Sex, Drugs, and 'Commies' in the Heartland

Spring semester ’66 at Indiana University was surely a season of discontent for President Elvis Stahr. Of the four major speakers visiting campus, two were known personally and warmly welcomed by the president, a former Secretary of the Army, while the other two, far removed from mainstream America, were a source of woe.

 President Stahr welcomed two generals, both forceful supporters of the Vietnam War, at IU’s large auditorium. The two outliers, both strong opponents of America’s war in Vietnam, were shunted off to smaller venues. All the speakers were met by protests from one direction or another. During his short, turbulent tenure at IU, the president invoked the spirit of academic freedom to defend the more unorthodox speakers’ right to speak on campus, but when it came to the IU New Left, he grew increasingly critical and intolerant.

A more incongruous quartet of speakers could not have been imagined at a conservative university in the middle of America’s heartland. General Maxwell Taylor appeared first in late February ’66. He had served as JFK’s special military adviser on Vietnam, as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and as Ambassador to South Vietnam. Taylor was met by an orderly protest that included campus SDS activists, including my ex-Vietnam GI brother Jeff Sharlet.

Barely a week passed before Allen Ginsberg, poet of the Beat Generation famous for the poem Howl (1956) and a guru of then contemporary counter-culture, unexpectedly arrived at IU. Privately invited by a Sociology professor, word quickly got around, and the well-known poet was soon sought out for a public reading.  However, given Ginsberg’s free use of obscenities in his verse celebrating homosexuality and drug use, a hue and cry went up at the state legislature. The poet’s criticism of the war in another poem of more temperate language was of less interest to the legislators.

Two months later in early May, the second general marched onto campus. General Lewis B Hershey was not only pro-war, but Director of the Selective Service System from which draft calls issued forth, putting young men at risk. General Hershey’s appearance was met by a larger and more vigorous protest at which Jeff and others spoke – a peaceful demonstration confronted by a huge, unruly student counter-demonstration.

 Finally, just a day later, the theoretician of the American Communist Party, Herbert Aptheker, arrived to speak to a much smaller audience. Although a major academic specialist on the plight of the Negro in America, his talk focused on opposition to the Vietnam War. Objections by both town and gown to Aptheker’s presence on campus were so strong that Bloomington provided him with police protection enroute to the venue.

The story of the generals and IU’s New Left protests has been told†, but the tale of the hippie guru and the ‘notorious’ communist on campus is less well known. The two men came from the margins of American society – the hardline Old Left and the very provocative counter-cultural revolution. Although Herbert Aptheker was the furthest thing from a hippie and the poet Allen Ginsberg the antithesis of orthodoxy of any persuasion, the two had much in common.

Both were Columbia University graduates who became leading public intellectuals of their time. While Aptheker was a PhD as well as a Communist Party (CP) activist, Ginsberg was a leading poet as well as an essayist on public issues. Both poet and scholar were prolific writers, each producing dozens of books.

Allen Ginsberg reciting ‘Howl’ in Greenwich Village NY, 1966 

Ginsberg and Aptheker had come to the fore during the placid postwar decade, the ‘50s, described aptly by one writer as years that “seem to have taken place on a sunny afternoon that asked nothing of you ….”** For most people, those were years of great complacency and high conformism during which the poet and the communist each staked out his controversial public position. It was a period when anything other than heterosexual sex was considered perverse and hidden in the ‘closet’, and narcotic use was severely punishable. Ginsberg in his poem America (1956) boasted of his drug use and flaunted his homosexuality:

I smoke marijuana every chance I get.

...

America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.  

Likewise, long before the Supreme Court’s Brown decision (1954) and during the lengthy case by case unwinding of segregation, Aptheker thundered his criticism of the difficult circumstances of the Negro, not just as the CP party line, but in his role as one of the country’s noted academic experts on the subject. In word and voluminous print, he was a veritable 20^th century John Brown, albeit absent violence.

While a segment of the American public shared a concern about racism, although not from a Marxist perspective, Aptheker went completely off the rails of public discourse after the USSR’s bloody suppression of the anti-Soviet Hungarian Revolution (1956). With the US still in the grip of McCarthyism and anti-communist hysteria rife, Aptheker, a defender of Stalinism, rushed into print with The Truth about Hungary (1957), a book justifying the brutal Soviet crushing of the ‘Freedom Fighters’ even as the newly installed Hungarian government was carrying out its draconian campaign of trials, hangings, and the imprisonment of survivors.

In the ‘60s, Ginsberg and Aptheker were both early opponents of America’s involvement in Vietnam, well before the war came to wide public notice. Ginsberg had visited South Vietnam in ’63 during the low intensity phase of the war, Jeff’s first year in-country. Later, as the war grew in scale, Aptheker was invited to Hanoi by the North Vietnamese leadership and went there along with two non-communist peace activists.

Allen Ginsberg arrived at IU on March 1^st ’66 as the private guest of a sociologist researching national drug legislation, a topic on which the poet was well informed. He was touring the Midwest and had driven up from Kansas. News soon spread that the famous poet was in town, and the English Department asked if he would give an impromptu reading of his work.

Ginsberg agreed, and hundreds of students and faculty crowded into a small auditorium to hear him, standing room only. He and his partner, Peter Orlovsky, alternated reciting their poetry. Their poems involved sex, religion, and the virtues of drug use, all in wildly off-color language. In spite of the presence of the Kinsey Institute at IU with its focus on deviant as well as straight sex, a number of people were shocked by the poets’ explicit sexual references, particularly one of Orlovsky’s poems, which, as one student – not a shrinking violet – later said, grossed him out.

With the Vietnam War raging halfway around the world and General Taylor’s encomiums to it a week earlier, for the politically-minded student activists, Ginsberg’s new poem Wichita Vortex Sutra was the big hit of the reading. He had recorded the poem via stream of consciousness and then transcribed it just a couple of weeks earlier while on the road in central Kansas. 

Wichita Vortex Sutra was a powerful antiwar poem of the Vietnam era, perhaps Ginsberg’s most emphatic poetic demonization of the American war in Southeast Asia. The structural technique was brilliant, juxtaposing the violent ‘Newspeak’ of war with scenes of bucolic Kansas – under the thematic aegis of “American Eagle beating its wings over Asia.” Three sets of contrasting images below from the long poem, including two that even feature Generals Taylor and Hershey, illustrate the poet’s technique: 

Omaha World Herald – Rusk Says Toughness

Essential for Peace

~~

A black horse bends its head to the stubble

beside the silver stream winding thru the woods

***

General Taylor Limited Objectives

imagining Enclaves

Tactical bombing the magic formula

~~

black cows browse in caked fields

ponds in the hollows lie frozen,

quietness

***

boys with sexual bellies aroused

chilled in the heart by the mailman

with a letter from an aging white haired General

Director of selection for service in Deathwar

~~

in chill earthly mist

houseless brown farmland plains rolling heavenward

The poet’s recital had a dramatic effect on one student, a fellow political activist and good friend of brother Jeff’s at IU, who later wrote “inspired by Ginsberg, I decided to return my draft card to the Selective Service. I was turning in my membership card. I no longer belonged.”***

IU’s administration found the whole affair lurid, embarrassing, and offensive to the community’s sense of propriety. Repercussions began immediately. Up in Indianapolis, the Speaker of the Indiana House of Representatives viewed much of what had been spoken as obscenity in violation of decency laws and threatened a legislative investigation of what was going on down there at the state university.

It took President Stahr nearly two weeks to quiet the furor by arguing academic freedom and the right of the campus to hear all points of view. Not content to leave it at that, however, in a left-handed swipe at Allen Ginsberg he added  that the students could “not be swept off their feet by fads, fancies, or phoneys.”****

Given public fears of domestic communist subversion, Herbert Aptheker’s appearance at IU in early May ’66 proved even more provocative than the storm of criticism over Ginsberg. While the poet, so to speak, had slipped onto campus ‘over the transom’ by private invitation, Aptheker had been formally invited by two radical campus groups. The Dubois Club, the youth affiliate of the Communist Party USA, and Young People’s Socialist League (YPSL) were both duly registered as official student organizations, thereby indirectly implicating IU in the campus visit of a well-known American Communist.

As with all campus events, Aptheker’s lecture was announced in advance on the university’s event calendar, which was available to all residents of the small town of Bloomington. Although it was well before the age of the Internet, the gist of the speaker’s bio would have been accessible to anyone interested. He had joined the CP in ’39, earned a PhD in History from Columbia University, and served honorably in WWII. By the end of the war, Dr Aptheker had attained the rank of major in the Army, but in 1950 he was forced to resign his commission because of his CP membership.

In his scholarly career Aptheker had become a distinguished historian of  the Negro in America, publishing numerous books on the subject. However, due to his CP affiliation, Aptheker was blacklisted in academe except for a brief stint as a visiting professor at Bryn Mawr College. By the ‘60s, he was widely known as the Communist Party’s intellectual star, tirelessly dedicated to opposing American racism, capitalism, and imperialism.

Prior to his IU lecture, Dr Aptheker’s notoriety as a top communist in Cold War America had caused problems at several campuses to which he had been invited to speak. He was hung in effigy at Ohio State University in the fall of ’65, while in March ‘66 he was escorted off campus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill under a state law banning communists from speaking. And then in late April, just a week before his IU appearance, Aptheker was again hung in effigy –  this time at the University of Miami, although 2500 students listened politely to his presentation on the American Negro.

As news of Aptheker’s upcoming visit got around Bloomington, local businessmen criticized IU for inviting an ‘avowed’ communist, while individual members of the Board of Trustees, –  political appointees at a public university –  began receiving outraged complaints from citizens around the state. Alarmed by the popular reaction, the board chairman, a banker, met with President Stahr.

Stahr argued that a speaker such as Aptheker espousing an unpopular cause fell under the rubric of academic freedom, the right of individuals to express their contentious views on campus freely. Persuaded that to un-invite Aptheker would bring IU into disrepute in academe, the chairman issued a statement providing political cover for the trustees and the university. Assuring the public that the state’s main institution of higher learning loathed communism, he announced:

                               We will not assist the communist conspiracy
                                by denying freedom of speech and thereby
                                martyring its mouthpiece.****

Although Elvis Stahr no doubt had a hand in drafting the board’s cover statement, by sleight of hand he still managed to occupy the high ground in the affair, taking credit before the faculty for a victory for diversity and tolerance.

Herbert Aptheker followed Selective Service director Lewis Hershey by a day at IU. General Hershey’s speech on Monday, May 2^nd, had been met by protest and counter-protest demonstrations. Forewarned of Aptheker’s recent bruising encounters at other universities, Bloomington police escorted him to the auditorium given, as the chief put it to the local paper, the ‘high feeling’ in the community. At the door of the event, IU Security then checked IDs to ensure that only members of the campus community were admitted.

Herbert Aptheker speaking at IU, May, 1966 

A few months earlier, Aptheker had returned from a trip to Hanoi and soon thereafter had published a small book, Mission to Hanoi, dismissed by a scholar of Asia as mainly a propaganda tract. Not surprisingly, the Vietnam War was Aptheker’s topic before a packed house of 450 students and faculty. Predictably, he opposed America’s involvement in Vietnam’s civil war and advocated US withdrawal – positions most likely congenial to most of those who chose to hear him; thus, the evening in the hall passed with no untoward incidents.

 

Aptheker in Hanoi (see arrow), cover of his book, 1966 

Although the campus New Left, which by then had been actively opposing the war for over a year, welcomed Aptheker’s critical perspective as counterpoint to the two generals; the majority at IU, and for that matter throughout the country, still supported the Johnson Administration’s war policy. Most people either ignored or dismissed antiwar rhetoric, but a small group of conservative IU students vigorously objected both to Aptheker the communist as well as his remarks on Vietnam. Not to be outdone by fellow students elsewhere, they hung him in effigy at Indiana University. 

In these instances, the generally outraged public reactions to individuals expressing extremely unconventional and unpopular views happened to have taken place at Indiana University, but (certainly in Aptheker’s case) the same did and could have occurred at many other universities in politically and socially conservative sections of the country. It was the era of the Cold War, the divisive surrogate war in Vietnam, the Civil Rights struggle, and a time of essentially still traditional attitudes on sexuality – all emotionally-laden subjects giving rise to considerable passion by supporters and opponents.

In a more philosophical vein in the midst of that roller coaster spring semester at IU, one professor shrewdly remarked at a faculty meeting that the greater danger at the university was actually widespread student apathy, not student radicalism.
___________________
† http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2012/09/the-generals-march-on-indiana.html 
* A Ginsberg, Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays 1952-1995 (2000), 126
** E Hardwick, Bartleby in Manhattan and Other Essays (1984), 82
***D Worker, Escape, Adventure and Other Tales of Madness: http://dwightworker.com/author/allen/
****T Clark, Indiana University: Years of Fulfillment, Vol. 3 (1977), 587
*****Ibid.

The Generals March on Indiana

Back from Vietnam in ’64, my brother Jeff Sharlet returned to Indiana University (IU) to resume his education. Coincidentally, the same man under whom he had served in the long military chain of command was now president of the university. Elvis Stahr had been appointed Secretary of the Army by President Kennedy (JFK) in ’61. Stahr acquitted himself well during difficult times for JFK – the Bay of Pigs fiasco of spring ’61 and the Berlin Crisis, which culminated in the construction of the Berlin Wall that summer. Stahr held the Pentagon post until his departure for Indiana a year later.
 
His would not be an easy tenure at IU.  As the Vietnam War heated up with President Johnson’s (LBJ) major escalation in early ‘65, a small number of students organized, joining a Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) march on Washington DC in April of ’65, and sponsoring a local march in Bloomington in August. At the same time Robin Hunter, Bernella and David Satterfield, Jim Wallihan, Peter and Lucia Montague, and others worked on establishing an IU SDS chapter that Jeff soon joined.  As if providing grist for the antiwar mill during the next two years, President Stahr, who was well-connected in Washington, invited a series of major pro war speakers to campus.
 
It was quite an impressive roster, beginning with former Vice President Nixon, following with Generals Maxwell Taylor and Lewis Hershey, and concluding with Secretary of State Dean Rusk. Stahr invited no counter-balancing antiwar speakers of similar stature; Herbert Aptheker, theoretician of the American Communist Party, and a few other lesser known leaders of the left were all invited by tiny sectarian groups at the university with little following. IU, a sleepy Midwestern campus, was fundamentally a conservative place, and the pro war notables attracted very large audiences, while Aptheker drew only hundreds and was hung in effigy outside the student union.
 
What drew the Washington luminaries to the middle of the Great Plains? Presumably, Stahr had the contacts and the clout to persuade them to visit the campus as his distinguished guests. He clearly seemed to know some of them professionally since he often personally introduced the speaker in the university’s vast auditorium. For Nixon, accepting an invitation in the fall of ’65 was no doubt an easy decision. Out of office and working as a New York lawyer, he had ambitions to get back in the political game.
 
Indiana, long a Republican state, would be a good place to show himself to the thousands of conservatives who would come out to hear the former VP. Not many would have been aware that in ’54 then-Vice President Nixon had tried to persuade President Eisenhower (Ike) to save the beleaguered French colonialist forces, which were about to be overrun by Ho Chi Minh’s communist army at Dien Bien Phu—given Nixon’s anti-communist portfolio, it was a logical recommendation, but one which Ike wisely rejected.  However, the roughly 200 student activists marching in protest outside the auditorium that day were well aware of Nixon’s stance on Indochina.
 
The generals came marching onto campus the following spring of ‘66. General Taylor, a hero of WWII, came in March; he was so closely involved with Vietnam War policy that his arrival was unmistakably a pro war statement. After visiting Vietnam under JFK, Taylor recommended  the introduction of US combat troops and even the idea of ‘liberating’  Communist North Vietnam,  decisions the President declined to take. Subsequently Taylor served as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and later as Ambassador to South Vietnam. He was an ardent supporter of the war.

President Stahr introducing General Taylor, ‘66

 
Taylor was followed to the rostrum in early May by a fellow flag officer, General Hershey, an avuncular 73-year-old whose military career went back to the Mexican Border War of 1916. He’d been head of the Selective Service System since ‘41. An Indiana native son, he was certainly a welcome guest at the Hoosier state’s largest university; like most schools, IU liked to bask in the glory of those with local connections who went far.  But for IU student activists as well as draft age male students, a protest was called for.  Hershey had recently told draft boards they could draft college men who were not performing well academically; prior to that, young men were automatically exempt from the draft while in college. 

 

Further, Hershey ordered an aptitude test to be resumed after a long hiatus that very month; performance on the test would determine who remained exempt and who did not.  For activists as well as poorly performing male students blindsided by the directive, the general represented the point of the spear marshaling young men to war in faraway South Vietnam.  A year later the general would issue another regulation aimed directly at college-deferred men, subjecting them to the draft immediately for demonstrating against a military recruiter. 

 

The last in the string of pro-war speakers was Rusk, a major hawk, at the end of October ‘67. Like Nixon, he carried personal baggage from the past that no doubt shaped his unremitting advocacy of the US mission in Vietnam. Rusk had been Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs in the postwar Truman Administration after the fall of China in ‘49. When the Republicans tarred the Democrats with ‘losing China’ to the ‘Reds’, Rusk made certain that his image as a tough-minded Cold Warrior was clearly visible.

 

Tapped by JFK for Secretary of State a decade later, Rusk had been prepared to throw himself with the zeal of a true believer into the young president’s crusade against international communism. However, it was understood by all that JFK would conduct his own foreign policy with Rusk as his diplomatic place holder, a status to which he accommodated himself without complaint. In Washington circles he was soon considered a mediocrity, a perception he subsequently did little to change.

 

After JFK’s assassination, Rusk continued to go with the flow and fly with the hawks on Vietnam. By ’67, other than LBJ himself and Defense Secretary McNamara, Rusk’s appearance before a student audience was guaranteed to serve as a lightning rod for antiwar protest, and IU was no exception. A special ‘reception’ was prepared by an activist group calling itself the “Dean Rusk Welcoming Committee.”

 

Each of the national advocates of the Vietnam War was met by an escalating level of antiwar protest at IU, albeit very small in scale compared to the size of the student body. At the time of Nixon’s arrival on campus, increased American involvement in the conflict in Southeast Asia was barely six months old. The campus protestors’ challenge was not students supporting the war; on the contrary, the war barely registered with the average IU student at the time – the main problem was student apathy.

 

The newly formed SDS chapter and a campus left group, YPSL or the Young People’s Socialist League, managed to mobilize nearly 200 demonstrators to march in protest of Nixon’s fall ’65 appearance. Predictably Nixon praised LBJ’s recent escalation – the start of a bombing campaign against the Communist North and the dispatch of combat troops to South Vietnam.

 

When the generals arrived on campus during the spring of ’66, the student activists were better prepared to mount protests, but as it turned out, a significant part of the campus population was also ready to counter-demonstrate on behalf of the war. Under a newly formed campus umbrella organization, the Committee to End the War in Vietnam (CEWV), a coalition of groups led by Jim Wallihan, Destiny Kinal Handelman, and brother Jeff for SDS; Professor Jim Dinsmoor, who was hoping to run for Congress as a peace candidate; and others, devised a different strategy for General Taylor’s visit in March.

 

Instead of protesting the general’s appearance on campus, a demonstration was organized in support of Indiana’s junior senator, Vance Hartke, who had come out publically against the war. Signs were made, marchers were urged to wear jackets, ties, skirts; and Taylor was greeted by a neatly dressed, orderly group of young people vocally supporting a Washington opponent of the war.

 

In May, General Hershey was met by a traditional demonstration that unexpectedly provoked a raucous counter-protest. Again, CEWV put out word and had no difficulty in bringing some 350 protestors to demonstrate in front of the auditorium. The general had recently changed the regs, advising draft boards they could begin considering student performance, i.e., those with poor grades could be drafted.

 

 

General Hershey and IU students ‘66

 

The demo, which moved on to Dunn Meadow, also included antiwar speakers who found themselves confronted by a crowd of 1500 to 2000 hecklers – including many fraternity boys -- waving American flags, throwing eggs and water balloons, and calling into question the demonstrators’ patriotism. Jeff, speaking as an ex-Vietnam GI, was hit by an egg, but, unfazed, he  issued the shouters a forceful challenge to put their money where their mouths were  since they were so gung ho for the war. Years later a fellow activist, Russell Block, remembered “the courage of the Vietnam vet and the cowardice of the frat rats who were all for the war as long as someone else had to fight it.”

 

 

Protesting General Hershey ‘66

 

By early ’67, it was evident that the only visiting speakers who were going to grace the podium of the campus auditorium with glowing introductions by President Stahr would be supporters of the war. In an exchange of public letters with the IU president, Jeff, by then doing his turn as SDS president along with vice president Bob Tennyson, challenged Stahr on the university’s one-sided speakers’ policy, but to no avail.† Jeff had graduated and moved on to the University of Chicago by the time Rusk was welcomed to campus that fall. As a member of LBJ’s war cabinet, the antiwar students decided his appearance required a different strategy for opposing Vietnam policy.

 

CEWV, SDS, and the campus Progressive Reform Party (PRP), a New Left group led by Guy Loftman victorious in the previous spring’s student body elections, decided that heckling Rusk would be the best way to get the community’s attention, far more so than simply marching in front of the venue with signs, so-called speech on a stick. In an interview in the campus paper the day before, a protest leader made clear their intentions, saying that in view of the magnitude of the war issue, “a breach of good manners seems of rather little consequence.” In effect, he argued, “social nastiness to combat the nastiness of war.”*

The next day some 200 activists donned black armbands, briefly marched around the water fountain in front of the auditorium, then entered the building uneventfully, dispersing themselves among the 3,000+ people in attendance. As the Secretary of State spoke, individual black armbanders in various parts of the room would stand up and yell things like ‘liar’, ‘murderer’ and the like. By that point in the war, Rusk was no doubt accustomed to interruptions, and he continued speaking in spite of the cacophony of shouts. At the end he left by a side door under police escort.**

 

Dean Rusk at IU, a perturbed Elvis Stahr behind him, ‘67

 

The universal embarrassment about the behavior of the protesters was, however, to a degree counteracted by a protest which had occurred the day before Rusk’s arrival. Corporate recruiters from Dow Chemical, manufacturer of deadly napalm, were due at the Business School (B-school) that day, and it was decided by the New Left leaders that the visit should not pass unchallenged. A few weeks earlier the company had attempted to interview job candidates at the University of Wisconsin, a far more actively antiwar campus, where a full-scale melee ensued – complete with tear gas and dozens of demonstrators and police alike sent to the hospital.  Events in Madison made the national news, and the IU security chief laid plans to avoid anything similar on his watch.

 

Secretly, campus security scouted the interview venue, coordinated with local and regional law enforcement, and even reserved a university bus to transport arrestees if necessary. Unaware of the university’s preparations, approximately 40 activists showed up at the B-school to meet the Dow recruiters. Campus cops tried to block their access to the room, but the students pushed their way forward and, led by the newly elected head of SDS, Dan Kaplan, began a sit-in. That triggered phase two of the security plan with city police and deputy sheriffs decked out in riot gear arriving on the scene.

 

The occupiers were ordered to leave peacefully and get on the waiting bus for police processing. Most did so, but four young men refused, and the forces of law and order moved in with swinging riot sticks, putting two of the students, Dwight Worker and George Walker, in the hospital. It was clearly a police over-reaction; as news got around in the papers the next day, the occasion of the Rusk visit, there was outrage at the administration and the cops in some quarters. Thus, for two days in the normally placid heartland, there was uproar over a war thousands of miles away. To some extent the dueling outrages precipitated by the back to back Dow and Rusk visits mitigated each other depending upon one’s politics.

 

However, the cumulative protests were eventually too much for Elvis Stahr, who publically criticized and demonized the campus New Left. A former senior officer in WWII and member of the government, and, above all, a Rhodes Scholar long accustomed to a string of unruffled successes, Stahr couldn’t take the dissonance of university life in the midst of a divisive war and resigned in bitterness at the end of the academic year.

 

*Quoted from the Indiana Daily Student in M A Wynkoop, Dissent in the Heartland: The Sixties at Indiana University (2002), 55.

**http://www.dlib.indiana.edu/omeka/archives/studentlife/items/browse/1?search=Dean+Rusk&submit_search=Search

† http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2011/08/elvis-and-new-left-at-indiana.html