Greg Calvert
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Gregory Nevala Calvert (April 16, 1937 – August 12, 2005)[1] was National Secretary of Students for a Democratic Society in 1966–67.
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[edit] Biography
[edit] Early years
Gregory Calvert was born during the Great Depression, in a squatter's shack on the slopes of the Mount St. Helens volcano. As a boy, he lived with his Finnish grandparents on a small farm—Finnish was his first language. He was an excellent student, and eventually won a much-need Weyerhaeuser scholarship to Oregon State University. After graduation with a degree in history, a Woodrow Wilson fellowship enabled him to begin work toward a graduate degree in European History at Cornell University. He spent a year in Paris, then returned to the US in the fall of 1963, where he was offered and he accepted a teaching position as an Instructor at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa.
[edit] SDS involvement
In the Fall of 1965, with about a dozen others, Greg started a local chapter at Iowa State University of the budding Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). He left that post with Jane Addams, the National Secretary, in the Spring of 1966. Greg was himself elected National Secretary that summer at the 1966 convention at Clear Lake, Iowa. His election was part of the "prairie power" move of the organization away from the East Coast Jewish crowd who had largely controlled the organization up to then. He played an important part in how the March on the Pentagon in 1968 unfolded—he prevented a suicidal charge by the demonstrators on the soldiers guarding the entrance of the Pentagon by persuading them to sit down instead. He was a pacifist who believed in non-violent methods of confrontation, and left SDS when it split into the Progressive Labor Party and Weatherman factions later that year.
[edit] Later years
Calvert had a lifelong interest in Buddhism, and set up a practice as a Buddhist psychotherapist in the late 1970's. He finished his doctoral studies at UC Santa Cruz in "History of Consciousness." Calvert and Ken Carpenter, his partner from 1977 until his death, established an intensive Spanish language school, Casa Xalteva, in Granada, Nicaragua in 1995. He died of complications from diabetes and lung disease in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 2005.
[edit] Books by Gregory Calvert
- Democracy from the Heart: Spiritual Values, Decentralism, and Democratic Idealism in the Movement of the 1960s Comunitas Press (1991) ISBN 0-9628800-0-0
- A Disrupted History: The New Left and the New Capitalism co-author Carol Neiman. Random House (1971) ISBN 0-394-46267-X
[edit] References
- Sale, Kirkpatrick. SDS: Ten Years Towards a Revolution New York: Vintage Books (1974) ISBN 0-394-71965-4. It is available online: [2]
- Calvert, Greg Democracy from the Heart: Spiritual Values, Decentralism, and Democratic Idealism in the Movement of the 1960s
