They Marched Into Sunlight (17 page)

J
UST AS ARMY COMMANDER
Terry de la Mesa Allen Jr. was shaped by the traditions of his father and grandfather before him, so too was antiwar activist Paul Richard Soglin. The military was not an institution to which members of his family felt special allegiance. Aaron Soglin, a grandfather, had grown up in Nosovich, a village in Russia, and sailed to America in November 1912 aboard the SS
Patricia,
a ship that plied the Atlantic in the early years of the twentieth century carrying thousands of Eastern European immigrants to the United States from the port of Hamburg, Germany. In immigration papers he signed after landing in New York, Aaron Soglin listed his occupation as tailor and his age as twenty-six. He also recorded that until then he had lived under the alias Yankel Katzoff. As his grandson Paul later reconstructed the story, the alias was taken so that Aaron Soglin could avoid serving in the Russian army. The czarist army did not draft only sons, so when Aaron was born as a second son, his parents registered his birth under the name of a nearby married couple, the Katzoffs, who were too old to have children. On the other side of the family, the maternal grandfather, Chaim Centora, had fled Russian-controlled Poland and sailed to America on the same
Patricia
seven years earlier, and had also ended up in Chicago, only to discover that his blind father, a rabbinical scholar, had been jailed in Poland on charges that he had helped his son avoid military service. Centora, whose name was Americanized to Hyman Century, was in London on his way back to Poland when he learned that his father had bribed authorities and been released.

Paul’s father, Albert Soglin, grew up in the Jewish settlement around Marshall High on Chicago’s West Side. He was drafted into the army out of college and served in the Signal Corps during World War II but was not sent overseas. (Paul, his oldest son, was born on April 22, 1945, which the family also remembered as the day the Russians entered Berlin.) After the war Albert earned a master’s degree in mathematics at the Illinois Institute of Technology and was hired to teach in the Chicago public school system. When the Illinois legislature passed the Broyles Act, requiring a loyalty pledge from government employees, teachers who refused to sign could continue working but would not be paid unless they took the oath. Albert Soglin refused to sign. His wife, Rose, taught correspondence courses for two years to earn money for the family while he taught without pay; he relented when the state supreme court upheld the law’s constitutionality. To question the American government was the norm in the Soglin family. When Paul was four, his mother took him along as she marched in nuclear disarmament demonstrations, protests that marked the birth of a peace movement that would grow and transform over a generation into the movement against the war in Vietnam. Rose Soglin named her son Paul R. in honor of Paul Robeson, the majestic black singer, actor, and civil rights activist who was a hero of the American left. Paul rarely saw his mother more dismayed than she was on the day that he came home from the Hyde Park school with an American Legion medal he had won for a seventh-grade essay extolling the symbolic glory of the American flag.

A few years later, when he was only fourteen, he sent away for transcripts of the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings. He read them as part civics lesson, part tragedy, and part melodrama revealing “who’s squealing on whom.”

By Paul’s junior year in high school in 1960, his family had moved up to Highland Park in the north suburbs, among the more progressive communities outside Chicago, a town that did not have restrictive covenants against blacks and was fairly evenly divided among Catholics, Protestant, and Jews. He had some cachet among his suburban peers because he knew the hip sections down in the city near the University of Chicago. In the classroom he had a reputation as a mild rabble-rouser. His English teacher gave him an A for an entertaining speech he delivered on mathematical oddities, including how presidential candidates with double letters in their surnames historically had prevailed (Jefferson, Hoover, Coolidge, the Harrisons, the Roosevelts, Kennedy), but then dropped him a grade point when he followed that with a stirring oration in praise of Fidel Castro and the Cuban revolution.
Paul, that was a very good speech. Do you really believe what you said?
the teacher asked.
I wouldn’t have said it if I didn’t believe it,
he answered. He was also known for asking his teachers pointed questions about the air raid drills:
Why are we doing this?

When it came time to choose a college, the military was a factor, in a sense. It was “a given” that Soglin did not intend to go into the service. One attraction of the University of Wisconsin, along with its academic reputation, was that it had reduced the ROTC requirement to a handful of hours while most midwestern land grant colleges still had at least a year of mandatory ROTC. Soglin arrived in Madison at age seventeen, a baby-faced kid too young to drink beer even by Wisconsin’s relaxed standards. After a few months living in Kronsage Hall across from a few Wisconsin boys who trapped chipmunks along the lakeshore path and kept them in a cage, he escaped to a rooming house on North Henry Street, which offered a decidedly more bohemian atmosphere.

By his second semester Soglin was secretary of the local branch of SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which at Wisconsin then was mostly white. On the first day of school in his sophomore year in 1963, he participated in a moment of silence on Bascom Hill in memory of four black children killed in the racially motivated September 15 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. The next month, on the afternoon of October 18, he attended the first major protest at UW against the incipient war in Vietnam. The demonstration drew 350 people to the front of the Union, where speakers denounced U.S. government support of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem and accused Diem of running a tyrannical regime that committed atrocities against dissident students and Buddhist monks. Placards at the rally urged “U.S. Out, U.N. In” and “Diem Out, People In.”

An editorial in the
Cardinal,
whose editor-in-chief was future political journalist Jeff Greenfield, noted that while the protest’s sponsors—ranging from the Young Democrats to the Young Socialist Alliance—had differing viewpoints and no solutions, they showed that they could “put aside differences of opinion to make a stand on achieving common goals.” (Greenfield also wrote an accompanying column that said FBI director J. Edgar Hoover was wasting his time worrying about whether student radicals were communists. “This is, of course, absolute nonsense,” he wrote. “They don’t stand a chance of winning over college students. The reason for this failure is obvious—they dress badly.” According to Greenfield’s analysis, “the college audience demands not only a better world, but a cooler world.”) In a front-page photograph of the demonstration, Soglin could be seen standing in the middle of the crowd, trying to look cool, smoking a cigarette.

T
WO WEEKS LATER
Diem was assassinated in a military coup orchestrated by the CIA and backed by the Kennedy administration. His death marked not an end but another bloody beginning in America’s entanglement in Vietnam.

One noontime later that November, Soglin emerged from an eleven o’clock calculus class and had reached Bascom Hill when he noticed that the campus walkways were desolate at what normally was the busiest time of day.
Where is everybody?
he asked someone standing outside South Hall.
Didn’t you hear?
came the reply.
Kennedy’s been shot.
Soglin raced down the hill and across Park Street into the side door of the Union until he reached the entrance to the Rathskeller, where in the dimness he found a group of students at two tables near the archway, huddling around Harvey Goldberg, a young history professor who had started teaching in Madison only that fall but was on his way to becoming the guru of the student left. Soglin later described the scene: “By this time it is known that Kennedy’s dead, and everyone was around Goldberg and he was talking quietly, very quietly, you could barely hear him, and he was genuinely mortified by what had happened, maybe not with Kennedy personally, but with the implications of a rightwing coup, and was it the end of democracy, and where does this fit with revolutions of Europe and the revolution of 1848 and the assassination of the archduke and the flow of history and meantime people are running up and down to the second floor where the television sets are—and then just everybody disappeared.”

Thanksgiving was coming, and no one could study, so they went home. That was always part of the reality, or unreality, of student life. One could simply leave.

Soglin began college with a premed curriculum, heavy in the sciences, but he was slowed by mononucleosis in his sophomore year, failed calculus, and nearly flunked out altogether. He gradually switched his concentration to history, which was closer to his political interests and at Wisconsin meant that he could choose from an illustrious cast of professors, from William Appleman Williams and William Taylor on American foreign policy to the charismatic Goldberg on French social history to Merle Curti on American intellectual history to John R. W. Smail on Southeast Asian studies to George Mosse on European history and the lessons of nationalism. What mattered most to Soglin and his activist classmates was what they called relevance. They looked for analogies between the abolitionists of the nineteenth century and antiwar activists of the sixties. They studied abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison’s argument that in fighting for a moral cause, one must be an irritant, shake up the social order, and call for immediate change rather than gradualism. They analyzed Thoreau’s philosophy of civil disobedience, holding that there was a higher law than the law of the land—the law of conscience—and that when the two laws were in conflict, one must choose the law of conscience and accept the consequences. They became interested in educational policy and the question of whether a university could ever be neutral. They hungered for connections between imperialism and modern American foreign policy.

The history department at Wisconsin was renowned for a distinctive school of thought deeply rooted in midwestern values: progressive, democratic, scornful of the eastern establishment, and somewhat isolationist. As one colleague described it only half jokingly, it was “history from the viewpoint of South Dakota,” which happened to be the home state of one of its practitioners, American colonial historian Merrill Jensen. The modern department was built by Fred Harvey Harrington. Before his rise to the presidency of the university, Harrington’s field had been U.S. foreign policy, and his central theme was that economic imperialism served as the engine that drove the United States into the world, especially into Asia. He and his disciples, including William Appleman Williams, who was much sharper in his critique of American foreign policy, in a sense constructed their work on the foundation laid by Frederick Jackson Turner, whose portrait greeted visitors to the history department offices. Turner’s thesis at Wisconsin became the seminal document on how westward movement into the always shifting frontier shaped the American democratic character. Once that expansionism moved beyond the nation’s borders, the Wisconsin historians argued, it lost its larger purpose and became a manifestation of corporate greed.

Williams, a Naval Academy graduate and World War II officer who grew up on a dirt farm in Iowa, was especially strong in making the historical connections between traditional western liberalism, trade, and U.S. policy in Vietnam, what he called “the tragic ambitions of Empire.” “No one can be certain, but it is highly probable that the first Americans to reach what we now call Vietnam were various masters and sailors who, seduced by the lure of wealth and adventure, became international pirates during King William’s War (1689–97),” Williams once wrote. “They returned with gold and silver and other exotic wealth to flaunt their success in the streets of Boston and other ports south to Charleston. They indulged themselves in colorful and garish costumes, and made bold advances to women of all classes.” That, said Williams, presaged centuries of imperial expansion during which “American leaders were chasing the nightmare of a global Pax Americana. It was a mindless hunger that led…finally to intervention in Vietnam.”

Goldberg and Mosse drew the largest crowds, their lecture halls buzzing with hundreds of students filling the aisles and leaning over the balconies. Radical students formed a cult around Goldberg and sat spellbound as he delivered lectures laced with revolutionary allusions, cultural anecdotes, literary references, reflections on the day’s
New York Times,
and arcane sociological data from French archives. Described by Madison writers Dave Wagner and Ron McCrea as “small, scrawny to the point of being cadaverous…all animation, elfish, with a droll smile and a pair of eyebrows that sent out a semaphore of confidential signals when he was amused or appalled,” Goldberg was pure performance, yet his scholarship, and the sort he encouraged in his graduate school disciples, was based on the assiduous accumulation of fact. Soglin preferred Mosse.

With his heavy German accent and appearance of quizzical bemusement, Mosse, a wealthy Jewish refugee who had spent much of his career studying the dangerous rise of nationalism, fascism, and Nazism, was far less ostentatiously leftist than Goldberg, and less taken by the idea of empire than Williams. In his memoir written decades later, Mosse said that he and Williams “spent many a night debating whether terms like mercantilism could simply be transferred from 17th century Europe to 19th century America.” Williams thrived on those connections, but Mosse thought “concepts could not be applied to different centuries and continents.” He was also often curmudgeonly in his disapproval of student behavior. While receptive to what he saw as the new left’s search for “a third way between Marxist materialism on the one hand and capitalism on the other,” he never shied away from criticizing radical students when he saw them falling into fascistic tendencies, suppressing the speech and dismissing the thoughts of others. It was Mosse’s dream to make “the power of reason” the centerpiece of liberal and leftist thought and to “put the autonomy of man into the center of socialism—man was the
end
and must never become a
means.
”