Slouching Towards Gomorrah (7 page)

Some of the faculty became a bit unbalanced. The admissions committee accepted one meagerly qualified student because, as a radical protest, he had attempted to burn down his college’s cafeteria and was, therefore, “interesting.” College students disrupted
law school classes. (The spokesman for a relatively mild group that invaded my seminar displayed the acuity typical of such students, saying, “We don’t want to disrupt. You are teaching antitrust and we are willing to discuss monopoly in America. Why aren’t there more day care centers?”) We often had to get to our classes through pickets marching in the halls. Faculty, afraid for their safety, no longer returned to their offices in the evening. Most took their research and writing home to avoid the possibility of its destruction. Professors at other universities had suffered losses of years of work. We were probably average in disruptions, suffering less than some universities and more than others.

Most disheartening was the rhetoric which foreclosed argument and rendered the radicals’ minds as clouded as drugs did. They seemed to think that “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem” was profound analysis and that institutions such as Yale could be dismissed as “irrelevant.” Nobody seemed to have any idea what either the problem or the solution might be or what we were supposed to be relevant to. That is not entirely accurate, since one gathered that the problem was “the system” and that the solution was dismantling it, with no very clear notion of what came next, except that “the people” would come to power. The “system” was not just capitalism but all institutions wielding any authority in American society. These white, upper-middle-class Yale law students saw themselves as the people’s vanguard. Judging from the reaction of the non-Yale population of New Haven, “the people” would have liked nothing better than to cane their vanguard’s bottoms.

It should not be supposed that all, or even a majority, of the students were radicals. It is customary to refer to the radical students or the hippies of that era as the “Sixties generation,” but the great majority of that generation was not radical or hippie, anymore than the majority of them today are modern liberals. In fact, Clinton’s age group gave him a lower proportion of its vote than did any other age cohort. But the radicals set the tone and the pace, particularly in the more prestigious universities. One lesson we learned is that a minority of fanatical disposition can effectively control an institution.

The activists organized and acted in concert. Those who did not join them were regarded with contempt as moral inferiors.
Though they spoke of democracy and brotherhood, they were in fact authoritarian and manipulative. These activists had their way because at Yale, as at every other university, the moderate students did not organize. “Moderation” is not a cry that packs auditoriums or brings throngs into the streets. The moderates kept quiet, and tried to live through it with as little discomfort as possible. Students who just wanted to get on with their studies were intimidated by the radicals. The threat of physical violence was always in the air, but the intimidation was primarily moral. It must be remembered that the moderates were youths in their early twenties; most of them had little experience of life outside an academic institution and had no fixed convictions about the morality of America’s culture. As they watched the faculty waver and appease, they must have wondered whether the radicals did not have at least a partial truth. In that time, it was true, as Yeats wrote: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity.” In the event, the center certainly did not hold.

Shortly before his graduation, one student orator said, “We came here to make the Yale law school fit to survive in America. And we failed.” If his and his friends’ efforts were any guide, the law school could have been made fit to survive only by destroying its intellectual and professional standards, and they made a pretty decent run at that.

Black law students had a separate grievance. The law school, competing with other schools, had rushed into affirmative action and recruited black students who, having attended very inferior colleges, were in no way prepared for the Yale law school. As economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out, a minority student who is overmatched can react in one of two ways. Either he can accept his inability to meet the standards of the school or he can attack the standards as dishonest, corrupt, and probably racist. In an effort to hold on to self-respect in a bewildering and seemingly hostile environment, many will choose to reject both the standards by which they are judged and the faculty that judges them.

One Saturday I was writing at home when a telegram arrived from the Black Law Students Union announcing that I, along with the rest of the faculty, was “summoned” to appear before the BLSU in the faculty lounge the following week. In a mild panic, the faculty met at the dean’s house but could not agree on a
course of action. Some denied that the “summons” was an insult. One professor said that it was his custom to accept “invitations.” The president of Yale, Kingman Brewster, was present but, already daunted by the radicals, declined to give any advice. I decided not to go. In the end, a little over half the faculty appeared as summoned. The result was a fiasco.

The faculty sat in folding chairs that had been set out for them; the BLSU leaders stood before them like instructors…very angry instructors…before a class. Two large students stood at the door, seeming to prevent any faculty from leaving, and no professor chose to test that proposition. In violently obscene language, the BLSU leaders berated the faculty which sat submissively in their chairs and took it. When the dean, a man who had marched at Selma and had a long and distinguished record of fighting for racial equality, tried to speak, he was told that he must remain silent so long as any black had something to say. But, for some reason, the BLSU leader did recognize the former dean, Eugene Rostow. He, however, refused to speak unless the present dean was given the floor. At that, the students swept angrily out of the room, much to the relief of a very frightened faculty. Probably the students needed a pretext to leave since there was no reason for the gathering except to shout obscenities at the faculty, and, that having been fulsomely accomplished, continuation could only have been anticlimactic. When the BLSU was gone, a prominent member of the faculty turned to Alexander Bickel, from whom I had this account, and said, “Wasn’t that wonderful! They were so sincere!” Bickel did not speak to the man for almost a year.

White radicals behaved no better. One of the few favorable developments, from the faculty’s point of view, was that the black radicals refused to cooperate with the white radicals. They believed, accurately, that the whites wanted to use them to further the whites’ aims. Blacks sat at separate tables in the dining room, sat together in the rear of the classrooms, stood apart at receptions and other functions, demanded and got their own office and television set on the ground that they could not relax with whites. Timid professors cajoled the white radicals, both cajoled the blacks. Neither set of cajolers got anywhere.

Violence and threats of violence occurred on and off campuses across the country. The culmination at Yale, which revealed a
great deal about us, came on May Day weekend, 1970. The body of a black male, who had been tortured and then shot in the head and chest, was found in the spring of 1969. Alex Rackley had been a Black Panther and was believed, on the basis of solid evidence, to have been killed in New Haven by other members who suspected him, probably wrongly, of being a police informer. Bobby Seale, a national leader, and other Panthers were indicted. As trial came nearer, agitation among radical groups across the country grew more strident. This was to be a cause célèbre for the Left, a rallying point like the trials of Sacco and Vanzetti and the Rosenbergs.

May Day weekend was chosen for a convergence on New Haven to protest the trial. Some of the groups were known to be violent and the F.B.I, told government officials that there were killers among them. Tension escalated day by day until it was palpable among students and faculty. Though many of the out-of-town groups who were coming did not care if the Panthers were guilty, it was an article of faith among many students that all trials of radicals, and most especially of black radicals, were nothing more than political suppression by a fascistic nation. The Student Senate voted a campus-wide strike in support of the Panthers. Students voted to house and feed the out-of-towners in Yale’s residential colleges. Students demanded that Yale pay for the Panthers’ defense, but it was illegal to use educational funds for such purposes. Frenzied mass meetings on campus demanded that the trial be canceled. Chanting pickets paraded before the courthouse on the town Green.

As the hysteria on campus mounted, Kingman Brewster emerged from an overheated faculty senate meeting to announce to the press that he was “skeptical of the ability of black revolutionaries to achieve a fair trial anywhere in the United States.” He said he was “appalled and ashamed” and that questions about the fairness of such trials had “been created by police actions and prosecutions against the Panthers in many parts of the country. It is also one more inheritance from centuries of racial discrimination and oppression.”
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Yale alumni were not amused…Brewster became a major liability to fund-raising efforts…nor were judges, lawyers, or citizens generally.

We lived in the “faculty ghetto,” close enough to the campus
and the town Green, where the demonstration was to take place, to be mildly worried. Should a rampage occur, as many thought possible, the faculty homes were not out of reach. Just before the designated weekend, Ralph Winter, a professor of law and a friend of mine, told a reporter: “If 10 percent of the rumors spreading around here are true, there will be no New Haven on Monday.” Stores sold out their stocks of fire extinguishers. A surprising number of faculty families found it just the time for out-of-town vacations. So did many students, including some who had voted to open the campus to the demonstrators.

Radicals poured into town in bus loads. Over 13,000 people…students from Yale and other universities mingled with Black Panthers, Weathermen, and other violent groups…in a volatile mass worked up by the usual demagogues. My wife and I sat all day in the backyard with our children to reassure them and to make certain they did not go off to see the excitement. The shouts and chants from the mob and the obscene speeches given over loudspeakers were audible, though most of the words, fortunately, were not clear. Over 4,000 federal troops were stationed nearby as reserves for the New Haven police and Connecticut state troopers. Low overhead, light spotter planes and helicopters circled watching for outbreaks. The only daytime violence occurred when Jerry Rubin said that to free Bobby Seale it was necessary to go to “the court of the streets.” Fifteen hundred demonstrators ran from the Yale campus onto the Green where they threw bottles and cans at the police, who regained control with tear gas. Radical leaders began to caution the crowd to remain peaceable, which was not the way they had spoken at the outset. In the end, the presence of the troops damped the radicals’ enthusiasm for physical force.

Night came, the town grew quiet, we put the children to bed, and raised our glasses to one another in a toast of satisfaction and relief. The explosion was so loud it seemed to slosh the whiskey in our glasses. More likely, the thud made our hands shake. The Yale hockey rink had been dynamited. Kingman Brewster, the president of Yale, announced the next day, on no evidence he ever cared to disclose, that the sabotage was done by right-wing terrorists. That was a particularly penetrating insight since no one knew of any right-wingers, much less right-wing terrorists, anywhere near New Haven, or Connecticut, or New England. No matter. Known left-wing
terrorists, who
were
in town, must not be suspected.

Brewster was defended in his serial capitulations by the Yale establishment. A prime instance was John Hersey’s book
A Letter to the Alumni.
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Hersey, a novelist who was then the master of one of Yale’s residential colleges, capped Brewster by writing that based on his research, “I am skeptical of the ability of any black person to get as fair a trial as any white person in any American court today.”
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He wrote that he feared for the country more because of the older generation that denounced the student radicals than because of the disrupters themselves.

The insanity of the times is difficult to credit a quarter of a century later. That a man had been tortured and murdered was all but forgotten as many Yale students and faculty simply assumed the evil of police, prosecutors, and courts. Outrage was expressed that Black Panther suspects should even be tried. Yet there was no doubt that sufficient evidence to compel a trial connected the Panthers with the crime. As a matter of fact, one Panther was convicted of conspiracy to murder, two others pleaded guilty, and the jury deadlocked as to the charges against the other defendants.

Because there was advance warning and a massing of police and federal troops, and only because of that, Yale’s troubles were minor compared to those of other universities and of the wider society. Cornell collapsed under the threats of black and white radicals (the Afro-American Society, soon renamed the Black Liberation Front, and SDS, respectively).
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The nation was jolted by front-page newspaper photographs of rifle-carrying black students emerging from a university building they had occupied. They came out to sign the surrender that president James A. Perkins and a majority of the faculty had accepted. The surrender was the rescission of the very mild punishments the university had imposed for such actions as trashing a library and occupying a building. Perkins was so reduced to servility that at an angry gathering of over 8,000 students, he publicly embraced the leaders of the AAS and SDS on stage; they mocked him in turn, and then kept him sitting cross-legged on the floor of the stage while they orated. When his turn finally came, Perkins submissively told the crowd that the occupation of the university building and the student pressure was “probably one of the most constructive, positive forces that have been set in motion in the history of Cornell.”