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David Thoreau Wieck
1921-1997
I am posting this page In Memoriam to Professor Wieck. I did not know he was long dead until a few days ago. I had no idea of his involvement in Anarchism and other Left movements of his day until a few days ago. Nonetheless, without formal declaration or instruction in such matters, Prof Wieck had a profound influence on my life and thought.
Prof Wieck had the temerity me to ask me "What is a Fact?" during my bachelor's thesis defense. I have never forgotten that question. I have struggled many times to answer it in the 41 years since it was asked. I owe David Wieck a great debt, for having provoked me into thought as a lifestyle to this day.
As an activist on the Left, I owe him a lesser debt. But, somehow, his influence helped frame the questions that demand the answers we of the Left provide. So, for this, and much more,
THANK YOU DR WIECK.
The following is an EXCERPT from ...
David Thoreau Wieck was born in St. Louis, Missouri on December 13, 1921. Named after David Henry Thoreau, he was the son of Edward A. and Agnes Burns Wieck. His mother, known as the Mother Jones of Illinois, was the daughter of a miner. She was a writer in the middle and late 1920s for the weekly journal Illinois Miner, and after training with the Women's Trade Union League, she worked as an organizer for the Progressive Miners of America. His father was a self-educated coal miner and writer. In 1934 the Wiecks moved to New York City when Edward Wieck was hired as a research associate for the Russell Sage Foundation's Industrial Studies Department. David Wieck joined the Young Communist League in 1935, but by 1936 had become, in his own words, a "dissident bolshevik," much more enamored of the anarcho-syndicalists then fighting in Spain.
He enrolled at Columbia University in 1937 and graduated in 1941. He subsequently did post-graduate work toward a masters degree with Leo Wolman, writing an unpublished study of the process of centralization in the United Mine Workers of America. Registering as a conscientious objector following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he left New York City in early 1943 pending his appeal and was arrested in New Orleans for not notifying his draft board of his "change of address." In July 1943 Wieck began serving a three-year sentence at the Federal Correctional Institution in Danbury, Connecticut for refusing induction into the United States Armed Services. As prisoner #2674 Wieck was involved in numerous actions protesting racial segregation in the federal prison system.
He was released from prison in 1946 and began a life-long marriage/life-partnership with Diva Agostinelli, herself the daughter of anarchist coal miners from Pennsylvania. In the late 1940s and early 1950s Wieck wrote for the anarchist publications Why?, Liberation, and Resistance. He enrolled again at Columbia University in 1956 and received a Ph.D. in Philosophy in 1961, apparently concentrating on aesthetics. He began teaching philosophy at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1960, retiring as Professor Emeritus in 1987. During his tenure he published numerous articles and reviews in professional journals and the radical press both in the United States and abroad. He was the author of a biography of his mother, Woman from Spillertown: A Memoir of Agnes Burns Wieck (Southern Illinois Press, 1992). Afflicted with Alzheimers Disease, Wieck died on July 1, 1997.
The following is a reprint from Perspectives on Anarchist Theory, Institute for Anarchist Studies, in Volume 1 #2, Fall 1997:
David Wieck: An Anarchist Life
by John Schumacher
David Thoreau Wieck, an
anarchist theorist, educator, and
activist, died on July 1, 1997 in Albany, New York.
I met David 33 years ago, four years after he started teaching philosophy at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. I had no idea who he really was. He was just my professor in "Logic and Argument," an introduction to logical analysis. He would come into class looking neat, hair combed back and shirt tucked into his pants. But not long into class, he was drawing his hands through his hair, and twisting with such excitement, that his shirt would be out of his pants and his hair would go in all directions. I had never met anyone who was so involved in his teaching--and this was about logic, not politics, remember!
David
was born in 1921, to parents who themselves were notable activists of their day.
His mother, about whom David wrote an unusually insightful memoir, Woman
from Spillertown: A Memoir of Agnes Burns Wieck, was known as "the
Mother Jones of Illinois" for her work as a labor organizer. David's own
principles eventually led him into jail for 34 months as a conscientious
objector during W.W.II. As he told it, there "I learned the methods of
non-violent resistance and ... what a hunger-strike is like by fasting for ten
days in support of other C.O.'s."
After the war David returned to New York City to join the editorial board of Why?, soon to become Resistance, on which he played the leading role until it ceased being published in 1954. This publication provided a crucial voice and support for many people, including Paul Goodman before he became famous in his own right. Another member of Why?'s editorial board, even before David, was Diva Agostinelli, whose life is a good story itself, including a family heritage of other anarchists. To David she was also "my life-partner."
In 1958 David returned to Columbia University, his alma mater of 1941, to earn a Ph.D. in philosophy and came to Rensselaer to teach. David did not draw a line between theory and practice, between an intellectual life and an activist life. As he himself pointed out in his famous little piece, "The Habit of Direct Action": "the important distinction is between talk that it is mere moral assertion or propositional argument, and talk (in fact: direct action) which conveys a feeling, an attitude relevant to the desired end." David was always challenging his students and friends alike to think more clearly and deeply about everything they thought and did.
He
had a way of drawing humor out of people as well. It was his laugh itself, I now
realize: so delightful was it to hear, I would do anything to make it happen.
And yet he could be intimidating to people at the same time, as they were often
so distracted by his penetrating eyes and sharp tongue that they could not hear
the twinkle of playfulness in his laughter. He was a truly wonderful person, and
the world will sorely miss him.
David was fond of saying that, as an idea, anarchism is a negativity, because it can tell us what we need to unlearn in order to be free, but it cannot tell us how to use that freedom: anarchism does not impose a certain life on us, it challenges us to make a decent life together, to rid ourselves of all vestiges of the authority of power, political authority. To understand the mutual aid of our own authority of competence, David liked us to picture two sawyers, at either end of a two-person saw, cutting through a tree. For the work we need to do together, David had a special gift of description.
Right up to the end, even though he had suffered from Alzheimer's for several years, David could display his customary insight. One of his care-givers, herself Black, told Diva that David had said to her: "It's not the heritage of slavery that is the problem for Blacks. It is their exploitation today." When the caregiver asked her own companion how he understood David's remark, he replied, "You earn $4.35 an hour."
~ John Schumacher
John Schumacher is a regular contributor to anarchist publications and the author of Human Posture: The Nature of Inquiry (Suny Press, 1989). He lives in Troy, New York.
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The following is reprinted from QUADRANT:
Dedication
| In memory of David Thoreau Wieck and John A. Schumacher, we dedicate
this journal to the social ideals they tirelessly struggled to see realized.
David and John were loving and courageous individuals - honest, straightforward, highly ethical men who shunned personal celebrity, success and wealth, and devoted their lives to the well-being of others, and to the betterment of society at large. They are loved and missed by their families, and by countless students, friends, and colleagues. Both were social anarchists - a position they embraced not only as a philosophy, but as a daily practice. They recognized anarchism as a potent antidote to the destructive forces of patriarchy, hierarchy and capitalism. They sought, at every turn in their daily lives, to act in accordance with the profound principles on which anarchism is founded. Appreciating that social organization built on coercive relations can never be ethical, nor just, both men sought to call social hierarchy into question whenever and wherever they found it. This is no easy thing to do in a world in which the powers-that-be feel that they must, at all costs, create the illusion that coercion is legitimate in order to maintain positions of privilege founded on it. As David wrote in an article he wrote in 1966 -
Not only did both men eloquently critique coercive forms of social organization and strive in practice to root them out, they actively participated in constructing positive alternatives - grass-roots communities in which individuals could voluntarily come together, in a spirit of mutual aid and solidarity, to forge their own destinies. I am fortunate to have been born into an informal, loose-knit community of families and individuals who believed strongly in these things, in no small part due to the presence in that community of David Wieck, and his life-long partner, Diva Agostinelli Wieck. David was at that point teaching at R.P.I, a college in my home town. John Schumacher, his student at the time, was there, as was John Fudjack and other students of David's. They had been introduced to anarchism by Diva and David Wieck and embraced it. Thirty-four years earlier, the Spanish revolution had inspired David himself, at the tender age of 15, to adopt an anarchist approach. David, who was a pacifist, later spent nearly three years in a federal prison as a conscientious objector during WWII. After his release he became an editor and contributor to 'Why?' (later renamed 'Resistance'). It was there that he met Diva, a feminist and anarchist who was on the editorial board of the periodical. Dorothy Rogers, Emma Goldman's companion and secretary was part of that early group, as was Paul Goodman, who found the early friendship and support of Diva and David invaluable. Much later, when David took up teaching and the Wiecks settled in our area, they brought with them this larger network of folks - many of whom would, on occasion, visit our town to see David and Diva and participate in local events. Over the years, the membership of our local community changed. People came and went, grouped and regrouped - as will happen in college towns. I was at the time too young to later remember many details of these early days, and there was a period of years in which my family and I traveled elsewhere. We eventually returned, and I had the opportunity, as a teenager, to sit in on a course that was given by John Schumacher, who had by then become a seasoned and greatly admired teacher himself. A few years afterwards, when I was writing on participatory democracy, and was immersed in organizing for the restoration of democratic governance at Goddard, I was most fortunate to have had David and John to talk to and to read and criticise what I had written. When David died in 1997, John Schumacher wrote:
John contributed frequently to anarchist publications, writing eloquently on the basic principles on which anarchism is founded. He also brought the view alive by applying it - with insight, skill and creativity -
to diverse subjects: science and technology, childhood and authority, the environment, and the university [See On Choosing to be a Radical Professor], to mention but a few. A strong-willed, committed and brilliant spokesperson, he nevertheless characteristically expressed himself with a gentle warmth, compassion, and sensitivity that was awesome and inspiring. Like David, he was more interested in finding ways to support and encourage his students, and in helping them to create forums in which they could empower themselves and each other, than in stepping into the spotlight himself. His untimely death, a few short years following the passing of David, was heartbreaking. In dedicating this site we want to acknowledge not only the influence that Diva and David Weick and John Schumacher have directly and indirectly made to the various ideas that can be found within these pages - we also want to acknowledge the influence they have had on the course of our lives. We would not be who we now are had it not been for their beneficial presence in our world, and that world would have been much worse off for their absence. Although David and John are no longer with us, their contribution will not be forgotten. The spirit in which they lived remains strong and healthy in the individuals they touched and in the communities they devoted themselves to. May the ideals to which they dedicated their lives be fully realized! In solidarity,
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June 26, 2004
Last update: 11/13/2007
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