She Wasn't on the Radical Left -- She Was a 'Pacifist' Rebel

One of the ways reporters avoid putting someone on the radical left is by merely calling them "anti-war" or "pacifist" – or even "combative pacifist." From my vacation perch in Wisconsin Dells, I found on the front of the "Daybreak" section in Friday’s Wisconsin State Journal (out of Madison) an Associated Press obit of leftist poet Grace Paley. "Poet, pacifist Paley dies," was their headline. The appreciation by AP writer Hillel Italie began: "Poet and short story writer Grace Paley, a literary eminence and old-fashioned rebel who described herself as a ‘combative pacifist,’ has died. She was 84."

A few paragraphs in, it’s more clear that Paley’s parents were communists, and nearly everyone in her early milieu was, ahem, "anti-war." Italie added:

Her family spoke English, Russian and Yiddish, but politics proved the universal language. Her parents had opposed the czar in Russia and were supporters of the New Deal. The bitterest neighborhood feuds were between Trotskyites and Stalinists. "I thought being Jewish meant you were a socialist," Paley said. "Everyone on my block was a socialist or a communist. ... People would have serious, insane arguments, and it was nice."

Italie’s obit also displayed the tendency to equate siding with the communists in American wars, like the Vietnam war, visiting Hanoi on "peace missions," made you a "pacifist," too:

Mrs. Paley was a self-described "combative pacifist" who joined the War Resisters League in the '60s and visited Hanoi on a peace mission. She was arrested in 1978 during an anti-nuclear protest on the White House lawn and for years could be found every Saturday passing out protest leaflets on a street corner near her New York apartment. "I happened to like the '60s a lot. I thought great things were happening then, and I was glad my children were part of that generation," she said.

In the Washington Post, obit writer Adam Bernstein focused on Paley’s literary output and typically downplayed her radical politics, but late in his piece, he added more political detail:

Ms. Paley wrote her fiction slowly and sparingly, spending a great deal of time focused on her deepening political involvement as a pacifist concerned with environmental and anti-military causes...Ms. Paley, who once described herself as "a somewhat combative pacifist and cooperative anarchist," was willingly distracted from her writing by other pursuits. She gave more attention to teaching fiction at Sarah Lawrence College north of New York and especially to her political activism.

During the Vietnam War, she encouraged young men to avoid military service, participated in rallies against the war and in 1969 went to Hanoi as part of a U.S. delegation to bring home prisoners of war. She once spent time at Greenwich Village's Women's House of Detention for blocking a military parade.