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

This is a multifaceted work of history, biography and politics written by two scholars—Mark Weber, a retired dean of libraries at Kent State University and Stephen Paschen, a retired archivist at Kent State University Libraries—who have long admired the activism of Alice and Staughton Lynd. Their book is an engaging complement to Carl Mirra's 2010 study, The Admirable Radical: Staughton Lynd and Cold War Dissent, 1945–1970, and picks up chronologically where Mirra's book ended, with the conclusion of the 1960s and the realization that Staughton, denied tenure at Yale and black-listed from a number of Chicago universities for his criticism of American foreign policy in Vietnam, would never find another teaching position in the academy. Looking at the fullness of the Lynds's life together, one might say that they were better off outside the Ivory Tower. As post 1960s colleges and universities became more conservative, the Lynds never backed away from their activism—for the rights of workers, prisoners, and the elderly. They remain today symbols of social justice and worthy of biographical treatment.

In many respects, this is a book that traces the human impact of deindustrialization in Ohio's Mahoning Valley. After leaving Chicago in 1976, Alice and Staughton moved to Youngstown, Ohio to practice labor law. By this time the sixties had definitively ended. SDS and SNCC were gone, the Vietnam War was over and the Lynds found themselves at a crossroads. Staughton had taken a law degree at the University of Chicago in 1973 and Alice enrolled in a paralegal program at Roosevelt University in 1974. Together they sought to continue their engagement in participatory democracy and nonviolence through the legal profession. But this meant more than defending trade unions. In Chicago they had both grown skeptical of large union bureaucracies, questioning their interest in affecting meaningful and positive change for the rights of their members. This kind "business unionism," they insisted, promoted hierarchical top-down relationships that distanced powerful organizations from those they ostensibly served.

In Youngstown, a strong union tradition was being overturned by the neoliberalism of the 1980s. Faced, as he thought, with a decision to either represent the unions or represent the workers, Staughton left his job at a Youngstown law firm in 1978 and he and Alice (having taken a law degree at the University of Pittsburg) began working at the Northeast Ohio Legal Services until they retired in the 1990s. Weber and Paschen offer within this narrative a useful history of Youngstown's economic struggles, legal fights over the same, and the impact of plant closings on workers that demonstrate their fluency with the recent history of the region—a history that, as residents and academics at neighboring Kent State University, they are in an ideal position to relate.

One of the Lynds' major campaigns was over the question of community rights to shuttered industrial property. They lobbied, petitioned, organized, and occupied buildings in an effort to produce a legal decision that would recognize worker owned mills. Unsurprisingly the American property rights tradition proved too strong, and the Lynds lost this legal fight. It demonstrated, however, the eagerness of workers in the region to challenge corporate power and their willingness to remain committed to another hallowed American tradition—grassroots social democracy. For the Lynds the fight for community rights continued and in more recent years they became involved in prison reform and the Occupy Movement. More broadly, their opposition to the Gulf Wars, US foreign policy in Central America, and Israeli occupation of the West Bank and ongoing settlement building has often taken their reform efforts out of the Ohio context.

Among the real virtues of this book are the many interviews that flesh out the Lynds' lives and work in Ohio. Alice and Staughton participated in these discussions but so also did, to name but...