Patrick Michael Quinn 1942-2025

Robert Bartlett

FIRST MET Patrick in 1972 in Madison, Wisconsin when we were both members of a rank-and-file union caucus. He had joined his first labor union a dozen years earlier, when he was a senior in high school and worked part-time for the post office.

His childhood was not a Norman Rockwell image. The reason his grandparents raised him was that both his parents were absent — his father abandoned his mother, and his mother was committed to a mental institution where she was subjected to treatments that are now considered medical experimentation at best. These details he only learned after entering college.

In 1960 he left his grandparents and uncle in Lake Geneva to attend Whitewater State University. There he joined the Peace Studies Club and was won to socialism by the faculty advisor, Jim Flynn.

Two years later he moved to the University of Wisconsin in Madison. The following account of his political evolution and experience in the regrowth of the left during the 1960s has been taken largely from his excellent article on that period.

When he moved to Madison, Patrick was able to enter a small milieu of radicals, leftist academics and students who were children of CP members. He observed that the radical movement was predominantly Jewish in heritage and from large urban settings like New York. He called himself a fish out of water and was one of the few goys in the small radical left.

He joined a Socialist club and for the next few years was part of this semi-bohemian setting where he was introduced to folk music and foreign films, which the University Union would show in their small theater. His first wife, Marty Quinn, mother of their two daughters, was a folksinger and also a lifelong socialist.

Civil Rights and Anti-War Movements

The political climate began to change with the growth of the Civil Rights movement and the fight to end segregation. After the 1964 murder of three Civil Rights workers in Mississippi he went to Selma, Alabama where he later participated in the famous march over the Edmund Pettis bridge.

This was a turning point in his life where he made decisions, like dropping out of graduate school, to turn to politics fully. He concurrently joined Friends of SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) and the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).

In addition to holding forums and rallies, SDS decided to test the ban that had been in place at the university since Senator Joe McCarthy began his anti-Communist ravings a decade and a half earlier. They invited the Communist Party to send a speaker and then widely publicized the meeting. With Claude Lightfoot, an African American Communist, the featured speaker, SDS filled Tripp Commons in the Student Union to capacity and reclaimed the right of free speech.

This was also when the United States was escalating its involvement in Vietnam and the movement to oppose the war began. Patrick participated in the raging debate over whether the movement should call for negotiations or immediate withdrawal. Soon after he joined the Socialist Workers Party’s youth group, the Young Socialist Alliance, which called for withdrawal.

Later I was amazed as he related the story of how, based upon a cold call to Mohammed Ali, he and the YSA were able to get Ali to speak to a packed crowd on the campus. I suspect he might have made the call, as he was always confident and seldom at a loss for words.

Those were heady times as the anti-war movement grew rapidly. By 1968, when I enrolled at UW in Madison, hundreds would turn up for meetings and thousands for demonstrations. Even the traditionally conservative fraternity and sorority houses joined marches down Langdon Street.

A change in attitude within the movement occurred following the summer of 1970. SDS, the largest component of the youth radicalization, splintered and dissolved in an internal struggle. Then a group of four, calling themselves the New Years Gang, dropped a dud of a bomb at the Badger Ammunition factory and shortly afterwards set off a car bomb. It killed a researcher who worked in the campus physics building that also housed the Army Math Research Center. and injuring three others. None were connected to the center.

 This had a dampening effect on local campus activism. Yet one of SDS’s remnants, the Weather Underground, engaged in a similar set of actions aimed at “bringing the war home.” This was not the direction that anti-war activists wanted to follow.

The Long Decline

While the spectacular implosion of SDS preceded the gradual decline of the anti-war movement, the political groups that proliferated and grew expanded their work into the women’s and labor movements along with the emerging movement for gay liberation. Yet the relatively universal growth of all political tendencies slowed, and as the work became more diversified each group faced new challenges.

Revolutionary possibilities in Central America — El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua — were developing. With the victory of the Sandinista Revolution in 1979 the United States began an aggressive effort to defeat the Nicaraguan Revolution and prevent the Salvadoran revolutionary movement from advancing.

As the Reagan administration funded the contra war against Nicaragua, Patrick was key in putting together a local group to oppose the U.S. intervention throughout the region. The Evanston Committee on Central America was active for over a decade, leafleting, holding forums and always marching in the Fourth of July parade with anti-war banners.

Along with challenges and opportunities, often a vigorous, sometimes factional debate within the left broke out with the all-too-common result of expulsions and splits. By the end of the 1970s only the most monolithic groups remained outside this experience.

This period of decline and factionalism was present in our orbit as well. Differences which had been present in the SWP since the early ’70s became factionalized. By the mid 1980s expulsions from the SWP resulted in an unsustainably small group, Socialist Unity.

In looking for partners, we were interested in finding a political convergence where we could agree on major principles: class independence, a socialism that is democratic, international, and feminist, the right of self-determination against national/racial oppression, a commitment to overcoming all oppression and a political belief in building working-class power “from below.”

The result was Solidarity, a merger of three groups and a collective with lineages in the Trotskyist past. Although differences that went back to the late 1930s over characterizing the class nature of the Soviet Union remained, we decided they were not particularly relevant to current politics. But before we developed a new synthesis, the USSR dissolved.

Instead, we had a common appreciation of the negative effects of factional warfare that led to splits and expulsions over inflating differences. We agreed to work together while continuing to discuss different appreciations of the current situation.

Patrick played a role as part of the national Solidarity leadership and organizer of the Chicago branch as we continued to look for partners in the larger left. We sought groups of similar lineages as well as those from a Maoist origin. But despite the search, the effort came up short.

Life as an Activist, and Beyond

Patrick was an archivist at Northwestern University and particularly interested in collecting recollections from leftists. That position allowed him to meet visiting scholars who wandered into his office; he quickly ascertained if they were lefties.

He not only introduced me to a former English rail worker but pursuaded me to take him to my local rail union meeting. Another person he met was Marco d’Eramo from Italy’s Il Manifesto current. D’Eramo was in Chicago researching a book that became The Pig and The Skyscraper, a political analysis of the growth of the city and what it portends for industrial capitalism.

Patrick was also a key asset in lining up speakers for Solidarity forums. These including people with reputations far beyond the city, including Ernest Mandel and Daniel Singer. He cultivated relationships with political authors like Mike Davis and with his favorite fiction writer, Frederick Exley.

He taught classes at Loyola and Dominican, was active in professional archivist/librarian organizations and the founder of the Midwest Archivists Convention.

He wrote a biography of Albert Goldman for his Masters thesis and throughout his life wrote poetry, letters, short stories and even a novel or two. One of the novels, The Storking, was written in tandem with a friend, as they alternated chapters. I’m pretty sure this was done as a diversion from work. I can’t speak to his talent, but his willingness to experiment in fields away from his wheelhouse showed his self-confidence.

On a few occasions he would recite his poems, again a testament to his willingness to expand beyond what would normally be expected of a political activist.

He was friendly with the African American painter Achibald Motley, and was said to have hung out with Nelson Algren. For many years he maintained season tickets for both UW Madison and Northwestern football games and of course was a Green Bay Packers fan.

After he retired he and his wife of 40 years, Mary Janzen, moved back to Lake Geneva where they bought the modest family house he grew up in. He became a columnist for the local newspaper and spent much of his time researching and writing about local history. He scoured archives and cemeteries for news of his own family. Building a social circle in Lake Geneva, they also participated in the Milwaukee branch of Solidarity.

Patrick was devoted to his two daughters, Abra and Rachel, Rachel’s spouse Tim Marshall and his two grandchildren Ruby and Rosie. He and Mary would drive to Oakland to visit every year where he would grill the granddaughters on geography, including the state capitals — an ordeal they both dreaded and fondly recalled.

He was also devoted to Mary; they traveled to England regularly where they would call on friends in London and Brighton before heading to the Lake Country. Once while they were in England, she became ill. He felt the transport he’d arranged to get her back home managed to save her life.

His loyalty extended to his political family, including comrades he had worked with years earlier and whose paths may have diverged from his own. His affection survived political disagreements. Happily he would write letters of recommendation, help people get jobs, and be a critical eye on the work of academic friends.

His pipe a constant fixture, he lived a ife of politics, lifelong friendships, a love of literature and new adventures. Many people describe him as a legendary character, a garrulous raconteur. Above all, he remains someone who saw the emergence of a vibrant left develop from the wasteland of the ’50s and believed there would be another resurgence of the left.

January-February 2026, ATC 240