University of Illinois at Springfield

Norris L Brookens Library

Archives/Special Collections

Ralph Stone Memoir

ST71. Stone, Ralph b. 1934 Interview and memoir 5 tapes, 355 mins., 77 pp.

Ralph Stone, professor of history at Sangamon State University, discusses his involvement in student activism, civil rights and anti-war movements, and his involvement in teaching innovative and radical educational programs. He also discusses pacifism, the Vietnam War, political activities at Miami University in Ohio, conspiracy trials, and the political atmosphere in the 1960's and 70's.

Interviews by Don Richardson, 1972 and Cliff Wilson, 1978 OPEN See collateral file

Archives/Special Collections LIB 144 University of Illinois at Springfield One University Plaza, MS BRK 140 Springfield IL 62703-5407

© 1978, University of Illinois Board of Trustees PREFACE

I: I ! ' This manuscript is the product of tape-recorded interviews by Cliff I, Wilson and Don Richardson for the Oral History Office, Sangamon State ! ' University in the fall, 1978 and March, 1972. The transcription was reviewed by Ralph Stone.

I i Ralph Stone was born in Placerville, Colorado in 1934. From Colorado, Ralph and his mother moved to Moscow, Kansas, and subsequently to Sharon Springs, Kansas, where he grew up on a ranch and wheat farm. His experiences with the Depression and poor working people gave him particular empathy and concern for the disadvantaged. He studied to I! ': be a teacher and has held positions at Southern Illinois University, i I Miami University, and Sangamon State University. He was active in civil rights, education, and peace movements of the sixties, and has exposed his students in his courses to an examination and understanding of radical movements.

i Readers of this oral history memoir should bear in mind that it is a 'i transcript of the spoken word, and that the interviewer, narrator and editor sought to preserve the informal, conversational style that is inherent in such historical sources. Sangamon State Univer• sity is not responsible for the factual accuracy of this memoir, nor for the views expressed therein; these are for the reader to judge.

The manuscript may be read, quoted and cited freely. It may not be reproduced in whole or in part by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the Oral History Office, Sangamon State University, Springfield, Illinois, 62708.

:.

i ! ' : t Table of Contents

Interview with Cliff Wilson, 1978

I: Family Background 1

Growing Up In Kansas 2

Religion and Politics 3

Thoughts on Racism 4

Civil Rights and Civil Liberties 5 I: ! Professional Background: Southern Illinois University, 6 Miami University, Sangamon State University

Change in Beliefs 9

Pacifism 10

CORE, SNCCC and NAACP 11

Anti-War Activities 13

Thoughts on Viet Nam 17

Underground Newspapers 20

A. J. Muste and Other Sixties' Leaders 21

More Thoughts on the Anti-War Movement 22

The Cold War 24

The War Resisters League, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, 25 and Women's Strike for Peace

Anti-War Demonstrations 25

' ' I 1 The Gentle Revolution and the Voices of Reason 27 I', ! Miami University Events and Personalities 31

Reflection on Political Leaders 36

Yippies, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin 44

The Peace and Freedom Party; the Socialist Workers' Party 45

The Pentagon Papers 47

Viet Nam 48 Table of Contents

Author of The Irreconcilables and the Fight Against the 49 League of Nations

Public Affairs Colloquia: Student Unrest 50

The Welfare State 51

Concern and Courses on Radical Movements 52

Conspiracy Trials of Sixties and Seventies 53

Opinions on Drug Use 55

Protest Newspapers, LNS, and Anti-War Music 56

JSO Program at Sangamon State 59

Angela Davis 60

Reflections on the Sixties and Seventies 61 ...... Interview with Don Richardson, 1972, begins after page 65 of the above interview

Radical Activities at Miami University, Ohio 1

Desire for a Student Voice 3

The New University Conference 5

The Administration's Response to The Gentle Revolution 7

Alternative Institutions 8 Ralph Stone, Fall 1978, Springfield, Illinois.

Cliff Wilson, Interviewer.

Q. First, I should get your full name.

A. Ralph Allen Stone.

Q. Okay. What is your social background as far as your family is concerned?

! A. Well I was born in April of 1934, in a town called Placerville, i i Colorado. My father was a lead and silver miner. My mother was a ' I> school teacher. My mother had graduated from the University of Colo• rado at Boulder a few years before, and had taken a teaching position i in Telluride, Colorado, not too far from Placerville, where she met

I that point we moved. My mother and I moved to I.l my father. And from I: Kansas following the divorce of my father and mother, to a small town I. in southwestern Kansas called Moscow, which some have seen as appro• I priate to my future beliefs, but--(laughs). That was during the Depression and I was raised mostly by my grandmother. My mother was working for the Farm Security Administration as a traveling represen• tative helping farm women mostly, teaching them how to cope with the problems of the Depression. So I grew up in Moscow for the first seven years of my life. My grandmother's husband had died several years before, and so she and her youngest son and I lived together in a boxcar of all things, an old refrigerator car that had been fixed up, and was comfortable enough as far as I was concerned. ! But looking back on it, it seems rather rude. dI i Q. Was your family close? Do you have any brothers and sisters?

I: A. Well, I didn't have any full brothers owing to the fact that my I! parents were divorced when I was about a year old. I had a slew of ! t stepbrothers, and stepsisters, and halfbrothers. My mother remarried \I in 1940. They had two children, so I had two halfbrothers. And my : : f stepfather had three children that were living. So you might say thl't I had five brothers and sisters, though the closeness wasn't compara le to what it would have been had we grown up in the same family togeth r. Then I had relationships between my grandmother's children, her youn&est son with whom as I said I lived. Her youngest son was about six yea~s older than I, so our growing up together for about five or six years 1 meant that I saw him as something of an older brother, although he l was an uncle in fact. So I don't know that the questions about clos,• ness • . . • Certainly there wasn't a large nuclear family that was always close, but it wasn't a divided family in the sense of being a split, fighting family, anything of that sort. ,

Q. What was your stepfather's profession? Ralph Stone 2

A. He was a farmer and a rancher. He had farmed in southwestern Kansas in the late 1930's, during the Depression, and tried to eke out a living. And in the fall of 1940, after he and my mother were married, they moved to northwestern Kansas, to a ranch near the town of Sharon Springs, where I finished my youth and where my mother still lives today on the same place. We had a half section of land which we bought for nine dollars an acre. Interestingly, I was talking to my mother last night over the phone and was mentioning this interview that was to come up, reminding her as I have several times to do an autobiography, clear up some of the obscure points in my background, and she was relating that when she and my stepfather were married they had a total of twelve dollars to their name. But I suppose that with land nine dollars an acre, that didn't mean much. But we farmed and ranched, during the War years, and made a living. Prices rose; wheat, cattle.

Q. What commodities did the ranch produce?

A. Well, wheat was raised, dry-land wheat. The rainfall there is about fourteen to fifteen inches a year, semi-arid. Today people are irrigating in large parts of the county, but there was no irrigation at the time, so we raised some wheat, some alfalfa, ran cattle, a few hogs Mostly just tried to live from year to year.

Q. What was it like growing up in Kansas?

A. Well, you felt isolated. As I look back upon it, I realize that it was a rather isolated, provincial existence. I can illustrate it perhaps with a story. When I first went to college at the University of Kansas, and subsequently returned home at the first vacation, two or three people asked me what it was like back East whether the people in eastern Kansas were friendly. Anything east of Hayes, Kansas was considered part of the East coast, [the] cold urban conglomerate we think of today. You didn't have· to go very far east to be a part of that as far as western Kansas was concerned. So we were isolated, and yet I didn't think of that at the time. It's a small, small community. The county which was a county of several hundred square miles--about forty miles square--the county had about twenty-five hundred people in it, so you didn't see many people. Those people you did see you knew. People knew what other people were doing and it was a typical small town, country life. I didn't particularly care for farm life, ranch life at the time, though looking back I feel rather fortunate growing up on a farm. Few people have that opportunity today to learn about it but I didn't see farm life as idyllic. The new-mown hay didn't smell that sweet to me. I used to smell manure more than anything else on the farm. It wasn't fun either, driving the tractor or cutting calves, whatever you were doing. It was hard work, not very rewarding, either personally or certainly not financially rewarding. So I didn't ever think about becoming a rancher or a farmer. I' I

Ralph Stone 3

What county in Kansas was that? l; Q. i i il A. That was Wallace County, named after Fort Wallace in the eastern part of the county at which Custer, Cody and Hickock at one time had been stationed. [There is] actually now an effort to restore the area, and recapture some of the glory that was lost.

i r Q. What was your religious background? i A. Well, my grandmother beat me into the--(laugh) no, strongly urged me to attend a church in MOscow. I think it was the Christian Church :I or the Methodist Church. And then when we moved north to Wallace County, my mother attended the Methodist Church. So did I, but I never got all of the gold stars that other kids got for perfect attendance. I was never real serious, but I suppose--again in retro• spect--that religion would have some influence on me some of the ethical teachings I would take seriously. Certainly not the theology, and not the formal religion. I've since become an agnostic at least, probably an atheist. Many years ago I became an unbeliever.

Q. What are your political affiliations? Do you have any definite ones?

A. Today?

Q. Yes.

A. Well, I would certainly call myself a socialist today, that posi• tion evolved over the years from being a bemocrat, a liberal bemocrat, to a radical socialist without any formal political affiliations, simply because there have been no political parties, with any signi• ficance, that have been able to mount effective campaigns from a radi• . cal perspective. The Socialist Party, of course, is virtually dead . I It was even dead in the 1950s when Norman Thomas finally abandoned 1 1 i the Party as a political instrument. So I voted for the Peace and ' I Freedom Party in 1968. I think I voted for the Socialist Workers' Patty in 1972. In 1976 I ended up voting for Carter. That's a story too. But the problem of a non-sectarian radical is, of course, the problem of not having more than two parties to vote for neither one of which represents the interests of the Left, but pretty much middle of the road politics.

Q. Before you became a socialist, did you have any definite political affiliations?

A. Well, I think to answer that question in a more general way, I would say that I didn't have hard-and-fast political affiliations, but I did derive from my background, and especially from the influence of my mother, a belief in democracy. A belief in people's goodness, specific commitments to underprivileged people, and even more specif• II ically, I think, the influence of my mother to recognize racism. 'I i Ralph Stone 4

Probably her growing up in a family that was itself poor was important. My grandfather was a Socialist from Oklahoma. Now, I didn't know him, and I didn't even know that he was a Socialist until years later when my grandmother, just a few years ago, told me in the midst of a dis• cussion of socialism. Of course, Oklahoma had the highest per capita number of Socialists in the country, so it was not surprising that he would have been a Socialist. But I think my early influences were more Populist and more Liberal Democrat, more New Deal Democrat than they were anything else. My mother was a great admirer of Rexford Tugwell. And Tugwell was probably the most radical of Roosevelt's advisers; he was head of the Resettlement Administration, which, of course, was concerned with relocating poor farm families and giving them another opportunity. And then her work in Kansas--traveling and witnessing po~erty, and helping poor families cope--had an impact on me.

As far as the matter of racism is concerned, I can still almost vividly remember my mother talking to me when I must have been no more than five or six about how blacks were discriminated against, and impressing upon me the necessity of not being part of that. And later when we had all moved to Wallace County, I can remember specific acts that must have cemented the ideology. It must have reinforced the rhetoric that I was hearing. There was one black family in Sharon Springs, two Mexican families, and they were all poor. The black family was a family of twelve or thirteen kids, and they lived in a dugout basement on the other side of the tracks. Mrs. Houston would walk to the grocery store, which was probably three-quarters of a mile or a mile away, and carry the groceries all the way back from the store to .her house. Now, I can remember my mother giving Mrs. Houston rides, and '' she was the only person that I know who did that. Not that there was necessarily that much overt racism, but people would just not stop and give a black woman a ride even if she were carrying two heavy bags of groceries, and was laboring to walk. So that made a great impact on me, and the civil rights movement in the 1950's and 1960's would be an antecedent of the anti-war movement.

. I Those movements would all come together for a time in the 1960's . I'm sure that my anti-war sentiments and activities grew out of I beliefs that stem back to that early period in my childhood. Though I wasn't too much different from a lot of liberals in the 1950's, [I]

I pretty much went along with the great American consensus; thought · I I God was in his heaven, everything was right with the world, and the United States was number one. So in terms of formal political beliefs, before socialism, it would have been the Democratic Party. I was never that enthused about the Democratic Party. I suppose in the 1950's after I had gone to college, I liked Adlai Stevenson. I wasn't as thrilled by Stevenson as were many college students and college professors. i I I, 'j Q. Are you a firm believer in civil rights and civil liberties then? I. Ralph Stone 5

A. Well, I like to think I am, (laugh) whatever being a firm believer means. I' Q. Do you overtly support central organizations and movements?

A. Yes, I belong to different organizations, and have supported civil liberties and civil rights groups for a number of years. There are a couple of civil liberties organizations that are active·-;tn country, the ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union] being the -mOst notable. In the field of civil rights there are and have been over the years a great number of organizations. Not all of them have I supported because some of them are more or less liberal, militant, [or] conservative than the others. I've generally been associated with some of the radical civil rights organizations, if not as an actual member, as a supporter. In the 1960's it was the Student Non• violent Coordinating Committee, the committee that was the cutting edge of the sit-in and the voter registration program in the South. The organization suffered the most in terms of abuse. Stokely Car• michael was active, and Rapp Brown, and James Foreman; I was much more sympathetic at.that time with CORE [Congress of Racial Equality) and SNCC than I was with the NAACP [National Association for the Advancement of Colored People] or the Urban League. And that con• '! tinues to today, though SNCC is no more, CORE is almost deceased. I still support black organizations that seem to me to be pushing 'i harder for social change than the more moderate black organizations. I ; f I I support the Poverty Law Center in Atlanta associated with Julian Bond. I support the efforts to free political prisoners, most of whom are black. The Southern Conference Education Fund I support. 't Q. Would you say that you're very involved in freedom of, not just speech, but the freedom of thought, the freedom of movement?

A. Well, the question is a difficult one because it orients itself toward a civil libertarian perspective, and I would say that my per• spective is less that of a civil libertarian than it is that of a Socialist. Civil liberties are not my ultimate standard by which I judge everything else. For some radicals that is their ultimate: free speech, the first ten amendments. I think my approach is some• what different. I firmly believe, as I said, in civil liberties. And I'm not one of those Marxists who say we should dispense with bourgeois freedoms such as contained in the first ten amendments.

I think those are critical for us, but I see other agendas as more important than civil liberties. I guess I'm a believer in the Anatole France dictum that expresses itself by saying the civil liberties-- in effect--are meaningless to many people if they do not have the power to affect their liberty. Civil liberties to Nelson Rockefeller, I I and civil liberties to a poor black person on the east side of Spring• field are not the same. It's the power, the resources you have to put into practice those presumed liberties that matters. Now, of course, they're not entirely meaningless, I don't mean to suggest that. Ralph Stone 6

But by comparison the difference between the civil liberties of a Rockefeller, in practice, and the civil liberties of a poor black woman are so great as to make these presumed freedoms virtually :' t I I unimportant, except in certain times of crisis. I don't want to :! suggest that they're not necessary at all times, but what we--I

I l : l guess what I would emphasize would be more the problems associated :I with implementing such civil liberties. Q. Your profession or professions in the past, what have they involved?

A. Well, I've been a teacher since 1960. I took a BA degree at the . i University of Kansas in 1956, an MA degree in history at the Univer• sity of Illinois in 1958, and a Doctorate at Illinois in 1961. Since 1960, I've taught history, but I've never done anything else; I'm very unskilled (laughs) as far as making my way in the world.

Q. At what schools did you teach?

A. I taught at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale for a year, and then took a job at Miami University in Ohio for nine years, and then came to Sangamon State in Springfield in 1970, and have been here since.

Q. Which of these teaching positions would you consider the most interesting? i! i ' A. Well, that's hard to say. If you're just talking about teaching itself and not about the milieu and the time in which the teaching took place, then I would have to say Sangamon State has been the most interesting. But the 1970's have definitely not been the most inter• esting time in which to teach, especially after 1971 or 1972. So in a larger context, teaching at Miami University in the 1960's was far more interesting because far more was happening. The whole univer• sity there and elsewhere was aflame, sometimes literally of course, but was alive. Change was in the air. The 1970's have been a very reactionary period, should have ended in 1973 or 1974. But education• ally, pedagogically, Sangamon State has been far more interesting because far more has happened here. There's been much more innova• tion here in terms of subject matter. I've grown a lot intellectually here, not so much in the sense of new techniques, but substantively, I've learned a lot of things that I was not aware of in the 1960's. We could talk about those later perhaps, the way my understanding of issues changed from the 1960's, especially the early 1960's to the late 1960's and the early 1970's. But Miami was a conservative school although the climate nationally was liberal and in some cases radical. Sangamon State, you might say, has been a liberal or a radical school but in a climate that has been very conservative, so the situations have just been reversed.

Q. Would you say that Miami University had been in the 1960's a little behind the times? Ralph Stone 7

A. Just a bit. (laughs) Fifty years, perhaps. It was an old school. It had been founded in 1809, one of the oldest, I think the second or third oldest state university west of the,Appalachians. 'And the campus oozed tradition with giant oak trees; the Georgian architecture, neatly trimmed lawns; even the dogs seemed to respect the beauty of place. And the faculty was good but traditional, the administration was respectable. The town was small and southern, about thirty miles from the Ohio River, from Kentucky. So Miami's traditions were defi• nitely conservative and southern. There were very few rights for students compared to rights students have today. There was an accep• tance of hierarchy at all levels, and rather rigid curriculum patterns.

Q. Would you consider Miami University then reactionary to the things that were going on at that time?

A. Well, I think that's an accurate characterization. It wasn't totally different from many schools. Most universities resisted the changes that were occurring in the 1960's. Miami probably resisted more than the average school, but it did yield on some issu~s as the decade of the 1960's wore on, as pressures were brought by students and faculty.

Q. What were some of the pressures of the 1960's that carne into the light at Miami University? •

A. Well, pressures associated with civil rights, pressures associated with the student demand for change, pressures associated with the draft, the Viet Nam War. At the end of the decade pressures that emanated from the Women's Movement. Mostly student pressures, I would say. At least early in the decade demands for more relevance in their courses; demands for a relaxation of the parietal rules that governed the student body, an end to the dress code restr.ictions, an end to restrictions involving the sexes, freedom to initiate more changes. "Participatory Democracy," was the phrase in the 1960's that was on the tongues not only of students, but civil rights workers and anti• war activists. And for the campus that meant students serving on committees. It meant students running their own newspaper, not having the faculty adviser who exercised a heavy hand. It meant taking some control of their own lives. It meant a rejection, of course, of many of the values that they had come to know. It was a striving for independence, breaking out of the mold of the 1950's.

END OF TAPE ONE, SIDE ONE

Q. You said that your first teaching position was in 1960 at Southern Illinois University, and that you went to college in the 1950's, and

'r in school through most of the 1950's. What changes did you see going i on between the time that you were in sqhool and the time that you first started teaching? l I I i ! Ralph Stone 8!

A. Well, a great many changes. The 1950's, as I think you know, being a history student, were a time of real torpor, real quiescence in the nation. We were going through that period following World . ! War II, and we were in the midst of the Cold War. It was what Daniel I Bell later called "the end of ideology." A period characterized, he said, by the end of serious disputes over what should be the nature of American life. All the questions now, he said, were purely tech• nical questions designed to make the system run better, but nobody quarrelled over the real nature of the system. It was also a time of virulent anti-communism and anti-radicalism. The whole Left move• ment was extirpated in the 1940's and 1950's, and I must say that I was no radical in the 1950's. I could be called a liberal with beliefs that might eventually lead me to radicalism, to socialism, but I would have called myself, and would call myself today, looking back on the 1950's, a liberal. One of the issues that came up, of course, was McCarthyism. I can remember watching the Army-McCarthy . t hearings on television, and being interested in the outcome of the issue. I think I probably shared with many people at the time a criticism of McCarthy's means, but not so much of his ends. I prob• ably shared some of the prevailing notions about communism. It was an evil, and the United States needed to be ever-vigilant. I didn't believe in running rough shod over others the way I felt McCarthy and some other Communist hunters were doing. I didn't believe in the House Unamerican Activities Committees procedures, but I surely wasn't raising fundamental, radical critiques at this time. When I was in graduate school at· the University of Illinois, one of the questions concerned Communist speakers on campus, and I remember helping to bring a Black Marxist historian named Herbert Aptheker to the campus at the University of Illinois--or not to campus per se but to the Unitarian Church, which was right across the street from the campus. ': 'He couldn't speak on the campus. It was legally off limits to Commu• nists, so we arranged to have him speak as near the campus as possible. '. 1 And the fact that he was banned, I'm sure, insured that many people were there who wouldn't otherwise have been. It was like a film being banned in Boston; it immediately guarantees that it has a certain popularity to it.

Aptheker made some impression upon me, but he didn't convert me into being a Communist. Later, in the 1960's, that same issue, freedom or a Communist to appear on campus would surface. I was at Miami Univ• ersity. By then my ideas had shifted somewhat to the left, and there was a group of faculty on the campus at Miami who went to Columbus, Ohio to testify to the state legislature in favor of allowing Communist speakers on campus. But most of those faculty members made the argu• ment that the reason that we should allow communist speakers to come on campus was in order to better combat their ideas. In other words, these faculty had already made up their minds that communism was bad, but we needed to know our enemy better in effect. I thought that was a curious twist to the argument, and revealed something about their real concerns. For me--since the early 1960's--! was beginning to change, and beginning to doubt somewhat the assumptions that liberals Ralph Stone 9

made about their society. If there's one real change in my thinking over the past ten or fifteen years it has been away from liberalism that does not in my opinion, take a hard enough look at the society, does not try to make a systemic critique of the society, that in effect ignores most of Marx's ideas. I remember when I was being taught history in the 1950's, both at the undergraduate and the graduate level, I imbibed certain assumptions that, as I look back upon them, were very heavily infused with liberal beliefs. Now, professors could say that they were objective because liberalism was so prevalent a norm that no one was questioning Right or Left. What I learned about the labor movement was that Samuel Gompers was right, that the Social Democrats, and the Socialist Laborites, and the Social• ists themselves were all to utopian. But we needed this pure and simple unionism, practical adjust-to-American type of pragmatic unionism. I learned that the progressive movement was good and that the New Deal was better, that the Fair Deal was a continuation, in effect, that we were living in about the best of all possible worlds. Again the end of ideology analysis, or lack of analysis. So that sameness of the 1950's, almost unquestioning easiness, was to be so sharply shattered in the 1960's. It did, of course, cause an upheaval in the whole society, including the university.

'i 'I Q. In what ways did you yourself see it shattered?

A. Well, I saw the beliefs that I had accepted shattered. That was probably the most fundamental upheaval to me. It was a gradual process. I didn 1 t wake up one morning saying, "Golly, gee whiz, I'm a .:ocialist now. Liberalism is debunked." It wasn't that kind of a change. It was gradual, and I think hark back to questions you asked earlier about my religious beliefs and my ethical beliefs. I probably was operating first from the premise of a person morally upset by what was going on in America in the 1960's. I was morally upset at the treatment accorded blacks. And that in turn derives from my early childhood when, as I've said, my mother instilled in me a feeling of concern about discrimination and prejudice, that is, racism. So when I saw on the television screen Bull Connor's police dogs, and I saw the fire hoses, and I saw the stormtroopers beating down blacks and whites who were peacefully demonstrating, I felt this moral condemna• tion.

'' What I'm saying is that in the early 1960's I don't think I had an analysis yet that moved me beyond liberalism. What I had was a sense of moral repugnance, a terrible criticism of people who could act so viciously toward another human being. But it was still an isolated examination I was making. I wasn't putting together the treatment t~at blacks were receiving from the police and from the political authorities with the economic conditions the blacks suffered. I wasn't making t~e connections, in other words, which I think I've made later as a $Ucialist. The liberal critique is a discreet critique. There's this problem that's wrong, there's that problem, there's another problem. But liberalism as I came to understand it didn't connect

i I Ralph Stone 10

the problems. And so I changed from a person who was morally outraged by victimization of blacks and whites, who were working for the civil rights movement, and the victimization of anti-war activists, and the victimization of students to a broader analysis which I think made more sense.

Q. Would you say your own, your change in your own feelings stemmed out of your own ethical understanding?

A. I think that was the first motive force behind--my ethical convic• tions, my feelings, my emotions--! sensed that something was wrong. I could get upset when I saw this happening, but I've since come to feel that one of the weaknesses of that position is that it doesn't lead to an analysis of what's wrong. It results in a moral outcry, but that isn't enough.

Q. You mentioned the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Does this show that you are especially against violent forms of of)pression '' or

A. Resisting oppression by violence?

Q. Resisting oppression by violence.

A. Well, my views on violence have changed, too, over the years. I can say that through the 1960's and perhaps in the early 1970's, I would have classified myself as virtually a pacifist, an opponent of violence in almost any form. I believed that one should resist violence by non-violence, that it was possible to convince the violent prone by non-violent techniques, that violence was a mistake, that you could overcome your enemies by non-violence. I, of course, sub• scribed to the theories of Gandhi and King. And my support of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee [SNCC] was an expression of that same faith in non-violence. The civil rights workers would turn the other cheek. They would fill the jails. They would lie down in front of a truck. Whatever it took, they would respond non-violently.

Well, as you know, SNCC itself changed in the 1960's. People in it i i decided that that was too utopian an approach. I changed, too. I :! no longer believed that non-violence is necessarily effective. In ~ j some situations it may be, in others it certainly will not be. There '. are persons, and institutions, and gro~ps, and of course, nations that will laugh at and tharougl;ily:-dis<;:otint any non-violent approach.

Q. Could you maybe explain what you saw as the development and growtth of such organizations as CORE, SNCC, and the NAACP?

1

i!, I A. Repeat the question. (laughs) i :! Q. Could you maybe explain to me what you saw in the growth

! Ralph Stone 11

and organizing of groups like CORE, SNCC and the NAACP?

A. Well, I saw them as hopeful signs of change. I was more identified with the civil rights movement in the early 1960's than with any other movement. I did not know personally any of the leaders in CORE or SNCC. But in 1964, the SNCC people who would go to Mississippi and other states in the South held a training session in Oxford, Ohio, on the campus of Western College for Women, right across the road from Miami University. And that generated a lot of interest among some of us who were active in the civil rights ~ovement. We subse• quently developed a support group in Oxford for those freedom workers in the South. I corresponded with some of them. I've kept tabs on a couple of them to this day. They're still active even though SNCC has long since declined and died.

CORE, of course, goes back to the second World War, but you didn't hear anything about it until the 1950's, and especially in the 1960's, whereas SNCC was a creature of the 1960's. I was very hopeful about these groups. They provided a lot of leadership at that time. One of the points I remember about SNCC, will give you a sense of the beauty of the movement. We called it the movement then. You don't hear much talk about the movement today in the 1970's. But I had a letter, oh, it was probably August of 1964, by a civil rights worker named Eli Zaretsky. [He] was a gradua.te student in history at the University of Maryland, who was down in Hattiesburg, Mississippi working on the voter registration drive. And Zaretsky was recount• ing how even the highest leadership in SNCC did not hesitate to join the workers to do the dirty work, the hard work.

One of his letters pointed out that James Foreman, who was one of the outstanding leaders of the black civil rights movement, at that time, was mopping floors with Zaretsky one night. He said that was not uncommon. You would find Foreman doing that kind of work regularly. There was no pulling of rank, no elitism that he knew. Of course, there was some elitism, particularly male chauvinsim in the radical movement, but much of it was the best form of participatory democracy too. So what appealed to me was not just the ideology of SNCC or CORE. The people were attempting by their own lives to build a move• ment. They were living what they were preaching, and there was a lot i. of preaching. That's why I emphasize the moral character to the movement.

Q. Then these were entirely peaceful movements?

A. Well, they attempted to be. Sometimes, of course, they were caught up in violence, but there were few occasions when persons from SNCC or CORE initiated violence or even retaliated with violence. That was part of the strength of the movement; now I'm talking about the early 1960's.

By 1967 or 1968, that had begun to change. Persons who earlier had Ralph Stone 12

professed to be non-violent decided to pick up a gun. They might be killed anyway, but at the very least they were not going to suffer as Chap_ey, Schwerner and Goodman suffered. Those were three of the civil rights workers who were murdered in the summer of 1964, this very summer I'm talking about. In other words, they were going to meet fire with fire.

Q. Were they in any way related to the Black Panther Party?

A. Well, there was an early Black Panther group in Georgia, in Lowndes County, Georgia. And, of course, later there was the Black Panther Party of Henry Newton that had chapters around the country. The Panther Party, too, was committed to non-violence, but only if treated non-violently. The Panthers had decided openly to defend themselves with weapons. Weapons were required, and of course, the Panthers suffered enormously. So I don't know that there's any easy lessons to be drawn from advocating viDlence or non-violence in the 1960's. By the end of the 1960's, a good deal of repression was coming down on both non-violent and violent common people.

Q. Were these groups in any way tied in with what has been called the J:jew _J:;ef t?

A. Well, it was all a part of the New Left. That term the~ew Left includes civil rights workers, women who were struggling for ~om~n' s~

-I liberation. It includes students, anti-war activists, Socialists, both old and new. It includes some anarchists, such as the Yippies. It's an all-embracing term to describe what I would call a reaction - against both the old left of the 1930's and the liberalism of the New Deal, Fair Deal, and John F. Kennedy's New Frontier. It was a break, best expressed probably in the Port Huron statement of the Students for a Democratic Society.

Q. What was it like for black students before the civil rights move• ment?

A. Well, I can only speculate-and it's a tough question. I didn't know many black students before the 1960's. There weren't many attending the University of Kansas. I knew a few foreign students at the University of Illinois, but students--black students--obviously

-I were maltreated, had segregation even in the sports world. It may seem incomprehensible to today's generation, but it was only thirty years ago that professional baseball broke the color bar. I suppose black students experienced everything they experienced later, but without any release for that frustration. There were few organized expressions of protest. The protests were mostly individual if they were anything at all.

Q. What about other student movements that were going on?

A. Well, on the campuses the students were concerned about issues Ralph Stone 131

that were not necessarily related to the Viet Nam War, concerned about whether they had to wear ties to dinner, at least that was one -I of the concerns at Miami, whether men and women could be together in a dorm room and close the door. There was a rule at Miami that the door had to be open at least the width of a matchbook folder, which allowed you to close the door but still preserve the integrity of the rule. They were concerned about hours and the whole parietal issue that the University should not act in place of a parent. They should be free and college was a -place where they rid themselves of the rules. [They were] concerned about censorship on the newspaper, con• cerned about representation politically, and in programming the university departments. It may seem· odd that in the late 1970's we have great difficulty in getting students to serve on committees, when a few years [earlier] students were clamoring to get on committees, and faculty and administrators were arguing that they shouldn't be on committees. It seems like we turned that one around. Of course, they were becoming concerned about the war, too. The draft was·a live issue. They were concerned about civil rights and civil liberties.

Q. What about ROTC on campus?

A. That was an issue. Miami University had a very active ROTC unit, and there was considerable opposition to it, especially after 1966 or 1967. A group that I was associated with in the late 1960's, called the New University Conference, wrote a pamphlet entitled The Gentle Revolution, one section of which was an attack upon ROTC at Miami. We argued in effect two points, that ROTC, as an arm of the military, was committed to principles that were hostile to academic freedom. And secondly, that those principles were hostile to civil liberties. No arm of the military should be present on campus because those pro• fessors in ROTC owed loyalty to something other than the institution. They were hired and fired by outside agencies. One of the big events at Miami University in the late 1960's, in fact, was a sit-in at the ROTC building, which occurred I believe in 1970, in the spring of 1970 a month or so before Kent State.

Q. Do you remember any specific peace, or anti-war rallies, or demonstrations at any of these campuses you've taught at?

A. Well, yes, there were anti-war rallies going on, let's say after 1966 on Miami's campus. One of the first rallies or demonstrations that I can remember involved a protest against Dow Chemical. Dow had recruiters on campus, and a movement was organized to sit-in at the building where the Dow recruiters were talking to students. That was nipped in the bud and it was decided--the leadership of the sit-in decided--to move outside and walk around in a circle to protest the Dow recruiters. That was done with appropriate- placards and signs. That was done for a couple of days. ---

There were smaller demonstrations and protests against other corporate military recruiters. We had what we called "Gentle Wednesdays" during the late 1960's every Wednesday. Anti-war activists would gather,

'i Ralph Stone 14 have a silent vigil protesting the war, and there occasionally would be draft card ~uru~ggs at these vigils. Occasionally poetry readings on the politics of love and peace.

And there were two teach-ins that I can remember. One large teach-in that occurred, probably in 1966, where we began at five or six in the afternoon and went all night. We had speakers from several other universities, and that was an event of major proportions on campus. Teach-ins, of course, had been going on for a couple of years. I believe they started in 1965 at the University of Michigan.

Q. What did a teach-in involve exactly?

A. Well, at Miami it involved trying to have a debate between pro and anti-war advocates. We had difficulty finding anyone who wanted to speak out for the war in 1967. My department chairman was one of the most -pro-war o:t;_

Q. Were you ever involved directly or indirectly, with draft resisters?

A. Yes, both directly and indirectly. I was beyond the age then, but many students came to me and to others of us who were identified as radicals, seeking advice, recommendations to their draft boards, help with their appeals to be conscientious objectors. Some of those students were committed to resisting to the point of going to jail. One of my friends, who was a student, ended up spending the better part of two years in Ashland, Kentucky, in prison. A number of-us who were active faculty radicals not only defended, but indeed even welcomed students who resisted the draft, and we made that publicly known. We felt, I suppose, that the students were taking the bigger risk, and the least that we could do was to voice our support of tho.e who were ready to go to jail or to Canada, whatever way they felt right to protest.

Q. How did you make this publicly known?

A. Oh, we wrote letters. We spoke out; no unwillingness to make it clear that we supported them.

Q. Were you involved in any other forms of non-cooperation with the Selective Service?

A. I didn't pay excise tax on my telephone. That persisted well into the early 1970's. I forget when that stopped. We used to get frequent notices from the telephone company about our failure to pay, Ralph Stone 15

our ten percent Viet Nam War Tax. We put them off, and put them off, sometimes paying sometimes not. Sometimes paying a little depending upon our mood at the time, how effective we thought we could be, what the possibilities for prosecution would be, trying to weigh your moral conscience as you saw it versus the pragmatic possibilities about what would happen, what it meant to let yourself be prosecuted for something that might not have the effect of dramatizing the case that you intended.

That was a constant dilc;muna that you faced, whether to be as we thought in the early 1960's very-pure, go to jail for your beliefs no matter what they were, or whether to be more opportunistic and calculate what you did. I think the faith of the early 1960's was that if you were a moral witness, others would rally round you, see the rightness of your cause and not pay taxes, not discriminate against blacks. There was certainly a turning away from that point of view too, which can lead to cynicism and can lead to worse forms of opportunism. When I say opportunism I didn't mean to suggest that that kind of pragmatic calculation is necessarily immoral.

Q. When did you have your first anti-war feelings?

A. I don't know. I've talked about that and I can't put a date on that. I'm not even sure I can date disillusionment, because I had anti-war feelings in the very early 1960's that were connected to the movement against nuclear testing. Before there was an anti-Viet Nam, anti-war movement there was a movement to ban the bomb or a movement to end nuclear testing, and I was active in that. I was very much worried about the dangers of radioactive fallout, and convinced that the United States and the Soviet Union were building up ,stockpiles to an incredible, nonsensical level. So I was anti-war then, but I wasn't anti-Viet Nam War. I think that's what you meant in your question, "when did you first become ... "?

Q. Well, now when did you first become anti-war in general? Do you remember when--1 believe it was 1963--the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was signed.

A. That's right. June of 1963.

Q. What were your feelings when you heard of this news?

A. Well I was pleased, but I did not think that it was going to effect any fundamental change. I really didn't regard it as anythin~ more than a step along the way. I didn't accept the argument that was made by many people that it marked a complete breakthrough. It was all right. It was a limitation, a nuclear arms limitation treat~. It wasn't a total banning of nuclear weapons. Underlying the arguments i I over nuclear weapons were arguments about power; arguments about I ideology, arguments about ways of life, arguments that I didn't per• i I ceive as clearly then as I do now, arguments about socialism and capitalism. So when Kennedy negotiated the Test Ban Treaty I thought Ralph Stone 16 it was fine, was all in favor of it. It was both strategically wise and a good end in itself to reduce the testing.

Q. Do you think the recent SALT [Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty] talks are a continuation of that?

A. Well no. There have been movements over the last couple of decades toward limiting nuclear weapons; but the movement is glacier• like, so slow, and again the movement or lack of movement is related to the underlying conditions. Until we deal with those we will con• tinue to have the possibility of nuclear Armageddon at any time. We can blow ourselves and the Russians off the face of the earth.

Q. Would you consider yourself a pacifist?

A. Certainly not today.

Q. At what time were you one?

A. Well, I made the change as I said sometime in the 1960's or early 1970's. The reason? Well, I didn 1 t believe that an absolut.e view on nonviolence made sense. I didn't accept Gandhi's belief [that] you could persuade all people to lay down their weapons. I decided that it was more important to live than to die. That sounds dramatic, but that's what it comes down to, and Gandhi thought it was more important to die nonviolently than to live violently. Gandhi would lay down his life in order to demonstrate the efficacy of his beliefs. I felt by the early 1970's that that was totally utopian.

Q. What made you change to the point where you might believe that violent means are more effective?

A. Well, I don't believe that they're more effective in every case. I believe that sometimes they are necessary. Partly it's history. Partly it's my understanding of the nature of American society today. The experiences of the late 1960's and the 1970's gave me and many others no basis for believing that Johnson, and Nixon, and Agnew, and J. Edgar Hoover, and the others were going to deal nonviolently with nonviolent people. You didn't have to go to Nazi Germany to experience repression. Not that I would say that there was fascism in the United States of the kind that we associate with Nazi Germany, but neither did we have toleration of dissent, neither did we have the acceptance of non-violent protest._~e had repression, and that repression could be--in- -the ·form of inurci'er-. - I believe that many of the Panthers were murdered. Certainly several of the civil rights workers of the 1960's were murdered. I don't say that they were murdered by orders of the federal government, but the violent climate of opinion was encouraged by leaders • . . .

END OF TAPE ONE, SIDE TWO Ralph Stone 17

Q. Why were you against the war in Viet Nam?

A. Why was I opposed to the war in Viet Nam? Well, I thought it was a bad war. I thought it was an immoral war. I thought it was an unrealistic war, a war that we couldn't win. I thought it was an unjust war.

Q. Did you feel at all that it was a war of American economic imperialism?

A. I came to feel that. I don't think I felt that in 1965 or 1966.

Q. When did you come to feel this way?

A. Probably by 1968, 1967 or 1968.

Q. And what events made you .•

A. I'm not sure. I don't think any one event. It was a combination of learning more about the war itself, learning more about American foreign policy, becoming more and more convinced that the administra• tion wasn't telling the truth, the deception that was going on?

Q. Were you just anti-Viet Nam or were you anti-war in general?

A. I'd say at that time I was anti-war, period. I was a pacifist.

Q. Looking back now in perspective do you see other wars that America has fought in as unjust wars?

A. No, looking back from today I think I'd characterize them more as imperialistic. The term justice I used very freely in the 1960's and 1970's. It's a good term, but it implies kind of a moral sureness, a moral absolutism that I don't feel now the way I felt then. I view the war as much more from a socialist perspective now. I see wars of the nineteenth century, the wars of the early twentieth century from a perspective that emphasizes economic forces, not exclusively

I but primarily. I • Q. Do you see Viet Nam as a racist war?

A. In part.

Q. In what ways?

A. Well, in two ways primarily. White Americans fight~ng Asians,· and within the American armed forces, a disproportionate number of blacks who were the frontline soldiers. It was a war of a predom• inantly white civilization against an Asian civilization, and instead of whites from the United States dying, proportionate to their numbers, they were not. Black Americans were disproportionately represented Ralph Stone 18 in the forces, so that it became a racist war in that sense, And I think by 1968, men like Martin Luther King were making the connection between the poverty and racism at home and the nature of the war abroad.

Q. How do you, or how did you look on the country of Viet Nam as a nation, as a people?

A. Well, by 1968, certainly, I wanted to see Viet Nam win the war, and I didn't say that openly very frequently, but I had come to the conclusion that it would be better for all concerned--the United States as well as Viet Nam--if the United States was defeated. I looked upon Viet Nam as one country. I didn't even see it as a civil war. I had at first, but by 1968 I was no longer looking upon it as a civil war, I think that was wrong. Viet Nam was one country. The attempt on the part of the French and the United States to make that division was a false division, it was a false and deceptive act. So I wanted to see the North Vietnamese, I wanted to see the Viet Cong win.

Eisenhower had written that Ho Chi Minh, in a free election, would have received eighty per cent of the vote. This was good enough for me, besides which I thought Ho Chi Minh was a much more genuine' leader than Marshall Ky, or Big Minh, or Little Minh, or Thieu, or any other of the essentially puppet leaders that were running the South Vietnamese government. Now, you couldn't say that very openly. You couldn't come out and say the Viet Cong should win. People, a few people did say it to their, to their regret.

Q. In the best words that you can, would you sum up what you think America did for or did to Viet Nam in the Viet Nam War?

A. I don't know that we did anything for Viet Nam. We did a lot to Viet Nam. There's a cartoon that I remember that expresses part of what we did to Viet Nam. The cartoon shows an American plane flying off into the distance and waving to the plane are a couple of Viet• namese peasants in a rice paddy but the rice paddy is simply a strip of land, a tiny strip of land between hundreds of big bomb craters that devastate the landscape. And I got the feeling that some of America's military men, if not civilian officers, would have liked nothing more than to see Viet Nam bombed to the point where it was detached from the rest of the Southeast Asian Archipelago, and just floated out into the Pacific.

Q. Do you remember anybody referring to the bombing of Viet Nam as, "Let's bomb them back into the Stone Age."

A. Wasn't it Curtis LeMay who made the statement?

Q. Not really, I don't .

A. I think so. That was LeMay's statement that expressed the attitude of a good many people, not all people by any means. But we were Ralph Stone 19

determined to win in Viet Nam for many years, at any cost. (interference)

Q. October 31, in 1968, about a week before the general election, President Johnson announced that he was going to stop the bombing of North Viet Nam. What were your reactions to this, and do you think it was a completely political move?

A. Well, I can't remember what my reactions to it at the time were. I'm sure I thought it was a political move. I think in retrospect it was a political move, though separating out Johnson's motives was nearly impossible.

Q. It was also about that time that Johnson organized the first peace conference. Do you looking back now, do you see Johnson or Nixon as the man who initiated peace in Viet Nam? I , I A. Well, I wouldn't put it in those terms. I think that's the wrong way to look at it. Initiating peace suggests that one of those two should be viewed as a peacemaker, and I simply don't think that's the framework in which to look at either one of them. Johnson had made the decision to cut losses, not to bring peace, and Nixon followed up on that initiative. It was clear by.l968 that the country preferred a policy other than what Johnson was following. That's why he didn't run for reelection. Even in his own party he was something of an out• cast. Nixon had been a hawk throughout the 1960's, so when he talked of peace, or Johnson talked of peace, they were talking of the best way to get out of a war that they couldn't win. Or if they could win it, they were not prepared to pay the cost which a victory would bring.

Q. During the campaigning for the 1968 General Election, did you believe what Nixon was telling the country, that he would bring peace with honor, that he would get us out of Viet Nam?

A. I hadn't believed in anything that Nixon had said for .a long time. (laughs)

Q. What were your reactions when he announced that he was going to step up the bombing of North Viet Nam and the mining of Haiphong

I I Harbor?

A. Well, I was outraged, yet not surprised.

Q. Did you at any time think that there would be Soviet intervention, nuclear war?

A. I thought that that was a possibility, either or both.

Q. Do you think America has learned anything from the Viet Nam War?

A. Very little. That is .very little of the important lessons. It Ralph Stone 20

may have learned not to get entangled again in that kind of a war, but that's not the main lesson that should be learned from the VietNam War.

Q. What do you base this belief on, that America should not get involved in that kind of war again?

A. Well, I'm not saying that it necessarily has learne~ that lesson, but if it has learned a lesson, that seems to be the short-run lesson. There have been occasions in the past few years in Africa, and Asia, and the Middle East when the United States might have sent troops in large numbers, but did not do so because, I think, of the Viet Nam experience, and because of the fear that the public would react adversely. Although I would say that that's a short-run lesson. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the United States did intervene mili• tarily again in Latin America, or Asia, or Africa as the nearness of Viet Nam fades. And it has faded about as rapidly as anyone could expect. One of the things that I've noticed is that there has been virtually no public debate on the meaning of the Viet Nam War, no attempt to examine that experience. Certain people will say that it's too searing an experience, too traumatic an experience; but I don't accept that as a reason for not looking at the war more closely.

Q. Do you remember distinctly the Mai Lai Massacre, and when it hit the press in America?

A. I remember it pretty well.

Q. What were your initial reactions to that?

A. I was not surprised again. If you were reading something other than the mainstream newspapers and magazines, you were aware of massacres on that scale that had been taking place before. I think it was people who were not exposed to what I would call the more critical press, or in some ways the underground press, who were not reading I. F. Stone's Weekly, who were not ·reading Ramparts, who were l not reading some of the new left's journals, who seemed terribly i' I shocked by Mai Lai. · Q. You mentioned I. F. Stone's Weekly. Would you tell me a little Ii bit about that? I I I ! A. Well, I. F. Stone was a journalist, who began to edit this news• paper of his own sometime, I think, in the late 1950's. He did almost all of the research himself. He examiaed the Congressional Record, he looked at the Congressional hearings, he interviewed people, and he wrote honestly. I can remember going down into the basement of the library at Miami, furtively examining I. F. Stone's Weekly. It seemed as if it were kept down there rather than upstairs where all of the other newspapers and magazines were kept because there was something dirty about the Weekly. It wasn't an attractive, slick Ralph Stone 21

publication even. But Stone was on target most of the time and later was, of course, made almost a folk-journalist hero as a result of his early criticism of the W:'ar.

Q. Do you remember when his earliest criticisms of the war were placed?

A. No, I don't, sometime in the 1960's, early or mid 1960's.

Q. What do you remember of the local leaders in the anti-war move• ment, leaders in your areas?

A. Well, they were young, students and faculty, very few nonacademic persons were involved. Of course, I was in a small community of five thousand people, the university had ten to twelve thousand.

Q. Was this Oxford?

A. Oxford. So it was as you would expect, a university that dominated the life of the town. Most of the faculty were young.

Q. What do you remember of the national figures in the anti-war movement?

A. Oh, I suppose A. J. Muste was a person that was very familiar and someone with whom I looked to for leadership at that time. He was an old socialist-pacifist. Dave Dellinger was another in the nonviolent movement. He was a couragecius anti-war leader. Leaders like Tom Hayden of SDS. Fred Halstead of the Socialist Workers' Party. Benjamin Spack. Staughton Lynd, an historian who worked in the Civil Rights Movement. Martin Luther King. And there were two or three politicians whom we looked to. People like Ernest Gruening, the senator from Alaska; Wayne Morse, the Oregon &enator, J. William Ft).l:Q!'Jgl:l_t;:.,_ Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Conunittee. But the persons to whom I looked for leadership were not the ·-$enators. The politicians had followed the anti-war movement that had been initiated by the other organizations, by SDS, by SNCC, by individuals such as Dellinger.

Q. Do you remember any particular cases of the SDS speaking out on-• against the war on Miami campus?

A. We had only a few SDS students on campus, nothing resembling an organized chapter. One was attempted, but never got off the ground. But nationally SDS had been active as early as 1965, leading the march on Washington.

A. Well, it's a broad generalization because there were many different groups in the anti-war movement, but the overall weakness I would say :I'I was in not educating the public better as to the nature of the war. ! Ralph Stone 22

That is that the war was not simply an aberration, not simply an acci• dent. That's the way the war came to be viewed even by many of the anti-war activists, not the radical anti-war activists; but many of those who marched, many of those who protested came to think of the Viet Nam War as a terrible mistake.

We had had other good wars. We had had a foreign policy that was successful, these people thought. Then came Viet Nam. They viewed the war as the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time. It was a war that we couldn't win. It was unrealistic war. Scholars like Hans Morganthau and George Kennan represented this point of view. It was a war in which our commitments exceeded our capacity. The means were not commensurate with the ends. That view of the war seems to me to have predominated, and it overlooks the ties between American foreign policy after 1945 and the war itself.

In other words, I'm saying that the war grew'out of decisions that were made after 1945. Of course, decisions were made before the end of World War II that had an impact, naturally, upon our foreign policy. But the Cold War decision of the mid and late 1940's, and the early 1950's very clearly, as far as I was concerned, had to do with our involvement in Viet Nam. Viet Nam was not an aberration, it was part of a larger whole. That's the lesson, I think, [that] has not come through.

Q. Did you see any disunity in the anti-war movement as far as struggles for leadership? ·

A. Sure, sure there were struggles that went on. The Socialist Workers' Party was blamed for being too sectarian. SDS was attacked for being too radical, for alienating too many nonradical people who were needed to join in the demonstrations. Liberals wanted to lead, and they were blamed by radicals for taking charge of the movement that had been initiated by the radicals. I suppose those struggles were natural and inevitable.

• i :I Q. What do you see as the major strengths of the movement? A. Ending the war would be the biggest achievement. Some anti-war radicals in the 1970's--looking back on· the 1960's--were .prone to i be too negative about what had been done. They were prone to think I we really accomplished nothing, but I think it's owing to the radica~ anti-war movement in particular that the war ended as quickly as it ; did. There was also some education done. Some people did become · radicalized, as a result of the war. Some people did make connections between the anti-war movement and the'movement against racism.

Q. What do you see as the main importance of the anti-war movements?

A. Well, for a time it helped to create a'radical constituency; FoJ:; a time it had the possibility of growing into something larger. As ll I

Ralph Stone 23 say, it radicalized some people. I would hope that the record might be reexamined by subsequent generations so that these lessons that are not being looked at today, this debate that is not occurring today might occur in the future.

Q. What have you learned personally through the anti-war movement, through the war in Viet Nam?

A. Well, I don't know if I could give you a list of things that I've learned. All of this was so much a part of my life. I thought that I was part of the movement. It changed my life, really, I think along with other struggles of the 1960's.- It was a process of moving from liberalism to radicalism, and those lessons are not just lessons of tactics or strategies. They're lessons that relate to who I am and what I believe. To really get into that would be to open up things that probably would be much more valuable than what we're talking about now. But I'm not su~e that you want to do that.

Q. · Well, if they're valuable then it might do good to be on the tape.

A. I'm not sure I've assimilated all of those experiences. It was a process of upheaval in persons' lives, as well as upheavals in the cities and the countrysides. Over the past few years I've looked for persons who moved through the 1960's, who are roughly of the same background as I am, and who have recounted their experiences. And I've found almost none. And you're asking me to do that now, and I haven't formulated the questions· well enough to provide the succinct answers. So I~m hesitating because I just don't know where to begin, and I don't think that the questions that you're asking are eliciting from me the answers. And I'm not saying that to be critical, because as I say, I'm not sure of the questions myself.

Q. Could one of the questions be that change is possible, that stopping the government from doing·something is possible through a mass movement?

A. Well, I would agree with that, that we had built a mass movement of a kind that had not been achieved before. We had brought together groups that had not been brought together before. We had radicalized a good segment of certain groups. But1 that's always tempered by my realization that we're now in the l970i's, and we're subject to a period of reaction that's been going on for at least ten years. We're in the backwash, or backlash that's as ri~htist, as the 1920's or the 1950's, compared to decades that went before. I don't mean literally as rightist, but in comparison to what went on.in the 1960's; It's as rightist a decade that followed as the decade of the 1920's was as rightist compared to what went on in a previous decade. In some ways it may be more reactionary. I'm not sure I prefer Nixon, and Ford, and Carter to Harding, and Coolidge, and Hoover. Certainly I prefer Eisenhower to what's happened in the 1970's. So there's been a sobering

l Ralph Stone 24

of thought in the 1970's with an attempt to understand what went on.

I'd say that my own view of the lessons of the 1960's has to be that among other things we need a much better analysis of the society than we had in the 1960's. I believe I mentioned earlier that one of the weaknesses of the anti-war movement was its moralistc, someways anti-intellectual outlook. Primarily I mean there wasn't an under• standing of class forces as well as other forces. The reason so many anti-war radicals, civil rights radicals of the 1960's have become Socialists in the 1970's is because they've come to see the importance of economic forces as well as political and social and cultural forces.

Q. You mentioned intellectuals. What do you see as the intellectual's main role in the anti-war movement.

A. Well, intellectuals formulated the ideas. They had the freedom to study the war. As intellectuals, they could [and[ always can excercise that leadership., They can't necessarily exercise other forms of leadership.- aut they can expose--they can rake the muck. They can analyze. Above all they can analyze. And they can fearlessly lead in revealing what is happening. I think that most intellectuals have been bought off as a result of the great consensus of the 1940's and the 1950's, the great Cold War consensus.

Q. Whom.

A. You're familiar with Godfrey Hodgson's book, America In Our Time, in which he describes this process by which the country as a whole overwhelmingly accepted certain assumptions, and the intellectuals were.accepting those assumptions as well as the man on the street. They were even celebrating those assumptions. It is that abdication of intellectual responsibility which I see as one of the striking features of the late 1940's and the 1950's, and that makes even more remarkable the protest of the 1960's when you have the emancipation of some of those intellectuals from that consensus bondage that they had.

Q. Who was bought off?

A. Well, bought off may be too strong a word. I don't always mean it literally, obviously. But I mean that academicians accepted most of the Cold War tenets that they were being given. They accepted the arguments that the Soviet:Union was responsible for the Cold War. They accepted the arguments that we had to be vigilant at home in protecting ourselves against domestic radicals and Communists. There was not, in other words, a serious challenge to the liberal picture of reality. America, the consensus went, was the best of all possible worlds. We were not, the consensus went, plagued by problems of poverty, powerlessness, injustice. Now there were scattered excep• tions. There will always be some exceptions, but liberal intellectuals :. were a part of that great Cold War consensus. If they hadn't been, Ralph Stone 25

we might not have made some of the mistakes that we made in the 1940's and the 1950's. We might not have gotten into- the war in Viet Nam.

Q. You mentioned earlier that you were involved with supporting war resisters and draft resisters. Were you a member, did you support any organizations like the War Resisters League or the National Council to Repeal the Draft?

A. I was a member of several different anti-war organizations. I can't remember all of them, but I was a member of the War Resisters League for a number of years", partly because the WRL was the most radical pacifist organization at the time. I was also a member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation which was A. J. Muste's group. In the early 1970's, I was able to bring !gal Roodenko, the former national chairman of the WRL, onto the campus. I believe he came three times and spoke to classes and to groups in the community. This would have been in 1971, 1972, and 1973. Unfortunately there weren't local anti• war chapters of these national groups in Oxford. And when I came to Springfield in 1970, I suppose the most active anti-war group was the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. There was no WRL chapter, so I belonged to WRL as a.member, a dues-paying member, but not as an active member of a local chapter.

Q. You mentioned women against the war in Viet Nam. Do you remember any of their involvements in the anti-war movement?

A. Well, Women's Strike for Peace, and.WILPF, and other groups con• ducted demonstrations, handed out leaflets, protested in ways that are not that different from other anti-war groups. I don't remember anything in particular that those groups did that stands out.

: i Q. Do you remember any other specific protests against the war in Viet Nam?

A. Well, there were lots of them. They sort of fade into one big demonstrations. There were marches on Washington, and there were marches on the state capitals and there were marches on the county courthouses. I wouldn't say that any one stands out in my mind as being more important than the rest, or more meaningful to me.

END OF TAPE TWO, SIDE ONE

Q. Could you tell me a little bit about specific demon$trations against the war? ·

A. Well, there were many kinds of activities that I participated in to protest the war. We've talked a little about not paying taxes, :I marching, so forth. I remember one activity that was perhaps more creative than the usual demonstration, which I think was unde~taken

1 ------Ralph Stone 26

in 1968 or 1969. That was what we called a Christmas Boycott for Peace on Earth. It was a project of the New University Conference [NUC], this organization to which I belonged when I was at Miami University. Incidentally, the NUC was sometimes seen as a graduate student-faculty equivalent of SDS. It was a radical organization and was active on a number of fronts, not just the anti-war movement. In any case, our NUC chapter there in Oxford wrote a two-page docu• ment, which we circulated widely throughout the university and the community, calling upon citizens not to buy Christmas gifts from corporations; and we included a few names of corporations that were directly, most directly connected to the war. Generally we wanted people to buy Christmas gifts--if they were going to buy Christmas gifts--from groups that were identified with the peace movement. And we listed several organizations from which such gifts could be purchased.

Our thinking was that by withholding this money from the corporations, we could bring to bear some of our power as consumers. We also urged people to write directly to the corporations and explain why they weren't being patronized. Now, that kind of a boycott was being followed by several groups around the country that year, and whether it had any direct impact I don't·know, but certainly it couldn't have hurt. And it's one kind of activity that people can participate in and have used on numerous occasions.

The most recent of which, and perhaps the best known, was the boycott of the Gallo wine products during the clash between the United Farm Workers and the growers in California. But apart from the boycott, which we tried to promote for two or three years, there were other demonstrations. Probably the most dramatic one in which I partici• pated was in the spring of 1970. There was a sit-in at the ROTC building on the campus shortly before the explosions at Kent State in May of 1970. This particular sit-in had begun late in the after• noon and continued on into the evening. It was probably around 6:30 or 7:00p.m. when·troops were brought in: state police, local police, the National Guard was sta~ police from surrounding communities; and I no National Guard ~ tioned outside the campus. As far as I know, I troops were on campus though some observers thought they were there,! but the sit-in resulted in mass arrests. I didn't get arrested. i Most of those who got arrested were students.

What I remember most distinctly was the use of police dogs--shepherds-• and tear gas against the crowd that had massed in front of the ROTC building. There were probably two to three thousand people there watching the troops take the students out of the building. The sit-in had begun rather spontaneously, it had not been organized by NUC or any group. A few students had gone there in the afternoon, and it had mushroomed. When the police came in they sealed off the area.

I came over about 5:30 or 6:00p.m., and I found out what was happening. i I The tear gas was used, I thought, very indiscriminately. The troops l; shot tear gas behind the crowd and then used the dogs at the front

I I f: Ralph Stone 27

of the crowd so that people were caught in between the tear gas and the dogs, and it wasn't at all pleasant. The campus was filled with the stench of the gas for hours.

The dogs were unleashed on several people during the night. There were reports the next day of troops taking the dogs on leashes, going up and down the streets, and whenever students would yell some remark from a porch along the street, the troops would turn the dogs loose and chase the students back into the houses. Sometimes catching them before they got back in, and a few students were bitten by the dogs. It was, as was true of many demonstrations, testimony to the lack of discretion on the part of police. And it was in some ways a prelude to what would occur at Kent State just a few weeks later.

It's one thing, of course, to read about demonstrations and to see dogs on the t.v. screen being turned loose against demonstrators, and to see tear gas wafting through the air. It's quite another to be in the midst of such a demonstration. A club that's hanging from a policeman's waist on t.v. looks far less menacing than it does when you're ten feet away, and police are in full riot gear with batons that are several feet long.

So that sit-in which had as the focus of its protest the ROTC build• ing, in a larger context was a protest against the war. A protest against conditions at the university, an expression of discontent with the way the administration at the university had reacted to our attempt to bring about changes.

I mentioned earlier the pamphlet that the New University Conference had written, The Gentle Revolution. Our proposals in that pamphlet were treated almost with contempt. They were not even referred to any of the university committees. We attempted to go through the channels. We introduced the proposals as the governing body of the 't university, and they were summarily dismissed, not even referred to committees for formal rejection. (laughs) It was as if anything emanating from such a body was of no value. Many students, who were not radicals, saw the New University Conference--a very radical body-• as the most concerned organization, at least the most concerned faculty organization with the problems of students. We got a lot of sympathy from such liberal students and when our proposals were rejected, to the students it was another example of administrative intransigence.

Now, in 1970, 1971, and 1972, there were demonstrations here in Springfield against the Viet Nam War. I remember one particular demonstration. I can't recall the date when students and faculty marched on the State Capitol. It was a time following a resumption of the bombing of North Viet Nam. There were many such occasions,

l. so I can't place it exactly, but there were a few hundred people. There were speeches from the steps of the Capitol. Petitions were left at the Governor's office, but there was no violence on that occasion. In fact, in Springfield, I never witnessed any such

' I ! ! i Ralph Stone 28

violence, in demonstrations in which I participated. Now, there was some that I heard about. There were spectators at a speech of Nixon in 1970, I believe, when Nixon came to speak in Springfield. A radi• cal who was not a native of Springfield had come through and he was roughed up by the Secret Service when he voiced his displeasure at Nixon's conduct of the war.

Q. While at Miami University, you were mentioning The Gentle Revolu• tion, pamphlets that a number of the faculty out there put together. Do you remember (tape interference) any of the specific reactions to this pamphlet from other members of the Miami faculty, or from the student newspaper, or the student body?

A. Well, it created a reaction. (laughs) I don't think we who wrote the pamphlet were prepared for the reaction. It was a call to arms you might say, though we didn't intend it as such. There was vigorous opposition almost immediately, and not only parliamentary opposition. The Voices of Reason as they were called. A disparate group of faculty and some townspeople--organized a campaign against us, and inserted a large ad in the Oxford newspaper attacking us as irresponsible rad• icals. We were subjected to constant attacks in the student newspap·er, not from students, but from faculty members. A few townspeople wrote letters individually to the village newspaper.

We tried to reason with the Voices of Reason. We invited them to picnics where we would peacefully discuss the issues. We never had any success in doing that. They never accepted our invitations. The Voices of Reason had seemingly made up their mind. We were very confident that the issues that we were raising were legitimate issues. I've indicated some of those issues. Most of them involved changes at the university; changes in the course structure, changes in student representation, changes in ROTC, changes in the nature of the black student body; increasing the number of minority students and minority faculty. Familiar programs of the 1970's, such as affirmative action, student reform, student participation in governments.

But we were seen as part of a larger plot. We were part of a con• spiracy that was tied to the New Left, and that was interested only in tearing down the institutions. Well. that's partly true. We wer~ tied to the New Left. We consciously saw ourselves as not only carr1t• ing out reforms at the university, but as tying those reforms into ' the larger changes in society. Again, I think we got attacked by liberals who were unwilling to make connections between what was wro~g '' in the universities and what was wrong, as we saw it, in the larger society.

Now, even before The Gentle Revolution was published, there had been clashes between liberal faculty and conservatives. As early as 1966 ,, i: a very, very volatile incident occurred when I initiated a letter of 1 I I protest to the alumni director in response to this alumni director's i editorial in the alumni magazine. This was an editorial which attacked

! I I 'I I Ralph Stone 29

beatniks and scruffy students (laughs) with long hair, (laughs) who were lying about like bums in doorways as he put ·it, (laughs) and he didn't want any such students on the Miami campus. I have a selection of part of his editorial which I'll just read to give you some indica• tion of the nature of the editorial that I was writing this letter in opposition to. The column that he wrote said in part, ''We want a school,"--after saying that we don't want these bums and beatniks, he said,--"we want a school where college students learn right and wrong while they learn about money and government. Where manhood is identified because of its respect for womanhood, not for panty raids and telephone squeezes. Where womanhood is identified with virtue and refinement, not by non-virgin clubs and back-alley coarseness. Where the sanctity of the home is upheld rather than scoffed at by infidel professors advocating free love. Where Americanism is identi• fied by respect for the stars and stripes rather than by compliments for the hammer and sickle. Where the capitalistic system is presented with appreciation rather than apology. Where prayer is an occasion of acknowledging God rather than its absence being an occasion of denying Him, and where the Bible, the word of God, is believed rather than belittled. If such an institution is worth anything to this community and to the world we are glad that we have had a little part in building it. It is not of value, we confess, that we know of little in this world. If it is not of value we confess that we know of little in this world that has value."

Now this was a statement that he was borrowing from a published state• ment put out by Florida College in Temple Terrace, Florida, whatever that was. That a vice-president of the university and the alumni director was that--for a vice-president of the university to put out in the pages of an official publication such tripe, many of us thought was (laughs) demanding of a response, and we organized a response. Eventually there were about fifty or sixty faculty members who signed the letter that I and a couple'of others drafted. There were many other faculty members who signified their willingness if it came down to needing that many signatures.

Well, that issue dragged on for the better part of a year. The alu~i director ~efused to print the letter: We insisted t~at ~is failure ~ to print 1t was to exercise censorsh1p over the publ1cat1on; and 1 that faculty were being misrepresented as was the university by such! a statement in the alumni journal. Eventually, the president put · some pressure upon the vice-president, and the vice-president agreed1 to print the letter, though not before it had caused much gnashing of teeth and had become something of a cause celebre on the campus. Again, we were looked upon as dirty vil,lain who were out to·crucify the vice-president. We supposedly didn't have any interest in the character of the university.

Q. Who were these people? You've mentioned the president, and the vice-president, and the head of the alumni. What were their names? i I Ralph Stone 30

A. The alumni director was John Dolibois, and the president at that time was Philip Shriver. Now, I quoted only one column. Mr. Dolibois had written another column in which he carried on the argument against these unwashed heathen, (laughs) and I won't quote all of it, but I think the excerpt that I read fairly summarizes his position. Our response to him I have here, and I'll read a paragraph from that response to give you a sample of what we said.

We began by saying, '~est it be assumed by your readers, especially our present and former students, that your columns in the Alumnus of April 1966, 'Beatniks at Miami' and July 1966, 'Give and Take with the Activists,' have been accepted by all Miami faculty, we wish to correct any wrong impressions. Your April column advised everyone to quote 'resist strongly any effort to make Miami over into an institu• tion few of us would recognize,' end quote, as you say would happen if a small crop of protestors had their way completely. You do not, however, point out just what the dangers are or what it is you object to in the protests of the 'beatniks' end quote. Instead, you insinu• ate that their ideas have close relationship to their body odor and general appearance. Under your standards of evaluation, the ideas, morals and accomplishments of a sandled Christ, a disheveled Einstein, a bearded Lincoln, or a Schweitzer sweaty in his jungle hospital would fare poorly. You offer for our edification a statement which you would, quote, 'like to think applies to Miami University,' end quote. Judged from this statement, the model institution is one which, among other things, teaches appreciation only of laissez-faire capitalism, inculcates uncritical nationalism, and encourages a provincial religious fundamentalism. Obviously, one does not have to choose between Miami's so-called beatniks and Florida College at Temple Terrace, as your simplistic either-or proposition would have us believe."

So we go on to say that we hope that Miami's present and former students would not, as he thought, accept that statement from Temple Terrace. We thought that they were a bit more sophisticated and enlightened than that, and as the columns of the paper indicated, the student paper indicated, they were indeed more enlightened than that. But in some ways that issue, in 1966, anticipated the clashes that would be occurring for the next four years at Miami. Clashes between conservatives on the one hand and liberals and radicals on the other, and then clashes between radicals on the one hand and liberals and conservatives on the other. I would say by 1969 or 1970 the liberals were often lined up with the conservatives against the radicals.

Q. You mentioned Temple Terrace. What is that?

A. That's the town, I take it, in which Florida College is located. How Mr. Dolibois ever came to pick out Florida College at Temple Terrace as a model I don't know, but ...

Q. Is it a religious seminary?

i i: Ralph Stone 31

A. I really don't know. Presumably it has some strong religious orientation.

Q. What was the president of the university like, Philip Shriver?

A. He had been a professor of history at Kent State University, a graduate of Columbia University. He had come to Miami in the mid 1960's--! can't remember the exact year--replacing a man named John D. Millett. He was relatively inexperienced in administration. He had, I believe, been a dean of liberal arts after serving as a pro• fessor at Kent State. He told me once that he had been a supporter of Adlai Stevenson back in the 1950's. He told me that, I think, to show that he was not as illiberal as I might imagine him to be. And indeed this conversation occurred when I was urging upon him, to urge upon Mr. Dolibois, to open up the columns of the alumni magazine to the letter signed by several dozen facutly I've just referred to.

He wasn't an illiberal man. I think he was genuinely interested in trying to understand what the nature of the protests were that were buildil}gup around him in the late 1960's. I don't think he was an openly repressive man either, but he didn't display much initiative to my way of thinking. He dragged his feet on several of the proposals for change. He certainly could have, I think, insured a fair hearing for the proposals that the New University Conference presented.- Not that we expected him to lead the charge in behalf of them •. I always had a fairly good personal relationship with him. I must say, however, that when faculty radicals, in 1969 and 1970, were punished by the University it was later revealed that he had indeed participated in that punishment.

In 1969 several faculty had been singled out for less-than-average salary increments, or had not been promoted, or had not been given tenure. And many of these people were in the New University Confer• ence. We refused to accept our punishment. We took our case to the University's Rights and Responsibilities Committee, which was the university-wide committee that investigated complaints or grievances. We also took our case to the local Association of University .ProfessQrs' chapter. And both of these bodies unanimously concluded that we had been unjustly denied rights as a result of political reprisal. The administration at first denied it, but subsequently admitted it saying that it had done so for the good of the institution, which always reminded me of the justification that Kissinger and Johnson and Nixon provided by citing national security.

Virtually anything could be justified by saying it was for the good of the institution, just as national security covered a host of ills. So the president, for all of his kindness (laughs) and his liberalism, ended up justifying and participating in the repression. But I still don't think particularly ill of him as a person.

Q. Do you remember any direct confrontations between the president of the university and the students? Ralph Stone 32

A. Well, there were demonstrations when students marched on the presidential mansion. That's what you call such houses--for example, Illinois' governor's mansion--to make us properly respectful, I suppose. There weren't any violent confrontations. There were some charges that students had littered the lawn. And there were to be several times, in 1969 and 1970, verbal confrontations in meetings when students would attempt to refute the president. However, I saw nothing that ever took the form of violent confrontation. I never saw any student throw anything on the lawn. I never saw any physical acts that could at all be interpreted as violently directed against the president. There were a couple of firebombings of minor buildings in.the spring of 1970, either before or after Kent State. But I thought that such acts, while understandable perhaps, were self-defeating. There was no way to translate your anger from an. intellectual disagreement to firebombs and advance your cause.

Q. Do you remember a lecture on language given by Professor Michael Scriven?

A. Well, Michael Scriven was a philosophy professor at the University of California at Berkeley who had come to Miami to speak, I believe in 1967 or 1968. He was known as a supporter of the student movement and spoke very well about the need for student riots, also-pointed out some of the linguistic-peculiarities-of radicalism and conservatism, what language meant.

Q. Do you remember exactly what his lecture was about?

A. Well, it was as I say, designed generally to show us the nature of language and how meaningless certain'words were when taken out of context. I remember in particular his discussion of so..,.called four• letter words. How the degree of discomfort caused by four-letter words was in some ways foolish. And he illustrated that point by writing up on the board letters K-C-U-F as you would write from left to right. And then he erased those letters and put the letters ver• . ' tically from Kat the top to F at the bottom, K-C-U-F. And then he . erased those letters and then formed the letters into their position, with F at the left and K at the right. And as he did this rather i quickly, and as the crowd of several hundred became aware of what he! I' was doing you could sense going through the crowd this titillation as it watched the point that he was making. Letters randomly assembled meant nothing, but assembled in ways that connoted meaning could cause a great consternation. The whole milieu of four-letter words, I suppose in retrospect, looks somewhat sophomoric and naive though it might have been liberating to- some. Students and faculty were using. words of that kind to show that they were not slaves to sexual, ' cultural stereotypes. But I think they probably overdid it, however, Scriven was making a point that was well-taken. ' i: END OF TAPE TWO, SIDE TWO Ralph Stone 33

Q. How did this whole problem at Miami University turn out?

A. Well, we· were discussing the issue involving Mr. Dolibois with the columns that he wrote and our response to those columns. That was in 1966, and as events developed on campus and as the New Univ• ersity Conference was organized, the tension between ourselves and the administration grew more intense. ·The confrontation came in 1969 when the administration recommended--well, did not recommend--it instituted actions against us in the form of salary reprisals; salary discriminations, not being given promotions where they were justified; and in one or two cases persons not being tenured. The seven or eight of us decided to file grievances with both the AAUP and the local academic committee, the Rights and-Responsibilities Committee, which had been created by statute within:the university. Those two bodies met and unanimously found that those of us who appealed had been denied due process. We had not been told the reasons for the salary increments we received which were well below average. We had not been told the reasons for denial of promotion or denial or tenure.

The Rights and Responsibilities Committee presented a report to the Senate of the University, the body which included all faculty, a report which condemned the administration for both the substance of its decisions and for the violations of due process, and coupled those condemnations with recommendations that salary increments be made commensurate with our rank and with the records that we had made. The president, after first denying that these decisions had been taken by the administration, as punitive decisions, eventually admitted that, yes, the decisions had been made. But because in his words we had constituted a disservice, had done a disservice to the university; therefore his actions were justified.

After the Rights and Responsibilities Committee and the AAU Committee had made their reports, however, the president agreed to seek partial restitution. He agreed to recommend to the Board of Trustees that salary increments be made at the half-year point. That is, he would not make them retroactive, but would restore the increments recommenaed by the Rights and Responsibilities Committee as of mid~year. The Board of Trustees did not accept even that recommendation and the Rights :. and Responsibilities Committee regretfully concluded that academic freedom had been grossly violated in contravention of all of the statutes and rules that the university itself had created-over the years. Faculty members were being punished for expressing their views.

Q. How were the faculty members' academic freedoms violated?

A. Well, the university had stated in its own guidelines established by committees over the years that--and I'm quoting here from the report of the Committee--"that of all of the institutions in a society which labels itself as, or aspires to be a democracy, it is the univ• ersity which ought not to punish its members.for critical expression." Ralph Stone 34

The canons of professional rights and responsibilities of the AAUP and of academic freedom, which Miami had accepted, clearly stated that a faculty member had the right to criticize and seek revision of the policies of the university as long as that faculty member did not violate others'rights. And there was nothing, of course, that the administration pointed to that we had done that violated anyone else's rights. On the contrary, it was the administration that was contravening our academic rights by punishing us for simply stating our views.

Q. Were there any instances of the university's not allowing certain materials to be used in a classroom?

A. Well, as a matter of fact, one English professor teaching a fresh• man English course attempted to use--and did use in fact--the documents that grew out of the Dolibois affair. Now, this English professor was not one of the New University Conference members, but he thought that the issues that had been raised by the column "Beatniks at Miami," and the faculty response to that column were legitimate issues for freshman English students to write themes about. Two points of view at least were expressed in that controversy, and he asked the students to study those writings and to make their assessments and to write their papers. The alumni director vehemently objected to the use of those materials. This was at least a year or two years later. He vehemently objected and threatened legal action against the faculty member for as he put it, "having attempted once more to defame his good character." Pressure was brought to bear by colleagues in the English Department upon this faculty member who eventually agreed to discontinue use of the material if it was made clear that he was not doing so because of the threat of legal action but because he chose to be a bit more understanding than Mr. Dolibois.

I think that was a clear case of a faculty member's academic freedom being circumscribed by threat and intimidation. He was a young faculty member. He did not have tenure. Perhaps he felt somewhat insecure, but that was not an isolated instance. I should say that most of the faculty members who were at Miami in 1969 and 1970, and who were in this group that experienced the repression of the university administra• ! t ''' tion left the institution in 1970. Our collective belief was that wt could no longer be very effective at Miami. Positions had polarized. It was very unpleasant. The administration was committed to stone• walling, if not to outright actions, and we sought positions where there was somewhat more toleration of academic freedom.

Now, the national AAUP had the case under advisement and had actually sent representatives on campus, had interviewed the President and the local committees that were investigating, had gotten as far as writing letters to the administration urging them to rectify what they consid• i I ered clear violations of academic freedom. They were prepared to move further, to what might have eventually resulted in censure, the strongest Ralph Stone 35

penalty that the AAUP can visit upon an institution. But the cases were withdrawn when we left Miami and moved to other universities.

In some ways, I suppose, you could say we should have stayed and fought it out. In some ways, our situations were not as bad as those in many institutions. There were a lot of so-called atrocity cases in 1969 and 1970, cases in which faculty members were axed for their political views. Most of us were not axed. We were simply discrimin• ated against through salary increments or not being given promotions and so forth.

Q. What does the AAUP stand for?

A. The American Association of University Professors is a professional association that represents faculty. Its main concern over the years has been academic freedom. It was instrumental in cases going all the way back to World War I, I believe, when faculty members were dismissed as a result of expressing opposition to the war. It was active, most active, in the 1960's. It attempts to improve the over• all position of the faculty member. It has many committees including salary, retirement, and so forth. But academic freedom has been historically its most important function; to see to it that neither within the institution nor as a result of external pressures are the rights of faculty members abridged when they speak as citizens or when they speak with expertise in the classroom.

Q. During these controversies at Miami, were you or any of your colleagues labeled any names because of these controversies?

A. Oh, of course, we were labeled many names. I suppose the label that those who used it felt was most appropriate because [the] most heinous and horrendous to them was to label us as Communist homosex• uals. In fact, in letters to the editor, and in posters, placards, and by word of mouth, that was the charge that was most frequently flung at us. But yes, we were radicals, we were reds, we were social• ists, troublemakers, starry-eyed, misguided utopians. (laughs) You single it out, we probably were named it.

Q, (laugh) Was there any mudslinging in the opposite direction?

A. Well, certainly the opposition thought there was mudslinging (laughs) in the opposite direction, but we tried to reason with them. We sought to engage them in debate. We thought we had issues on our side. We were proposing changes in the institution. I've mentioned The Gentle Revolution, and we proposed a series of changes that would make Miami University what we thought was a better university. Many of those changes today have come about just as they've come about at a good many schools around the country. We were ahead of our time in that sense. But I don't think that we engaged in mudslinging. I think that we hit home with some of our specific complaints, and when we i'f! ! raised questions of academic freedom, the right not to be censored, Ralph Stone 36

we were on the mark. And these committees that conducted the investi• gations were composed of a variety of people including conservative full professors who could by no stretch of the imagination be called even liberal to middle-of-the-roaders. But there were only a few, I think only a few faculty at Miami who considered us so dangerous that they were almost vitriolic in everything they said and almost apoplec• tic in their fears, but there were a few, I must say.

Q. As far as political parties and political leaders, I'm going to kind of throw a few names at you. And I'd like you to give me responses, what you thought of them at the time that they were running or at the time they were in office. I'd like to start out with Eisenhower.

A. Well, at the time I thought Eisenhower was a disaster. I think I reflected in the 1950's that consensus liberalism that I've spoken of earlier. I was not a radical in the 1950's. I saw Eisenhower as a do-nothing president. I think the consensus of the time was to glorify the institution of the presidency. It was to push for action. It wasn't quite clear always what action we wanted, but Eisenhower was inactive. He was somnolent. He played golf. He let his subor• dinates do whatever needed to be done. I was also disappointed in his reliance upon massive retaliation rather than more diversified conventional forces.

His Secretary of State disappointed me--John Foster Dulles' moralistic diplomacy. But as I look as Eisenhower from the perspective of 1978-• and this has been my view for a number of years--I'm willing to admit that I was wrong in some ways about Eisenhower. It's true he was a do-nothing president, but I'm not sure that what we wanted in the White House then was an active president. One at least who was committed to the Cold War the way that Dean Acheson or John Foster Dulles was committed to the Cold War, given the consensus of the time, namely that the Soviet Union was the director of monolithic communism. Given the existence of nuclear weapons, What we needed was a president who was willing to cool the rhetoric. And that Eisenhower did. And finally in his farewell address when he spoke of the military industrial complex, to me that evidenced prescience, and insight, and courage that had not been displayed by Truman; and was not to be displayed by Kennedy or Johnson. By the late 1960's anyone who spoke of the mili• tary industrial complex was written off as a red radical. So Eisen• hower as I've viewed him over the years has come to mean different things to me.

Q. What about John Kennedy?

A. In some ways the positions that I've taken were reversed on John Kennedy. I think you could describe me still in 1960 as a liberal. I was to the left of Kennedy, to the left of that wing of the Demo• cartic Party, but still hopeful about Kennedy. Kennedy was young. He did have great energy and ambition. He was willing to criticize the policies of the Republicans in the 1950's for being too inflexible, Ralph Stone 37 for relying too much upon theories of massive retaliation. He was more sympathetic to labor. At least in his campaign of 1960 he expressed a desire to assist labor more. He was more sympathetic than Republicans to the old New Deal elements, that is, the poor and the lower middle-class. So I thought that indeed he could get the country moving again.

The country was stalemated. We had come out of a period of dormancy in the 1950's. We needed to move again [and] recall once more that I grew up believing the New Deal was extraordinary, an extraordinary accomplishment. Again, I've changed my opinions about that. But with my early upbringing, with my mother working in the New Deal and thinking that Tugwell and Roosevelt were almost saints, I came to feel that we had to restore that old New Deal momentum, and I thought Kennedy would do that.

Since then I've come to have grave questions about Kennedy. I remember one of the cabinet appointments he made which first caused me some disillusionment, and that was the appointment of Luther Hodges as Secretary of Commerce. It wasn't that Luther Hodges was a terrible reactionary, but I expected someone a bit more liberal in the position rather than a person that seemed to be and was pro-business. In that, I was probably naive to expect that an appointee to that position would be more critical of business. But Kennedy's failure to do more in the areas that he claimed he would be active in disappointed me. His intervention, of course, at the Bay of Pigs was one of the great disillusioning experiences for many liberals and radicals in the 1960's; and then the confrontation with the Soviet Union over the missile crisis in 1962 bothered me a great deal. Furthermore, the whole issue of the missile gap turned out to be another instance of the government manipulating us into believing something that was not in fact the case.

Q. What about Lyndon Johnson?

A. I never was a great fan of Lyndon Johnson's. I saw him as one of the most opportunistic politicians of the time. And even after he had made a very credible record in 1964 and 1965 through his sponsor• ship of civil rights legislation and the War on Poverty that he moun~ed, I was still not a great Johnson supporter. I was always a bit dubious about his commitment to civil rights and his commitment to end poverty. He, after all, was a kind of nouveau riche politician who had made a lot of money. He was a terribly arrogant person who most wanted to be told how important and how great he was. He clearly used people. I say clearly, you could almost see the way he used Hubert Humphrey in 1967 and 1968 in order to further his own ambitions. And, of course, with the war escalating in 1965, any kind thoughts toward Johnson'§._ record on domestic affairs was eclipsed by what was happening in foreign affairs.

Q. You mentioned Hubert Humphrey. What do you think of Hubert Humphrey?

A. Well, I was never a great supporter of Hubert Humphrey. I thought Ralph Stone 38 he was one of the better senators. Humphrey in the 1950's and 1960's was, after all, not on the extreme left wing of the Democratic Party, particularly in the 1960's. He was a very energetic man whose interests were wideranging. He spoke upon everything. The standard joke was that if you went to Washington to watch the Senate debate, the person you were most likely to see on any given day was Hubert Humphrey. I remember having read that. And then a year or so later being in Washington, doing research at the Library of Congress, wandering over to the Senate galleries, and sure enough,_ who should I see but Hubert Humphrey exercising his lung power.

Again, in the last few years as I've looked more deeply into the politics of the Cold War, what you find is Hubert Humphrey, the "Cold Warrior," who is as anxious to corral Communists as many of the most rabid Republicans. You find Hubert Humphrey the hawkish senator on VietNam. You find Hubert Humphrey red-baiting radicals. It's not a very pleasant picture.

Q. What about the Humphrey-Hawkins Bill?

A. Well, I think that the Humphrey-Hawkins Bill as originally con• ceived was highly commendatory. But after all, we passed the Full Employment Act in 1946 which stated that the government was committed to full employment and was committed to finding every person who wanted to work a job. So Humphrey-Hawkins was really doing nothing more than restating what had already been stated. Of course, it was providing some implementing mechanisms. But I'm not one of those who got sentimental toward the end and thought that Hubert Humphrey was the greatest senator to have come along since John C. Calhoun, or George Norris, or Robert LaFollette. I don't think he's in the same league with LaFollette and Norris as progressive senators. He was loved, he was admired, but I think that was because Hubert Humphrey was a very warm person. He was extremely considerate of others whether they be conservatives or liberals, but I don't think his record as a progressive or a liberal was in any way as consistent and as strong as that of a Norris or a LaFollette.

Q. How do you feel about Barry Goldwater?

A. How do I feel about him? Well, back in 1964 people felt more strongly about Barry Goldwater when he was running for the presidency against Johnson. And what I remember as being the standard joke, in 1964, was that Goldwater's advice to those who were concerned about the defense establishment, was to "put the wagons in the circle boys and let's gather up and fire when you see the whites of their eyes." [This] kind of old frontier attitude he brought toward modern problems was symptomatic of his simplistic position. Of course, on domestic affairs he was reactionary. You've probably seen the pictures of the sign that was put up at the Republican nominating convention, "In Your Heart You Know He's Right." And some had tacked onto it, "Yes, Far Right." Ralph Stone 39

Q. (laughs) What about Richard Nixon?

A. What about him?

Q. How do you feel about Richard Nixon, his bid for the presidency in 1960, and again the election in 1968, election in 1972, his two administrations, Watergate?

A. Well, you must say he's persistent, whatever else is said. He's dogged and determined. I believe I said that I was critical of Nixon from an early point. Nixon was one of the first of the head-hunting anti-Communists of the post-war era. And he not only was active in terms of the committees of Congress, which were investigating so-called traitors, but he himself used tactics in his own campaigns against Helen Gahagan Douglas and Jerry Voorhees out of California, which were models you might say of dirty politics. So I was aware even in the late 1940's of Nixon as a campaigner. Then when he made his bid and lost for the governorship of California in 1962--I believe it was-• and made the famous statement that he was retiring, that the reporters wouldn't have Nixon to kick around any more, this crybaby, and that's what it was, was revealed. Then, of course, making the tremendous comeback that he made in the 1960's, the mid and late 1960's, was a real political feat. No one has ever said that Nixon was not a shrewd politician. However dirty he was as a campaigner, however corrupt the administration eventually became after 1972, no one ever has said that he lacked political savvy. Well, his whole posture on the Viet Nam War in the 1960's, of being a hawk, the maudlin sentimentality. If we might go back to the 1952 campaign when the Slush Fund Scandal was raised, and when he went on t.v. in the famous Checkers Speech, all of that was part and parcel of the Nixon who was willing, it seemed to me, to go to any lengths to advance his own fortunes.

And finally with Watergate--! was not as affected by Watergate as . i were many; my disillusionment with the whole political process had come much earlier--but for many people, Watergate was something that '! ripped the clothes off of the emperor, and not just off of Richard Nixon, but off of the institutions. I thought that the televised hearings of the House Judiciary Committee Proceedings was one of the most compelling examples of what can be done to educate people by the media when that is indeed being done upon an issue that is of importance to everyone. If they would only do something like that to look at the economic institutions of society. If they would only have used the Rockefeller Confirmation Hearings, as Vice-President, to get into the whole question of corporate wealth and power and the interlocking directorates that exist, then they would have performed an even more valuable service. But as for Nixon, I can't say really anything good about him.

Q. What are your views on Spiro Agnew?

A. I think he was an effete intellectual snob. (laughs) No, I Ralph Stone 40 thought that like the person who picked him he was something of a disaster. He had few qualifications as far as I could see to be vice• President of the United States, much less president, that he was irra• tional when it came to dissent, that he seemed to have less than the highest standards of ethics in regard to government. There were stories at the time he was elected ~ice-president that made me wonder what his relationships had been with certain criminal figures in New Jersey. And his record in office did not dispel any of my fears, indeed added to them. He was the hatchet man, interestingly enough for Nixon who had always been the hatchet man when he was serving Eisenhower. Eisenhower had taken the high road, Nixon the low road, and now ironic and surprising as it may seem, Agnew was the one who was attacking the pinkos and the radiclibs as he called them, snotty little protesters. So, (laughs) I didn't think too much of Agnew and still don't.

Q. How about Ronald Reagan?

A. Well, of course, Reagan unlike the other names you've thrown at me hasn't impinged as directly on my life or on national affairs. I think he's every bit as ardent a conservative if not more so than Nixon and Agnew. He seems to be more of an ideologue, than either Nixon or Agnew. As far as his ideas are concerned, I can't find that they have much relevance to what's happening in the last half of the twentieth century.

Q. How about the Rockefellers, both Nelson and David?

A. Well, they are corporate liberals of that variety of corporate leadership that has accepted the realities of life in the twentieth century to the extent they're willing to make concessions to certain groups. They're not principle idealogues of conservatism. They'll accept the role of government. In fact, they use government to serve their own interests. They're not laissez-faire free enterprise advocates. They accept labor. They recognize the necessity for making concessi~ns. They'll accept a certain measure of welfare spending. They're very intelligent defenders of the corporate structure as opposed to certain right-wingers who say, "Let's get government out of life, let's start even, let's be competitive, let's return to the days of yesteryear."

Neither of the Rockefeller brothers is that simplistic. I think David's role in the formation of the Tri-lateral Commission expresses the sophistication on the international level, of the kind that was dis• played on the domestic level by Nelson's forebears and other corporate leaders beginning back at the turn of the century when they recognized that to take a position of unyielding hostility to labor would be a mistake. They recognized that by judiciously agreeing to certain limitations, or apparent limitations on the power of corporations, by using the federal government to ameliorate the worst aspects of life in America, they could, in fact, benefit from such an apparently Ralph Stone 41

ameliorative position. Hence you find these more sophisticated corporate leaders accepting Social Security, accepting the Wagner Act, accepting workmens compensation and unemployment insurance, accepting even some of the efforts of the mid 1960's to combat poverty.

Q. What about Gerald Ford?

A. Well, he is not a principled ideologue, ala Reagan. He's a political animal who worked his way up through the bureaucracy in government, who got along by going along, who many people think of as a nice guy, who nobody has said will get first prize for intellec• tual brilliance, who as the story goes forgot to wear his helmet once when he was a center on the University of Michigan football team. It may have been Johnson that made that comment about Ford. Johnson wasn't very charitable. Obviously, the pardon of Nixon was the big issue for Ford's presidency as far as I was concerned. And while he may have rationalized it in his own mind as being a service to the country, taking the issue out of politics, I think the effect of it was to fuzz over and blur an issue that the public wanted clearly resolved.

END OF TAPE THREE, SIDE ONE

Q. What did you think of Edmund Muskie?

A. Oh, I thought Muskie was a decent enough man with middle-of-the• road liberal proclivities not an exciting personality by any means, with little of the charisma of some of the politicians of his time. I considered him honest, nothing too cataclysmic about him that stands out in my mind. He was not as hawkish as some and not as dovish as others on the war. On domestic affairs he was somewhere in the middle of the party, too, I would say, perhaps a little to the left of center.

Q. What about Romney? l j A. George Romney? Well, Romney had established a fairly respectable record as a Republican governor of Michigan. He had presidential ambitions which were aborted after he made the trip to South Viet Nam and later concluded that he had been brainwashed by those in Viet Nam who had pictured the war to him as something other than what he came to believe. I think his great mistake was in admitting that he had changed his mind so sharply as a result of what he con• sidered to have been propaganda fed to him in Viet Nam. I think that

!I , ' happened to quite a few officials of our government who went to Viet Nam and were given a very sanitized tour of the situation there, who were told several good things about what was happening and then came to see for themselves later, either through returning and taking a more independent look or through just the process of osmosis over the