In memoriam : RI Obituaries
Posted: Mon Nov 07, 2011 6:18 pm
Been gestating for ages the idea of an obituaries thread to mark ( either with mourning or not ) the passing of those figures good & bad relevant to the board .....……here it is.......and idly googling authors I found my first most worthy nominee for RI Valhalla had sadly passed away very recently .
Carl Oglesby obituary
Angry, radical and persuasive leader of the American left during the 1960s
Godfrey Hodgson
guardian.co.uk
Friday 16 September 2011
Carl Oglesby, who has died of lung cancer aged 76, was one of the most talented and interesting of the leaders of the 1960s American left. Within a short time of joining Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), in 1965 he became its president. He was passionate in his opposition to the Vietnam war, making a landmark speech at an antiwar rally in Washington, and became convinced that unless profound changes took place in American society, there would be more similar wars.
His honesty and intensely personal search for the truth made him a divisive figure, and he was subsequently attacked both by Marxists and by radical groups such as the Weathermen. Oglesby was invited by the Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver to be his vice-presidential running-mate for the Peace and Freedom party in 1968, but he declined.
Unlike many leaders of the American left, old and new, Oglesby came from an authentic working-class background. His family had migrated from the south, his father from South Carolina and his mother from Alabama. His father worked in a rubber plant in Akron, Ohio. Oglesby himself wore a beard, not as a badge of radicalism, but because he had suffered from acne in adolescence and his friends believed that his family were too poor to have it treated.
Oglesby was several years older than the other leaders of SDS, such as Tom Hayden and Todd Gitlin, and was married with three children by the time he became involved in radical activism. He had earlier studied at Kent State University – where the national guard later killed four students during a demonstration against the Vietnam war – but dropped out and went to live in Greenwich Village, then the bohemian quarter of Manhattan, where he worked as an actor and wrote three plays.
In 1960 he was in Ann Arbor, Michigan, working as a technical writer for the Bendix corporation, a defence contractor, and studying part time at the University of Michigan, where SDS was formed. When he wrote an article in a campus journal criticising US policy in Asia, three SDS members visited his home to recruit him. His intelligence and commitment so impressed his new colleagues that he was soon elected president of the organisation.
Oglesby was involved in a celebrated "teach-in" at Michigan, and he helped to organise the big demonstration in Washington on 17 April 1965, just after President Lyndon Johnson had started bombing North Vietnam. In November that year he spoke at a major demonstration against the war in Washington. His speech became a classic of the antiwar movement. "It was a devastating performance," said the scholar and author Kirkpatrick Sale, "skilled, moderate, learned and compassionate, but uncompromising, angry, radical, and above all persuasive. It drew the only standing ovation of the afternoon [and] for years afterwards it would continue to be one of the most popular items of SDS literature."
Oglesby was essentially an autodidact and developed a hybrid political philosophy of his own. He made himself unpopular with some by insisting that the men who led the US into the war were not bad people as individuals, and that the war was the product of systemic faults in American society. He came under the influence of the libertarian thinker Murray Rothbard and even aspired to a kind of fusion between the old right, in which he included such conservative figures as General Douglas MacArthur and Senator Robert Taft, and the new left.
In his 1967 essay Vietnamese Crucible, Oglesby rejected the "socialist radical, the corporatist conservative, and the welfare-state liberal" and challenged the new left to embrace American democratic populism and the American libertarian right. He refused to pay a portion of his taxes in protest at the Vietnam war.
After SDS collapsed in 1969, Oglesby worked as a musician, writing and recording two albums, described as psychedelic folk rock. He taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and settled in New Jersey. He became obsessed with the Kennedy assassination and other conspiracies and wrote several books about them.
His three marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by his partner, Barbara Webster, and by two daughters and a son from his first marriage.
• Carl Oglesby, political activist, writer and academic, born 30 July 1935; died 13 September 2011
Carl Oglesby: Political activist and campaigner against the Vietnam war
By Michael Carlson Thursday 29 September 2011
www.independent.co.uk
Carl Oglesby was perhaps the finest orator of the anti-war movement in Sixties America, and one of its best thinkers. He was a settled family man when he became president of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and led the protest against the Vietnam War, but his version of radical politics, always inclusive and rarely extreme, eventually put him at odds with others in SDS who grew frustrated with their inability to bring about change through the political process.
Oglesby came from working-class roots. His parents had migrated from the deep South to Akron, Ohio, where his father worked in a rubber mill, and where Carl was born in 1935. He grew up a true believer in the American way, even winning a high-school prize for an essay on the rightness of America's stance against communism.
But while at Kent State University he began to look in other directions, dropping out and moving to New York to pursue acting. He wrote three plays – which were produced off-Broadway – and an unpublished novel, before returning to the Midwest. There he married, had three children, and took a job in Ann Arbor, Michigan writing technical materials for the Bendix corporation, who were, among other things, a major defence contractor.
He studied part-time at the University of Michigan to finish his degree. After writing an essay critical of American policy in Southeast Asia for the college paper, three members of the newly formed SDS came to his house to recruit him; soon he was elected president of the organisation.
His writing and performing skills translated into dynamic leadership, and his maturity made him a valuable organiser, starting with teach-ins on the Michigan campus and culminating in the 27 November 1965 March on Washington for Peace, where he aligned SDS with a number of more mainstream groups opposed to the growing Vietnam war. His speech "Let us shape the future" drew the day's only standing ovation, and in print form became a landmark essay. He argued that American anti-communism moved in the service of corporate interests which were happy to profit from tyrannies with which they could do business. But he was most stirring when he recalled his own shattered idealism.
Confronting those who called him "anti-American", he said "Don't blame me for that! Blame those who mouthed my liberal values and broke my American heart."
Oglesby declined an invitation from the Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver to be his running mate on the Peace and Freedom Party's 1968 presidential campaign; by then SDS had grown to over 100,000 members, but was already crumbling from within. Oglesby was at odds with the Weathermen faction, which advocated violent Marxist revolution, a stance Oglesby described as "road rage and comic-book Marxism".
The man who hoped argument could persuade leaders to change was expelled from SDS for being a hopeless bourgeois liberal. Ironically, as the new left disintegrated, he was editing the excellent New Left Reader (1969) for a mainstream publisher.
His illusions again shattered, Oglesby turned to music, releasing twofolk-rock records which were well-reviewed but didn't sell. In 1972 he helped found the Assassination Information Bureau. His lucid writing was directed toward conspiracies, and he was particularly interested in the murder of John F Kennedy. In 1976 he published Yankee and Cowboy War: conspiracies from Dallas to Watergate, which linked the JFK assassination and Watergate by identifying a conflict in the American power elite between the eastern establishment bankers and the growing western money in oil, aerospace, and military contracting. In the 1990s he published two further books analysing the various theories behind the JFK killing.
He taught at Antioch and Dartmouth Colleges and MIT, and also co-authored – with the eponymous house restorer – Bob Vila's Guide to buying your Dream Home. His memoir of the anti-war movement, Ravens in the Storm, appeared in 2008.
As he said "It isn't the rebels who cause the troubles of the world, it's the troubles that cause the rebels." He died of lung cancer. Married and divorced three times, he is survived by his partner, Barbara Webster, two sons and a daughter from his first marriage.
Carl Preston Oglesby Jr, writer and activist: born Akron, Ohio 30 July 1935: married Beth Rimanoczy (marriage dissolved; two sons, one daughter), second Anne Mueller; third Sally Waters (marriages dissolved); died Montclair, New Jersey 13 September 2011.
Friday, 30 September 2011
CARL OGLESBY: THE INDPENDENT OBITUARY
irresistibletargets.blogspot.com
My obit of Carl Oglesby, SDS leader and author of one of the most interesting of assassination studies, was in yesterday's Indy (29 September); you can link to the online version here. By the time I came to consider SDS, Oglesby was already on his way out, but his earlier writings and speeches were impressive, and The New Left Reader, which he edited, was a handbook of sorts as I wandered my way through protest. Oglesby's version of left-wing politics reflected his working-class upbringing, and a certain idealism which originally led him to found useful alliances with the wider anti-war and civil rights movements, with whom he organised the first great March on Washington. But his faith in the ultimate rationality of America's political leaders proved misplaced, at best. When the Weathermen came along, Oglesby was condemned as being hopelessly bourgeois, when really what he might have been was hopelessly American.
From that perspective, it's easy to understand the importance the assassinations of JFK, MLK, and RFK had for him; he helped found the Assassination Information Bureau, and he wrote a number of books which reflected the wealth of information he gathered. The most interesting is The Yankee and Cowboy War, which tries to create a sort of unified field theory of the assassinations, and connect the dots between Dallas in 1963 and Watergate in 1972.
It was a foreunner of what came to be known as 'Deep Politics', considering the forces that really power our country (and indeed, today, the world) regardless of who holds nominal power, and he tried to identify a power-struggle within that American elite between the old money of the east and the newer money in the west. If you don't see the relevance today, consider the Bush family, Skull and Boners all, who begin as Yankees, merchant bankers in New York with Prescott becoming a senator from Connecticut--but transform into Cowboys--George W goes into the oil bidnez, heads the CIA, and eventually becomes president, and Shrub, full scale born-again Texan, doesn't do much of anything but serves the needs of Cowboys as he becomes governor of Texas and then president, where he gets to recapitulate the Reagan malaise on a far grander scale.
I hadn't seen much by Oglesby on that malaise; he did two books on the JFK assassination in the 90s, but the more interesting of them draws heavily on Yankee/Cowboy, and I've yet to read Ravens In the Storm, his memoir of radical politics in the Sixties, but I surely will.
I never even knew he'd made two folk-rock records, and it's interesting because one of the covers makes him look just like the great keyboardist Barry Goldberg. But in many ways he symbolises the better impulses of the Sixties generation--even though, like most of that generation's leaders, he came from the pre-baby boom. Perhaps someone ought to consider why my generation has proven so incapable of leading itself, at least in a progressive direction.
3 comments:
Caleb O. said...
I appreciate your thoughtful insights into my father's life and character.
You have hit on many of the points I feel have been missing in a number of the tributes and obituaries that I've seen so far.
Caleb Oglesby, NYC
2 October 2011 18:48
Michael Carlson said...
Thank you for the comment; I'm very pleased. It was a privilege to be able to show some appreciation of your father, and I'm very glad if some of my own impressions were accurate. My condolences,
best
MC
7 October 2011 22:39
Robin Ramsay said...
Very good, Mike. Oglesby influenced me profoundly with an essay of his in Ramparts, 'In Defence of Paranoia', which said that the American left need to look at the assassinations of the sixties rather than sticking to class forces, economics etc. I took this to be true of the UK, as well – not assassinations per se (though there were many of those in Northern Ireland) but what became known as parapolitics; and later deep politics.
I had no idea he did music and there are some tracks of his on YouTube - and they're not too bad, either.
18 October 2011 11:39