Men Are What They Do

Dick Hyland is an extraordinarily sympathetic and gifted radical. It is not clear what has happened to him in Mexico City, or what will happen. Nor is it clear what we can do for a comrade far away and in some danger. One thing, certainly, is simply to remember him, speak about the kind of person he is, and the things he shared with us while he was a student here.

Dick was a leader of the non-PL left at Harvard. That group began as the New Left caucus of SDS; became, after the SDS split, the November Action Coalition, and then last year, after Dick had left, the Radcliffe-Harvard Liberation Alliance.

He was a committed revolutionary, yet he always seemed about to be consumed by his own gentleness. In the world he believed in he might have been a forest ranger or a doting and bemused primary school teacher. Perhaps because he was by natural inclination so unlike a political leader, he managed to avoid the anti-human and rhetorical aspects of a political life. Perhaps it was because, as a friend suggested, he made the decision to be a political actor over again each morning. For whatever reason, he seemed always to speak the best parts of what he knew, and to give to our movement a dignity and grace that it might not otherwise have had.

We can remember him at University Hall, the day it was seized, chairing the meeting that was supposed to decide what to do with the liberated territory. He stood in the center of the big room on the second floor, surrounded by boisterous rebel comrades, focussing the debate with the combination of total confusion and benign serenity that was peculiar to him.

Looking backward two and a half years, the seizure of University Hall seems an innocent act, and Dick a mirror of that innocence. It seems little more than a scribble of outrage on a wall that separated us from the thousand outrages of the war and a University administration that was hurrying to stay even step with the thundering war machine. We believed that we had positively torn that wall down, but more likely, the tremor was only within us--a shudder at the sudden demystification of University liberalism. For that momentary alteration of power relations within the University--and such violent acts as carrying Dean Archie Epps out the door--a price was paid. Certainly not a great price, by comparison with that of non-white rebels, or even whites in less elite schools. But Dick and many others were beaten unconscious, and bloody bodies were hurled down the steps and out the door of University Hall.

Each sacrifice that was made, each scar, each moment of defiance, no matter how brief or insignificant it seemed, mattered. That was what Dick Hyland tried to say in his writing. It mattered because people in Vietnam and China and Czechoslovakia and South Africa who were of the same frail flesh and blood as us, and wanted the same things we did, were fighting hard every day. They faced an array of power we could only try to imagine. They fought with a courage and a belief in themselves that was distinct from anything we had ever known. They were winning, inexplicably and miraculously. And we had to be there with them in their struggle. Not simply because they were fighting for us, but because they were fighting for the very possibility of good in a nearly universally corrupted world.

Dick's writing catalyzed in all of us that sensibility--of the imminent apocalyptic confrontation of absolute good, the Vietnamese, and absolute evil, the American government. There was no question of which side you were on. The only question was how hard were you fighting.

The question plagued the November Action Coalition long past November when they staged a series of semi-violent assaults on MIT's armaments research laboratories. That action was not enough. All you had to do was read the newspapers to know that it was not enough. And so the rhetoric of struggle moved to greater and greater stridency, carried by its own momentum.

Dick wrote a long Crimson piece that fall entitled "In Defense of Terrorism." In it be extended a theoretical analysis of the CFIA as a necessary link in the chain of American Imperialism to a political statement that the CFIA ought to be destroyed. That second claim, the call to act upon analytical judgement, ran counter to the academic grain. Dick insinuated that intellectuals do not have to be carried by the precision of their documentation to a hopeless cynicism, in which there is only the celebration of work, normally a means, as an end in itself. Similarly he questioned the valuation of intelligence divorced from a simultaneous valuation of the ends which intelligence is to serve. Intellectuals could come down from their towers, declare their values, and undertake action.

The political demarcation between NAC and Weatherman, which had never been precise, blurred through the Spring of 1970. NAC sponsored a riot in Harvard Square following the April 15th Moratorium. The political goal of breaking all those windows in Harvard Square, if there was any at all, must have been to affirm with some violent deed the words, "Solidarity with the Vietnamese." Dick wrote a piece the day before the action in Harvard Square called, "Stay in the Streets." He wrote:

The only way I have been able to understand the war is to pretend that each time a GI or a Vietnamese dies, that it was my brother or my father or my mother that had died. By now over a million Vietnamese have died and probably eighty thousand Americans. All of America could not begin to digest that much sorrow... We are left with the freedom, and also the necessity of inventing ourselves. Instead of finding meaning in our lives, we must first find a direction. The Vietnamese, for example, are different. Their condition presents them with the necessity of fighting American Aggression. They accept the necessity as valid and meaningful. They can therefore find meaning in the lives they are forced to lead. From them we will have to learn.

Another riot followed in May. Dick was very unhappy, wondering how the continuation of such random violence could do any more than make a lot of people angry. He hurried nervously about shaking his head. "This is not a good idea," he said. "I thought we had decided not to have any more of these."

In living out the all-consuming struggle of good and evil that Dick posed in his writing, we were never the equals of our emotional commitments. No action seemed to resonate at the clear passionate note of the call to arms. The will of commitment never seemed able to discover its object. The highest ideals of radical humanism which Dick explored dissolved into street-fighting. Dick's enemy, and through him our enemy in those days, seemed the human condition itself.

Those days, of stormy weather, and mounting frustration at our inability to measure up to what we came to believe was necessary, are gone. Everywhere they are gone; not just at Harvard. Children toting M-16's have been replaced on the back page of the Panther paper by elderly black grandmothers. No one really regrets their passing. But we must hope that after its clamorous uncertain birth, our movement, far from dead, is slowly growing toward what will be a triumphant adulthood.

Dick grew faster than those around him. And so he had a greater gap between what he professed to believe and what he was able to do. Now he is in Mexico City, and we remember him. And more important, we continue to explore the dialectic between necessary radical action, and the essential values of the human spirit that Dick described:

After the revolution I want to band ducks in Canada and follow them south to the Tetons. I would work for the People's Ministry of Wildlife Conservation. But that simply is not a choice today. Our time, our situation, requires that we be revolutionaries...There simply exists no alternative for creativity, in fact, for life, than to try to create a new society.