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Along with Roslyn and Howard Zinn and Carol and Noam Chomsky, Alice and Stoughton Lind belonged to a generation of radical married couples in the United States who took controversial, unpopular public positions—on civil rights at home, on Vietnam and subsequent wars abroad—regardless of consequences and adheres to lifelong commitments. Stoughton died last week aged 92, survived by Alice and their three children.
“I lost my ability to make a living as a teacher when I tried to do everything I could to stop the Vietnam War,” Stoughton said in 2009:
I have complied with all the rules and requirements. I went to Hanoi over Christmas break and practically overturned the world communist bureaucracy to get back to the States in time for my first scheduled class of the new year. There was no difference. Yale’s president said I had “given aid and comfort to the enemy,” a phrase from the Treason Act.
A trip to Vietnam, with Tom Hayden and Herbert Apteker, made Stoughton a household name but ended his academic career.
The son of sociologists Robert and Helen Lind, Stoughton went to Harvard as an undergraduate but dropped out (temporarily) after reading Trotsky’s book Literature and Revolution. Still came back and finished. In 1951 he married Alice Niles and for a time they lived in a commune in Georgia. Back in New York, Stoughton worked as an organizer at New York’s University Settlement House: “One day on the subway it occurred to me that I didn’t want to chaperone teenage dances for the indefinite future.” He received funding through the GI Bill to write a master’s thesis in Columbia on land tenure and class struggle in the Hudson Valley during the Revolutionary period.
It was published in 1962, at which time he was teaching at Spelman College in Atlanta. Howard Zinn was one of two senior advisers to the Student Anti-Violence Coordinating Committee, and he hired Stoughton to run the Freedom School program for SNCC in 1964. Stoughton called Freedom Summer his “most important political experience.” He was with Fannie Lou Hamer and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party at the 1964 Democratic Convention.
Zinn was fired from Spelman in 1963, and Staughton left the following year to attend Yale. After Yale fired and blacklisted him, the Linds moved to Chicago, where he was offered five teaching jobs, all of which were canceled. Instead, he worked as a community organizer for Saul Alinsky.
A group of radical historians tried to elect Stoughton as president of the American Historical Association in 1969 to get her to oppose the war. Eugene Genovese helped thwart the plan and went on to run the radical historic retreat. However, Lind outlived him, founding Historians Against the War within the AHA (I joined the former but not the latter) to oppose the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Stoughton writes about The release, Studies of the Left, Dissidence, Socialist Revolution, Science and Society and Radical Americaand he and Alice edited a book of primary sources, Nonviolence in America,in 1966. The following year he published Class Conflict, Slavery, and the US Constitutionwith a foreword by EP Thompson, and in 1968 Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism, a pioneering social history of ideas. In 1971 he wrote the resistance with Michael Ferber on organizing opposition to the project and edited Personal stories of the early CIO. He coined the phrase “guerrilla history” to describe a new way of treating working-class people as subjects of history they did not make themselves, and as historians in force. It was a far cry from the narrow empiricism or consensus history that Lind and Zinn had helped to spark. In 1973 he wrote a book with Gar Alperowitz on strategies for a socialist revolution in the United States.
“Later,” in the words of historian Geoffrey Gould, “he put his intellect, courage, and creativity to the service of the labor movement in ways I wish more of us could emulate.” Stoughton followed Alice into law, earning a doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1976, and they put down roots in Niles, Ohio, near Youngstown, where they fought for union- and community-owned and operated steel mills instead of plant and capital shutdowns flight. Stoughton writes about this in The fight against suspensions (1982). Labor law for rank and file employees was published in 1978; Rank and File: Personal Stories from Working Class Organizersedited by Alice and Stoughton, appeared in 1981.
It is hard to think of anyone other than Zinn whose scholarship has been fully integrated into his activism. in Companion: Pathways to Social Change (2012), Staughton uses a term borrowed from Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador to outline the ways in which middle-class intellectuals can participate in grassroots struggles to democratize society.
When I met the Linds 25 years ago, Stoughton had recently published three books: an edited volume of oral histories of forgotten working-class radicalism before the New Deal and the formation of the CIO; Living in Our Hope: Confessions of an Unwavering Radical, who offered a message to my generation; and Lucasvilleabout the uprising at the eponymous prison in Ohio on Easter Sunday in 1993. Zinn called it “one of the most powerful indictments of our ‘justice system’ I’ve ever read… The detailed transcripts (yes, oral history!) give great power of the whole story.
Stoughton and Alice were staunch abolitionists long before the position became popular, and long before I met them they corresponded and visited prisoners. Stoughton said he learned more in one prison than in twenty steel mills. Solidarity was not an abstraction: as Solidarity trade unionism: Reclaiming the labor movement from below (1991) clarifies that it is a self-critical, concrete practice anchored in particular places, institutions and social customs and norms. The Linds provided something of a compass, with a clear north, in a time of ideological confusion and demoralization on the left.
In October 1997, Marcus Rediker drove a small group of students—including myself, historian Gabriele Gottlieb, and actor Cornell Womack—from Pittsburgh to Youngstown for a one-day sabbatical. Peter Linebaugh had come the night before from Toledo and had slept in the Lind’s basement. The meeting was called by the Labor Solidarity Club, designed to join forces against the death penalty in Ohio and Pennsylvania.
I felt that I had joined an antinomian family in which radical ideas were alive and thriving. It wasn’t subcultural either. I can’t remember what I insisted we discuss with Stoughton during the break in the meeting—unlikely to advance our common goals, that’s for sure—but he was tolerant, listened carefully, and responded kindly, encouragingly, with very few words.
After I began writing about Bolivia, where I lived from 2003 to 2005, researching the Federal War of 1899, Stoughton and I corresponded briefly by email. Wobbly and the Zapatistas: Conversations on Anarchism, Marxism, and Radical History — a book of interviews published in 2008, the year he underwent triple bypass surgery — and “To Another World,” his Distinguished Lecture at the Fernand Braudel Center in 2009, reflect the evolution of his thought in relation to local self-government movements in Latin America. In 2009, both of his history books from the late 1960s were republished by Cambridge, which he has “always considered the Holy Grail of historians”. The long-awaited recognition in the historians’ guild – a ball that Marcus Rediker had set in motion – unleashed an “overwhelming rush of emotions”. In 2011, Stoughton co-authored an essay published in William and Mary Quarterly – for the first time since the 1960s.
“Everything we know about learning shows that people learn through experience”: Stoughton returned to this point repeatedly in conversations and interviews, although he continued to read widely and write prolifically into his eighties. He was generous and his students are legion.
One route to his work might be the pamphlet written by Stoughton and Alice on Quaker Liberation Theology in 2015. Or From Here to There: The Staughton Lynd Reader (2010); or The main Staughton Lynd (2013); or The world is my countrya collection of speeches and writings against the Vietnam War to be released in 2023. Or Solidarity unionism at Starbucks (2011). Or picketing in support of Starbucks, Amazon and other union-fighting workers.
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