Gay socialist led protests against the Vietnam war and twice ran for president
David McReynolds Peace activist b October 25, 1929 d August 17, 2018
David McReynolds, who has died aged 88, was for more than three decades one of the most outspoken socialists and pacifists in the United States, a leftist organiser 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 setting 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 openly gay candidates to run for Congress and president and, though 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 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 speaking skills with the Travelling 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 he described as a mentor) and pacifist A J Muste (for whom he worked as a top lieutenant).
He was also a member of the Bromeliad Society, an international botanical group, and filled his East Village apartment in New York with tropical plants and hundreds of bottles of perfume, which he created himself and arranged on floor-to-ceiling shelves.
Active in the anti-Korean War and civil rights movements, McReynolds joined the War Resisters League in 1960 and was soon named field secretary. He became a behindthe-scenes architect of the anti-Vietnam war movement, known for maintaining unity in a coalition that included members of the political Left and Right.
A 1982 nuclear disarmament rally drew, by some estimates, one 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,’ ’’ Cronin said.
Among the league’s most controversial
‘‘To feel that you were doing something, or that you shortened the war by one day, or saved one life on either side. To some extent, we did that.’’
actions was the burning of draft cards. McReynolds appeared on a wooden platform in Manhattan’s Union Square to burn his card on November 6, 1965, amid counterprotests from a group chanting ‘‘Drop dead, red.’’
He went on to coordinate anti-war rallies across the country and twice met with dissident groups in Vietnam. According to A Saving Remnant, a biography 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, returned to the US to run for a House of Representatives seat later that year. As in 1958, during his first bid for Congress, he was crushed, receiving 5 per cent 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. ‘‘Our purpose is to make possible a discussion of socialism and to raise issues on foreign policy and unemployment.’’
McReynolds received fewer than 7000 votes. He ran once more, in 2000, and four years later mounted a Green Party campaign for the US Senate.
David Ernest McReynolds was born in Los Angeles one day after the stockmarket crash that signalled the start of the Depression.
He came out publicly in 1969, but never identified as a gay rights advocate, and when running for president decided his identity as a socialist pacifist was ‘‘complex enough’’.
In 2000, he said he feared the Vietnam war and its accompanying protests had ‘‘sunk into a memory hole’’, and recalled a harrowing time for him as well as the country. He had turned from teetotalism to alcoholism, he said, but stopped drinking around the time the war ended. ‘‘From one point of view, it was a wonderful time – to feel that you were doing something, or that you shortened the war by one day, or saved one life on either side. To some extent, we did that.’’
He is survived by a brother and sister. –