Radical profile- Carl Oglesby
Todays feature is of a radical writer and activist.
Carl Oglesby, in the early 60s and before, qualified himself as a ‘liberal’ and was quite proud of the fact. He worked as a writer for a military contractor, had a family and lived quite a typical middle class life.
Carl came to the attention of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a hyper democratic organization, after he wrote an article on US foreign policy for the campus newspaper. He got talking with members of the group, joined and became its president within a year. SDS organized opposition to the Vietnam war and set specific goals for their organization that included the Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP) which targeted poor urban areas. The idea was to make the communities more self reliant and to radicalize the population by showing people that they could create democracy for themselves.
As well as being president of SDS, Carl wrote and campaigned extensively on the assassination of President Kennedy, founding the Assassination Information Bureau. Oglesby’s most important book was ‘The Yankee and Cowboy War’, a dissection of power in the United States and a study of vying groupings within the political class.
An excerpt from Oglesby’s speech ‘Let us shape the future’
Not long ago I considered myself a liberal and if, someone had asked me what I meant by that, I’d perhaps have quoted Thomas Jefferson or Thomas Paine, who first made plain our nation’s unprovisional commitment to human rights. But what do you think would happen if these two heroes could sit down now for a chat with President Johnson and McGeorge Bundy?
They would surely talk of the Vietnam war. Our dead revolutionaries would soon wonder why their country was fighting against what appeared to be a revolution. The living liberals would hotly deny that it is one: there are troops coming in from outside, the rebels get arms from other countries, most of the people are not on their side, and they practice terror against their own. Therefore: not a revolution.
What would our dead revolutionaries answer? They might say: “What fools and bandits, sirs, you make then of us. Outside help? Do you remember Lafayette? Or the three thousand British freighters the French navy sunk for our side? Or the arms and men, we got from France and Spain? And what’s this about terror? Did you never hear what we did to our own Loyalists? Or about the thousands of rich American Tories who fled for their lives to Canada? And as for popular support, do you not know that we had less than one-third of our people with us? That, in fact, the colony of New York recruited more troops for the British than for the revolution? Should we give it all back?”
Revolutions do not take place in velvet boxes. They never have. It is only the poets who make them lovely. What the National Liberation Front is fighting in Vietnam is a complex and vicious war. This war is also a revolution, as honest a revolution as you can find anywhere in history. And this is a fact which all our intricate official denials will never change
The full text can be read here
Carl has a new book out about his SDS years, ‘Ravens in the storm’. It is available from amazon
You may also be interested in reading ‘The new radicals’, an excellent book on 60s radicalism.
After a few weeks, we will begin to make podcasts, and we hope that Carl will be among our first interviewees.
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