Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Born August 22, 1915 in Wakefield, Massachusetts, David Dellinger was the son of a wealthy lawyer from a prominent Republican family. Dellinger spent his entire life involved in non-violent action against war and oppression. After graduating from Yale with a degree in economics in 1936, he walked away from his comfortable background and spent a summer living with hoboes during the Great Depression. The following year Dellinger won a fellowship to Oxford University, and he spent some time in Germany experiencing Nazism first-hand. During the Spanish Civil War he traveled to Spain and volunteered as an ambulance driver. His experiences there had convinced him that “whoever won the armed struggle, it would not be the people.” When he returned to America in 1940, Dellinger refused conscription into the military and was sentenced to serve a year in federal prison. As an inmate he refused to recognize segregated seating arrangements, which resulted in his serving out his sentence in solitary confinement. When the United States officially entered World War II in December 1941, Dellinger again refused to join the military, and spent another two years in prison. After his release from prison and at the end of the war, Dellinger co-founded the left-wing radical magazine Direct Action with A. J. Muste and Dorothy Day. Direct Action was largely critical of the US government's involvement ... log in or subscribe to read full text