Greg Calvert

Gregory Alan Calvert was born in April 1937 in Longview, Washington. He was the eldest child of Clyde Walter Calvert and Nellie Louise Nevala (Gregory would later take his mother's maiden name as his middle name).{{cite web |title=Person Details for Nellie Louise Nevala (1911-2009) |website=FamilySearch.org |url=https://ancestors.familysearch.org/en/GHLK-3GV/nellie-louise-nevala-1911-2009}} The Calvert residence was a squatter's shack on the slopes of the Mount St. Helens volcano, and the family lived in harsh rural poverty.{{cite book |title=Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America |last=McMillian |first=John Campbell |publisher=Oxford University Press |year=2011 |isbn=978-0195319927 |page=27 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=JroUDAAAQBAJ&pg=PA27}} As a boy, Gregory spent a number of years with his Finnish grandparents; they lived on a small farm, and he became fluent in Finnish. He was an excellent student and eventually won a Weyerhaeuser scholarship to the University of Oregon.

After graduating in 1960 with a BA in history, Calvert obtained a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, enabling him to work toward a graduate degree in European History at Cornell University. Next, he studied for two years at the University of Paris, and then returned to Cornell in the fall of 1963 where he obtained his PhD in Political and Social Theory.{{sfn|Calvert|2007|p=105}} In 1964, Calvert accepted a teaching position at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa.{{cite news |title=Greg Calvert Sets SDS Talk |url=https://www.newspapers.com/clip/110332819/greg-calvert-1937-2005/ |newspaper=Austin American-Statesman |date=9 November 1968 |location=Austin, TX |page=12 |access-date=28 September 2022 |via=Newspapers.com}} {{Open access}} He taught a History of Western Civilization course and was the creative force behind, and the faculty advisor for, the alternative weekly student newspaper The Liberator. Calvert was able to bring renowned writers and intellectuals such as Paul Goodman and Stephen Spender to speak at Iowa State.{{citation needed|date=February 2025}}

In the fall of 1965, Calvert and about a dozen others started a local SDS chapter at Iowa State. He and Jane Adams from the SDS Midwest Regional office would soon rise to national prominence within the organization. At the SDS committee meeting in June 1966, Adams agreed to serve as interim National Secretary until the convention at the end of August in Clear Lake, Iowa. She appointed Calvert as her Acting Assistant National Secretary, and he also became editor of New Left Notes.{{cite book |last=Sale |first=Kirkpatrick |author-link=Kirkpatrick Sale |title=SDS: The Rise and Development of the Students for a Democratic Society |publisher=Random House |year=1973 |url=https://www.sds-1960s.org/books/sds.pdf |page=189 |isbn=0394478894}} At the convention, Calvert was elected National Secretary. His election was part of a "prairie power" trend in the SDS. The organization sought to correct its tendency to be overly controlled by East Coast and West Coast leftists without drawing sufficient talent from the Midwest "prairie".{{sfn|Sale|1973|pp=186–188}}

In her book Prairie Power: Voices of 1960s Midwestern Student Protest, Robbie Lieberman describes Calvert's contributions to SDS ideology:{{blockquote|Calvert wrote in 1967 that the basis of radical consciousness was 'the discovery of oneself as one of the oppressed (emphasis in original). Calvert was among those who proposed that many middle-class professionals (including students, who would come to play those roles) were members of a "new working class" whose role in bringing about social change was critical precisely because of their place in the knowledge industry. He suggested that "[w]hat has held the new radicalism together, what has given it its life and vitality, has been the conviction that the gut-level alienation from America-the-Obscene-and-the-Dehumanized was a sincere and realistic basis for challenging America." The black power movement expressed this idea in different terms, but the point was that radicalism began with an affirmation rather than an apology for one's identity.{{cite book |last=Lieberman |first=Robbie |page=19 |title=Prairie Power: Voices of 1960s Midwestern Student Protest |location=Columbia |year=2004

|isbn=978-0826215222 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=__wnDwAAQBAJ&dq=Gregory+Nevala+Calvert&pg=PA19 |publisher=University of Missouri Press}}}}

As National Secretary of SDS and a leader of MOBE, Calvert influenced how the 1967 March on the Pentagon unfolded. A number of angry demonstrators wanted to launch a suicidal charge at the soldiers guarding the entrance to the Pentagon. Calvert was able to dissuade them against that plan and instead to face down the soldiers for hours and thereby avoid bloodshed. He was a pacifist who believed in non-violent methods of protest and confrontation. The tension over tactics at the March on the Pentagon was symptomatic of a new "mood of militancy" which gripped the SDS and anti-war movement, as Lawrence Rosenwald writes:{{blockquote|[N]onviolent resistance had begun to many to seem insufficient, a sellout, and plans were afoot to fight with police in the streets and "trash" downtown Washington, D.C. Counseled by David Dellinger and Barbara Deming—the latter in particular helping him to articulate a "non-heterosexual perspective" on the movement's still-underacknowledged "violence-prone machismo"—he [Calvert] managed to hold the group together and kept it from splintering at least for a time. Soon enough, the SDS did split—some female members forming feminist groups, the Weather Underground bombing the Capitol, the Pentagon, the State Department—and Calvert withdrew from his former role.{{cite book |editor-last=Rosenwald |editor-first=Lawrence |title=War No More: Three Centuries of American Antiwar & Peace Writing |year=2016 |publisher=Library of America |isbn=978-1598534733 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=cZqTCgAAQBAJ&dq=Gregory+Nevala+Calvert&pg=PT845 }}}}

After the demise of the SDS at the end of the 1960s, Calvert lived in Austin, Texas. He and his wife at the time, Carol Neiman, co-authored A Disrupted History: The New Left and the New Capitalism (1971). In their book, they argued that the New Left was a logical response to "Neocapitalism", which they termed "the third stage of capitalist development" after "laissez faire" and "monopoly capitalism".{{cite book |last1=Calvert |first1=Greg |last2=Neiman |first2=Carol |year=1971 |pages=70–73 |title=A Disrupted History: The New Left and the New Capitalism |publisher=Random House |isbn=0-394-46267-X}}

Over the next few years, Calvert contributed to various journalistic and educational projects. For instance, he inspired his younger brother Alex, along with David MacBryde, to start The Armadillo Press.{{cite web |date=September 2015 |title=In Memoriam: David MacBryde |publisher=Yale University Class of 1964|url=https://www.yale64.org/remembrances/macbryde.htm}} Calvert worked for a while in the Illinois State Drug Rehabilitation program. He occasionally wrote articles for the alternative newspaper The Rag. He continued his own education by studying in the History of Consciousness program at UC Santa Cruz. He also pursued a lifelong interest in Buddhism, and set up a practice in the late 1970s as a Buddhist psychotherapist.

In 1991, Calvert summarized many of his New Left ideas in Democracy from the Heart: Spiritual Values, Decentralism, and Democratic Idealism in the Movement of the 1960s.{{cite journal |last=Cottrell |first=Robert |title=Reviewed Work: Democracy from the Heart: Spiritual Values, Decentralism, and Democratic Idealism in the Movement of the 1960s |journal=The American Historical Review |url=https://doi.org/10.2307/2167025 |url-access=limited |volume=98 |number=2 |date=April 1993 |page=600 |doi=10.2307/2167025 |jstor=2167025}} In 1995, he and his partner Dr. Ken Carpenter co-founded a Spanish language school, Casa Xalteva, in Granada, Nicaragua. They remained at the school for three years before returning for financial reasons to teach at the University of New Mexico.{{cite web |url=http://www.casaxalteva.org/about-casa-xalteva/history.html |archive-date=21 February 2012 |title=Casa Xalteva - History |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120221191212/http://www.casaxalteva.org/about-casa-xalteva/history.html }}

On August 12, 2005, Gregory Calvert died of pneumonia and complications from diabetes in a hospice in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He was 68.{{cite magazine |date=25 October 2005 |page=26 |magazine=The Advocate |number=949 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=YmQEAAAAMBAJ&dq=greg+calvert+obituary+2005&pg=PA26 |title=Transitions}}

• {{cite book |title=A Disrupted History: The New Left and the New Capitalism |location=New York |publisher=Random House |year=1971 |isbn=039446267X}} Co-authored with Carol Neiman.
• {{cite book |title=Democracy from the Heart: Spiritual Values, Decentralism, and Democratic Idealism in the Movement of the 1960s |location=Eugene, OR |publisher=Communitas Press |year=1991 |isbn=0962880000}}

• {{cite web |title=In White America: Liberal Conscience vs. Radical Consciousness |series=Lost Writings of SDS |url=https://sds-1960s.org/Calvert-WhiteAmerica.pdf}} Speech by Calvert at the SDS Princeton Conference in February 1967.
• {{cite news |title=Shake the Empire! |newspaper=The Movement |date=December 1967 |page=5 |jstor=community.28040902 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/10.2307/community.28040902.pdf}} Interview with Calvert in November 1967.
• {{cite book |editor-last=Roussopoulos |editor-first=Dimitrios I. |title=The New Left: Legacy and Continuity |publisher=Black Rose Books |year=2007 |isbn=978-1551642994 |last=Calvert |first=Gregory Nevala |chapter=Democratic Idealism: SDS and the Gospel of Participatory Democracy |pages=105–129 |chapter-url=https://books.google.com/books?id=WIm7-RRDoSUC&pg=PA105}}

{{Reflist}}

• Sale, Kirkpatrick. [https://www.sds-1960s.org/books/sds.pdf SDS: The Rise and Development of the Students for a Democratic Society]. Random House, 1973. {{ISBN|0394478894}}.

• {{cite web |title=Greg Calvert Papers, 1920-2000 (majority within 1960-1992) |publisher=University of Michigan Finding Aids |url=https://findingaids.lib.umich.edu/catalog/umich-scl-ams0147}}
• {{cite web |last=Morrow |first=Frank |title=Greg Calvert, SDS and the New Left |date=1979 |url=https://archive.org/details/AV_022-GREG_CALVERT_SDS_AND_THE_NEW_LEFT |via=Internet Archive |publisher=Alternative Views}} Videotaped interview with Calvert.

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Category:1937 births

Category:2005 deaths

Category:American activists

Category:Deaths from diabetes in the United States

Category:People from Skamania County, Washington

Category:American people of Finnish descent

Category:Members of Students for a Democratic Society

Category:University of Oregon alumni