Staughton Lynd

Staughton Craig Lynd (November 22, 1929 – November 17, 2022) was an American political activist, author, and lawyer. His involvement in social justice causes brought him into contact with some of the nation's most influential activists, including Howard Zinn, Tom Hayden, A. J. Muste, and David Dellinger.

Lynd's contribution to the cause of social justice and the peace movement is chronicled in Carl Mirra's biography, The Admirable Radical: Staughton Lynd and Cold War Dissent, 1945–1970 (2010).

Background

Lynd was one of two children born to the renowned sociologists Robert Staughton Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, who authored the groundbreaking "Middletown" studies of Muncie, Indiana, in the late 1920s and 1930s. Though the family lived in New York City, his mother elected to give birth at a hospital she preferred in Philadelphia. Lynd followed not only his parents' academic occupations, but also their strong left-wing beliefs. He was a conscientious objector who was assigned to a non-combatant position in the U.S. military, but amid the McCarthy Era, he was dishonorably discharged after it was found that he had briefly affiliated with communist groups while an undergraduate at Harvard College.

Personal life

Lynd married Alice Niles in 1951. They had three children and remained married until his death.

On November 17, 2022, Staughton Lynd died from multiple organ failure at a hospital in Warren, Ohio. It was five days before his 93rd birthday. As a self-described "social democratic pacifist" and "Marxist Existentialist Pacifist", he became interested in the possibilities of local grass-roots organizing.

Labor activism

In 1968, Lynd published Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism. Although the book was praised by David Donald in Commentary magazine as "a major work in American intellectual history", it came under severe criticism from then-Marxist professor Eugene Genovese, writing in the New York Review of Books. As a result of the negative review—combined with Lynd's controversial reputation as an anti-war activist who had traveled to North Vietnam with Tom Hayden—it was soon clear that Yale would deny Lynd tenure. After losing his post at Yale, he became unemployable in academia.

Lynd relocated his family to Chicago. There, he struggled to make a living from community organizing. In 1968, he accepted a job from Saul Alinsky as supervisor of the second phase of Alinsky's Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) organizer training school. Sociologist and Professor of American Studies Clément Petitjean writes of Lynd: