Gay socialist pacifist who twice ran for president

For more than three decades, David McReynolds 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 openly gay candidates to run for Congress and president, and 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.

Mr. McReynolds, who died Friday at age 88 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. 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.

Active in the anti-Korean War and civil rights movements, Mr. 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, Mr. Cronin said, known for maintaining unity in a coalition that had members of the political left and right.

Among the league’s most controversial actions was the burning of draft cards. Mr. McReynolds made national headlines when he appeared in Manhattan’s Union Square to burn his card on Nov. 6, 1965, amid counterprotests chanting “Drop dead, red.”

Mr. McReynolds, who said he was a socialist, not a communist, ran for a U.S. House seat in 1968. As in 1958, during his first bid for Congress, he was crushed.

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.

Mr. 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 Schumer. 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.