PANTHERS & BULLDOGS REVISITED
Ribuffo, Leo P.
Compared to Harvard or Chicago, not to mention Berkeley, Columbia, or Wisconsin, Yale was a remarkably placid campus during the late 1960s. Most students opposed the Vietnam War and felt an...
...The trial of Bobby Seale widened a controversy instead of ending it...
...Along with others who fear for the Western intellectual tradition whenever classes are suspended, he has a utopian view of what undergraduates do with their time, especially during the last two weeks of spring semester...
...We are not told, for example, that many academic "conservatives" were liberal Democrats on the national spectrum...
...Worried by contemporary courtroom disruptions, he gave unusually harsh contempt sentences to Hilliard and Douglas...
...And second, the determination of New Haven's police chief, James Ahern, to resist the violent inclinations of both Nixon's government and assorted radicals, and be called "patsy" or "pig" any number of times rather than see a single person killed...
...The local chapter of the New University Conference was closer to the mark when it pronounced Yale "Brewster's Secret Society...
...Seale had been in New Haven on the night of the murder, and on hand for an interrogation of Rackley...
...By May 1, almost one-third of the undergraduates had left town...
...But is was hardly "irrational" to think that public attention would encourage fairness by the judge and restrain a zealous prosecutor...
...Nor can we suppose, as Americans like to do between crises, that consensus and quiet are the natural order of things...
...Nor was the affability permanent...
...Taft himself would have profited from the discussions of "value free" social science...
...For a decade, scholars in diverse fields have questioned the assumption that ideology can be reduced to neurotic symptoms...
...leveled at any white who argued at a meeting—frat boys screaming "Pig...
...They cut their hair and conducted a "teach-out" in the city's ethnic neighborhoods...
...The last such era needs to be rescued from those who identify it with its unhappiest excesses—by those who will not speak as apologists for the same excesses— before we can see it accurately...
...Nevertheless, though Ma...
...professors warned that young radicals resembled Hitler's Brownshirts...
...Voting took place in the late night and early morning hours...
...But the fair-trial motion lost...
...On Saturday, Tom Hayden announced a national student strike to protest the Cambodian invasion...
...And what I know of the other colleges reveals a similar pattern...
...On April 19, speaking as an "anguished citizen," Chaplain William Sloane Coffin told his congregation that the trial "might be legally right but morally wrong...
...Moreover, especially after Agnew's attack, faculty and students could love their president for the enemies he had made...
...During the spring of 1970, however, the indictment of 14 Black Panthers intruded on Yale's placidity...
...In a sense, Mai'dar is an inverted version of the hymns to Alma Mater that often pass for educational history...
...Governor John Dempsey announced that he was sending 4,000 national guardsmen to New Haven on May 1. Assistant Attorney General William Ruckleshaus said that troops would stand ready in neighboring states...
...Yet, though his constituency changed, his mode of operation did not...
...This position involved tactical risks...
...Spiro Agnew said that Yale needed more "mature" leadership...
...He still relied on informal consultations, showmanship, and mediation among rival factions...
...Several moments come back to me vividly...
...He observes that an assistant chaplain "eloped to Australia with his girlfriend" from the Panther Defense Committee...
...We have given you these proposals," Mills said...
...Compared to Harvard or Chicago, not to mention Berkeley, Columbia, or Wisconsin, Yale was a remarkably placid campus during the late 1960s...
...On April 21, David Hilliard, whose jail sentence had been reduced to time served, told a mass meeting at Ingalls hockey rink that there was nothing wrong with the murder of "pigs...
...His lawyer was introduced, and told the audience: "I bring you word from Huey P. Newton...
...Simultaneously, students gathered to discuss the trial, the purpose of higher education, and Yale's responsibility to New Haven...
...The sober 1970s distort our perspective in another way...
...Ultimately, the verdicts satisfied neither activists who had exonerated all defendants nor conservatives who had believed that an independent judiciary was threatened by external pressure...
...William F. Buckley wrote that he sounded "like the last days of Alexander Kerensky...
...Passing over suggestions to seize the courthouse or commit suicide in protest, the gathering urged Yale to create a defense fund and called for a moratorium on classes...
...Yale has established the Graduate School of Organization and Management —a distant kin to the controversial Social Science Center—whose "neutrality" is clear only to those who suppose that the business of America is business...
...But the two moods seemed to me then, as they do now, closely related...
...q David Bromwich "Panthers & Bulldogs": A Comment ommit yourself' (the 1960s) and "Enjoy yourself' (the 1970s) are cant phrases...
...Most students opposed the Vietnam War and felt an amorphous commitment to racial equality but few stood to the left of Eugene McCarthy or Robert Kennedy...
...Taft concedes that his shrewdness helped to control a volatile situation...
...Surveying the weekend in his Sunday sermon, Coffin concluded, "We took a Christian chance and it paid off...
...Later in the day, Doug Miranda, the local Panther captain, demanded a student strike...
...This version of the 1960s on campus has triumphed partly because professors are good at covering their tracks...
...A student-faculty monitoring committee rebutted wild stories...
...I will not try to convey the mood of hysteria that crept into Yale at the end of April, following the suspension of classes: the split-second changes of heart in people of moderate views—whispered confessions of a desire to live beyond the next few weeks—the Panthers with their universal denunciation, "Fool...
...Moreover, the Weimar analogy allowed intellectuals to believe that they too were on the barricades— defending humane learning against bar barians...
...The choice lies with you...
...National radical celebrities related repression at home to American aggression in Indochina...
...I can remember arguing at a mid-April meeting that we ought to support a fair trial for Bobby Seale but not ask for his immediate release—assuming, as everyone then did, that this were possible (the Yale Corporation would pay for it...
...Influenced by such "leftist friends" as William Kunstler, Brewster was ready to "leap leftward...
...In Mat'dai', "radical" is roughly synonymous with disorderly and conservatives are those who defend "academic integrity" against radicals...
...Copious citations, a list of 52 interviews, and the author's announcement that his research began in a Yale seminar contribute to the aura of scholarship...
...In criminal cases that impinge on controversial social issues, the problem of bias is particularly acute...
...Impervious to wit—ironically, a failing commonly ascribed to the left—he cannot appreciate the gallows humor that accompanied and relieved anxi ety...
...Kimbro followed suit a month later...
...By offering hospitality, undergraduates hoped to dissuade visiting radicals from violence...
...A quick retreat to affability failed to satisfy the crowd...
...sometimes still growled at each other...
...Borrowing from pluralist sociology, he notes similar "paranoid" behavior among medieval millenarians and modern mobs poised to attack an "American Embassy or a Jewish ghetto...
...Nixon's government had gone stark raving mad, and in the last weeks of April, according to Moynihan, the war room of the Pentagon was covered with street maps of New Haven...
...It was, however, during two weeks of April 1970 an extreme right-wing notion, prohibited at radical meetings and timidly voiced by a few students in the privacy of their rooms...
...Abby Hoffman, the Falstaff of the revolution, tried unsuccessfully to convince the crowd that Kingman Brewster was an enemy...
...Fires of undetermined origin damaged the law school and destroyed the headquarters of New Haven's left-liberal Democrats...
...Today the guardians of wisdom are less likely to cry for justice as anguished citizens than to preach a gospel of efficiency...
...In May the strike was experienced by most students as a freedom from year-end exams: unfortunately, it seems in the long run to have been almost as inconsequential as exams...
...Tom Hayden compared him to Prince Sihanouk...
...Having said all this, I somehow find myself agreeing with Professor Ribuffo that "the spirit of the 60s has as much reproach to lay upon the 70s as the other way around...
...The student who said to me yesterday, "I'm going to law school or med school, wherever the money is," had a different look...
...And this was the line urged by William Sloane Coffin in his sermon of April 19...
...Second...
...About half of Yale's undergraduates— by my estimate, which is no better or worse than any other—attended the meeting at Ingalls Rink...
...Once again analysis is muddled by Taft's fear of creeping radicalism...
...Even this narrow view is flawed, because Taft deposits us at Phelps Gate in mid -1970 without an orientation...
...The Yale strike focused attention on racial discrimination, poverty, collegiate indifference to the surrounding community, and the courtroom problems of those whom William Kunstler called the "pariahs of the land...
...The book in which Taft renders these verdicts is subtitled a "case study...
...The student of ten years ago, when he said "I'm gonna take a year off and get my head together," had a look that was really a challenge: "Try and find insincerity in my face...
...These issues are no longer fashionable, but none of them has been resolved...
...In my own college, just over 100 votes were cast...
...The two-day demonstration was anticlimactic...
...Local Panthers spoke about the trial...
...What he said was unintelligible...
...The meeting ended with an injunction from Kenneth Mills, a brilliant and practiced orator, who insinuated in his ;III• speeches a world of sinister goings-on that the audience could know nothing of, but claimed for his part to be merely a disinterested ally of the Panthers...
...Anything I say about the Yale strike of 1970 will be colored by my impatience with such people, and perhaps by one other fact: I was at that time active in the antiwar movement and, beside an ever-present awareness of the slaughter in Vietnam, questions of university reform seemed to me of absolutely no importance...
...The murder case against Seale was weak, but the possibility remained that he had wanted Panthers to "discipline" Rackley without killing him...
...Late on April 30, after President Nixon had announced the invasion of Cambodia, Brewster anxiously conferred with an incongruous group that included Coffin, David Dellinger and Cyrus Vance—all alumni...
...He answered a chorus of boos by denouncing racist Yale "motherfuckers...
...Brewster's "leftist" associations were less revealing than his claim to friendship with both Kunstler and McGeorge Bundy...
...Taft criticizes the "devious tactic" of allowing women canvassers to charm New Haven residents, a tactic about as devious as an ad for Dewar's Scotch in Business Week...
...In 1954, sharing the dominant view that "radical criticism had nothing more to say to us," Murray Kempton regarded the left of the 1930s with "ironic detachment...
...vdavv fails as history and declines to be forthright polemic, it remains interesting as an ideological artifact...
...I said that if ever laws were abridged for a special occasion, the first group to suffer in the country as a whole would be the left...
...Although Superior Court convened less than a block from Yale, most students and faculty ignored the case until the spring of 1970...
...Seale, George Sams, Warren Kimbro, and Lonnie McLucas were indicted for first-degree murder...
...Many had retired into a disenchantment as unreal as the idealism of a few months before...
...Also recalling recent "political" prosecutions, particularly the trial of the Chicago Seven, Kurt Schmoke, a black campus leader, explained that the strike was intended to prevent another "kangaroo court...
...Brewster's decision under pressure was wiser than his second thoughts...
...Showing what Professor Peter Brooks called their "managerial instinct," they organized to fight fires, treat injuries, and control crowds...
...But my feelings about the war certainly helped to put me out of sympathy with the strike...
...None is more enlightening than the Weimar analogy...
...Still, rumors abounded during the week after normal expectations had been modified: that someone had installed machine guns in the Calhoun college tower, that a howitzer protected the rarebook library, that campus conservatives were arming...
...Indeed, the critique associating universities with the business elite and the Pentagon has been dismissed as effluvium from that wayward decade...
...On firmer ground, attorneys claimed that the prisoners were denied adequate opportunity to confer with counsel and each other...
...Although students interviewed by Taft remembered the spring of 1970 with nostalgia, most wished that they had been closer to the "political center...
...No aspect of Mayday produced more controversy than the role of Kingman Brewster...
...Similarly, Kingman Brewster questioned the wisdom of having opened Yale to protesters...
...at passing cops—the confidential rumors about stashes of guns, ammunition, food, dope, plans, all leading to an overwhelming question—what will happen on Mayday...
...I would still recommend the book to anyone curious about these matters...
...But there are people, well-meaning and ingenuous as a rule, who look to the slogans for guidance and try to live by them, decade by decade...
...We lack essential background about earlier towngown tensions, internal university politics, and campus activism...
...Evidence showed that Huggins had at least witnessed Rackley's agony...
...Academic conservatives are cerebral, disinterested, and wise...
...Four days later he doubted that black revolutionaries could be tried fairly "anywhere in the United States...
...For John Taft, who regrets that the chance was taken, Coffin personifies "indiscriminate enthusiasm for the passing fashions of the young...
...Looking back a month later, Peter Brooks concluded that the talks had been "utterly boring...
...It led to a hung jury, and Seale followed Nixon into politics...
...Even these dissidents were likely to concur in the prevailing opinion, noted by John Hersey, that they attended "quite simply the best private university in the country...
...But as for the strike, I cannot begin to see in what way it advanced the cause of justice, and its effect on a less sympathetic judge might have been disastrous...
...Police Chief James Ahern and his force showed admirable restraint...
...On Friday and Saturday nights, some demonstrators confronted police and guardsmen on the green where the two sides exchanged epithets, rocks, and tear-gas cannisters...
...In another address of the evening David Hilliard found himself cursing the students who had come to hear him...
...A fair trial was only the last screen for hypocrisy, and to ask for it here was the same thing as killing Bobby Seale...
...Beneath the aura, however, Taft is insensitive to problems that perplex good historians...
...Anything that the activists did is suspect...
...Panther supporters obviously exaggerated when they said that Seale was being railroaded to death row...
...And I am afraid this is what the children of the 70s have lost, and what they can hardly miss until they look back with regret...
...Sophisticated practitioners of oral history recognize that reminiscences are affected by current moods...
...He understates the distaste for violence that several commentators discerned among students...
...Taft's book would now be recording more violence—and possibly several fatalities—if student marshals had not calmed crowds or if Brewster had left 25,000 demonstrators to sleep on the green...
...I got my first inkling of the strike from a friend, Peter Connolly, who had gone out of curiosity to the ad hoc meeting of April 15, which he described as "crazed...
...And afterward a friend took me aside, his eyes filled with a look of disappointment I shall never forget, and said: "How could you do it...
...At the meeting a Yale Suicide Pact had been proposed: every day, for an as yet undetermined period, one student would take his plunge, presumably from the top of Yale's fake-Gothic Harkness Tower, to alert the conscience of the world to the plight of the Black Panther party...
...He reminds us that it is easy "to see through the conventional wisdom of a generation gone" but difficult indeed "to escape the half-conscious acceptance of the wisdom of this one...
...Neutral" is not the best adjective to describe their attitudes...
...But the two subjects that one cannot avoid these days, money and self, were less in the air: this seems to me to have been an unmixed good, and I do not attribute it solely to economic causes...
...Others had returned to normal niches in the establishment...
...Even those who had never read a newspaper account of the case could tell that Seale was innocent...
...Jurors are moved both by public attitudes and by judges...
...Even academic conservatives should wonder whether what Taft calls university "neutrality" is worth four lives...
...According to an emerging orthodoxy, higher education lapsed from "neutrality" into radical chic "relevance"during the 1960s...
...It stood to reason...
...Yale trustees currently include two Republican senators, the editor of Foreign Affairs, and the Secretary of State...
...A touch of the spirit remains with them...
...Despite some annoying personal asides, his account had the ring of truth for me, when I read it in the summer of 1970, because in most of the essentials it answered to my experience at Yale...
...While the Cambodian invasion and fatal shootings at Kent State stirred other colleges in May 1970, Yale reimposed moreorless "normal expectations...
...The next day, an ad hoc meeting discussed various means, both sensible and silly, to influence the trial...
...And there was confusion all around...
...He wooed the audience of 1,500 with a shrewd allusion to the college mascot: "There's no reason why the Panther and the Bulldog can't get together...
...Thereafter, he permitted Yale's residential colleges to feed and house demonstrators and coordinated plans for Mayday with the police...
...From a different vantage point, the Panthers feared a police raid on their headquarters...
...Throughout the winter, pretrial defense motions vainly argued that the arrests, seizure of evidence, and indictments were irregular...
...The planks dealing with wages, day care, housing, and the Social Science Center appealed to specialized constituencies...
...Furthermore, Justice Frankfurter has warned that judges, despite efforts to discipline themselves, "unconsciously are too apt to be moved by the deeper undercurrents of public feelings...
...What the Panthers and Bulldogs demanded was the unconditional liberation of Bobby Seale...
...Few endorsed all of the Steering Committee proposals...
...His application of these conventions is surprising only in its crudeness...
...We can avert the terrible things we all fear...
...The 60s were a time of prosperity, interrupted by a long war that shook the confidence of the middle class, and the results of this instability were often good in themselves...
...Fewer than 30,000 persons gathered on the New Haven green...
...The nitty gritty of New Haven, including its ethnic politics and black ghetto, were physically near but psychologically distant...
...Later they forgot that tactical flexibility may have avoided bloodshed on their campus...
...Within a day or two "morally wrong" had become the prevailing wind, and how it filled the sails of the students...
...It would, Coffin said, be "legally right but morally wrong" for Seale to be kept in jail...
...I f the trial was fair after all, it was owing to the conduct of Judge Mulvey, a man well known for his liberal views, though referred to by the radicals of April 1970 as "Pig Mulvey...
...An activist quoted in Mayday recalls that the campus left had hoped to "co-opt Brewster," but Taft thinks that co-optation was unnecessary...
...But the voice sounded European, and the Panthers may have brought to his mind an image of some other party, fascist or communist...
...The idea was given serious consideration but rejected...
...radicalism, as Irving Howe and Lewis Coser note, often functions "as a kind of prep school for the leaders of American capitalist society...
...Experts from the Yale Law School kept watch on the case with a vigilant eye...
...Amid escalating apprehension, they prepared for an estimated 100,000 demonstrators on Mayday...
...But this case is not a pretty thing...
...Within hours, a majority of undergraduates in 9 of the 12 residential colleges endorsed the strike...
...There was nevertheless an impressive amount of wish-fulfilling violent talk...
...They mean nothing, they lead to nothing, they imply neither specific thought nor specific action, and they are so far pure...
...Kenneth Keniston has called the activity before Mayday an "essentially constructive human and social process...
...But Taft's one-dimensional portrait of sinister radicals and befuddled liberals is indefensible...
...Both Taft's view of the late 1960s and his general approach to social issues represent what should be called the new, new conservatism (ordinary new conservatism having peaked about 1953...
...At least the thinking stimulated by lectures, seminars, and informal bull sessions compared favorably to the usual last-minute rush to finish papers...
...He prefers accounts of meetings that stress an "apocalyptic" mood...
...As spokesmen for the American Civil Liberties Union observed in 1970, the legally correct conspiracy indictments and pretrial treatment of the Panthers showed that something was wrong with Connecticut law...
...In addition, the Steering Committee asked Yale to accommodate pro-Panther demonstrators who would rally in New Haven on May 1-2...
...Yet he cannot forgive Brewster for compromising Yale's "neutrality" by allying himself, even briefly, with foes of "academic integrity...
...Pruned of excesses, however, the argument retains merit...
...To amend Brewster's famous remark, an obscure black revolutionary probably could not receive a fair trial anywhere in the United States...
...Rather, he tends to accept recollections at face value, especially if they contain "sober" second thoughts...
...Taft's treatment leaves a sense of deja vu...
...Radicalism consisted of small bands of socialists, feminists, and Ivy League hippies...
...Some spadework uncovers plenty of conservative misconceptions and absurdities...
...The place was dominated by an old-boy network...
...In May 1969, police had arrested eight New Haven Panthers for allegedly kidnapping, torturing, and murdering Alex Rackley, a suspected turncoat...
...Despite these incidents, there were few injuries, only a handful of arrests, and slight property damage...
...The meeting ended with a call for a "shutdown" by Kenneth Mills, a black philosopher who was de facto liaison between Yale and the Panthers...
...But the leaflet-makers went to work, and by the time of the "mass meeting" at Ingalls Rink, most students could read the fine print: something new had entered their lives, and school was no longer the main order of business...
...On most campuses, the "altered priorities" hailed by Taft mean expansion of "practical" programs at the expense of liberal arts...
...Discussion of the second of these issues tended to be rhetorical or perfunctory, while the first, once Mayday had passed and the world had failed to come to an end, dropped out of the picture entirely...
...In June, in July, in August, the war in Vietnam ground on, but the very students who loved Bobby Seale enough to call him "Bobby" did not hate the war enough to protest against it...
...Maintaining that Seale had ordered him to kill Rackley, Sams pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in December...
...As Taft remarks, several activists had already retreated into drugs or religious cults...
...When Panther guards beat a student who approached the microphone, Hilliard recommended similar "humane" treatment for all foes of black liberation...
...But the Black Panthers were peculiar to Yale: the issues discussed throughout April were the approach of Mayday, the proper relation of the university to the community, and the liberation of Bobby Seale...
...More than 300 students belonged to the college...
...It was either Jerry Rubin or Abbie Hoffman or both who in all innocence led a cheer of "Fuck Kingston Brewer...
...Taft charges that Yale abandoned "integrity" when it acquiesced in the student strike...
...On April 19, declaring Yale's neutrality in the Panther case, President Kingman Brewster had affirmed his faith in the Connecticut judiciary...
...The communal spirit of the time was partly bogus...
...Academic conservatives like Taft felt betrayed when Brewster met the crisis by adding some new boys...
...Always in charge of the co-optation, he resembled neither Sihanouk nor Kerensky, but Theodore Roosevelt and FDR...
...I liked this sudden quiescence no better than the hysteria that preceded it...
...That Bobby Seale deserved a fair trial might seem common sense...
...Convinced that "massive publicity" precluded an impartial rehearing, Judge Mulvey dismissed the indictments...
...The Panther trial, on the other hand, provoked widespread discussion...
...Of the "Panther and Bulldog" alliance, and the panic-vacation it brought about, Leo Ribuffo gives the most reliable account I have seen: in adding my own words to his I can hardly pretend to write as a historian...
...Those who find that some joys are unselfish by their very nature, and believe that political commitment ought to occur as a natural and not a compelled expression of conscience, will be unhappy with either slogan...
...Taft blithely ignores this rich literature relevant to any "case study" of radicalism...
...And yet—or therefore ---the spirit of the '60s has as much reproach to lay upon the '70s as the other way around...
...Soon, Taft observes, an economic recession "altered priorities for everyone" and students are now "working much harder than in 1970...
...In this opinion Kingman Brewster either concurred or affected to concur...
...and for many who were young in the 60s I believe that it did...
...Although Taft never discusses his own activities during 1970, his tone and selection of evidence suggest that he identified with the "conservatives...
...If we join Taft in deriding the "naive excitement" of undergraduates, what can we make of scholars who had trouble distinguishing between a noisy meeting at Calhoun college and the Reichstag fire...
...Six additional party members, including Chairman Bobby Seale, were apprehended during the summer...
...So did everyone around me, and I note the fact for what it is worth, since it has not been recorded in any history of the strike...
...For the peaceful coming and going of Mayday 1970, we may be grateful to two unexpected developments...
...So did the administration, which operated with characteristic flexibility...
...but unselfishness can, to a degree, become a habit like other habits...
...Even now, who can speak confidently about the guilt or innocence of Sacco and Vanzetti or Julius and Ethel Rosenberg...
...The court refused bail to all but one of the defendants who was jailed for refusing to testify under a grant of immunity...
...He was the leader of a rigidly top-down national organization...
...The dynamics of one kind of university strike, buried in such questions as how moderate students are "radicalized," how class doubt or guilt paralyzes logic, how stopping the life of a university comes to seem a sure way of ending misery in the world, is treated at length in Steven Kelman's Push Comes to Shove...
...Perhaps not quite...
...This was evidently a new thought to some: it may have shifted a few votes...
...The votes were counted by the organizers of the strike, who reported their findings to "headquarters," from which in the late morning issued a paper heralding the unan imous strike...
...Lonnie McLucas was convicted of conspiracy to commit murder, acquitted of three other charges, and sentenced to 12-15 years in prison...
...They listened to lectures, often by distinguished scholars, on race relations, law, and educational reform...
...At this time few Yale students knew who the Black Panthers were...
...In 1967, when urban riots and an Asian war dramatized the failures of postwar policy, Kempton concluded that the "spirit of the thirties had as much reproach to lay upon the fifties as the fifties had upon the thirties...
...Taft dismisses the nationwide harassment of Panthers, blandly says that rulings against the New Haven defendants were "not unlawful," and ascribes "absurd" exaggerations about the case to "indiscriminate hatred of the government...
...But I attended many ad hoc meetings during those weeks, read many leaflets, argued with many friends, saw, heard, and felt a great deal, and have remembered what I saw and heard and felt...
...The Strike Steering Committee, composed of delegates from undergraduate, graduate, and professional school "collectives," quickly formulated five demands...
...It may be that a certain madness is inseparable from any era of social ferment...
...First, Taft thinks that he can explain Mayday by saying that participants were "irrational...
...But Yale hardly noticed...
...Unfortunately, the preference for peace was not universally shared...
...What, then, of Bobby Seale...
...In Mardar, only leftists and their sympathizers respond to glandular secretions and nocturnal fantasies...
...Like Studs Terkel or Marcel Ophuls, Taft might have turned this perennial problem to advantage by using interviews to illuminate past and present...
...Never in my life have I heard such a roar as greeted this announcement...
...Taft is glad that fashions pass quickly...
...Following Brewster's lead, on April 23 the college faculty voted to modify "normal [academic] expectations...
...Academic conservatives also have unconscious needs...
...Moreover, he uses political labels to designate heroes and villains...
...Two youths were turned over to juvenile authorities...
...Judge Mulvey was subject to the currents of his time...
...Doubtless they too deserve credit...
...The circumstantial evidence is not unlike the evidence linking Nixon to Watergate...
...In May 1971, the prosecution of Seale and Huggins ended in a hung jury...
...a member of the New Haven branch of his organization, Alex Rackley, had been tortured and put to death...
...Hilliard's bodyguards gave him a swift pummelling, and then Kenneth Keniston came to the platform, introduced himself as a psychologist, pronounced the man "disturbed" and took him away...
...the others were charged as accessories...
...The Yale Corporation must demand "immediate dismissal" of the "political" trial, cease depleting the local housing market, provide day-care facilities for employees, establish "adequate" wage and retirement programs, and abandon the proposed Social Science Center, a school for managers who would manipulate the poor instead of helping them...
...It is clear, however, that extralegal factors affected the rulings of Judge Thayer in the first case and the sentence passed by Judge Kaufman in the second...
...Unfortunately, few professors who denounced student radicals are moved to defend the Western intellectual tradition against this latest form of "relevance...
...We licked 'em with love...
...Uncritical faith in the law is the third shibboleth of the '70s promoted in Mai'da}v...
...Considering dismissal of the indictments neither likely nor desirable, most students favored efforts to secure a fair hearing...
...Despite growing sympathy for Seale and his fellow defendants, Panthers and Bulldogs *John Taft, Mayday at Yale: A Case Study in Student Radicalism (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1977...
...The speakers may have muted their rhetoric in order to discourage violence...
...You will now go back to your colleges and vote...
...Yet Taft's version of the criminal-justice system is no more illuminating...
...Judgments of this kind, however questionable, are the legitimate province of a historian...
...Strike leaders, including Panthers and other blacks, who expected retaliation to fall hardest on the ghetto, worked to preserve order...
...On May 4, 1970, Taft says, Yale undergraduates had sensed "their own closeness" to the four students slain at Kent State...
...On strike, shut it down...
...Bliss was it then to be alive...
...On April 14, following a scuffle in court, Judge Harold Mulvey sentenced two visiting Panthers, Emory Douglas and David Hilliard, to six months in jail...
...Between April 22 and Mayday, almost three-quarters of the student body boycotted classes...
...The latter remark says more about Taft than about either radicalism or romance...
...For numerous undergraduates, John Taft says, in his book,* these contempt citations confirmed "vaguely held opinions" that the Panthers were victims of persecution...
...A man looking angry and distraught made his way to the speaker's platform, and wrested the microphone from Hilliard...
...The facile comparison of students and Stormtroopers supports John Hersey's contention that faculty feelings about undergraduates often ranged from "mild distaste to loathing...
...Huey Newton, soon thereafter to publish his dialogues with an eminent Harvard psychologist and direct the black revolution from a $1,000-a-month penthouse in San Francisco, was in jail...
...Overall, Taft's interpretation is less persuasive than earlier analyses by Sayre, Peter Brooks, John Hersey, and Francine du Plessix Gray, who made no effort to conceal their bias...
...Wiser than Hayden, Buckley, or Taft, Nora Sayre saw that Brewster had offered a "lesson in the old uses of liberalism...
...Even so, there is no excuse for his mechanical view of human nature...
...And we all had a lot to learn from the Black Panther party...
...It would be difficult, Taft says, to exaggerate the prevailing "mood of fear...
...The "case study" offers generalizations about student radicalism without comparing Yale to other cases...
...When, near the end of the evening, William Sloane Coffin pledged his solidarity with the strike, but urged nonviolent forms of protest, I heard a flood of hisses and jeers...
...Self-interest prompted enthusiasm for the opening of Yale on Mayday weekend...
...They were not alone in anticipating violence...
...Perhaps it was also an educational success...
...First, the small number of protesters that actually showed up: 20,000 by a generous estimate, and if there were indeed 20,000 surely not less than 5,000 hailed from that well-accredited school of protest, the FBI...
...Passing over American parallels that might have made some sense...
...Thanks to Daniel P. Moynihan's Playboy interview, in the course of which he calls Nixon, Haldeman, and Erlichman fine gentlemen whom it was a pleasure to work with, we now know that the hysteria was not confined to Yale...
...I may have been wrong in this...
Vol. 24 • September 1977 • No. 4
