One of my colleagues at Lake Region Union High School was young Howard Frank Mosher, an aspiring writer in his mid-twenties and Superintendent Pelkey’s fishing companion. Howard had been appointed to head the five-person English Department at the new school. Both he and his wife Phillis were among the most popular and successful teachers on the faculty. Howard was a no-nonsense kind of guy, very down-to-earth, and very sympathetic to student concerns. He commanded an enthusiastic following among the members of his college-bound senior English class. But Howard was determined to try his hand at writing as a career. For that purpose he decided to enroll in a creative writing course at one of the University of California campuses for the 1968-1969 school year. He recommended me as his successor to chair the department, bypassing Mrs. Elliott, who had headed the English Department at Barton Academy before the regional consolidation. I heard that Mrs. Elliott was quite disappointed, although she should have known from the fact that she was not selected the year before that in the new school youthful leadership would definitely be preferred.

As it turned out, Howard was quickly disenchanted with his creative writing course in California, and by the end of the year or shortly thereafter he was back in the “Northeast Kingdom”, ready to try to make a go of it on his own. Howard, who had grown up in northern New York State, was genuinely fond of northern Vermont and its odd assortment of French-Canadian and ornery Yankee character types, the protagonists of most of his books. He had a real talent for writing and a strong, firm bias in favor of unconventional, courageous, and principled behavior, the kind of traits he found to proliferate among the simple, unschooled, rural population of northern Vermont, their occasional craziness notwithstanding. Howard also had a strong rebellious streak that made him sympathetic to outcasts and outsiders of all kinds and served him well in his writing. His impatience with illegitimate authority would sometimes blend into intolerance for educated intellectual types, the only aspect of his writing that occasionally made me feel uncomfortable. But I remember how very impressed I was by the manuscript of short stories he gave me to read that was later published as Where the Rivers Flow North. In that manuscript one could immediately recognize the born writer, committed to his craft by his innermost nature, it seemed. I was especially impressed by the fact that he had actually accomplished through discipline and will power what I had vainly set out to do at his age when I returned to Europe in 1962.

Howard did have a strong romantic streak that sometimes led him to sentimentally idealize the denizens of his “Kingdom County,” an amalgam of the three counties, Orleans, Essex, and Caledonia, that make up the “Northeast Kingdom” of Vermont. In 1989 he published a highly fictionalized account of the “Irasburg Affair,” entitled Stranger in the Kingdom and eventually turned into a filmed version as well. Out of an incident of run-of-the-mill rural racial prejudice Howard made a complex and exciting murder mystery in which, however, his heroes were just a bit too good and his villains just a bit too evil to ring true. Mama was affronted by his writing, insisting that he had got the distinctiveness of Vermont natives all wrong. “New Englanders are the most bigoted people in the world,” she claimed. “They came as Puritans knowing they were better than anyone else, and they still do. It’s their strength. It’s what makes them so attractive. The typical Vermonter is shrewd, mean, and miserly – and makes a go of everything he touches.” Even though Howard’s romanticized version of the Irasburg Affair bore little resemblance to the mundane original, I was flattered when he told me that my thesis had given him some inspiration.

The notoriety accruing to the Northeast Kingdom as a result of the Irasburg Affair undoubtedly had its advantages as well. In December 1968 our principal Millard Harrison told me about one-year “Leadership Development Grants” offered by the Ford Foundation to potential leaders in rural backwaters with the goal of strengthening local leadership, promoting economic growth and educational reforms, and combating the effects of the continuing agrarian decline. At least the Irasburg Affair certified our status as “backward,” as did the fact that the road leading to Lake Region Union High School was still unpaved at the time. I had the distinct impression that the fortuity of living in Irasburg played a key role in my selection as a Ford Fellow. The Ford Foundation of course hoped that the leaders it selected would return to their hometowns after their fellowship years to apply their newly-gained skills for the benefit of the community, but in my case the fellowship served as the catalyst for my return to graduate school and my liberation from the grind of teaching high school. Ironically, the unstructured nature of the fellowship program, in which grant recipients were encouraged to follow their interests and predilections, worked against the return of Ford fellows to the locales from which they had been selected. I recorded my reaction to the planning conference I attended in Farmington, Maine, in June, 1969:

I went to the conference feeling “up-tight” (a word that seems distressingly coined to fit my particular condition) about what would be expected of me during my fellowship year. It was therefore exciting to hear both Ralph Bohrsons’s remarks on leadership and Marv Rosenblum’s on his experiences during his fellowship year. Bohrson spoke of persons capable of handling the changes that were occurring and would occur in the coming years. Rosenblum spoke of the change that he had gone through involving not his ideas or methods, but his whole personality. The greatest benefit of the Ford grant had been freedom, time, the opportunity to do just what he wanted to. He pleaded for as little “structuring” as possible. “That’s how things happen.” His most marvelous experience – the cultural shock of Hawaii – had been possible because his mentor had been unexpectedly delayed for six weeks and he (Marv) had been entirely on his own. He had been married at the outset of his fellowship year. “It was a one-year honeymoon. I recommend a Ford fellowship for all newly-weds.” “People talk about imposing change on the system, but do not realize that the essential change must come within themselves. . . I’m coming to think that change for the sake of change is a good thing. . . Many changes can be made without money. And another thing. Let’s not exaggerate the risk. Few of us run the risk of losing our jobs. We run the risk of being disliked. And this is a hard thing. One wants to be liked by everyone, and this just isn’t possible.” I would like to have known what he was like before his fellowship year. Could the grant have effected as much change as he gives it credit for?

The marvelous cynicism of Charlie Colcorde and the older grantees and their advice on expense account padding: “It’s a one-year vacation. Enjoy it! . . . Face it. The Foundation’s got to spend their money or they can’t keep their tax-free status.” Bohrson: “You are potential leaders, who have not yet been recognized as such, and in some cases may not even have recognized yourselves as such.” Rosenblum: “The Ford fellowship allowed me to recognize the difference between my private person and my public image.”

Rosenblum was an articulate advocate of the “sensitivity training” that was just coming into its own as part of the youthful counterculture of the late 1960s. “You’re not doing anybody a favor by sparing them,” Rosenblum insisted, “by not telling them your honest opinion. Advertising has made millions from the fact that nobody tells you you have bad breath and everyone assumes he has it.” In retrospect, perhaps, the ubiquitous “encounter groups” that seemed to spring up everywhere in those years were more a reaction to than an expression of the counterculture, but there is no denying the strong appeal that this rebellious and brutally honest new sensibility had for me. Under the dispensation of these new values, it seemed, it was OK to speak your mind and show your emotions. No longer were you compelled to do what was expected rather than what your conscience or your instinct or your inclination told you to do. Conventional norms were no longer binding in the new, more natural, more humane society the youthful rebels were trying to create. Now it was OK to let it all hang out and to do your own thing. Although at 34 I was almost twice as old as the “Woodstock generation,” I heartily identified with their outlook. In many ways, it seemed to me, the student movement, the hippies, and the “sixties generation” had succeeded in breaking out of the stifling conformism that my own “fifties” generation had been fighting to overcome for too many years.

The mentor I was assigned to for my Ford fellowship year was Arleigh “Dick” Richardson, the director of a small government-sponsored agency called the National Humanities Faculty. His famous brother, Elliott Richardson, would later resign his position as attorney general in Richard Nixon’s cabinet rather than follow his boss’s instruction to fire the special prosecutor in the Watergate Scandal, Archibald Cox. The National Humanities Faculty recruited university professors to visit secondary schools to give lectures to teachers and students. Dick Richardson invited me to accompany him on a ten-day trip in April 1969 to San Antonio, San Francisco, and Seattle to visit various schools and monitor their progress in establishing new humanities courses. In San Francisco I had the chance to visit my cousin Ellen Fleenor (born Edmonds) whose husband was completing on-the-job training at one of the San Francisco department stores in preparation for his return to his hometown in Boise, Idaho, to run the large family retail business. Interdisciplinary humanities courses were all the fashion in 1969. My Ford fellowship was to be devoted to learning about these new kinds of courses, which seemed to promise a whole new direction in secondary education. Students would supposedly be humanized by their exposure to the arts. Thereby their alienation from society – a growing problem in 1969 – would be overcome. Interdisciplinary humanities programs on the high school level seemed almost like a pedagogical silver bullet at the time.

Most of my fellowship year was to be devoted to learning about innovative humanities programs that had been or were being developed at various sites all across the land. This involved quite a bit of travel, but of the fun kind, with all expenses paid. My main base of operation was Boston, from where I could commute to the historic town of Concord, where the National Humanities Faculty had its small four-person administrative office. I also took the opportunity, of course, to visit Ralph Waldo Emerson’s home in Concord, where I marveled at the sturdy rustic charm of his study with its huge oak desk at which he wrote his famous sermons and essays. In the spring of 1970 Steffi and Trina joined me in Boston at a dingy one-bedroom student apartment at 230 Commonwealth Avenue with the shared toilet out in the hall. By that time we had started rather earnestly to try to have another child, having “wasted” more than two years in doing our best to prevent a pregnancy. Among our visitors on Commonwealth Avenue were Fritzi and her daughter Andrea, recently returned from Europe. Not having any living room furniture (or even a living room) in our tiny apartment, we had to sit on the edge of our bed. “Isn’t it funny?” Fritzi said, with a glance around the dingy room. “You were always the bright one and were supposed to be the big success in the family. But it is Olaf who turned out to be the successful one.” Tact was never Fritzi’s strongest suit.

Meanwhile, Betsy had fallen in love with Alvin Shulman, a violinist and instructor at Lyndon Institute, the local state college in Lyndonville, twenty miles south of Irasburg. Alvin was my young colleague at Lake Region, Marty Shulman’s, older brother. In June 1969 Betsy and Alvin got married in a civil ceremony at Marty and Carol’s home in Barton. Marty announced a “welcome to Shulmanland” and assured me that his family had no objections to his brother’s marriage to a non-Jewish wife. Betsy converted to Judaism and became much more active in the Lyndonville Jewish community than the more secularly-minded Alvin. Their common interest in music (Betsy taught music at several local schools) seemed to augur well for a happy marriage. Chris and Julie, on the other hand, faced a bit of an adjustment. They complained to their mother that they could never tell whether Alvin was joking or not. “Just ask him,” she advised; “he’ll tell you.” Alvin did begin to lay down the law, which at times even rubbed us adults the wrong way. We were no longer to discuss the Vietnam War in front of the children, because they were too young to understand. And, much to Steffi’s dismay, German was no longer to be spoken at family gatherings.

Another major event that June was the ordination of our cousin Johnny Edmonds into the Episcopalian priesthood in South Weymouth, Massachusetts, not far from his mother’s home in Andover. We used the occasion, too, to visit his brother Nick at his backyard studio and received a guided tour of his latest massive creations, carved out of huge tree trunks that had been delivered directly from the lumber mill to his studio. Aunt Temple’s farm on Reservation Road had been sold after Uncle John’s death in 1966, and she now lived in an isolated house in a forested area on the banks of the local reservoir. Active and enterprising as always, she worked the night shift at a hospital in Boston. One day, however, she returned home dead tired in the morning only to find that her alpha dog had killed one of the subordinate dogs in her pack. One source of the conflict between the dogs was their rivalry for Aunt Temple’s affections, leading me to record the following reflection in my journal: “Mama’s animals die of neglect or want; Aunt Temple’s of jealousy or competition.”

In July 1969 Steffi’s father, his second wife Elisabeth, and his 9-year old son Johannes visited us in Vermont.

Gerhard Heuss had a gratifyingly high opinion of me. “Du bist ein Tiefstapler,” he told me, using a term for which there is no precise equivalent in English to describe someone who understates his qualifications (the opposite of Hochstapler or “con man”). But he also gave his daughter due credit for the improvement in our fortunes: “Das hättest du dir doch nicht träumen lassen,“ he said to me, “in deiner Bruchbude in Berlin,dass du in zwei Jahren so ein schönes Heim haben würdest, was?“ (in your wildest dreams you wouldn´t have imagined, in your dump in Berlin, that in two years you`d have such a beautiful home, would you?) Yes, what all one can`t accomplish with such a wife! The energy she generates, it shames one, and inspires one to action.” Both Steffi and I were impatient, however, with the laxness with which they were bringing up their son: “The boy is unbearably fresh to both his parents,” I wrote in my journal. “It makes one want to give all three of them a good slap in the face.”

In August all of us crammed into our tiny car, an early-model Corvair, made notorious by Ralph Nader for its lack of safety, for a three-day trip to picturesque Quebec city, the commercialization of which, however, struck us the wrong way:

Steffi on the demeaning treatment accorded to tourists: nowhere treated as persons, everywhere exploited and despised. The boy who came rushing up to wash our windshield while we parked for one minute to watch the falls at Montmorency. The girl who sold us the watercolor postcards probably thought of us, Steffi said, only as potential buyers. On all sides surrounded by tourist traps – restaurants, souvenir shops, horse-drawn carriages, “museums,” etc. A kind of second-class citizenship. You cannot presume to be taken seriously or personally.

I combined our visit to Quebec with an interview with a M. Mackey of the Bilingual Center at Laval University, as bilingual education, along with humanities curricula, were to be the foci of my fellowship year. However, M. Mackey did not talk about bilingual research, as I had expected, but about French Canada in general.

It is the language, and only the language, that will preserve their cultural identity. French Canada is dynamic and growing. Unable to expand east or west, it has traditionally expanded north and south. The French in New England will preserve their language and culture only if there is communication with Canada. Small minorities have successfully maintained their language only where they have been able to lean on a strong neighbor – as for instance in the case of Switzerland.

On our way home Steffi`s father delivered his verdict on our idyllic Vermont way of life: “Maisfelder bearbeiten, alles schön und gut, aber es fehlen die nötigen Spannungen” (cultivating the cornfields, all very good, but the necessary tensions are missing). He compared his visit to Vermont to turning the pages in a picture book, a pleasure evidently magnified by the fact that he wasn’t forced to make his home here.

Steffi and I, on the other hand, were entirely happy in the lush verdancy of Vermont, however remote it might be from the excitement of more urban areas. I spent many happy hours putting in a huge vegetable garden by hand on the site where the barn and its outbuildings had collapsed several years before. The large garden plot proved astonishingly fertile, a function no doubt of the plentiful rotting organic matter which included substantial amounts of well-rotted cattle manure from the former stable.

Despite a two-week dry spell in August our harvest exceeded all expectations. The few strawberry plants I put in spread rapidly and bore full fruit in the three or four summers that followed. In 1970 and 1971 we had enough strawberries to supply family, neighbors, and Ray’s general store, which sold them to the public for a small commission.

Steffi’s mother Lilo and her second husband, Steffi’s stepfather Hans Thümmler (1906-2002), came to visit in September 1969, bringing with them at our request a Volkswagen bug that would have cost us much more if we had had to buy it over here. Lilo and Hans were going to use it to take a little driving tour around New England and then leave it for us when they returned to Germany later in the fall. Tümmi, as Steffi called her stepfather, had a badly compromised history as an enthusiastic member of the Nazi Party and the SS. Trained as a lawyer, he had served as a judge in military courts-martial, condemning a number of ordinary Wehrmacht soldiers to death for defeatism in the closing stages of the war. For this he was interned after the war, but was released in 1948, and in the amnesties of the early 1950s the charges against him were dropped. Tümmi returned to civilian life as an executive of the renowned Zeiss Optical company, now headquartered in Aalen in the state of Baden-Württemberg where he met and married Steffi`s mother. She rather apologetically explained her decision to remarry as motivated by the desire not to become a burden to her daughters in her old age. But Tümmi was never able in his long life to entirely escape his past. Because the statute of limitations on serious war crimes was abolished in Germany in 1979, his case was periodically reopened. As late as the 1990s the attorney-general of the state of Baden-Württemberg had plans to resume the prosecution.

When I first met Hans Thümmler in 1966 he had become a conservative pillar of post-war German society. Prosperous, graying, and heavy-set, he exuded an aura of confidence and bourgeois solidity. His views seemed narrow-minded and old-fashioned, to be sure, but otherwise entirely conventional. I did not feel comfortable with him, but not because of his Nazi past, which seemed almost unreal to me, but because his present-day politics were so different from mine. A staunchly anti-communist member of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), he was predictably critical of the protest movements of the 1960s, but not without a certain satisfaction that the United States was now also incriminating itself (in Vietnam) as his own country had done on a so much greater scale during the Second World War. Tümmi had a somewhat unexpected aesthetic streak, delighting in beautiful objects, admiring well-designed buildings, and eager to visit museums. “Ich bin ein Büchernarr” (I am a book-fiend), he told me. “I love books with beautiful bindings.” On October 4th 1969 I recorded the following impression in my journal:

Amazing! Tümmi, the ex-Nazi, SS man, “kein Freund der SPD,“ (no friend of the Social Democrats) loves Henry Miller! But why not? He loves the folksiness, the animalistic (in a positive sense) masks-off aspect, the sexual sordidness (jeder hat so seine eigenen Erfahrungen gemacht [everyone has had his own experiences]) – perhaps it gives meaning to his own sordid experiences – the absence of introspection (but plenitude of “philosophy”), the hedonistic nihilism: nothing is bad, if it is enjoyable: the emptiness of traditional values (and haven’t they let Tümmi down, though he can never really lose them!). And he loves what we all love in Henry Miller — his lack of embarrassment, perhaps even his mischievous delight in shocking the fearful and the virtuous. And Tümmi has something of that quality I have always sensed in Henry Miller: a basic distrust that people might look down on them, a distrust of all “superiority”. Is it this “healthy”, self-strengthening resentment, hatred, bitterness, that appeals most to Tümmi?

That autumn I visited Wini in her tiny apartment on top of the flower store in Salisbury for the first time since I had left for Germany ten years before. She and her son Johnnie had already visited us in Vermont the previous year. Of course we talked about Mama and reminisced about the past. We speculated on what effect the war might have had on Mama. That it had had an enormous effect seemed indisputable. “The war threw me into dungarees,” Mama had said of herself. And in fact I can’t remember Mama ever wearing a skirt or a dress except on very rare occasions, such as the Emmet wedding we attended in New York in the late 1940s. Wini wondered whether Mama’s domestic and sartorial negligence, which had become ever more pronounced over the years, might not be due to the fact that she had done too much during the war.

“She kept us all going. She had none of that fear, that panic, that everybody had. And she shared everything. This was very unusual, you know. Most people kept everything for themselves, and they couldn’t understand that with four children Mama wasn’t worried about food. At that time the house wasn’t dirty. Only once I remember being surprised when she opened a bureau drawer that it was so messy. But she had no animals at that time, and animals are dirty.”

Wini talked about her trip to Zurich in 1944, and her decision to return to Ried, despite the residency permit procured for her by her friend Ying, the Chinese attaché in Switzerland.

“I couldn`t just sit there doing nothing. So I went back. They thought I was crazy. Then Sweety invited us to Elmhof, and I persuaded Mama to go. If I hadn`t talked her into it, Mama probably wouldn`t have gone. Maybe it was a mistake, I don`t know. It was terrible for Clare. Peter Massenbach saw us leaving with our Leiterwagen — we had to walk to Bichl, you know — and he said he felt awfully lonely.” –- “Why did you want to leave Ried?” I asked. –- “I was disliked. Brummer hated me. I was too openly anti-Nazi. I couldn`t understand the Bavarian dialect. Your mother was well-liked. She understood those people and got along with them well.”

Wini, who had taken up painting seriously a few years before, had just opened an exhibition at a gallery in New York. I couldn`t help but laugh at the distortion of history contained in the announcement of the exhibition put out by the gallery in an effort to stimulate public interest: “She chose as her place to work quiet Salisbury, Connecticut, where one has time! Desiring complete artistic independence she opened a small flower shop on Main Street.” I knew, of course, that she would always be in Mama’s debt, a realization that conferred a certain psychological advantage. Wini claimed to want to get out of “the flower work” entirely, but couldn’t find anybody to run the business. She did not want to turn over the running of the shop to her employee, dependable though she might be. “Suzy is very good, but she is too ignorant to be a manager. She doesn’t have enough education for that.” Her son Johnnie had grown into a very attractive eighteen-year-old, now a student finishing his senior year at Salisbury School. “He’s a little bit of a snob,” Wini told me. “He doesn’t like to work. ‘You don’t understand the young generation, Mommy,’ he says to me. ‘We’re different from your generation.’” “Of course,” Wini concluded, pensively; “everybody is a snob in some way.”

On New Year’s Eve 1969 poverty and negligence produced another potentially tragic mishap in Mama’s life. Her self-constructed jerrybuilt shack burned to the ground. She had moved back to her shack several months before when relations with Connie grew too antagonistic. She was barely able to escape in her underclothes by cutting through the plastic sheathing she had used for a make-shift greenhouse lean-to on one side of the shack. She had difficulty piercing the heavy plastic and thought she was going to die. “So this is the way,” she thought. “It was as if a voice were saying, ‘Come this way, route 60, not route 70.’” She scrambled up the hill to her neighbors half a mile away, who drove her to our house at about ten at night. I felt partly responsible for the disaster, because we had not invited Mama to spend this holiday evening with us even though we lived only six miles away. Steffi had begun to resent what she took to be Mama’s excessive influence on me. Instead we had young guests from the National Humanities Faculty office in Concord who had come to ski at Jay Peak. Among the victims of the fire was our “Puppsy,” whom we had entrusted to Mama for temporary safekeeping. She had tied her next to the stove where the dog had no chance to escape. Mama’s several farm animals — pigs, goats, and a cow — survived in a separate barn distant enough not to have caught fire. Mama lost all her books as well as enough animal feed to have lasted until spring. I also blamed myself for not having prevented the fire. It was not as if I hadn’t foreseen the danger. Water dripped from the ceiling onto the Christmas tree lights and her logs were stacked high all around the stove. But I consciously decided that even a fire might be preferable to the consequences that might result if I should persist in my tiresome warnings. I felt it was a risk she was quite aware of, especially in view of her previous experience with fire, and therefore a risk she was quite prepared to take. Even if she was inviting an accident, I did not feel it was my place to intervene. Our relationship was not one in which I could presume to give her advice on how to run her mini-farm.

While alone in Boston, before Steffi and Trini joined me after Christmas, I could not resist the temptation of revisiting Blackwood Street and Crusher Casey’s, the bar where I had spent so many hours drinking with Terry Fortes and her friends. I was unable to track her down, however; people in Casey’s had heard of her but could not give me any information as to her present whereabouts. Demographically the area had changed. What had been a mixed residential area was now almost exclusively African-American. Children were playing in the street just as on the day when we arrived from Cambridge in Nick’s station wagon. But there were no white children playing in the street now.

Living in Boston finally gave me a chance to reestablish contact with Paul Russell, now a successful psychiatrist affiliated with Beth Israel Hospital and enjoying an expanding private practice as well. His marriage to a fellow-physician with whom he had gone to medical school had broken up in some bitterness, apparently because his wife, under the influence of the burgeoning feminist movement, had become conscious of how unequal their relationship was. “She got tired of picking up after me,” Paul told me. “I had always left my pajamas lying around, but suddenly this became grounds for divorce.” His wife had gone to school with Sylvia Plath and figured as one of the ill-disguised major characters in her memoir, The Bell Jar. Later Paul’s ex-wife filed suit to have some unflattering references to herself deleted from the TV movie made of the book.

I found Paul now living in a new luxury apartment building in midtown Boston to which one could only gain entrance by passing through a security check. To me it seemed odd that anyone would want to thus publicly signal their separation from surrounding society, but to Paul it seemed quite natural in a crime-ridden urban environment. When I finally got in touch with him, Paul told me of a recent dream in which I had made so vivid an appearance that he had looked through the telephone book on the off-chance that I might be here in Boston! I found Paul unchanged, and certainly unspoiled, by success. His psychiatric training, or the habits of his practice, had reinforced those distinctive traits that made him so well-suited to this profession. In my journal I described these traits as “a tactical kind of listening, or rather, listening as tactic, and a patient kind of explaining.” His mind was sharper than ever, though in my view directed too much to the goal of therapeutic adjustment to conditions as they were rather than social and political critique.

My own political radicalization had continued as a reaction to the Nixon Administration’s continued prosecution of the Vietnam War, incisively analyzed in a series of long articles by Noam Chomsky in the New York Review of Books in 1969 and 1970, before that estimable journal closed its pages to such radical critiques. One of Chomsky’s sentences in particular struck a chord with me: “The world’s most advanced society has found the answer to people’s war: eliminate the people.” In November 1969 I was one of the approximately 100,000 persons who assembled on Boston Common to mark the Vietnam Moratorium. Boston University professor Howard Zinn gave a fiery talk in which he not only called for an end to the war, but optimistically envisioned the approaching socialization of American institutions. The counter-cultural “movement” seemed to be gaining ever greater momentum, and I was happy to be a part of it, even if I had never smoked “pot” up to that point in my life.

The books that I read in those days reinforced the radicalization of my views. The example of my student George Small, David Johnson’s son who had taken his grandmother’s name, first got me reading Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice. I was amazed to discover how good it was, discovering thereby also my skepticism that a person with Cleaver’s background could have written anything so good. I defended the book against Marty Shulman, who doubted whether Cleaver was the sole author. Marty was totally out of sympathy with its message. “I believe in compensatory politics,” Marty said, “compensatory economics, not in violence and revolution.” Another strong influence was Paul Goodman, especially his Growing Up Absurd (1960) and The New Reformation (1970), which I first read in article form in the New York Times Magazine. From Paul Goodman I got my all-time favorite quote, condensing into one pithy sentence a point of view to which I continue to subscribe: “The repressed and excluded are always right in their rebellion, because they stand for our future wholeness.” From a student of Paul Goodman’s I read what I still consider one of the best books ever written about primary education, George Denison’s The Lives of Children (1969). The best book on secondary education, I thought, was Coming of Age in America (1965) by Edgar Z. Friedenberg, whom I had the good fortune to meet at some of the many educational conferences I attended during my fellowship year. I transcribed his definition of integrity (from The Vanishing Adolescent [1959]) in my journal:

Integrity is the power to use your real feelings to guide your actions in a real world that is refractory and densely populated with other persons whose goals and feelings must be recognized and respected. It operates as a delicate balance between subjectivity and objectivity, passion and self-discipline.

I was also impressed by the following quote: “Any individual through whom subjective intensity may intrude upon the processes of bureaucratic equilibrium is extremely threatening to our society.” I was dismayed, however, by his pessimism when I heard him speak in Toronto shortly after the killings at Kent State on May 4th, 1970:

No hope that even a revolution would produce the changes that we desire: it is the minority groups that get shot and killed. About the Kent State student killings: you’d think the people of Ohio would be disappointed in their National Guard – that the body count was not higher. Referring, perhaps, to the construction worker riot in New York and the police’s failure to arrest or stop them: One had expected the coming of fascism in America to be more different from the models of the past.

My admiration for Friedenberg was undiminished, however, as attested by the following entry in my journal in April 1970:

He has, by dint of constant work, constant reiteration and reexamination of his beliefs, become a man who can stand up for them at any time. My article has shown me that I can gain this moral stature only during moments of insight, only at odd times – that my life has been (though it need not continue to be) corrupted by laziness, forgetfulness, compromise, repeated failure to act on my instincts or beliefs, repeated failure of integrity.

The article referred to in that entry was to become my first academic publication, entitled “The Moral Purpose of Humanities Programs,” published in the November 1970 issue of English Journal. Presented as the summation of my fellowship experiences, the article turned into a protest against the unending war in Vietnam and what I saw as the collaboration, whether intended or not, of the educational establishment in the continuation of that war. Dissenting from the self-congratulatory exaggerations of the benefits to be derived from interdisciplinary humanities programs that were the theme of so many conference presentations, I wanted humanities programs to become a genuine vehicle of social critique and reform, not just an exercise in socializing students and citizens into the existing social structure by making students feel good about themselves. “It sounds like you want a humanities program to be a journey into the heart of darkness,” my brother-in-law Alvin commented after reading the article. It seemed to me that the innovations advocated at these conferences had mainly the function of increasing the technical efficiency of humanistic education, not developing the ethical conscience that should be the foundation of such an education. “What is it the humanities movement is purveying?” I wrote in my journal. “Ostentatious enthusiasm for edifying slogans – the same old malady of society as a whole.”

Is the objective of education really only that Johnny (and Mary) be able to read better? Have we done our duty by Johnny if we have raised his reading ability to a point where he can pass the qualifying exams for the armed services and be sent to Vietnam to kill and be killed? Is it only ever greater educational efficiency we are after? That is the Eichmann syndrome, just do your duty without questioning the results. That is the attitude expressed by “what’s wrong with security?” [a question posed by someone who objected to my criticism at one of the conferences I attended], an attitude responsible for most of our crimes. I see the planet teeming with little nests of security, with each person worrying about his own little nest, and making it bigger and better, usually at the expense of his neighbor, while the planet itself goes to hell.

This importunate thought formed the major theme of my article:

A case in point is the treatment of war, an almost mandatory unit for humanities courses nowadays that want to be up-to-date. War is the most easily visible evil, and opposition to it is not likely to provoke disagreement in any quarter. Even the politicians and generals who make war are opposed to it (if only because they would much prefer to realize their aggressive designs without recourse to war). We take a stand, then, against war and say that the impulse toward war is an evil trait in man that we must seek to overcome or get rid of. We tend to blame wars and atrocities on the Hitlers, large and small, of the world (usually our enemies), and disregard the much more numerous Eichmanns, although (or perhaps because) there is a lot more of Eichmann than of Hitler in most of us. We do not analyze how wars result from our own normal everyday virtues, our aggregate efficiencies, our dutifully executed routines, our functions which we dignify with the word “responsibilities,” our modesty (the positive form of timidity), our goodwill, our cooperativeness, our sense of order and propriety, our decency, our respectability, yes, our humanity. By implication we do not admit that we are responsible at all. War is some lurking evil in mankind. We fight it in the moral sphere, by pledging our abhorrence. When asked to eradicate it in fact, we reply that that is, after all, not the job of the schools.

Technology is another fashionable bugaboo. It is not hard to see that we will never achieve the objectives we claim to espouse if we seek the source of our troubles outside ourselves. It is not technology, but the technocratic frame of mind – a frame of mind admittedly fostered by technology, but by no means restricted to it – that produces and permits the social maladies that we are all united, at least in words, in opposing. There are technocrats in every walk of modern life, and most emphatically in the humanities, too: people who see their jobs, whatever they be, not in their larger moral context, but as functions to be carried out with ever greater efficiency. It is ridiculous, of course, to suppose that a person should be more “humane” (less susceptible to such vices as bureaucratism, careerism, professional vanity, and the intellectual vices of jargon, intellection, and abstraction) just because one is active in the field of humanities. But the rhetoric of the humanities does throw a certain hypocritical aspect into relief. . .

Perhaps the problem boils down to a basic lack of commitment. Perhaps it is not just coincidental that most humanities programs speak of man in the third person, of “his achievements and problems, his past and present,” as if they were speaking of a species to which the administrators of the program did not belong. What commitment there is, is to the program, not to man. Small wonder, then, that the program develops a life of its own, develops the same showcase quality, the same formal objectivity, the same exaggerated sense of its own importance, as all the other programs that have preceded it. The program itself becomes one of man’s problems – and an obstacle to the humanistic values it literally feeds on. The humanities become just another vehicle to the kind of success to which we owe our deepest commitment, and the humane values, to which we pay such fancy lip service, turn out to be simply the morality most compatible with this success.

Whatever we may say in our course guidelines, we do not, by and large examine our moral values; we profess them. Our humanities courses, by and large, are in search and pursuit of goodness, not awareness. They are designed to do for the spirit what physical education does for the body: strengthen it. They do so with pretty much the same type of determination and fall into most of the same traps (accent on winning, exhibitionism, pep rallies, downgrading of individual idiosyncrasy in favor of the team). Most ominous of all is perhaps the competition in enthusiasm that facilitates placing the blame for eventual miscarriages on those who show less. It is the same kind of subtle, and not so subtle, pressure that established institutions exert against dissent. Woe unto him who does not at least claim to love people, though he may only love his success with people, or hate being alone, or wish to ingratiate himself.

To complement the brash self-confidence of the football field, humanities guidelines propose to develop what is called “self-concept.” It is a much safer and more positive term than the one in the dictionary – self-consciousness. Self-concept suggests that a person think favorably of himself, self-consciousness that he understand himself. But self-consciousness suggests also the insecurity that a person must feel when one becomes conscious of one’s motives, intentions, desires. (A linguistic analysis of why self-consciousness has received such a negative connotation in English might shed some light on our cultural values. My own theory is that it has gotten this connotation because it impedes activity – and activity is a prerequisite to success. Self-consciousness slows decision – though not necessarily ethical decisions, which without self-consciousness, are generally never made at all.) There isn’t a person in the country, including the most narrow-minded and bigoted, who hasn’t learned to dress his prejudices in the most winning garments. The humanities ought not to make it easier for us. It ought not hand us the garments; it ought to rip them off us.

What are the practical consequences of what I have said? . . . The humanities must become more radical, more socially, politically, economically, psychologically aware. It does not mean that we must go out in the streets and demonstrate. It simply means that we get off our high moral horse and back on to the plane of reality, that we once again substitute analysis for enthusiasm, and criticism for reverence and piety. It means that we encourage, both for students and teachers, an examination of our present life, of our present activities – and not just to find more streamlined methods of operation. Let us not give up our moral purpose, let us fulfill it, not by celebrating the values we call humane that lead to success, but by analyzing the ultimately pernicious consequences of some of these very values. The moral life is not just “being good” or “loving man”; it is continuous hard work. The extremely human traits of laziness, forgetfulness, complacency, opportunism, self-deception thwart it at every turn.

Let us enter into areas that are presently taboo . . . Let us ask embarrassing questions. Let us ask why nations, and those responsible for national policy, do not respect the values we have found to work in personal relations. Why is it quite acceptable for nations to be arrogant, self-seeking, and boastful? Why is a politician sure to find approval if he justifies his acts as in the self-interest of the nation, no matter how immoral these might otherwise be? And let us call a spade a spade. The name of the human game as we presently play it and as we seem constituted to play it is power – power in all its variations. The humanities in the schools – if they are serious about correcting the abuses of power – should not allow themselves to become simply the arsenals of moral weaponry that help us to pursue this game with greatest success.

Our young people are trying to tell us this. I deliberately use the word trying, because I am convinced there are literally millions of young people in this country who feel this sense of discomfort and alienation, who feel in their bones that they are surrounded by sham, delusion, and hypocrisy, even while we tell them to be honest, respectful, and decent. But it is only the fortunate few who can put their fingers on the trouble, who can tell what is bothering them, who really are aware of what is bothering them. Is it not our task, the task of the humanities, to help them get to the source of this alienation, not to dismiss it with lofty sentiments about man, but to pinpoint and act upon it? Not to add to the smoke screen of comfortable delusions, but to dispel it? Not to make us feel good about ourselves, but to make us aware of ourselves?

Forty years later the sexist language that seemed quite normal in that still male-dominated age is certainly embarrassing, but the article’s activist political philosophy reflected the temper of the times and continues to accord with my left-oriented political attitude today. I found plenty of corroboration for my views in the alternative press that proliferated in those years. In April 1970 I quoted one such passage in my journal:

Picking up the Village Voice, feeling guilty for killing time, finding the following excerpt that fits right in with the article I am writing: [it spoke of] “the smokescreen of delusions that allow too many Americans to cling to the pious belief that if only we could treat each other with honesty and respect and the decency that dwells within us, everything would be all right. And until that smokescreen is dissipated, too many Americans will continue to wait for the full flowering of our latent humanity rather than work up the political will to confront the results of our inhumanity.”

But I also came to realize that it is much easier to preach activism than to practice it:

Another thing my article shows me (is there anything that doesn’t show me?) is that I am again and again criticizing something in myself, or to put it another way, I am again and again guilty of the very things I am criticizing.

Not political activism, but depolitization – citizen apathy –, I concluded, was the true source of the problems we faced as a society. Maintaining the activism and idealism of the civil rights and anti-war movements would prove to be the major challenge of the 1970s, one that became particularly daunting after President Nixon ended the draft and created the all-volunteer professional army in 1973. Young people seemed to lose interest in trying to end the war. The “movement” fragmented and gradually dissolved in the course of the 1970s, leaving the field clear for the resurgence of a conservative backlash that culminated in the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.

In the spring of my fellowship year I made the decision to return to graduate school, with Steffi’s encouragement, but not without a strong feeling of guilt for thus abandoning the teaching post at Lake Region that had made me eligible for the fellowship in the first place. Dick Richardson had been right when he pinpointed the main problem facing the administrators of the Ford fellowship: “How do you keep them down on the ranch once they have seen the world?” While most of the fellowship recipients did return to their former careers, prepared to put their newly-acquired training at the service of their communities, I used the opportunity to try to move on to teaching on the college level. My real motive was to pursue my frustrated writing ambitions, which I knew I would never do unless forced to by professional obligation. My years of teaching experience helped me to get a teaching assistantship at the University of Vermont, which not only made graduate school affordable, but also had the advantage of keeping us close to our beloved home in Irasburg.

Steffi would open a shop in the living room of our home in 1971 for which I provided the wood paneling and the shelves. Her exquisitely designed jewelry was attracting growing numbers of customers at crafts fairs, assuring us of an additional income. And so, fourteen years after abandoning Columbia, and ten years after forsaking Harvard, I resumed my graduate training – this time in history, a field that I expected to give me greater incentive to write for publication than language or literature.