More There Than an Old Square: David Dellinger’s Radical Peace
Not even the courtroom is accurate. The trial in Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7 is set in a nondescript wood-fixtured traditional courtroom. Perhaps smitten by Atticus Finch, Sorkin wanted something familiarly American, rather than its true historical setting, the super-modern room designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, lit in Abbie Hoffman’s words like a “neon oven” with judge’s bench set intimidatingly above and cut off from the floor. Style is not the greatest sin of The Trial of the Chicago 7, but it is a peculiar instinct to sand away the distinctions that actual history offers up in favor of something more bland and forgettable. That seems to be the problem of the film: a unique moment in history, which produced its own logic, its own theory, its own oratory, needed somehow to be corralled into something that felt familiar and tame.
One might have wished: the film might had made clear that Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton was drugged and asleep next to his pregnant girlfriend during the supposed “shoot out” with the police. The film might have portrayed the FBI more accurately as inciters looking to provoke and entrap protesters rather than cool things down. The film might have portrayed the three days of chaining and gagging Bobby Seale that really took place, rather than just the one. The film might have portrayed US Attorney Richard Schultz as the brown-nosing believer he was, rather than a troubled conscience.
The film might also have shown that on the day of Moratorium against the Vietnam War, the defendants tried to hang a Vietcong flag from their table. Or that the milquetoast Rennie Davis on the witness stand said he was going to turn the sons and daughters of the jury into Vietcong. See: the defendants, unlike Sorkin, did not believe there was a muzzy-headed middle to appeal to, conscience was not some detente between right and left; they believed one had to take sides.
It would be one thing to question the validity of radical beliefs or to interrogate the flaws in the people that held them. One could imagine the responsibility of film at this time is to deal honestly with such people and the conclusions that they came to, to see indeed if the matrix of their moral worlds would shed any light on the place we find ourselves: what should we do? If solidarity with an imperfect ally is a question that troubles you, or affinity for people with whom you disagree is a tendency that disturbs you, one might think to use film as a vehicle to explore these impulses.
In film, a character is what enables us to move through difficult and nuanced questions without surrendering the truth of the situation for convenience. In our lives, character is what allows us to take positions that don’t conform merely to talking points. Regardless of his politics or his historical revisions, one of the true disappointments of Sorkin’s film, is that it fails to use its characters to dramatize the moral and political question at the center of the Trial. It stages the drama he wants to see, with characters of his own devising, to provide an answer that confirmed his own point of view.
One of the least understood figures in The Trial was Dave Dellinger, played by John Carroll Lynch. Dellinger’s politics in the film are dismissed by his own counsel, and he is presented as an affable kind of dimwit. Lynch is capable of channelling a real sense of menace and darkness in films like Zodiac. More often, a rather humble surface persona gets poked until the bear comes out. That’s how he is here. Whatever machinations of consciousness lie under that dynamic are almost totally obliterated. This is a guy who organized the 1967 March on the Pentagon, who helped cajole Martin Luther King, Jr. into taking a stand on the Vietnam War, and here he is mostly eating sandwiches and talking about leading a boy scout troop — before he takes a swing at a marshal.
Dellinger came into the Chicago demonstrations drawing on a philosophy of revolutionary nonviolence that saw him through a long history of antiwar and antiracist activism. Approaching activism from moral conviction, he believed that true nonviolence would require the entire reformation of society. In a characteristic article he states, “The enemy is every institution which denies full social and economic equality to anyone. The enemy is personal indifference to the consequences of acts performed by the institutions of which we are a part.”
Decades before the New Left, SDS, and the Yippies, in his very person Dellinger, anticipates them all: he was motivated by the highest spiritual realizations, he refused to play Cold War politics and accede to liberal demands to exclude communists from his organizing, and he embraced a spirit of participatory democracy as both a principle of personal action and movement making. He was non-dogmatic, difficult to characterize, and therefore more convenient to dismiss than to understand.
Dellinger’s beliefs derived more from personal revelation than from intellectual cogitation. Educated at Yale taking in the social gospel, then espoused at the student-run social action organization Dwight Hall, while there he went homeless and travelled the rails to experience a small measure of what life was like for society’s dispossessed, understanding all the while the privilege he had to eventually come home.
He took in but was ultimately unconverted by 1930s Communist Party doctrine, feeling that “people who wanted to create a better world should live now as much as possible in the kind of human relationships they were supposedly working for.” He was likewise unmoved by the kind of top-down subservience he observed in the Socialist Party. These two elements remained consistent in his activist practice as he came to prominence as a leader of the antiwar movement in the 1960s: an almost ecstatic immediacy that demanded he act on seeing injustice and a desire to work from a base in a “beloved community” of “warm-hearted democratically functioning, egalitarian revolutionaries.” Much less the Boy Scout, he lived in communal housing and experimented with new forms of relationships. One of the joys of his memoir, From Yale to Jail (shove it, “from Homeless to Harvard”), is how much he talks about love and living an authentic life in communion with others.
Dellinger went to jail for his pacifism during the Second World War. A seminarian, he refused to take a religious exception to the draft. Hardly execrable behavior, he refused to get out of the war on anything but his conviction in the inherent evil of violence. His time in jail is its own moral education. In that dark place a radical sense of human solidarity opened up to him. Placed in solitary for organizing against the institution, he contemplates his own longing for men when a gay inmate manages to smuggle him cigarettes and a lighter:
“I thought about how Hudson had gotten to me in solitary, when no one else could, and asked me to stand on the chair and stick my cock through the peephole in the door. I was afraid to, even though I felt horny and said to myself, “Why not? I wonder what it would be like.”
He gives a wonderful subversive vibrancy to the life of this elder generation. Admits that beneath the coming suburbanization and conformity, were real strains of humanity and longing.
But more, threatened in that first jail stint by the prison warden and terrified that he would be tortured forever in jails on trumped up charges or that the wardens would induce someone to kill him, Dellinger remembers his revelation, brought on by his friend in an unlikely place: “If you fight clean and hard people can kill you but they can’t hurt you. They can do terrible things to you — and probably will — but they can’t hurt you unless you do it to yourself. From now on, no one will ever frighten or control me, no one will stop me from living to the full and loving to the full, loving everyone I know and everyone I don’t know, fighting for justice without seeing anyone as an enemy.”
When his first stint ends, Dellinger is warned to stay away from activism. He doesn’t, and he is sent right back. Where he again agitates, organizing hunger strikes against the war and to improve conditions for prisoners. But he learns that one of his fellow anti-war activists has become the target of inmates who want to rape. Dellinger has a bum wrist from an earlier football injury, but with no allies and no recourse he decides to set vigil before his comrades prison door, prepared to test the limits of his nonviolence.
Three men come with the intent to rape and do harm, and Dellinger stands there. He neither fights nor flees, but talks to the men, tries to find some basis for human solidarity. He talks to them about their families, about his family, trying to make contact, before finally bringing it to the intended rape:
I decided to come down here and do my best to prevent it. And if necessary, I was going to tell whoever it was that they would have to stick a shiv into me before they could stick into Bill. You can imagine how relieved I was to find out that it’s you guys and someone who would do that.
And for whatever reason the men moved on.
Nonviolence has gotten a bad reputation for the kind of ineffectual protest that feels more like self-congratulatory virtue signaling, but Dellinger believed in “creative” nonviolence. Not just holding rallies in cordoned off streets, but disrupting the flow of society, getting in the way, and finding some opportunity for the miraculous: to demonstrate by one’s own ethic what humanity was.
Dellinger, as much as anyone, made it possible for the brief merger between the Civil Rights movement and the antiwar movement to take place. When longtime friend A.J. Muste died in 1967, Dellinger in many ways took over his role as the most visible antiwar activist from the older Peace movement. In his final years Muste, a former Trotskyist and revered pacifist who in his lifetime oscillated between top-down bureaucratic approaches to activism and more radical direct action, played an important role in nurturing connections between a broad coalition of liberal and radical organizations. Dellinger, taking this on, sought to balance the goals of encouraging mass participation in demonstrations, seeking to radicalize moderate elements, while also developing practices to keep the attention and motivation of radical activists, who were at this time already frustrated by what they saw as the lack of progress in traditional organizing. For instance, Dellinger describes how he and his associates solicited Martin Luther King, Jr. to make known his position on the Vietnam War at the April 15, 1967 demonstration in Washington, D.C. King, in doing so, would be leaving behind a broad base of supporters who thought entering the conversation on the war would be distracting from Civil Rights, so too he would be giving up on a more charismatic leader-oriented model of activism based on suasion for one more closely aligned with the direct-action interventions of SNCC organizers like John Lewis.
Dellinger emphasized that the demonstration would feature teach-ins for the troops, retaining the religious underpinnings of his pacifism through slogans directed at soldiers, like “You are our brothers, join us” and “You are victims too, join us.” Those that marched did so under the banner, “From Protest to Resistance,” a ramping up of the action that was borne out by mass arrests.
In many respects the April 1967 action took the shape it did because of the pressure Dellinger was feeling to grow the movement into a more directly confrontational force. In his autobiography Dellinger writes of his concerns about the pattern demonstrations were falling into at mid-decade. At first, they played an important role “in showing the public, the traditional peace organizations, the government… how widespread and serious the opposition was.” They also made clear to people who held antiwar views and may have felt isolated in their towns, offices, and families, “they could come to a national demonstration, march, sing, listen to persuasive speakers, interact with a diverse crowd of tens of thousands… and be reassured that they were not crazy after all.” Over time, however, the demonstrations began to pull focus as an end in itself: “Instead of helping people to gain new insights and the energy to go home and express them in new relationships and practices, they were becoming almost a substitute for doing so.”
One of the aims of the actions planned for the week of the 1968 Democratic Convention therefore was to teach and organize in practical ways that would lead participants to be able to return to their own communities with lessons and strategies for organizing work to come. Announcing intentions for the week, Dellinger writes, “For six days, from August 24 to 29, a combination of movement workshops, decentralized actions and massive rallies, marches and street protests has been scheduled.” Rather than focusing on disrupting the official Democratic convention, the Mobe sought to use the occasion as an opportunity to begin creating institutions of its own that might advance the causes of ending the war in Vietnam and ending black repression at home.
Threats of violence from Mayor Daley and the National Guard kept many people from coming to Chicago and participating in the Convention Week actions. As a result, Dellinger was left as one of the few old guard organizers committed to a philosophy of creative nonviolence rather than just its tactical employment. In what led to a major shift in the mood of the demonstrators, police attacked a gathering in Grant Park on Wednesday August 18. Dellinger tried to maintain faith, urging those present to stay where they were: “This is being done for the whole world to see. Let them see who is committing the violence here.” In the ensuing violence, police cracked open the skull of Rennie Davis, serving as a marshal for the demonstration, sending him to the hospital bleeding.
As the protesters moved to march to the Hilton where the Convention was being held, Dellinger felt his own failure palpably. The crowd was angry after being brutalized by the police, and now he had led them into a trap, as police kettled protesters on their way downtown.
The police got out of the buses, lined up and marched toward the crowd, goose-stepping and shouting their favorite slogan: “Kill, kill, kill.” To my amazement and joy, the demonstrators universally responded with a spontaneous, more creative and forceful nonviolence than I had thought possible. “O ye of little faith.”
As police attacked demonstrators retreated, but only to regain ground, rescuing comrades who had been struck to the ground or snatching them nonviolently from the arms of the police. “[T]he spirit and practice of active nonviolent resistance were not dead,” Dellinger wrote.
When the court of the Conspiracy Trial began session on the morning of October 29th, U.S. Attorney Richard Schultz brought to the Court’s attention comments Bobby Seale had made to Black Panther Party members in attendance, attempting to construe them as encouraging the use violence. Seale reacted strongly, standing to denounce Schultz as a liar and a fascist. When the marshals moved in to force Seale back into his seat, it was David Dellinger who stepped into their path.
The trial transcript records the prosecutor Schultz’s account: “May the record show, if the court please, that while the marshals were seating Bobby Seale, pushing him into his chair, the defendant Dellinger physically attempted to interfere with the marshals by pushing them out of the way.” Dellinger here is the aggressor interfering with the marshal’s proper “seating” of Seale. John Schultz, a writer in attendance, describes it another way. Dellinger “placed his elbows to his sides and his hands to his face and tried to put himself between the marshals and Seale.” Dellinger recounts in his memoir what he calls a spontaneous act. Having previously seen the marshals “seating” Seale by kneeing him in the testicles, this time Dellinger “got between Bobby and them and I was the one who got kneed in the balls.” Dellinger received a contempt citation for one month for this act.
Seale would be gagged and bound to his chair for the next three days. The defendants at Seale’s urging agreed not to disrupt the trial, although each of them at some point reacted strongly interposing bodies or words in the motion of the trial, even the lawyers got in on it. Dellinger, however was never comfortable afterwards with the decision made by the defendants to go along with the trial. To Dellinger, in choosing unity of the defendants and unity of trial strategy, the defendants gave up on a larger unity: “A fundamental human unity of Black and white that Bobby himself might have ultimately appreciated my having asserted, despite the different tactical views he and I held on how it was best for his codefendants to respond to the abuse he was experiencing.” Dellinger held that it was ethical and loving behavior that ultimately enjoined and moved others to their cause.
As the trial was put into recess that morning and the defendants ushered out to decide how to proceed, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin ran up to Dellinger: “That’s real nonviolence. That kind of nonviolence we believe in.”
