David Dellinger

Early life and schooling

Dellinger was born in Wakefield, Massachusetts to a wealthy family. His father, Raymond Dellinger, a graduate of Yale University, was a lawyer and a prominent Republican and friend of Calvin Coolidge. His maternal grandmother, Alice Bird Fiske, was active in the Daughters of the American Revolution.

Dellinger studied at Yale University and Oxford University, and he also studied theology at Union Theological Seminary with the intention of becoming a Congregationalist minister. At Yale he had been a classmate and friend of the economist and political theorist Walt Rostow. Rejecting his comfortable background, he walked out of Yale one day to live with hobos during the Depression. While at Oxford University, he visited Nazi Germany and drove an ambulance during the Spanish Civil War. Dellinger, who opposed the war's victorious Nationalist fraction led by Francisco Franco, later recalled “After Spain, World War II was simple. I wasn't even tempted to pick up a gun to fight for General Motors, U.S. Steel, or the Chase Manhattan Bank, even if Hitler was running the other side.”

Political career

During World War II, he was an imprisoned conscientious objector and anti-war agitator. In federal prison, he and fellow conscientious objectors — including Ralph DiGia and Bill Sutherland — protested racial segregation in the dining halls, which were ultimately integrated due to the protests. In February 1946, Dellinger helped to found the radical pacifist Committee for Nonviolent Revolution. He sat on the executive committee of the Socialist Party of America and the Young People's Socialist League, its youth section, until he left in 1943, and was also a long-time member of the War Resisters League.

During the 1950s and 1960s, Dellinger joined freedom marches in the South and led many hunger strikes in jail. In 1956, he, Dorothy Day, and A. J. Muste founded the magazine Liberation as a forum for the non-Marxist left, similar to Dissent. Dellinger had contacts and friendships with such diverse individuals as Eleanor Roosevelt, Ho Chi Minh, Martin Luther King, Jr., Abbie Hoffman, A.J. Muste, Greg Calvert, James Bevel, David McReynolds and numerous Black Panthers, including Fred Hampton, whom he greatly admired. As chairman of the Fifth Avenue Vietnam Peace Parade Committee he worked with many different anti-war organizations, and helped bring King and Bevel into leadership positions in the 1960s anti-war movement. In 1966 Dellinger travelled to both North and South Vietnam to learn first-hand the impact of American bombing. He later recalled that critics ignored his trip to Saigon and focused solely on his visit to Hanoi. In 1968, he signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.

Chicago Seven trial

As US involvement in Vietnam grew, Dellinger applied Mahatma Gandhi's principles of nonviolence to his activism within the growing anti-war movement. One of the high points of this was the Chicago Seven trial. The trial was held over allegations that Dellinger and several others had conspired to cross state lines with the intention of inciting a riot, after anti-war protesters had interrupted the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The ensuing court case was turned by Dellinger and his co-defendants into a nationally-publicized platform for putting the Vietnam War on trial. On February 18, 1970, they were acquitted of the conspiracy charge, but five defendants, including Dellinger, were convicted of individually crossing state lines to incite a riot.

Judge Hoffman's handling of the trial, along with the FBI's bugging of the defence lawyers, resulted, with the help of the Center for Constitutional Rights, in the convictions being overturned by the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals two years later, on 21 November 1972. Although the contempt citations were upheld, the appeal court refused to sentence anyone.

Subsequent activities

Dellinger appeared at the December 1971 gathering of music and political views in favor of the then-jailed John Sinclair.

In the late 1970s, Dellinger spent two years teaching at Goddard College’s Adult Degree Program and Vermont College. In 2001, he was invited back to give the commencement address to the graduating class of Goddard's Residential Undergraduate Program.

In 1986, when his Yale class of 1936 held its fiftieth reunion, Dellinger wrote in the reunion book: "Lest my way of life sounds puritanical or austere, I always emphasize that in the long run one can't satisfactorily say no to war, violence, and injustice unless one is simultaneously saying yes to life, love, and laughter."

For his lifelong commitment to pacifist values and for serving as a spokesperson for the peace movement, Dellinger was awarded the Peace Abbey Courage of Conscience on September 26, 1992.

In 1996, during the first Democratic Convention held in Chicago since 1968, Dellinger and his grandson were arrested along with eight others, including Bradford Lyttle and Abbie Hoffman's son Andrew, during a sit-in at Chicago's Federal Building.

In 2001, he led a group of young activists from Montpelier, Vermont, to Quebec City, to protest the creation of a free trade zone.

Death

David Dellinger died in Montpelier, Vermont, in 2004, after an extensive stay at Heaton Woods Nursing Home.

Selected works

Related publications