Paul Goodman (1911–1972) was a counterculture hero when I was growing up, not for his antiwar work but for Growing Up Absurd (1960). That book, more than any other writing I encountered as a young man, suggested why certain modes of respectable life felt meaningless.
The two pieces included here show different aspects of Goodman. In the first, he mourns his son’s death, and as a mourner draws on the part of himself that wrote novels and poems, the open-hearted, sharp-eyed, loving observer. We have no better portrait of a pacifist growing up (non-absurdly) than the one Goodman offers us here.
His son’s death shattered him, his friends said, and perhaps one can feel that shatteredness in “A Causerie at the Military-Industrial,” delivered less than three months after young Mathew Goodman’s death; the speech feels almost self-destructively confrontational. Here was Goodman, invited to speak before the National Security Industrial Association on “Planning for the Socio-Economic Environment,” and here is what he has to say to the four hundred members of that association, as if daring them to throw him out: “you are the military-industrial of the United States, the most dangerous body of men at present in the world . . . the best service that you people could perform is rather rapidly to phase yourselves out.” But few antiwar speeches from the period feel more alive on the page than this one, animated by its anger.
Goodman had astonishingly numerous interests, careers, and talents. He grew up in New York, got a B.A. at City College, majoring in philosophy and studying with Morris Cohen. He began to write—poems, plays, stories. He taught drama, became a graduate student in literature, published his first novel in 1942, taught at Manumit Preparatory School, and was dismissed for “homosexual behavior” (later he was dismissed from Black Mountain College for the same reason). He published essays and novels, studied and practiced psychoanalysis, wrote about urban planning and gestalt therapy and education and sexuality. The Living Theatre staged his plays, and everyone read Growing Up Absurd.
Emotionally, from early childhood, Matty’s pacifism was certainly related to his unusual protectiveness of his many animals. He identified with their lives. I remember him and his mother medicating and sometimes saving sick little turtles, tropical fish, white rats. Yet there was nothing squeamish or sentimental in his attitude. If he needed to feed his lizards, he calmly caught flies, tore their wings off and offered them; but otherwise he would not kill a fly but adroitly catch it and let it out the door. He gave up fishing around age 10 and began to rescue the fish and return them to the river. Mostly he liked just to watch the fish and pond life, for hours, in their natural habitat.
More intellectually, he was an ardent conservationist, indignant at the spoliation, opposed to insecticides. The focus of his scientific interests (in my opinion) was ecology, the community of living things in the appropriate environment. And in method he strongly favored—so far as the distinction can be made—naturalistic observation, letting things be, rather than experimenting and imposing programs. These were also his political biases.
My first political recollection of him is when, in junior high school, he called my attention to corporation advertising being used in his class. He collected the evidence and we succeeded, temporarily, in having it expelled. This involved his being called down and rebuked by the principal.
During his first year at Bronx Science High School he wrote a report on the life of Gandhi, who impressed him deeply. For a reason known only to himself, he took to fasting one day a week—and continued this sporadically later.
He was active in the antibomb protests in 1960–62. He used to take part in the “General Strike For Peace” thought up by Julian Beck. Since people were supposed to leave off work for a day and picket for peace, Matty took off from school and picketed the Board of Education on Livingston Street. Naturally he was captured as a truant and I had to go and rescue him. This was one of the few moments of pure delight I have ever had in the peace movement.
He was at the Times Square demonstration against the bomb-testing when the police rode their horses into the crowd. Matty was in the line of fire and came home shaken, saying, “This is serious.”
As a junior in high school, he refused to take part in a shelter drill and he and three others who would not recant were suspended. But there was considerable newspaper publicity and they were reinstated and allowed to stand aside during the drills, which were soon discontinued. His reasons for nonparticipation were (1) the shelters were unscientific, (2) the drill was an insult to intelligence in its form and (3) it predisposed to accepting nuclear war.
When reinstated, he was told he had a black mark on his record. I wrote to Admissions at Harvard asking if this was a disadvantage; when we received the expected reply that it would rather be judged as a sign of critical independence, Matty had the letter copied off and distributed around Bronx Science—which sorely needed the nudge.
By now he was a seasoned radical and when he was again threatened with punishment for pasting antiwar stickers in the school subway station, he faced down the administration by pointing out that the subway was not in its jurisdiction.
At age 15 he and other high-school students formed a citywide association to protest against nuclear war. This came to nothing.
When he applied for admission to Cornell, Professor Milton Konvitz phoned me in alarm that he was likely to be rejected because he had sent a photo of himself with uncombed hair. Matty said, “If they don’t want me as I really look, they can keep their lousy school.” They admitted him anyway, but sometimes they may have regretted not following their routine impulse. Matty loved Cornell and therefore fought it tooth and nail.
At 18, he refused to register for the draft. I shall return to this later, but I recall that, the following summer, he distributed antiwar leaflets in front of the Army recruiting station in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, near where we have a summer home. This made me anxious, since of course he had no draft card. But he explained, “I can’t live in fear every day. I must act as I ordinarily would.” My guess is that he loved St. Johnsbury and wanted to redeem it for having a recruiting station.
Burt Weiss writes as follows about Matty at Cornell (my own comments are in brackets):
“Students for Education, SFE, organized themselves in late February, 1965. Matty was in almost from the beginning. He was most active in the Grading Committee, whose only proposal he and I hammered out. The S-U option in it has since come to be offered in much weakened form by most of the Cornell colleges.
[In fact, insisting on another option in the proposal, Matty got his professors not to grade him at all, or to keep his grades secret from him. Later, to his annoyance, he found his name on the Dean’s list, and crossed it out with a crayon and complained.]
“Astonishingly, Mathew attended all meetings and rallies of SFE and its steering committee. Such an attendance record was unique for him. He had little toleration for contentious political meetings, especially when the contention was made by those he loved. When he guessed that a meeting was likely to be angry and unfruitful, he usually stayed home. If he went despite his guess, or if the angry mood of a meeting took him by surprise, he left early. Several times, when he stuck it out, he was moved to the point of tears or actually cried. I loved him then very much, and respected his ability to mourn. He mourned that people were acting stupidly, timidly, or dishonestly. He mourned the sudden vanishing of community spirit.
“Later that spring, Matty took part in the 24-hour vigil in the Arts Quad and in the walkout while Rockefeller was speaking at the centennial celebration. Nobody got in trouble for either of these actions. But then came the Harriman lecture and the resulting fracas widely reported in the press. Before Harriman spoke, he received the enclosed letter written by Matty and Jerry Franz. [The letter complains that official spokesmen evade real questions and warns that the students will insist on real answers. Harriman’s behavior did turn out to be insulting to college-level intelligence and the students sat down around him.]
“In May came the sitdown to block the ROTC review in Barton Hall. All (70) participants were prosecuted by the University, but Matty and Jerry walked out of the hearing before the Faculty Committee on Student Conduct. Here, according to the Cornell Sun, is what they said: ‘The members of the group made a definite commitment to stand by each other if there was anything like differential punishment. Tonight they went back on their commitment. The group agreed that it was necessary to have a collective hearing so that past offenses could not be taken into account. Tonight the group agreed to let them take past offenses into account. Therefore we can no longer be associated.’ They were summarily suspended, but reinstated when they appeared, just the two of them, at the next meeting of the Committee. They were placed on Disciplinary Probation.
“That was an exciting spring. We kept rushing about in no particular direction, although everything we did seemed to be of a piece. Most important things happened late at night, leaflet-writing, mimeographing, emergency meetings, passionate revelatory dialogue among friends.
“During our months in Europe—fall of ’65—Matty had little to do with politics. One day in Paris—I think it was an International Day of Protest, Oct. 1965—he picketed the American Embassy. He had expected to meet others there. As it turned out, he was all alone, but picketed anyway. In Seville we went to see the American consul to register our protest against the Vietnam war. We did nothing to end the war, but did get a good idea of the sort of person who is appointed to American consulships.
“At Cornell in the spring of 1966, Matty and some friends founded the Young Anarchists. The group never did much, but it put out some neat broadsides. Nevertheless, as I later learned by accident, the very existence of a group of that name intimidated the administration and extensive files were kept, including glossy blown-up photos of every member.
[It is touching that I, a long-time anarchist, never heard of these Young Anarchists from my son.]
“In May a hundred students sat in at President Perkins’ office to protest against Cornell’s complicity with Selective Service. Matty was one of the first seven to get there and so was able to enter the presidential suite before the campus police locked the doors. The latecomers were kept in the corridor. Only the ‘inner seven’ were prosecuted by the University. The Undergraduate Judiciary Board, composed entirely of students, voted ‘no action’ and made us all proud. The Faculty Committee, however, changed this to ‘reprimand.’
“The day after the sit-in, the University Faculty met in special session to discuss the relation between Cornell and Selective Service. As faculty members entered the meeting, they were handed ‘A Plea Against Military Influence at Cornell,’ written by Matty and Jerry.
“In the last year of his life, Matty was deeply involved with two groups, Young Friends and the Ithaca We Won’t Go group. He was committed to the people in these groups and to the fraternal and community spirit among them. This was the only time since SFE that he was so committed.
“In the fall Matty helped organize the Five-Day Fast for Peace, explained in the enclosed leaflet that Matty helped to write. The fast was very successful in terms of the number who participated, the interest and sympathy roused on campus and in town, and the amount of money raised for medical aid [for North and South Vietnamese]. For some reason Matty gradually became the chief PR man for Young Friends. He was rather inept in that position.
[Again, I was surprised to learn of his Quaker connections. His mother and I had never been able to interest him in religion at all, even to read the Bible as literature.]
“Also that fall, Matty, Tom Bell, and I began talking about starting a local draft resistance group. The group grew slowly and beautifully, just as Tom Bell explained in New Left Notes last March. When Matty returned from inter-session in February, he was excited about the possibilities for mass draft-card destruction, and the desirability of starting on April 15 in New York. Everybody was interested, yet nobody seemed moved to action. Finally, Jan Flora and I were startled to realize how soon it would be April 15. We called Matty, rounded up a small meeting, and decided to go ahead. I was going to New York later that night and so I was asked to find out what people there thought. You were the first person I saw. The rest you know.
[I tried to rally help for them by a letter, to academics who had signed Vietnam ads in the Times, of which Matty distributed six thousand copies. On April 15, about 160 students burned their cards in the Sheep Meadow. Matty, who had no card, held up a sign—“20 Years Unregistered.”
[And proud Matty would have been on October 16, that so many who were leaders of the 1500 who turned in their cards had been his fellows in the Sheep Meadow on April 15.]
“For Matty, the most painful occurrence in connection with the draft-card destruction was the breakdown of community spirit that it, and the Easter Peace Bridge demonstration, occasioned in Young Friends. SDS was soliciting pledges in the student union. The Proctor was citing those responsible to appear before the Judiciary boards and suspending those who refused to give their names. Matty and others tried to get Young Friends to solicit the same pledges at their own table, in solidarity with fellow war-resisters. At first Young Friends went along, but then began to talk about backing out. At about the same time, Matty saw the official ‘instructions’ for the Easter demonstration at the Peace Bridge, in which Young Friends, including Epi and himself, had planned to participate. This document had nothing to do with love, fellowship, or respect for the individuality and holy spirit in every person, what Matty conceived to be the essence of Quakerism. There were strict rules governing both the demonstration itself and the personal behavior and attire of the participation. Worse, the document advised male participants to bring along their draft cards to show at the border. The whole thing made Matty sick. Yet his feelings seemed to be shared by only a minority of Young Friends. The group was falling apart in front of his eyes. . . .
“Matty had planned to go to Brazil this summer as part of a Cornell anthropological project. His main purpose, as he explained at the first meeting, would have been to work politically with Brazilian students and thereby help to foster an international community of radical students.
[This project was abandoned when, at the disclosure of C.I.A. tampering with American students, the Brazilian students had to dis-invite the Cornellians. Matty told me that previous South American trips had been exciting and useful. He had worked hard learning Portuguese.
When Brazil was closed off, Matty at once proposed that the entire group should go to Cuba; this would be a reasonable and necessary retaliation to the C.I.A. system and was also worthwhile in itself. Dr. William Rogers, who was the director of the project, has written me as follows: “I won’t detail the debate that followed Matty’s proposal. It was the age-old struggle of the soul between the single act of moral purity and courage, and the prudential and tactical considerations of effectiveness. We spoke of Jesus’ parable of the Pearl of Great Price. Was this act the pearl for which a man will sell all that he has, in order to possess it? Matty, with an eschatological sense akin to the New Testament, seemed to think so. Considerations of the future did not weigh heavily with him. The important thing was to be moral, thoroughly moral, now. How much longer can we wait?” Unfortunately, Matty did not persuade them.]
“Early in the spring Matty took part—as who did not?—in the riotous demonstration which defeated the DA when he came on campus to suppress the sale of the literary magazine. Matty’s battle-cry was entirely his own: ‘Fuck you, Thaler,’ he said to that unfortunate man’s face.
“Later in the spring he made it his business to operate the printing press in the We Won’t Go office. He intended, next year, to spend considerable time there doing routine work.”
On August 7, Matty and I drove down from Expo in Montreal, where we had attended the Hiroshima Day youth rally. In his sleeping bag Matty had hidden some contraband, a book of short stories bought at the Cuban pavilion as a gift for his teacher in a course on Mexican revolutionary novels. However, we decided to declare it, in order that the book might be seized and burned and we could complain to Robert Kennedy. The Customs offices obligingly acted up in the face of our high literary disdain, so we had fun planning our indignant letter. Next day Matty died on the mountain, but I have sent the letter.
Matty refused to register for the draft on general pacifist grounds—the subsequent worsening of the Vietnam war merely confirmed what he already knew.
His method of refusal was not to recognize the draft system at all and to continue as usual, including, of course, his overt antiwar activity—now without a draft card. In fact, he stepped up this activity, but I think this was because of Vietnam rather than to force a showdown. I never saw any sign that he courted going to jail. He did not regard himself as a Witness in any way. On the other hand, he was entirely too open to live “underground.” And the “tactical approach,” of trying for C.O. or accepting II-S in order to carry on revolutionary activity, was also against his disposition: he could not live on an ambiguous basis. Besides, he believed it was bad politics; his enthusiasm for the mass draft-card burning meant that he believed in open massive noncooperation and active nonviolent resistance. His eyes twinkled at the idea of “nonviolent terrorism”: if one is arrested, five others burn their cards on the courthouse steps.
The F.B.I. first got in touch with him in November 1966, purportedly about a classmate applying for C.O., for whom Matty had agreed to be a reference! (This was part of his “business as usual.”) They visited him as a nonregistrant in March 1967 and set the wheels of prosecution going.
Matty’s approach—to “do nothing”—is appropriate, in my opinion, only to young people who are sure of their own integrity and the human use of their own developing careers, who just need to be let be. Matty had this confidence. Besides, he was a balky animal: he would have found it impossibly humiliating, paralyzing, to try to move his feet toward anything he strongly disbelieved in, such as filling out a draft form. He was not, in my experience, “rebellious,” defiant of authority as such. But he had learned that authority was very often irrational, petty, dishonest and sometimes not benevolent, so he was antiauthoritarian. (The school administrations he had dealt with were certainly not models of magnanimity, American democracy or even simple honor; and these are the only officials that a growing boy knows, unless he is a juvenile delinquent or on relief.) Matty was also unusually stubborn in general. He had to do things his own way, at his own pace, according to his own slowly developing concern or fantasy. This was often too slow for other people’s wishes, including mine, but there was no hurrying him. Once he cared, he acted with energy and determination.
He refused to be a leader—at Cornell, as at Berkeley in its best days, leadership was regarded as a poor form of social organization. Yet it is clear in the above accounts that Matty often did lead. But this was because he acted according to his own inner belief, without ambition or ideology. He was frank, loyal and consistent, and his integrity was legendary. If, in an action, he was among the first, or seemed to be the most intransigent and unwilling to compromise, it was not that he was brash or doctrinaire, but because of some elementary human principle. Naturally, then, others found security in him and went along. So far as I can discover, he had no enemies. Even administrators liked him personally and have sent me touching letters of condolence. His lust for community seems to have been equal to my own, but he had more luck with it.
After he became seriously illegal at 18 he, like others in a similar plight, showed signs of anxiety, a certain tightness, a certain hardness. This roused my indignation more than anything else, that the brute mechanical power of the State was distorting the lives of these excellent youth. For nothing. For far worse than nothing—abstract conformity, empty power, overseas murder. Nevertheless, in Matty’s case at least, his formula of dismissing fear and acting as he ordinarily would, seemed to work spectacularly. Once he had made the hard choice, he threw himself into all his activities with increased enthusiasm; new energy was released and during this period—whatever the causal relationship—he embarked on an uninterrupted and pretty happy love affair with Epi Epton, who shared his convictions; this of course must have immensely increased his security, assertiveness and courage.
As I said at the outset, Matty was not essentially political; he was politically active only by duty, on principle. Rather he was a daring swimmer, a good handball player. He ground his own telescopes. He jeopardized his nonexistent II-S deferment and took off for Europe for a semester. He had found a method of meditation that suited him. Hungry for music, he sat for hours at the piano and was in charge of selecting the records in the library. He was an Honors student in anthropology and he was, I am told by Professor Joseph Calvo and Dr. Elizabeth Keller, beginning to do original work in genetics. But his political activity also blessed him with friends and community.
My own hope was that, after he was arrested, he would—having fought through to the end—skip bail and go to Canada, since jail did not seem to be the best environment for him. He said he would make up his mind when it was necessary. He had looked into it and made connections so that it would be possible for him to work politically in Canada.
Every pacifist career is individual, a unique balance of forces, including the shared hope that other human beings will become equally autonomous. Most people want peace and freedom, but there are no pacifist or anarchist masses.
As I tearfully review my son’s brief pacifist career, the following seems to have been his philosophy: He had a will to protect life in all its forms and to conserve the conditions for it. With this, he had a kind of admiring trust in the providence of natural arrangements and liked to gaze at them. He felt that human beings too could form a natural and wise community and he was daringly loyal to this possibility. He was astonished to see people act with timidity, pettiness or violence. Yet he was not naive. He knew that people in power and people bureaucratized are untrustworthy and one has to be prepared for their stupidity and dishonesty and confront them. (I don’t know if he thought that people as such could be malevolent.) As for himself, he felt that there was plenty of time to brood and mull and observe and wait for the spirit; it did not delay, and there was no need for pressuring or forcing votes. What he himself could do to help was to be open to the facts, honest in speech and as consistent as possible. When a practical idea occurred to him, it was never complicated or dilatory, but always a simplification and a way of immediately coming across.
It is a beautiful soul we have lost, who behaved well and had a good influence.
The National Security Industrial Association (NSIA) was founded in 1944 by James Forrestal, to maintain and enhance the beautiful wartime communication between the armament industries and the government. At present it comprises 400 members, including of course all the giant aircraft, electronics, motors, oil, and chemical corporations, but also many one would not expect: not only General Dynamics, General Motors, and General Telephone and Electronics, but General Foods and General Learning; not only Sperry Rand, RCA, and Lockheed, but Servco and Otis Elevators. It is a wealthy club. The military budget is $84 billion.
At the recent biennial symposium, held on October 18 and 19 in the State Department auditorium, the theme was “Research and Development in the 1970s.” To my not unalloyed pleasure, I was invited to participate as one of the seventeen speakers and assigned the topic “Planning for the Socio-Economic Environment.” Naturally I could make the usual speculations about why I was thus “co-opted.” I doubt that they expected to pick my brains for any profitable ideas. But it is useful for feeders at the public trough to present an image of wide-ranging discussion. It is comfortable to be able to say, “You see? these far-outniks are impractical.” And business meetings are dull and I am notoriously stimulating. But the letter of invitation from Henri Busignies of ITT, the chairman of the symposium committee, said only, “Your accomplishments throughout your distinguished career eminently qualify you to speak with authority on the subject.”
What is an intellectual man to do in such a case? I agree with the Gandhian principle, always cooperate within the limits of honor, truth, and justice. But how to co-operate with the military industrial club! during the Vietnam war 1967! It was certainly not the time to reason about basic premises, as is my usual approach, so I decided simply to confront them and soberly tell them off.
Fortunately it was the week of the demonstration at the Pentagon, when there would be thousands of my friends in Washington. So I tipped them off and thirty students from Cornell and Harpur drove down early to picket the auditorium, with a good leaflet about the evil environment for youth produced by the military corporations. When they came, the white helmets sprang up, plus the cameras and reporters. In the face of this dangerous invasion, the State Department of the United States was put under security, the doors were bolted, and the industrialists (and I) were not allowed to exit—on the Twenty-third Street side. Inside, I spoke as follows:
I am astonished that at a conference on planning for the future, you have not invited a single speaker under the age of thirty, the group that is going to live in that future. I am pleased that some of the young people have come to pound on the door anyway, but it is too bad that they aren’t allowed to come in.
This is a bad forum for this topic. Your program mentions the “emerging national goals” of urban development, continuing education, and improving the quality of man’s environment. I would add another essential goal, reviving American democracy; and at least two indispensable international goals, to rescue the majority of mankind from deepening poverty, and to insure the survival of mankind as a species. These goals indeed require research and experimentation of the highest sophistication, but not by you. You people are unfitted by your commitments, your experience, your customary methods, your recruitment, and your moral disposition. You are the military-industrial of the United States, the most dangerous body of men at the present in the world, for you not only implement our disastrous policies but are an overwhelming lobby for them, and you expand and rigidify the wrong use of brains, resources, and labor so that change becomes difficult. Most likely the trends you represent will be interrupted by a shambles of riots, alienation, ecological catastrophes, wars, and revolutions, so that current long-range planning, including this conference, is irrelevant. But if we ask what are the technological needs and what ought to be researched in this coming period, in the six areas I have mentioned, the best service that you people could perform is rather rapidly to phase yourselves out, passing on your relevant knowledge to people better qualified, or reorganizing yourselves with entirely different sponsors and commitments, so that you learn to think and feel in a different way. Since you are most of the R & D that there is, we cannot do without you as people, but we cannot do with you as you are.
In aiding technically underdeveloped regions, the need in the foreseeable future is for an intermediate technology, scientifically sophisticated but tailored to their local skills, tribal or other local social organization, plentiful labor force, and available raw materials. The aim is to help them out of starvation, disease, and drudgery without involving them in an international cash nexus of an entirely different order of magnitude. Let them take off at their own pace and in their own style. For models of appropriate technical analyses, I recommend you to E. F. Schumacher, of the British Coal Board, and his associates. Instead, you people—and your counterparts in Europe and Russia—have been imposing your technology, seducing native elites mostly corrupted by Western education, arming them, indeed often using them as a dumping ground for obsolete weapons. As Dr. Busignies pointed out yesterday, your aim must be, while maintaining leadership, to allow very little technical gap, in order to do business. Thus, you have involved these people in a wildly inflationary economy, have driven them into instant urbanization, and increased the amount of disease and destitution. You have disrupted ancient social patterns, debauched their cultures, fomented tribal and other wars, and in Vietnam yourselves engaged in genocide. You have systematically entangled them in Great Power struggles. It is not in your interest, and you do not have the minds or the methods, to take these peoples seriously as people.
The survival of the human species, at least in a civilized state, demands radical disarmament, and there are several feasible political means to achieve this if we willed it. By the same token, we must drastically de-energize the archaic system of nation-states, e.g., by internationalizing space exploration, expanding operations like the International Geophysical Year, denationalizing Peace Corps and aid programs, opening scientific information and travel. Instead, you—and your counterparts in Europe, Russia, and China—have rigidified and aggrandized the states with a Maginot-line kind of policy called Deterrence, which has continually escalated rather than stabilized. As Jerome Wiesner has demonstrated, past a certain point your operations have increased insecurity rather than diminished it. But this has been to your interest. Even in the present condition of national rivalry, it has been estimated, by Marc Raskin who sat in on the National Security Council, that the real needs of our defense should cost less than a fourth of the budget you have pork-barreled. You tried, unsuccessfully, to saddle us with the scientifically ludicrous Civil Defense program. You have sabotaged the technology of inspection for disarmament. Now you are saddling us with the antimissile missiles and the multi-warhead missiles (MIRV). You have corrupted the human adventure of space with programs for armed platforms in orbit. Although we are the most heavily armed and the most naturally protected of the Great Powers, you have seen to it that we spend a vastly greater amount and perhaps a higher proportion of our wealth on armaments than any other nation.
This brings me to your effect on the climate of the economy. The wealth of a nation is to provide useful goods and services, with an emphasis first on necessities and broad-spread comforts, simply as a decent background for un-economic life and culture; an indefinitely expanding economy is a rat-race. There ought to be an even spread regionally, and no group must be allowed to fall outside of society. At present, thanks to the scientific ingenuity and hard work of previous generations, we could in America allow a modest livelihood to everyone as a constitutional right. And on the other hand, as the young have been saying by their style and actions, there is an imperative need to simplify the standard of living, since the affluent standard has become frivolous, tawdry, and distracting from life itself. But you people have distorted the structure of a rational economy. Since 1945, half of new investment has gone into your products, not subject to the market nor even to Congressional check. This year, 86 percent of money for research is for your arms and rockets. You push through the colossally useless Super-Sonic Transport. At least 20 percent of the economy is directly dependent on your enterprises. The profits and salaries of these enterprises are not normally distributed but go heavily to certain groups while others are excluded to the point of being out-caste. Your system is a major factor in producing the riots in Newark. [At this remark there were indignant protests.]
Some regions of the country are heavily favored—especially Pasadena and Dallas—and others disadvantaged. Public goods have been neglected. A disproportionate share of brains has been drained from more useful invention and development. And worst of all, you have enthusiastically supported an essentially mercantilist economics that measures economic health in terms of abstract Gross National Product and rate of growth, instead of concrete human well-being. Both domestically and internationally, you have been the bellwether of meaningless expansion, and this has sharpened poverty in our own slums and rural regions and for the majority of mankind. It has been argued that military expenditure, precisely because it is isolated and wasteful, is a stabilizer of an economy, providing employment and investment opportunities when necessary; but your unbridled expansion has been the chief factor of social instability.
Dramatically intervening in education, you have again disrupted the normal structure. Great universities have come to be financed largely for your programs. Faculties have become unbalanced; your kind of people do not fit into the community of scholars. The wandering dialogue of science with the unknown is straitjacketed for petty military projects. You have been mentioning the need for personal creativity, but this is not to listen to the Creator Spirit for ideas, but to harness it to your ideas. This is blasphemous. There has been secrecy, which is intolerable to true academics and scientists. The political, and morally dubious co-opting of science, engineering, and social science has disgusted and alienated many of the best students. Further, you have warped the method of education, beginning with the primary grades. Your need for narrowly expert personnel has led to processing the young to be test-passers, with a gross exaggeration of credits and grading. You have used the wealth of public and parents to train apprentices for yourselves. Your electronics companies have gone into the “education industries” and tried to palm off teaching machines, audiovisual aids, and programmed lessons in excess of the evidence for their utility. But the educational requirements of our society in the foreseeable future demand a very different spirit and method. Rather than processing the young, the problem is how to help the young grow up free and inventive in a highly scientific and socially complicated world. We do not need professional personnel so much as autonomous professionals who can criticize the programs handed to them and be ethically responsible. Do you encourage criticism of your programs by either the subsidized professors or the students? [At this, Mr. Charles Herzfeld, the chairman of the session, shouted “Yes!” and there was loud applause for the interruption, yet I doubt that there is much such encouragement.] We need fewer lessons and tests, and there ought to be much less necessity and prestige attached to mandarin requirements.
Let us turn to urbanism. Prima facie, there are parts of urban planning—construction, depollution, the logistics of transportation—where your talents ought to be peculiarly useful. Unfortunately, it is your companies who have oversold the planes and the cars, polluted the air and water, and balked at even trivial remedies, so that I do not see how you can be morally trusted with the job. The chief present and future problems in this field, however, are of a different kind. They are two. The long-range problem is to diminish the urbanization and suburban sprawl altogether, for they are economically unviable and socially harmful. For this, the most direct means, and the one I favor, is to cut down rural emigration and encourage rural return, by means of rural reconstruction and regional cultural development. The aim should be a 20 percent rural ratio instead of the present 5 percent. This is an aspect of using high technology for simplification, increasing real goods but probably diminishing the Gross National Product measured in cash. Such a program is not for you. Your thinking is never to simplify and retrench, but always to devise new equipment to alleviate the mess that you have helped to make with your previous equipment.
Secondly, the immediately urgent urban problem is how to diminish powerlessness, anomie, alienation, and mental disease. For this the best strategy is to decentralize urban administration, in policing, schooling, social welfare, neighborhood renewal, and real-estate and business ownership. Such community development often requires heightening conflict and risking technical inefficiency for intangible gains of initiative and solidarity. This also is obviously not your style. You want to concentrate capital and power. Your systems analyses of social problems always tend toward standardization, centralization, and bureaucratic control, although these are not necessary in the method. You do not like to feed your computers indefinite factors and unknown parameters where spirit, spite, enthusiasm, revenge, invention, etc., will make the difference. To be frank, your programs are usually grounded in puerile theories of social psychology, political science, and moral philosophy. There is a great need for research and trying out in this field, but the likely cast of characters might be small farmers, Negro matriarchs, political activists, long-haired students, and assorted sages. Not you. Let’s face it. You are essentially producers of exquisite hardware and good at the logistics of moving objects around, but mostly with the crude aim of destroying things rather than reconstructing or creating anything, which is a harder task. Yet you boldly enter into fields like penology, pedagogy, hospital management, domestic architecture, and planning the next decade—wherever there is a likely budget.
I will use the last heading, improving the quality of man’s environment, as a catch-all for some general remarks. In a society that is cluttered, overcentralized and overadministered, we should aim at simplification, decentralization, and decontrol. These require highly sophisticated research to determine where, how, and how much. Further, for the first time in history, the scale of the artificial and technological has dwarfed the natural landscape. In prudence, we must begin to think of a principled limitation on artifice and to cut back on some of our present gigantic impositions, if only to insure that we do not commit some terrible ecological blunder. But as Dr. Smelt of Lockheed explained to us yesterday, it is the genius of American technology to go very rapidly from R & D to application; in this context, he said, prudence is not a virtue. A particular case is automation: which human functions should be computerized or automated, which should not? This question—it is both an analytic and an empirical one—ought to be critical in the next decade, but I would not trust IBM salesmen to solve it. Another problem is how man can feel free and at home within the technological environment itself. For instance, comprehending a machine and being able to repair it is one thing; being a mere user and in bondage to service systems is another. Also, to feel free, a man must have a rather strong say in the close environment that he must deal with. But these requirements of a technology are not taken into account by you. Despite Dr. Smelt, technology is a branch of moral philosophy, subordinate to criteria like prudence, modesty, safety, amenity, flexibility, cheapness, easy comprehension, repairability and so forth. If such moral criteria became paramount in the work of technologists, the quality of the environment would be more livable.
Still a further problem is how to raise the scientific and technical culture of the whole people, and here your imperialistic grab of the R & D money and of the system of education has done immeasurable damage. You have seen to it that the lion’s share has gone to your few giant firms and a few giant universities, although in fact very many, perhaps more than half of, important innovations still come from independents and tiny firms. I was pleased that Dr. Dessauer of Xerox pointed this out this morning. If the money were distributed more widely, there would probably be more discovery and invention, and what is more important, there would be a larger pool of scientific and competent people. You make a fanfare about the spinoff of a few socially useful items, but your whole enterprise is notoriously wasteful—for instance, five billions go down the drain when after a couple of years you change the design of a submarine, sorry about that. When you talk about spinoff, you people remind me of the TV networks who, after twenty years of nothing, boast that they did broadcast the McCarthy hearings and the Kennedy funeral. [This remark led to free and friendly laughter; I do not know whether at the other industry or at their own hoax.] Finally, concentrating the grants, you narrow the field of discovery and innovation, creating an illusion of technological determinism, as if we had to develop in a certain style. But if we had put our brains and money into electric cars, we would now have electric cars; if we had concentrated on intensive agriculture, we would now find that this is the most efficient, and so forth. And in grabbing the funds, you are not even honest; 90 percent of the R & D money goes in fact to shaping up for production, which as entrepreneurs you should pay out of your own pockets.
No doubt some of these remarks have been unfair and ignorant. [Frantic applause.] By and large they are undeniable, and I have not been picking nits.
These remarks have certainly been harsh and moralistic. We are none of us saints, and ordinarily I would be ashamed to use such a tone. But you are the manufacturers of napalm, fragmentation bombs, the planes that destroy rice. Your weapons have killed hundreds of thousands in Vietnam and you will kill other hundreds of thousands in other Vietnams. I am sure that most of you would concede that much of what you do is ugly and harmful, at home and abroad. But you would say that it is necessary for the American way of life, at home and abroad, and therefore you cannot do otherwise. Since we believe, however, that that way of life itself is unnecessary, ugly, and un-American [Shouts of “Who are we?”]—we are I and those people outside—we cannot condone your present operations; they should be wiped off the slate.
[Most of the 300 in the audience did not applaud these remarks, but there was quite strong applause from a couple of dozen. Afterward these sought me out singly and explained, “Thanks for having the courage” or more significantly, “Those kids outside are right. My son is doing the same thing in Boston—Ohio State—etc.”
The chairman of the session, Charles Herzfeld of ITT, felt obliged to exclaim, “The remark about our committing genocide in Vietnam is obscene. He does not say what is really intolerable there, the Viet Cong single out college graduates for extermination.”!!
More poignantly, the director of the symposium, a courteous and intelligent man, apologized to the gathering for having exposed them to me, which must have been a wrench for him to say. He had of course seen my text beforehand.
We went out by the exit onto the other avenue, and I was able to rejoin the more amiable company of the young people, who were now sitting with their backs pressed against the auditorium doors, still among the white helmets. I answered their questions about the proceedings and we dispersed. That night NBC-TV showed a picture of the pickets, and next morning I got a story in the Post.]
Where is it at? Unquestionably the week of Resistance demonstrations was successful and made its point, that thousands and probably tens of thousands are now willing to go to jail or get their heads broken to stop the Vietnam war. There were no disappointments: Turning in the draft-cards, resistance at the induction centers and staging areas and against the Dow and Navy recruiters, the crowd in Washington and the melee at the Pentagon, all proved strong enough.
We are witnessing a test of legitimacy, and in my opinion the government position is now untenable. Despite a few exotic slogans, there is a groundswell of American populism, including sporadic populist violence as in 1890 or 1933, but mainly solidly secure in the belief that it is itself the democratic voice and LBJ is a usurper. As was not reported in the press, the night vigil on the Pentagon steps on October 22 sang “The Star-Spangled Banner.” It was probably a mistake for the President to have exposed so many troops to the young resisters who were mostly peaceful but obviously spunky and sometimes persuasive.
The climate is beginning to feel like the eve of the French withdrawal from Algeria, including the same coalition of the young, the intellectuals, and the Algerians (Negroes). The question remains, is the American structure so rich and technologically powerful that its government can dispense with legitimacy? I don’t know. And while the NLF and the North Vietnamese have been hanging on and continuing to counter-attack (and their people and our people are dying), American opinion has finally begun to veer sharply toward getting out. The hawk spokesmen have become divided and confused.
There is a persistent rumor in Washington that the President (or the hidden government) is about to cast the die and approve the prepared invasion of North Vietnam in December. If so, a hundred thousand youth and many many others will resist non-violently or violently and there will be martial law and concentration camps. I will not speculate further along this atomic line.
But there is evidence that shrewder counsel might prevail; to write off this odious war, adopt a somewhat less adventurous foreign policy, put a little more money into the cities, divert some of the military-industrial enterprise into Outer Space and “long-range planning,” and come to a solid understanding with the Russians. I think this is the meaning of the rapidly increasing dovishness in Congress and the sudden conversion of the Republicans who threaten to nominate Percy or Gavin. The strategy is similar to the New Deal: when the going gets too rough domestically, accommodate and go on to build a grander corporate structure that is, in some respects, better—temporarily. For this plan, however, Johnson would have to go, since it now seems impossible for him to sound a retreat from Vietnam without getting shot by the irate father of a young man who died in vain. Whether we would then get Robert Kennedy or a moderate Republican is probably unimportant.
Needless to say, this is not the outcome that the radical young are after. They fear, justifiedly, that if we stop the war, most of the Americans will again fall morally and politically asleep. Yet they, like the rest of us, do want to stop the Vietnam war; there are few indeed who are so fanatical for world upheaval as to want that particular evil to continue so that good may come . . . This is not the stuff of new humanism. For instance, those who objected to being processed at Berkeley will have to think seriously about Chairman Mao’s little red book. And those who want to make love not war but who also want to imitate Che Guevara in American cities, must ask themselves what adequate guerrilla tactics would be in a high technology, namely to poison the water, wreck the subways, and cause power failures in New York and Chicago; is this what they intend?
But I do not think the young themselves will fall asleep. They have been through remarkable experiences and have found one another. There is the potentiality of a kind of youth international. Most important, the present power-systems of the world are indeed unfit for modern conditions, and this will become increasingly apparent. If the young continue to be in conflict, to try out innovations, and to study professionally what ought to be done with our technology and ecology, mores and authority-structure, and the fact of one world, they will gradually shape for themselves a good inheritance to come into. Considering the tremendous power and complexity of the systems they want to displace, twenty years is a short time to devise something better.