March 8, 2023 at 5:30 Eastern, 4:30 Central time:  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/my-country-is-the-world-tickets-569789424507
 A book called My Country is the World:  Staughton Lynd’s Writings, Speeches, and Statements against the Vietnam War edited by Luke Stewart, is about to be released by Haymarket Books:  See https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1956-my-country-is-the-world?mc_cid=28ef3d72c2&mc_eid=f491d9cdea

You can watch the event while it is being broadcast live; alternatively, it will become available as a recording immediately afterwards.  Please note that there is no need to make a financial contribution in order to watch the program.

Staughton and I knew that Staughton could not get a full-time job as a history professor after he made a trip to Hanoi, December-January 1965-66, as the editor says (page 4) “to explore possibilities and clarify the peace terms of the other side.”  But what we did not know until we read Luke Stewart’s book and the fruit of his exhaustive research was the role of the FBI, CIA, and other governmental agencies to make sure that Staughton was blacklisted.  This is from page 4 of the Introduction by Luke Stewart:

It was Lynd’s trip to North Vietnam and his address to a gathering of North Vietnamese intellectuals wherein he argued that the war was “immoral, illegal, and antidemocratic,” which eventually got him blocked from tenure at Yale and blacklisted from the university altogether. Yale’s president, Kingman Brewster, argued that such comments gave “aid and comfort” to the enemy, words taken from the law against treason. For all these reasons, the Central Intelligence Agency, even though it was constitutionality barred from domestic intelligence gathering, identified Lynd throughout this period as “the notorious ‘national peace leader,’” whose “appeal among the new left is enormous, and his views and attitudes can be taken as indicative of the new left,” and who “has not missed a major cause of the Left for years.” Lynd would also be added to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Security Index on 27 August 1965 as someone whose “background is potentially dangerous; or has been identified as member or participant in communist movement; or has been under active investigation as member of other group or organization inimical to U.S.” Moreover, he was singled out as a “subversive” who offers “expression of strong or violent anti-U.S. sentiment.” The Security Index allowed the FBI to arrest and indefinitely detain Lynd and others on the list in the event of a national emergency. The Senate Committee on the Judiciary, with the aid of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, singled out Lynd as one of the intellectual leaders of the movement in a 236-page report released in October 1965 documenting communist subversion via the antiwar movement.

I am enormously impressed by the both the depth and breadth of Luke Stewart’s scholarship as revealed in the settings within which the documents appear, and within that framework one hears Staughton in his own voice.

As Staughton Lynd’s speeches, writings, statements and interviews demonstrate, there were coherent and persuasive arguments against the war in Vietnam based on U.S. and international law, precedents from American history, and moral and ethical considerations based on conscientious objection to war and an internationalism embraced by American radicals which said: “My country is the world, my countrymen are all mankind.”

Alice Lynd