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Epilogue A Reflection on the Committed Life Clinton E. Jencks was many things to many people. And even to himself, he could be a puzzle, a man who struggled with compulsive behaviors that dogged him throughout his life, including problematic interaction with women and sometimes disruptive family relationships. These character issues complicated his already complex personal life, at least until he sought advice that enabled him to move beyond the psychological wounds he had sustained as a young man. Not the least of his burdens was the reality that he was essentially a modest man who necessarily lived with the dramatic story of his own life in the movement for social justice. Given his consistent reticence about excessive focus on his personal achievements, it falls to others to document Jencks’s substantial record of unselfish service to the human community. Like most people, he had a dark private side, but it was his bright public image that marked his relations with a variety of communities, whether labor activists, Mexican American progressives, Hollywood cultural workers, hard-rock miners , or academics in the radical caucus. Close examination of Clint’s interaction with these varied groups yields a balanced and nuanced evaluation of an extraordinary life. It may reasonably be argued that, as noted by longtime colleague George Babilot, Jencks’s impact at San Diego State University and in the wider world of labor and academe is “being recognized more since his death than before it.” The huge turnout at a memorial service for him in San Diego on January 8, 2006, demonstrated the breadth of his reach and the deep respect for his life’s work found among disparate communities. Babilot observed that Jencks was an extremely sensitive man who kept many of his deepest concerns to himself in the knowledge that such thoughts might burden others. Perhaps, as Rolf Schulze speculated, his “personal history had made him cautious,” Lorence_Palomino.indd 193 2/19/13 12:12 PM a characteristic that reflected the trauma of his earlier experiences in the progressive labor movement. Yet the “young Turks” in the radical caucus perceived him as a pragmatic Marxist, always open, unafraid, and willing to align himself with the forces of change in the department and the discipline of economics. They also admired his active engagement in antiwar activities, feminist struggles, environmental issues, and other concrete demonstrations of support for the New Left agenda. At bottom, they, like him, were dedicated radicals who were willing to put their names and bodies on the line on behalf of social change.1 Jencks’s story of personal commitment began with the political engagements of his youth, including volunteer activities that brought him face-toface with the harsh demands made by capitalism on the worker who created wealth. Even more significant for the future were his activities as an ambitious University of Colorado student who was willing to challenge the authority of the university administration and the business interests who profited from the student presence in a segregated community. Before long, Clint sought a political outlet for the expression of his social beliefs, and it was this search that brought him to the campus student movement and the radicals who led it. After a careful exploration of the options before him, he made a conscious decision to identify with the Young Communist League and the American Student Union, both organizations that he saw as activist groups willing to translate their beliefs into social action. Emerging quickly as a natural leader, Clint soon became a spokesperson and leader for Communist and Socialist students at the university, as well as for the liberals who cooperated in the Popular Front alliance. Jencks’s youthful decision for progressivism may be viewed as one of the most important choices made by a young man who was to become an active leftist for the remainder of his political life. Reviewing his life in a moment of candid self-analysis, Jencks asserted that he had “always believed . . . that [he had] the responsibility, opportunity, and obligation to be guided in [his] daily life by the Golden Rule,” an ameliorating force that meant he was uncomfortable with “dictatorship of whatever form.” Rather, he maintained, he had always embraced “political, economic, and social forms . . . that [sought] to empower and mutually benefit all, including especially ‘the least of these, my brethren.’” Since Karl Marx had not supplied a definitive blueprint for the dynamic Socialist economy still in formation, Jencks assumed that it was “up to me, to us...

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