What strikes me most in reading books like Alfred Kazin's haunting poetic reminiscences of boyhood in an immigrant Jewish neighborhood in the East, is the vast gulf which separates that kind of growing up and the childhood and adolescence of those of us who came out of the towns of the American South and Southwest a generation later. With the Eastern Jewish intellectuals who play such a substantial part in American cultural life, perhaps in the late 1960's a dominant part, the struggle as they grew up in the 1930's was for one idea or set of ideas over others, for a fierce acceptance or rejection of one man's theories or another man's poetry—and with all this a driving determination to master the language which had not been their parents' and to find a place in a culture not quite theirs.
But for so many of us who converged on Austin, Texas, in the early 1950's from places like Karnes City or Big Spring or Abilene or Rockdale or—as in my case—Yazoo City, Mississippi, the awakening we were to experience, or to have jolted into us, or to undergo by some more subtle chemistry, did not mean a mere finishing or deepening, and most emphatically did not imply the victory of one set of ideologies over another, one way of viewing literature or politics over another, but something more basic and simple. This was the acceptance of ideas themselves as something worth living by. It was a matter, at the age of eighteen or nineteen, not of discovering certain books, but the simple presence of books, not the nuances of idea and feeling, but idea and feeling on their own terms. It is this late coming to intellectual and perceptual awareness that still gives the intellectuals from the small towns of our region a hungry, naive quality, as opposed to the sharp-elbowed over-intellectuality of some Easterners, as if those from down there who made it were lucky, or chosen, out of all the disastrous alternatives of their isolated lower or middle-class upbringings, to enjoy and benefit from the fruits of simply being educated and liberal-minded.
I was sorrowfully ignorant—ignorant of myself, ignorant of the world of moving objects I was about to enter. One hundred miles to the north of Yazoo, Faulkner had been writing his great tales of violence and the destruction of honor. As a senior in high school I went to Oxford for a convention, and watched as they filmed the jail scenes for the movie Intruder in the Dust, yet this did not inspire me much one way or the other. Had I known that great books were for one's own private soul rather than mere instrumentalities for achieving those useless trinkets on which all American high schools, including small ones in the Mississippi delta, base their existence, perhaps I would have found in Faulkner some dark chord—some suggestion of how that land had shaped me, how its isolation and its guilt-ridden past had already settled so deeply into my bones. Unfortunately this was to come later. Then I had joined easily and thoughtlessly in the Mississippi middle-class consensus that Faulkner, the chronicler and moralist, was out for the Yankee dollar.
What we brought to the University of Texas in the 1950's, to an enormous, only partially formed state university, was a great awe before the splendid quotations on its buildings and the walls of its libraries, along with an absolutely prodigious insensitivity as to what they implied beyond decoration. Minds awakened slowly, painfully, and with pretentious and damaging inner searches. Where an Alfred Kazin at the age of nineteen might become aroused in the subway by reading a review by John Chamberlain in the New York Times and rush to his office to complain, we at eighteen or nineteen were only barely beginning to learn that there were ideas, much less ideas to arouse one from one's self. If places like City College or Columbia galvanized the young New York intellectuals already drenched in literature and polemics, the University of Texas had, in its halting, unsure, and often frivolous way, to teach those of us with good minds and small-town high-school diplomas that we were intelligent human beings, with minds and hearts of our own that we might learn to call our own, that there were some things, many things—ideas, values, choices of action—worth committing one's self to and fighting for. Yet the hardest task at the University of Texas, as many of us were to learn, was to separate all the extraneous and empty things that can drown a young person there, as all big universities can drown their young people, from the few simple things that are worth living a life by. Without wishing to sound histrionic, I believe I am thinking of something approaching the Western cultural tradition, but if someone had suggested such a thing to me that September night in 1952, as I stepped off the Southern Trailways bus in Austin to be greeted by three fraternity men anxious to look me over, I would have thought him either a fool or a con man.
I emerged from that bus frightened and tired, after having come five-hundred miles non-stop over the drab hills of Louisiana and the pine forests of East Texas. I did not know a single person in Austin. The three men who met me—appalled, I was told later, by my green trousers and the National Honor Society medal on my gold-plated watch chain—were the kind that I briefly liked and admired, for their facility at small talk, their clothes, their manner, but whom I soon grew to deplore and finally to be bored by. They were the kind who made fraternities tick, the favorites of the Dean of Men at the time, respectable B or C-plus students, tolerable athletes, good with the Thetas or the Pi Phis; but one would find later, lurking there in their epicrania despite—or maybe because of—their good fun and jollity, the ideals of the insurance salesman and an aggressive distrust of anything approaching thought.
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It was early fall, with that crispness in the air that awakened one's senses and seemed to make everything wondrously alive. My first days there I wandered about that enormous campus, mingling silently with its thousands of nameless students. I walked past the fraternity and sorority houses, which were like palaces to me with their broad porches and columns and patios, and down “The Drag” with its bookstores and restaurants, a perfectly contained little city of its own. On a slight rise dominating the place was a thirty-story skyscraper called the “Tower,” topped with an edifice that was a mock Greek temple; the words carved on the white sandstone said, “Ye Shall Know the Truth and the Truth Shall Make You Free,” causing me to catch my breath in wonder and bafflement. That first morning I took the elevator to the top, and looked out on those majestic purple hills to the west, changing to lighter shades of blue or a deeper purple as wisps of autumn clouds drifted around the sun; this, they would tell me, was the Great Balcones Divide, where the South ended and the West began, with its stark, severe landscape so different from any I had known before. I saw the state capitol, only a few blocks to the south, set on its sloping green acres, its pink granite catching the morning light, and away to the east the baseball field dug into the native rock, and the football stadium, the largest and most awesome I had ever seen. Then down again to the campus, where all the furious construction and demolition were going on, and where the swarms of students back for another year greeted each other with such shouts and screams of delight, war-whoops and hoo-haws and wild embracing, and twangy “hello there's” with the “r's” exploited as nowhere else in the South, that 1 suddenly felt unbearably displaced and alone. Everything around me was brisk, burgeoning, metropolitan. It was bigger than Memphis when 1 was twelve.
I was a desperately homesick Mississippi boy of seventeen, and the life I saw about me was richer and more flamboyant than anything I had known before. In the very atmosphere of the place was the dictum that everything is possible. There was a kind of liberality of spirit there, an expansiveness which, as 1 was one day to learn, is one of the most distinctive qualities of Texans, even though it can be directed toward things that do not deserve being expansive about. There was something frenetic, almost driven, about the organized pursuits of these Texas students; even by the gregarious standards of my own high school there was not enough loneliness in them, not enough disaffection, they moved about in packs, and they would organize committees—a service committee, a social committee, a committee on committees—on the merest excuse. Today this characteristic, which reaches far into adult life, seems most curious in a state which in most established quarters glorifies, perhaps more than any other region of America, some mystical individualism, with sources more contemporaneous with Goldwater and Buckley than Rousseau.
Yet I myself shared that compulsion to join, and join I did, everything from the Freshman Council to student government to the ROTC Band. This, 1 thought, was the mark of success, something one assumes without dispute. Versatility, gregariousness, the social graces, these were the important things, just as they had been for me previously in Yazoo City, where as athlete, valedictorian, sports announcer, and editor of the Yazoo High Flashlight, 1 had been voted most likely to succeed and had been known as a perfect young gentleman. These were what the University of Texas could provide, only bigger and better. Yet as time passed I would grow progressively more lonely, more contemptuous of this organized anarchy, more despairing of the ritualized childishness and grasping narcissism of the fraternity life.
This taste of fraternities had a curious effect. The experience of seeing grown men twisting paper mache into flowers for a float, or of social lions advising how best to impress the sorority girls, at least gave one some early insight into priorities. And in that day this fraternity was the best one there; the further one got down the scale, the more insufferable were the practices. The new members who had not been initiated were called out at all hours, for “exercise rallies,” “walks,” or “serenades.” Some fraternities beat their new members with paddles and other instruments, or gave elaborate “pig” parties, in which each member was expected to bring the ugliest girl he could manage to get for the evening. Around the campus one got to know of the “perennial” fraternity boys; one in particular was over thirty years old, registered each semester for the minimum of courses and seldom if ever went to class, his purpose being to indulge as freely as possible in all aspects of the Greek Life. He escorted girls twelve years his junior, and gave bright little lectures on how to handle yourself in the best social circumstances. Once he turned on me for some minor trespass and said, “I wonder when you're going to grow up.”
Early in that year I was taken on my first “walk.” It was late on a Saturday night in the fall; the fraternity boys blindfolded me and put me in their car. We drove for miles, until the concrete gave out, and down some interminable gravel road until we stopped. They took all my clothes, including my shoes, and tied me to a tree. After I heard the car drive away, I worked the rope loose and started down the road, walking in the middle of it to avoid the beer cans, broken whiskey bottles, and other debris that clutter up the sides of every Texas road I have ever been on in such abundance. It was the last indignity: homesick, cold, alone, naked, and lost, off on some meaningless adolescent charade. That afternoon I had escorted to the football game a gat-toothed brunette they had picked out for me, from a “wealthy family in Dallas,” the thirty-two-year-old perennial had said, and she had spent the whole time making fun of the way I drawled! Finally, at the top of a lonely hill, I got my bearings. Looking down from the hill I caught sight of Austin in the cold night air: the Tower, lit orange because of the day's football victory, and the state capitol, and the curved boulevards faintly outlined in the pale blue artificial moonlight from the old street lamps. There it all was, miles away, and I was bruised and tired, but that skyline almost struck me over with its strange open beauty, the clear open beauty of the Southwest plains. Then, all of a sudden, I got mad, probably the maddest I had ever been in my life—at homesickness, at gat-toothed Dallas girls, at fraternities, at twangy accents, at my own helpless condition. “I'm better than this sorry place,” I said to myself several times, and be damned if I didn't believe it. Then I started walking again, until two hours later I reached the concrete and flagged down the third car that came past, and got back to my dormitory just as the sun began to appear.
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It was two things, and the bare suggestion of a third, that made my lonely and superficially gregarious freshman year tolerable, and helped shape my knowledge of that campus.
One was the mad, rudimentary life of the dormitory. Old Brackenridge Hall, a yellow-brick affair with Spanish stucco roofs, stood right at the edge of the long intramural field, only a quarter of a mile from the capitol, and just across a narrow street from a line of dingy shops and greasy cafes. We called it “The Slum Area,” not only for its general dinginess but for its violence, both organized and sporadic, which erupted inevitably on the weekend nights after the beer houses across the street closed down. Brackenridge Hall was where life was, stripped of its pretenses, where one saw every ‘day the pathetic, the hopeless young men—often poor though sometimes not, often ignorant but not always, but never anything if not various. Here a fairly sensitive boy could not help avoiding a confrontation with his basic and bare-boned self, and see a big state university in its true dimensions. My first roommate, who flunked out soon enough with five F's and a D-plus, was an alcoholic who saw giant roaches in the middle of the night, though the roaches may have been for my benefit. He would throw his slide rule against the wall, or piss in the trashcan from a range of six feet. As I sat in front of my typewriter composing my pieces for the Daily Texan, he and his friends played poker and drank rot-gut bourbon on the other side of the table, interrupting themselves occasionally to make fun of my literary output which, when they read it, to their eternal honor, they did not appreciate.
I lived on the fourth floor, in a room overlooking the intramural field and the entire Slum Area, and down on the third floor lived the baseball players. I became a sort of poet laureate of that group, the resident egghead, it may have been, because I at least tried to study my books, and I actually did try to write for the student paper, which they called “The Daily Wipe.”
Their floor was unquestionably the filthiest establishment I have ever seen, and from it emanated the most savage and grotesque, though until now unrecorded, happenings at the University of Texas in the 1950's. It was the decade of McCarthy, of Eisenhower and Dulles, the decade of students that David Riesman would characterize for posterity as other-directed, the silent generation, I think it was called. These were labels that missed the closer truth, for real life at the University of Texas in the 1950's was like a circle with many rings—the smallest ring in the middle consisting of those students who were conscious of the labels and what they meant, the other inner circles progressively less aware. At the outside of that ring, the farthest out of all, was the third floor of Brackenridge Hall. They came from small ranch towns and middle-sized cities on the plains, and it was their decade right along with Ike's. Old newspapers covered the floors, and two of their number slept on cots in the hall so that one room could be a combination TV room, bar, and pornography library. Every so often they had rummage sales there, and for bargain prices tried to get rid of old waterwings, empty bottles, stale socks, and waterlogged baseballs. Dust and dirt covered the newspapers and the walls. Held most in contempt there were the leaders of student government, fraternities, and deans, and they could smell a stuffed shirt fifty yards away.
They wandered around at night in the pipes under the campus, breaking into office buildings through the sewage system in search of examination papers. Somewhere under there they found the mechanism which controlled the big clock on top of the Tower, and whenever the chimes struck 18, 20, or 24, I knew they were down there again. They would spend hours on cheat notes, for they felt that an elaborate and successful set of cheat notes was a work of art, and in itself a kind of achievement. These were cunningly indexed with rubber bands for manual maneuvering, so that for a quick look at the Causes of the American Revolution one had only to flick the rubber band to C—and there, sure enough, were all seven causes, and in the right order. On a history identification test, one of them, his cheat notes not working, identified Daniel Webster as a colored Senator from Arkansas.
For fifty cents they would take anyone to see the cadavers in the Biology Building. They had a public-address system which they would occasionally place in the window of the third floor and turn on at full blast. Once I was standing at rigid attention in the ranks of the ROTC on the intramural field while in total silence the troops were being reviewed by a general from San Antonio. Suddenly I heard a booming voice down the field, loud enough to be heard all the way to the capitol building: “Private Morris, Private Willie Morris, Company D, Squad C, take charge of your troops and dismiss them. You got more pull than that general!” At another ROTC drill I noticed them up in the window again, fiddling with the loudspeaker, and I feared the worst, but the voice merely said: “The War is over boys, General Lee just gave his sword to ol’ Grant! Go home to your families and your crops!”
They spied on parked cars behind the baseball field, sneaking right up to the windows and looking inside, then startling the passionate couples by setting off firecrackers under the cars and shouting and circling around like Apache Indians. Some two dozen of them, myself included, hiding in the grass under the bleachers at the baseball field late one night, watched while the starting pitcher for next day's game performed the act of love on a waitress on the pitcher's mound. The only times I saw them attentive, or ruminative, were during Dragnet, or the Ed Sullivan Show, or when they were listening to telephone conversations with an elaborate device that tapped the dormitory switchboard. All this was far more representative of the American state university generation in the 1950's than deans would likely have admitted. Nihilism was more articulate than silence, and more colorful than respectability.
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The student newspaper, the Daily Texan, turned out to be one of the two or three best college dailies in America, with an old and honorable tradition. It was housed in a brand-new building in the middle of the campus, and its physical setup was impressive; there were individual offices for the important editors, a “city room” with a big copy desk and two wire-service tickers, and a chute to drop the copy down to a modern composing room below. I felt good just walking into those offices, for it was obvious they were designed for professionals.
In its finest moments, and they had been often, the Daily Texan had defended the spirit of a free university even when the University of Texas itself was unable or unwilling to do so, and in these periods it had reached an eloquence and displayed a courage that would have challenged the mature profession. The tolerant seniors who ran it were bemused enough to give me a weekly column in my first semester, to report on the hundred or more college papers I was assigned to read every week. Here I began to read about strange ideas like integration, and issues of academic freedom, and observations that Dwight D. Eisenhower might be something of a bore. This was heady stuff indeed. On some nights I would stay up until three or four in the morning in my dormitory room, with the newspapers scattered on the tables and floors, trying to understand the incomprehensible goings-on in Berkeley or Ann Arbor or Colorado Springs or Chapel Hill. I gradually began to see the differences in all these papers; the ones from Harvard or Yale and a few big state universities were almost daringly outspoken, and kept talking about “conformity” and “self-satisfaction” in a way that both mystified and excited me, but the great majority which poured in from all over America spoke in a tongueless idiom, imploring students to turn over a new leaf at the start of each semester, give blood to a blood drive, collect wood for a bonfire, or use their leisure time more wisely. Something was out of order here, but I did not know quite what or why.
Once during that year I was invited to the apartment of a graduate student and his wife. The walls of their apartment were lined with books, more books than I had ever seen before in a private dwelling—books everywhere and on everything. I was astonished; I tried to talk with those people, but I was unaccountably shy, and I kept looking at their books out of the corner of my eye, and wondering if I should say something about them, or ask perhaps if they were for sale or if they formed some kind of special exhibit. It is a rare experience for certain young people to see great quantities of books in a private habitat for the first time, and to hear them talked about seriously in the off-hours. Good God, they were doing it for pleasure, or so it seemed. The wife, who was also a graduate student, asked me what I wanted to do with myself when I graduated from college. “I want to be a writer,” I said, but not even thinking about it until all the words were out; my reply surprised me most of all, but it was much more appropriate in those surroundings to have said that instead of “sports announcer,” which probably constituted my first choice. “What do you want to write about?” she persisted. “Just . . . things,” I said, turning red. That night, stirred by the conversation and by all the books I had seen, I went to the library, promising myself to read every important book that had ever been written. I was at a loss, because I did not have the faintest notion where to start. I picked out the most imposing volumes I could find—Lord Bryce on the American Commonwealth, which put me to sleep for ten nights in a row. But once this fire is lit, to consume and to know, it can burn on and on. I kept going back to the library, taking out tall stacks of books and reading them in a great undigested fury: Hemingway, Faulkner, Wolfe, Dreiser, anything in the American literature and American history shelves that looked promising. I started buying Modern Library books with the money I made writing for the newspaper, and I pledged to myself, as Marilyn Monroe had, that I would read them all, and in alphabetical order.
I believe now that the University of Texas was somehow beginning to give me an interest and a curiosity in something outside my own parochial ego. It was beginning to suggest the power not merely of language, but of the whole unfamiliar world of experience and evocation which language served. Books and literature, I was beginning to see, were not for getting a grade, not for the utilitarian purpose of being considered a nice and versatile boy, not just for casual pleasure, but subversive as Socrates, and expressions of man's soul. It took me years to understand that words are often as important as experience, because words make experience last, but here, in the spring of my freshman year, there were men like Frank Lyell who were teaching me these things, perhaps with very little hope that anyone in their classrooms remotely cared, and I think perhaps I may have been listening.
That whole first year was also one peregrination after another between Texas and Mississippi and Mississippi and Texas. At holidays there was the long bus ride through little Texas towns—Round Rock and Carthage, Jacksonville and Tyler and Kilgore, through the pine forests in the moonlight into Shreveport—the layover in the station there for another bus, then on through Ruston and Monroe to the big bridge and Vicksburg. The two places, Mississippi and Texas, were already beginning gradually to exist in separate realities for me, one meaning one thing, one another, and I myself was as ambivalent as my sense of place. Yet by the end of that first year I believe I already had had an unusual glimpse of this state university in the beginnings of the Eisenhower age: its ambiguity, its complexity, its promise.
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In the early 1950's, the University of Texas was trying desperately to come up in the world. The vast holdings the state had given it in the late 19th century, when it was mainly a collection of wooden shacks on a hill, had turned out to be rich in oil; its reputation had suffered from the old Texas myth. The school had never had the advantages of public support which had made the handful of great American state universities preeminent. It had to struggle hard against the suspicions of a boondocks society, and time and again it had been hurt badly by ruddy nabobs and crossroads potentates who were wary of its very existence.
Some kind of turning-point for the place occurred in the 1940's, when it suffered a series of blows that might have killed most struggling colleges. The firing of President Homer Rainey has become something of a legend in American higher education. Rainey became president in 1939, and was immediately faced with a Board of Regents increasingly controlled by the appointees of Governor W. Lee “Pappy” O'Daniel, the perambulating flour salesman and radio entertainer who was himself an instrument of a new wealth ideologically to the right of Mussolini. The clash between O'Daniel's men and Rainey was direct and brutal; professors were fired and books blacklisted. A state which had contributed Martin Dies to national politics was clearly not ready to support a university with pretensions toward independence. When Rainey was fired, the American Association of University Professors after a three-year investigation censured the “systematic, persistent, and continuous attempts by a politically dominant group to impose its social and educational views on the University.” The place was badly scarred, and after that the only thing to do was forget.
The 1950's were a quiescent time at the university just as they were not a very poetic time in America. There were no student protests, no sit-ins and stand-ins such as were to occur in the more activist 60's. There was as much, probably more, to dissent from then, but I am convinced that the softening of disaffection on most campuses was an accurate reflection of the somnolence of our national life. The fire seemed to have gone out of many of the more rebellious old-timers, as if courage had been the victim of its own strength. The Rainey episode, which had split the campus in two, when five-thousand students could march to the state capitol to dispute the latest barbarisms, carrying a black-draped coffin labeled “academic freedom,” was still sensitive in many minds—and in none more so than the people who called the shots. The AAUP blacklist, if one mentioned it in the environs of the main building, provoked mild attacks of administrative epilepsy, and there were enough administrators over there to carry an epidemic a long way.
Texas itself, its chronic xenophobias fed by the passions of the McCarthy period, was not an entirely pleasant place in those years. There was a venom in its politics and a smugness in its attitude to outsiders and to itself. Democratic party conservatism in the state was infinitely less sophisticated, cruder and more corrupting than its counterpart was to be in the 1960's. Businessmen, Texas-style—promoters, a lot of Snopeses—were firmly in power in the statehouse, just as they controlled the university. In my senior year every member of the Board of Regents was an appointee of Governor Allan Shivers, a strong follower of McCarthy. In the prevailing ethic, education was where it belonged, in the hands of oil and gas men, corporation lawyers, cattle ranchers, and experienced old wildcatters. Texas reformers in that day were much like the old American mugwumps of the last century, and their antagonists resembled the industrialists of the 1880's, who were similarly held to be—in Richard Hofstadter's words—“uneducated and uncultivated, irresponsible, rootless and corrupt, devoid of refinement or of any sense of noblesse.” With rare exceptions among these people in Texas in the 1950's, there was not even yet the argument that higher education was good for attracting industry. The dominant attitude was that higher education attracted other, less desirable elements, and was to be handled warily, and, when the occasion demanded it, with all the old and tested dogmatisms. Varsity football stirred up the only undiluted enthusiasm among them. There was one student-protest meeting in those years over McCarthy, where all the speakers prefaced their remarks by tracing their loyal ancestry back to Sam Houston, Davy Crockett, or the Alamo, and if possible to Queen Elizabeth and King Alfred.
In this context it is not difficult to see the problems that Logan Wilson,1 the president of the university, was up against. He was a highly capable if somewhat frosty administrator who added new dimensions to aloofness. His aim was to heal the wounds of the calamitous Rainey era with analgesic balm and periodic injections of novocain, and at the same time, in these years of spiritual drought, to build a better financial base for the University of Texas while praying for rain. The challenge, politically and for the school's position in a conservative state, was to keep the lid on. For this reason Wilson's tenure may have been something of a bridge from more disastrous years to the 1960's, when the University of Texas would come alive again. But then it was a stolid and unimaginative time, and few were those to take a dare.
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As for me, I slowly began to see many of these things, but mainly through a prism. It was only later that I directly faced these aspects of Texas society and found them tawdry and suffocating. What I mainly noticed then were the boorish remarks of Regents, who could make the most reflective and charitable monk in the most isolated cloister want to bite back, the self-satisfaction of most of the students, and, politically, the general hardening of the arteries after the Supreme Court decision of 1954. It was also during this time, as a foretaste of later years, that a second-team halfback named Duke Washington ran fifty yards or so for a touchdown for Washington State against Texas. A large part of the Texas student section, myself included, stood up to applaud the first Negro ever to play in Texas Memorial Stadium.
I suppose it was the students, and the life they and their adult counselors had devised for themselves, that I was noticing most, as always. Led by the organized structure of the fraternities and sororities, the great hotbed of philistinism in the 1950's, this campus, as others surely did, reached unprecedented heights of carefully planned frivolity—parades with homemade floats, sing-songs, carnivals—anything, in fact, to do something meaningless with all that energy. It was the era of beauty queens, bless their souls and bodies, and they decorated the front-page of the Daily Texan and inspired their own mystique, like Hollywood starlets tied down unfairly by classes and lectures. Their names were Edna and Mary Lou and Lee, Sara Sue and Jimmy and Debbie, and in Brackenridge Dormitory their relative virtues would be discussed philosophically, though always graphically. It was also the period of “retreats,” when organizations, accompanied by deans, sub-deans, assistant deans, deans emeritus, and various other spiritual, marital, social, medical, and inspirational advisers, would isolate themselves at some dude ranch out in the hills. Here they would sit around in circles talking into the weary night about the virtues of greater campus “service” and all the nuances of human sincerity. If a new idea was ever unloosed by these strange semi-evangelical institutions it has yet to be reported, but may be hemmed in by the statute of limitations.
From all these things I had by my junior year become strangely removed, both intellectually and emotionally. I had ceased to be the torrid activist I had been before, and I was chiefly interested in the panorama. I knew so many different people-lonely 20-year-old failures who drank coffee and ate cheesecake at 1 A.M. in the Snak Shak, suave leaders of clubs and committees, janitors, sorority girls, campus cops, lady booksalesmen, ranch boys from West Texas, grubby graduate students, and an occasional beauty queen—one in particular, though she was a Phi Beta Kappa. They are now lawyers, politicians, manufacturers of toilet seats and garbage-can lids, Junior Leaguers, schoolteachers, members of the John Birch Society, doubles in Hollywood Westerns, and wives of New York editors.
Finally, in the late spring of that year, having worked for the Daily Texan as sports editor, writer of a column called “The Round-Up,” and editorialist, and having viewed the campus for two-and-a-half years as both a frenetic participant and a detached observer, I decided to file for the editorship. The race was an elective one, and I began campaigning from one end of the campus to the other. In the big student rally where all the candidates were questioned, someone asked me about integration. I replied: “There's an inner turmoil in the United States; there's an inner turmoil in me. The Supreme Court decision was inevitable, but I don't think any universal rule can be applied to the entire nation when the time for integration comes. I don't think Ole Miss is ready for integration. I think the University of Texas is.”
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Early in the summer, just before I became editor, I went back for a few days to Mississippi. I had an old car now, a ramshackle Plymouth with dual exhausts, and I took the southern route across Louisiana to Natchez. The road from Natchez to Vicksburg, over hills heavy in wisteria vines and unbelievably deep-green trees, parallels the river slightly to the west; there are few more lush or beautiful places than this stretch of Mississippi at the first of June. I drove through Natchez, with its old homes set in their broad flowering lawns, north through the hills to Port Gibson, where the church with the hand on its steeple points to the sky, and on to Vicksburg and the broken hill-and-delta country beyond. I had the most overwhelming sense of coming home, to some place that belonged to me. I was not merely stunned by its beauty, for this was not new to me; I was surprised to feel so settled inside, as if nothing, no matter how cruel or despairing, could destroy my belonging. It was the last time I would ever feel so strongly about a place.
The third or fourth day I was there, people started talking about a “meeting.” I heard about it everywhere I went. When my old schoolmate Bubba Barrier came by, I asked him what it was about. The meeting was going to be that night, he said; I could go with him. Its purpose was to organize a local chapter of the White Citizens' Council.
From several people I talked with, I began to piece together the story. The NAACP had selected the town as one of five targets in the state for putting the Supreme Court's school desegregation decision into effect. The local NAACP submitted to the school board a petition signed by fifty-three Negro parents seeking an immediate end to segregation in the schools. The petition had shocked the whole town. Subsequently the names of all fifty-three who had signed it were printed in the local paper, then reprinted the next week in a sizable advertisement. Sixteen of the most prominent white men in town had called the meeting to deal with the situation.
Early that night we drove to the school auditorium; there were so many cars we had to park two blocks away. People walked toward the school in groups, and in the yard several policemen stood together, waving and shouting greetings. Inside the building, the auditorium was packed; some of the people were sitting in the aisles, others in the big open windows.
The moment we walked into that auditorium I sensed the tension in the atmosphere. Many times later I would feel the pent-up hysteria of organized crowds angry and out on a mission, but this was my first confrontation with that experience, and from the beginning it made me clammy and uneasy. I could recognize a kind of claustrophobic terror in the place, accentuated by a low undertone of serious talk and sudden loud shouts as people waited for the meeting to begin: “Let's go!” and “Let's get them niggers!” Then the crowd began stomping their feet.
On the stage, sitting in straight-back chairs, were just over a dozen men. I knew them all; some of them were fathers of my best friends, men I had known and admired and could talk to on a first-name basis. In the audience were scores of men and women I had known as far back as my childhood. I saw my father there, sitting next to one of our neighbors. By this time the policemen we had seen outside were sitting in the windows, and I heard the police chief shout, “Come on, Nick, let's get this thing started.”
A handsome, graying man stood up on the stage and pounded a gavel. For a moment there was silence, and then everyone broke into applause and the yelling started up again. The chairman explained that this was the charter meeting of a new organization that would “protect our way of life.” He talked about the NAACP petition and said the people who signed it did not know what they were doing. A stand had to be taken that night, he said. Give an inch and they would take a mile. If everyone stood together, he said, those niggers would regret the day they did what they did. Retaliation was a necessity. There was no other way.
The audience shouted its support while the chairman listed the steps to be taken. White employers would immediately fire any of the signers of the petition who worked for them. Those petitioners who rented houses would immediately be evicted by their landlords. White grocers would refuse to sell food to any of them. Negro grocers who had signed would no longer get any groceries from the wholesale stores. “Let's just stomp ‘em!” someone shouted from the back, but the chairman said, no, violence would be deplored; this was much the more effective method. Public opinion needed to be mobilized behind the plan right away. The new organization would not itself take these steps, but rather the whole white community would act spontaneously.
Out in the audience I noticed someone asking to be recognized. The chairman had finished his speech and three hundred different people were talking at once. Someone came out with a long rebel yell, and the chairman pounded with his gavel. The man waving his hand was a neighbor of ours, from the big house across the street, and the chairman asked for quiet so our neighbor could talk.
“I agree with everything that's been said and with everything we're trying to do,” my neighbor shouted, his great bald head shining under the lights. “But, gentlemen, I work for a corporation, and all this is unconstitutional, it's against the Consti. . . .” His words were abruptly drowned out by the roar from the crowd. “Sit down, Ed!” people yelled, and there was a collective groan, and boos and catcalls that might have wilted Justice Earl Warren himself. My neighbor smiled sheepishly, shrugged his shoulders, and sat down.
I sat there quiet as could be. For a brief moment I was tempted to stand up and support my neighbor, but I lacked the elemental courage to go against that mob. For it was a mob, and I was not the same person I had been three years before. In the pit of my stomach I felt a strange and terrible disgust. I looked back and saw my father, sitting still and gazing straight ahead; on the stage my friends' fathers nodded their heads and talked among themselves. I felt an urge to get out of there. Who are these people? I asked myself. What was I doing there? Was this the place I had come up in and never wanted to leave? I knew in that instant, in the middle of a mob in our school auditorium, that a mere three years in Texas had taken me irrevocably, even without my recognizing it, from home.
I stuck around town a few days more, long enough to see that the plans were working. Then I packed my bag and went back to Austin.
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It was a viciously hot Texas afternoon in June when I moved my ten or fifteen favorite books, a toothbrush, an electric razor, an extra pair of shoes, and an emergency pint of Old Forester into the editor's office of the Daily Texan. Had I been able to predict the events of the next twelve months, I would have included the Book of Common Prayer.
A great irony occasionally besets an American state university, for it allows and at its best encourages one to develop his critical capacities, his imagination, his values; at the same time, in its institutional aspects, a university under pressure can become increasingly wary of the very intent and direction of the ideals it has helped spawn. It is too easy, too much a righteous judgment, to call this attitude hypocrisy, for actually it is a kind of schizophrenia. This involves more than a gap between preaching and practicing; it involves the splitting of a university's soul. There can be something brutal about a university's teaching its young people to be alive, aware, critical, independent, and free, and then, when a threatening turn is taken, to reject by its actual behavior the substance of everything it claims for itself. Then ideals and critical capacities exist in a vacuum. They are sometimes ignored, and in extreme instances victimized. And the greater society suffers as well.
For a year I had been reading heavily in politics, history, and the journalism of the great editors: H. L. Mencken, Lincoln Steffens, William Allen White, S. S. McClure, Bernard DeVoto, Hodding Carter, Brann the Iconoclast—and Edmund Wilson's New Republic essays. I read the files of the Daily Texan itself, learning of different and more alive times—the great editorials of Horace Busby, who brought sanity and courage to the campus during the Rainey disaster of the 1940's, D. B. Hardeman, Ronnie Dugger, and others. The political climate of the state had become more pointed to me, and in long and sometimes agonizing talks with the brightest and most perceptive student leaders I had thought out the huge responsibility of the largest and most prominent student newspaper in the South in a period when the integration issue was coming alive; my experience with my hometown Citizens' Council had helped me judge the extent of my own personal change, and showed the sad barbarism of intransigence. I was suffused with the ideals of freedom of expression and the open marketplace. I had the most emphatic belief that this freedom should be used to positive purposes, that freedom is as freedom does, that the pages of this newspaper should reflect the great diversity of the place I had come to know, that the University of Texas was too much a part of its state and of the rest of the world to avoid editorials on significant questions beyond the campus, and that the campus itself—like so many others then—was bogged down in dullness, complacency, and the corporate mentality. My deficits, as I fully realized later, were self-righteousness, a lack of subtlety in polemic, and an especially underdeveloped awareness of the diplomatic approach. I knew little about when to fish and when to cut bait.
So it was that I came out fighting hard, and the reactions were no sooner than immediate. I erred, first of all, into editorializing occasionally about state politics, particularly its twin gods, oil and gas. We were going against a set of scandals and money frauds that had rocked Governor Shivers's administration. We were seeking intelligence and good will on integration and lauding most Texans for their tolerant attitude. Occasionally we chided John Foster Dulles's view of the rest of the world. Against the reactions from the school administration we categorically defended student-press freedom and our right to comment as we wished on controversial state and national issues. We were committing the crime of being vigorous and outspoken, naively idealistic and exuberantly but not radically liberal in a state that at that time had little patience with either, on a campus where exuberance was reserved for the minor furies, and in a decade which encouraged little essential ebullience in the young.
There began a series of summonses to President Logan Wilson's office, much as a grade-school student who has been caught throwing spitballs in class is called to the principal. Wilson's personal secretary would telephone and say, “Mr. Morris, the President would like to confer with you. Could we see you at three?” Ushered into the offices of the principal, who ruled over an academic domain from El Paso to Galveston, I would wait in the outer chamber for an appropriate five minutes, and admire there the lush carpet six inches deep; then the President was ready to see me. I would be offered menthol cigarettes and dealt with soothingly, charmingly, and with the condescension befitting the occasion. These biting editorials had to stop, though for a while the issue was not presented quite that frontally. There were meetings with the corps of deans, especially the one who had been a captain in the Navy and who believed that when an order is given, people should hop-to; anyone to the political Left of Eisenhower, he once told me, was stupid if not downright treacherous. At first he was baffled, but then gave way to rage; there was no bemusement in these quarters. The slight liquid film that glazed his eyes as I came into his office suggested that he was keeping himself under control with some difficulty; his apparent preference was to assign me to the brig. A good part of the time I was scared, and Logan Wilson must have been equally miserable; he was beginning to get caught in a vicious crossfire. The political appointees who ran the university were beginning to use the old and tested dogmatisms. And in the end more people than President Wilson and I were to be involved.
Finally the Regents erupted. At a meeting with several student leaders, including good friends of mine who were president and vice-president of the student body, they declared that the student paper should not discuss controversial state and national topics, and that college students were not interested in these things anyway. The Daily Texan, they said, had especially gone too far astray in commenting on a piece of natural-gas legislation. There, now, was the rub! A little later they handed down a censorship edict. This was based, they said, not on principle but on legal considerations. They cited the rider on state appropriations bills, which stipulates that no state money “shall be used for influencing the outcome of any election or the passage or defeat of any legislative measure.” Then they advanced one step further, a major step as it turned out, and announced that “editorial preoccupation with state and national political controversy” would be prohibited.
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My friends and I on the Texan did some painful soul-searching after that announcement. Should we give in and avoid an agonizing fight? Was a fight worth it? The next morning, as I remember it, I drove out to one of Lyndon Johnson's lakes; I sat around under a scrub-oak for a time reading some Thomas Jefferson. Then I came back to town and talked with Bergen, our managing editor, a shy deceptive little man with an abundance of courage, and we decided in thirty minutes what Tom Jefferson would likely have recommended all along.
That began one of the greatest controversies in the history of American college journalism. Bergen and I stayed up all night in the editor's office, planning and writing editorials under the new censorship arrangement. We submitted critical editorials the next day, attacking the implications of the Regents' order along with a guest editorial from the New York Times on the natural-gas legislation2 and several paragraphs from Jefferson on press freedom. All were rejected. The Jefferson quotes had been included in a personal column, and when he was censored there was thunder in the heavens, fire in the sky was reported over Monticello, a thirty-minute moratorium on bourbon was declared in Charlottesville. But the student majority on the publications board outvoted the faculty representatives, and all the editorials were printed in toto in the next issue.
We kept right on going. We authorized a brilliant young law student, the “attorney general” for the student government, to examine the legal consequences of the Regents' order. He counseled with some of the state's most respected lawyers and legal scholars and refuted the applicability of the appropriations rider. The Regents' interpretation of this rider, he argued, had “terrifying implications” and could be used in the same way to stifle legitimate comment among students, faculty, and quasi-independent corporations housed on the campus like the alumni organization, the student government, and the law review.
In retrospect a number of things stand out clearly. One Regent saying. “The Texan has gone out of bounds in discussing issues pertaining to oil and gas because 66 per cent of Texas tax money comes from oil and gas.” And another adding, “We're just trying to hold Willie to a college yell.” . . . A journalism professor coming up to me the day after the controversy broke into the open and whispering, “I just want to shake your hand. I'm proud to know you.” . . . My parents phoning long-disance from Mississippi and asking, “Son, you in trouble? They won't kick you out of school so close to graduation, will they?” . . . At one of the interminable meetings of the publications board, one faculty representative saying to me, “You know what you are? You're a propagandist,” a gripping judgment coming from an associate professor of advertising. . . . And I recall one afternoon soon after the Regents' action when I telephoned J. Frank Dobie, the indomitable and lovable old pater familias of Texas writers, who had lost his own teaching job at the university in the 1940's, and asked if he would consider writing to the letters column commenting on our troubles. “Hell,” he said, “I been workin' on one all mornin.’” The Board of Regents, Dobie's letter said, “are as much concerned with free intellectual enterprise as a razorback sow would be with Keats's ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’”—a well-known statement now despite the fact that this phrase, and many another colorful one, were cut out by the loyal censor's representative, after I had gone home to sleep and the paper was going to press.
One day one of the few outspoken old souls on the faculty in that period, an English professor who had never ceased to fight the political appointees with scorn and satire even in the 1940's, stood up at a faculty meeting and asked what the student newspaper's troubles meant in terms of the entire university. “We should discuss this matter,” he said, waving his walking cane at his colleagues, “and deplore a contemptuous, cynical attitude toward what the student body or what an elected student leader may say.” He spoke of the “dignity of the student” as “a new citizen”; a university's funds, he said, “should not be meant to stifle discussion but to encourage it.” There was no further discussion, however, from the faculty. I wrote a lead-editorial on his speech and entitled it “Whispers in a Sleepy Lagoon.” The night of its publication, as I sat at my desk eating a cold hamburger and drinking my fourth cup of black coffee, one of the administrative deans telephoned. “You published that editorial,” he said, “but do you know that professor is runnin’ around on his wife?” I had barely slept in a week, and at this point the fatigue had robbed me of any semblance of cynicism or humor. “Why you old bastard” was all I could say, and hung up the telephone.
Finally, after more troubles, after we ran blank spaces and editorials entitled “Don't Walk on the Pansies” or “Water the Grass Every Day” and held to our prerogative to publish what we wished, there was a loosening up. There were no further official orders, and we remained free. But I was obsessed with the fear that in winning the battle we had lost the war, and that we had fought back wrongly and badly—and that the fight had not been worth it.
Yet I do not believe it was coincidence that in May of that year the Regents and the administration sought to impose in the general faculty a sweeping set of restrictions on the involvement of University of Texas faculty members in politics and political issues. One of the administration's spokesmen described these restrictions as the drawing of “a little circle” around political responsibilities. “That little circle,” one young professor, the philosopher John Silber, said, “happens to comprise 90 per cent of my political concerns.” The issue was resoundingly defeated. For whom was the bell trying to toll? I believed then that there was a connection; the contempt for an independent student voice trying to engage itself in important issues in that age of McCarthy and silence was reflected in an effort to do lasting damage to a state university's most basic civil liberties. Perhaps if the student newspaper had not chosen to meet the whole question head-on and in public, the controlling political faction would have thought anything easy and possible. Perhaps we won something more than a battle after all.
People would tell me long afterward that this sort of thing could never happen again in the later climate of the University of Texas, that everything became much better, that academic freedom, and freedom of expression, had been won, and were old issues now. I was convinced this is true. The 1960's were not the 1950's, and at our state universities these issues would become not more straightforward, but more complex, involving considerations of the very quality of the mass society. In 1956 the issue was a direct one, and it became bigger than the Daily Texan, bigger than the Board of Regents, bigger than the university itself—and it could never be old-fashioned.
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At graduation at the end of that year the air was heavy with the scents of the berry trees; most of the students were long since gone, and the campus was more lovely and still than I had ever seen it before. The chimes on the Tower rang with stirring processionals to the Class of 1956, and proud country parents stood in diffident little groups watching their children march past. I received my diploma, and before a packed audience walked out the wrong door of the auditorium. At the reception afterward a journalism professor said, “I told my wife, there goes Morris, lost again,” and the mother of one of my classmates walked up to me and said, “Why, you look too innocent to have caused all that newspaper trouble.” The next day I left the campus, my ‘47 Plymouth loaded with books and the paraphernalia of four years, and drove all night one final time to the place I had come from.
1 Later president of the American Council on Education.
2 This was the Fulbright-Harris bill that Eisenhower later vetoed for the exertion of “improper influence” on the Senate.
