I considered myself a strong liberal, leaning to the radical, in politics. I thought John F. Kennedy, for example, a sell-out; another pretty face but business as usual, little more. I thought American society deeply philistine. Backed by the books of H. L. Mencken and Sinclair Lewis, I thought the middle class, though it was the class of my origin and upbringing, hollow and hypocritical. If you had said to me, as my father used sometimes to say that “you can’t argue with success,” if you meant success in America, I would have answered that I knew of nothing better to argue with.
Living in the South in 1963–64, I was, at the age of 26, director of the anti-Poverty Program for Little Rock, Arkansas, and its surrounding county. As such I befriended and worked with the local chapter of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the courage of whose members in facing down angry southern police and their German police dogs I much admired. When I say “worked with” I mean I gave local SNCC leaders advice on how to secure federal funds for their own political causes. I felt myself on their side as I did on the side of all blacks whose lives in the south were clearly stunted by inferior education and other segregationist arrangements. I was impressed by Lyndon Johnson, whom I thought of as John F. Kennedy minus the Camelot baloney and with real political savvy added.
The first inkling I had of feeling uncomfortable with the sixties was when graduate students from Columbia, Barnard, and NYU came down to Little Rock, supposedly to aid the black cause. A few taught at the city’s two impoverished Negro colleges, Philander Smith and Shorter; others worked on SNCC projects. They were fundamentally unserious, I thought, spending a summer doing moral tourism. One among them, a young woman, called me at my anti-Poverty office to notify me that a protest march was planned that afternoon at the state capital building and that I was expected to attend.
“If I do,” I said, “I would have to give up my job and with it any possible further usefulness I might have.”
“You’re either with us or not,” she replied, and hung up.
Not long after I left Little Rock, Stokely Carmichael, one of the leaders of SNCC, announced that the time had come for the Civil Rights Movement to declare for Black Power, which meant white participation was no longer welcome and which put an end to the integrated movement that had until then had such splendid momentum. Thus the first and last great moral movement of my lifetime—“moral” in the sense that it set out to right clear wrongs and its appeal through moral suasion was to the best nature of Americans—ended, heartbreakingly, in shambles, never to regain its former strength or standing.
I would encounter something of this same moral righteousness that I found in the New York students come down to join the civil rights movement among the young at my next job. This began in 1965 in Chicago, where I was a senior editor of Encyclopaedia Britannica. The spirit at Britannica was preponderantly liberal, in a largely admirable way. One editor there remained in his home in the South Shore neighborhood long after the neighborhood had become nearly all black. Another, an older woman, had moved into a deliberately and carefully integrated apartment complex on the near South side called Prairie Shores to show that not only her heart but her entire body was in the right place.
The younger editors at Britannica were differently disposed, keener on symbolic behavior than on committed actions. The smell of pot wafted in the back stairwells at Britannica. Anti-Americanism was part of coffee-break conversation. One among these younger editors used to say about anyone he found loathsome, “He’s a great American.”
I began teaching in the English Department at Northwestern University in 1973. The Vietnam War was over, and so, one might think, was the sixties. But the universities, where much of the tumult had begun, was among the first of the country’s institutions to continue to feel the effects of the era in a powerful way. The significance of the university in keeping alive the spirit of the sixties can scarcely be overestimated. The reason, of course, is that members of the sixties generation for the past 40 or so years have been the preponderant teachers of college students, and have imbued many of these students with their own sixties-formed views.
The university culture I entered as a teacher in 1973 was vastly different than the one I had known as a student two decades earlier at the University of Chicago. An almost militant informality now reigned. Younger professors taught in jeans and tee shirts. They called their students by their first names, and in some instances their students returned the compliment. Student evaluations, one of the small victories of the student uprisings, were now installed, so that at the end of every term a professor was, in effect, graded by his students. This put being lively, as opposed to be being thorough or serious, at a premium.
Course titles—“Television Commercials as Poetry,” “Science Fiction in the Real World”—began to sound more like uninteresting magazine articles than university courses. Marxism, disqualified elsewhere in the world, found a home in contemporary English departments. Fresh political interpretations of traditional works were everywhere on offer. Shakespeare turned up gay in one classroom, a running dog of 17th-century English imperialism in another. A graduate student once came to me to ask if I thought David Copperfield “a sexual criminal.” She went on to explain that the man who taught the Victorian novel in our department thought he was because he had contributed to his first wife’s death in childbirth—contributed, that is, by making her pregnant in the first place. Not nice to knock a colleague, no matter how nutty or stupid he might be. “We sleep tonight, Ms. Jones,” I replied, “criticism stands guard,” and walked off.
“Question Authority,” another shibboleth of the sixties, took a direct toll on universities, where intellectual authority was formerly, quite properly, at the heart of things. In an earlier era, the chairman of an academic department was the most distinguished man, less often woman, in the department. In what the sixties academic rebels would view as the bad old days, he set the tone and more important the standard, in scholarship, conduct, seriousness generally. If a young instructor wished to teach a course in, say, the Beat Generation or the novels of Kurt Vonnegut, the chairman, was likely to say sorry, but such subjects fall below the line of serious literary study. Besides, students could read such stuff outside the classroom on their own without pedagogical aid.
Now, with the chairman being someone who has agreed to take on the job, with all its pettifogging administrative tasks, only because it meant as a reward he could lighten his teaching load or take an earlier sabbatical, no one, really, is at the helm. Now there is unlikely to be anyone to tell a teacher he can’t do the course in “Star Wars and the Literature of Apocalypse.” Owing to the sixties, conduct became, and has remained, free-floating, with everyone in business for himself. Any outside interference with what goes on in the classroom or outside of it with students is likely to be viewed, incorrectly but firmly, as an infringement of academic freedom, as if the right to egregious behavior and politicizing courses were what academic freedom is about.
Midway in my teaching career at Northwestern, a woman named Barbara Foley arrived to teach in the English Department. She was a no-bones-about-it Marxist. At Northwestern she openly proselytized undergraduate students, ushering them into a group she called INCAR, or International Committee Against Racism. Everyone knew about this proselytizing; nobody stood ready to object. Only when she allowed, after organizing a shout-down of a Nicaraguan Contra speaker, that the man didn’t have a right to speak—in fact, she said he deserved to die—and that First Amendment rights didn’t apply to him did she get into difficulties. None of this, not even her turgid Marxist writings, got in the way of her being offered tenure by the Northwestern English Department. When the university’s provost, an honorable and earnest traditional liberal named Raymond W. Mack, denied approval of her tenure on the grounds of her uncivil behavior, many of her colleagues among the faculty protested. The Modern Language Association, by this time itself vastly politicized, beseeched No
rthwestern to reverse its decision, though under another man of principle, the school’s then-president Arnold Weber, the school did not back down. It held that anyone who acted on the belief that he or she didn’t believe in free speech was not a worthy citizen of a serious university. Foley is still in business, now a distinguished professor at Rutgers, unaltered in her politics, still arising each morning hoping to greet the revolution.
A few of Foley’s converted students wandered into one or another of my courses at Northwestern, and a rigid and dreary cadre they were, little lunatics of one idea, seeing the exploitation of the workers, blacks, not least themselves, everywhere. Soon enough they were joined by the academic feminists, whose one idea was that current arrangements were everywhere stacked against women, with the cure for this being more courses featuring Virginia Woolf, Kate Chopin, and other women writers, and a more thoughtful disposition of pronouns and suffixes, and an end to what they called “phallocentrism.” I retired from university teaching before the Queer Theorists took hold, multiculturalism kicked in, and victimology became the real and staple subject of so many university courses in the humanities and social sciences. But of course the way had been prepared for all this by what you might call the enforced tolerance of the sixties.
In the sixties, the adversary culture, a term first used by Lionel Trilling, and standing for an academic milieu opposed to the prevailing mainstream, itself came close to becoming the mainstream. One of the chief inheritances from the sixties was the death of traditional liberalism, a liberalism devoted to public justice, political equality, economic opportunity, and honorable disagreement with opponents—the liberalism of such politicians as Hubert Humphrey, such writers as John Steinbeck, such intellectuals as Lionel Trilling himself.
If the sixties killed liberalism, it also did a pretty good job on adulthood. Most men and women who went through the sixties even now find it difficult to oppose any doctrine or behavior that is leftist in its origins or inspirations, for to do so would be to betray their youth. Among his many wise political apothegms, Orwell wrote that liberals fear few things more than being outflanked on the left. In the 1930s, this fear brought many liberals into the Communist Party, put them on the side of the Stalinists in Spain, caused them to overlook the monstrousness of Lenin and sanitize the cruelty of Trotsky, and turn the Democratic Party over to identity politics. History has never been an effective teacher, and so 30 and more years later, liberals, out of fear of being outflanked once again, everywhere gave way to radicals, so that dogmatic academic feminism, victimological African-American Studies, and the rest found a secure place in the first watering and then dumbing down and thorough politicizing of university study that eventually seeped through the general culture.
Scratch a man of the sixties, who now himself may well be in his seventies, and you will discover someone who feels a continuing, if in however lingering a form, allegiance to the era of his youth. Youth is the keyword here. The great promise of the sixties was to snatch the world from the stodgy and dodgy old, and make it anew for the ebullient young. I occasionally see men I taught with who are now in their late sixties and early seventies who dress as if still students. They carry backpacks, wear baseball hats backwards, are in jeans and gym shoes—in what I think of as in youth drag. But for their lined faces, gray hair—and the occasionally heartbreakingly sad gray ponytail—they might themselves be students. Clearly they intend to go from juvenility to senility, with no stops in between.
The price of the sixties was the death of a once-admirable liberalism and the eclipse of adulthood. Some would say, considering the broadening of American society overall, it was well worth it. Your call. Rorschach Tests, after all, aren’t graded.
University of Chicago Days
(2017)
“Everyone was neurotic, weird, bizarre—it was paradise.”
—Mike Nichols
The fortuitous, happening by accident or chance and not by design, a word never to be confused with the fortunate, plays a larger role in people’s lives than they might think. Certainly it has in my own.
When I was in the Army, stationed at Fort Hood, Texas, I learned that there were openings for typists at recruiting stations in Little Rock, Arkansas, and Shreveport, Louisiana. I applied, and one morning soon after was told that I had been selected for one of these jobs. I met with a southern staff sergeant, a man I judged to be not long on patience, who said, “Take your choice, Shreveport or Little Rock.” I had a nano-second to reply. Shreveport, I thought, Louisiana, good food, Catholic, possibly interesting illicit goings-on; Little Rock, Governor Faubus in power, politically volatile, closer to Chicago. “Little Rock, Sergeant,” I said. Subsequently, in Little Rock, I met and married and had two children with my first wife. What, I have often wondered since, if I had said “Shreveport, Sergeant?”
I had more time to think about going to the University of Chicago, but my thoughts about the place were scarcely more informed than my thoughts about Little Rock and Shreveport. Even though I lived in Chicago all my life, I had never seen the place, with its fake but nonetheless grand gray Gothic buildings. In Chicago one lived in one’s neighborhood as if in a village, and my village, West Rogers Park, in the far north of the city was as far from the University of Chicago and still in Chicago as it was possible to be. The University of Chicago was reputed to be radical, some said “pinko,” meaning vaguely communist. This reputation derived, I learned much later, from the school’s president, Robert Hutchins, making it clear that he wasn’t going to be pushed around by Senator Joseph McCarthy and his crude anti-Communism. Hutchins had also eliminated the school’s Big Ten football team and installed a program, known jokingly as Hutchins’s Children’s Crusade, that allowed students as young as fifteen to matriculate at the university. The word “nerdy” not yet having come into existence, people who went to Chicago were in those days thought “brainy.”
Brainy was the last thing I would ever have been called. A thoroughly uninterested high school student—I graduated 169 in a class of 211—my high school years were spent playing basketball and tennis, pursuing girls, and establishing myself as a good guy, which is to say, as a genial screw-off. When it came time to go to college, my father, a successful businessman who left high school in Montreal at seventeen to move to Chicago, told me he would pay for my college, but he wondered if my going to college weren’t perhaps a waste of time. He thought I would be a terrific salesman. Since that is what he was, there was a compliment implicit in the thought. He may well have been right on both counts, but I decided that, like most of my friends, I should give college a shot.
In those days, the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, had, in effect, open enrollment, at least if you were a resident of the state. You could have three felonies and graduate last in your class and the school still had to take you, on probation, to be sure, but take you they did. So, without anything resembling study habits, having read no book of greater complexity than that of The Amboy Dukes, without a single intellectual interest, with no goal in mind but, hope against hope, to avoid flunking out, in 1955 I mounted the train at Chicago’s Twelfth Street station for Champaign-Urbana.
I had never heard the term liberal arts until I arrived at the University of Illinois. And then I heard of it as a way out of majoring in business, which most of the boys I hung around with did, no doubt to establish their seriousness, both to their families and to themselves. I did know enough about myself to realize that the dreariness of accounting courses and the rest of it would have paralyzed me with boredom. (“Lloydie,” the successful immigrant father of a friend of mine is supposed to have said to his son, who evinced an interest in accounting, “don’t be a schmuck. You don’t study accounting. You hire an accountant.”)
My first year courses at the University of Illinois included Biology, French, Rhetoric (really freshman composition), physical education, and ROTC, the latter two being requirements at a land grant college.
Biology in those pre-DNA days meant little more than distinguishing among and memorizing the phyla. French meant memorizing, too, irregular verbs and the rest. I was too unsophisticated to known that my instructor, a man named Philip Kolb, was the editor of the French Plon edition of Proust’s letters, for which he won a prize from the Academie Francaise and the legion of honor. I made it through Rhetoric by steering clear of anything tricky; and tricky at that time meant using a semi-colon or dash or attempting a sentence longer than twelve words. I got mostly Bs.
Bs were good enough to get me into the University of Chicago. This was in part because my generation—those of us born late in the Depression—was a small population cohort, so small that the universities actually wanted us. Then, too, Chicago, for reasons I’ve mentioned, was not a particularly popular place for undergraduates. When I was there, I believe there were fewer than 2,000 undergraduates alongside more than 6,000 graduate and professional students. I remember awaiting word about my admission, and when, by late April, none arrived, I drove to the university to inquire about it from the dean of students, a man named Robert Strozier. “Wait a minute,” he said, went to a file cabinet, pulled out a folder that he quickly glimpsed, and said, “Yes, you can come if you like.”
I began that summer (1956) at the University of Chicago taking what was called the Math Course. I was living at home, and somehow made a connection with another University of Chicago student from West Rogers Park who was also taking the course. He drove me down for the first day’s class. When the three-hour class was over, I suggested we alternate driving each other down each day.
The Ideal of Culture Page 15
