Personal History (16 page)

And, in fact, with no more thought than that, off I went, arriving in Chicago less than a month after our conversation on the train. I hadn’t foreseen the magnitude of the decision I’d made and didn’t realize what I was in for until I was already in the thick of it. My father had come with me to Chicago to enter me in the university and find me a place to live, but once he left I was completely on my own in a strange environment and a sea of thousands of students, with only one or two casual acquaintances. Maybe it was lucky that I hadn’t had the time or the sense to envision being so alone; I might well have pulled back. Probably I reassured myself
with the thought that I was planning to stay only one year and could always return to Vassar—indeed, I kept that safety net by telling the college I would be back. But little by little life sorted itself out, and the university was good for me. Eventually I found my way, growing to love the place and staying on to graduate.

I lived on the edge of the campus at International House, which was filled with foreign students, graduate students, and some transfer students like me. We all ate in the cafeteria, sitting at round tables that afforded opportunities for making friends and acquaintances of every kind. Before too long I met and became roommates with Tayloe Hannaford, a like-minded girl from Winnetka who had transferred from Sarah Lawrence, and gradually we assembled a nucleus of friends. We both were entranced with a graduate student, Sidney Hyman, who was much around the house. Early on, Sidney and I fell into conversation about our shared enthusiasm for Thomas Mann, and we talked for hours, cementing a friendship that moved with me through the years. “Fun” for our group was talk, exchange of ideas, laughter, close-harmony singing, and hours at the college beer parlor, Hanley’s, which had a long bar, in front of which was a row of small square tables with red-and-white-checked tablecloths where you could sit with your friends and nurse a beer or two all night.

After a few months, I was approached by members of two different clubs, Mortar Board and Quadrangle, similar to sororities, suggesting that I join. I went to a meeting of one where lots of young women were sitting around, many of them playing bridge. It wasn’t the kind of atmosphere I was used to, even at Vassar. Shortly afterwards, a friend of mine who was a member of Mortar Board asked if I was really interested in joining and said that if I was she would go to bat for me: she was willing to take on a fight about my being Jewish, but not if there was nothing to be served by fighting. Having had no idea that my being considered Jewish was an issue, I was startled, and assured her that I wasn’t really interested. Later, a friend told me that the Quadrangle had actually disbanded over the question of admitting me to membership. This was one of the very few instances in which anti-Semitism touched me directly in those early years, and I was more surprised than distressed by it.

Chicago then was a center of intellectual turmoil. The university was a distinctly urban school, with mostly nonaffluent students, some excellent faculty, and high intellectual standards. Because Hutchins had become enthralled by the theory that education consisted in reading the great books of the Western world and absorbing their ideas, the academic program was very different from that at most colleges. Hutchins had been influenced by Mortimer Adler, who was the leading exponent of these ideas, and by St. Johns College, where they had previously been tried out. Hutchins had also abolished football and other athletics. The whole thing
was slightly flaky but stimulating—a universe of its own, and, important for me, a far cry from Vassar.

I had decided on American history as my major, so I enrolled in survey courses in economics and in history and, despite some trepidation, the course in the great books taught jointly by Hutchins and Adler. It started with Plato and Aristotle, worked up through St. Thomas Aquinas and other philosophers, and ended with Freud and Marx and Engels. This class—which was supposed to teach you “how to read a book,” as Adler later titled one of his own books—met once a week for two solid, sometimes torturing hours. About thirty of us sat around an oblong table, and Hutchins or Adler or both would use the Socratic method in discussing what we had read and testing us. For the whole two hours, the two men hammered away, bullying us unmercifully—“Well, Miss Meyer, tell us in your own words what Aristotle thinks about this.” “What do you think about what he says?” “Do you really think that good behavior follows from good values?” “What are good habits?” “What are good values?” “If that’s what you think, what if such-and-such happened?”

The methods they used often taught you most about bullying
back
, about standing up to Hutchins and Adler, about challenging them and fundamentally pleasing them by doing it with gusto and verve, so that they were amused. If you learned to cope with their methods, you could stay afloat. When I didn’t do well, the most awful depression set in, because so much depended on that performance. When I did do well, my elation carried over to everything else I was doing at the university.

Despite its intimidations, the course was good for me, and I actually got an A in it at the end of the first year. My father, who strongly believed in Chicago’s educational theories, was thrilled at my grade and sent me a check for $100, which I said I would spend on books by Plato and Aristotle to commemorate the event. I suggested he may have overreacted, because “marks don’t mean much out here and Adler usually deals them out pretty irrationally. Though he teaches logic, he knows better than to base his conduct upon it.” For all I knew, I added, “the marks may have been the result of the rides home in the car when, as I told you, we got on very well.”

I was still finding it difficult to learn the right balance between social and academic activities. Mrs. Kellogg Fairbank, a friend of my mother’s, who once described herself to me as “that person in Chicago who voted for Landon,” was my one link, except for Tayloe, to the social scene beyond the university. She lived in a large, stylish lakefront apartment and occasionally included me in her lunch or dinner parties and invited me to her weekend house. After these events I always made what I thought was the polite card gesture, often worrying about whether I was supposed to leave one card or two and whether I had to turn the corner down. Even as
a college junior, and while the outside world was changing so dramatically, I was concerned to make sure I was adhering to the proper ways, doing the correct thing, making the appropriate gesture.

Through an old beau of my sister Flo’s, I met a classicist émigré professor, Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, whose book
Goliath
I had read and respected. I found him to be a bit of a madman, but very entertaining and very bright. Soon afterwards, I was excited and flattered to be invited to dinner by Borgese. We ate in downtown Chicago—a great treat, since we students lived almost exclusively in South Chicago, the area around the university. On the way back from dinner he quizzed me about how many of my classmates I thought were still virgins, a question entirely beyond my ability to answer or even guess at. There were other leading questions, followed by an invitation to inspect his apartment. I was still so young and unsuspecting that poor Borgese obviously took my acceptance as an agreement to amorous advances, but, being so naïve about sexual relations, I was surprised when the distinguished professor made a pass at me. When I resisted, he pursued me, and I found myself racing around his desk, the professor in pursuit. Finally, I insisted on leaving, and he drove me home. Surprisingly, he called and asked me out again. I was in such a panic about offending the great man that I went to the university’s infirmary and insisted I had appendicitis. When the doctors assured me I was in fine health, I had to tell the professor I was unable to go out with him—a monstrously difficult thing for me to do. It almost killed me with mortification.

My political outlook developed further as a committed liberal—primarily passionately antifascist and sympathetic toward the labor movement. Yet, though I was engaging in liberal thinking and activities, I remained basically conservative. I had never encountered real communists until I reached Chicago. The American Student Union there was very different from the one I’d left behind at Vassar, which had been run by girls who were relatively new to politics and whose passions—the political ones, at least—weren’t all that deep. I was greeted effusively by the Chicago branch of the union, which was mostly composed of communists and socialists of a rather boring mind-set. An exception was a young British graduate student, Norman O. Brown, a Commonwealth Fellow, who took me to a few meetings and to dinner. He kept suggesting that I join the Young Communists, since they and the parent party were the most effective antifascist forces in the world. At that time, with the rise of Hitler and Mussolini, and Franco fighting against the forces of Spanish democracy, this argument could be made with some force. The ghastly crimes of Stalin had not yet been revealed, and when the famous trials started, they were, at least initially, viewed ambivalently by even the liberals among us.

I remained unpersuaded, and wondered whether Brown might be a communist himself, assigned to convert me. In response to his proselytizing, I eventually wrote him a letter—which I later found in one of my textbooks and probably never sent—in which I said that, although my parents were doing certain things with which I disagreed, I loved them, was grateful for the circumstances into which I was born, appreciated what I had, and had no desire to revolt against any of it. I didn’t want to help overthrow a system that I knew I belonged to, although I certainly understood that there were problems that should be addressed.

I’m not sure why when many of my friends had joined the party I had the resolve to reject it. Perhaps there was a balancing weakness at work, one that had long been a part of me—that inherent desire to conform, to please, to abide by laws; to be a good girl, if you will. Anyway, very luckily for
The Washington Post
during the McCarthy era, when we were constantly being attacked as “reds” by various constituencies, I never had been a member.

In the spring of my first year at Chicago, I took a course on labor relations from Paul Douglas, later a United States senator, and grew interested in labor problems. This was a time of broad-scale industrial organization that was being resisted by the steel, coal, and automobile companies in extremely forceful, even violent ways. My sympathies lay with the right to organize, and they haven’t changed in that respect, although I have grown to regard some union leadership and tactics with a degree of skepticism. But at this time the great mass of workers in the industrial area had no way of dealing jointly with employers.

I became friends with Ralph Beck, a young man who was stringing for the
Chicago Daily News
and covering the Chicago steel strike. The Republic Steel plant in South Chicago, not too far from the university, was being struck, and Ralph called to tell me that there was going to be a confrontation of some sort between the strikers and the company and invited me to go with him to observe it. I agreed with enthusiasm. The picketers were facing armed Chicago police. I was not in danger, being at some distance, but I was scared. Ralph had left me behind for safety and had gone nearer. The steelworkers advanced and the guards or the police suddenly fired on them, killing seven and wounding others. Pandemonium and fear of arrest spread, even to where I was standing, and we all piled into any available vehicles and fled this horrifying scene.

After recovering from this traumatic event, we returned once or twice to the struck plant, and it occurred to us to wonder what was going on inside. Ralph suggested we try to find out. I asked for permission, mentioning
The Washington Post
as well as the
Daily News
, and learned a never-to-be-forgotten lesson about the power of a Washington newspaper, even though the
Post
was a minor one at that time. We were invited in and
toured the plant with its officials, somewhat to my embarrassment and surprise—a college junior and her stringer friend.

I wrote Casey Jones, explaining and apologizing for using the paper’s name to gain entry. He answered that he had gotten a bang out of our experience and thought the picture we’d received of the way a big strike works was equivalent to a year’s work in any economics course, and graciously sent a letter of introduction for future use.

Many years later, I was to get a more graphic—and personal—lesson about labor relations.

M
Y FATHER
and I kept up a constant conversation through the mail in which the
Post
often figured. Although it was improving editorially and even attracting more ads, Dad was being worn down by the seemingly impossible task of getting it out of the red. Costs were rising. The
Herald
had the blue-collar readership locked up, in part because of its famous third page—the sex-and-crime page. The
Times
was the afternoon version of the
Herald
. Scripps Howard had a solid, jazzy, tabloid niche—newsstands and lunch sales—and the
Evening Star
seemed to own the market and the town. It was the respectable establishment paper, overflowing with ads.

Dad wrote me in the spring of 1938, almost five years into the struggle to make the
Post
succeed, that he had had one of those lucky breaks that sometimes occur. He was offered the
Herald-Tribune
service, which meant columns by Walter Lippmann, Dorothy Thompson, and Mark Sullivan, some desirable comics and Sunday features, daily crossword puzzles and bridge articles, and book reviews—a rich trove, which he grabbed. The
Star
had had the
Tribune
service, and through a difference of opinion over cost it landed in our lap. The
Post
also got some routine coverage from the
Herald-Tribune
’s Washington bureau, which relieved our small national staff. In addition, we got foreign news from their correspondents abroad, which we could not afford at that time.