They Marched Into Sunlight

by David Maraniss

  Chapter 8

  Sewell’s Predicament

  BELOW, TO THE EAST AND WEST, a luxuriance of treetop green shrouded the campus in midday sleepiness. To the north the slender peninsula of Picnic Point poked out into the waters of Lake Mendota, sailboats speckled the soft blue surface, white triangles flitting silently from here to there, and at the shoreline barefoot waders slipped along rocks slimed with squishy algae. Few scenes could be more reassuring than the one William H. Sewell took in on a summer’s day in 1967 as he gazed out the wide windows of Room 1820 atop Van Hise Hall. It was a vista of serenity that seemed appropriate for such a notable moment in his distinguished academic career, when he was introduced at the boardroom of the UW Board of Regents as the new chancellor of the university. But no sooner had Sewell reached the hallway on his way out of the room than a local newspaperman sidled up and posed a question about the reality of what teemed below. Well, what are you going to do about the student problem?

  Student problem? Sewell’s mind revolved back to something he thought Winston Churchill had once said, that he hadn’t become prime minister to preside over the demise of the British empire. Out came an uncensored wisecrack. “I didn’t become chancellor of this university to be dean of students!”

  For some reason the reporter chose not to use the quote in his story about the event, much to Sewell’s relief. It would have made him sound elitist and contemptuous of the young people without whom a university would be little more than a think tank and research institute, which is what many critical students complained it was becoming in any case. But the truth was, even though Sewell felt in no way dismissive of students, he meant what he said in that moment when he was caught off guard. He took the job of chancellor with no intention whatsoever of being dean of students, and in fact with a promise that he would not have to deal with daily student concerns, especially not the problem to which the journalist referred, which meant protest and disruption. The men who had recruited him for the job, including president Harrington and Robben Fleming, the chancellor he was replacing, had all tried to erase his doubts with variations on the same theme. Troubled times were ending, they said. Student protests had peaked. They knew how to deal with them now. No problem.

  And if anything did come up, they said, Joe could handle it. Joseph F. Kauffman was the dean of student affairs, and though he had suffered through a rough spell with protesters the previous spring, when they had blockaded him in his office, he too thought the worst was behind them. People tended to take his word on the subject. He had a national reputation in higher education circles for understanding the psychological needs and motivations of college students. Sewell heard it over and over: Joe can handle it.

  The stress of dealing with rebellious and hostile students was not something Sewell needed. He was fifty-six years old and had high blood pressure, occasional angina, and a leaky heart valve that had plagued him since he had been struck by rheumatic fever in college. His wife, Elizabeth Shogren Sewell, a painter and superb athlete, feared that the burden of running the university would exacerbate his heart problems, and she advised him not to do it. But when Sewell checked in with his cardiologist at the UW Medical School, he received a more encouraging judgment: the job should not be debilitating as long as he kept it in perspective and did not work day and night. That was all he needed to hear to take a post that he was eager to try, even though he had no administrative experience beyond the faculty level as chairman of the sociology department and president of the university committee. He believed deeply in the concept of the academy. A university was defined by its faculty, he often said, and should be governed by the faculty as collegially as possible. What most excited him was the prospect of overseeing that faculty governance, and subtly manipulating it just as he had in the sociology department, all in the cause of shaping a great university in a bright new age.

  Sewell was not the sort of academic to get lost in his own make-believe ivy-covered cloister, but like many professors his sense of the world around him could be off a notch. He might be years ahead of popular culture or years behind, but rarely perfectly in step. In 1967 he was still looking at the world, and at his university, with the optimism that had infused Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society vision in Washington a few years earlier. There was a sense in the social sciences during those middle years of the sixties that solutions to the problems of American society were within reach, that the racial dilemma was being solved, that there was enough money, brainpower, and momentum to eliminate poverty and its attendant afflictions (Wisconsin had its own Poverty Institute at work on it), and to move on from there to the ills of the world. It was with this sensibility, with what sociology department demographer Hal Winsborough described as “a kind of euphoria,” that Sewell grabbed at his chance to run things. He became enthralled with the idea that he and the Wisconsin faculty could create a liberal pragmatist ideal—just when the tide was turning in another direction, when liberalism was facing its greatest vulnerability, attacked from right and left, and when the notion of an all-encompassing super-school was being disparaged by student critics for its corporate entanglements and the impersonal nature of what they called a “multiversity.”

  Some of his colleagues thought that Sewell, in his euphoria, underestimated the ways in which the war would affect everything, especially his university, but he was not unmindful of the raging debate over Vietnam and on the contrary had long participated in it. He had been the chief organizer of a Vietnam teach-in on campus on April 1, 1965, one week after a first-in-the-nation teach-in was held at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. One of his many friends at Michigan had called him and said, “Why don’t you guys have one too?” and Sewell agreed. This was less than a month after the U.S. Ninth Marine Expeditionary Force had landed at Da Nang, starting the rapid buildup of American troops in Vietnam. Sewell had already concluded that he “didn’t think we had any business over there” and that “we shouldn’t be invading a country because we had some political differences; we weren’t going to stop communism there, anyway.” As chairman of the sociology department he arranged for the large lecture halls in the Social Sciences Building to be used for the teach-in that day and helped schedule an array of speakers from the faculty, including ten from history and four from sociology. With topics ranging from U.S. foreign policy to French existential philosophy, the discussion was intellectual but rather one-sided, against the war. Posters lined the walls: “Out of Vietnam By Easter.” “End Gas Warfare.” “In Your Heart You Know It’s Wrong.” Crowds grew from three hundred in the afternoon to a thousand at night. The audience was roused to a standing ovation at one point when a professor proclaimed that this was not a teach-in but Wisconsin’s first “freedom school.”

  The memory of Sewell’s role in that event, more than anything else, prompted some student activists, including Paul Soglin, to respond with at least mild enthusiasm to his appointment as chancellor. As Sewell reflected decades later, looking back on that era, his reputation “may have made the students feel…that I would turn the war over to them, turn the university over to them, and go along with anything they wanted.” His style in the classroom certainly would not have encouraged that assumption. He had no interest in entering the pantheon of hero-professors and “didn’t teach the kinds of courses or teach in a way that the kids liked.” He had none of George Mosse’s spellbinding eloquence and certainly not Harvey Goldberg’s dramatic radical flair. He never inflated his lectures with the hot rhetoric of the day. Rather he believed in the hard, dry science of social science, in numbers, methodology, the meticulous work of analyzing statistics and testing hypotheses against results. He was a stickler for process. The first responsibility of people seeking to improve the human condition, he maintained, was to get the facts right. Here was the living definition of a rational and orderly man.

  Few students who encountered him at Wisconsin in 1967 realized how intricately the threads of Sewell’s life story wove through themes they considered
the exclusive domain of their generation. Economic disenfranchisement, inequities of the military draft, the effects of massive aerial bombing on civilian populations, the role of early childhood parenting in shaping human behavior—these disparate interests were the stuff of William Hamilton Sewell’s career long before they became totems of the sixties.

  ONE OF THE unforgettable figures of generational tension during the Vietnam era was General Lewis Blaine Hershey, the crew-cut, bespectacled director of the Selective Service System, an agency that through its military draft had near godlike powers, making decisions about who would be called to military service and who would not, determining the lives and potential deaths of millions of young men. Hershey was a relic of another era, his reign at the draft agency going back to the dawn of the U.S. involvement in World War II. At his side in those early days was none other than Bill Sewell, who came to Washington as a navy lieutenant during the war to serve as assistant director of research for the Selective Service. Sewell, born in 1909, had grown up in the small town of Perrinton, Michigan, the son of a well-to-do Republican pharmacist, and had been a jock as a young man. He was recruited to play football at Michigan State University by Jim Crowley, one of the famed Four Horsemen of Notre Dame. Sleepy Jim, as he was known, later went on to coach Vince Lombardi and the Seven Blocks of Granite at Fordham. A broken ankle in his freshman year ended Sewell’s football career and set him on the scholar’s path that took him to a Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Minnesota and a professorship at Oklahoma A&M, where he made his first mark developing a farm family socioeconomic scale to determine living standards in rural homes during the Depression. It was that work that attracted the attention of Hershey’s top statistician, who persuaded the boss to call the young social scientist to Washington.

  Sewell’s specialty at the Selective Service was manpower statistics. He analyzed the number of young men being drafted each month from every state and how various occupational exemptions affected the call-up. In his statistical breakdown of the deferments, Sewell reached the conclusion that farm states were benefiting from deferments far more than industrial states. In a state like Wisconsin, for example, the point system was based on a ratio of persons to cows. “Let’s say you were up for the draft and your father had a herd of a hundred cows; he could get two sons deferred on that basis,” Sewell explained later. “And there were probably more people deferred in Wisconsin taking care of cows than there were machinists in all of the United States. In the South it was bales of cotton, the same way.” When Hershey testified before a Senate committee, Wisconsin Senator Robert M. LaFollette Jr., the mastermind of the cow-ratio deferment, saw Sewell sitting next to Hershey at the witness table passing the director notes containing statistics that accentuated Wisconsin’s deferment break. Later, infuriated, LaFollette called the young statistician into his office, closed the door, and thundered, “The committee on manpower is now in session!”—and proceeded to “grill the hell” out of Sewell. Fighting Bob LaFollette might have been the voice of Midwestern Progressivism and the force behind the Wisconsin Idea, but his son Young Bob was never a particular favorite of one future university chancellor. By contrast, Sewell considered General Hershey “one of the nicest men” he ever met, although eventually he would disagree with his former boss’s draft pronouncements.

  Days after Japan surrendered, Sewell was dispatched to Tokyo with a team of social scientists to study the effects of the air war on Japanese morale, part of the larger United States Strategic Bombing Survey. Relentless U.S. bombing raids from June 1944 to August 1945 killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians and destroyed nearly two-thirds of the buildings in the nation’s sixty-six largest cities, according to the survey. Sewell spent four months in Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka, and Hiroshima as a research team leader, constructing a probability sample for the morale study and conducting interviews with civilians. “What bombing experience have you personally had?” Sewell and his cohorts would ask, using Japanese-Americans from Hawaii as interpreters.

  Sewell learned that, even taking into account the atomic tolls of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, by far the most civilian deaths and injuries were caused by incendiary bombs—forerunners of the napalm bombs that two decades later would incite Vietnam war protests. Fleets of B-29s loaded with napalm bombs had burned out almost 60 percent of Tokyo. More than half of the Japanese civilians who had survived bombing raids said the attacks came at night and involved incendiary bombs.

  Then came the follow-up question: “Can you tell me more about your personal bombing experience? Tell me what happened, what you did and how you felt.” The survey revealed that “fright was by far the most common emotional reaction to the bombing experience. Many thought that they would be killed. Others (10 percent) were so paralyzed that they could neither think nor act. Few claimed that they were not frightened and practically none indicated that their experience heightened their desire to carry on the war against the United States.”

  Notwithstanding the methodological precision of the social scientists, the final report of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey could not—or chose not to—avoid the most political and subjective debate of that time and place. It concluded that even before the atomic bombs were dropped, the strategic air war had achieved its purpose, effectively destroying both Japanese morale and its war machine, and that the Japanese were ready to surrender and were suing for peace through third parties. The implication of this finding seemed to contradict the prevailing rationale that the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were horrors necessary to preclude a land invasion in which countless more American soldiers would be killed.

  When he finished his assignment in Japan and arrived at the sociology department at the University of Wisconsin in 1946, Sewell brought with him lasting memories of both the horrors and complexities of modern war. Margaret Bright, among his first graduate assistants in Madison, recalled that he talked constantly about the morale survey and the devastation of what he saw in Japan. She described him as a “man of great conscience” tormented by the vision of Hiroshima—people living in tents in public parks, buildings leveled everywhere, phantasmal shadows of lost human existence. And yet many of his graduate students were married veterans attending school on the GI Bill and living in trailers near campus, good young men with their own awful stories of buddies killed by the Japanese. Was the bomb necessary? Sewell concluded yes, as Bright remembered it, but still seemed haunted by “that torturing feeling of whether or not it was.”

  Sewell soon turned from one twentieth-century trauma to another, from the atomic bomb to the Freudian theory on the effects of breast feeding and toilet training on human personality. Employing many of the probability methods that he learned or refined in Japan, he decided to lift Freud’s theory from the analyst’s couch and put it to the test in the field. First he studied the demographic maps of Wisconsin until he found a setting, Richland County, in the rolling hills northwest of Madison toward the Mississippi River, where he could have a controlled sample—162 children ages five and six, all from farm families and all of what he called “old American stock,” which in this case meant white and Anglo-American. Then he conducted a study over a five-year period with the assistance of four women graduate students who compiled personality test data and conducted interviews with the children’s mothers.

  His conclusions: the personality adjustments of children did not differ significantly whether they were breast-fed or bottle-fed, nursed on self-demand or regular schedule, weaned gradually or abruptly, had bowel and bladder training early or late (though those with late training were less likely to bite their nails), punished for toilet-training accidents or not punished, or slept with their mothers during infancy or did not. It was more likely that other factors, including the general attitude of the mother, had greater influence. “Consequently,” Sewell wrote in the abstract of his paper, “Infant Training and the Personality of the Child,” “considerable doubt is cast upon the general validity of the Freud
ian claims and the efficacy of the prescriptions based on them.”

  The findings created an international stir. “I got letters from all over Europe, especially from Jewish mothers, who would say, ‘My family has been blaming me for Irving’s troubles and his psychiatric symptoms. Now you have freed me!’” Sewell recalled. “And of course I was condemned by the Freudians as a charlatan. But the Freudians never had a course in statistics, so they couldn’t really attack.”

  SINCE THE 1950S in America, the word liberal had rarely come unattached. In Madison the common phrase was west side liberal. Madison was an east side–west side town, with the Capitol Square downtown serving as the line of demarcation. East and West were the rival high schools, symbols of two very different ways of life. The east side was grittier, more working-class, home to the meatpackers of Oscar Mayer and the machinists of Gisholt. Aside from the village of Maple Bluff, an enclave of country club wealth hugging Lake Mendota, the east side was a land of aluminum siding and corner bars. The west side had the university and its professors, along with high-level supervisors of the state government and other professionals, who lived in comfortable neighborhoods moving out from old homes near Vilas Park to modern split-levels made of redwood and stone in the former corn fields of University Hill Farms. The east side sent more of its sons into the military and offered the strongest support for the war in Vietnam, an issue that by 1967 was tearing apart long-standing political alliances between working-class unionists and white-collar liberals.