They Marched Into Sunlight (22 page)

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 Freudian 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.”

S
INCE 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.

One small measure of that tension in Madison was the diminishing circulation of the liberal afternoon newspaper, the
Capital Times,
which, along with the subscription decline that all evening papers faced, was losing even more subscribers on the east side, traditionally its strongest base of support, because of its early and unequivocal editorials against the war. Since its founding in 1917 by William T. Evjue, a leading figure in the Wisconsin Progressive movement, and during the 1950s and ’60s under Evjue’s disciple, Miles McMillin, the newspaper had developed a reputation for taking strong liberal stands on controversial issues—most notably in standing up to Wisconsin’s red-baiting senator, Joseph R. McCarthy—and the Vietnam war was part of that progressive continuum. On February 12, 1965, a month before the marines landed in Da Nang, the paper ran a headline reading “Negotiate in Viet Nam Before It’s Too Late.” “The fighting in Viet Nam is escalating to a point of serious danger,” the paper wrote:

President Johnson, we hope, is finding out that the Goldwater policy leads to the dangers predicted. The President should go back and look at the election returns again. Before it is too late, the Johnson administration should move toward the negotiations that should have been initiated long ago.

We are heading into a war that we can’t win. Even now, as Sec. McNamara has said, we cannot defend against the type of fighting being carried out against us. We are losing not only the military engagements. But we are losing prestige in Asia even faster. It is bad enough that we are looked upon as an intruder. We are looked upon as a bumbling intruder that can’t even match the fighting prowess of the Viet Cong guerrillas.

The antiwar editorials continued incessantly from there, month after month: “The Only Way to Save Face Is to Get Out of Viet Nam.” “Why Are We Bombing When It Has No Military Significance?” “A Cynical Rationalization of Broken Promises on Viet Nam.” “Time for Congress to Reassert War Making Authority.” “Viet Nam Bombing Strains Credibility Gap Again.”

On the west side of Madison, the epicenter of Wisconsin liberalism, people and institutions were judged not only by what they said about Vietnam but when they said it. Antiwar credentials were determined by the month and year one came out against the war: before or after the Gulf of Tonkin, before or after the marines landed, and so on through the Tet Offensive and other benchmark events of the sixties. By national standards Democratic senator Gaylord Nelson was regarded as an antiwar stalwart, but in his own retrospective accounting he did not enter the fray early enough. He had trouble excusing himself for voting for the Gulf of Tonkin resolution on August 7, 1964, a congressional acquiescence that LBJ used as authority to widen the war. Nelson had been skeptical during floor debate before the vote. He had been reassured, wrongly, that the resolution would not be used as congressional authorization for a full-scale war and had authored an amendment limiting the authority of the president to wage war, yet he thereafter regretted not having joined the two lone senators who voted against the resolution, Wayne Morse of Oregon (who was born in Madison and a graduate of the University of Wisconsin) and Ernest Gruening of Alaska.

The divide in Madison then was chronological as well as geographic. A defining point on the timeline was the grassroots Hearing on the War in Vietnam conducted by Democrat Robert W. Kastenmeier, the liberal Second District congressman, on Friday and Saturday, July 30 and 31,1965. It was one thing to organize a teach-in on the war on a college campus, as Sewell had done a few months earlier, and quite another to bring the debate into the larger civic realm. Kastenmeier’s was the first such congressional hearing in the country. The issue was so controversial that he was denied use of the City-County Building and instead held the hearing in a downtown Methodist church. Opposition to the hearing was orchestrated by the local hard-hat boss, city alderman Harold (Babe) Rohr, a World War II veteran and leader of the building trades labor council who supported LBJ’s war policy, explaining that “building trades is a big part in any war.”

In contrast to the UW teach-in, this was not an overwhelmingly one-sided hearing but reflected the fuller range of the Vietnam debate. In this civilized forum there was no jeering, but partisans applauded speakers on both sides of the argument. Among those testifying in support of the Johnson administration’s war effort were representatives of the American Legion, Young Americans for Freedom, the Military Order of the World Wars, UW political scientists Fred Von Der Mehden and David W. Tarr (with some reservations), and the chairmen of both the local Young Democrats and Young Republicans. The latter was a second-year law student named Tom Thompson from Elroy, Wisconsin, who testified despite having qualms about “the wisdom, advisability, and intent” of the gathering. “If this hearing is to take up that question of abandonment—if it is only to hear the cries of appeasement from people who cannot find enough distaste for communism to fight it—then this hearing does not serve a purpose, that is, no other purpose than to weaken dangerously the determination of our country and its people at a time when great determination and strong moral courage are demanded as fitting examples of democracy.”

The YAF spokesman at the hearing, David A. Keene, focused his testimony on Viet Cong atrocities encouraged by the government of Ho Chi Minh as part of its strategy of destabilizing the South. Starting in 1957, Keene said, Ho Chi Minh “began a campaign of terror in South Vietnam designed to isolate the people from their government. Principal targets included teachers, doctors, nurses and village officials. The late President John F. Kennedy, in May of 1961, revealed that between May 1960 and May 1961 more than 4,000 low level officials were killed by the Viet Cong.” That number had grown to thirteen thousand by 1965, Keene added, and the only way to stop it was to defeat the Vietnamese Communists. American withdrawal, Keene said,

would abandon fourteen million people to Communist enslavement…. More than a million of those people voted with their feet against Communism when they fled from North Vietnam following the Geneva Agreements of 1954. They have trusted our word and they have fought Ho Chi Minh. The South Vietnamese population has suffered more than we can possibly imagine to keep their country out of the hands of the Communist regime to their north. Communism, and this is too often ignored, is evil. It is a pseudo-religion which justifies a ruthless dictatorship. Since 1917 its disciples have been responsible for the planned deaths of many millions of innocent men, women and children. It is a system of government that destroys its opponents without mercy, controls the minds of those who live under it, and ambitiously boasts that it will one day dominate the world.

Both Thompson and Keene would emerge decades later as players on the national political stage, Tommy Thompson as Wisconsin’s governor and as secretary of health and human services in the administration of George W. Bush, Keene as an aide to Vice President Spiro T. Agnew and longtime chairman of the American Conservative Union. Thompson joined the Wisconsin National Guard and did not serve in Vietnam. Keene, who opposed the draft even as he supported the war, was protected from the draft by deferments.

The oldest speaker supporting the war was retired Captain Joseph Bollenbeck, representing the Military Order of the World Wars, whose service in the military went back to the First World War. “The Vietnam affair is not, as some falsely allege, a revolt against the government, but an invasion by the North Vietnamese Communist forces,” Bollenbeck said. “It is another incident of Communist violation of the 1954 Geneva Agreement and the basic principles of the United Nations which oppose the use of force. It is conclusive proof of the hypocrisy of Communists who talk peace but blatantly violate it as they arrogantly announce they will support “wars of liberation and popular insurrections.” He had little doubt, Bollenbeck added, that “American and foreign demonstrations…are largely Communist inspired. Leaders of college groups demanding our withdrawal have a long record of pro-Communist activities, and this is particularly true in Madison.”

William Appleman Williams, the academic critic of American empire, appeared among the antiwar speakers and dealt first with Bollenbeck’s charge. “I should like, at the outset, to speak to three charges made against the critics of American policy in Vietnam,” Williams began.

First: that some critics are Communists. This is true as fact. It is also true as fact that some extreme reactionaries are also critics of American policy in Vietnam. Both facts are incidental to the substantive issues. Criticism is properly judged by its relevance, by its evidence, and by its internal coherence and logic. If Communists offer a better critique than non-Communists, which I deny, then the effective non-Communist response is to do better homework on the issues instead of forwarding fantasy and hearsay to Washington.