THE SPRING OF OUR DISCONTENT: ITS ETIOLOGY
Tyrell, Emmett Jr.
A NEW FASCISM? H. R. Trevor-Roper I have often been asked, in the last twenty years, whether I could forecast an effective revival of Nazism in Germany. I have always answered, no;...
...And — oh yes — as one distinguished luminary from the New University Conference remarked, "We radicalized a lot of students...
...Though this is a responsible course for the majority, it is not altogether certain that it is the course most responsible, for it will allow the radicals to continue their manipulation of student government's synthetic authority and assure continued loss of private funds (now exceeding three million dollars), state funds and serious faculty...
...Students grew bewildered...
...Even the campus statesmen in their campaigns for high public office tippy-toed aroimd the issue, opting for the usual beauty contest...
...The intelligent majority will accord them very little attention...
...they wanted the students to lose and become disillusioned, confused and ripe for seduction to mindless radicalism, where the seduced discard the sticky business of thinking...
...Tyrrell is the editor-in-chief of The Alternative and political editor for The National Tattler...
...Duped by the epibiotic trend setters and craven rhetoric from authorities who had lost the will to govern, most of the student leaders considered our generation's will invincible...
...Another article in this magazine reports how the professor from NUC's game affected those who pay his salary...
...he at least partly physically destroyed himself...
...To this the only alternative is for Helmke to reject the radicals, galvanize moderate support and pursue a new policy with state government...
...Then as spring suffused the campus with its tranquilizing greens and pastels, all hell broke loose...
...Was it all a Communist plot...
...Democrats nor Republicans, care to subsidize draft dodgers, playboys or whatever other dream world figures they imagine exist down here...
...The accuracy of their vision matters not at all...
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...that's the name of the game, isn't it...
...None of them seemed to know who holds ultimate power at a state university...
...Ultimately Helmke can protect I. U. from last spring's misfortunes, for he has the resources and intelligence — we all hope he has the will...
...James Hitchcock in the New York Times has uttered the ineffable...
...Even I. U. contributed some blood in its now legendary Rites of Spring...
...Throughout our time of troubles, not one student leader attempted to analyze the genesis of the fee increase, nor the probable success of student activism...
...Let the laws of Indiana govern students...
...Your only obliga servative Mainstream tion as a member is to accept 3 books from within 30 days for full refund plus extra cash to cover my return postage...
...Indeed, with such differences, it has already occurred...
...Not that this was unknown to all I. U. students...
...In the words of Corporal Rudd they "manufactured the issue...
...Any doubts over the effectiveness of the boycott should have vanished with the first whiff of smoke from the library...
...FREE and enroll me in among some 50 to be offered by the Club the Conservative Book over the next 15 months, after which you City/State-_Zip_ Club...
...While they fussed about the campus, confusion increased and an amazing fear spread amongst student leaders...
...The University's legitimate domain is education, not politics...
...yet other student leaders understood the situation precisely...
...I agree to buy 3 may resign at any time...
...But though this is their ostensible goal it is not, alas, what our campus activists really desire...
...A campus politician is, when he can affect the lives of serious students, an annoyance, and the whole rickety machinery of campus government should be chucked...
...Mr...
...Student politicians should have held their political antermae high enough to sense this...
...Hitchcock thinks that in doing our own things and all that, we are really being bilked by fashion designers and charlatans, exploited by the media, and rendered just a little foolish by Madison Avenue's bright boys...
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...Some of us wondered why...
...Realizing the political dimensions of their predicament, student leaders should have assumed the top hat of the diplomat rather than the attire of the Hun...
...The university, as Sidney Hook has asserted, is not and should not be a political community...
...Jones...
...A rock singer's balad may strike a resonant chord with his audience, but that does not make him an intelligent social critic...
...No, the name of the game is "self-delusion...
...could it be that we are not the chosen generation...
...Hysterically, little herds of students stampeded from office to office, onto the Capitol and out into the provinces...
...Surely many of those lusting for disruption realized this as did more thoughtful students like Ros Stovall, Larry Lehmer and perhaps Helmke...
...Most likely our generation dragged the entire campus along on their little binge because an uprising at Purdue reminded them of it, because nowadays campus disruption has replaced the racoon coat, because the faculty failed to dissuade students from their sequent foolishness and because imbiciles like Greg Scott* and Kerry Kaplan, in their frenzy to etch themselves into I. U. history, had divided moderate students, isolated Paul Helmke (on whose coattails they rode) from more seasoned campus leaders, and made his office a supple medium for obsessed little busybodies like David Cahill and his Hitler Youth...
...In reforming our incredibly complicated society, we are all just a little over our heads...
...Most likely not...
...and even if all the same circumstances should recur, in the same order (which is inconceivable), the emotional content would not be communicable, unchanged, to another generation: for the identical pattern of pressures and the same intellectual climate would not recur...
...And naturally the editors of the Daily Stupid, giddy with the excitement any slope-head journalist feels when exhorting his readers to a Spanish-American War, had no time to *The unfortunate Scott in his mania for destruction was utterly thorough, for' after pointlessly destroying Impact...
...and although a knowledge of the original fascism may help us to understand the new phenomenon, the precise form in which they have been resumed could not,I think, have been predicted...
...What does matter is that most of the citizens of Indiana are uneasy about happenings at I. U., and upon hearing that one million dollars of their taxes had been cremated in the Main Library, that students (sporting red arm bands) had quit their classes for rallies and a march on the Governor's office, and that some faculty supported this activity, their uneasiness evolved into disgust...
...You can get a free copy by joining Gentlemen: Please send postpaid The Conservative Mainstream, by Frank I I Send The ConArlington House's affiliated company, the S. Meyer...
...report or analyze Stovall's intelligent plan for relieving financially distressed students...
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...Well, unless our generation is profoundly more intelligent than its self-ordained shamans manifest it to be, life in the 'seventies will prove about as dreary as ever, though without the discomforts of open universities, sanctioned dissent and democracy...
...Teachers and oracles who fail to educate us to this stuffy fact are derelict in their calling and would benefit society more by joining the relief roles...
...Elements of them would recur, here and there, in new situations: for some of the elements are permanent features of German history, and some are predictable responses to recurrent social pressures...
...Forming committees and delivering manifestoes, they made dithering idiots of themselves, for throughout those magnificent days, through all their panel discussions, committee meetings and editorial torrents, not one student, administrator or faculty member mentioned that a resolute state legislature in cadence with Governor Whitcomb A) had final control of I. U.'s budget and B) held absolutely no sympathy for I. U.'s tax endowed playground...
...Nevertheless the twenty-year-old social critics enjoyed a long and gaudily celebrated run last season, providing profitable employment for cub reporters, fly-by-night publishers, Hollywood mullahs, free-lance mountebanks, cops, etc., making ita nourishing year for all society's parasites...
...So the campus was littered with slogans and junk (costing some $60,000 to remove), buildings were barbecued, people were effigously burnt and a peaceful boycott was celebrated...
...The thought is positively chilling...
...Shouldn't the ne w Administration be guided by the ideas - and ideals — in this major statement ''%/ > of the conservative position...
...They might survive, as a kind of dead deposit, in aging minds...
...The fee increase was a political reflex, the result of a national budgetary constriction on education, and in Indiana the manifestation of a growing uneasiness over that university's noisiest product, namely you and me...
...Why did not one candidate inform the electorate that he would soothe I. U.'s sores with boycotts, amateurish rallies and red arm bands...
...If you prefer this plan, please check the appropriate box in coupon and mall today...
...But the Yapping Left had oozed into student government, barring the Stovalls and Lehrners from its reputedly bipartisan student committees...
...Robinson or Mr...
...This fall these fascist youth and their thalidomide intellectuals will "manufacture an issue" (probably exploiting Negro grievances) to dupe students into disrupting the University...
...For this reason, the new fascism, when it occurs, will occur with radical differences...
...Is it possible that in spite of our genius and purity we are all fated for eventual roles as Mrs...
...H. R. Trevor-Roper I have often been asked, in the last twenty years, whether I could forecast an effective revival of Nazism in Germany...
...Before his boycott and public speaking tour ended, he had suffered a complete breakdown, was placed in the health center and apparently is still uncertain of his future...
...The arrogant cult of youth, the nihil ism, the intolerance of dissent, the rejection of rational argument, the delibrate invocation of force to justify counter-force — all these have recently been resumed.* But they have been resumed in classes and circumstances very different from those of the 1920s and 1930s...
...because I have never believed that the old doctrines could revive in the old form...
...Last spring the will to govern palsied in every organ of authority, allowing the left's perpetual malcontents to arrogate authority and speak for a community of thirty thousand...
...For as the youth rebellion continues to beget violence and thoughtlessness, it is assuring its own defeat, subjecting even its worthier values to cynicism and inaugurating an era of cultural if not economic depression...
...With rare acuity Irving Kristol has remarked that students cannot reform the universities because they simply lack the power...
...But the fusion of all these elements ina particular dynamic pattern was caused, in the past, by the particular unrepeatable experience of one generation...
...O * Since delivering this lecture,I have seen an issue of "Beaver" (5 December 1968), described as the "Newspaper of the London School of Economics Students' Union...
...From that point on, regardless of who set the fire, state-wide solicitude for impoverished students froze...
...But most of them did not understand their situation...
...Why in all the noble oratory did the statesmen not threaten retaliation against the evil forces behind our fee increase...
...The campus media effectively banned realistic discussion of the students' predicament...
...Neither Continued on Page 312 TYRRELL (Continued from Page 305) Gary steelworkers nor Bedford stonecutters...
...price plus shipping...
...This uneasiness, nurtured throughout the sixties by a yearly injection of scandals culminating in Guy Loftman's brutishness, has grown to a diapsonal refrain against I. U.'s accelerating budget...
...It is shipped automatically and the Club charges your account...
...H. R. Trevor-Roper, in a Lecture at the London School of Economics, "The Past and the Present" (1969) . Tke Spring of Ou r T)iscontent: Its C^tiology R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...In the winter Indiana's Board of Trustees hadraised tuition almost vertically (68%) and nota squeak was heard...
...If not pleased, I may return book Conservative Book Club...
...True revolution or even reform can not emanate from the universities, for though the universities are many things, they are not crucial to the American system...
...Rather than autonomy from university jurisdiction, they want the imiversity to offer sanctuary from which they might dabble at revolution and the coercion of their betters...
...No less an apotheosizer of the youth rebellion than Richard Goodwin has recently asseverated that "history has a lot of brilliant twenty-year-old poets, but very few brilliant social critics in their twenties...
...That some jejune academics and administrators, ignorant of their social role, attempt to make it an uplifted precinct does not corrupt the fact that hardly one-third of the I. U. (or almost any university) community ever bothers with campus politics, and but a few hundred ever partake of its bounties...
...and I can add that the obscene and vindictive jovimalistic style of Julius Streicher's notorious anti-semitic periodical "Der Stunner" has also been resimied — though against new scapegoats...
...to wit, our generation, that tinglingly aware generation set on ushering in the Age of Aquarius, is — lo and behold — being duped...
...At I. U. they have also shown they lack the intelligence...
...My payment of $8 is enclosed...
Vol. 3 • September 1969 • No. 2
