BOOK REVIEWS

Lynd, Alice, and Staughton Lynd. Stepping Stones: Memoir of a Life Together. Lanham, MD:Lexington Books, 2009. Foreword by Tom Hayden. 2009. 209 pp. US$70.00 (hardcover).

Mirra, Carl. The Admirable Radical: Staughton Lynd and Cold War Dissent, 1945–1970. Kent, OH:Kent State University Press, 2010. Foreword by Howard Zinn. 2010. 224 pp. US$34.95(hardcover).

Staughton Lynd does not go away. It is tempting to think of him only in hismultiple roles of the 1960s: precocious historian of Revolution-era America,stalwart of the southern civil rights movement, nationally prominent foe of theVietnam War. But his front-page moment—the Christmastime 1965 trip towartime Hanoi with Herbert Aptheker and Tom Hayden that torpedoed hisacademic career—was forty-five years ago. And at no time in that long stretch ofyears has he ceased being an active agent of radical social change.

The two books under review complement each other nicely, each with itsown strengths. Carl Mirra’s semibiography covers the years 1945–1970, but sixof the seven full-length chapters are about the sixties. This focus enables him todelve in considerable depth into Lynd’s scholarly writings and academic career,his civil rights involvement (chiefly as director of Freedom Schools in the 1964Mississippi Summer project), his mid-sixties antiwar leadership, his trip toHanoi, his de facto blacklisting from academic employment, and the challengethat he and fellow insurgents mounted to the American Historical Associationhierarchy at the AHA’s annual conference in December 1969.

The phrase “The Admirable Radical” in the book’s title is drawn from aphrase that Lynd himself applied to Henry David Thoreau in a 1963 article. Justas Lynd shunned academic neutrality in applying such a label to Thoreau, CarlMirra’s use of the same phrase signals his own partisanship. Lynd’s “five decadesof movement activism,” he writes, “offer us hope and inspiration” (3). Mirra, aformer marine who refused service in the first Gulf War, is a fellow member withLynd (and with the reviewer) of the steering committee of Historians Againstthe War.

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It is a book marked by, but by no means limited to, admiration. Mirra wasgenuinely curious about Lynd’s academic and political lives in the sixties, and hasskillfully fleshed them out without putting Lynd on a pedestal. His realisticnarration will resonate with the fleeting memories that many middle-aged andolder readers will bring with them to the book, and its clear, compelling proseought also to draw in a good number of socially conscious readers to whom thename “Staughton Lynd” rings a faint bell or none at all. At a time whenorganized antiwar protests are at historically low ebb in relation to the fightingin Afghanistan, Mirra’s book is a useful reminder of a time when the VietnamWar evoked a widespread and fiercely idealistic response.

The framing of Mirra’s book may seem arbitrary in two ways. First, itcovers only a twenty-five-year span of the eighty years that Lynd (as ofNovember 2009) has lived. Second, it focuses on Staughton Lynd as an indi-vidual, explicitly sidelining the equal partnership between Staughton and hiswife of almost sixty years, Alice Lynd. In the first regard, a volume coveringLynd’s life and work since 1970 is being written by Mark W. Weber for thesame publisher, Kent State University Press. In explaining the “cameo role”that Alice plays in his book, Mirra points out that she was not present duringtwo of the central events in his narrative: Mississippi Freedom Summer andthe trip to Hanoi. He could have added that Staughton’s role as a professionalhistorian is instrumental to the book’s story line and that this was a role thatAlice did not share.

In both respects—time span and the Lynds’ equal partnership—the jointmemoir Stepping Stones is a distinct complement to Mirra’s fine volume. “TheSixties” occupy only 32 out of 181 pages. And the book is a rhythmic interweav-ing of passages by each of them separately and by the two of them together. Itgoes from their childhood memories to their meeting as students at Harvard andRadcliffe colleges, to their three years in the utopian Macedonian Community inultra-rural Georgia, to Staughton’s intense time in the spotlight, to their fourdecades of shared lower-key activism that has stretched wonderfully to thepresent.

A telling passage in the introduction presents the book’s story line in anutshell: “The theme of our adult lives together has been the search for a certainkind of community. In our late-seventies it has become clear to us that we havefound such community most of all with each other, in our marriage” (1). Thebook depicts many disappointments—cooperative efforts that failed to last orwent off in abhorrent directions. Above all, there was the Macedonian Commu-nity, to which they devoted three years of their lives in the mid-fifties. Theyhappily bore the hardships of living (and having their first child) in a primitivecabin with electricity but no running water, forty-five minutes by dirt road to thenearest telephone. They thrived in the shared sense of community and inconsensus decision making, and they mourned as a majority of the adultmembers drifted toward—and then formally adopted—a fundamentalist Chris-tianity that the Lynds could not intellectually agree to. “Thereafter,” they write,“despite moments of deep fellowship in civil rights, antiwar, labor, and prison

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work, we would function in the cold outside world as a couple, a two-personcommunity. Instead of dealing with the ‘slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’as one family among many, who together faced whatever life might bring,henceforth we were on our own” (52).

There is an unembarrassed sense of wonder, of unpredictability, in theLynds’ book. Despite the book’s overall chronological framework, a readernever knows what will come next. They include poetry, even dreams. They donot skip over a temporary breakup in the late 1950s. They find inspiration in oddplaces and at odd moments. Alice at one point narrates a story, from a familyvacation in Maine, of returning two starfish to the water. They landed on theirbacks. One of them, with great difficulty, managed to turn itself over. “And then,to my utter amazement, the first starfish wedged its tentacles under the secondstarfish until it also turned over! If starfish can do that for one another, whatabout human beings?” (59)

The longest and perhaps climactic chapter of the Lynds’ memoir, coveringthe years from the 1970s on, is titled “Accompaniment.” This is a term they saythey encountered first during visits to Central America in the 1980s and inreading about liberation theology. “For us,” they say, “the idea of accompani-ment is that there should be a relationship of equality between the professionallytrained person who has a skill to contribute and the poor or exploited personwho can offer the lessons of a different kind of experience” (93). They contrastit with alternative approaches such as symbolic direct action, Alinsky-style orga-nizing, and going to work in factories. Staughton recounts that when heconsidered looking for a job in a steel mill, a steelworker friend told him,“Staughton, you could be there for twenty years and people would still say toeach other: ‘Let’s see what the Professor thinks’” (98).

Their work of accompaniment began well before they came across the term.It included oral history. Out of Alice’s work as a draft counselor from 1965 to1970 came her edited volume We Won’t Go (1968), personal accounts of draftresisters. Staughton, along with the young activist Michael Ferber, put togethera subsequent volume on organized draft refusal, The Resistance (1971), also basedheavily on interviews. By that time he and Alice had started oral histories withrank-and-file union activists, which have resulted in several volumes over theyears and which led to their doing oral histories with Palestinians both in theU.S. and in Palestine itself.

The same impulse—making skills available to workers and communitygroups—led them to the study and practice of law in the Youngstown, Ohio areawhere they moved after Staughton finished law school in 1976. (Alice worked asa paralegal and then became a lawyer herself in the mid-1980s.) In the face ofYoungstown’s deindustrialization they championed the principle of worker-community ownership and operation of the area’s steel mills, whose ownerspreferred to shut them down. They helped to galvanize several local groupsbased on workers’ solidarity. As Youngstown’s economy turned from steelmak-ing to high-security prisons, they took an interest in the supposed “worst of theworst,” seeking justice for death-row prisoners, in whom they saw abundant

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sparks of humanity. They earned the nicknames “Scrapper” and “Mama Bear”for their work on prisoners’ rights.

Both Carl Mirra’s book and the Lynds’ book have high-powered forewords,written by Howard Zinn and Tom Hayden, respectively. Zinn eloquentlyrecounts the long friendship between Staughton and himself, dating back to thewinter of 1960–1961 when he recruited Lynd to join him in teaching history in thehistorically black Spelman College in Atlanta. There, the two of them played vitalsupportive roles for the youthful civil rights movement of the still-segregatedSouth until Zinn was fired and Lynd was left in solidarity. Hayden, for his part, inthe foreword to Stepping Stones, testifies to Staughton and Alice’s remarkablecloseness but also muses on the political implications of their work. He points outthat “by their own account, all their many organizing efforts, after temporarygrowth, broke apart or failed to last” (xi) but that they led to significant reforms,on however local a scale. He ends on this note: “Through all the storms,Staughton and Alice have represented the basic blend of moral force, criticalinquiry, and trust in the evidence of things unseen that have helped rank-and-filepeople become the driving force wherever great reforms were achieved” (xiii).

Reading first Mirra’s book and then the Lynds’ joint memoir gives a feelingof looking at American radicalism close-up through an adjustable lens: first wesee in some detail the central involvement of one remarkable man in the dra-matic events of the 1960s, then we zoom out and see the same man as part of aneven more remarkable activist partnership over an even longer span of time. Forthose who hope and work for a radically more equal and peaceful society and arein occasional need of inspiration, it is a blessing to have these two books availableto read.

Jim O’Brien holds a PhD in U.S. history, has taught history and writing at thecollege level, and is currently a freelance editor and indexer. He has been apolitical activist since the early 1960s and is currently a member of the RadicalHistory Review editorial collective. Since 2007, O’Brien has been cochair ofHistorians against the War. Address correspondence to Jim O’Brien:jimobrien48@gmail.com.

Jan, Stutje Willem. Ernest Mandel: A Rebel’s Dream Deferred. London and New York: Verso Press,2009. 392 pp. US$34.95 (hardcover).

Jan Willem Stutje’s Ernest Mandel: A Rebel’s Dream Deferred begins with oneoverriding theme that flows through the entire book like a red thread. Thattheme is Ernest Mandel’s overriding faith in human nature and passionatededication to their capacity to overcome all forms of oppression. Considered byJan W. Stutje as one of the most significant living revolutionary Marxist econo-mist and social scientist of his times, this theme is carried with him throughouthis life. It is this complementary sense of contrast between Marxist economics

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