[msb-alumni] Rennie Davis, 80, Antiwar Activist Who Took a New Age Detour, Dies on February 2, 2021

From: Steve <pipeguy920@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <msb-alumni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 5 Feb 2021 17:54:54 -0500

BlankI remember the mess at the Democratic Convention; had no idea he was from
Lansing!

Rennie Davis, 80, Antiwar Activist Who Took a New Age Detour, Dies on February
2, 2021   .
By Peter Applebome.

The trial arising from the 'police riot' at the 1968 convention thrust him into
the
spotlight. He later became an unlikely spokesman for a teenage guru.

Rennie Davis, who lived out one of the more quixotic journeys of the 1960s
generation when
he went from leading opponent of the Vietnam War, as a convicted member of the
Chicago
Seven, to spokesman for a teenage Indian guru, died on Tuesday at his home in
Berthoud,
Colo. He was 80.  His wife, Kirsten Liegmann, who announced the death on his
Facebook page,
said the cause was lymphoma, adding that a large tumor had been discovered only
two weeks
ago.

Smart, charismatic and a blur of energy and engagement, Mr. Davis was a leading
figure of
the antiwar movement. After graduating from Oberlin College in Ohio, he joined
the top ranks
of the activist organization Students for a Democratic Society and the National
Mobilization
Committee to End the War in Vietnam.

In 1967, he and Tom Hayden, another S.D.S. leader, attended an international
conference of
student radicals in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia; traveled to Hanoi, the capital
of North
Vietnam; and returned in time for the march on the Pentagon immortalized in
Norman Mailer's
1968 book "The Armies of the Night."

That experience led to Chicago, where Mr. Davis helped organize a motley
assemblage of
antiwar activists, political radicals and the theatrical revolutionaries known
as Yippies
with the aim of descending on the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

A rally at Grant Park on Tuesday, Aug. 27, turned into a riot, with helmeted
police clubbing
thousands of demonstrators, including Mr. Davis, who was left bloodied, his
head swathed in
bandages. A national commission later called the clash a police riot, but
federal officials
charged Mr. Davis and seven others with conspiracy and inciting to riot. They
went from
being called the "Chicago Eight" to the "Chicago Seven" after the case of one
of them, the
Black Panther leader Bobby Seale, was severed from the others. (In the end, Mr.
Seale was
never tried.)

The Chicago Seven trial became a seminal moment of the '60s -- part legal
drama, part
political theater. Its story was told last year in the Aaron Sorkin film "The
Trial of the
Chicago 7."

In 1970, after a tumultuous four-and-a-half-month trial, all seven defendants
were acquitted
of conspiracy, but Mr. Davis and four others -- Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin,
David Dellinger
and Mr. Hayden -- were convicted of inciting to riot and sentenced to five
years in prison.
The verdicts were overturned on appeal, as were various contempt citations.

After that, Mr. Davis returned to antiwar activism, traveling again to Hanoi
and going on to
organize the 1971 May Day antiwar rally in Washington, which resulted in some
13,000
arrests. And he became an international figure, on good enough terms with John
Lennon that
he was invited in 1971 to a recording session putting the finishing touches on
"Imagine."

Then, in 1973, he took what many thought to be a baffling turn: He became the
chief American
promoter for Guru Maharaj Ji, a 15-year-old Indian billed as a "perfect
master," who claimed
millions of followers around the world.

Most of the rest of Mr. Davis's career found him trying to blend the political
radicalism of
his 20s with an entrepreneurial pastiche of progressive or New Age agendas. The
results
played out like an improvisation on '60s themes, leading to divided opinions
about him.

Some admirers saw a lifelong commitment to a progressive vision taking new
forms. Others,
especially many of his old allies from the antiwar movement, lamented a life of
great
promise diverted to magical thinking and dubious causes.

Rennard Cordon Davis was born May 23, 1940, in Lansing, Mich., to John and
Dorothy Davis.
His father was a labor economist who joined President Harry S. Truman's Council
of Economic
Advisers, and the family lived in Bethesda, Md., during those White House
years. His mother
was a schoolteacher.

When Truman left office -- Rennie was in the seventh grade -- the family moved
to a 500-acre
farm in Berryville, Va., in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

While many '60s radicals were growing up in cities or suburbs, Mr. Davis spent
much of his
youth in an idyllic rural setting. He was student body president and played
varsity
basketball in high school. But he later said that winning the 4-H Clubs'
Eastern U.S.
chicken-judging championship was the proudest moment of his high school career.

As told in "Fire in the Streets" (1979), Milton Viorst's account of 1960s
radicalism, a
senior year high school trip to New York City left Mr. Davis torn between
remaining in
pastoral rural Virginia and wanting to address the ills of poverty and race
that he saw in
the city's troubled neighborhoods. He turned down a scholarship to study animal
husbandry at
Virginia Tech and instead enrolled at Oberlin in 1958. There he became joined
at the hip
with Paul Potter, a fellow student who later became president of S.D.S.

Impressed by the civil rights movement in the South, particularly the 1960
sit-ins in
Greensboro, N.C., and taken with a belief in the power of his generation to
effect change,
Mr. Davis became a full-time activist and one of the most committed S.D.S.
leaders.

Associates remember two sides to Mr. Davis. On the one hand, he was one of the
movement's
most successful organizers. Focused and empathetic, he worked in Chicago with
poor white
people from Appalachia, played bluegrass banjo at parties and did much of the
serious
negotiating with the city for permits to march and camp out before the Chicago
convention.
The journalist Nicholas von Hoffman once described him as "the most stable, the
calmest, the
most enduring of that group of young people who set out to change America at
the beginning
of the '60s."

But many also remember him as an enthusiastic promoter of causes with an
elastic view of
reality who believed in the importance of fudging the truth in the interest of
building a
movement.
"He used to say the way to organize is with smoke and mirrors," said Richard
Flacks, an
early S.D.S. leader who became a sociology professor at the University of
California, Santa
Barbara. "He believed in political salesmanship, creating a kind of myth that
wasn't quite a
lie but created an image of possibility, even if it wasn't yet true."

Friends and associates said he also experimented at the time with drugs,
including LSD.

As the energy leeched out of leftist politics, Mr. Davis's promotional
instincts took a
surprising turn when he accepted a free plane ticket to India to learn about
Guru Maharj Ji.
He later said that the experience had filled him "from head to toe with light."

He became a convert and spokesman for Maharj Ji (who was born Prem Pal Singh
Rawat), saying
the guru's teachings would provide "a practical way to fulfill all the dreams"
of the 1960s,
"a practical method to end poverty, racism, sexism, imperialism."

At 32, he proclaimed, "I would cross the planet on my hands and knees to touch
his toe."

That movement peaked with an underwhelming turnout at an event called
Millennium 73, held at
the Astrodome in Houston in November 1973, where Guru Maharj Ji appeared in a
glittering
silver suit on a blue plexiglass throne. Mr. Davis had billed it as "the most
important
gathering of humanity in the history of the world" and said he expected 100,000
people to
show up. The police estimated the turnout at 10,000, and even some of the
guru's followers
began to question the young man's lavish lifestyle, complete with a Rolls-Royce.

His celebrity soon waned. Many former allies saw Mr. Davis's mystical detour as
a depressing
generational metaphor.
"Everyone was trying to reinvent themselves after the stuffing of the New Left
had fallen
out, trying to find ways to heal their broken psyches," the author and scholar
Todd Gitlin
said in an interview for this obituary in 2018, "and Rennie took the most
garish, the most
mockable, the most virtually self-caricatured of those paths."  Mr. Gitlin had
first met Mr.
Davis as a fellow student radical at an S.D.S. convention in 1963.

Mr.  Davis remained active in relative obscurity, mostly in Colorado, for
decades afterward,
promoting his work in business consulting, technology, socially responsible
investment and
various healing regimens. He recalled taking what he called "a long, quiet
sabbatical at the
bottom of the Grand Canyon" after an unexpected business collapse in the 1990s.

With his wife, he led the Foundation for a New Humanity (now called Foundation
for
Humanity), which sold "peak performance" elixirs, touted a new approach to
meditation and
promised a New Humanity World Tour for a movement "larger than the Renaissance,
American
Revolution and Sixties combined."

Ms. Liegmann described his time with Guru Maharaj Ji as a brief "steppingstone,
a portal,
that opened a massive pathway' to spiritual work crucial for human awakening."

Even friends who had shaken their heads at his Guru Maharaj Ji episode say that
Mr. Davis
had been sincere in the paths he took, that he had never turned his back on the
politics and
values of his youth, and that his exploratory route, moving from political
activism to more
spiritual and personal pursuits, was similar to that of many other members of
his
generation.

"People went off in different directions; not everyone became the rootless
cosmopolitans
most of us did," said Daniel Millstone, a friend from Mr. Davis's S.D.S. days.
"If there
were only one road you were allowed to follow, it would have made more sense to
judge him
harshly. But he was never angry or hateful. I never thought he was ever a
huckster kind of
guy."

Susan Gregory, his partner from 1969 to 1973 and a longtime friend after that,
said: "He
felt called to try and change the world, to end the war, to bring peace, to
help people who
needed help. He was not ideological. He followed his heart, his inner feeling.
He was true
to that regardless what people thought about what he was doing or who he was."

In addition to his wife, Mr. Davis is survived by two daughters, Lia and Maya;
a son, Sky; a
sister, Bea; two brothers, John and Bob; and two grandchildren.

Mr. Davis remained proud of his role in history and convinced of his era's
continued
relevance. In an unpublished article he wrote last year, he was critical of Mr.
Sorkin's
film, saying its portrayals of the events surrounding the Chicago Seven trial
and the people
involved, including him, were inaccurate. ("I was portrayed as a complete nerd
afraid of his
own shadow," he complained. "I felt sorry for Tony winner Alex Sharp who played
me.")
"I once told the Chicago defendants," he wrote, "that no movie producer will
ever fully
capture the courage and elegance of the actual defendants. It was my honor to
know them.
They were an inspiration that is needed again today."

[msb-alumni] Rennie Davis, 80, Antiwar Activist Who Took a New Age Detour, Dies on February 2, 2021

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