It was rather the Protestant religious training of Dave himself–he had once planned to go into the ministry–and of A. J. Muste, along with the Catholic Worker movement, and especially Dorothy Day, whose circle intersected the Liberation group, that struck me most. Something in the lives of the men and women I met through Dave shone out with unusual radiance. They were activist Tolstoyans. They read the Sermon on the Mount and tried to live by its teachings–which naturally made them anathema to the vast majority of Christians. As William Sloane Coffin would later say–he embodied a more socially respectable variant of this serious Christianity–“Christians have always been the best argument against Christianity, but Christ [and, I think he would add, these few Christians] is the best argument for it.”
In the fall of 1966 I moved to Boston, rented an apartment with Patch and another classmate, and began taking English literature courses at Harvard (Patch began at Harvard Medical School). I soon made contact with the Unitarian Universalist Association on Beacon Street, and with Homer Jack, the director of its social action office. That spring, as I told Homer of my plan to go to the big march in New York against the war, of which Dave was the central organizer, Homer tried to warn me off going, saying that Communists were an influential part of the coalition and would manipulate well-meaning liberals like me into taking extreme stands (like withdrawing US troops immediately). It struck me as quaint to be so exercised about the Communist Party’s participation that one would boycott what looked to be the largest demonstration yet against the war. And of course I had heard from Dave and Patch how large and diverse a coalition was assembling, in the midst of which the CP and various Trotskyist sects would be barely noticed. So I went. So did Homer’s son Alex.
I learned from Dave after the march, where Martin Luther King spoke, just a few weeks after he first denounced the war in Riverside Church, that Homer had been part of a group of liberals who had tried to persuade King not to come out against the war. They had even offered to raise $100,000 for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference if King stayed silent. King wrestled with the dilemma for a few weeks; he called Dave at least once to argue out the pros and cons. And then he took his stand on principle.
This news hardly endeared me to Homer, who seemed to be refighting the bitter sectarian battles of the thirties. But he was certainly supportive in every way of the draft resistance movement, which I joined that summer; along with Alex and four or five others I helped plan and publicize the Boston share of the first nationwide draft-card turn-in that October, under the rather grandiose name “The Resistance.” It was under impeccably Unitarian auspices, held in the Arlington Street Church, which was the home of the congregation once led by William Ellery Channing, endorsed by several UU organizations. The call to come forward and deliver the cards was given by the Rev. Dr. George Huntston Williams, the Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard and a UU minister–and Alex’s uncle.
Rev. William Sloane Coffin, Jr., chaplain of Yale University, gave the main sermon of that ceremony, and what a sermon it was! By then I had heard several fine black orators in the civil rights movement, including King, and knew the shivers and tears they could arouse, but here was a white man who was their equal, with a voice that sang like an archangel’s and delivered pithy memorable phrases. “To hundreds of history’s most revered heroes,” he said that day, “not to serve the state has appeared the best way to love one’s neighbor.” “I have the highest sympathy for our boys in Vietnam. They know what a dirty, bloody war it is. But they have been told that the end justifies the means, that the cleansing waters of victory will wash clean the hands of all the blood and dirt. No wonder they hate those who say ‘There must be no cleansing water.’ But they must strive, hard as it is, to understand that there can be no cleansing water if military victory spells moral defeat.” Coffin noted it was two weeks from the 450th celebration of the Reformation, and concluded, “You stand now as Luther stood in his time. May you be inspired to speak, and we to hear, the words he once spoke in conscience and in all simplicity: ‘Here I stand, I can do no other. God help me.’”
I must be one of very few friends of Bill Coffin’s who first met him in a Unitarian church. A Presbyterian, and rather conservative in doctrine, he was a little chagrined that the UUs should be out in front of his own denomination in offering “sanctuary” to conscientious draft resisters. In his sermon he defended the consciences of humanists and atheists, but for him the example and preaching of Christ were at the center of his moral and spiritual life. Some of his non-religious friends have doubted this, but I never have. He complimented me on my own speech that day, though he could not bring himself to call it a “sermon” exactly. Over the years that followed, when I sometimes sent him a speech I gave to a UU congregation, he would thank me for my “thoughtful Unitarian lecture” or some such phrase. “You Unitarians,” he would say, “are thin in theology, but you’re thick in ethics.”
The draft-resistance ceremony in the church, and the national gathering at the Justice Department later that week, where a thousand cards or copies of cards from all over the country were turned in to the Attorney General’s office, led to my indictment for conspiracy on January 5, 1968, with Coffin, Dr. Benjamin Spock, Mitchell Goodman, and Marcus Raskin. The evening after the arraignment in late January, in Boston federal court, we joined a large gathering at the Arlington Street Church for another draft-card turn-in. Dave Dellinger was a featured speaker, and when the time came for the young men to come forward, one of them was Patch, who handed his card to his father.
By then I was lucky enough to have these two extraordinary men, Dellinger and Coffin, as models, inspirations, and sources of wisdom. If Dave was the more radical, and more tenacious, with a quiet personality, a modesty, that belied his inner strength, Bill was the renaissance man, amazingly gifted at music, languages, athletics, and public speaking, flamboyant and charming, flirtatious and witty, always the center of things, always in action. Both went to Yale, but Bill was a blue-blood, with the poise and ease and noblesse oblige of his social class. While Dave sat in prison for refusing the draft, Bill was in Germany and Czechoslovakia, as a liaison from the American Army to the Russian Army. By the middle of the Vietnam War, however, their positions converged, and the sectors of the anti-war movement that they stood for also converged into a powerful force.
1968 was the year of years, when one amazing thing happened after another, not only here but in France, Czechoslovakia, and China. I’m happy to say that the New England Resistance, our anti-draft group, marched to the Czechoslovakian consulate in Boston to protest the Warsaw Pact invasion that put an end to the “Prague Spring”; I don’t think any of the other youth groups on the left took such a stand. With so much happening so swiftly I found it hard to keep a steady head, but it helped to have Dave Dellinger and Bill Coffin to check in with now and then. By then, too, I was among several older men and women–my co-conspirators, and other supporters such as Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, and Staughton Lynd–who, whether they knew it or not, provided me with continual seminar on politics and morals, not to mention lunches.
Coffin was the life of the party during our month-long conspiracy trial that spring. Our judge, a near-sighted eighty-three years old who was not about to listen to broad arguments about the legality of the war or the draft, sat like a grumpy schoolmaster behind his huge, high desk, so we defendants misbehaved like schoolboys, passing notes and suppressing giggles. When I whispered to Bill that we should all bring apples to put on the judge’s desk, Bill replied, “I think I can hit him from here.” Bill’s mother, a lady of great distinction and gracious manners, sat near the front, as if to remind the judge that conspiring to violate the draft laws is what any civilized person would do.
In the summer Tom Hayden telephoned to invite me to Chicago for a set of demonstrations he and Dave and several others were organizing for the Democratic National Convention. I have to admit I was pleased to be asked, and flattered, but I shrank from joining the Chicago affair, mainly because I felt it would be a distraction from my ongoing work as a draft-resistance spokesman, but partly because I had doubts about the plan itself. Perhaps a certain timidity also entered into it, as it looked to be a serious confrontation with the infamous Chicago police, and I wasn’t ready to add a second conspiracy indictment to the one I already had.
Whether the Chicago demonstrations and the enormous publicity they garnered (“The whole world is watching!”) helped or hurt the anti-war movement I am still not sure, but I lean to the latter. Some Boston students came back from it convinced the Revolution is at hand, and lost whatever patience and attention to strategy they had; fighting the police held new prestige as a tactic. But it certainly sent a jolt through the country: even if the public deplored the demonstrators, it was clear to more and more people that the war was tearing us apart and had to be stopped.
After Dave was indicted for conspiracy for his part in the Chicago demonstrations, he and I discussed the Boston trial and its legal defense. He was critical of our legalistic and sometimes technical approach, and said he hoped his own case would be more political and educational. I agreed with him, by and large, about our own defense. Bill’s lawyer in particular, James St. Clair, who would go on to represent Richard Nixon, was “all case and no cause,” as Bill put it. But, a year later, after the outrageous shenannigans in Judge Hoffmann’s Chicago courtroom, I came to think that what the Chicago group accomplished was to push the already committed to further extremes, much like the Chicago demonstrations themselves, whereas what we accomplished in Boston was to prod the uncommitted or undecided: our polite behavior but forceful speech opened doors to us that were closed to the likes of Abby Hoffman, even if our lawyerly trial sometimes muffled our message. I had the feeling that Dave, who was by far the oldest and most sober-sided of the Chicago defendants, was sometimes uncomfortable with his colleagues, though he never broke solidarity with them.
Whether I agreed with him on this or that tactic or position, I always admired his way of staying engaged with “The Movement” as it surged and changed. He may have felt that, if he was to have much influence on it for the better, toward nonviolence, among other things, then he had to join it at its cutting edge and take the accompanying risks, whatever his misgivings. He had a gift for communicating, and negotiating, with nearly every faction of the anti-war coalition, not to mention with police officers and other government agents. It was partly due to his modest demeanor, partly to his steady determination, and partly to his prestige as a genuine radical who was not afraid of jail or beatings. He no doubt felt otherwise, but to me he seemed the indispensable glue that held the coalition together, at least for the big marches. When the radical tide ebbed, and especially after the US withdrew troops from Vietnam in 1973, Dave was no longer in the thick of things, but he soldiered on, speaking wherever he could get invited, writing books, founding a group and journal in Burlington, Vermont (Liberation had folded), and “networking” as much as he could. We were only intermittently in touch then (I did some editing of the first chapters of his autobiography), but by the mid-1970s I think I had internalized many of his ideas and values; I would often ask myself, if I didn’t already know, “What would Dave say about this?”
I stayed in closer touch with Bill Coffin. We overlapped at Yale for year (1975-76), where I taught English and he completed his remarkable tenure as chaplain; he then moved to Riverside Church, the great cathedral built by the Rockefellers but which Bill called his “humble Baptist chapel.” There he not only preached some of his greatest sermons, including a beautiful and heartbreaking one about the death of one of his sons, but launched the Riverside Church Disarmament Program with Cora Weiss as its director, a program which brought the nuclear arms race back onto the agenda it had been shouldered off by the Vietnam War. The arms race had gotten more dangerous while we peaceniks were preoccupied elsewhere. When the Nuclear Freeze Campaign got under way in the early 1980s, Bill and his church were at the forefront.
At his funeral service in 2006, Cora asked the crowd that filled the church how many mourners present had been married by Bill. Hundreds of hands went up, including mine. When Susan and I went to see him in 1987 to ask him to officiate, he said, “I can offer you a Presbyterian service, a Lutheran service, a UCC service, but I’m not sure I know quite what to do at a Unitarian service.” But he was eager to do it, and we worked it out. “I know you may not want to mention God in your service,” he asked, “but do you mind if I do?” We didn’t mind, we didn’t mind at all. And we felt well and truly married.
Michael Ferber
This piece appeared as: “Memorial for David Dellinger and William Sloane Coffin,” in Mary Susannah Robbins, ed., Peace Not Terror (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008).