GLR May June

ESSAY

Doug Ireland’s Passion and Praxis M ARTIN D UBERMAN

Following Goldwater’s defeat in 1964, Doug redirected much of his energy to working for SNCC (the Student Non- violent Coordinating Committee), once getting arrested at a SNCC-sponsored mass civil disobedience action to desegregate an amusement park in Maryland. After SNCC turned towards “Black Power” and urged its white members to organize their own communities against segregation, Doug shifted more of his energy to mobilizing against the escalating war in Vietnam. Throughout the ’60s, he worked as well with various labor groups (the UAW and the New Jersey Industrial Union Coun- cil) and on several national Democratic campaigns—including Eugene McCarthy’s anti-war bid for the presidency in 1968. That led directly to stints as the successful campaign manager for the antiwar Congressional candidacies of Allard Lowenstein and, in 1970, Bella Abzug. By then he’d reached the hoary age of 24, had come out as a gay man, and had developed a reputa- tion as a skillful political operative with a developing network of contacts. Doug’s relationship with Bella Abzug is worth lingering over for its insight into his candor and unimpeachable integrity. He

What follows is the introduction to a forthcoming collection of Doug Ireland’s essays, edited by the author of this piece, titled The Emperor Has No Clothes: Doug Ireland’s Radical Voice (Boerum Hill). The book is available at www.Amazon.com. W HO WAS D OUG I RELAND , and why is he held in esteemed memory? He grew up with few advantages, had few breaks in life. A large, ungainly child, his impov- erished parents were pious followers of Christian Science and refused to pro- vide their son with the usual inoculations. At age ten, Doug be- came one of the last children to contract polio—so severely that he had to have an emergency tracheotomy and remained con- fined to an iron lung for a full year; for the rest of his life he suffered from muscular degeneration and bouts of respiratory illness. As the novelist Edmund White has suggested (in City Boy ), it was “perhaps not coincidentally [that] Doug became a militant atheist.” He also became an omnivorous reader. Never encouraged to with advanced degrees. He believed the past held lessons for the present and that we were obligated to apply them in active en- gagement with the unjust world around us. Nothing angered Doug more than complacency in the face of deprivation. At an early age, he enrolled ardently in the struggle against inequality. While still a teenager, Doug became a New Leftist; by 1963, straight out of high school, he devoted himself both to the black struggle and to Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the radical student organization. Robb Burlage, one of the leading figures in SDS (and himself the son of working- class parents), picked up on Doug’s passionate intelligence and deep aversion to hypocrisy, became a kind of mentor to him, and enlisted him in the electoral-politics wing of SDS, which was then focused on defeating the presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater. Others soon picked up on the young fire- brand’s acuity and at age seventeen Doug was elected to the SDS National Council. Martin Duberman's latest book is Hold Tight Gently: Michael Callen, Essex Hemphill, and the Battlefield of AIDS (New Press), a Finalist this year for both the Lambda and Randy Shilts Awards. go to college (though in 1965 he took a few courses at the left-leaning Goddard College in Vermont, including a class called “Con- temporary Radical Thought”), he read his way through books with the kind of zeal that most boys of his generation invested in base- ball cards. In particular, he devoured works of history and as an autodidact became more learned—but much less dutiful—than many

adored Bella for her pragmatic radicalism, her tireless crusades for issues she cared about, and a directness matching his own. He was thrilled when she became the first major political figure to embrace gay rights and to campaign actively for gay votes. Throughout the ’50s, as Doug put it, Bella had “fought the McCarthyites toe to toe in that dark hour when the establishment liberals sponsored

He believed the past held lessons for the present and that we were obliged to apply them in active engagement with the unjust world around us.

their own book burnings and witch hunts, saving themselves from the reactionaries by capitulating to them.” When the two of them went together to an emotional Carnegie Hall tribute to an absent, ailing Paul Robeson on the occasion of his 75th birth- day, they had to share a box of Kleenex. Bella wasn’t part of what Doug disparagingly called “the satisfied middle class.” She was, as Doug put it, “too crudely full of life, too much the peas- ant for our homogenized modernity; in the rawness of her pas- sions lies a reminder of where we came from.”* Bella’s character, as Doug once shrewdly put it, had been “shaped in a different time. ... [She was] a product of the im- migrant-bred New York Jewish Left, the daughter of refugees from Russian ghetto life.” He was well aware that Bella’s abra- sive personality and her “capacious ego” could make her diffi- cult to deal with (after one argument they stopped speaking for months). When she ran for mayor of New York City in 1977, Doug didn’t hesitate to criticize her in New York magazine for

* Quotations from: “Democratic Dogfight,” New York , Sept. 5, 1977; “Trying to Think,” Soho Weekly News , Jan. 26, 1978; and “The Meaning of Bella’s Loss,” Soho Weekly News , Feb. 23, 1978.

May–June 2015

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