THE FOUND GENERATION

Mayer, Milton

THE FOUND GENERATION by MILTON MAYER "We have also seen a sharpening and refinement of abusive power. The legislative investigation, designed and often exercised for the achievement of high ends,...

...There will be fighting minorities of us codgers...
...That is what is beginning to happen in America...
...Profit to somebody: $40 to $60 per print...
...It couldn't even look for a Communist to arrest because it would have found three hundred University of California faculty members who attacked the Committee just before the San Francisco hearings, and one hundred sixty-five faculty members of San Francisco State, and the Episcopal Diocese of California (and the Friends Committee on Legislation), and the California AFL-CIO, and the New York Times and the New York Herald-Tribune and the Milwaukee Journal and the St...
...Irving is carted about from hearing to hearing — this is where the Committee's $327,000 appropriation goes — with his sealed and re-sealed sack of incoming foreign mail...
...These are the Communists Mr...
...for the rest, they, unlike Goodie Knight, have to leave it to the inferential powers of the American people...
...War—the milk of old men—is the last best hope of restoring the world as it was...
...It hit them all over the world and wouldn't stop hitting them...
...A Committee narrator took the place of the original recorded sound track (which would have given the lie both to the finished film and the narration...
...The film, Operation Abolition, carries no credit lines of any kind...
...You see," my psychiatrist went on, "this is an epidemic movement which has spread to America...
...In San Francisco the trigger of the student—and faculty—protest was the Committee's frontal atack on the teaching profession...
...What they did—and shouldn't have done—when they were incited was sing and chant in the echoing rotunda of a public building...
...And their elders can only beat them—with police clubs and misrepresentations and editorial cries for more police clubs...
...Looking up from the first floor of the great rotunda, it centered on the flight of thirty-six broad marble steps with soaking young men and women in various stages of their removal, sitting, falling, bumping their way down, and being dragged or carried...
...As long as it is free Mr...
...The future is (as F.D.R...
...and short of war it can't be...
...In 1959 it subpeonaed 110 California teachers and leaked their names to the press...
...There was no act of physical aggression on the part of the students," said Sheriff Matthew Carberry of the City and County of San Francisco on a TV interview two months later...
...The spectacular photograph taken in the San Francisco City Hall last May 13 was the hardest thing that has hit Mr...
...In the ensuing howl the hearings were canceled before they began, but teachers were fired anyway...
...but, as John Locke was saying, happening along with Aristotle at his side: "Whensoever, therefore, the legislative shall either by ambition, fear, folly, or corruption, endeavor to grasp themselves, or put into the hands of any other, an absolute power over the lives, liberties, and estates of the people, by this breach of trust they forfeit the power the people had put into their hands...
...But now, with that deadly photograph in front of him, he picked up McCarthy's brass knucks and came wading in with the old knee...
...The lunch counter sit-in movement in the South was and is its own leadership...
...We want it as it was...
...One must be...
...Pressed by Committee counsel, he breaks the seal on the bag and pulls out the Communist propaganda and says: "No effort is spared to flood Communist propaganda to perhaps every college, university, and secondary school in the United States...
...These are the villains...
...I said to Aristotle and Locke, as they happened by...
...What they say doesn't matter...
...The national election was coming on...
...There were a good five thousand of them—not counting Archie Brown and Merle Brodsky—picketing the City Hall the day after the "riot" in San Francisco...
...It used to be that the Commies kissed themselves in on these demonstrations...
...Hoover and the Committee can't look for lest they find them...
...The FBI can take care of subversion...
...the State Education Code permits, and in practice compels, school boards to discharge teachers who refuse to cooperate with legislative committees...
...Why not...
...Hoover, in Communist Target—Youth, "of the extent to which they can be victimized and exploited...
...The police, incited by the Committee, responded in the only way policemen know how to respond to non-violent resistance...
...The generation of lawsuits lost or won by five-to-four decisions is on its way out...
...Hoover and the Committee will not sleep of nights because they dare not...
...It will take a pending lawsuit to determine how the Congressional power of subpoena can be used to produce a commercial article: Washington Video Productions, 1637 Wisconsin Avenue, N. W., Washington, has sold more than five hundred prints (and are behind in their orders) at $100 each...
...Neither Brown nor Brodsky—nor any other Communist — had anything to do with the affair...
...Instead, think about the two policemen who had heart attacks beating them...
...The picture was a natural triumph of composition...
...Each time he does it, the New York Herald Tribune reports, "the Committee members act out their part in the talking charade just as if they hadn't already seen, heard, and done the same thing repeatedly...
...It was all unfortunate...
...I am its leader...
...Unscrupulous demagogues have used the power to investigate as tyrants of an earlier day used the bill of attainer...
...Totally unaware dupes who are now graduate students and teaching assistants in great universities will become leaders in America...
...That is the true sign of the times...
...He was sent first to the barricades after San Francisco because he is still thought to be sacrosanct even among the professors and preachers who attack the Committee...
...they will go their way with or without you...
...In the Old World, wherever the fathers try to force more war and poverty on them, the beaten sons get up from the ground and beat their fathers...
...This is Irving Fishman, Deputy Collector of Customs at the Port of New York...
...There was no missing the point anywhere in the world outside the United States: the American student, who used to swallow goldfish and nowadays drives a sports car, was being washed into the historic channel of student revolt...
...Communists are going all out to ready U. S. for a similar fate...
...We elders are the last generation here which can exist out of the world...
...One of the papers was Ixvestia...
...They are finished...
...The wisdom I give away free...
...And don't think for a minute that you are leading the students because you are on their side...
...In trying to hold off our own young people, we are trying to hold off the world...
...would say) iffy...
...What incited the students was their exclusion from a public hearing...
...They are, by and large, the best students on these campuses...
...The three San Francisco witnesses who were willing to testify are all well-known members of the Committee's road show, and one deserves special mention...
...They are young and healthy...
...Age," my psychiatrist went on, "can not stop youth from doing anything good or bad...
...Tokyo was still to come, and you wouldn't expect Izvestia to dig up old pictures of policemen beating students in Budapest...
...If there is something really rotten in the American government, a fundamentally good, free government, they will topple it unless the American government can be made rotten first...
...Even after the election Democratic office-holders went on ducking and refused to help the students schedule the film with a panel of participants in the "riot" to show how a Congressional factfinding committee falsified the facts of the demonstration from start to finish...
...But Izuestia used part of the page for auxiliary news photographs from Seoul and Ankara, showing policemen beating university students...
...Hoover and the Committee in their whole joint career...
...The San Francisco police and press said, "Mob Riots at Red Hearing," and my household psychiatrist said this: "Don't think about the students...
...So," my psychiatrist went on, "you need not worry about what the old Congressmen and the old editors and the old policemen and the old Legionnaires are doing to the students...
...These are the answers to the Saturday Evening Post's agonized question, "How could American boys and girls be stampeded into this shameful performance...
...In invoking the First or Fifth Amendment in the State of California, they put themselves in certain jeopardy...
...The old men who edit the worst of the country's news magazines said, in publishing it: "The moral drawn by the FBI: Students, a prime target of Communists, have helped topple governments around the world...
...There were two thousand at Berkeley alone who signed the petition against the Committee in the space of a few days before the hearings began...
...Law and Order, with its clubs, its hoses, and its 130,000,000 unduplicat-ed sets of fingerprints, could not find a Communist to arrest...
...And in years past he has marshaled his myths in measured fashion...
...Goodie Knight, who has gone from the governorship of a state to a local TV show, has nothing to lose by opening the Hoover-Committee bag all the way to the bottom...
...The film has been shown, under Legion, military, church, and Congressmen's sponsorship, all over the country, in high school and college assemblies, Army and Navy posts, and even, the Washington Post discovered, in government bureaus...
...Senator John F. Kennedy, 1960...
...Was there a riot, as Mr...
...Hoover's report was a white-collar Operation Abolition...
...The Hoover report was not an unqualified success...
...But there may be a found generation...
...The son's waywardness—his going his own way, for good or evil—is what the father can not bear...
...The enemy is, in a word, the mind of man...
...Not one of the teachers called to the stand in San Francisco would testify...
...They can produce reports and films of student riots incited by Communists who are not arrested for incitement to riot...
...It was the panoramic photograph of the demonstrators against the House Un-American Activities Committee being washed out of the San Francisco City Hall by fire hoses in the hands of policemen wearing black jackets and helmets...
...The reason I liked it is that, at my advanced age I was one of the dupes in the "Peace March...
...Four to six hours of footage was reduced to forty-five minutes and doctored throughout to bring separate incidents together, reverse the sequences, and eliminate altogether the students' story and the police assault...
...The San Francisco judge who dismissed the riot charges against them said that they were "for the most part clean-cut American college students who will within the next few years enter into the business and professional worlds, and many of them, I am sure, will become leaders in their respective fields...
...The white background lent itself especially well to detail, and many newspapers used it as a full-page shot...
...They will survive the bumps and the beating and the jail...
...deplorable...
...The sons still have confidence that they can get their way by rejection without revolution...
...not when youth has become infatuated, as these students are with justice...
...but there is beginning (just beginning, to be sure) to rise on the campuses a generation of young men and women who will not accept the inch-at-a-time — forward or backward — respectability that offers them good jobs, a lifetime of futile letters to their Congressmen, and a constitutionality under which the HUAC is constitutional...
...just the reverse...
...They could lose McCarthy and survive, and, as long as they survived, McCarthy, though he was beaten and gone, was still winning...
...Anti-intellectualism was what the Founding Fathers were most afraid of when they debated the merits of democratic government...
...The Walk—"March" was Mr...
...Hoover's emendation—was sponsored by the American Friends Service Committee, the Unitarian Fellowship, the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, and the World Affairs Committee of the International, Interracial Commission of American Baptists, and by no other persons or organizations...
...But the use of all these weapons brings on heart attacks because the elders know that their authority is gone, and they therefore go wild and exert more violence than their elderly condition permits them to...
...Hoover and the Committee and the police did not ask for the Communists who duped them...
...The judge did not ask that the Communists who duped them be produced...
...All that we can incite is ourselves...
...What I liked best in the Hoover report was this minor libel: "Arrangements were made to have the demonstrators join a party-sponsored [italics mine] 'Peace March' on Saturday, May 14, at the conclusion of the hearings...
...And who incited them...
...Hoover, Fishman, Brown, and Brodsky for another decade, and the Russians bypass us for the moon, these students will be doing something somewhere in America...
...we don't need the Un-American Activities Committee...
...They are revolting against their elders who, like former Senator Kennedy, deplored the misery of our culture without being able to do anything about it even though they held the highest positions...
...Hoover and the Committee say they were...
...Its deadly message was inescapable: the American student is rejecting his old folks and the forms which alone maintain their clutch on the world as it was...
...at which point, "cry up their governors as much as you will for sons of Jupiter, let them be sacred or divine, descended or authorized from Heaven, give them out for whom or what you please—the same will happen...
...Who's your friend...
...in America because it was spectacular, in the rest of the world because it indicated that the American university student was at last becoming a political animal...
...Box 1021, Berkeley, will send you its analysis of Communist Target— Youth...
...Then who committed the felony of incitement to riot...
...The Student Civil Liberties Union, P.O...
...But though the film was used effectively to run up tension, especially in small towns, it, like Mr...
...Standard Oil of California bought ten copies...
...Both of these versions," says Aristotle, thumbing through the Law of Contradiction, "may be false...
...Here we are fortunate that it takes a less terrible form...
...What they do doesn't matter...
...The Committee obtained all the television film of the "riot" by subpoena...
...He goes crazy and in the end destroys himself, and the son picks himself up from the ground and goes his wayward way...
...Local Republican candidates furnished the film for use in their campaigns, sometimes dubbing themselves in for an introduction...
...Their analysis of the film can be obtained from the Bay Area Student Committee for the Abolition of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, 1732 Francisco Street, Berkeley 3, California...
...Those of us arthritic professors and preachers who support the young in revolt are trying to hang on to our youth or recover it...
...Former Governor Goodie Knight of California, showing Operation Abolition on his Los Angeles TV show, said: ". . .But we will not be cowed by mobs and we will not be misled by stupid propaganda and the screams of young men and women who have been misled, first by their professors and, second, and let me say while I'm on the subject that it wasn't only the University of California, it was my own alma mater, Stanford University, and San Jose State and San Francisco State, where members of the faculty disgraced themselves by inciting the very thing you saw on the screen tonight...
...They still hold power by virtue of the forms of power, which they can use to kill a Chessman but not a generation...
...The counter-offensive opened with Mr...
...Were the clean-cut totally unaware dupes incited to riot, as Mr...
...Last May 14 a spectacular news photograph was published all over the world...
...Just as the struggle for civil rights in the South is passing to the young from the palsied hands of their gradualist elders, so the struggle for civil liberty in the country as a whole is passing...
...We know that the Un-American Activities Committee will not be abolished by the old men in Congress...
...I thought I'd drop through the floor when they introduced him as Thomas Jefferson...
...Louis Post-Dispatch and the Des Moines Register and Tribune (and The Progressive), and the American Federation of Teachers, and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, and the Young Democratic Clubs of America (and Young Democrat John F. Kennedy...
...Hoover's report, was not an unqualified success...
...now the Congressmen provide them...
...Nor did Harry Bridges...
...We know that the FBI will not be restrained by the old men in Congress...
...According to Mr...
...According to the narrator of Operation Abolition, "Among the Communist leaders who had an active part in the San Francisco demonstrations was Harry Bridges, who you see here being escorted out of City Hall by police officials moments before the rioting broke out...
...The legislative investigation, designed and often exercised for the achievement of high ends, has too frequently been used by the Nation and the States as a means for effecting the disgrace and degradation of private persons...
...But Archie and Merle were there because they were subpoenaed by the Committee after the students had run an advertisement saying, "Where are the Communists...
...Revolt against really unbearable conditions, under capitalism, under Communism, under anything else, is its own leadership, and the elderly persons and organizations who may think they incite it are the counterpart of the man who ran through the streets of Paris during the Commune saying, "Which way did the mob go...
...without, indeed, even being able to vote against Senator McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover...
...The TV stations have never been paid for the use of the subpoenaed film...
...If the country survives the attack of Messrs...
...They are toppling rottenness in the American South...
...In California the Democrats ducked for cover, refusing to appear on panels discussing the film...
...But the governments the students have been toppling around the world were rotten governments...
...maybe just because Mr...
...They reject it as it is, and us as its symbol...
...At the awful prospect the dupes grinned in the dock...
...It is the movement of youth...
...nobody made it or produced it or copyrighted it...
...I said, "You don't say," and my psychiatrist concluded: "You will have to excuse me for not having used any two-dollar-and-a-half words in explaining this to you, but you aren't paying for them, and what you don't pay for you don't get...
...There were Communists involved, two old San Francisco wild men, Archie Brown and Merle Brod-sky, and the narrator of the Committee's film of the event, Operation Abolition, says, "Archie Brown, second in command in the California Communist Party . . ." and there is Archie on the screen...
...Government Printing Office, Washington...
...That deadly newspaper picture remained intact, and may itself have suggested that what was needed was a picture...
...Hoover's special report, Communist Target—Youth (U.S...
...It moved the leaders of the student movement — who might otherwise have gone back to their books — to throw themselves full force into the nationwide crusade against the Committee...
...you arc simply trying to hold on to your own youth...
...J. Edgar Hoover and the Un-American Activities Committee affect to believe that the students are dupes of the Communists, "totally unaware," says Mr...
...I said, "You don't say," and my psychiatrist went on: "The father beating his wayward son and then dropping dead from the exertion is the picture you must see...
...But that one picture— there were others, of girls beaten bloody, of four policemen attacking one student—put their backs to the wall...
...Hoover has been around too long...
...Hoover and the Committee say there was...
...The experiment could not be more interesting than it is right now...
...Even if they turned to fascism, they would have to have the leadership of youth...
...The enemy is the teaching profession, disgraceful professors...
...Last year the papers refused to print the names of those subpoenaed, but many teachers were known to have been called...
...The movement at Berkeley and on campuses across the country was and is its own leadership...
...I said to Jefferson, and Jefferson, who still talks as if it were the year 1804, said: "No experiment can be more interesting than that we are now trying, and which we trust will end in establishing the fact that man may be governed by reason and truth...
...And what do you think of it all...
...Hoover's Communist Target—Youth, "Order had been restored [after the "riot"] when Harry Bridges, president of the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union, suddenly appeared on the scene...
...No Communist, known or unknown, was arrested...

Vol. 25 • March 1961 • No. 3


 
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