The Hidden Revolution
Stipp, John L.
are provoked--but, in the end, we go together, down through the ages. Meanwhile, those who disagree on this issue should keep arguing. On this perhaps evanescent, perhaps long-term, issue,...
...Hell, if they can't figure it out for themselves then what good would it do for me to bother...
...Sigmund, Miller's protagonist, is a celebrated novelist, published abroad, banned at home, who has written a public letter to the United Nations which has so ineensed the government that he must finally choose between exile and a trial for treason...
...At least in this instance the bumper stickers that stridently read "AmcricamLove It or Leave It" probably did and still do represent the sentiments of the country at large...
...Those that involved blacks, women and sexual attitudes and behavior are generally accepted as bona fide revolutions...
...On this perhaps evanescent, perhaps long-term, issue, persons oriented toward two different poles tend to divide...
...What is your reaction to such conclusions...
...They just don't believe that this feeling, real and deep running as it is, enjoins them and their fellow countrymen to behave as though they are God's chosen people destined to lead lesser breeds into an American paradise...
...Adults saw youth go hirsute, adopt androgynous attire, revel in rock music madness...
...Against the conventional image of the male, the priesthood was a sign of contradiction...
...Young men simply did not want to fight and die in a far off land in a war of obscure origins and purposes...
...your back and waste all the time and effort that you could use to build yourself a new life...
...Those who argue in terms of "equality of power" prove their position not to be Christian, as do those who believe ordination makes any male--or the male in general~superior...
...The phasingout process, begun around 1965, did indeed somewhat level off...
...Truly like death and taxes, it is actually or potentially always with us, an ineradicable part of the human experience...
...They don't participate in dangerous acts of civil resistance that lead to arrest and imprisonment...
...It hurts me because I didn't really do anything to help, but I don't think I could do anything...
...Their behavior was indeed the behavior of idealist revolutionaries...
...Some of Miller's most recent plays---Alter the Fall, The Price---end in muted affirmation, but not since The Crucible in 1953, in which John Proctor elects death over false confession , has the playwright written so romantic a curtain for a play seriously concerned with moral choices...
...But the peace revolution of the Sixties is dormant, not dead...
...I am Commonweal: 429 doing what I would have all people do...
...If anybody in the States has any kind of head on his shoulders - - i f he's at all open--he's got to see that there are reasons for this...
...He came to believe that the refugees did not leave the country "merely as a reaction to the draft, military service in Vietnam or the war in Indo-China [though] these . . . were the immediate provocations...
...The generous pay raises and almost overly generous fringe benefits have naturally appealed to many blue collar and black youth suffering from a severe and sustained freeze in the civilian job market...
...Mont: I hope so, but I wouldn't go out of my way to persuade anyone to my thinking...
...That's what's wrong with people--they can't think for themselves...
...the Wednesday drill saw young men in uniform all over the place...
...But the overall condition of the reserve officers training program does not support "saved" claims...
...Rick: I don't think it was cowardly...
...They too often saw their children tune in to the mystic vibes of the world of hallucinogenic drugs...
...They lifted eyebrows as some took up communal lifestyles that violated traditional morals and mores...
...Adrian, an American novelist, ill-at-ease with his own success, who turns to this beleaguered country in search of something--perhaps, as Maya says, limitations to his freedom...
...Marcus, an older novelist, who spent five years in prison in Stalinist days but has since made an uncomfortable accommodation with authority and who is jealous of Sigmund as artist and lover...
...They saw flower children bedeck the rifles of national guardsmen with bright garlands, and Weathermen blow up buildings...
...How do you react to the charge that your action was one of 'cowardice'--that if you had been sincere you would have remained in the United States either to accept the consequences or to attempt to change U. S. policies...
...It's unpatriotic to them, but I've decided I'm no longer going to be one of them...
...The idealism of youth has been weakened first by the macing and clubbing of the Nixon law-and-order regime, and then by the moral weariness that follows every season of well-doing...
...As far as the unpatriotic stuff, that's part of the whole sickness...
...Except for an unrepresentative few Amerika-haters--and, as we have seen, those who felt forced to flee in Vietnam days for reasons of conscience and convictions--the youth of America feel the pull of patriotism...
...When even the liberalized draft was suspended in favor of an all-volunteer army the ranks of war-protesters thinned almost to the vanishing point...
...At the Ohio State University, for example, the president's office announced this Fall an increase in RO enrollment...
...the sadness you feel for someone who is insane...
...It was simply a decision to start life somewhere else and not kill people...
...The four main characters in The Archbishop's Ceiling do not act out of political necessity alone...
...I don't feel heroic, and I wouldn't buy much of that...
...The United States Congress seemed, even during the rolling Sixties, to reflect this sentiment...
...The famous New York City Civil War riots against the draft were not riots against war per se, but against Lincoln and Lincoln's notion of what the Union ought to be...
...But in the following decades, after a series of revolutionary flare-ups, new repressions--"seasons of dismay'--and renewed flareups, the revolution finally overpowered where it did not completely destroy the monarchical principle that was the main target of the French revolutionists and that had for centuries set the tone and general conditions of life for western European society...
...There is no reason for that...
...Even more telling, for those who argue its superficiality, the peace movement at no time achieved ground swell dimensions among the general populace...
...Historians have no calculus that enables them to determine the precise phase-marks of large-scale human behavior, but often they can reasonably approximate them...
...Somewhere in the 1960s young people found themselves nurturing modes of thought productive of values and behavior fundamentally alien to revered, established ways of life...
...Wally: They probably wouldn't think it so heroic if they had to do it because it simply becomes a process of going and settling here because it is that easy to do...
...On the contrary, the military establishment grew and continues to grow ever larger (there are today more general officers in the armed forces than there were during World War II...
...But at neither time were their numbers very large nor their views supported by a substantial portion of the public...
...Objection may be made to judging as "extended" a series of actions covering no more than a half dozen yea...
...Some people had the idea I should have stayed and gone to prison, but I'm not cut out to languish in some crummy military jail...
...I have different values and I don't share the values of my culture, but as an individual, and in my order of priorities, what I'm doing is right and proper...
...Diametrically opposed to each other, both theses made frustrating sense...
...Implicated in his dilemma and his choice are three friends or former friends: Maya, an actress blacklisted in films because of a speech she once made at the Cannes Film Festival, who loves and is loved by Sigmund although their affair has come to an end to protect the novelist's wife...
...I don't accept the concept of country...
...For example, the military code of justice has nothing to do with the Constitution...
...Restoration" reigned...
...You have to say, 'Alright, I feel guilty in the sense I'm committing a crime, but there are reasons for both...
...Like their forebears, the adult generations (of both middle and post-middle ages) believe that war is an unchangeable part of human existence...
...The whole question has the ambivalence that once surrounded the question of how the universe was created...
...It could be heroic in the sense that some people are outright persecuted for resisting the whole Selective Service system, and put into prison because they don't want to kill...
...Bill: Whenever you do something which is very much against the mores and values of your culture, you invariably get a guilty feeling...
...In Italy, where I once studied, urchins in the streets shouted "petticoatsF' at priests, who always wore "skirts" (cassocks...
...It is rather to say that both motives moved the dissenters, with revolutionary idealism being the dominant one...
...youthful dissenters, Congress at no time showed signs of dismantling the Pentagon...
...Thus gauged, the opening phase of the peace revolution may be said to have achieved movement status by 1965...
...Some day historians undoubtedly will be able to speak more or less flatly on the present question...
...To argue that the new army is as large as the old is a kind of special pleading...
...Reactionary "conservatism" is in the air...
...They share, in Jerome Frank's words, a "world-wide hypnotic fixation on violence as the ultimate arbiter of conflict"--and therefore agree with their buttoned-down crises managers that there is an unending need to negotiate world problems only, or at least basically, from fire-power strength...
...But even granting the sincerity of the rampagers, was not their real target cessation of fighting in Vietnam rather than abolition of the war system...
...The equivocal nature of the Archbishop's ceiling (Adrian likens the possible hidden microphone to a watchful God whose existence is in Commonweal: 431...
...Hoyle and a number of other astro-physicists argued for the steady-state theory...
...Political leaders tiptoe around ground once prepared for new frontiers and great societies...
...Their whole logic is disoriented...
...Some Americans would consider you a hero while others would use such adjectives as 'disloyal,' 'treasonous,' etc...
...Miller's play, which is set in an unnamed European capital in which the line between literary and political acts ]has disappeared, is timely, then, but unhappily it would have been timely almost any week since the end of World War II...
...the characters often talk directly to the light fixture--going on record, so to speak--instead of to one another...
...Also revealing the movement's revolutionary nature is the duration of its active, agitation phase...
...Until then the Gamows and the Hoyles of the history fraternity will argue their own interpretations: The following "refugee" evidence, obviously subjective, is offered in support of the peace revolution position...
...They agree, too, that America's famous silent majority and the Congress it elects are firmly opposed to serious tampering with our present macho military machine...
...The available data, in truth, are sufficient neither in quantity nor objectiveness to sustain either position beyond reasonable doubt...
...It comes from an academician who studied the new life conditions and attitudes of a few of the young men who fled to Canada during the Vietnam War (and who, paradoxically, insists in his study that they were certainly not revolutionaries...
...they are moved in various degrees by artistic vanity, by professional jealousy, by sexual desire or resentment, by fl'iendship or the longing for it...
...the contrary is surely closer to the truth...
...Several of the architects of the nuclear bomb had, as is generally known, strong second thoughts...
...In that controversy Gamow and his followers argued for the explosion or "Big Bang" .theory...
...Other colleges, of course, have other ranges...
...I came up here not on the fear of being killed, but a fear of killing...
...The common feeling seemed to be that although war is deeply deplorable it is nS less deeply human...
...more did so in Word War II...
...The Bourbons returned, autocracy revived, revolutionaries either quietly licked their wounds or escaped into romantic dream worlds...
...But fourth fronters believe that although such evidence is real enough, it is overbalanced by conditions and developments destined to mold tomorrow for all their being little perceived today...
...No one knows how many refugees of this sort there are...
...THE HIDDEN REVOLUTION JOHN L. STIPP The anti-war movement was more than a passing protest The cultural explosion of the Sixties erupted along four fronts...
...That day, fourth fronters insist, is closer than our so-called hard-nosed realists can ever know...
...It's much clearer up here on a Canadian stool how deathly ill it is...
...I wouldn't kill for my country.* }oe: To people like that I can only offer my sympathy...
...During the American Revolution many Tories fled to Canada and other countries, but not because of anti-war feelings...
...One of them, Albert Einstein, said, "The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe...
...The assumption is that there is a microphone hidden in the ornate chandelier...
...but across the country the level of change probably has not even approached the "saved" mark...
...When the lottery system liberalized the draft the peace movement visibly weakened...
...Reasonable arguments support both positions...
...Rise of a wadess world--hardly...
...You're a subject of the Army or whatever...
...On the sidelines (literally, since most of his scenes are played standing at the edge of the stage talking on the telephone) is Martin, a critic who is also errand boy for the forces who would destroy an artist he admires...
...Two facets of the new pattern lie at the heart of the hidden revolution...
...In short, by showing nothing like the mass actions of the Sixties, the historic record underscores their historic breakthrough nature...
...Many more years were needed before a permanent substitute was found--the Third Republic and its successors--but the crucial, revolutionary breakthrough was of relatively brief duration...
...In recent years the collection of new data has allowed Gamow to claim, and most astrophysicists to agree that his Big Bang hypothesis has passed beyond serious argument into the realm of probable "law...
...In 1955-1956 nearly 70 percent of the male students were enrolled in ROTC...
...Great strides in the liberation of women, yes...
...A third condition marks, for the fourth fronters, the Sixties' strike as truly revolutionary...
...what it did not add, however, was that even with the increase less than 4 percent of the male population was involved in the program...
...Once you're in the military you lose all rights as a citizen...
...For one thing, the war-protesters were more sincere than self-serving (as they were in the earlier race struggles that they spearheaded...
...A then and now comparison from the vantage point of my own campus is illustrative of the change...
...Rather his view, he said, could be summed up in the (none too grammatical) words of one of his friends in Canada: The people coming up here are not hardcore radicals by any means, or people who left the States because it's the greatest political move of their lives --just guys who are fed up with the old system-often they are fellows who haven't thought it through very much in moral or ethical terms, but people who realize something is drastically wrong--sometimes guys who can't understand what is wrong--people who are trying to find a new life...
...They fled to get away from an independent "Patriot" society that had severed the English bonds they loved...
...Apart from the technical question of whether a professional army is a more effective fighting force than a "citizen" army, there is the larger question of what the change means concerning young people's feelings about the war system itself...
...At the end of the play, Sigmund forces Marcus to voice his support of the UN letter in a room that is probably bugged and, having decided to stay, Sigmund, then Maya and Adrian, each carrying part of Sigmund's new novel, go out to face probable arrest, certain danger...
...Those who tend to emphasize the incarnational structure of Christianity, tend to believe that the singular ordination of males is a typical and critical lesson in how to find transcendence within the bonds and the limits of the flesh...
...They've got to question this and see what kind of an effect it's having on their young people...
...Unlike their forebears, they are fundamentally one-worlders...
...Those who believe in the reality of the fourth front agree that the lottery draft and its subsequent suspension weakened the drive of youth against both the war and the war system...
...Within a span of five years---1789-1794 --the Old Regime that had existed across the centuries was torn asunder...
...Dennis: I wish I had come when I was eighteen...
...We are today roughly where western Europe was in the years after Waterloo...
...It would be nice if my family could accept my point o[ view, and I'm sorry they couldn't, but I think eventually they will see my viewpoint...
...Even the Korean War, least supported of American wars up to the Vietnam War, provoked no mass marches on the home front and no large-scale desertions on the fighting front...
...If I feel a little guilty about it, well then, I have to accept that...
...Admittedly the evidence here is not the kind that trial lawyers are happy with...
...I'm really very dismayed about my country...
...It's unnecessary...
...For Miller, presumably, the romantic choice is the only practical one, although the case in the new play is not as black-and-white as that in The Crucible...
...The action takes place in Marcus's apartment in a building which was once the Archbishop's palace...
...somewhere between 60,000 and 100,000 is not an improbable figure...
...Many youth, far from being so minded, are ready to test these socalled verities...
...The hidden peace revolution is countering this drift, though surface conditions belie it...
...I don't accept the concept that one owes something to a country because you were born there...
...Today, as in post-Napoleonic times, a season of dismay is upon us...
...sadly so, perhaps, but so nonetheless...
...But this overlooks an elementary fact of revolutionary life, namely, that initial, pivotal revolutionary acts never extend much beyond five or six years...
...Other evidence, still far from concrete and conclusive, points to the revolutionary nature of the peace movement...
...In that year it prompted nationwide demonstrations of various kinds--marches, vigils, teach-ins, etc...
...That the priesthood should continue to be a sign of contradiction to the power-oriented female stands not in the least outside the ancient and honorable tradition...
...This is natural, and I think you have to deal with it...
...But by far the most significant revolutionary force at work was and is a state o f mind...
...And at the same time youth became aware, however dimly, of the mounting frustration their elders felt as they faced problems beyond their ability to manage or often even to recognize...
...But the rhythm of revolution is at work...
...Profound changes in racial relations, yes...
...I'm going to become a Canadian citizen, so I'm no longer 'unpatriotic.' The real patriots in the States are people like Senator Hughes and the Resistance who are trying to keep the United States, and the Constitution...
...Many youth can and do...
...Sigmund's decision is reached during a long, second act in which the crosstalk of mixed motivation obscures the neat sacrificial line that John Proctor walks so surely...
...S _9 _9 "Do you have any regrets over leaving the country...
...For some five years hundreds of thousands of young people and their adult allies rampaged for peace...
...COME HOME TO MAYA 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 THE STAGE The day after I came back from the Kennedy Center and a look at Arthur Miller's first new play in five years, The Archbishop's Ceiling, the New York Times carried a story about Pavel Kohout's loss of his home in Prague, the most recent move by the government in its attempt to isolate the playwright from the intellectual and theatrical world outside Czechoslovakia...
...but he uses the term in a far more general sense than it is used in the context of this article...
...Vaino: I can't accept it as a brave move or a sacrifice, but it's something that I had to do regardless...
...The peace revolution, or fourth front, is not...
...What they did not see, and apparently still do not see, is the profound rejection of a traditionally bound, limited outlook that is unable to catch even fleetingly the emerging vision of a new society too humane to tolerate longer the use of war as an instrument of national policy...
...Fourth Fronters believe that it signifies repudiation of that system...
...I could go back and talk to a hundred people and convince them, but somebody else will come along and do exactly the reverse...
...That person doesn't realize they're insane because they're so far gone...
...This is not to say, of course, that the youthful demonstrators were unfeeling about their own prospects of being given a gun and sent to the rice paddies of Vietnam...
...They feel hurt sometimes and they don't know why they feel hurt, They feel pushed around, but they don't know why they feel pushed around...
...It follows that they don't believe that we, or any other people, are a 8 July 1977" 430 sacred community accountable only to ourselves...
...Supporting evidence is found in the historic record or, more precisely, what is not found in the historic record...
...Most adults cannot envision life in terms that do not allow them to believe that their nation is and must behave as a completely sovereign unit...
...And the percentage of overall enrollment in ROTC courses had dropped from around 70 percent to under 5 percent...
...I think the United States is very sick, and it's a sad thing to see...
...The wave of the past laps around us...
...For one thing, many Americans see the anti-war movement of the Sixties as a passing protest of youth, basically prompted by self-serving interests...
...From abroad many of them actively supported the British cause...
...It is a scandal to the enlightened of every age...
...They don't work for and take part in mass demonstrations that invite popular denunciation and reduction of employment opportunities, to say nothing of police clubbings and macing...
...Serious rending of the fig-leaf way of life, yes...
...However distressing it may prove to flag-waving patriots, the war system is fini.~hed...
...It is the protester's blunt negation of war as an instrument of national policy or, more simply put, the rejection of mass killing as a way of settling international disputes...
...Lord knows you're going to need the time...
...The academician, Kenneth F. Emerick of Clarion College in Pennsylvania, inter.viewed a number of the exiles and published his findings in a slim volume entitled War Resisters Canada (Knox, 8 July 1977:#28 Pennsylvania Free Press, 1972...
...How, then, can even dedicated pacifists insist that a peace revolution was generated during the Sixties, and is at work today...
...In general, those who emphasize the liberations of Christianity, its impulse to free us from various earthly constraints, tend to believe that the ordination of women will lead us to a higher plane of spiritual awareness, beyond the confines of mere flesh...
...In the generation confrontation that followed a new value pattern emerged...
...People who basically seek to serve their own interests don't Commonweal: 427 openly flout honored traditiona,~1o do it...
...The same is true of the Russian Revolution (1917-1922...
...In World War I some young men registered as conscientious objectors...
...8 _9 _9 Bill: This is a very important part of my reason for coming . . . . The fact that so many thousands have said that what the States has to offer and what they are doing just isn't acceptable to me--I've got to look for something better...
...Admittedly the early signs were none too clear...
...Last year (academic 1975-1976) one had to be on special alert to see them anywhere except on the drill ground itself...
...The suspension of the draft and the development of a volunteer army are further evidence of profoundly changed conditions...
...In the mid-seventies, it is true, ROTC advocates claimed the decline of the Sixties over and "RO" saved...
...Despite the noisy antics of I I JOHN L. STIPP, proJessor emeritus o/ history at Knox College in Illinois, has edited works on Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia and is senior author o[ the text, Rise and Development of Western Civilization...
...Tobey: My sadness is that my country is sick...
...Emerick's interviews included these questions and responses: "Do you think your action will have any influence in the United States...
...Despite endless talk about, and solemn studies made of, the widening generation gap, most of their elders did not then and do not now sense, let alone understand, either the nature or real meaning of this metamorphosis...
...We might as well get used to the divisions...
...It was a personal decision--not against the United States...
...This is not to say, of course, that their minds are closed to the notion of either the reality or the propriety of patriotic sentiments...
...Then Metternichean reaction was busy turning back the cultural clock...
...The conflicting motivations are further confused by the uncertainty implicit in th e play's title...
...This makes the very conceptmrevolution against war-silly...
...Typically, Christianity makes high what was low, and low what was high, and operates by standards opposite to worldly standards...
...Tomorrow's world is the world of the children of the new modes of thought...
...Tobey: I'm about as heroic as a stick of mud...
...In American colleges the long-established ROTC program is having trouble keeping alive...
...The French Revolution is a classic example...
...If you don't like something and you know as sure as hell that you can't change it, why break *F_anerick points out here Allen Ginsburg's comment "that young people today are not unwilling to die for their country, but are ~mnply unwilling to kill for it...
...I wish I had never registered for the draft and stayed and tried to make some kind of case out of it...
...The second pair of contrasting views is closely related to the first...
...From then until 1970 or 1971 the movement steadily grew in numbers, scope, intensity and influence...
...Though only passively now, they are shaping into coming reality the substance of the pacifist cliche: Someday a war will be declared and ~nobody will come...
...the Constitution...
Vol. 104 • July 1977 • No. 14
