Up Against the Wall... or Let Them Throw Pies

I am so very bored with the 1968 unpleasantness, which people have been talking about more or less incessantly for the last 40 years—but dues have to be paid. This week: praise. Next time: scorn.

It is not hard to see the uprising as a singular event, even if it may not be “among the most significant [events] in the history of higher education in the United States,” as some Spectator reporters claimed from the historical vantage point of three months later. Obviously nothing else in Columbia’s recent history looms so large or provides such an easy point of comparison for any political activity or interaction with anyone outside the gates.

But the uprising is really one instance of a larger trend. Rather than detail exactly what happened in 1968—which will undoubtedly be rehashed over and over again in the Spectator opinion section in April, when the anniversary truly arrives—I will focus on the general background of politically motivated misbehavior at the University during the ’60s. I use “misbehavior” because transgression is clearly a factor—otherwise it seems unlikely that Mark Rudd, a CC student and the leader of the Columbia chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, would have concluded an open letter to the University president with “Up against the wall, motherfucker, this is a stick-up.”

Of course transgression has its place; the brilliant, manic prankishness of Abbie Hoffman—trying to levitate the Pentagon, inducing stockbrokers to scramble for money on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, etc.—has had a longer half-life than most of the counterculture rhetoric. But it should be the right sort of transgression—i.e., not what was inflicted on Madame Ngo Dinh Nhu, the de facto first lady of South Vietnam, when she visited Columbia in 1963.

“At Columbia they threw eggs at me like I was a peasant,” she told the Harvard Crimson. Why would they do such a thing? Perhaps because she began her speech by saying that there was nothing more terrible in the world than “devils, ghosts, and students.” Perhaps they were upset with the repressive policies of her brother-in-law Ngo Dinh Diem, the very popular—98.2 percent of the vote is not at all suspicious—prime minister/U.S. puppet of South Vietnam. Or perhaps they had fallen for the trickery of the Buddhist monks who set themselves on fire to protest the Catholic Diem’s intolerance toward the religion of the vast majority of the population—Madame Nhu’s response was that the “barbecue” was not “self-sufficient,” because “they used imported gasoline.”

Still, charming as she is, eggs may not be the thing to throw at the woman who referred to her opponents as “scabby sheep” in the pages of Time. As every property owner can tell you, people who throw eggs are hoodlums. People who throw pies, however, have the entire history of film on their side; like Charlie Chaplin and the Marx Brothers, they are the good guys—or so perhaps the reasoning went for the students who threw a lemon meringue pie at an Army draft official who came to campus in the spring of 1968.

“Speaking both professionally and as a loyal American,” the editor of Gourmet magazine offered her thoughts to Spec a month before the building occupations. “Here is a man who is only doing his job,” she wrote. “He is no more responsible for the horrible events in Vietnam than Adolf Eichmann was for the evils of Nazi Germany. He is just a good solider carrying out his orders.”

She continues: “When the pinko administrators of Columbia find out who threw the pie, they should take all appropriate disciplinary action. I might suggest either castration or frontal lobotomies as appropriate. After all we can’t have these awful boys going around reproducing their awful genes.” After another oddly sexual punishment suggestion that I am not equipped to analyze—it involves the offenders licking the pie off of the draft official’s face—she concludes by offering her own special recipe, which requires “a little rat poison.”

So we can perhaps see how the split between old and young intensified. And we do get a sense, however imperfect, of the violence that seems to lie just beneath the surface of everything in the ’60s. But one thing that might seem foreign to us is the way in which even the most pointless stupidity could become politicized.

In the early ’60s Spec covered panty raids devotedly (in some cases diagrams were employed). But in October 1968 the New York Times scooped it with the disingenuously headlined (and obviously political) “Nonpolitics Stirs Columbia Men; 300 Raid Barnard for Panties.” Even without the student quote labeling the raid “a return to normalcy,” it is clear what place the Times reporter thinks students should occupy (the one where they have generally remained for the last 40 years).

But for a brief moment young people were truly powerful (or at least feared to be). To wish that everyone could have simply sat down and talked it all out is to misunderstand almost everything about the ’60s. To make Columbia stand in for all the ills of America, as Rudd’s letter does—it is unlikely that University President Grayson Kirk masterminded the Vietnam War to maintain control over his empire—is not fair (and really more of an insult than “motherfucker”). But it is hard to argue with essayist Peter Marin—in a letter written around the uprising’s 20th anniversary and posted on Rudd’s Web site—who states that the young people “saw our own nation more clearly then than we have since.”

Robert Ast is a student in the school of General Studies studying English and comparative literature. Columbia Babylon runs alternate Fridays. Opinion@columbiaspectator.com