The Pridi Banomyong Library Rare Book Room, Thammasat University, Tha Prachan campus, owns a number of rare and useful items of potential interest to students and researchers, especially those interested in history, literature, education, political science, Asian studies, and related subjects.

Among them is The Other Side, a 1966 book by Staughton Lynd about the Vietnam War.

The TU Library collection includes many  other books about the Vietnam War.

Staughton Lynd 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.

At university, Lynd became an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War.

His protest activities included speaking engagements, protest marches, and a controversial visit to Hanoi along with Herbert Aptheker and Tom Hayden on a fact-finding trip at the height of the war, which made him unwelcome to the Yale administration.

As the protest movement became increasingly violent, Lynd began to have misgivings.

As a self-described “social democratic pacifist” and “Marxist Existentialist Pacifist”, he became more interested in the possibilities of local organizing.

Lynd’s obituary in The New York Times described his political influences as “drawing equal inspiration from Marxism, American abolitionism and Quaker pacifism”.

In 1967, Lynd signed a letter declaring his intention to refuse to pay taxes in protest against the Vietnam War, and urging other people to also take this stand.

A memorial notice stated:

In a 2009 talk to teachers, called “What is to Be Done?” he states,

I lost my opportunity to make a living as a teacher when I tried to go all-out to stop the Vietnam war. I took account of all the rules and requirements. I went to Hanoi during Christmas vacation, and practically overturned the world Communist bureaucracy to be back in the States in time for my first scheduled class in the new year. It didn’t make any difference. The president of Yale said I had ‘given aid and comfort to the enemy,’ a phrase from the law of treason.

The book Lynd published with Tom Hayden, The Other Side (1966), made him a household name and ended his academic career. He published another book on the trip, Mission to Hanoi (1966) with the Communist Party historian Herbert Aptheker, thus placing himself beyond the pale.

When the Vietnam war came along, in addition to doing everything else I could think of to oppose it, I mailed my draft card back to my draft board. When you do these things, you don’t know at the time what’s going to happen. In that case, nothing happened. I was in my late 30s. They figured I wasn’t worth bothering with. But I can describe to you in minute detail the mailbox into which I dropped that letter, because I didn’t know at the time what the reaction would be.

For his anti-war leadership, the Radical Historians’ Caucus tried to get him elected president of the American Historical Association in 1969. As president, he would persuade the organization to go on record against the war.

In 1965, he wrote a letter to the editor of a periodical:

To the Editors:

In their statement on “The Vietnam Protest” (NYR, Nov. 25) Messrs. Howe, Harrington, Rustin, Coser and Kimble spoke of “a few professors” who shared with a larger number of students the tendency to “transform the protest into an apocalypse, a ‘final conflict,’ in which extreme gestures of opposition will bring forth punitive retaliation from the authorities.” I believe I am one of the professors they have in mind, and I wonder if I may have the opportunity to respond?

First let me say that I for one welcome a variety of forms of protest, including those recommended by your correspondents. One reason I believe that extreme forms of protest during the summer and fall have been helpful is that, far from leading to the disappearance of more moderate dissent, they have stimulated it. Witness the forthcoming SANE-sponsored march on Washington, the newly-formed committee for Reappraisal of Far Eastern Policy, and indeed, your correspondents’ statement. Many persons who last Spring were silent are now taking a more forthright position.

However, just as Mr. Howe and his colleagues see dangers in blocking troop trains or advocating resistance to the draft, so I see dangers in their proposals. They say that the protest movement should urge that the United States immediately stop bombing North Vietnam; that the United States declare its readiness to negotiate with the NLF; that the United States propose an immediate cease-fire as a preliminary to negotiations; that the United States “recognize the right of the South Vietnamese freely to determine their own future, whatever it may be, without interference from foreign troops, and possibly under United Nations supervision”; and finally, that Hanoi and the NLF accept the proposed cease-fire and declare their readiness to negotiate. […]

The authors of “The Vietnam Protest” deplore sectarianism yet they propose to ban from their coalition anyone who gives “explicit or covert political support to the Vietcong.” There follows the remarkable statement that this condition is “both a tactical necessity and a moral obligation.” May I inquire why it is immoral to desire a Vietcong victory? I had thought that, just as during the American Revolution there were many Englishmen who hoped for a victory by the American colonists, so it would be only natural to expect that some sincere opponents of the Vietnam War should actively sympathize with the National Liberation Front. It seems that in excluding such persons Messrs. Howe et al. have in fact implicitly assumed a “full-scale analysis of the Vietnam situation” which others are required to accept unarticulated and unexamined.

The authors of “The Vietnam Protest” are at pains to distinguish civil disobedience against the war in Vietnam from civil disobedience in the Southern civil rights movement. This section of their argument concludes with the assertion that Southern civil rights demonstrators, in contrast to Vietnam war protestors, “acted in behalf of the legal norms and moral values to which the nation as a whole had given its approval.” Isn’t it the point that the nation had “given its approval” to racial equality in just that insubstantial sense in which it might now be said to have “given its approval” to the doctrine of loving one’s enemies? In other words, isn’t the effort in the one case as in the other to make the nation live up to concepts which it had endorsed in the abstract but which it had failed to practice?

Finally, I passionately object to the deprecation of those who blocked troop trains in California as “the action by a small minority to revoke through its own decision the policy of a democratically elected government.” From where I sit, it was President Johnson and his Tuesday luncheon club—a very small minority indeed—who revoked through their own decision the policy to which they had pledged themselves in the 1964 election campaign (“so we are not going North”) and to implement which the voters had elected them. Earlier in their presentation, the authors of “The Vietnam Protest” insist that the escalation policy “has never been seriously debated in Congress or candidly presented to the country.” Nonetheless, it seems we are to regard it as “the policy of a democratically elected government.”

This, in the words of Kipling’s elephant child, is too much for me. I shall continue to say “No” as an individual in every way open to me, at the same time urging others to do likewise.

Staughton Lynd,

Department of History

Yale University

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)