Archives and Special Collections Mansfield Library, University of Missoula MT 59812-9936 Email: [email protected] Telephone: (406) 243-2053

This transcript represents the nearly verbatim record of an unrehearsed interview. Please bear in mind that you are reading the spoken word rather than the written word.

Oral History Number: 036-014 Interviewee: Interviewer: Claire Rhein Date of Interview: September 8,1986 Project: Daniel Kemmis Interviews Oral History Collection

Claire Rhein: This is Claire Rhein talking to Dan Kemmis for kind of our yearly chat it seems. The date is the 8th of September and the year 1986, and I don't really understand why I see you just once a year, Dan.

Daniel Kemmis: Well, I don't know either. Maybe it's because life is moving slowly these days. That's about as frequently as there is very much to report. But I'm glad we do it that often, anyw ay.

CR: I would think it's because life has been moving rather rapidly and maybe it's just kind of getting out of hand, for me, and I don't move as quickly as I used to. (Laughs.) I hardly think that your life could be slow.

DK: It's lot slower than it used to be though. I spend a lot more time at home than it feels like I ever have, and well, just about all the way around I feel it has slowed down and that's by design. I've really felt the need to spend more time with the family and to try to do fewer things and try to learn how to do a few of them better. So, you know, I'm not saying that I won't turn around and sometime get very busy again, and certainly it is the case that I have my hands more than full. I've got plenty to do and never quite get it done at the end of the day or the end of the week or whatever. But the pace is more manageable than it was for a long time.

CR: I think you have earned that, for a while. Does this give you a little thinking tim e—a little more thinking time?

DK: Well, part of what I have enjoyed about the last several months is that the Northern Lights Institute has really afforded me thinking time. What I've been doing since March of this year is splitting my time half and half between theory and practice. I've been continuing to do the community organizing and community development that I talked about the last time. Since March, with Northern Lights, I've also been reading and writing about the theory that lies behind what I've been doing. So yes, in that way too my life feels much more leisurely in that I'm not always doing, but half of the time I'm supposed to be thinking and writing about what I'm doing.

CR: That sounds as though it would be comfortable for you.

DK: It's great, just great. I don't expect to maintain that forever, but I think I've become more and more acutely aware of the way that I find myself balanced between theory and action,

1 Daniel Kemmis Interview, OH 036-014, Archives and Special Collections, Mansfield Library, -Missoula. between thought and action. But I have to have both of them and when I'm in an action field I think that most of the people that I'm working with think that I'm usually theory prone and yet among theoreticians I think it's a puzzle on why I insist on being so much involved in practice. But for me, at least, it's the right balance. It's why I never conceive of myself being an academician. I like to teach and I like to write and I like to do research, but I think I would feel claustrophobic very quickly if I weren't out really engaged in action at the same time.

CR: Sometime though, it had to be three, four, maybe five years ago, we talked about your competitiveness and that everything you were doing at that time dealt with competition, competition against another lawyer, competition politically. Are you competing now or have you taken a breather from that too?

DK: Well, I sure don't feel like I'm competing. Yes, I suppose the one area in which I find myself competing is competing for funding with other people who need funding and there is a certain amount of that that you have to do. But I've turned my attention so much to the idea of cooperation and that's at the kernel of what I'm trying to understand and work with. So I suppose that it would be unfortunate if I were doing that in a very competitive way.

CR: Do you miss it?

DK: No.

CR: But you enjoyed it then.

DK: Oh, yeah, I think at least in the political realm that I enjoyed the competition. I don't remember enjoying it too much in the legal field.

CR: You didn't? (pause) I'll have to go back and look at my notes.

DK: You probably remember it better than I do.

CR: I remember thinking it was so interesting; it seemed in a way so foreign to Dan Kemmis that I had known up to that point. Everything you were doing was so strongly competitive then, and you seemed to deal with it very calmly but thriving on it. Did the nerves show some other way?

DK: I think particularly, well, in both fields I think I came to the place where I was just very restless and unsatisfied with the way that in a competitive situation you kind of have to pretend to be more right than you ever are. You really do, in an adversarial system, whether it's a politically adversarial, or a legally adversarial system, you have to pretend to the whole truth when you know that you don't have the whole truth. That really got to be a burden to me. More and more politically it became clear to me that my opponents had a good share of the truth and yet we were never able to acknowledge each other's truths. You just can't do it. Or at least I didn't know very well how to do it politically and I don't know anybody who did.

2 Daniel Kemmis Interview, OH 036-014, Archives and Special Collections, Mansfield Library, University of Montana-Missoula. CR: You're such a reasonable person. Is that where this became a problem? That you couldn't just be right, you had to be reasonable.

DK: That's probably a good way to put it.

CR: How does this work with parenting, incidentally?

DK: Oh, well, now that's a good question. No, I have no trouble being totally right as a parent (laughs)

CR: Oh, I am relieved. It is kind of comfortable today to have a parent who can say, no, I can be totally right.

DK: Well, actually I'm fairly facetious about it and I try to maintain an open mind there, too, to recognize that I'm not all that right but still I suppose I'm firmer and stricter and more certain in the family than I am in many other situations.

CR: Incidentally, how old are your children now?

DK: How old are they?

CR: Yes. Is th a t a fair question?

DK: Yes, that's fine. Dava is ready to turn 16; she's a sophomore. John is in 8th grade and he is 13. Abraham is six and just starting first grade, and Sam is 2.

CK: Abraham is 6 already, and you have a daughter who is 16!

DK: Right.

CR: She goes to school w here?

DK: Hellgate High School.

CR: Does she? I don't think I've seen Sam. Abraham is 6. He was a very bright, it seemed to me, 2 >2 or 3-year-old, which is probably what he was when I saw him last. Has he continued to develop as astoundingly as he seemed to then?

DK: Oh, I guess that I don't consider him to be extraordinary except in the way that parents think their kids are. He's extremely inquisitive about some areas that surprise me. He loves science and nature very much and I think he is gaining a pretty good understanding of the world. I think he'll probably end up being fairly scholarly.

3 Daniel Kemmis Interview, OH 036-014, Archives and Special Collections, Mansfield Library, University of Montana-Missoula. CR: Do you get a chance to father more now with the younger children now than you did with the older ones?

DK: I thin k so, yes.

CR: That's kind of interesting because I think, let's see you're 41?

DK: Just about.

CR: I don't know why I'm stunned except it seems that when you were 39 you were on everybody's list of doing remarkable things and then you kind of dropped out of sight.

DK: Right.

CR: You were on the Esquire list. You were on the state list—the University list. Who else besides me is coming around and saying, "Where are you now, Dan?"

DK: It's definitely a major factor that not only do a lot of people say it, but I'm sure there are many others who don't say it just out of politeness. And I think that that troubles me to a certain extent.

CR: Does it?

DK: Well, I was talking to Jean [his wife] about it just the other day, the fact that you do like to have people know what you are doing and understand what you're doing. When you are in the legislature that sort of says it and people know what your record is, and they know what your main issues are and so they understand you. Now, what I'm doing now is sort of so outside the system in an effort to change things more fundamentally than I think I was trying to change them before. I came up with an image the other day that I never worked through very carefully, but it's as if you had been house painter or facade designer or something like that who was always seen up working on the parapets of this building, and so on. Then all at once you're not seen any more and people wonder what going on, and then when you do show up you're kind of smeared with dirt and so on and it's because you've gone to work down on the foundations, which you think is more important but nobody knows what you're doing.

CR: An interesting picture.

DK: So it does cause me a little bit of pain, I think.

CR: Does it?

DK: Yes, just because I think it's a natural human instinct to want to be known. I don't mean

4 Daniel Kemmis Interview, OH 036-014, Archives and Special Collections, Mansfield Library, University of Montana-Missoula. famous. I don't mean in that sense, but understood by those who do know you.

CR: Because people have said, well, what is Dan doing now? It's a difficult question to deal with.

DK: It is. It is. You see, I can never answer the question in a meaningful way in any short period of time, so I know that none of my friends can.

CR: Do you think that this period where you are really submerged into your head and into working these things out pretty much on your own. I think probably you have a tendency to do that because your mind moves a little differently than anybody else right off hand that I could thin k of.

DK: Really a tactful way to say it.

CR: Well, you go at things rather differently. I don't think that's any real surprise to you, is it?

DK: Well, of course it's not just that I'm working them out in my head because while I am spending a fair amount of time thinking, as I said earlier, I need to be acting at the same time. But the action is not highly visible action, nor is it anything— it's not within the given structure. It's action among people in a way that has to be pretty unstructured, and something that you can't just put your finger on and say, he does that.

CR: How many people do you motivate right now compared to the number that you were moving two years ago?

DK: Well, it depends a lot on what you mean by motivation. The number of people that I have contact with is smaller. The quality or depth of the contact is considerably more profound, I think. In that I don't just work with people who call me up and say, "I think you ought to vote this way on that," and then that's the end of it. I am trying to work with people in a way that ends up giving them a whole different sense of what being a citizen is and what relating to each other is all about. That's all.

CR: That's a very slow way to affect a lifestyle, isn't it?

DK: Yes, it is. I had a conversation the other day, in the end a very gratifying conversation, with a fellow from the Ford Foundation who happened to be coming through town and had heard some about my work and wanted to talk to me about it. It was gratifying because on the one hand he was familiar with some of the theoretical work that really lies at the root of what I am doing, and because of that I was able to speak to him much more directly than I can with most people. It's as if, you know, sometimes we speak in words, sometimes we speak in sentences, and where you really want to be is where you can speak in books to somebody. (Laughs.) You know, you just mention a book and that means— it has all of this meaning. That was great. But it was also gratifying because he identified a couple of the things that we have talked about

5 Daniel Kemmis Interview, OH 036-014, Archives and Special Collections, Mansfield Library, University of Montana-Missoula. here. He said, "People must not understand very well what you're doing." It felt good to have somebody say that and know why that would be true.

Then he also said, "You have to be very patient because what you're doing may not show any fruit for 10 or 15 years—even in your lifetime." Again, I know that and I'm fairly content with that, but it's nice sometimes to have somebody who understands that.

CR: You've taken rather a long view, a longer view than most people in public life, in the legislature, at least, who seem to go from crisis to crisis. You've looked at, as a recall, 200 years as a short term view of what happens on the Clark Fork [River], for instance. I thought that was just marvelous, a 200-year view of the Clark Fork. That's a longer view than probably anybody has ever taken of the Clark Fork.

DK: You thin k so?

CR: Oh, I'm quite sure because in the 1870s they thought it was dead and now it came back, but they're still looking at the Clark Fork long term — 20 years. That's not really long term because Dan Kemmis thinks long term on the Clark Fork is about 200 years.

DK: I was reminded of that whole issue this last week. I went to a conference in Helena on state taxation, and I was asked to go as a participant in a debate on the coal tax. I had the privilege of debating one of my old legislative adversaries, Ken Nordtvedt, whom I always enjoyed opposing. [Nordtvedt was a three-term legislator and also served briefly as director of the Montana Department of Revenue.] But I found myself very, very depressed by the attitude of most legislators about the coal tax. I'm afraid it has become an exceptionally short-term attitude, and one that has almost no relationship to what it was that created the coal tax in the beginning. So I'm very down about that. I feel as if we've moved away from the real high ground that was claimed in '75.

CR: W as th a t to o high to be practical?

DK: Well, it just depends on what you mean by practical. It wasn't. What's practical in that situation, I think, is not only what's right but what the people of Montana would support as being right. They would have supported that coal tax come hell or high water. They were proud of the coal tax. They were proud of the fact that it was attacked, and it was sustained in the United States Supreme Court. They were proud of the fact that it was attacked in the Congress, and that our people were there to defend it. They would have defended that thing like the Texans defended the Alamo.

CR: Well, we still have the same people in Congress to defend it, and the people of the state have not changed that much. The change has been in the state leadership?

DK: I think so. I don't lightly place blame for such things, but in this case there was one person

6 Daniel Kemmis Interview, OH 036-014, Archives and Special Collections, Mansfield Library, University of Montana-Missoula. who had complete power to have either sustained the historical direction that we had staked out or to abandon it, as I see it, and that was the governor [Ted Schwinden]. He simply abandoned it. I rarely feel as bitter as I do about that. I think the reason that I feel so bitter about it is because there is history involved. There is high history involved.

CR: Is he able to do this as a fiat and it's done, or what is happening over there? What's with the legislature? Why can't they back—?

DK: I don't know. There just isn't—

CR: Is there not the leadership in the legislature? Is there not someone strong enough?

DK: There are strong people there who, on other issues can make a difference. Somehow on this issue it just doesn't seem that there is that strength of leadership. I don't know. I mean it's probably just asking too much of a legislature to do that in the face of the fiscal crisis that we have now against a governor who has taken the other position. So I regret what I see happening in the legislature but I'm most distraught about the course the governor has taken.

CR: So I have to ask you, do you ever have a little remorse or guilt that you didn't stay there and keep a watch on this thing? You could have.

DK: I wish that it were possible to just stay there and keep a watch on something like that without paying the price of family life and so on that would be required. But it's not. It's that old saw about if wishes were fishes we'd all have some fried. Well, that's not the way the world is, you've got to pay the price in order to be in that position. I was willing to pay that price for a certain period of time, but no longer. So, yes, when a battle like that comes up, then wish I could be there.

CR: I think there are a lot of people for whom this very thought has come to mind. But if Kemmis were still there, they wouldn't dare do that.

DK: Oh, you know I wouldn't go nearly that far and I wouldn't have any confidence that I would have been able to make a difference. But I know at least that I could have made the fight.

CR: You could have made the fight and very possibly the governor wouldn't have made the move, knowing you were going to be his opponent.

DK: I don't think that's true. I'll have to disagree with you there.

CR: You w on a couple o f o th e r tim es.

DK: Yes, right.

7 Daniel Kemmis Interview, OH 036-014, Archives and Special Collections, Mansfield Library, University of Montana-Missoula. CR: I'm not laying this on you as a problem that you should have done this, you understand. I just wonder whether it doesn't come to your mind that it would have been a good fight. This couldn't have been done had you still been using the control that you had, and you were developing an awful lot, Dan, in that area.

DK: Yes, but you have to know that when you step away from a base that you've built up that you are abandoning the ability to influence things in the same way that you have before. You know, though, that part of the reason that I am where I am now is because I think in the long run what it would take in order for the people of Montana to really support a coal tax or any other such historical innovation is a stronger sense of their own capacity as citizens. You can't, or at least I can't, be content to rest that kind of historical choice on the vagaries of who happens to be in office at any particular time. In the end, I have to be more concerned about where are the people and how sure are they of their ability to govern themselves.

Part of the reason that this happened is because people aren't that sure of those things. At the very least they need someone leading them who says, yes, we are sure, and when somebody says we are sure then the people very often will say, yes, we are.

CR: Well, it doesn't fragment the fight when there are two in opposition, whether it's two parties or two individuals, but when you leave it to the people, as all of these individuals, then it's fragmented and it isn't very successful?

DK: Right.

CR: So you think, and you're writing and you are in contact, I am sure, with some people who are also involved in this level of thought and developing philosophy that's a little different?

DK: Yes, I have some good contacts around the country and I'm very grateful for those, partly because I have to seek funding from foundations, which means I have to keep in contact with some interesting people who in turn put me in touch with other interesting people and that's always very challenging.

CR: I find it fascinating that it's such a terrific experience for you to find someone with whom you can talk.

DK: I was a little surprised by that too, as a matter of fact. (Laughs.)

CR: That must be really great because, how about local people? Is there anyone locally, not necessarily naming individuals, but are there two or three heads that work with yours, not necessarily in opposition, but are feeding the fires for you?

DK: Oh, yes! I think that there are more and more people who do that, and that's on different levels. There are many of the people that I work with in the concrete projects in the community

8 Daniel Kemmis Interview, OH 036-014, Archives and Special Collections, Mansfield Library, University of Montana-Missoula. are involved because they share, pretty fundamentally, the kind of visions and aspirations that I have. Then there are people, too, who are more academically inclined that are great sources of sustenance, particularly Albert Borgmann in the philosophy department.

CR: He's long been a friend o f yours?

DK: Yes. Albert and I meet once a week, almost every week, and spend an hour together and that's very important to me.

CR: What are some of the concrete kinds of community things that you are doing?

DK: Well, in Missoula County, which is where the bulk of the activity is taking place, we've been involved in, oh, I'll name about a half a dozen projects and one is planning what is called a small business incubator, another is planning a community-owned investment company that would raise money from all of us and invest it in local businesses, another is planning an ongoing art and music festival for Missoula to try to evolve it into something pretty high class and something that people would look forward to being at and perhaps travel some distance to attend. Related to that is an effort to establish a community calendar that would be available to everybody in the community and be very reliable. Those are, I guess, just a few of the things.

CR: Do you ever look at the magazine that the Electric Co-op puts out? You look at the calendar of events in the back and every month when it comes out Leo opens to that page, and passes it over to me because here's Havre and Havre and Havre and Havre. It seems as though everything that goes on in the state is going on in Havre, Montana, and you know and I know that's not true. (Laughs.) But when you say community calendar, maybe a lot of things are happening that we are not planning and we are not part of, that not only develop—whether it's art or music or any of the humanities, but nobody knows about them. That's a very practical kind of thought—very practical, getting this out to people.

Sunset magazine doesn't know [local events]. These are the things I look at too, because I look to see what is going on in other communities. I think that's a very good practical kind of thing.

DK: Part of the reason that I'm interested in it is because so many different kinds of people can see that it is practical. That is, people who have very different ideologies can still say, "But I need to know what you're doing," and we all need to know what we're all doing. So it's a kind of unusual common meeting ground.

CR: I don't even find it unusual. It think it may be the common meeting ground for this sort of thing. The other two, the small business incubator and the investment company, goes back, it seems to me to...

DK: 95.

9 Daniel Kemmis Interview, OH 036-014, Archives and Special Collections, Mansfield Library, University of Montana-Missoula. CR: Initiative 95.

DK: Ninety-five. Yes it does.

CR: What's happening with this in the local area? Has this been going on, on a level I haven't been aware of?

DK: W h a t's that?

CR: Well, either the small business thing or the investment thing. Is this still in the design —

DK: Yes, it's been fairly quiet, still in the design stage and the incubator is a lot further along. It's to the point now of being, I think fairly well designed and now we need to find some money for it and of course in this day and age that's a very challenging thing to do. But I think we're in the position where if there is enough local support for it then we'll raise the money locally, som ehow , to do it.

CR: Then you must be on a soapbox somewhere or another selling—

[End o f Side A]

10 Daniel Kemmis Interview, OH 036-014, Archives and Special Collections, Mansfield Library, University of Montana-Missoula. [Side A]

CR: When I said "selling," that is a completely different kind of thing for you, is it not? Because this is a selling, I think we're agreed on that. You have to get out. This has to be sold.

DK: Except my role as the salesman is fairly low key. My role, as I perceive it, is to try to help people come together and plan the project and so on, so I'm a facilitator. But it's the people who are involved in the project that have to make it go. So I'm no more the salesman than I am the architect. I'm none of those things.

CR: You'd rath er be th e facilitato r.

DK: Right.

CR: Who's going to carry the flag then, for instance, in these? Someone always has to do that.

DK: Right, but there are plenty of good people around to do those things. That will get done. I'm willing to do my share, but I think that I've gotten more and more clear about playing a particular role and it's a role that really doesn't put me forward as much as has often been the case in the past. And that's the way that I like it and for right now, the test of the success of what I'm doing is the fact that the thing goes on and gets done through the efforts of the people who are involved in it. What I want to do is to help those people learn that people who have usually considered themselves to enemies, that they're able to accomplish something together. So it's their accomplishing it together that matters.

CR: Do you see this actually working?

DK: Yes. As the fellow said, it's very long-term, it will take a long time. You can do it in one case, and you can do something like an incubator and you could have the different groups that would have to work together there and make it work. But then, if that's all that they do and they make the incubator work but they never do anything else together, then you haven't done very much. What I want to do is to help to design some kind of process or system or whatever where the people who have been involved in the incubator, some of them then get involved in the investment company. This we've seen happen. I'll tell you a little story there to help elucidate what I'm trying to do.

The idea is to bring together some of these different interests that have usually only met each other in a public hearing or in a lawsuit, worse. Who have never had to deal with each other except in a very adversarial way. Try to bring them to work together on a common project. So in the case of the incubator, we've got some people whose whole background is with citizens' movements, with social action and that sort of thing. Liberals, right? And other people whose whole background is with business and so on, who generally would consider themselves to be conservative. By and large, they haven't had much contact with each other, except sometimes

11 Daniel Kemmis Interview, OH 036-014, Archives and Special Collections, Mansfield Library, University of Montana-Missoula. in an adversarial way. So they come together, they find that they both want to help small businesses and that it's hard work to do that, and they work together over a period of years... well, of months at least. Then finally, they got to the place where they were saying, well, part of what small businesses need is more investment capital, so let's see about getting together a group that would raise some capital, but we're tied up with the incubator so we're going to have to have other people do that. They start inviting some people in to talk about raising capital. Some of those people then come together and they find themselves sitting across the table from their enemies, or they hear it's suggested that they should. Their first reaction is "No, I'm not going to do that. I don't like those people." But then some of the people who have been involved in the incubator say, "Oh it's not that bad." In effect. The idea, the image that I've developed here, one of the images is the very simple one of throwing a pebble into a pond and having the ripples expand. What happens there of course is that any given point on the pond actually has quite a few ripples pass over it. That's what needs to happen here. You start out with something small, and then the people that are involved there get other people involved. The ripples keep passing over everybody until everybody has had four or five experiences of working together in this cooperative way and finally they start to say, just as a m atter of course when faced with a difficult problem, their reaction isn't, "Let's sue the bastards," or, you know, "Let's go to City Hall and complain about it." But, let's sit down with them. You can get along with those people and develop a different attitude there.

CR: That's long -term , Dan.

DK: Yes.

CR: That's really long-term .

DK: Right.

CR: I don't even want to consider how long-term.

DK: Well, one way that I've come to think about it—why am I so insistent that this is the way to do things? I think part of the reason that I believe it so strongly is because of my background. You mentioned the REA earlier. We got electricity when I was 8 years old. It came to our farm land and it wouldn't have come then if it hadn't been for the REA. I grew up with the REA, I grew up with the Farmer's Union, I grew up with all of our neighbors getting together to brand or to thrash or to do whatever. It strikes me that out of the, well if you will, out of the frontier there was this whole ethic and culture of cooperation. The more I started thinking about it, I started thinking about who were those people who got together? I started realizing that they didn't really necessarily like each other any better than a lot of the people who fight each other in Missoula. If they'd had their way, many of them wouldn't have had anything to do with each other. But that wasn't an option. They had to come together and they had to work together and out of doing it over and over again, they learned that they could do difficult things like bring electricity to distant farms and so on. But when you talk long term, that culture took

12 Daniel Kemmis Interview, OH 036-014, Archives and Special Collections, Mansfield Library, University of Montana-Missoula. generations, of course, to build up and there's no reason to expect that anything like a modern equivalent of it would come about very quickly.

CR: But w h a t happened a fte r th e y got REA?

DK: They got comfortable, they got soft.

CR: That's true. So the question that keeps running through my mind is how do you continue to m otivate?

DK: It's tough; I think that we have to—one thing that I think happened there is that the people came to believe that as long as you had a technical solution for something, that was good enough. If you had a technical solution and it replaced getting along with each other, or it replaced cooperating with each other, or really engaging with each other, that's okay. But it's the end product of that; it's not how you get there. I think that what I would hope is that maybe we could learn that the end product isn't all there is to it: that it does matter how you get there. The danger is always going to be there that we just slip back into the easy, quick fix.

CR: I can't think of anything, really that has developed in REA or the Farmer's Union and at one time that was a very, very powerful movement. Most of the people now, most of the people that you talk with now who were very active and who were great movers in the Farmer's Union are my age or older.

DK: Right. Oh yes, it's practically gone.

CR: And th e re 's been nothing to replace it.

DK: I suppose that's not quite true.

CR: Okay. W h a t is replacing it?

DK: Well, there are sort of little nodes of things that people have done.

CR: The Grange is no longer viable in Montana, Western Montana.

DK: No, I think that nothing has come along of the scale of the agrarian movement. It was really the agrarian movement that produced the grain (unintelligible).

CR: It's not producing it now.

DK: No. The only question is whether there are enough little examples of something beginning to stir that could be tied together into a network that people would understand. People are starting to do cooperative housing. There are various kinds of cooperative activities that go on.

13 Daniel Kemmis Interview, OH 036-014, Archives and Special Collections, Mansfield Library, University of Montana-Missoula. Then you've got, within churches I think you'll often find that people relate to each other in a different way that is much closer to that cooperative way than they find in their daily lives. What I'm saying is, I think part of what we need to do now is be real alert to those little isolated instances where people have experienced the satisfactions of cooperation. But we also need to be creating more and more places where that can and needs to happen until eventually it becomes more of a matter of course. Swimming upstream, huh?

CR: Well, we have a park in Missoula. The riverside park, begun and developing. But I see that as an end.

DK: Oh, it is pretty much. I think that that could be a much more cooperative kind of thing than so far it has been. It could be something that involves a lot more people than it has. One of the things I'm considering right now, the Missoula Redevelopment Agency, which has done most of that work, is looking for an executive director and I'm trying to decide whether I should put my name in for that position or not. The reason that I'm interested in doing it is just what you're suggesting. There is something that can either go on, that development of the riverfront, the development of downtown, can either go on in a kind of a technical way where you decide what you want to do, a few people decide, they hire the technicians and they get it done. Or you could do it in a way that yes, calls on the expertise of technicians, but involves a lot of people who in the end can point to it and say, "We did that." When people visit from out of town and say, "What a nice place this is," people can say, "Yeah, isn't that great? We did that." I think Missoula is really ready for that kind of awakening of civic pride, but we don't know how to mobilize it anymore. We're not very good at it. I think it's important that we do that.

CR: Well, certain things surface occasionally, but it's kind of bubbled up and then died down.

DK: Right.

CR: But th e d o w n to w n isn't dead.

DK: No, the downtown is doing great.

CR: They've managed one way or another. I don't know who's doing it, really, but there has to be merchants working with somebody else.

DK: Yes, I think it's the merchants have been doing a good job of working together, and working together with this government agency. See, there's a kind of softening that goes on there. The merchants tend to be...you know, if left to themselves, ideologically, they would say, "Get the government out of here, out of our pocketbooks, and off of our backs." But here they see a government agency that's able to help them some and so attitudes kind of moderate on both sides, I think. So there's a real opportunity there for some growth, I think. Because we're back again to that whole business of the adversarial system where you always have to pretend to be so right. There's so much of that that goes on. Is the government anti-business, is Missoula anti­

14 Daniel Kemmis Interview, OH 036-014, Archives and Special Collections, Mansfield Library, University of Montana-Missoula. business? Well, of course it's not, but it's politically convenient to say that it is. W hat you need to overcome that with are some places where people who care about business and people who care about quality of life can come together and see that they really care about very much the same things. They need to work on them together.

CR: Didn't John Badgley in the Institute of the Rockies— has that just kind of gone downhill now that John has gone back to New York? [The Institute was founded in Missoula in 1973 as a non­ profit educational association based on the idea that citizens should empower themselves to shape their future.]

DK: It's gotten a little hard for me to keep track of it. I haven't been very closely involved with it, and it does seem that it's been fairly quiet here.

CR: I haven't heard of anything like the Columbia River or that sort of thing.

DK: No. I think the Northern Lights Institute, which is a little more broadly based, has maybe started to do some of the same things on a broader scale.

DR: But is there still an Institute of the Rockies?

DK: I think there is.

CR: Is there? Do you know what happened to—the man leaves...?

DK: Right, right.

CR: Then it w asn't very strong?

DK: That's right. So I've got a story, a kid's story, that is the...it sort of says how I think those things should happen, so when the man leaves, that doesn't happen. So it's the story of making soup from a stone. Do you know that story? This fellow that shows up on the village green in a medieval city one day, and he has a pack on his back, and he sets it down rather ceremoniously, and people come around and ask what it's for. He says he's going to make soup. A couple more people come and ask what's going on and they say he's going to make soup. So they say, "What are you going to make soup from?" And he says, "Well, I'm going to make it from a stone." He pulls this stone out of his sack. He says, "I just need a kettle. Does anybody have a kettle?" Somebody says, "Yeah, I've got a kettle." So they go and get a kettle. He puts the stone in the kettle and he says, "Well, I need some water." It goes on, of course, he gets an onion, he gets some meat, he gets some carrots, and some salt and pepper and he makes a pretty good soup. Everybody has the soup, then he takes the stone, washes it off, puts it back in his sack, and leaves town.

CR: M agic stone.

15 Daniel Kemmis Interview, OH 036-014, Archives and Special Collections, Mansfield Library, University of Montana-Missoula. DK: Right. (Laughs.) That's how I've come to feel about myself more and more.

CR: The m an w ith th e stone?

DK: Right. It's not much, right? That's a good place to be. It's a comfortable place to be.

CR: Well, I have a feeling that I'm going to have to sit here and think about that for a while. Is there anywhere else that we want to go with this?

DK: No, I think we've about brought us up to date probably. As long as you're here again next year.

CR: You just turned on my head, and I'm afraid I'm not thinking of questions. I'm going off thinking that's a very good story and it does illustrate very well, I think, a part of what it is that you want to teach. What you're going to have to do is teach, whether you like it or not.

DK: I know that now, and I'm more and more aware now that what I want to do really amounts to education. That's true.

CR: That's true. I can't help but think that lo, (?) one needs a brass tool to generate the excitement that he was able to generate with his words and his incredible physical desire for things to be a certain way.

DK: You say that you think that that is needed?

CR: I do. I do. I've been listening on and off, well, I did about two weeks ago. I had been to (unintelligible) to some of Ross's lectures that were taped in 1976 when [UM Professor and historian K. Ross Toole] Ross had already had his heart problem but not the cancer, and these lectures are vintage Ross Toole. Oh, they're just great to listen you know? I want to put down my pencil and pick up my jacket and march behind Ross's banner, knowing all along that Ross carried a banner that really wouldn't in some cases tolerate too much examination, but oh my. Wasn't it exciting, and wasn't it grand, and didn't your heart pump listening to it? What that did was generate enough people who went out in the state and I think they're the people that voted for your constitution and your great changes. I think by that time, Ross had made an imprint on enough people who still didn't understand what Ross was saying, but listened and moved, and would have followed him anywhere, as I would have, knowing, you know, that maybe we need a bit of a demagogue, maybe you might have to look into some of that too, because I think Ross was.

DK: Oh, he was.

CR: (Laughs.) I love being (unintelligible).

16 Daniel Kemmis Interview, OH 036-014, Archives and Special Collections, Mansfield Library, University of Montana-Missoula. DK: I think you really get close to what needs to be examined because when we talk about the coal tax and what I call the historic high point of its adoption and defense, yes, Ross Toole was a very, very big force behind that. I said that at his memorial service, that he spoke the voice of Montana, but he spoke it more confidently than most of us would dare to do and part of that was because he was willing to crimp a little bit at the edges.

CR: He did, he did. He stood on the edge a lot of times.

DK: Right. So he could be more confident than he deserved to be, but that gave people confidence and we do need to give people confidence. I am very, very chary of demagoguery or even of charisma, and I know I'm probably wrong about that. But it makes me nervous, so I guess that at least at this stage that it's true that I really am trying to experiment with a different way to move people that I think in the end goes deeper than that. I hope it's clear that when I say that that I don't think that I could ever have the kind influence that Ross had. I just feel that my place to work has to be a somewhat different place than that. But there's a time to thunder as well.

CR: I think so. Ross did do it with style. I was just wondering if Ross ever got tired of being right.

DK: I wonder too. That's a good question.

CR: I never knew him th a t w ell.

DK: I never knew him to (laughs) betray any doubts.

CR: I w onder...I w o n d e r if Ross ever got tired o f th a t.

DK: I d o n 't know.

CR: I w o n d er if John w ould know: his b rother.

DK: He might. Joan [his wife] would more likely know.

CR: Joan.

DK: I'll have to ask Joan sometime.

CR: Thank you Dan. I think I'm left with more to think about after a visit today than perhaps I ever have been before.

DK: W ell, good. I —

17 Daniel Kemmis Interview, OH 036-014, Archives and Special Collections, Mansfield Library, University of Montana-Missoula. CR: And as a pragmatic realist, but an idealist, I'm having a little conflict in my own head with this, plus not the patience maybe that you have. Not the time.

DK: There's a sense in which, I think, all of us feel that we don't have the time. That's really a mark— I'm pretty sure it's always been true to a certain extent but I think that the nuclear generation feels that probably more acutely than any others have. The question on how slowly can you afford to work. It really does build in a substantial tension, to the extent that you take the threat of world war seriously. You have to ask...

CR: Do people do th a t today?

DK: Do people?

CR: Young people?

DK: I think they do it different ways. I mean, some of them don't. Many of them take it seriously in the sense that they're so sure it's going to happen, they're going to live their lives as if it was a foregone conclusion. They're going to get what they can get. I think in different ways that most people take it seriously. There are very few people as it weighs to the level of consciousness where we actually work with it consciously and I don't work with it consciously very much, either. But to the extent that you do, then, you do want to move faster. You want to fix things faster. With that kind of danger are many of the other dangers that we know of exist and we want to move faster. It makes it hard to be willing to move slowly.

CR: How many young people do you talk with?

DK: Oh...

CR: I started to say 'to.' I want you to notice I changed that to 'with.'

DK: You did. I need to talk with more of them. I try to do a fair amount of that, but it is one thing that I need to do more of for sure.

CR: Because I'm not aware of the many young people that I'm around that this nuclear thing bothers them that much. Maybe it isn't a thing that they're really conscious of and I'm completely unconscious of it because I don't think about it.

DK: I just think it's much more a part of our lives whether we happen to be those who happen to think about it and march about it and write letters about it. There are those who live our lives in other ways but there are a few of us who live our lives without its influence showing up som etim es.

CR: I think of it in the nature that it has certainly cost us a lot of money.

18 Daniel Kemmis Interview, OH 036-014, Archives and Special Collections, Mansfield Library, University of Montana-Missoula. DK: It has done that.

CR: With the little structure over in Washington, the hoops and the ones that I see in operation in California that send out (unintelligible), tremendous amounts of money.

DK: Well, I think that the suicide rate among teenagers, which has reached such astonishing proportions, that I think it's hard to understand that apart from the fact that you're dealing with a generation that really doesn't believe that there is any future. Again, I don't know that they know that in a way that they say it, but they say it in different ways.

CR: I think Ross helped a lot of them because he made a purpose for them that they could deal with and I guess I'm going to miss him, more than I had thought for a while because I think that there is a group even here on this campus that would have been very aware of and perceptive of and would have picked up his banner, whichever way he happened to be leading at the time. Thank heaven, he was a very concerned citizen. I think that demagoguery, when it's of a very concerned citizen maybe is what young people need, and on that basis I miss him very much.

DK: Well the other person I have personally felt that way very strongly... We faced, you know, in the period of about two years, the loss of many prominent Montanans who had had that kind of influence: Clancy Gordon [Clarence C. Gordon was a professor of botany and environmental studies at UM who died in 1981.] and Dick Hugo [Richard Hugo, who died in 1982, was an acclaimed poet and UM professor of English]. Then this last year—well, first we lost Kim Williams [Williams was a naturalist who earned an interdisciplinary master's degree, with a primary focus in journalism at UM and whose commentary was heard on National Public Radio. She died in August 1986.], and I thought a lot about how much I was going to miss Kim and I cried a lot about it. It was just sad to think that there was just one more person who understood the world in a way that one understands it, even better than I understood it, who wasn't going to be there to understand it that way or to help me understand that way anymore.

CR: You know, many people, when they found out we came from Missoula, Montana, would say, "Do you by any chance know that woman that's on National Public Radio?" And I would say, "Well, yes." You know. "Well, is she real?" (Laughs.)

She affected a lot of people that way. They couldn't really get a finger on was she real or was she a Betty Crocker-type or something like that? If she was nothing else, she was real.

DK: That's exactly right. That's just it. I think everybody in Missoula is proud of Kim having been from here. But in a way saying [on NPR, as she closed each broadcast], "I'm Kim Williams from Missoula, Montana," I think she really was from Missoula, Montana. She chose Missoula and Missoula chose her and that way in which she was real is just a sort of exaggerated way in which most of the people here are real I think.

19 Daniel Kemmis Interview, OH 036-014, Archives and Special Collections, Mansfield Library, University of Montana-Missoula. CR: But Missoula didn't make Kim. Kim came to Missoula and brought herself pretty complete.

DK: Well, I think Kim grew a lot in Missoula.

CR: I'd like to think that this is not uncommon. I think there are people who are affected by this and that is one of the reasons I will always come back.

DK: It's a healthy environment in a lot of ways.

CR: I think it is. I think it is. It's not evil. It's never been evil, it seems to me. Thank you, Dan.

DK: All right, Claire.

[End of Interview]

20 Daniel Kemmis Interview, OH 036-014, Archives and Special Collections, Mansfield Library, University of Montana-Missoula.