For more than three decades, DAVID McREYNOLDS,
who was born on this date (d: 2018) was among the most outspoken
socialists and pacifists in America, a leftist organizer who combined a
belief in wealth redistribution with a fierce opposition to the Vietnam
War and nuclear weapons.
As a leader of
the War Resisters League, he spurred a wave of antiwar demonstrations in
1965, when he joined four other men in lighting their draft cards on
fire, defying a federal law that could have sent him to prison for five
years and earned him a $10,000 fine.
He went on to
become one of the first candidates to come out as Gay to run for
Congress and president. Although he never came close to winning office,
he helped “define modern pacifism in the United States,” said his friend
Bruce Cronin, chair of the political science department at the City
College of New York.
McReynolds, who
died in August 2018 at a hospital in Manhattan, drew the attention of
the FBI and landed in jail several times as a result of his activism.
His political career was all the more remarkable given his upbringing in
Los Angeles, where he was raised by a family of conservative Baptists
and joined the Prohibition Party in his youth.
Though he came to
don tie-dye shirts, beads and patchouli cologne with other Vietnam-era
peaceniks, he honed his public speaking skills with a group called the
Traveling Temperance Talking Team, in which sharply dressed teenagers
competed to see who could best denounce the evils of alcohol.
Indeed,
McReynolds was described as more professorial than proletarian, with
interests that ranged far beyond political rallies and campaigns. He was
a prolific photographer, taking more than 50,000 pictures of New York
City streetscapes and activists such as the gay civil rights leader
Bayard Rustin (whom McReynolds described as a mentor) and the pacifist
A.J. Muste (for whom he worked as a top lieutenant).
McReynolds was
also a member of the Bromeliad Society, an international botanical
group, and filled his East Village apartment with tropical plants and
hundreds of bottles of perfume, which he created himself and arranged on
floor-to-ceiling shelves. He was found unconscious in the apartment
Wednesday, several weeks after suffering a fall, said his younger
brother, Martin McReynolds.
Active in the
anti-Korean War and civil rights movements, McReynolds joined the War
Resisters League in 1960 and was soon named field secretary. Alongside
Norma Becker and Sidney Peck, he became a behind-the-scenes architect of
the anti-Vietnam War movement, Cronin said, known for maintaining unity
in a coalition that included members of the political left and right.
“If you can bring
together labor, teachers, students, folks from all walks of life, then
you can turn the country. That’s painstaking work,” said Cronin, who met
McReynolds while preparing for a 1982 nuclear disarmament rally that,
by some estimates, drew 1 million people to Central Park.
“It took somebody
like David to bring people together and say, ‘Look, let’s keep the
focus on what we want and not break up over trifles.’”
Among the
league’s most controversial actions was the burning of draft cards.
McReynolds made national headlines when he appeared on a wooden platform
in Manhattan’s Union Square to burn his card on Nov. 6, 1965, amid
counterprotests from a group chanting, “Drop dead, red.”
The burning was
interrupted, the New York Times reported, when a man sprayed McReynolds
and his fellow demonstrators with a fire extinguisher: “The pacifists
managed to dry the cards over the flame of a cigarette lighter, however,
and the cards burned crisply.”
At 36, McReynolds
was the oldest member of the group, which included Tom Cornell, Marc
Paul Edelman, Roy Lisker and James Wilson. While the others were
indicted on charges of defacing their cards (three were sentenced to six
months in prison), McReynolds was left alone, reportedly because he was
too old to be drafted.
He went on to
coordinate antiwar rallies across the country and twice met with
dissident groups in Vietnam. According to “A Saving Remnant,” a
biography of McReynolds by Martin Duberman, he was visiting
Czechoslovakia when the Soviets invaded in 1968 to quash the Prague
Spring.
McReynolds — who
said he was a socialist, not a communist — was able to return to the
United States in time to run for a U.S. House seat that fall, on
Eldridge Cleaver's Peace and Freedom ticket. As in 1958, during his
first bid for Congress, he was crushed, receiving just 5% of the vote.
Undaunted, he
went on to run for president with the Socialist Party USA in 1980, on a
platform that called for nuclear disarmament, the breakup of large
corporations and sharp reductions in military spending.
“We have no
illusions that we will win the presidential election,” he said after a
rally with his running mate Diane Drufenbrock, a nun. “Our purpose is to
make possible a discussion of socialism and to raise issues on foreign
policy and unemployment.”
McReynolds
received fewer than 7,000 votes. He ran once more, in 2000, and four
years later mounted a Green Party campaign for the U.S. Senate seat held
by Democrat Charles E. Schumer of New York.
In part, he said,
his electoral defeats could be chalked up to an imaging problem in a
country where “socialism” has long been a dirty word.
“One of the
tragedies is that the things a Socialist candidate will say are things
that really could be said by a compassionate and moderately insightful
Republican,” he told the Progressive magazine in 2000. “If I say we
should have much greater mass transit in the major cities, that we
should be able to rebuild the railroad system so that Amtrak actually
connects all the small towns, that’s a reasonable thing. It’s not a
radical proposal.”
David Ernest
McReynolds was born in Los Angeles on Oct. 25, 1929, one day after the
Black Thursday stock market crash signaled the beginning of the
Depression.
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