In Defense of the Campus Rebels

May 19, 1969 I hate to write on subjects about which I know no more than the conventional wisdom of the moment. One of these subjects is the campus revolt. My credentials as an expert are slim. I always loved learning and hated school. I wanted to go to Harvard, but I couldn’t get in because I had graduated forty-ninth in a class of fity-two from a small-town high school. I went to college at the University of Pennsylvania which was obligated--this sounds like an echo of a familiar black demand today--to take graduates of high schools in neighboring communities no matter how ill-fitted. My boyhood idol was the saintly anarchist Kropotkin. I looked down on college degrees and felt that a man should do only what was sincere and true and without thought of mundane advancement. This provided lofty reasons for not doing homework. I majored in philosophy with the vague thought of teaching it but though I revered two of my professors I disliked the smell of a college faculty. I dropped out in my third year to go back to newspaper work. Those were the twenties and I was a pre-Depression radical. So I might be described I suppose as a premature New Leftist, though I never had the urge to burn anything down.

In microcosm, the Weekly and I have become typical of our society. The war and the military have taken up so much of our energies that we have neglected the blacks, the poor and students. Seen from afar, the turmoil, and the deepening division appear to be a familiar tragedy, like watching a friend drink himself to death. Everybody knows what needs to be done, but the will is lacking. We have to break the habit. There is no excuse for poverty in a society which can spend $80 billion a year on its war machine. If national security comes first, as the spokesmen for the Pentagon tell us, then we can only reply that the clearest danger to the national security lies in the rising revolt of our black population. Our own country is becoming a Vietnam. As if in retribution for the suffering we have imposed, we are confronted by the same choices: either to satisfy the aspirations of the oppressed or to try and crush them by force. The former would be costly, but the latter will be disastrous.

This is what the campus rebels are trying to tell us, in the only way which seems to get attention. I do not like to hear opponents shouted down, much less beaten up. I do not like to hear any one group or class, including policemen, called pigs. I do not think four-letter words are arguments. I hate, hate , intolerance and violence. I see them as man’s most ancient and enduring enemies and I hate to see them welling up on my side. But I feel about the rebels as Erasmus did about Luther. Erasmus helped inspire the Reformation but was repelled by the man who brought it to fruition. He saw that Luther was as intolerant and as dogmatic as the Church. “From argument,” as Erasmus saw it (in Froude’s “Life and Letters of Erasmus”), “there would be a quick resort to the sword, and the whole world would be full of fury and madness.” Two centuries of religious wars without parallel for blood-lust were soon to prove how right were his misgivings. But while Erasmus “could not join Luther, he dared not oppose him, lest haply, as he confessed ‘he might be fighting against the spirit of God.’ ” I feel that the New Left and the black revolutionists, like Luther, are doing God’s work, too, in refusing any longer to submit to evil, and challenging society to reform or crush them.

Lifelong dissent has more than acclimatized me cheerfully to defeat. It has made me suspicious of victory. I feel uneasy at the very idea of a Movement. I see every insight degenerating into a dogma, and fresh thoughts freezing into lifeless party line. Those who set out nobly to be their brother’s keeper sometimes end up by becoming his jailer. Every emancipation has in it the seeds of a new slavery, and every truth easily becomes a lie. But these perspectives, which seem so irrefutably clear from a pillar in the desert, are worthless to those enmeshed in the crowded struggle. They are no better than mystical nonsense to the humane student who has to face his draft board, the dissident soldier who is determined not to fight, the black who sees his people doomed by shackles stronger than slavery to racial humiliation and decay. The business of the moment is to end the war, to break the growing dominance of the military in our society, to liberate the blacks, the Mexican-American, the Puerto Rican and the Indian from injustice. This is the business of our best youth. However confused and chaotic, their unwillingness to submit any longer is our one hope.

There is a wonderful story of a delegation which came here to see Franklin D. Roosevelt on some reform or other. When they were finished the President said, “Okay, you’ve convinced me. Now go on out and bring pressure on me.” Every thoughtful official knows how hard it is to get anything done if someone isn’t making it uncomfortable not to. Just imagine how helpless the better people in government would be if the rebels, black and white, suddenly fell silent. The war might smoulder on forever, the ghettoes attract as little attention as a refuse dump. It is a painful business extricating ourselves from the stupidity of the Vietnamese war; we will do so only if it becomes more painful not to. It will be costly rebuilding the ghettoes, but if the black revolt goes on, it will be costlier not to. In the workings of a free society, the revolutionist provides the moderate with the clinching argument. And a little un-reason does wonders, like a condiment, in re-invigorating a discussion which has grown pointless and flat.

We ought to welcome the revolt as the one way to prod us into a better America. To meet it with cries of “law and order” and “conspiracy” would be to relapse into the sterile monologue which precedes all revolutions. Rather than change old habits, those in power always prefer to fall back on the theory that all would be well but for a few malevolent conspirators. It is painful to see academia disrupted, but under the surface were shams and horrors that needed cleansing. The disruption is worth the price of awakening us. The student rebels are proving right in the daring idea that they could revolutionize American society by attacking the universities as its soft underbelly. But I would also remind the students that the three evils they fight--war, racism and bureaucracy--are universal. The Marxism-Leninism some of the rebels cling to has brought into power a bureaucracy more suffocating than any under capitalism; the students demonstrate everywhere on our side but are stifled on the other. War and imperialism have not been eliminated in the relations between Communist states. Black Africa, at least half-freed from the white man, is hardly a model of fraternity or freedom. Man’s one real enemy is within himself. Burning America down is no way to Utopia. If battle is joined and our country polarized, as both the revolutionists and the repressionists wish, it is the better and not the worse side of America which will be destroyed. Someone said a man’s character was his fate, and tragedy may be implicit in the character of our society and of its rebels. How make a whisper for patience heard amid the rising fury?

I.F. Stone died Sunday at the age of 81.