Daniel Burke Leahy
October 6, 1943 – December 10, 2022
“If you don’t tell your own story, someone else will tell it for you.”
Daniel Burke Leahy died at home in Olympia, Washington on December 10, 2022. He led a life of radical political engagement, summoning his students, neighbors, workers and friends to understand and challenge the political and economic forces that affect our lives.
He was the son of Margaret Burke and Edwin Leahy, whose families had settled in Douglas County, WA in the early 1900s. Dan’s mother raised eight of her siblings in Waterville, Washington before marrying the eldest boy from the Leahy clan and moving to Seattle in 1940. Dan grew up in a Catholic community on Queen Anne Hill and attended St. Edward Seminary. He graduated from Seattle University in 1965 with a BA in Economics and Philosophy.
Dan operated from place in his learning, teaching and organizing. He was, for all of his life, “Dan Leahy from Leahy, Washington.” The projects he initiated, the organizations he built and the friends he made emerged from his encounters with the people and history of the places he lived in and traveled to throughout his life.
Dan’s travels began with two years in Turkey as a Peace Corps volunteer in the village of Comakli in Antalya Province. That stint in Turkey changed him in important ways. He kept in touch with Ibrahim Dokutan, his supervisor and an early mentor, during several returns to the country where he took pleasure in using the “village Turkish” he had learned to speak. Years later he learned that a Turkish professor, Zafer Parlak, was writing about the Peace Corps in Turkey. He contacted remaining Turkey volunteers to contribute to the book, and became firm friends with Zafer, welcomed into his family in Izmir.
Dan returned to the U.S. in 1967 and entered NYU graduate school of Public Administration on an NDEA fellowship. Confronted directly by the war in Vietnam he, like many others, dug into the realities of U.S. domestic and foreign policy, and refused induction. After leaving NYU with a Master’s in Public Administration, he became a community organizer for the Quakers. In 1973 he was appointed Executive Director of the Human Affairs Program at Cornell, integrating students into projects that served rural communities. Cornell terminated the program when Dan and his staff refused to end support for labor unions and community groups supporting public power campaigns. Dan responded by buying an Alfa-Romeo and driving it on back-roads across the country and home to Washington.
For the next five years, Dan pursued his conviction that working people needed structures — including a new political party — to collectively wield power for economic and social justice. In 1979, he became National Secretary of the Citizens Party, organizing dozens of state chapters and a founding convention in Cleveland, OH. In 1980, he formed Progress Under Democracy a political action committee focused on public utility districts (PUDs) as structures for democratic control of resources. In 1982-84, candidates supported by Progress Under Democracy won seats on the majority of the state’s PUDs and ended support for construction of 5 nuclear power plants in Washington. More recently, he advised organizers developing place-based Peoples’ Movement Assemblies and grass-roots decision making structures.
In 1984, Dan began a 25-year career as a faculty member at The Evergreen State College. He thrived in a school that saw the faculty’s role as “organizing learning opportunities” for students. At Evergreen, Dan taught in the Masters in Public Administration program and founded the state’s only Labor Education and Research center. As Executive Director of the Labor Center from 1987 until 1995, Dan and his staff designed spaces for rank-and-file workers to share experiences and learn from each other. The Summer School for Trade Union Women, the New School for Union Organizers and the African American Leadership Conference were among many conferences, workshops, oral history projects, popular education forums and strategy games that educated and trained new leaders for the labor movement in Washington state.
In TESC’s undergraduate program on Political Economy and Social Movements, Dan joined with other faculty to offer classes that encouraged students to analyze significant events — in class and — always — on the move. A class in 1999 focused on the main forces intending to protest the World Trade Organization’s Seattle Ministerial meeting. Students went to New Orleans to investigate Hurricane Katrina, and to Mexico on trips that took them to key sites in that country’s revolution. One such trip in 2002 led to his expulsion from Mexico when Dan’s students marched as The Heroico Battalion of San Patricio in Mexico’s May Day parade in solidarity with Atenco farmers — who were refusing to allow the state to take their land for an airport.
In 1995, Dan took his family to Zacatecas, Mexico for a sabbatical. There he studied Mexican history and organized the Trinational Coalition for the Defense of Public Education to connect education union leaders from the three countries collaborating on resistance to NAFTA. On leave from Evergreen in 2003-04, he took a job as Director of the Alliance for Sustainable Jobs and the Environment and promptly organized a cross-country bus trip educating local communities about the antidemocratic Free Trade Agreement of the Americas. He notoriously offered a class called “Marching” at Evergreen. It began with a visit from a Ft. Lewis drill sergeant and culminated with student research projects on historical marches from the Bonus March to the March on Washington.
Dan retired from Evergreen in 2009 and continued to organize, teach and travel for the next 14 years. He knew places because he traveled mostly on the ground, walking, taking buses and trains to destinations in the U.S. and abroad.
In 2008 he plotted a trip on public transit from Olympia to Santa Monica. In 2011 he was hired as an organizer with Stand Up Wisconsin where he led workshops and walked precincts with union members hoping to recall the state’s right-wing governor. In 2012 he took a favorite trip — three weeks on the Mongolian steppes. In 2014 he followed the proposed route of oil trains visiting mayors in small towns along I-5. From that came the Solidarity Roundtable on Oil (SRO), featuring statewide discussions hosted by the WA State Council on Firefighters. In 2015-16 and again in 2018 he traveled to Greece to volunteer with locals in refugee camps in Lesvos and Salonika.
Dan was a committed participant in the life of his westside Olympia neighborhood. He mapped his neighborhood and all its human potential by walking around. When in 2010, the City of Olympia approved a 7-11 on a contested intersection in the heart of the Westside, Dan led a successful 2-year effort that stopped the development and opened the way for a community park. He continued to track elitist policies in Olympia’s City government, among other things investigating and publicizing the City’s grant of property tax subsidies for private developers to build “market rate” apartments. In 2021 he discovered that the City was seeking a developer for housing on a city-owned site. He enlisted the community in a successful effort in support of the sole nonprofit applicant, holding the city to its promise of affordable housing and home ownership for working families.
Dan had a talent for making friends, turning them into collaborators and keeping in touch with them. His energy was contagious. His mailing lists were legendary. He had close friends in Iceland, France, Greece, Turkey, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, Canada and all over the U.S.
Friendship was part of his organizing strategy and he made sure that his political organizing included a large measure of fun. His lighthearted side was ever-present. As part of fundraising for a storm-damaged Mexican town, he drew friends and students into the “Battalion of San Patricio,” complete with elaborate credentials, insignia and a letter of support from Mary Robinson, President of Ireland at the time.
Dan met his wife Bethany Weidner in Washington DC and the two of them decided to marry in an abandoned church in Leahy, WA. They had two sons, JD Ross and Charles (Chad) and later adopted Rachel (Hicks) Georgio, a student of Dan’s. Dan’s connection to Leahy Country underlay his decision to buy a plot in Mold Cemetery, in the wheat fields of Eastern Washington. He was buried there on December 16 in a pine casket built by his sons, with a bottle of Jameson’s to keep him warm.
He is survived by his wife and children, their spouses and the grandchildren (Emily Fenton and Inian; Rachel Wilson and Juno; Simon Georgiou and Elsa); by his sister Kathleen Leahy (Waymon Whiting), dozens of Burke and Leahy cousins; students and colleagues who remained close to him through the years; and scores of friends and neighbors.
After Dan was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in February of 2022, dozens of his students and friends traveled to Olympia to tell Dan about their lives and the role he played in who they had become. Two of them created a website at DanLeahy.org where you can find documents about his work as an organizer, portions of an autobiography and archives.
