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ron dellums
Ron Dellums, Radical Antiwar Activist, Unlikely House Armed Services Chairman, Dead at 82
In 1993, the House chose socialist Ron Dellums as chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, with oversight for defense appropriations and global military operations.
Jul 31, 2018
Former Rep. Ronald V. Dellums, a Marine-turned-antiwar activist who represented Oakland in the House and went on to chair the Armed Services Committee, died of cancer early Monday in Washington. He was 82.
Dellums was elected to thirteen terms as a Member of the U.S. House of Representatives and was the first African American elected to Congress from Northern California.
Though he ran as a Democrat, and caucused as a Democrat in Congress, Dellums described himself as a Socialist. He was the first self-described socialist in Congress since Victor L. Berger. In the 1970s, Dellums was a member of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC), an offshoot of the Socialist Party of America. He later became vice-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which was formed by a merger between the DSOC and the New American Movement, and which works within and outside the Democratic Party.
Known for championing a progressive agenda that put civil rights and programs for people ahead of weapons systems and warfare, his career in politics spanned over 40 years, 27 of them in Congress and four as mayor of Oakland.
"I feel blessed to have called Congressman Dellums my dear friend, predecessor, and mentor. I will miss him tremendously, and I will hold dear to my heart the many lessons I learned from this great public servant," Rep. Barbara Lee said in a statement. Lee had served as Dellums' congressional chief of staff and then succeeded Dellums in the House in 1998 when he retired.
"If being an advocate of peace, justice and humanity toward all human beings is radical, then I'm glad to be called radical. And if it is radical to oppose the use of 70 percent of federal monies for destruction and war, then I am a radical."
- Ron Dellums
Dellums' stance against the Vietnam War earned him a spot on President Richard Nixon's "Enemies List." During his first run for Congress in 1970, Vice President Spiro Agnew labeled him "an out and out radical," according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
"If it's radical to oppose the insanity and cruelty of the Vietnam War, if it's radical to oppose racism and sexism and all other forms of oppression, if it's radical to want to alleviate poverty, hunger, disease, homelessness, and other forms of human misery, then I'm proud to be called a radical," Dellums told reporters in rebuttal.
He demanded a House investigation into American war crimes in Vietnam. When Congress refused, Dellums held his own ad hoc hearings.
When President Ronald Reagan vetoed Dellums' Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986, a Democratic-controlled House and a Republican-controlled Senate overrode Reagan's veto, the first override of a presidential foreign policy veto in the 20th century.
Dellums' voting records in Congress were "almost without exception straight A's" from groups such as the Sierra Club, the National Organization for Women and the AFL-CIO. He received 100% on consumer group Public Citizen's scorecard. In contrast, he received an "F" from conservative NumbersUSA, a group dedicated to limiting immigration.
His New York Times' obituary noted that:
He was an outspoken critic of presidents, Republican and Democratic, and for many Americans beyond his tiny Congressional district, he championed a progressive mantra: Stop war. Cut military spending. Help people. Address the nation's social problems.
He won a dozen re-election campaigns and the sometimes grudging respect of colleagues on both sides of the aisle. His voting record also won virtually straight A's from labor, consumer, women's and environmental groups. Human rights organizations hailed his fights to restrict aid to African nations, like Zaire, Burundi, Liberia and Sudan, whose regimes were openly repressive.
After a 14-year campaign against apartheid in South Africa, he wrote the 1986 legislation that mandated trade embargoes and divestment by American companies and citizens of holdings in South Africa. President Ronald Reagan's veto was overridden by Congress, a 20th-century first in foreign policy. The sanctions were lifted in 1991, when South Africa repealed its apartheid laws.
Mr. Dellums opposed every major American military intervention of his tenure, except for emergency relief in Somalia in 1992. He sued President George H. W. Bush unsuccessfully to stop the Persian Gulf War in 1990-91, saying the invasion did not have congressional authorization. And he voted against the new weapons programs and military budgets of all six presidents in his era.
His "alternative" budgets, written for the Congressional Black Caucus (he was a founding member in 1971 and chairman from 1989 to 1991) proposed spending instead for education, jobs, housing, health care, assistance for the poor and programs to fight drug abuse.
Right-wing critics repeatedly labeled him a Communist, citing his 1970 talk to a world peace conference in Stockholm and his meeting with President Fidel Castro of Cuba in Havana in 1977.
He was unperturbed.
"If being an advocate of peace, justice and humanity toward all human beings is radical, then I'm glad to be called radical," he told The Washington Post. "And if it is radical to oppose the use of 70 percent of federal monies for destruction and war, then I am a radical."
Over time, congressional colleagues came to respect Mr. Dellums's legislative and military expertise. In 1993, the House Democratic Caucus voted 198-10 to name him chairman of the Armed Services Committee, with oversight for defense appropriations and global military operations.
He was the first African-American and the first antiwar activist to hold that post. A fox-in-the-henhouse cartoon portrayed a general and an admiral at the committee door under a banner proclaiming, "Under New Management." Inside, Mr. Dellums brandishes a meat ax. "Call security," one military man says to the other.
In response to his death, Democracy Now! tweeted:
\u201cRon Dellums (1935-2018): Organizing for Peace Forces Us to Challenge All Forms of Injustice https://t.co/aRVRKn8D2S\u201d— Democracy Now! (@Democracy Now!) 1533053115
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May's the Month for Protest. Daniel Berrigan Would Agree.
The Jesuit writer and activist's death is a reminder of the necessity and power of protest in America.
May 07, 2016
May is historically a month for protests, and first, I'd like to protest the fact that Rev. Daniel Berrigan died last weekend, just a few days shy of what would have been his 95th birthday on May 9.
Our apologies, good friends, for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children...
May, too, was the month in which this outspoken Jesuit poet and peace activist, with his fellow priest and brother Philip, and seven others, staged one of the most significant and symbolic protests against the horrors of Vietnam. On May 17, 1968, they walked into the office of a draft board in Catonsville, Maryland, removed the files of young men eligible for military duty, took them to a parking lot next door, doused them with homemade napalm and set the files ablaze.
"Our apologies, good friends," Dan Berrigan said, "for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children, the angering of the orderlies in the front parlor of the charnel house. We could not, so help us God, do otherwise."
The Catonsville Nine were tried and convicted for destroying government property. Rather than go to prison, three of them, including Dan and Phil Berrigan, went on the lam, but the brothers soon were caught (while underground, Dan had a habit -- greatly vexing to J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI -- of popping up in public to deliver sermons, then disappearing again). In August 1970, Dan began his three-year sentence at the Federal Correctional Institution in Danbury, Connecticut.
Archival footage of the Catonsville Nine
So he wasn't around to offer guidance the following year, in 1971, as many of the more militant in the anti-Vietnam war movement decided that in light of events like Catonsville the time had come to up the ante and move from largely peaceful mass demonstrations to more direct and sometimes even violent acts of civil disobedience.
This, too, was in May, 45 years ago this week, in fact, when thousands came from around the country and gathered in Washington under the slogan, "If the government is not going to stop the war, we will stop the government."
The week before, perhaps as many as half a million had shown up for a Vietnam protest so mellow that many took advantage of a closed-off Pennsylvania Avenue to skateboard and sunbathe along the boulevard on a warm spring Saturday. But now, thousands gathered with the express purpose of physically blocking bridges, main arteries and traffic circles leading into the capital. According to The New York Times, the Nixon White House responded with 12,000 federal troops, 5,100 local police and 1,500 National Guardsmen.
If the government is not going to stop the war, we will stop the government.
Police broke up an encampment at West Potomac Park, near the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials, and protesters scattered, many of them to the Georgetown University campus, where I was a student. I still remember the helicopters buzzing overhead.
On Monday, May 3, the protesters regrouped and put into action their plan to shut the city down during the morning rush hour, using hit-and-run tactics and any large or small object that came to hand. The police and military pushed back hard.
I was a student reporter and my photographer John and I headed toward Key Bridge near the Georgetown campus. Forever in my memory is the sight of Rhode Island US Senator Claiborne Pell, standing on the steps of his townhouse in robe and pajamas, retrieving his daily copy of The Washington Post and looking completely befuddled by the flying debris and overturned cars around him.
Soon John and I were fleeing through streets and alleys with the demonstrators. We rounded the intersection of Prospect and 36th Streets and ran smack into a wall of tear gas, the worst I had ever experienced. We fell to the pavement, blinded, but soon were taken in hand by volunteer medics and led to a makeshift infirmary in the basement of a university building. Once our eyes had been thoroughly flushed with water and we had a chance to rest a bit and catch our breath, we headed back to the streets and raced to the main campus where police on motor scooters, in total violation of an agreement with the university, fired grenade after grenade of tear gas at protesters and students alike.
Over the course of three days, some 12,000 protesters were taken into custody, the largest mass arrest in American history. There were so many the city's jails couldn't hold them all and most were taken to RFK Stadium. People from the neighborhood threw food and blankets over the security fence.
I wanted to report on what was happening at the stadium but figured the only way to do it was to get arrested myself. I went to a sit-in on the Capitol steps where police were dragging protesters into buses. Get close enough, I thought, and I was certain to be sucked into the vortex. Sure enough, an officer soon had his hand on my arm but just as he tightened his grip, a photographer I knew from the Post pulled my other arm in the opposite direction. "He's with me," the photographer shouted and the cop actually let go. Thanks, I said to my friend, but inside I was screaming, "Stop helping me!"
I never did get into the stadium; ultimately, fewer than a hundred of the arrested were charged, everyone else was quickly released. The debate would continue over whether the violent confrontations were justified -- on the face of it, the attempted shutdown was a failure -- but in retrospect the government's overreaction to the Mayday protests was a misstep, one more proof of a failed policy that was simply delaying the inevitable in Vietnam at the cost of thousands and thousands more lives. Like the Berrigan brothers and their comrades at Catonsville, the attempt to obstruct the streets and bridges of Washington was an act of disobedience designed to throw a wrench in the works of the war machine.
The next year, Dan Berrigan was freed from Danbury after serving half his sentence. I interviewed a number of Jesuits for an article on Dan and Phil in Georgetown University's alumni magazine, modeled on an extraordinary all-Berrigan issue of the Holy Cross Quarterly, then joined the staff of Democrat George McGovern's quixotic, anti-war presidential campaign.
A few weeks after we had gone down to exhausted but noble defeat, I went to a lecture Dan Berrigan was giving at a downtown Washington church. I was nursing what I thought was just a very bad, long-lasting cold. We met afterwards and his greeting, characteristically to the point, was, "You look terrible. Go see a doctor." Sound advice. When I took off my shirt for the ER physician, revealing my fading McGovern tee shirt underneath, he said, "You're the seventh McGovern guy I've had in here since the election." Diagnosis: pneumonia.
Several years later, I had moved to New York. One Friday night, some friends showed up at my tiny apartment for a late dinner and with them was Dan Berrigan. He was in good form. Sufficient alcohol was consumed during the evening that unfortunately I recall little of what actually was said but I do remember Dan's post-midnight recitation of another great Jesuit poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins:
I say more: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is --
Christ. For Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces.
In the following years, I lost touch with him and apparently that was not uncommon. He took the advice of the great Catholic philosopher and author Thomas Merton and, in the words of Georgetown senior fellow Paul Elie, became "a figure of radical purity and apartness." The man once so visible, once so potent and public a symbol of dissidence, quietly continued to write and protest (and get arrested), as he kept his vows, studied and taught scripture and humbly ministered to those who needed his faith. The just man justiced and kept grace.
May is historically a month for protests. It's the month of Chicago's Haymarket bombing in 1886; of Paris in 1968, when students and workers almost brought down the government of Charles de Gaulle; of May 1970 and deaths at Kent State and Jackson State, the resulting student strike that closed colleges and universities across the country.
And now in yet another May of turmoil we protest the death of Dan Berrigan, mourn his passing but celebrate all that he did and said and wrote, while celebrating, too, all those like him who speak out and strive to make this country a land of peace and justice that's honest and wise and decent and compassionate. You know, the things that truly make America great.
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Democratic Socialism Has Deep Roots in American Life
The shock and disbelief with which many political pundits have responded to Bernie Sanders's description of himself as a "democratic socialist"--a supporter of democratic control of the economy--provide a clear indication of how little they know about the popularity and influence of democratic socialism over the course of American history.
Nov 01, 2015
The shock and disbelief with which many political pundits have responded to Bernie Sanders's description of himself as a "democratic socialist"--a supporter of democratic control of the economy--provide a clear indication of how little they know about the popularity and influence of democratic socialism over the course of American history.
How else could they miss the existence of a thriving Socialist Party, led by Eugene Debs (one of the nation's most famous union leaders) and Norman Thomas (a distinguished Presbyterian minister), during the early decades of the twentieth century? Or the democratic socialist administrations elected to govern Milwaukee, Bridgeport, Flint, Minneapolis, Schenectady, Racine, Davenport, Butte, Pasadena, and numerous other U.S. cities? Or the democratic socialists, such as Victor Berger, Meyer London, and Ron Dellums, elected to Congress? Or the programs long championed by democratic socialists that, eventually, were put into place by Republican and Democratic administrations--from the Pure Food and Drug Act to the income tax, from minimum wage laws to maximum hour laws, from unemployment insurance to public power, from Social Security to Medicare?
Most startling of all, they have missed the many prominent Americans who, though now deceased, were democratic socialists during substantial portions of their lives. These include labor leaders like Walter Reuther (president, United Auto Workers and vice-president, AFL-CIO), David Dubinsky (president, International Ladies Garment Workers Union), Sidney Hillman (president, Amalgamated Clothing Workers), Jerry Wurf (president, American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees), and William Winpisinger (president, International Association of Machinists). Even Samuel Gompers--the founder and long-time president of the American Federation of Labor who, in the latter part of his life, clashed with Debs and other socialist union leaders--was initially a socialist.
Numerous popular novelists and other writers also embraced democratic socialism, including Jack London, Upton Sinclair, Carl Sandburg, William Carlos Williams, Thorstein Veblen, C. Wright Mills, Erich Fromm, Michael Harrington, Irving Howe, and Howard Zinn. Eminent scientists, too, became democratic socialists, including Charles Steinmetz and Albert Einstein.
Many well-known social reformers also joined the ranks of America's democratic socialists, among them Elizabeth Cady Stanton (women's rights crusader), John Dewey (educator), Helen Keller (author and lecturer), and Margaret Sanger (birth control pioneer). Within the civil rights movement, particularly, a very important role was played by democratic socialists, among them W.E.B. Du Bois, A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, and James Farmer.
In fact, although very few people know it, even Martin Luther King, Jr. was a democratic socialist. "I am much more socialistic in my economic theory than capitalistic," he wrote to Coretta Scott (soon to become his wife) on July 18, 1952. This belief system continued throughout his life, and, in the late 1960s, contributed to his shift from championing racial equality to championing economic equality. In a 1966 speech to his staff, King declared: "Something is wrong . . . with capitalism." He added: "Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all of God's children." Plans for the Poor People's Campaign followed, as did his death while promoting the unionization of Memphis's exploited sanitation workers.
Some might argue that democratic socialism, like these individuals, is dead and gone, replaced by its hierarchical enemies, corporate capitalism on the Right and communism on the Left. But that contention is belied by the continued existence of large, democratic socialist parties that either govern other democratic nations or provide the major opposition to the conservative governments of those nations: the British Labour Party, the French Socialist Party, the Swedish Social Democratic Party, the Australian Labor Party, the Brazilian Democratic Workers Party, the German Social Democratic Party, the Irish Labour Party, Mexico's Party of the Democratic Revolution, South Africa's African National Congress, the Israeli Labor Party, the New Zealand Labour Party, Chile's Socialist Party, and many, many more around the world.
Nor is democratic socialism dead in the United States. In response to rising economic inequality and, particularly, the blatant greed and power of the wealthy and their corporations, Democratic Socialists of America--a descendant of the old Socialist Party of America, though an organization rather than a third party--is growing rapidly. Not surprisingly, it is fervently backing Bernie Sanders's campaign for the presidency. Meanwhile, Democratic Party leaders are suddenly shying away from their corporate dalliances and picking up a few programmatic ideas from Sanders, democratic socialists, and their allies. These include a $15 per hour minimum wage, expansion of Social Security, free college tuition, and opposition to two pro-corporate ventures: the Keystone XL pipeline and the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
If the political pundits would look around, they would even discover a significant number of prominent U.S. democratic socialists at work in a variety of fields. They include muckraking authors like Barbara Ehrenreich, journalists like Harold Meyerson, actors like Ed Asner and Wallace Shawn, intellectuals like Noam Chomsky and Cornel West, documentary film-makers like Michael Moore, TV commentators like Lawrence O'Donnell, science fiction writers like Kim Stanley Robinson, feminist leaders like Gloria Steinem, peace movement veterans like David McReynolds, and academics like Frances Fox Piven.
These and many other democratic socialists, among them Bernie Sanders, have played an important role in American life. It's a shame that so many political "experts" haven't noticed it.
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