133. Charisma, Angela Davis, Paris

There you were in 1972, trying to decide whether an injustice had been done to Angela Davis who, unable to make bail, sat in prison waiting to be tried as an accessory (the term for it in most states) to the murder of Judge Harold Haley.  The charge was based on evidence, later confirmed, that she had bought the gun that killed him.

Ordinarily those facts would make it easy for you: the charge was justified (providing the murder weapon would have forced an accessory charge almost anywhere) and due process had been followed in arresting her, imprisoning her, and setting bail (in her case $100,000, well justified by her having already fled).

What complicated your thinking was that many injustices had been done to African-Americans in the United States for a long time and that some in law enforcement, grudging the ground lost in the recent civil rights battles, were using and bending the law to gain some of it back. You had to ask yourself, "Is this justified enforcement or is it another case of racial harassment by the white majority?"  You had to look closely.

But in 1972 there was, especially in academia, something very powerful working against a close look: charisma.  Angela Davis was loaded with it.  So were Malcolm X and Eldridge Cleaver and all the Black Panthers she was associated with.  And those opposing them?  The Marin County prosecutor, Albert Harris?  Charisma zero.  Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover, addressing the nation about the case?  Maybe a negative number.  (Hoover put her on the Ten Most Wanted List — only the third time for a woman — and Nixon congratulated the FBI on its “capture of this dangerous terrorist.") 

I think that if you were an aspiring academic and intellectual in 1972 it would have been as hard for you to resist Angela Davis's charisma as it was for your political opposite to resist the momentum of white resentment.  She was a bright student, she had won a scholarship to Brandeis, she spent a year in Paris, she worked for civil rights, she was beautiful, and she had been a target of Governor Ronald Reagan, who requested that she, because she was a communist, be barred from teaching at any university in the State of California.  She was right there with all the good people who had been persecuted as "communists" in the recent McCarthy era. 

In our present charisma-free environment (at least on this score) we who want to stand with the just can go pretty directly to the essential questions.  About Davis, "Was there or was there not good reason to arrest her, imprison her, and set her bail at the given figure?"  About the Communist Party, "Is it expressing dissent or engaging in rebellion — that is, attempting to overthrow the government?"  In the 70s we had to work through so many layers of charisma that we — outside of a few privileged political-science seminars — had a very hard time getting to these questions.

And you know who had the hardest time?  People who had been to Paris, people who actually lived there or who lived there in their imaginations, people who felt its great postwar attraction.  If anybody these days is in doubt about that charisma all they have to do is read Alice Kaplan's new book, Dreaming in French. There it is, in the lives of three women who spent student days in Paris, and were liberated by that experience, as many others were.  It was wonderful, it was exhilarating, and it was a handicap to clear thinking.  For Americans trying to get to the essential questions about cases like Angela Davis's it was another layer, a very heavy layer, of charisma they had to get through.

For the French, and particularly for Paris intellectuals, there was no doubt about the injustice done to Davis.  It was the confidence of the distant look.  Americans were unjust to blacks, Americans were unjust to her.  In the letters of sympathy to her (some of which Kaplan showed on slides Wednesday at the American Library in Paris) Davis is simply "in prison," without qualification.  Another victim of the system.

That's such a bad example to young American academics.  It tells them they can be good, they can stand with the just, without looking closely.  It reinforces that kind of Christianity, stronger in America than in France, that tells them, dangerously, that goodness is measured entirely in the heart.  Take the right general position, adopt the right attitude, and you are relieved of responsibility for particular judgment — which always requires particular inspection.  (No hearts could be in better condition than those incapable of inspection: the children who wrote the letters Kaplan showed us.)

So should our young not go to Paris?  Not feel the liberation Jacqueline Bouvier and Susan Sontag and Angela Davis felt?  By no means.  There are too many provincial constraints (taking America to be a province of France here) they, in order to grow, need to be free of — among the many they shouldn't be free of, constraints needed for growth and understanding.

A smart young person, after feeling the Parisian liberation, will pause for inspection. "Let's see now, what am I liberated from and what not?"  He (or she) will be the heir of the smart young person in the sixties, who, looking at the Viet Nam mess, said, "Let's see now, what authorities have been discredited and what not?"  The smart ones of both times are trying to avoid the dumb mistakes of wild freedom and blind anti-authoritarianism; both have learned to look closely.

85. Suspense in the Sixties, Suspense Now

Street Movements and Moral Clarity (10)

I see that Hendrik Hertzberg in the latest New Yorker (10-17-11) is in the same state of suspense over the Wall Street occupiers that I was in over the Viet Nam war protesters. Will they focus on a worthy goal or will they blow their chance?

From my experience I can give him this exciting answer: some will and some won't. And the good that's done will depend on who the television cameras focus on. In 1968 it was Jerry Rubin and the Yippies — in Hertzberg's terms, "the flaky fringe." Now, who knows, but whoever it is a repetition will mean irrelevance, diffusion of force, disillusion. Hertzberg clearly fears that but, he says, it's "not too late to hope."

I want to tell him, and anybody else now in his state, that there are grounds for hope. You could see them right there in the sixties scene. If in today's university population we have any significant number of young people like those I saw going to work for Eugene McCarthy Hertzberg has nothing to worry about. Some American young people are going to be there ready to focus and, hopefully, make the others focus.

Remember that turnaround in 1968? The war was going on and on, Johnson was going to get re-elected, it would all continue, and then McCarthy stood up, declared against Johnson in the New Hampshire primary, New England's universities emptied their best students into the state to work for him, the votes poured in, and Johnson, shocked, dropped from the race. Power. Exerted by young people. Inside the system.

Humphrey steps in, takes over the Johnson machinery. McCarthy will run against him in the Indiana primary. Indiana, right next to Ohio. In our streets, as in most streets, we're hearing "Power to the People," black power, flower power, student power. Some students, though, are hearing, "power in the ballot box," and don't care if it's coming from what other students are calling "party hacks." They check in with McCarthy headquarters in Indiana and get organized.

In haste. Oh my God the haste. Who saw this coming? Who has any money? Small contributions come in. Veterans for Peace contributes fifty dollars. Not nearly enough for a bus but some students have cars. A prof has a station wagon. Here we go, OU for McCarthy.

Headquarters assigned our contingent two towns, Shelbyville and Franklin, historically tough for Democrats and poison for liberals. Canvassing would take place on separate weekends. Canvassers would be put up in private homes and church basements. They would feed themselves.

It may be hard now to appreciate what these establishment-joiners were giving up: status with the rebels, the hip, the icebreakers who were setting student style; the badges that showed their allegiance, the dress, the smoke, the long hair; even, here and there, the beard. "Lose it," said the boss in Indianapolis. Lose anything that might lose a vote for peace on the porches of Indiana.

The boss in Indianapolis, the one who set up the McCarthy operation throughout the state, was a nineteen-year-old sophomore. She had dropped out of Macalester College in Minnesota in the middle of the quarter. The fellow who was waiting for us in the one lit storefront in Shelbyville (it was one a.m., our people had late classes) had dropped out of Yale Law School. His briefing of arriving groups would take him well into the morning.

OK, so there's sacrifice, there's adulthood, there's the contrast with the juveniles around them, there's emersion from that juvenility. And there's the ground for hope that the young Americans in the Occupy Wall Street movement will focus on something worthy (Hertzberg lists seven possibilities) and not blow their big opportunity.

I hope they understand how big that opportunity is. At this moment the two-party system really is at a stand — worse, in its way, than in 1968. The Republicans won't squeeze the wealthy and the Democrats can't, not really. They need the big money as badly as the Republicans do. Why do you think Obama is so slow to crack down on them? To get re-elected he's got to pay for all that expensive television time. Same with the Democrats in Congress. So, without a campaign-finance law, the country's got nobody. Except, now, you. You've got a lot of eyes on you, OWS.

69. Watching Students Riot While Teaching Christian Authors

That was a painful sight, bad students throwing bricks and good students smiling on them as they screwed up their revolution. Few of us could explain it — or much else connected with the riots.

Old-time Christians could explain it, of course.  They had a scheme into which the rioting students fit perfectly. Human beings rioted because since Adam's fall they were born to do evil. If they weren't reborn in Christ, they'd keep doing it.

The name "Yahoo" brought in the whole Christian scheme. It was the name Jonathan Swift, an Anglican priest, used in Gulliver's Travels for the unregenerate man. Those university people who couldn't bring in the Christian scheme (out of scientific scruple, say) or didn't know it (out of curricular neglect of the humanities, say) were left in doubt.

I wasn't in doubt long because I was teaching a lot of Christian authors at the time. One of them, John Milton, gave me not only the scheme but the warning to political humanity that went with it. It's so apt and so well put that I'm going to quote it here in full. The archangel Michael is speaking to Adam, who has just recoiled from a vision of Nimrod, the first tyrant.

Justly thou abhorr'st

That Son, who on the quiet state of men

Such trouble brought, affecting to subdue

Rational Liberty; yet know withal,

Since thy original lapse, true Liberty

Is lost, which always with right Reason dwells

Twinn'd, and from her has no dividual being:

Reason in man obscured, or not obeyed,

Immediately inordinate desires

And upstart Passions catch the Government

From reason and to servitude reduce

Man till then free. Therefore since he permits

Within himself unworthy Powers to reign

Over free Reason, God in judgment just

Subjects him from without to violent Lords,

Who oft as undeservedly enthral

His outward freedom. Tyranny must be,

Though to the tyrant thereby no excuse.

Paradise Lost, XII, 79-96

Teaching Milton to a class with revolutionaries of the sixties in it was thrilling. Milton's revolutionary credentials were impeccable, and so easily dramatized. He had come hurrying back from Italy as soon as he heard of his friends getting engaged in Parliament's stand against the king, he had joined the movement, he had risen, he had become propaganda minister in Cromwell's revolutionary government, he had defended the killing of the king before a Europe full of threatening monarchies. And all the while he was writing those essays on divorce and freedom of the press whose progressive ideas would resound for centuries. You couldn't ask for a better revolutionary.

And here he was coming out for the old internal hierarchy, where reason's place over the passions was firmly fixed. It was Plato, it was Dante, it was Shakespeare, it was medieval, renaissance, and, yes, even enlightenment. It was pretty much the whole Western intellectual establishment, up to the romantic period.

There were a lot of other authors, just in my undergraduate courses, ready to put sixties behavior in perspective for us. Herman Melville, in "The House-Top" (printed out, below) showed us why we were so slow at recognizing the Yahoo, or the Yahoo in ourselves: we were a romantic nation. T. E. Hulme, in an essay in our criticism anthology, made romanticism clear. It taught that "man was by nature good," and that "it was only bad laws and customs that had suppressed him." Its opposite, classicism, taught that man was "an extraordinarily fixed and limited animal," but that he could be "disciplined by order and tradition to something fairly decent." (You can read the whole essay, "Romanticism and Classicism," at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/essay/238694)

Not everybody will say that that is moral clarity but I'm going to say it. I didn't know what I was seeing in my students and T.E. Hulme cleared away the fog. There were the students, there were my authors, and there was my country, all clearly placed. My seeing that may not count for much in the larger scheme but this is about personal morality — the person being me.

Like many moral clarifications this one was satisfying because I was in the picture, and standing in a very good light. Professors of the humanities, especially English professors, taught the tradition by which "something fairly decent" could be got out of this creature. I was particularly privileged because I, through Milton, taught the revolutionary tradition, the discipline and order in it.

Reading Hulme in preparation for a class, reading him anew with images of the OU riots crowding in, was the curtain-parting moment of insight. It deserved to be called an epiphany.

Well, if "epiphany" is the word, I'll use it for the moral of the story: don't trust epiphanies. They don't dispel the fog for long. T. E. Hulme, it turns out, was a fascist. Or, in 1908. a fascist precursor. He ran around with the crowd at Action Fancaise, whose founder was the anti-semite Charles Maurras.

But that wasn't the only thing obscuring the moral picture. Other clouds were coming over, as I'll show in the next post.

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The House-Top

Note: When the Union began drafting soldiers to fight the Civil War affected New Yorkers rioted for four days, attacking mainly blacks — the cause of the war — and hanging scores from lampposts in the city. Arson was directed mainly at black institutions. The mobs went on to general destruction and grew until they overpowered the police. The riots ended only when a regiment marched up from Washington (under the command of a colonel referred to below as "wise Draco") and in effect re-conquered the city.

No sleep. The sultriness pervades the air
And blinds the brain—a dense oppression, such
As tawny tigers feel in matted shades,
Vexing their blood and making apt for ravage.
Beneath the stars the roofy desert spreads
Vacant as Libya. All is hushed near by.
Yet fitfully from far breaks a mixed surf
Of muffled sound, the Atheist roar of riot.
Yonder, where parching Sirius set in drought,
Balefully glares red Arson—there—and there.
The town is taken by its rats—ship-rats
And rats of the wharves. All civil charms
And priestly spells which late held hearts in awe—
Fear-bound, subjected to a better sway
Than sway of self; these like a dream dissolve
And man rebounds whole aeons back in nature.
Hail to the low dull rumble, dull and dead,
And ponderous drag that jars the wall.
Wise Draco comes, deep in the midnight roll
Of black artillery; he comes, though late;
In code corroborating Calvin's creed
And cynic tyrannies of honest kings;
He comes, nor parlies; and the Town, redeemed,
Gives thanks devout; nor, being thankful, heeds
The grimy slur on the Republic's faith implied,
Which holds that man is naturally good,
And—more—is Nature's Roman, never to be scourged.

68. Not Clowns for God but Real, Excrement-throwing Yahoos.

 

If you no longer believe that the side you joined is good you lose your starting sense of virtue.  By the end of 1968 the Yippie side — meaning sixties youth in rebellion against the establishment — was doing so much harm to the good cause of peace in Viet Nam that I felt like a sinner going to their meetings.

Those student meetings. At one of them there was a fellow ready to go to Washington in a football helmet, carrying a baseball bat, wearing a T-shirt that said "Free Manson."

Maybe it was theater. I don't know. My age group was slow. But whatever it was the students at those meetings were ignorant of power. They were blind to the fact that in a democracy it's not in the streets, it's in the ballot box, and in modern America what goes in the box depends on what voters see on screens. What were they going to see here? Not what I saw. Not clever actors in a street drama, not wise fools, not clowns for God, but Yahoos. Real, excrement-throwing Yahoos.

As for the student leaders at this time, they showed me what courage was — not! There was an easy thing you could call courage: standing up firmly to the establishment. This meant going along with the people on your side. And then there was the hard thing: standing up to people on your side. Like saying to that fellow in the helmet, "Nope, can't have people screwing up the revolution. You're outta here." It's exactly the courage we ask modern Muslim leaders to show in dealing with their extremists.

Intellectual leadership? That was found mainly in The Post, our excellent student newspaper, one of the best in the country (one of only three the New York Times kept on file). No matter how good the editors were, though, they couldn't control their letter writers, or, at times, their own instincts for solidarity. By the seventies the establishment not only couldn't punish students right, it couldn't even look at them right. After riots that brought the National Guard to patrol the streets the Athens Police Department put some officers on the roof of Marting's Department Store to watch for further trouble. Post editors were outraged by the insult. A letter-writer's word for it was "tyranny." Logan's Bookstore, after taking several bricks through its windows, put floodlights outside. More insult. They put up cameras inside to protect against shoplifters. The last straw. You cannot, said the intellectuals, insult our Yahoos.

Ohio University students were far from alone in this kind of admonishment. "You have broken some of the best heads in the country," said the Yale student president, wagging his finger at the commencement audience. (How he must cringe now remembering that statement, the pomposity of it. What mature boomer wouldn't be cringing?) As at a lot of Midwestern schools, Ohio University people had their eyes on the Ivy League. That included student leaders.

I have already given my view of what these students, Yale and OU, were doing: expressing (in Melville's terms) "the Republic's faith" that man is "naturally good, and more, is Nature's Roman, never to be scourged" (Post #32, "Mob"). and suggsted that they were responding to the tremendous flattery they had received in those postwar years. Commencement speaker after commencement speaker had told them how superior they were. They had come in with the highest test scores in history. They were going out in a blaze of achievement. They were the new best, the new brightest.

But there was a deeper flattery, generated first by America's immigrants. Though those immigrants were "wretched refuse" they had these boys (it was always boys) who were going to knock everybody's lights out. If you beam on boys their way those who "succeed," those who, bless the Lord, are in college, are going to have a pretty high opinion of themselves.

Some foreigners I've listened to say that what I was looking at was just another form of "American youth-worship," which they say has a long history. If there is such a thing, in the sixties America certainly paid for it. It produced behavior so ugly that it sent once-worshiping Americans, the majority whose backing was needed for peace, fleeing right back — for a while — to the ugly devils that were for war.

The price I and a number of professors paid was low. In the race to personal morality we'd backed the wrong horse. These kids weren't going to win anything for us. The price the country paid was another matter.

64. Why the Viet Nam Hawks Weren't So Dumb

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To all us right-thinking lovers of reason the reflex anti-communists, the kind that supported Joe McCarthy, were dumbheads, but how about the senators and Congressmen who drew on those dumbheads for support? They were of the postwar generation John Gaddis (recognized "dean of Cold War studies," and teaching at Ohio U.) credits with a very reasonable aim, to apply the great lesson of World War II: stop aggression early. They needed the bumper hawks so that they could avoid the catastrophic mistake of their predecessors, letting the Nazis get strong before they could be stopped. If only, they thought, they could have had American bumpers plastered with 'get them fascists' when Hitler sent his soldiers into the Rhineland.

So Barry Goldwater and those bumper hawks were working for peace. Yes, peace. Not in the way of the mild but in the way of the stern: through credible threat. "When we make war on you we don't stop until we've crushed you." That was the way of the Romans, and it accounts, say the stern, for the longest periods of peace the world has ever had. (At the moment, in 2011, they would say that way accounts for the long peacefulness of the two countries most thoroughly crushed in World War II.)

It's a respectable way. Ask historians. If you define peace as time without blood-spilling (not cold) war then, they'll tell you, the stern way has the advantage over the gentle way. Examine the periods during which people lived in peace and see what gave it to them. Count up the days. Severity wins.

To make it win, though, you have to have credibility. If you don't have a track record of successful severity, something approaching the Roman, or the Spartan (or the British, at times), nobody will believe your stern threats, the ones that keep them from spilling blood.

So there's the rationale for throwing your all into Viet Nam. You're doing it for your track record, which gives you credibility, which gives you enemies who fear you, and neutrals who respect you. How can you hold back?

You wouldn't, readers, be university people if you weren't ready with a dozen reasons but our interest now is clarity, and I think we've made a gain there. What looked like a war between dumbheads, armies of the night, comes into focus as a reasonable conflict. All the thinking politicians who made use of an unthinking base (and what thinking politician doesn't?) to avoid the mistakes their predecessors made were thinking reasonably. Acting to meet a threat on time is reasonable, and acting to maintain credible threats is reasonable. (Remember, "reasonable" does not mean "right.") On the other hand, all the apparently mindless Yippies had their minds on a reasonable goal too, to avoid complicity in a crime.  Everybody was acting reasonably.  There's the sixties for you.

In the event, some of us wound up justifying Yippies and some of us wound up justifying Hawks.  I wound up on the Yippie side but my reasons are too long for here. Next post: Why the Yippies Were Almost Right.

62. The March on the Pentagon

In America the students' great cause was ending the Viet Nam war. What did drugs and beards and obscenities on the forehead have to do with it? Don't ask me. I was in East Asia getting steamed up over the Korean students' struggle to topple Syngman Rhee.

Very little of that Abbie Hoffman kind of side play had appeared, though, in the March on the Pentagon, at least in the part I saw. The leader of the OU group, senior Elaine Herrald, dressed straight and ran a pretty tight bus. Write down the schedule, show up on time, don't wander off at the potty stops.

Exuberance she left to her lieutenants, one of whom showed me what "counter-cultural" meant, at least at the time, with them. He got up and led a cheer. Only not a real cheer. It was a parody cheer, sending up the jocks and the school-spirit sophomores — the "establishment" they were against. Here's the way it went: "Gimme a G." "G. "Gimme an L." "L!" "Gimme an R." "R!" "Gimme a B." "B!" "Gimme a P" "P!" "Gimme an L." "F!" "F!" "Whaddya got?" And everybody turned themselves purple trying to pronounce GLRBPF.

In Washington we were turned over to leaders equally firm but much more knowledgeable than Elaine. They were veterans of the civil rights marches. "Eight abreast, men on the outside. Take off necklaces and bracelets, anything a hostile spectator might snatch. Hold hands. Don't respond to heckling. Keep going."

The immaturity I saw was touching. The demonstrators I was with knew little history. Those geezers on crutches falling in behind us at the reflecting pool. Who were they? The banner said, "Abraham Lincoln Brigade." What's that? They knew nothing of the Spanish Civil War. They used the word "fascist" with hardly an idea of its roots in Italy and Germany. It had become one of their words for "bad guys."

At the Pentagon, after the march across the bridge — serious, serious — I still couldn't be sure I wasn't seeing a mock. Some students knelt in the parking lot. Zen-looking. They were trying to levitate the Pentagon. They said.

The troops looked dead serious. The face I looked into, though as boyish as that of the students I was with, looked determined to follow orders. His bayonet was across his chest, as with others down the line. The orders would have come from his commanding officer, probably a captain. I, ready to cross the line he was ordered to defend, was a commander in the Naval Reserve, the equivalent of a lieutenant-colonel. I was tempted to do some mischief, showing him my ID card. Messing with his head. A surge of returning maturity stopped me.

I didn't have to cross the line; I found a way around it, and reached a grassy place, with small trees. Standing there I saw solders in the parking lot being formed into some kind of phalanx. They then marched toward the grassy place which, I saw, was filled with students who, like me, had found a way around, or broken through. The soldiers were in close order, taking tiny steps, their bayoneted rifles back across their chests. They marched in those bitty shuffling steps, the students having plenty of time to give way before them — the reason for the shuffle, I suppose — all the way to where I was. There they did a right flank, then another right flank, and shuffled back to the lot. The students resumed their position.

What was that about? I pictured the captain, thumbing through his tactics book. What the hell fits this situation? Ask the colonel, up on the roof. "Try the double-close-order sortie."

"Aye, aye," or whatever they say in the Army.

"Shit, that didn't work. Got any other ideas, major?" What a time to be an Army officer!

I made it to the steps of the Pentagon but didn't stay. It was impressive, the way people were sitting there silently in the half-dark, waiting to be arrested. It was too big a thing for me, though, and I had to get back to the bus.

60. Memories of the Newport Jazz Festival Riots of 1960

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When will we ever have a riot like the one that closed down the Newport Jazz Festival in 1960? I mean a riot like, when it's over things are clear. At Newport you had students just drunk, just partying, throwing rocks at the police just to make trouble. Rich kids' trouble. They'd come into town in MGs and BMWs (you saw dozens of them down by the beach — I was there) and their clothes (when they kept them on) were the latest Bermuda fashion. Moralists like me could express pure disapproval.

And what support we had! The music community was right with us, mad as hell about losing their festival. And to whom? Not to people worked up by the music. Not to people so eager for it that they'd fight to get tickets. No. To people who didn't know crap about the music. Or anything. I believe it was Whitney Balliett, jazz critic of the New Yorker, who called them "Yahoos." Yes, Swift's name for unregenerate mankind. Gulliver found them in trees, throwing excrement. Perfect.

And the intellectual community? Oh, they were with us. They had to be. The whole thing started in downtown Newport when a fight broke out between two fraternities. Intellectuals can't be seen close to fraternities. They run with the music community. Whitney Balliett.

So we were at the center of a solid moral, esthetic, and intellectual front with a clear view of the opponents we faced. They were the uneducated; we were the educated. They were the immature; we were the mature.

That was 1960. In a few years nothing was clear. What looked like the same youth, throwing the same rock at the same policeman, could not really be the same youth, the one we disapproved of. He had a cause. First civil rights, then ending the war in Viet Nam. We approved of those causes. We were, by and large, doing nothing to further them. How could we disapprove of this youth who was, at least, doing something? Who was "more moral"? Could you call somebody less mature and educated than you were when he was more moral?

Then there was the view of policemen. In 1960 the young people were looking at officials with no history. A few years later they were looking at officials with a history of "brutality," variously earned but surely named. That let the young refocus our attention, and quickly. The issue after a riot (or an act of "civil disobedience"; it all came under "lawbreaking") became the performance of the authorities. "Yes, we broke the law but you didn't punish us right." Well, sometimes the police punished right and sometimes they didn't. Oi. There were enough complications without adding that one.

The recent riots in England roused my memory of these sixties' complications. The riots' origin in a protest over police action against a minority immediately raised a banner like one I honored in the sixties. The subsequent mindless behavior raised the same doubts. The authorities' reaction raised the same question about punishment.

All this makes me realize how lucky I am, in a sad sort of old-age way. The chances of life seem to have put me far closer to significant riots (or acts of disobedience) than a moralist has any right to expect. After the Newport riots I was in the student march on the Pentagon in 1967 and I was on the campus of Ohio University in 1968. I knew all about the bombing of the ROTC building and the storming of the President's house and the coming of the National Guard and the closing of the University. And I was in Seoul, South Korea, close enough to the fall of Syngman Rhee to be inspired — no, thrilled — by an account of the march that brought him down.

At the same time I was lucky to be assigned to teach two authors not often found in one professor's course assignments, Herman Melville and John Milton. Nowhere else could I have stumbled on such well-timed wisdom about the riotous human being. In the next post or two I will, as I recall the riots and street actions I have witnessed, try to make something of my luck.

32. "Mob"

It's hard to use the word "mob," and especially hard if you're a citizen of a country in debt to Jean-Jacques Rousseau for its form of government. "Mob" suggests that the people you see throwing off society's control cannot be trusted to control themselves. Rousseau (in our standard reading of him) says that they can. You can trust man's basic nature, which is good.

If you don't trust it how can you justify giving common people the vote, and letting them serve in legislatures, and sit on the bench? Distrust takes you to the wrong side of the revolution, American or French, that gave you your government.

What made that side — king, nobles, clergy — so wrong? Their centuries-old view, encouraged by the church, that man's good nature had been corrupted by his disobedience in the Garden. That's so unenlightened. Who wants to be on their side?

We're sure that we don't, then we see a lot of young people go way out of control on a foreign city's streets and want to call them a "mob." But, alas, the society that would control them is very much like the kings, nobles, and clergy that in times past have tried to control our own young people. We've long ago, most of us, given up calling them a "mob." They took down the Bastille, for God's sake.

Our history textbooks have made us so conscious of the gains made by people throwing off society's control that we think Rousseau must surely be right. No, we don't think. We just assume, so deeply in America that some people, like college students, are shocked when other people, like the police, show that they don't take them to be basically good, and might need controlling. In the sixties, before the riots that closed Ohio University, police were stationed on rooftops, looking to spot lawbreakers. Students, as the editorial page of their newspaper showed, were outraged at the insult to them.

It has probably never been harder to express doubt about young people than it was on American university campuses than it was in the sixties. These were the leaders in the battle for civil rights and the end of the Viet Nam War. These were the highest scorers yet on our college entrance tests. And if they didn't know it Commencement speakers would tell them, "You are the best." But of course they did know it. "You have broken the best heads in the country," a Harvard student told the police from his Commencement lectern.

It was not a time to go back over history and count the losses suffered when people throw off society's control — the Reformation slowed by mobs pillaging in its name, Puritans discredited by their zealots, socialists ruined by anarchist allies. Nor were the parents of these people the ones to do it. It would reverse everything that made them happy as they listened to the adulation ("American youth-worship," said Europeans) in those Commencement speeches.

Even now it's hard to call those children in their later group actions a "mob," or class what they lost the nation with the losses of earlier mob actions. I want to say that young people failing to control themselves (yippies, crazies, druggies) delayed the changes the nation needed to make (they gave Richard Nixon, I think, what he needed to be elected), but I know that even at their worst they were doing a good thing: refusing to be complicit in the second-stupidest war in our history.

And the police on those rooftops were doing a good thing, trying to control a mob. I'm glad they were there, and I wish they had arrived at the ROTC building in time to keep the students from burning it down. I'm grateful for the troops the governor sent to Athens to restore order. A lot of the faculty, those who had stood watch all night to save the other buildings, are grateful to them.

It has occurred to me that we are a lot like the citizens of New York City after the troops that President Lincoln sent in had beat down those rioting over the draft in 1863 (they had killed hundreds, many of them blacks), as Herman Melville sees them:

and the Town, redeemed,
Gives thanks devout; nor, being thankful, heeds
The grimy slur on the Republic's faith implied,
Which holds that man is naturally good,
And more — is Nature's Roman, never to be scourged.