Henry Lesnick: Lessons of War

   The generation of protest that I grew up in emerged from the repressive 1950’s, the era of McCarthyite, anti-communist witch-hunts and school kids hiding under our desks to protect ourselves from nuclear attack. By 1965 we had all seen the Selma to Montgomery Marchers fire-hosed and beaten by police and attacked by police dogs. And we saw that Viola Liuzo was murdered in Alabama for her participation in that March.  Civil Rights workers, Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman were murdered by the KKK and the Philadelphia, Mississipi Sherrif for registering black voters. Malcom X was assassinated. We watched the Democratic Party Convention as the disenfranchised blacks of Mississippi, the Mississippi, Freedom Democratic Party, were excluded again from the so called democratic process by the President  and his party. During this period we watched succeeding presidents of both political parties escalate their imperial war in Southeast Asia. Yet paradoxically, this historical experience produced a generation of anti-racist, anti-war protest informed by the belief that we were on the verge of creating a truly humane, new social order. 

   Before I came to QC in 1968, I was a draft resister in Chicago, working with an anti-war street theater group. Our belief then was that acts of moral witness, burning our draft cards, and educating the public to the imperial appetites of the war makers in street skits would help lead the way to a new society based on non-cooperation with the old. As a strategy for social change, this may sound pretty naïve now, but when you consider that Timothy Leary, the Harvard University professor and guru of psychedelic drug use, toured college campuses throughout the country speaking to Standing Room Only audiences, urging us to “Turn-on, Tune-in and Drop out,” you can understand that the draft resisters’ vision of revolutionary social change was not far removed from the popular, white, middle class, do your-own-thing culture of the period.  

   One of the more popular slogans of the period was “fill the jails.” This was also popular with the American ruling class. The Mccarran Walters Act of 1952 provided for construction of huge detention facilities to accommodate extra-judicial prisoners— mass-detention facilities similar to those for which Haliburton has recently received a $385 million contract. By 1968 I had met with several of my young comrades from the Chicago Area Draft Resisters who had spent up to 18 months in jails where they had been raped, beaten and politically demoralized. Although the draft resistance movement gained a good deal of attention and generated publicity for the anti-war movement, and attracted some of the most deeply moral young people from divinity schools around the country, it never had much of a base of support among the working class populations that actually were called to war. When I arrived at QC in September 1968, a young colleague in the English Dept. asked if I would help organize a draft resistance chapter on campus. I declined, explaining that I no longer thought that public non-cooperation could serve as a model for the kind of movement that was needed. 

   On-campus recruitment during the Vietnam War was, as it is today, a prime target for anti-war protest. Major targets then were Dow Chemical, which produced napalm; branches of the military, of course; and General Electric, the largest military contractor at the time. When I was at Northwestern in the spring of 1967, we tried to pass a resolution in the faculty senate to bar military recruiters. It was defeated by faculty who argued that the first amendment rights of the recruiters had to be respected, so we set up an anti recruitment table next to the military recruiters and the local Evanston radio station covered our discussions with potential recruitees and recruiters and the military packed up and left.. When we learned that GE would be recruiting at QC in the spring of 1969, the QC Students for a Democratic Society chapter decided to hold a protest sit-in and wanted the small street theater group I worked with on campus to call attention to the sit-in. We prepared a brief skit that was presented repeatedly, along with an SDS leaflet calling for the sit-in, to the lunchtime gatherings on campus. As our troupe reached the recruiting center there were about 250 students and faculty in our procession that joined the several SDS students already in the building.

   The protesters drew up a list of several demands that included an end to military recruitment; the end to the use of the McCarthyite Max-Kahn guidelines for faculty personnel decisions (still in effect today), which ensure that personnel proceedings are cloaked in secrecy, kept even from the faculty under review; and the rehiring of an outspoken critic of the war who was not rehired ostensibly because of her “abrasive personality.” Thus began the seven-week protest, sit-in, and strike that included the early morning arrest of 38 students and me, selected as the lone faculty member to demonstrate student-faculty solidarity. As we were being led into the police wagons, the Dean of Faculty informed me that I was no longer working for QC and informally assured me that my college teaching days were over. Within the next day or two I was notified that I would be arrested again if I appeared on campus. Shortly thereafter the AAUP intervened (largely as a result of  our faculty union’s efforts, as I recall) to declare the college had been overzealous in its on-the-spot firing of me, and I was allowed to finish out my contract year. My FBI file obtained several years after I was fired from QC shows that a Spring 1969 meeting between the CUNY Board of Higher Education (an earlier incarnation of the Board of Trustees) and the Federal Government’s Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, Robert Finch, came up with a list of 10 anti-war professors that the Federal Government wanted fired and the BHE promised to act on.   After the arrests, our group decided that we wanted to plead not guilty and wage a political defense. We met several times with Lawyers Guild attorneys who agreed to assist us. But when our July hearing date rolled around the Lawyers Guild found an ACLU lawyer who they recommended we work with and who supposedly knew the Queens courts. When we arrived in court the new attorney approached me and instructed me to get everyone to plead guilty in order to avoid jail time and a permanent jail record. He told me that I wd be responsible for ruining these students’ futures if we did not plead guilty. Because we were under the impression that this would be a preliminary hearing, this was a turn of events we had hardly expected. With only minutes before being called to enter a plea, I tried unsuccessfully to contact our Lawyers Guild attorney. Intimidated into making a hasty decision, we reluctantly agreed to accept this attorney’s recommendation. The Judge immediately sentenced us to 15 days in Rikers Island, without even allowing us the chance to speak or the time to collect a toothbrush.

   During this period many of us were still somewhat unclear about the loyalties of the university and its relationship to the government. While I was at Northwestern in 1967, the FBI requested of the Administration that I be fired for my anti-war activities, and in particular, for using college mails to distribute an anti-war newsletter. But my department chairman objected, and I kept my job. Our view of the university then was that it was an enclave somewhat more civil than the rest of society. The protests at Columbia several months before and the vicious police reprisals should have served as forewarning. Certainly the murders of Kent State and Jackson State Students in 1970 should have removed any ambiguity about the relationship of the university and the government. However, I suspect even today university people still tend to think that we live in a cloistered community and are somewhat immune to the less restrained, more brutal force that the government exerts in time of war.

    Maintaining the military force needed to maintain US military dominance is critical to the preservation of U.S. capitalism’s survival, probably more so today than in 1969. In 1969, U.S. capitalism still produced goods and was developing technologies that were competitive in global markets. The major economic weapon the US has today is its military might. Were it not for the terrible power of the U.S. military, U.S. capitalism, with it uncompetitive educational infrastructure and muti-trillion dollar debt, would collapse.  Protest against the on-campus military recruitment will in the future be much more problematic. The Supreme Court’s recent unanimous decision upholding the Solomon Amendment’s denial of federal funds to any college that bars military recruiters will surely inform university and police response to future protests against on-campus military recruitment. The day after the recent court decision, the Hostos administration, not usually in the forefront of legal scholarship, posted an article on the decision on the Hostos list. CUNY today will be more cooperative with the Federal Government and military planners than they were in 1969.  The predominantly black and Hispanic and poor white populations that are called on to fight contemporary wars as they did the Vietnam war, will make CUNY and other public universities and public high schools essential recruiting grounds for the military manpower required for the government to perform its major task, protecting and advancing the geopolitical and economic interests of the U.S. ruling class.

   Arguably the most important lesson to be drawn from the experience of the anti-war movement of this period was put forward by the Worker Student Alliance that emerged from the final SDS convention of July 1969.  The Worker Student Alliance, as its name implied, was informed by the Marxist recognition that the working class was the essential component of any movement that looked to bring about revolutionary social change. An underlying realization was that the alliance could not be organized within the twin parties of capitalism. Democrats were as deeply implicated in waging war and nurturing racism as Republicans. These two propositions were confirmed by the experiences of the student movement as well as the history of modern class struggle. The French general strike of 1968 sparked by the French students and joined by French workers threatened the continued existence of the French capitalist Republic. Workers throughout Europe were shaking the foundations of established, undemocratic regimes. Negative examples of the consequences befalling protest movements isolated from the working class were all too abundant in the U.S. Hundreds of thousands of young people entered the anti-war movement, most often to be channeled into activities led by the Democratic Party. Large numbers of those not yet burned out joined the Get Clean for Gene McCarthy nominating campaign, which ended with the nomination of Hubert Humphrey in 1968 at the very undemocratic Democratic Convention in Chicago. The following year in Chicago, the bastion of the Democratic Party machine, the Chicago police, in close collaboration with the FBI, assassinated Black Panthers, Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in their beds. Just two of the 38 Panthers murdered by the FBI in conjunction with local police, made possible by the Panthers disregard for the working class and the historical racism of much of the white working class.

    Wars are ever more essential to the fading U.S. capitalist economy, which is rapidly being eclipsed by emerging economic powers such as China and India. The U.S. ruling class will not go quietly. Today they wage war for control of the oil fields of Iraq, as they look greedily toward the gas and oil of Iran. Can we imagine that the U.S. ruling class would not use every weapon at its disposal to prevent the ascent of China to world economic dominance? The vast majority of people in this country are working people whose children fight the wars for the further enrichment of the rich while the rest continue to scramble for scraps. Only by coming together in a multiracial workers party can we end this ever-growing devastation endemic to capitalism and achieve a new, truly humane society. The choice between socialism or barbarism has never been more sharply posed.

Robert Cowen: My First Years at Queens College

I retired from the Math Department in 2008 after teaching for over 40 years.

I came to Queens College in September of 1966 as a lecturer in the Mathematics Department. The Chairman of the department was T. Freeman Cope, an affable Texan who was very conservative. Once, on seeing a male student with long hair, he wondered out loud, whether the student was male or female. I pointed out the George Washington also wore his hair long, but that didn’t seem to make any difference to him.

My politics were radical, I was against the Vietnam War, and found like-minded people on campus, mostly outside of my department. Also, I soon became involved with the new faculty union on campus that represented the lecturers, the United Federation of College Teachers or UFCT. I became a grievance counselor, working under the very able Edgar Pauk, who was grievance chairman at Queens(He later became head of grievances for all of CUNY.) Finally, the SEEK program, for disadvantaged students had just begun at Queens College and frictions were developing between SEEK and the Math Department. I, of course, sided with SEEK.

The first few years under the new collective bargaining agreement between the UFCT and CUNY were difficult. Someone told me that when two parties can’t agree on substance, they often agree on language. I believe that this is what happened here and it led to numerous grievances. However one substantive area of agreement, that fulltime employees in the unit would be eligible to achieve permanent status was not popular with many departments at Queens. Under the new contract, lecturers that were hired for a sixth year received a “certificate of continuous employment.” This was roughly equivalent to tenure. The Sociology Department, on learning of this provision, fired those lecturers who had five years of service to prevent “being stuck” with them. In particular, I remember them firing Janet Henkin, perhaps the most popular teacher in the department.

I was the grievance counselor assigned to Janet and we first had an informal meeting with the Chairman, Nat Siegel and the Assistant Chairman, Charlie Smith. At that meeting Smith complained about the contract and said that they never envisioned lecturers as permanent members of their department and also he would have difficulty writing a letter of recommendation for someone who filed a grievance!

We immediately filed a grievance on his “difficulty.” The grievance was “heard” by the President’s designee, a sharp lawyer from Washington, D.C. He started off by warning everyone that Smith’s alleged statement was a seriously violation of the contract and wouldn’t be tolerated and then went around the table asking if Smith indeed made that threat. Janet and I said he did; Smith and Siegel said he didn’t. We failed to win the grievance or indeed to retain Janet’s job. However, no one would ever threaten a grievant in that way again. Janet had no trouble getting another position; I assume she had good letters of recommendation from the Sociology Department.

In 1967, I went with a group from the College, by bus, to a large demonstration in Washington D.C. My wife and I had tried to go by bus to other Washington demonstrations against the war previously, but the buses hadn’t shown up. It was believed that the bus companies were discouraged from providing buses to antiwar protestors by the FBI. This time I went alone, my wife, Ilsa, stayed home with our new daughter. I remember some very creative signs such as “Johnson pull out like your father should have,” and “No Vietnamese ever called me Nigger,” carried by a black protester. The Pentagon was completely ringed by soldiers with weapons ready and women from the demonstration would run up to individual soldiers and present them with flowers. Even though the protest was entirely peaceful while I was there, I understand that after we left the demonstration turned violent as the more militant protestors engaged in several confrontations with U.S. Marshalls and soldiers “protecting” the Pentagon. There was tear gas used and several arrests. When I returned home I enthusiastically told everyone about the huge demonstration including the wonderful signs. A Korean friend who I told about the “No Vietnamese ever called me Nigger” sign replied that they probably used another derogatory word to substitute for “Nigger.”

The conflict between the Math Department and SEEK centered on whether the Math Department would allow the SEEK program to institute new remedial courses for its students. At the time, in 1968, the Math Department offered only a single semester of remediation for unprepared students and SEEK felt that this was insufficient to make up for the lack of preparation in mathematics that many of its students entered college with. The SEEK program proposed a two semester remedial sequence, instead of the Math Department’s single course and the conflict became especially nasty when Freeman Cope was reported by the student newspaper, The Phoenix, to have made certain racist remarks to a white SEEK instructor and this led to his resignation as Chairman of the Department, under pressure by the College Administration. I thought the SEEK program’s desire for extended remediation made sense, and wrote a letter to the department supporting it and before putting it in everyone’s mailbox, I showed a copy of my letter to the new Chairman, Joe Hershenov. He told me that if I released the letter, I would harm the Math Department’s recommendations for tenure and promotion, including my own! (I released the letter anyway and was awarded tenure soon afterwards.)

The racist comments that Cope made that led to his ouster, were made to a very popular SEEK instructor named Ellen Bindman. The Math Department fired her soon afterwards and I undertook her grievance for the Union. It was both unpleasant and sad. Many members of my Department stopped talking to me. Ellen was killed during a robbery of her house in New Jersey a few years later.

In the Fall of 1968 trouble between the SEEK program and Queens College became acute. SEEK proposed a list of faculty members that they intended to hire to the College. The College rejected 15 on the list and sent letters to all 15 informing them that they were not going to be hired by the College and that if they set foot on campus they would be libel to arrest! The Union found out that all 15 had arrest records (evidently the College had been working with the police to identify potential “trouble makers.”). Fourteen of these were black students who had been arrested in April at Columbia during a sit in at Hamilton Hall and the 15th was a black woman who had been arrested during a civil rights march in the South. I recall vividly the step two grievance (at the Chancellor’s level) for the woman arrested in the South. Vice Chancellor Mintz offered to allow her to work for SEEK for one year but then she would have to leave. When we rejected this offer, he told us that this was only the second time that a College President’s decision would be overturned and asked us, derisively, what it was that we wanted. Edgar Pauk, head of the grievance committee at Queens answered, “What do we want? We want Justice.” It was exactly right.

Throughout the fall of 1968 there were demonstrations by the SEEK program. I remember trying to join a SEEK demonstration and being told politely that: “it was only for us.” (This, I regarded at the time, and still regard as being unfortunate.)

In the spring of 1969, recruiters from the Dow Chemical Company (the makers of Napalm) and General Electric were met with angry demonstrations from antiwar students and faculty, principally, SDS. Also a popular activist English teacher, Sheila Delany, was denied tenure. In April students occupied administrative office of the Social Science Building to protest the presence of recruiters on campus. The number of students occupying the building dwindled to less than 50 and most people expected that the protest would die out over spring vacation. Shortly before spring break, the Administration called the police on campus to arrest the remaining protestors. At the time of the police raid there was one faculty member present, Henry Lesnick, from the English Department. (It was considered important to have a faculty member present since Columbia students had been beaten by police during demonstrations the year before.) The Dean of Faculty, Dean Hartle, warned Henry if he didn’t leave the building, he would be brought up on charges by the College, of conduct unbecoming a faculty member. Henry stayed and was arrested along with 38 students and taken to jail.

The next day there were 500 students and faculty occupying the Social Science building and the Academic Building where most of the Administration offices were. Trying to cool things down President McMurray called a meeting of the college community in Colden Auditorium. The audience was very angry because of police being called on campus and the subsequent arrests. At one point McMurray offered to ask the Judge to be lenient if students would call off the protest. The audience responded by shouting “blackmail.” It was definitely not a good meeting from the administrations standpoint. As I was leaving the meeting I saw Professor Louis Finkelstein, chairman of the Art Department and a confidant of President McMurray. He was known to be liberal and I asked him what McMurray was thinking when he called police on campus even though the demonstration was petering out. At first he accused me of “Monday morning quarterbacking,” but then explained, that McMurray was meeting with the SEEK committee, of which he was a member, and they were afraid that if they didn’t call the police when the white students misbehaved, they wouldn’t be able to call the police if the black students misbehaved! It finally made sense to me why they were so anxious to call the police before the occupation ended. My friend, Henry Lesnick, wasn’t brought up on charges, as Dean Hartle threatened, but he was let go shortly afterwards by the English Department after being at Queens for only two years. During a union grievance meeting I attended, The English department maintained that he was not sufficiently committed to his research (he was a Blake scholar), as shown by his activist activities. He had difficulty obtained another teaching position and worked, I think, as a lineman for the telephone company for a few years. He finally got a job teaching at Hostos Community College where he developed an internationally recognized HIV/AIDS curriculum.

The highlight of the semester for me and other radicals on campus was the “Counter Commencement.” During the Commencement ceremony in June, a large group of faculty and students, in full academic regalia, got up and marched out of the regular commencement ceremony. Many in the audience booed and a few cheered as we went to an alternate location where we held our own commencement with Dr. Benjamin Spock as featured speaker. It was a good way to end a difficult year.

In retrospect, I think the two biggest failures of the antiwar movement on campus were our inability to forge an alliance with the black students struggling against the same repressive administration. Also we never did the hard work necessary to expand our movement to workers on campus. A few faculty members tried. Professor Frank Rosengarten sought out campus workers and tried to win them to an antiwar position. On the other hand many members of “the New Left” were hostile to unions in general, accusing them of racism in keeping blacks out of the skilled trades. Also the hostilities engendered by the UFT’s strike in 1968 pitting the largely white teachers union against the largely black community school board in Ocean-Hill Brownsville was still fresh in everyone’s mind.

If there is a lesson to be learned from all of this, I think it is that power structures recognize their enemies and will do all they can to keep them apart; only by uniting those “enemies” can a serious challenge by mounted to defeat those in power. The fact that at Queens, the SEEK program, the faculty union and the antiwar movement never came together to challenge the Administration allowed the Administration to deal with them separately and thus maintain its hegemony.

The Vietnam War Years at Queens College, CUNY

It is almost 50 years since the protests against the War in Vietnam took place at college campuses through the United States.  Queens College, CUNY was no exception and many faculty, students and staff participated. In the belief that their may be something to be learned from their struggle, I am asking people who took part to write about their experiences. Only by drawing on the collective experience of the participants will we arrive at something approaching the truth. Hopefully this will be of interest to those now struggling to fight for a better tomorrow.