Lundin remembered the first Red Scare. It was the early 1920s, he, a high school kid at the time, was left with the impression of an orgy of extralegality. The Bolshevik Revolution had taken Russia out of World War I, and postwar America was aflame with exaggerated fear of ‘reds’ and anarchists.
The government’s reaction, led by Attorney General Palmer and his right-hand man, young J Edgar Hoover, included illegal search and seizures; warrantless arrests; detentions and wiretaps; and the deportations of hundreds of resident aliens, many of whom were known radicals, as well as other individuals who merely fell under suspicion.
Even the New York State legislature – hardly a frontier institution – expelled its five Socialist members. In other states legislators rushed to enact an array of patently unconstitutional sedition laws as well as so-called ‘red flag’ laws making display of a red flag illegal. In a comic-opera waiver, Minnesota exempted red flags at railroad crossings. No surprise then that a bright and idealistic young Lundin would have been aware of the wholesale transgressions of the Constitution. Upon hearing Norman Thomas speak in Boston, Lundin, a Harvard student, joined the Socialist Party.
A student of early American history, Lundin had the good fortune to serve as research assistant to the doyen of the field, Samuel Eliot Morrison. A post-grad fellowship took him to Germany for a year’s study. Back at Harvard, young Lundin earned an MA before moving on to Princeton where he wrote his PhD under another luminary of the day – Professor Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker. It was the Depression, and academic jobs were scarce, but, as ‘Sam Morrison’s fair-haired boy’* and with the backing of his Princeton mentor, Lundin landed a position at Indiana University in 1937.
IU was then a sleepy campus in the southern Indiana town of Bloomington. It was deeply conservative country. Most of the students were from small town Indiana. Sports, fraternity parties, and the elections of pretty coeds as ‘queens’ for one or another social occasion were the salient events. Political apathy and cultural parochialism were the norm.
Among Lundin’s pre-war students there was no curiosity about the world at large. After the war in Europe broke out in ’39, one student told him that whenever war news came over the dorm radio, someone would call out, Turn that off, and get some swing music. Frivolity reigned.
The Ku Klux Klan (Klan) had a strong presence in the state. A decade earlier a Klansman had been elected Governor of Indiana. Bloomington was racially a Southern town. A man who grew up there remembered seeing Klansmen in full regalia riding into town on horseback in the late ‘40s. Predictably, the town was segregated, although by custom rather than law after pro-integration legislation in ‘49. Restaurants, bars, barber shops, and even most of the university’s main dining room were off-limits to the small number of Negroes enrolled at the university.
The KKK in
Anderson IN, 1920s
When
Lundin joined the History Department there were only 10 professors, all WASPs
(neither Jews nor Catholics were welcome). With few exceptions they were as conservative
as their environs. Curricular emphasis was on American history, the history of
the Midwest, and Indiana history. A few of the staff taught Ancient, English,
and European history.
History
at IU was not a research department; only a few colleagues were scholars,
Lundin among them, having published his first book in 1940. There was a contingent of grad students, but
the faculty’s ambitions for them were very modest. Even in the mid-‘50s the bar
was still set low by the old guard historians. As one said to the new
internationally-oriented chairman, the department should mainly be producing
instructors for the likes of East Tennessee State Teachers College.
For
young Professor Lundin who had arrived at Indiana directly from Boston, life in
Bloomington initially involved a bit of culture shock. The Spanish Civil War
was then raging. While students at Harvard were up in arms in support of the
Spanish Republic against General Franco, who was supported by Nazi Germany and Fascist
Italy, few at IU cared or were concerned with events in Europe or even knew
where Spain was.
Lundin’s
first political involvement was with a very small group in support of the
beleaguered Spanish Republic. Because he had studied in Europe, he was in
demand as a speaker on European politics and occasionally participated on a weekly
local radio program on public affairs. After Franco came to power, he carried
out a severe policy of retribution against the defeated supporters of the
Socialist government. Back in the Midwest, an Indiana statewide Catholic
magazine expressed unqualified support for the new fascist regime.
A
copy of the issue came into Professor Lundin’s hands, and on his next radio broadcast
he listed Franco’s draconian acts and rhetorically asked if those actions
indeed reflected the Church’s position. The president of the state federation
of Catholic women’s clubs promptly wrote the university president, Herman B Wells,
complaining that Professor Lundin had slandered the Church and intimating that
those responsible were ‘notorious Communists’. President Wells skillfully
fended off the attack, ensuring that Lundin survived his first brush with
controversy in Middle America.
When
Japan attacked China in the late ‘30s, the young historian became an officer of
a committee to oppose Japanese imperialism. A few years later, following Nazi
Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union, Lundin joined the committee for Russian
War Relief, most likely a Communist-front organization; but, even if he had
known that, one doubts he would have been deterred. It was all of a piece; he
stood up against aggression in Spain, China, and the USSR because it was the
right thing to do
Returning
from WWII a captain, Professor Lundin was back at his teaching post and in fresh
controversy not long after. Soon after the end of the war, the Indiana
Communist Party (CP) sought a place on the state ballot. Under Indiana law, the
party had secured the requisite number of petition signatures, but the
political establishment in the capital was stalling and trying to block the
move. No surprise in a state with Indiana’s political lineage.
The
dean of Indiana’s Law School along with a few law professors – politically
conservative to a man – and others supported the Indiana CP petition on the
principle of free democratic elections. Lundin observed with approval, but then
the law school group was vilified, not just in the statewide press, but in the
media of other Midwestern states as well.
In
the resulting furor, the legislature opened an investigation into Communist
influence at IU, the state’s flagship institution of higher learning. Furious,
Lundin denounced the investigation. President Wells saw it differently and told
the legislators, Come ahead, the university has nothing to hide. In the end
nothing came of the investigation.
A
few years later in the early ‘50s, at the height of second great American Red
Scare, Leonard Lundin joined others opposing the university’s plan to require
all newly hired professors to sign a loyalty oath under state law, which read
in part:
I
solemnly swear that I will support the
Constitution and
the laws of the United
States and the Constitution and
the laws
of the state of Indiana ….**
The
loyalty oath controversy stirred the statewide American Legion into action.
Under pressure from its many posts, the university trustees were induced to
hold hearings to detect if any subversive activity was afoot on campus. A wag
mocking the Legion suggested that perhaps they should investigate the school’s
colors of crimson and cream. In another unintentional light moment, a coed
being interviewed by the trustee panel was asked if she was aware of any
pro-Communist teaching on campus. She innocently replied, ‘What is Communist
teaching’? The trustees were stumped.
In
’54, when the US Senate censured Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, the
point man of the relentless anticommunist campaign, the pall had it cast over
the country gradually began to lift. By then the Civil Rights Movement was underway,
and the issue of segregation was being challenged in Bloomington. The Negro
population at IU, while still small, had grown, but the same segregationist customs
Lundin found on arrival in ’37 were still in place.
White
barbers claimed they didn’t know how to cut Black hair. A Black woman who
matriculated at IU in fall ’55 reported that she and friends could enter
restaurants and sit down, but they’d either be refused service or simply
ignored. The only place in town where she and students of color could eat,
party, and dance, was the Black Elks Club.
The
owner of one of the most popular student hangouts in Bloomington a block east
of campus, Nick’s English Hut, where both I and later my brother spent time, made
clear his racist feelings, “We’ll close the place before we serve Negroes.”***
Peaceful
sit-ins by Blacks and Whites took place in the restaurants. Led by the local
NAACP chapter and with the strong support of President Wells, and friends of
social justice like Leonard Lundin and the student activist leader Tom Barton††,
the town had been gradually desegregated by the time I arrived for grad school
in the fall of ’60.
By
the ‘60s, IU as an academic institution had changed significantly under Wells’
visionary leadership. No longer the insular, inward-looking university Lundin
had first joined, IU become a major center of international education. The
History and Government departments now fielded diverse course offerings on
nearly all the regions of the world while certain faculty members were in the
process of acquiring national and even international scholarly reputations.
The
university’s rich and diverse curriculum drew grad students from all over the
country. I arrived at IU from the East Coast in the fall of ’60 drawn by the noted
Russian and East European Institute, arguably second only to Columbia’s
program. My classmates included graduates of Berkeley, Harvard, the University
of Chicago, and other leading institutions.
Professor
Lundin, who had retooled as a European historian, was part of the university’s
new orientation. His course on Baltic history, cross listed between History and
the Institute with the Baltic Sea as the organizing concept, was a unique
course. With Russia and Poland among the historical Baltic powers, I found the
course fascinating, and it was evident why Leonard Lundin had been one of the
first professors honored with the university’s distinguished teaching award.
Back then I knew him only as a teacher/scholar and was unaware of his longtime
activist stands.
I
finished up at IU in the summer of ’63 and left for a year’s dissertation
research in the USSR at Moscow University on the Soviet-American Exchange. By
then, brother Jeff was a Vietnamese linguist in military intelligence serving
in Vietnam. Finishing his tour of duty in ’64, Jeff decided to complete his
education at IU, which is where he too came to encounter Leonard Lundin in his
role as a faculty activist.
Professor
Lundin, Indiana University, 1962
During
Jeff’s spring term of ’65, President Johnson (LBJ) escalated the war in
Vietnam, igniting the first sparks of protest on a number of campuses across
the country, IU included. Jeff became involved with a small band of student
activists who began to raise the banner of opposition at IU to LBJ’s war
policy.
Professor
Lundin, who from the beginning opposed US involvement in Vietnam, presided over
the first outdoor campus antiwar rally in Dunn Meadow. Reflecting back several
years later, he said that attempt to have an open discussion of the war policy
was constantly interrupted by rowdy pro-war students. In March ‘65 the first antiwar
teach-in was held at the University of Michigan with many other schools,
including IU, linked in by telephone hook-up. Lundin participated in that first
campus teach-in as well.
Nixon arrives
for IU appearance, 1965
That
fall, Richard Nixon, an unabashed supporter of LBJ’s Vietnam policy, was
invited to speak at IU. Jeff, his new friends and other students from various
campus groups mounted a protest demonstration against the former vice president
outside the auditorium. Lundin happened to be walking by, spotted the signs and
fell in with the marching demonstrators.
Jeff
and fellow activists organized the IU chapter of Students for a Democratic
Society (SDS), the fast-growing national outfit taking the lead in the
embryonic antiwar movement. When the group needed a faculty sponsor to become
an official campus organization, Professor Lundin stepped forward to fill the
role. Being a rather modest person, it’s doubtful that many of the SDS activists
were aware of their faculty adviser’s long activist career on the right side of
history.
Not
long after Jeff finished at IU and went on to found Vietnam GI out of Chicago,
Leonard Lundin again displayed the courage of his convictions in what may have
been his finest moment as a champion of reason and fairness. It was fall ’67,
and SDS and the larger umbrella group, the Committee to End the War in Vietnam
(CEWV), had grown frustrated with the series of major pro-war speakers brought
to campus by the president, Elvis Stahr, a former Secretary of the Army.††† In
November, yet another super hawk was due to speak, Secretary of State Rusk.
The
antiwar coalition decided to escalate its protest tactics. They began with the
familiar demonstration outside the speaker’s venue, but this time they then
entered the auditorium and carried out a planned heckling campaign against
Rusk. The Secretary kept his cool – in the third year of an increasingly
unpopular war he was clearly no stranger to protest – but the activists’
behavior was unpopular with the majority
of the audience who had come to hear a major public figure.
Secretary of
State Rusk at IU
Rusk
left under police escort, and the next day near universal condemnation from
both town and gown rained down upon the protestors. Whether pro or con on the
war, the consensus was that calculated rudeness to a visiting speaker had
crossed a line. While antiwar protesters had always been a small minority on campus,
that had never been more evident than when 14,000 students signed a letter of
apology delivered personally by student council members to Secretary Rusk.
There
was, however, one lone voice that defended the protestors in a not uncritical,
but reasoned manner to the effect that the Secretary of State was more than
merely a senior officer of the government. He was also a central symbol of the
war itself. In an open letter Leonard Lundin conceded that the protestors
conduct had been unmannerly, but added the caveat that Rusk had come to campus
as a:
very
high official and active director
of events, a foremost
representative and
presumably one of the architects
of our
war policy, a symbolic figure, a sort
of
‘Mr Vietnam War’.
He continued, “It is not easy to be polite to someone who seems determined to make you a corpse, an arsonist, a murderer, or a bully.”
Concluding, Professor Lundin forcefully argued:
possibly there are worse things than
bad manners toward a public speaker.
Possibly one worse thing is a government
lying to its people.****
Leonard Lundin certainly did not win all his engagements, but he remained steadfast throughout the years in his intent to bear witness for what was right – a singular man.
*C L Lundin, Indiana University Oral History Interview (1994), 8.
**A
W Mommer, “State Loyalty Programs and the Supreme Court,” Indiana Law J, 43:2
(1968), 462, fn 3.
***J
C Bell, The Time and Place That Gave Me Life (2007), 211.
****T
D Clark, Indiana University, Vol 3 (1977), 598-99.
Links
to previous posts:
†††
http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2012/09/the-generals-march-on-indiana.html
and http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2011/08/elvis-and-new-left-at-indiana.html
