1) WHY: Why Organize?
“Three guidelines that drive organizing: Organize to improve people’s real conditions. Organize to give people a sense of their own strength. Organize to change power relationships.” – Organizer’s Notebook on Public Utilities and Energy, 1976
An Irish Catholic Boy sees the world and can’t unsee it.
After leaving the seminary and going to Seattle University, Dan joined the Peace Corps. It could have easily gone the other way, as he loved the discipline of the ROTC. He marched every morning and carried the flag to hell and back, including to and from the Apple Blossom Festival. When the ROTC sergeant received orders to go to Vietnam, he brought a paper mache man to exercises that morning. The sergeant crashed through the man with a bayonet fixed to his rifle. Then he stood in front of each cadet and screamed “The job of the soldier is to kill! kill! kill!” Dan walked out that day – and later signed up for the Peace Corps.
Dan’s stories about living in Turkey for two years are about the successes and failures of community development schemes, backgammon tournaments, drinking coffee with old men, and riding a motorcycle through the countryside. He glows when he talks about this experience. It served as a pivotal learning time about global realities beyond his home state that he could never ignore. His stories are beautiful, and the letters he wrote to his family are archived at American University. “You know, Mom, I have a great opportunity to become something other than the normal, provincial American (if one exists). Language teachers often say that you begin to learn English while studying another language. I hope to learn about the U.S. by absorbing some of the foreign culture,” (1967).
He also learned about the realities of U.S. imperialism. He realized at the end of his stay in Turkey what he was supposed to be doing there: community development meant moving people out of subsistence farming into a wage economy, into a market economy. And he learned that the war in Vietnam was not just a policy but a fundamental function of the violence of the United States.
When he came home, he went to New York University on an NDEA Title IV Fellowship, “good for three years if I don’t flunk out.” He studied International and Comparative Public Administration at the Graduate School of Public Administration. “I don’t know exactly where this will take me but I’ll have to really do some striving to obtain a Doctorate. I hope they know who they gave the money to. Ha!”
Dan refused induction and then started organizing in the neighborhoods of Brooklyn. When I asked why he started organizing, he said “I found out where I was.” He saw parts of New York City where people were poorer than the Turks. “I asked myself, this is the richest country in the world, what is this about?”
It’s fun to picture a tall lanky long-haired twenty-something Dan dressed in his fatigue jacket taking over buildings, walking in and out of classes with these professional types, and eating lunch while he sat in on UN Security Council deliberations.
He took over Courant Hall with the anarchists and met Lin Dodge, who he later wrote about in the anarchism class we taught together in 2001. There was a debate about whether or not to blow up the computer lab if the Feds “didn’t meet their demands to end the war by Wednesday,” and Lin argued that they should not blow up the lab. He was the only one who knew what computers were and how to use them. Lin was a WWII resister and spent time in prison with Elijah Muhammad, lined up with the Black prisoners, and worked for the Quakers. He taught Dan how to use the assets of existing institutions, with the result that Dan printed all his flyers on the Quakers’ printing press.
Lin’s lover was Herman Berkman, a professor who sat on Dan’s dissertation committee. Herman told Dan “to read the 100 books you’re supposed to read,” brought a stogie to the defense presentation, and told Dan he was a teacher and gave him a stack of index cards to apply for jobs. (I looked up Herman and Lin. They were together for over 68 years, “close friends” the obituary read, both activists and educators their whole lives.)
Dan got fired from his first teaching gig for asking the students what they wanted to learn and then co-creating the curriculum. The Quakers hired him and he started organizing tenants and stumbled into the Methodist Hospital’s plans to expand and evict hundreds of residents from an apartment building. He used the Strategy Game to organize tenants and figure out how to cut federal funding, which enabled them to get pretty close to bankrupting the place. He learned a huge organizing lesson from the Quakers – “Is the action you want to take a movement building action? Does it bring people in?” A question I have heard him use over and over again to test an action.
Dan and the tenants lost the fight. “They tore down the apartment building. That tore me down.” He found out how important it is to know “Who owns the block?” With this loss and the shooting of students who looked like him at Kent State, “I decided I would never act in territory I didn’t know.”
Dan’s commitment to remembering the global context while working to understand the depth of local detail at the neighborhood level is a major characteristic of his work.
During his speech to become the party co-chair at the height of the Citizens Party, he said about himself, “I want to tell you who I am and what we’re going to do together: I spent four years in a Roman Catholic seminary and I learned what oppression was. I spent the next 4 years studying under the Jesuits and I learned what sophistry was. I spent the next 2 years in the Turkish Peace Corps and I learned what imperialism was. The rest of my life I’ve been living under major corporations and I’m goddamn tired of it!” . .
Dan carried the lessons from every aspect of his life in a unique way. Told in stories and also in succinct bullet point talks, his orientation to the world is a mix of being exactly who he has always been and the result of the incredible experiences that shaped him. He could not go back to seeing the world the way he was taught to see it, and he could not stop organizing to shape the world.
He’d been waiting his whole life to start a political party. And he did.
Return to Framework for Organizing
Continue to WHAT: What kind of organization is needed?
