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

The lives of a powerhouse couple like Alice and Staughton Lynd, engaged in reform work for more than five decades, warrant much attention, and they have received much. Mark Weber and Stephen Paschen’s slim volume, Side by Side: Alice and Staughton Lynd, the Ohio Years, continues a story Carl Mirra began in his book, The Admirable Radical: Staughton Lynd and Cold War Dissent, 1945–1970 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2010), and complements the Lynds’ own autobiography. Now in their eighties, the Lynds remain extremely vigorous, championing efforts to strengthen communities both near them and far away. Married since 1951, they have raised three children, practiced law together, and engaged in a wide variety of social justice movements, including civil rights, draft resistance, labor organizing, and prison reform. They have worked tirelessly in the United States and even in Central America and the Middle East. Weber and Paschen focus on the Lynds’ work since 1976, when they began a new life in Youngstown, Ohio. They emphasize that their study differs from Mirra’s not only in timeframe covered but because theirs is a dual biography, covering Alice’s work as well as Staughton’s. While Alice’s participation has often occurred behind the scenes, the authors emphasize that the couple has lived and worked continuously side by side.

The title of the book refers to the Lynds’ long marriage and overlapping careers and, secondarily and more importantly, references their unique approach to organizing. Rather than a “comprehensive scholarly biography,” the authors have chosen to tell the Lynds’ story “through the lens of accompaniment” (xxi). The Lynds embraced the New Left early in their careers, but by the late 1960s, they felt jolted by shifts in the civil rights movement. They felt alienated by a growing emphasis on violence and the move away from participatory democracy. Influenced by Latin American priest Oscar Romero, they developed what the authors perceive as “a much more sober and perhaps mature form of activism” (9). Accompaniment differs in critical ways from traditional social organizing; as opposed to methods of reform that typically employ top-down structures, accompaniment encourages horizontal relationships. Organizers seek to be led by participants whom they view as experts in their own lives. Instead of leaning on ideology and rhetoric, the organizer offers those he or she seeks to organize a specific set of useful skills—in the case of the Lynds, their legal expertise. The organizer pledges long-term support, actually living in the community and relating in a very practical way to his or her neighbors.

The Lynds’ move to Youngstown, according to Weber and Paschen, allowed them to live out their new theory of accompaniment. Their arrival in Youngstown coincided with its decline as a steel town. Staughton dedicated himself to saving steel jobs, in the process losing confidence in traditional international unionism and moving toward solidarity unionism and an emphasis on worker ownership. Following the couple’s retirement from paid employment in 1996, they have continued to promote solidarity unionism. As well, they have worked on behalf of Palestinian Arabs in their struggle against Israeli occupation of the West Bank, and, most recently, they have backed the Occupy Youngstown movement. The authors believe, however, the Lynds’ work on behalf of five Lucasville prison inmates best represents their ideas of accompaniment. As they have worked to overturn the convictions of several men believed to have led a 1993 prison uprising and to generally improve prison conditions, the Lynds have developed close relationships with the inmates, Alice even risking jail time herself.

This book will appeal to those interested in the intellectual underpinnings of the New Left and the ways it has evolved in the last fifty years. Unfortunately, the story often veers away from the Lynds as the authors launch into “brief detour[s],” such as the history of...