Pivot Points: Adventures on the Road to Christian Contentment (Chapter 3)

Current is grateful for P&R Publishing’s permission to serialize Marvin Olasky’s memoir, Pivot Points: Adventures on the Road to Christian Contentment.

Philosophy to Journalism

After my pivot from Judaism to atheism and from liberalism to radicalism, a third pivot concerns a way of thinking. I’m accepted into Yale’s equivalent of a Great Books curriculum. The official description of the program states, “Directed Studies offers a select group of first-year students an intense interdisciplinary introduction to some of the seminal texts of Western civilization. Working in discussion seminars with top Yale faculty, DS students learn to analyze complex texts and to put them into conversation with one another across time and genre.”

The 1969 student-generated Yale College Course Critique is more perceptive: “The courses themselves are generally well constructed, but with a determined open-endedness that can easily lead to high-in-the-sky b–––s–––ing.” After reading Lenin and playing a Soviet general, I pride myself on gruffly dismissing “bourgeois rhetoric.” 

In Philosophy I, twelve students sit around a table with Professor Robert Sherrick Brumbaugh, former president of the Metaphysical Society of America, author of Plato for the Modern Age and Plato’s Mathematical Imagination. He has lost a hand and during each seminar regularly refills and lights his pipe using only his one working arm. (Clench pipe firmly between teeth, pour in tobacco, hold cigarette lighter over bowl and flick it on, taking care not to burn self.) I ask impatient questions such as “How does this help us understand the war in Vietnam?”

In History and Politics I and other courses, we gather in the offices of professors who sit enthroned behind their desks. We dozen acolytes gather around in smaller but still rich-feeling leather chairs. We write papers giving our opinions about each week’s reading of Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, and Tacitus, then on to Hobbes, Locke, Mill, Marx, and Nietzsche.

I realize that my mind works inductively more than deductively:  instead of starting high on the ladder of abstraction with “why” and then working my way down, I work my way up from the who, what, when, and where.

During my second year at Yale, four professors provide valuable lessons of different kinds. The first is Harold M. Hodges Jr., a visiting professor who normally hangs out at the University of California-Berkeley. A journalism major in college and then a reporter on the Herald-Tribune in Paris, he is also the author of an 807-page book called Social Stratification: Class in America. The American Sociological Review praises it for emphasizing “the impact of class on intimacy, style of life, personality, and mobility.”

I also want to mix journalism and scholarly work. Better yet, the Review says Hodges defends his class-based analysis “with hard data” but also “a kind of vengeance which can only irritate those who adhere to current platitudes on ‘affluence’ and ‘classlessness.’” I also want to irritate and destroy.

When a graduate student teaching assistant gives my ranting term paper a “pass” (the Yale equivalent of a C), I visit Hodges during his office hours and appeal the grade—the only time I ever do that. Hodges reads the paper, likes the angry tone and journalistic detail, and regrades it “Honors,” a Yale A. My takeaway is that anger pays.

The second influential professor in my life is John Morton Blum, a Harvard graduate in 1943, three years after my socially awkward father. Smooth Blum is a natural in tweed jackets and bow ties, with an accent that’s migrated from New York Jewish to New England WASP. In Linsley-Chittenden Hall, home of $100,000 Tiffany windows depicting poets of ancient Greece and solemn angels thirsting for knowledge, Blum’s beautifully formed complete sentences hurl invective against plutocrats of the past.

Blum’s view of American history fits with H. G. Wells’s view of world history that captured me several years before. Blum praises twentieth-century Progressives, the New Deal, and the Great Society. A 2017 memoir by Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson, who attended Yale just before me, describes how “in Professor John Morton Blum’s classroom, the robber baron poses for a portrait with his greatcoat; the poor shiver in their tenements.  . . . Tycoons are men of scurvy habit; their smokestacks foul the air; their greed chokes small competitors; their factories and  mills wear down young girls before their time.”

Blum even recites dramatically the conclusion of William Jennings Bryan’s 1896 speech to the Democratic convention: “Upon which side shall the Democratic Party fight; upon the side of the idle holders of idle capital, or upon the side of the struggling masses? . . . You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.” Once a presidential candidate or a professor starts hammering away about class warfare, everything is a nail. But I love it.

One of Blum’s books, a biography of Theodore Roosevelt, gets me thinking about going on adventures. Blum reveres Roosevelt, who heads west for a year of cowboy life and later recruits “rough riders” to fight alongside him in the Spanish American War. When I ask Blum whether left-wing intellectuals and blue-collar workers can get along in contemporary US politics, he gives me the type of challenge that all professors should offer students: “Go and find out.”

I strike up a conversation with fifty-eight-year-old Yale janitor Benton Pride, the first Communist Party member I’ve ever met. When I learn he also opposes the Vietnam War, I propose that the dorm student council make him a “special fellow.” That will give him fifteen free meals in the dining hall during which he can talk with students about “real working-class experiences” and a “worker-student alliance.”

That story reaches the New York Times and then Life reporters, resulting in stories that puff Pride and me in photos and pampering headlines: “Yale Elects a Wise Janitor,” “Yale Fellow Well Met,” and “Master of Blue-Collar Wisdom.” I gain fifteen seconds of collegiate notoriety, but my classmates stop eating with Pride after two meals. He talks too much, they say, and he also smells.

The third professor I remember well is Charles Reich, author of The Greening of America, which for a week or two in 1970 is the #1 New York Times bestseller. Reich acknowledges writing it partly in Yale dining halls while listening to student spouting. The book begins, “America is dealing death, not only to people in other lands, but to its own people. So say the most thoughtful and passionate of our youth, from California to Connecticut.”

Flattered, about 450 of us pack into Reich’s American Studies course in the block-long Yale Law School building. It’s modeled on the medieval English Inns of Court and embellished with carved wood, including a bulldog (Yale’s mascot) dressed as a lawyer. Reich scorns those he calls “Consciousness I” (often small-business owners) and “Consciousness II” assembly line workers, whose days are “mindless, exhausting, boring, servile, and hateful.” He says no thoughtful person “could possibly be happy or contented in a factory or white-collar job.”

Reich says Yale students are the vanguard of a new consciousness, Con III. He’s vague about the specifics but says we’ll figure it out because, as Joni Mitchell sings regarding the just

completed Woodstock festival, “We are stardust, we are golden.”  Reich primes us to believe with him Ralph Waldo Emerson’s credo that “the simplest person, who in his integrity worships God, becomes God.”

Much of the course is not only abstract but fluffy. One novel on the reading list is Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion, whose protagonist is a Yalie from Oregon tired of sitting in the library. That character yearns for adventure, heads back home, and finds purpose among fiercely independent loggers. When I tell Reich I’ve spent my whole life close to the Atlantic Ocean, he suggests that I spend some time by the Pacific.

The fourth professor who affects my life, thirty-four-year old David Musto, teaches about the history of medicine. I’m not in any of his classes, but he sends a nice note about my Yale Daily News writing, so I ask him to be the professor of record for an independent study regarding New Haven poverty, with columns instead of papers serving as my coursework. He agrees, so I do street-level reporting in poor neighborhoods.

My subjects are old men like Harold Cornwall who live in single room occupancy hotels, with rooms costing $3.50 per night. Cornwall introduces me to neighbors who know each other and check on each other’s health. Urban renewal that includes construction of a New Haven government center throws them onto the street. Visits to jails, schools, and other sites allow me to write columns with specific detail. My Marxism affects what I’m looking for—like Hodges, Blum, and Reich, I look for class conflict—but I don’t purposefully offer hype and hide tripe.

I also write about African Americans who support Black Panther head Bobby Seale. He’s on trial in the New Haven courthouse, a golf shot from the Yale campus, for allegedly ordering the murder of a suspected police informant. That trial, along with anti-war reaction to the expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia, leads to my most memorable Yale month:  May 1970.

That’s when radicals of all stripes arrive for massive protests outside the courthouse. Newspapers report thefts of hundreds of guns and one hundred forty pounds of mercury fulminate used in blasting caps. Owners of downtown New Haven stores close and board them up. More than six hundred journalists come, anticipating disaster. With twenty-five thousand demonstrators expected, some students ship home stereos and other valuables. Others leave town.

On the morning of Friday, May 1, National Guard platoons march through the streets. Soldiers check roofs for snipers. Near the demonstration on the New Haven Green, four thousand National Guardsmen and two thousand state troopers wait with live ammo. But the afternoon demonstration merely features two hours of speechifying, plus Beat poet Allen Ginsberg reading a new work that begins, “O holy Yale Panther Pacifist  Conscious populace.”

Then nighttime overrides pacifism, as several thousand people gather in the dark opposite the courthouse, facing several hundred National Guardsmen. Some hoist bricks and throw bottles. Guardsmen respond with tear gas, not bullets. 

A British journalist from Reuters tells me of his disappointment: “Came here for nothing.” I also feel deflated until May 4, when National Guardsmen in Ohio open fire and kill four people at Kent State University.

“Look what they did,” one of my roommates says. But I know that we—anti-war demonstrators throwing things—also did it. I and many others realize this is not abstract theorizing or fluff. It’s life and death. Kent State leads some to emphasize non-violence. It leads others to believe in fighting power with more power.