Embarrassing Blemish

When an ideological lapse betrays the prompting of conscience

A new installment of Hunted, an autobiographical account of God’s action in the life of a Vietnam War era radical activist. New to the series? This introduction provides context for the events described here. An index of other episodes, updated monthly, is also available.

Being in the vanguard of the fight for justice wasn’t just about leading demonstrations and protests. Ideological struggle was just as important. All the lies promoted by the nation’s elites had to be challenged. Whatever courses you took, you couldn’t just sit there and let professors spew out their reactionary views without consequences.

This aspect of the cause I took up with great gusto. In my first term at a small state college in Providence, Rhode Island, I picked out Professor Wilder as my arch-adversary. Wilder taught U.S. social and intellectual history. Almost every class covered some controversial issue or other. Wilder and I were constantly clashing, but one brief exchange about slavery stands out in memory above all the others. Wilder held the view, not unusual among social historians in the early 1970’s, that the stability of slave society in the southern United States reflected the passivity of African-Americans and their acquiescence to the “peculiar institution,” a Southern euphemism for slavery.

I learned a lot from his class, but not about social and intellectual history.

When Wilder first came out with this preposterous claim, I couldn’t believe that I’d heard him right. It took me a second or two to grasp the full import of what he was saying. Did he really think he could get away with blaming slavery on psychological characteristics of African-Americans? How did he even come up with the idea that enslaved people were passive? It was a classic example of blaming the victim and a perfect opportunity for a radical activist to gain influence among other students by exposing the lies Wilder was teaching.

I knew just denouncing him wouldn’t win anyone over, so I started with seemingly innocent questions. If Wilder thought the slaves were contented, how did he know? Did they tell him? Did he send someone out to conduct interviews? Had he discovered some trove of thousands of diaries where they all wrote down that they loved “Massa”?

Wilder, in his naïvete, took these as serious questions, and responded gravely that in the U.S. there had been hardly any mass uprisings or resistance, like there had in the Caribbean. Nobody needed to ask whether slaves acquiesced because they showed that they did by their behavior. His bland confidence in this answer gave me the opening I was looking for.

Behavior? What sort of choice did he think the Africans had? If he were in their shoes, what would he do? Would he take part in a mass uprising? Would he even dare to walk away from the master’s property if he knew the punishment would be having his foot cut off with a hack saw?

Swept up in my own anger, I never even heard what Wilder said back to me. By the time I was able to focus again, he had finished. The classroom was dead silent. I looked around at my classmates. None of them spoke or moved or looked at me. Were they appalled, as they ought to be, at the enormity of America’s crimes and at Wilder’s blithe rationalizations? All I knew for sure was that I had unleashed something that made them profoundly uncomfortable. It didn’t occur to me that what they recoiled from might not have been the ugly truth about slavery, but rather the burning heat of my own indignation.

Now that I was a fully-fledged activist, writing papers was no longer a chore, but one more welcome opportunity to expound my political views. I put a great deal of effort into the term paper I wrote for Wilder’s class. In it I argued that the Communist Party (CP) played a central role in the organization of industrial unions, like the United Auto Workers and the United Steel Workers. Historians, I contended, had downplayed the role of the CP ever since Party members were excluded from union leadership during the Red Scare of the 1950’s.

I was very absorbed in this project. PL, the organization I was involved with, was an offspring of the Communist Party. PL claimed only a movement led by communists could bring about lasting social change. The CP role in industrial labor unions supported that claim. These unions have made a lasting difference in the lives of their members.

The expulsion of the CP from unions and the subsequent de-emphasis of its role in them supported another PL claim. The CP had downplayed their revolutionary ambitions. Members cast themselves as reformers, soft-pedaling the Party’s long-term aim of overthrowing the government. This strategy made the Party appear disingenuous and left workers ill prepared to defend its members when they were forced out of unions. PL founders had split from the CP over precisely this issue. The history documented in my paper fleshed out this criticism and shed light on the origins of the movement I was involved with.

Because I was sure Wilder would look for some way to denigrate my efforts, I took pains to provide robust support for every step of my argument. I was proud of the many sources I’d unearthed in scholarly journals. When Professor Wilder handed the papers back, I was not particularly surprised that he did not give me mine, but instead said he wanted to meet with me in his office. I assumed he would denounce my argument and preferred not to debate me in front of the class. When I sat down in his office, however, he said nothing about the Communist Party’s role in the CIO unions. Instead he questioned me about the sources I’d used. What was the argument of the paper cited in my first footnote? How did the source in the second footnote support my thesis? And so on.

Having taken quite a lot of trouble to locate these references, I had no difficulty remembering how each of them fit into the puzzle I’d pieced together. I answered all of Wilder’s questions easily. I was surprised, though, that he didn’t bristle at my enthusiasm, but moved doggedly from one footnote to the next, giving no sign that he cared anything at all about the political points I was making.

Finally, after answering the fourth or fifth question, I realized what he was doing. He wasn’t trying to rebut my thesis. He was trying to prove that I’d copied the paper from some other source. Was it really so much better than what he’d expected from me that he thought I couldn’t have written it?

At last the uncomfortable interview came to an end. He handed me the paper. Wondering what other surprises he had up his sleeve, I looked at the grade.

B-.

I couldn’t believe what I saw. This paper was so well written and thoroughly researched he thought I couldn’t have written it. For this he gave me a B-?

I knew intellectually this was a win for me and for the radical movement. My criticism in class had rattled him. Giving me a mediocre grade was revenge. All the same I didn’t feel the jubilation you’d expect from a radical activist who’s just bested a capitalist lackey. What did it say about Wilder that he graded me down because I thought for myself and argued with him on his own ground? Based on his lackluster lectures and simplistic answers to questions, it didn’t look like he was headed to an Ivy League college any time soon. If he taught his whole life at places like where he was now, I was probably the only student he would ever encounter who could perform at this level. Did he really prefer students he could intimidate, students who just sat there, wrote down what he said in his lectures, and regurgitated it on exams?

That night I was so swept up in my indignation I could scarcely think of anything else. The next day I shared the details with Bruce, my mentor and local PL leader.  

Bruce must have sensed how much that B- annoyed me, because he gave me a long look and then asked why I expected anything different. Was I really naïve enough to hope for intellectual honesty in a college classroom, especially from a parasite like Wilder whose whole purpose in life was to gaslight the world into thinking workers, including enslaved workers, caused the problems of capitalism, instead of the capitalists who paid professors’ salaries?

The reproach stung, but it got me thinking. Bruce was right. Based on what Wilder had said about slavery, he was obviously an enemy of all working people. I should have known better than to expect anything but deceit and repression.

I tried hard to rid myself of the bitter aftertaste of the counter with Wilder, but the B- continued to bother me. Wilder was supposedly encouraging his students to delve into social and intellectual history. Based on the other students’ demeanor in class, I was probably the only one who even attempted this in a serious way. His response was not to welcome my efforts but to sneer at them, affecting to believe I couldn’t have written the paper myself. If, as I suspected, he thought my take on the history of this period was biased, why didn’t he offer that as the reason for giving me the B-? I might not have agreed, but at least I would have recognized his intellectual honesty.

As a Christian, half a century later, I look back on this brash, aggressive young man with a mixture of wonder and puzzlement. This younger version of myself had learned all too well how to argue, criticize, and intimidate. But it was beginning to dawn on me that the targets I attacked were not the imperialist behemoth he conceived them to be; they were flesh and blood people who lashed out when attacked and displayed moral limitations very much like those I would eventually see in myself.

Even more disturbing, I myself was not yet the cold-eyed apparatchik I was hoping to become. These misgivings I felt were not the emotions of the dedicated revolutionary I aspired to be. God had endowed me with a sensibility utterly at odds with the ruthless intransigence communists sought to cultivate. Try as I would, he would never be able to rid myself of the qualms of conscience I was beginning to feel. I viewed them then as an embarrassing blemish on an otherwise spotless record of political orthodoxy. That younger version of me would have been horrified to learn where they actually came from. For the would-be revolutionary, they were something far more damaging than a brief ideological lapse. They were the mark of a young man Christ claimed as His own and would never let go of.