Side by Side: Alice and Staughton Lynd, the Ohio Years by Mark W. Weber and Stephen H. Paschen (review)

In their new book, Side by Side: Alice and Staughton Lynd, the Ohio Years, Mark W. Weber and Stephen H. Paschen attempt to provide a sketch of the lives of social activists Staughton and Alice Lynd as viewed through their practice of “accompaniment” from 1976 to 2011. The accompaniment philosophy is an alternative to traditional organizing techniques, which generally are founded upon the practice of entering a community in need, organizing that community, and then leaving to organize another community. Traditional organizing methods are often based on a relationship of inequality between the ideological organizer and the community members being organized. Accompaniment, as practiced by the Lynds, is a different approach to community organizing. Rather than entering a community and organizing on a temporary basis, the philosophy of accompaniment stresses that the organizer makes the community his or her home. In the case of the Lynds, they offered their professional skills as practicing lawyers, former counselors, and historians to Youngstown area steelworkers and retirees as well as to prisoners incarcerated in the Ohio penitentiary system.

The book begins with an analysis of the intellectual and experiential origins of Staughton and Alice Lynd’s accompaniment philosophy. Both came from households with activist parents, obtained educations from prestigious universities, and from an early age held spirited beliefs about the necessity of building strong communities that fostered solidarity and democracy. From the 1950s to the mid-1970s the Lynds lived in the Macedonia Cooperative Community located in Clarksville, Georgia, became involved in the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements, counseled draftees during the Vietnam War, and practiced oral history to capture the voice of rank-and-file workers in the Chicago area throughout the early 1970s.

The rest of the book analyzes how the Lynds implemented and refined their philosophy of accompaniment after arriving in Youngstown, Ohio, in 1976. The authors recount the Lynds’s decision to become lawyers and accompany steelworkers in their fight to purchase closed steel mills and save their pension and healthcare benefits. The Lynds also worked with Ohio prisoners to fight for prison reform, especially Ohio’s implementation of solitary confinement. Side by Side fills a gap in the historical analysis of Staughton and Alice Lynd’s life and work in Ohio.

This work has strengths and weaknesses. It excels in its effort to describe and define the philosophy of accompaniment. In the first five chapters Weber and Paschen clearly demonstrate how the Lynds’s activism from the 1950s to the mid-1970s influenced and refined their philosophy of accompaniment. The authors also clearly define Staughton and Alice’s philosophy of “solidarity unionism,” a union alternative to the bureaucratic, often antidemocratic, and contractual “business unionism” of the post–World War II era. In terms of weaknesses, the book fails to ultimately connect, analyze, and describe in-depth the Lynds’s practice of accompaniment. Instead, the chapters that focus on the Ohio years often read like a synopsis of key events that the Lynds took part in from 1976 to 2011. Interested readers will want more than a catalog of activities. How did they understand and approach each event in which they accompanied communities or organizations in social struggles? In what ways did they apply their expertise to help the movement? What in the Lynds’s estimation was successful and what could have been different? How might future generations of activists learn from the Lynds’s experiences, successes, and failures? The authors touch on these questions, but a deeper analysis of the practice of accompaniment does not fully materialize on the page. Furthermore, the book has many redundancies. For example, Staughton Lynd’s firing from a Youngstown union law firm in the late 1970s is repeated in numerous chapters.

Despite these deficiencies, the book gives the reader an understanding of many of the issues, events, and organizations that the Lynds were involved with from 1976 to...