Silas Timberman (10 page)

* * *

In 1911, a Clemington undergraduate, a senior then, had made a statement to the effect that he would rather be editor of
Fulcrum
than captain of the football team. It might have passed unnoticed, except that he had made the statement in print, and that subsequently, he became a United States senator of no small importance. All of which led later
Fulcrum
staffs to subscribe money to place his statement on a plaque which adorned the front of the Arts Building until 1937, when embarrassed alumni forced its removal to the corridor outside of the
Fulcrum
offices. Their feeling was that it went in the face of strong American principles and tended to sow confusion among otherwise unconfused undergraduates, and some of this natural embarrassment came from the fact of
Fulcrum
itself.

In the first place, the name—suggested, strangely enough, by Dr. Lazarus Meyers in 1896—was curious, and the fact that it was simply
Fulcrum
on the masthead of a daily newspaper, rather than
The Fulcrum
or preferably
The Clarion
or
The Call
or
The Bugle
, gave it a certain arty air, proper enough for a place like Antioch, but incongruous in a great university like Clemington. But while they forced the removal of the plaque from its conspicuous position, they were able to change neither the name nor the singular tradition of the newspaper—a remarkably persistent tradition, even though subject to a good deal of variation during the post-war years.

In 1898,
Fulcrum
launched a bitter and remorseless campaign against the Spanish War and the war in the Philippines, the high spot of which was a special editorial written by Mark Twain for the newspaper, dry, caustic, and as the then president of the university expressed it, “utterly immoral.” This resulted in the expulsion and subsequent reinstatement of the editor after quite a commotion on and off the campus, and for the next two generations,
Fulcrum
operated with a very live memory of its beginnings. There was almost no issue, no controversy, no public debate in which it did not make its position clear—usually iconoclastically clear. And as the only paper in the town of Clemington was the weekly
Star, Fulcrum
had a very considerable off-campus readership. Not too large, for Chicago and Indianapolis papers were sold in Clemington, but sufficient to save its four pages from being turned into a house organ, and sufficient to keep its editors alert and responsive.

Since 1945, however, the tone of
Fulcrum
had changed considerably, muting itself and becoming less blatantly anti-authoritarian. Caution and conservatism entered its columns, underlined when its former editor wrote, in 1948.

“A number of letters to the editor of
Fulcrum
have pressed the paper to take sides in the approaching election. Such pressure, we feel, is ill-advised—as ill-advised as the suggestion that we support the dubious emergence of a group which titles itself,
The Progressive Party
, simply because the tradition of
Fulcrum
has shown support of such political movements in the past. We have never regarded so-called tradition as a strait jacket, and an examination of
Fulcrum's
files reveals more anarchy than consistency. We refer in particular to the hate-the-rich, hit-the-successful pattern, which has been a juvenile indulgence all too often. Certainly, this kind of behavior in the past does not indicate its pursuit in the future, and it would seem to us more fitting that we conduct a sober re-evaluation, examining with fresh and candid eyes those mighty captains of industry and statesmanship who have contributed so much to make America what it is today. As always, our letter column is open to various points of view, but the notion that this paper should make a political alliance at this moment is one which we strongly reject.”

This tone was maintained.
Fulcrum
became cautious, remarkably skillful—considering that none but undergraduates worked on the paper—in a turgid game of words which achieved pomposity without ever saying anything of consequence, and which avoided the new spectre of
controversial issues
like a plague. Nevertheless, it was in tune with the times, and the students accepted it without any undue comment.

The regular election of new staff for the fall semester, Alvin Morse as the new editor and Frank Hoffenstein as the managing editor, both of them seniors in the School of Journalism, made no immediate apparent difference in
Fulcrum
. As with the previous editors, they gave ample space to the football squad and took up as a cause and an issue the construction of an adequate stadium. They ran a not too daring article on patterns of sexual behavior on campus, printed those letters which resulted from it, and then printed a series of letters on the question of why there was no Negro teacher on Clemington's faculty, a series which brought a calm and judicious comment, in letter form, from President Cabot—who approved the thought students were giving to this matter, cited it as an instance of the inevitability of “the American way,” and stated flatly that the standards of Clemington were scholastic and moral standards, pure and simple, and that anyone who met them, be he Jew or gentile, black or white, would be welcomed to the faculty. As for the Korean War,
Fulcrum
gave it formal support, echoing the position of the administration and condemning aggression, just as
Fulcrum
got out a special issue on the question of civil defense.

In all of this, there was nothing to indicate the position it would take in its October 30th issue.

* * *

It was fortunate, Silas felt, that he had not read
Fulcrum
before his morning class on that Monday; for if he had, he could hardly have ignored it and might well have been drawn into a discussion he was hardly prepared for. As it was, most of his students had read it, and several asked him whether he had. No, he had not, he replied, but he would immediately—immediately upon getting out of this, for he had a sensation of a class at odds with itself and himself, fragmented and confused—and his own confusion at not knowing what was in
Fulcrum
only worsened the situation. Yet he would not permit himself to exhibit such obvious weakness as to halt his lecture and peer into the newspaper, even though a number of students were doing just that—to a point where he was prompted to remark caustically,

“Whatever attraction
Fulcrum
has, suppose you pretend that mine is greater. Put the papers away.”

Afterwards, he writhed over this small stupidity on his part—after he had read the two editorials, which he was able to do immediately after the class, alone in the security of his office. The first editorial, lead-off on page three, and a full column, was written by Alvin Morse. It was titled,
Samuel B. Clemens, Communist
, and it went on to say:

“An incident has occurred here at Clemington which has gone far enough to make us heartily ashamed of ourselves, and which may in time make us the laughing stock of the nation. We consider it so shocking that we have decided to deal with it forthrightly, bringing the whole matter out into the open where it properly belongs.

“This incident began with the decision, on the part of a respected member of the English Department, to base a survey syllabus for the semesters of 1950–1951 on the concept of Mark Twain as the decisive and determining factor in modern American literature. While some may disagree with this concept, one must admit that it is not unprecedented, and certainly no one will gainsay the importance of Mark Twain on our native literary scene.

“Proceeding with his plan, the professor in question announced to his class that he would use Mark Twain's little known short novel,
The Man That Corrupted Hadleyberg
, as the central focus of his investigation, and characterized the work as an attack upon ‘Babbittry and the Chamber of Commerce mentality.' The professor's characterization was challenged in class as parallelism with subversive thinking—the challenge coming from one of the students. Subsequently, this student and two others went to the department head, where they accused the professor in question of deliberately furthering communist aims. We are informed that while the department head doubted the deliberate intention of the professor, he agreed in general with the criticism and promised to act.

“He kept his promise. The professor was confronted with his procedure and instructed to abandon it—in specific, to cease all mention and discussion of
The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg
. The obvious implications were attached to a refusal to comply.

“Which is precisely why we decided to go ahead with the publication of this editorial in this fashion—without interviewing or discussing said editorial with either of the two faculty members concerned, but with a scrupulous check and cross-check of facts. We felt that such a procedure, that of advice and consultation, would result in enough pressure to bury the incident completely. We were determined that it should not be buried.

“In our checking of details, we read
The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg
most carefully, and found it a rewarding and intelligent piece of satire—a bitter attack upon hypocrisy and false piousness. If this be communism, then we say, as an earlier American did of treason, make the most of it. We take our place with Mark Twain—to speak up and criticize without fear.

“We hold that the entire affair is compounded out of dangerous stupidity and even more dangerous panic, and we know of no better way of giving comfort to the enemy than to exhibit such arrant Philistinism. Unopposed, such tendencies mean the end of all free inquiry.”

The second editorial, in the next column, was written by Frank Hoffenstein, managing editor, and was titled, “Another Point of View.” It ran to greater length than Morse's editorial, beginning by stating.

“In deference to the long and hallowed traditions of
Fulcrum
, we accepted the editor's procedure without agreeing with it. Nevertheless, we hold that a single point of view is not sufficient, and maintain the privilege of stating our own.

“We do not dispute the facts which the editor puts forth, for we have checked them with him; but we object vigorously to his interpretation of these facts. Unlike the editor, we have no fears about being the laughing stock of the nation, nor do we consider the incident shocking in the manner in which he does. Our own fear is the fear of falling into a trap which has in the past caught so many so called ‘principled' and ‘liberal' souls. Our own fear is the fear of being ‘used.'

“Like the editor, we also read the story in question. This story might have been harmless half a century ago when Mark Twain wrote it. It might have had some relationship to the truth then, though we doubt it.

“However, it is not harmless today. The proposition of this story, very cleverly put, is a simple one, to wit—that all men of substance, wealth and ambition are bad, and that the poor and the loafers are good. We believe that there are good poor and bad poor, good rich and bad rich. But the only group that deals with these ideas as generalizations today are the communists—to stir up what they call ‘class hatred' as a prelude to overthrow of the government by force and violence.

“Of course, Mark Twain was not a communist, and our colleague only muddies the water by placing such emphasis on that fact. What is more to the point—and we have no hesitation in saying so—is that the ideas of Mark Twain are extremely useful to the communists today—not only useful to them, but used by them.

“We did some cold, hard-headed research on this question—and we are willing to let the facts speak for themselves. We went to the library and examined a year—1949—of publications, various shades of red. The
Daily Worker
, alas, was not among them, but we found three solid party-liners and checked references to and quotes from Mark Twain. Among the three, we found a total of ninety-seven references and seventeen separate quotations. And all of them favorable, we need not say.

“In other words, Samuel B. Clemens, take it or leave it, is the most popular in the American red galaxy of writers. The facts show it; they also show that the closest runner-up, Theodore Dreiser, is mentioned only fourteen times in all three publications and quoted only three times.

“Our colleague holds that neither he nor Mark Twain is responsible for what the reds do; but what is important is that they do it. We tend to become a little impatient with the fuzzy thinking of liberals who pick up the red bait, ad nauseum. Even a child does not burn itself twice at the same stove. The so-called ‘liberals' play a dreary tune to the effect that anyone who shows some hard-headed, everyday common sense in face of the red menace is a reactionary. But aren't the true liberals those who fight consistently to keep the red terror from triumphing in America?

“There is a woolly kind of logic that holds writers like Mark Twain to be sacred, and the commies gleefully use this logic. But let us just suppose that the enemy seized a pile of cannon balls from the War of Independence and fired them square at us. Would we cheerfully stand up to be killed, holding that these cannon balls were sacred, no matter which way they were flying? We would not. We would state flatly and unequivocally that these are weapons of the enemy which must be destroyed.

“We know that the analogy is contrived, but we hold that it is nevertheless valid. The misused professor does not have our sympathies. We may leave his motives to be decided at some future date, but we have a firm opinion about his results. We do not yet believe that Clemington is a haven for the teaching of communism.”

Silas finished reading, went back to the first editorial, read a paragraph or two over again, and then shook himself out of the trance into which he had fallen.

“Good Lord,” he said.

He brought out pipe and matches, and then decided that he wanted a cigarette very much and began to hunt through his desk drawers for one. Lawrence Kaplin walked in then, and asked whether he was looking for something.