Confronting the Grim Truths of War.

• Date: 01 April 2023
• Author: Gunn, Erik
• Published date: 01 April 2023
• Author: Gunn, Erik

By all rights, I should have grown up well versed in the work of seminal anti-war activist Staughton Lynd. At my Quaker high school in the East in 1969, the awareness that the war in Vietnam was a moral calamity was unremarkable. That autumn, my mother and I drove down to Washington, D.C., for the October 15 moratorium to protest the war. A decade and a half later, I began reporting on what has been my primary interest as a journalist ever since: work and the labor movement.

At any of these points, I easily might have found myself encountering the writing of Staughton Lynd, one of the foremost thinkers of the 1960s antiwar movement, whose journey--thanks in part to a promising academic career being cut off after just a year at Yale University--took him from the practice of history and public advocacy against racism, war, and most U.S. foreign policy to local advocacy for workers as a practicing labor lawyer.

Mores the pity that it hasn't happened until now--especially as I read My Country Is the World, a collection of Lynd's writing and speeches in opposition to the Vietnam War from 1965 to 1968, edited by Luke Stewart.

A Harvard-educated historian, Lynd, who died at ninety-two in November 2022, also was a theorist of American radicalism who "distilled the...