Confronting the Grim Truths of War.

• Author: Gunn, Erik
• Position: My Country Is the World

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 various traditions of peace activism and nonviolence in U.S. history," from the early Quakers through the mid-twentieth-century civil rights movement, Stewart writes. Lynd remained firmly committed to participatory democracy and nonviolence even as both lost favor with the New Left of the late 1960s.

Like many, Lynd came to the antiwar movement through the civil rights struggle. A professor at Spelman College in Atlanta, Lynd coordinated the Freedom Schools program that was part of the Mississippi Freedom Summer voter registration campaign. Three days after the bodies of three murdered civil rights workers -- Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman -- were recovered in 1964, Freedom Summer director Bob Moses presided over an informal memorial service and brought up the newly enacted Tonkin Gulf Resolution and a news headline that began, "LBJ Says Shoot to Kill." Moses said: "This is what we're trying to do away with--the idea that whoever disagrees with us must be killed."

In the years that followed, Lynd became an outspoken leader of the antiwar movement, writing, giving speeches, and confronting the administration of Yale University, where he began a tenure-track position...