When the hour was over, they didn’t want to leave. The bus driver had to come in and practically drag them to the bus. Their teacher shook my hand and said it was a fine hour. He said he wished the time had been longer. Three of the students hung back. They wanted to have their picture taken with me. I dug it. One of their buddies cranked off a few snaps of us all together, and we made nice on each other and they split. I wasn’t worried about their evaluation sheets.
I looked at Glenn Ray.
I’ve grown sensitive to the look of hate these last few years. I looked at Glenn Ray. He hated me.
The Program Director of the Dayton Living Arts Center hated me. I didn’t know why, but later, talking to a member of the faculty (and for the benefit of Mr. Ray and Mr. DeVelbiss, who insist they don’t want to fire Miss Benham for having had the wretched judgment to bring me in as a guest artist, despite the prevalent fears of everyone at the Center that that was precisely what they wanted to do, it is not Miss Benham to whom I refer here), I was told that Mr. Ray, even though he is the man most directly responsible for what happens to the kids, relates poorly to them. I was also told I made Ray angry, and that I’d capped it by getting along so well with the black kids. Though a Negro himself, it seems Mr. Ray can’t talk to blacks the way I did.
I didn’t think it mattered. Not till later that day, only a few hours before I was to deliver the public lecture for adults and college students that had been advertised for weeks. It was at that point that Glenn Ray’s fear of “wave making” melded with his hatred of your gentle columnist, and he pulled the plug. Spiro Agnew bit Glenn Ray and…
He canceled my speech.
And that’s when it hit the fan, friends.
52: 23 JANUARY 70
POISONED BY THE FANGS OF SPIRO: CONCLUSION
A wound neither as deep as a Chicago Conspiracy Trial nor as wide as two US Army sergeants being removed from their Armed Forces Radio posts when they told their audience that they were being censored and could not tell the troops what was really happening in the War. Neither as final as the silencing of Lenny Bruce…nor as significant as the attempted whitewash of My Lai before the evidence piled up so high it couldn’t be denied (though Time reported last week that 54% of the American people still refuse to believe it happened); neither as painful as the police moving in on a recent Allen Ginsberg reading and first cutting off his mike, then putting on Muzak so he could not be heard…nor as destructive as a Century City Riot; neither as debilitating as canceling Joyce Miller’s Encounter from KPFK because she was sniping at the Administration…nor as horrendous as the Smothers Brothers being flushed out of sight; neither as permanent as the silencing of Seale, Cleaver, King, Malcolm X, JFK, RFK or George Lincoln Rockwell…nor as ghastly as court-martialing soldiers who protest. But when Glenn Ray panicked at the two or three phone calls he’d gotten from parents of students to whom I’d spoken, parents who didn’t want their kids to hear any opinions but ones approved by the Good Housekeeping seal…when he grew terrified that his petty sinecure at the Center was in danger…when he realized that after the defeat of the school bond levy he was in a vulnerable position…when push came to shove and he had to suddenly stand behind the free speech and dissent he had so liberally championed to all those kids…the poison from the fangs of Spiro took effect, and he canceled me out.
What happened next happened so fast, some of it may have been rumor, some of it may have been nightmare, some of it may have been reality, and some of it will stick with those kids for the rest of their lives.
I was in a workshop session with John Baskin’s science fiction writing class when Barbara Benham—the creative writing director who’d hired me—stuck her head in and asked me to step into the hall. “Glenn Ray canceled your speech for tonight,” she said.
I grew very calm. Two thousand years of racial memory of pogroms took over and I grew very calm.
“Well, let’s just go talk to Mr. Ray and see what’s happening,” I said.
The kids spilled out into the hall behind us. “What’s happening?” they asked. “What’s going on?”
“Go on back inside,” I said. “Glenn Ray canceled the lecture tonight. We’re going to go to his office and see if we can straighten it out. I’ll come back and tell you what went down.” They looked startled, uncertain and—unless you’ve seen it in the eyes of kids 12 to 16 years old you won’t know how it can chew on your heart—frightened.
“He can’t do that?!” yelled one girl.
I smiled my best Robert-Culp-going-into-combat smile. Little baby, you have no idea how easily he can do that.
We went to Ray’s office, Miss Benham and myself.
He was sitting behind his desk. Jack DeVelbiss, the Administrative Director, was conveniently out of town or hiding out or comatose, god only knew what. So this was Ray’s play, all by his lonesome. There was no love lost between us (and all this in two days). He had openly implied to other faculty members that despite the fact that Miss Benham was living elsewhere while I used her apartment for my stay in Dayton, there was something seedy and clandestine about it. Mr. Ray was lucky he never said that in front of her boy friend, John Baskin, who could separate Mr. Ray’s tibia and fibula like a chicken leg without too much effort. He had evinced dislike for me that stemmed—I was told by another faculty member—from my “weird” clothes, my constant talk of sex, my seeming refusal to deal with him as an authority figure, and because of that strange class (strange to him, that is) in which I’d been able to relate to, and communicate with, black kids though Ray, nominally Negro, could not. So there we were, nose to nose.
What he said and what he meant were studies in the art of lying rationally, justifying evil in the name of good, and otherwise burning down the Reich stag himself so Spiro Hitler could acquire the reins of power.
“What seems to be the trouble?” I asked him.
“I’m canceling the balance of your contract here.”
“Oh, really? How come?”
“I’ve decided you don’t have the best interests of the Center at heart,” is what he said. I’ve decided you are making waves, saying things that will get the parents looking at us more closely, is what he thought.
“You aren’t relating to the children,” is what he said. You’re getting through to them and they’re going back home and asking questions and I’m getting phone calls, is what he thought.
“You’re turning a lot of them off,” is what he said. You’re turning me off, is what he thought.
“You’re not fulfilling the role of a guest artist here,” is what he said. You weren’t supposed to talk politics or start trouble, is what he thought.
“I can’t take a chance on your delivering a talk tonight that will cause the Center trouble. Our position is very uncertain right now,” is what he said. I’m scared shitless you’ll offend the Middle Americans and I’ll lose my job, is what he thought.
“Anything else?” I said.
“Yes; frankly, you have a foul mouth. It doesn’t offend me, you understand, but it has turned off some of the children.”
I quote to you now from an article in the Dayton Journal Herald dated 17 December 69, headlined ARTS CENTER CANCELS WRITER (pars. 8 & 9). “Students who were with Ellison at the center yesterday said his blunt language might have been interpreted by Ray as offensive.
“‘He used a couple of beauties,” a student said regarding Ellison’s speech, “but it didn’t bother anyone.’”
What Ray said to me, and what he meant, were light-years apart.
“We’ll pay you the balance of your fee,” Ray said. He had to. We had a contract. “Thank you, but I don’t think I’ll accept it,” I answered. “Just my expenses will do.”
“Great,” grinned Ray. “We can use the money.”
I suddenly had the feeling my ethics had made me a patsy. Even so, I suggested to him that he was being hasty, and that if he felt the night’s lecture was going to be a debacle, I’d show him the material I’d prepared
: an essay on creativity, a short story in the form of a fantasy about returning to one’s childhood, and some anecdotes. “My mind is made up,” he said.
“You don’t want any facts to get in the way, is that it?” I asked.
“You’re turning the children off,” he said.
It was the one thing that could stop me cold. I bit on it, despite that photo in the Dayton Daily News of the session at which the kids were rocking with laughter. What I didn’t know was that in the Evaluation Sheets that had been given out to the black students from Dunbar High School and their teacher, I’d been lauded as having delivered a wild, groovy hour talk, and they wanted to come back again. Had I known that, I would not have acquiesced so quietly.
But after all, he was the Director, wasn’t he? He knew what went down with the kids. Didn’t he? Sure he did.
So I went back to John Baskin’s class, and told him and the kids what had happened.
The next thing I knew, there was a children’s crusade.
(Bear in mind, these are not seasoned dissenters of whom I write. They are kids from twelve years old on up to maybe sixteen, middle-class mid-American, never been in a protest scene, never been beaten on by police clubs.)
They stormed Glenn Ray’s office.
“You can’t talk like a liberal and then cop out!” one girl shrieked.
“If this is the way you’re gonna live up to what you tell us, you can take your Center and shove it up your ass!” howled a boy of fifteen, then he turned so we wouldn’t see him crying, and stormed out of the building.
Little Nancy Henry, not yet in her teens, daughter of a Dayton policeman, began weeping, trying to get her voice high enough to yell, “You can’t do this! You can’t! We won’t let you!”
One black kid summed it up, to Ray. “Man, you talk the talk, but you don’t walk the walk.”
I didn’t want a bad scene, and I heard Barbara Benham urging them to go back to the classroom, to wait for their protest. Some did, some didn’t. Many hung around outside Glenn Ray’s office. At this point my mind went away, and so did my lust for reportorial accuracy.
Did they throw Glenn Ray out of his office and take it over? Did Ray call the police on the little kids? I’ve got three different stories, all of them culminating in a riot. I went back to Benham’s apartment and later that night a mass of people who had come in from Antioch and Columbus and other cities came and sat around on the floor and looked woebegone. They all kept telling me, “This isn’t what Dayton’s like…honest!”
But it is, friends. It is also what College Station, Texas’s like and Altoona, Pennsylvania and Madeira Beach, Florida and Seattle, Washington and Wheatland, Wyoming. It is the time of the Middle Americans, friends. It is the day of the Silent Majority.
And we are moving into a period of repression that will make the McCarthy era seem like the Age of Enlightenment. I said that was the theme of this three-parter way back at the beginning of this outpouring, and as soon as I give you a few more loose ends on Dayton I’ll deal with Spiro, tv, the wave of fear that’s backlashing us, and try to pry some sense out of the rubble.
That night, after the mourners left, John Baskin, Barbara Benham and I sat and talked. We talked about John’s fury at what had happened, and how he had used the riotous scene to make some strong points with the kids about liberalism meaning nothing if you fold when the pressure’s on. We talked about Ray’s intentions of getting Barbara fired, and how it had been that, more than anything, that had kept me from putting Ray against the wall. We talked about the sudden appearance at the evening’s wake of Hugh McDiarmid, City Editor of the Journal Herald, and his amazing remark: “I wanted to meet you, Ellison. My god, you’re awfully small to have caused all this trouble.” We talked about my speaking to the final session of the science fiction workshop the next day
…in the Benham apartment.
The next day there was even more talk. But it all went on at the Center, with DeVelbiss and Ray talking to the faculty, talking to Barbara Benham, talking to the newspapers (the headline reads LIVING ARTS GUEST ‘DIDN’T FULFILL ROLE’), talking to each other and very probably talking to themselves.
Finally, I got a delayed case of being pissed-off. Here were these two “administrators,” down there at the Center, bumrapping me and telling the world their idiotic position was justified because I was a moral leper. I decided to really make waves. But when I finally confronted Ray and DeVelbiss in the Center, it was apparent if I pursued my plan—to insist they pay me the full fourteen hundred dollar fee, and use it to hire Asher Bogen, Dayton’s best attorney, and sue them for defamation of character and anything else I could think of—they would fire Barbara Benham out of serendipitous vengefulness. I backed off. In fact, I offered to stay on, at my own expense, and provide them with an opportunity to get off the hook by doing the evening lecture two days later, from material I would submit for their scrutiny.
But their position was so inflexible, they were unable to back off; thereby demonstrating the most debilitating aspect of educational confrontations: inability to mediate, refusal to deal, concretization of posture because of a need to preserve ego and authority.
So we made a deal, of sorts, after the following conversation:
ELLISON: I’ll take my money.
DeVELBISS: You turned it down when it was offered.
ELLISON: I changed my mind. I have a use for it now.
DeVELBISS: I don’t have to pay someone fourteen hundred dollars to come in here and curse and cause trouble. If I want to do that, I can do it myself, for free.
ELLISON: Yeah, but you were dumb enough to hire me to do it.
There was quite a lot more, and some threats, and some Raymond Chandler hardnosing, in which Mr. Ray understood that after I broke every bone in his body (though on reappraisal I realize if I’d broken him open, all I’d have gotten would have been jelly on my hands) I would sue him. Not the Center, but him, personally, so he’d have no Board of Education money behind him. And after that I’d speak to a friend of mine quite high in the Health, Education and Welfare Department, and I’d make sure that they cut back the funds of the Center just enough to have to dispense with him…nothing else, just him. So they paid me.
And they promised they wouldn’t fire Barbara Benham.
And, of course, they are honorable men. “So are they all, all honourable men—”
And so, I left Dayton.
Neither as significant as the mass of current attempts to stifle dissent
…nor as permanent as the crimes committed against those who have spoken out, my Dayton foray was one with the terrors of these new times. What came out of those three days in mid-December? Only this:
John Baskin, who taught the sf class, who stood up and told the administration they were wrong, who tried to pursue the matter in articles for his newspaper, the Dayton Daily News, who inspired his class kids with discussions of just what freedom of expression means—John Baskin was fired from the newspaper. Perhaps there’s no connection. But…
Barbara Benham, who taught classes on revolution and the joys of being a “free spirit”—Barbara Benham has been cowed. Something has been stolen from her, at the precise moment it fell to her (as it falls to each of us) to discover whether she had enough courage to lose everything for that in which she believed…she found she did not.
The kids no longer trust Glenn Ray or the administration of the Center. They have been blunted once again with the knowledge that those who prattle about serving them, opening them, helping them—are merely exploiting them for their own personal aggrandizement. Those kids will be a trifle more cynical and bitter now.
What came out of those three days was ugliness, cupidity, irrationality and, in microcosm, provides a key to the days into which we are moving.
Time picked the Middle Americans as their man and woman of the year. It picked them because Spiro Agnew and television have forged out of the fears and prejudices and know-nothing provincialism of the mass of midd
le-class Americans an army of dupes, to be used to destroy the very freedoms those people say they most respect. Repression, in the name of platitudes, is what destroyed half of Europe in the Thirties and Forties. It is what gave Joseph McCarthy his power. It is what has kept us fighting a senseless war for half a decade. It is the systematic terrorization of those who—like Barbara Benham—have found it is easier to be a little bit frightened all the time, to acquiesce, to survive, than to ask the right questions, take the right chances, and discover for themselves that they are stronger than their puppet masters.
I watched William Buckley last Sunday, talking to three bright young men concerned with Our Times. He was glib, he was clever, and he made them look silly. But he dealt only with words. To hear him tell it, everything they chose to worry about—pollution, prejudice, repression, duplicity on the part of governments, censorship—all these were in their minds. It was merely a matter of using the right words. Even as Glenn Ray and Jack DeVelbiss and the man who fired John Baskin use words. They say we are “not doing the job,” or we are “foul mouthed,” or we “don’t have the best interests of the Center at heart,” but these are just syntax. They are obfuscations. They are the eyewash used by men of weak will and frightened demeanor to keep the status quo free of waves.
And through the use of the greatest propaganda medium the world has ever known, television, the puppet masters are duping an entire nation. The thousands of letters in support of Spiro Agnew and his denunciation of newscasters who report any news but that which the Administration finds balming to its ego is eloquent testimony to the success of the hoodwinking.
It is significant, I think, that on December 3rd the Writers Guild took a gutsy stand against Agnew and his pronouncements. Their press release said, in part:
The Glass Teat Page 28
