Visit to a Small Mind

The intelligent bigot is no uncommon phenomenon in American politics. While we have rabble rousers, we also have educated, sometimes almost cultured men whose prejudices unbalance them, and distort their outlook. Father Feeney is one of these, and David Wang, another.

Wang, however, is powerless to deal with the less educated. His appeal can only be made in language and logic which would be incomprehensible to the crowds on the Common. Ironically, this limitation on his audience destroys him. For his logic, exposed to the least sophisticated analysis, becomes illogic, and his language becomes the old refrain of hate.

Wang is personally an inconspicuous, soft-spoken, highly nervous Chinese. Born in Shanghai some twenty-six years ago, he came to America in 1949 to study. He wasted a year in pre-med studies at Dartmouth, but graduated with a B.A. in 1955. He claims to have worked on The Dartmouth Quarterly, The Dart, and to have been president of the Dartmouth Cosmopolitan Club, where, he asserts, he "encouraged the exchange of ideas and knowledge among the races." His class poem was censored by college officials, towards many of whom he holds an undying hatred.

"I ridiculed my professors in the poem," he says, "and I called one of them a bulfinch. . . . . I use birds. T.S. Eliot uses cats."

As a poet, he claims to be part of Chinese traditional writing, but his work is predominantly influenced by Ezra Pound, whose phrases and rhythms recur continually in Wang's work. His poetic judgement seems questionable: "Elvis Presley is a greater poet than Carl Sandbag (sic)," he says.

If his poetry is riddled with Pound, his theories have their roots in the same man. But underlying both is a strain of American bigotry which is as old as time--anti-Semitism. Wang becomes perceptibly agitated when the subject is brought up. His disclaimers are pathetic and contradictory. For near the surface of his quarrel with modern America is the recurrent theme--"Communism is a Jewish movement. . . . Talmudic filth. . . . Ike Eisenhower, Max Rabb, Col. Kuhn, Felix Frank-furter are a bane and a plague on our people. . . . usurer."

Wang admits he has never read the Talmud, but goes on to criticize it for obscenity and immorality. One of his other charges against American Jews is that their support of Israel weakens our national economy. He has no answer to the statement that Israel is the one nation most nearly embodying his concept of "awareness of one's own racial and cultural heritage."

Wang, himself, has apparently renounced his own culture. He is a High Church Episcopalian.

Yet for America Wang wants a non-integrated society in which the different races would have "the maximum opportunity to develop their potentiality independently of one another." Still he maintains that there are no longer American Chinese of high enough caliber to teach their children about the "glorious traditions" of China. For the American Negro he recommends study of African rhythm and sculpture. To attain his ends he seeks "segregation in elementary and high school education and also in housing," but opposes it in sports, transportation and recreation facilities.

He further demands a "racial franchise." State and national governments would be run by representatives of the different races in proportion to their size in the population. That such a system destroys the concept of federalism does not worry him. Even less is he concerned that the accompanying political divisions would work to the disadvantage of the non-white groups.

Nothing, as a matter of fact, penetrates his illogic. Quite apparently his quote-droping and title-recommending form a veneer of scholarship for his prejudice. It seems unlikely that Dartmouth taught him more than the forensic arts and the techniques of making propaganda plausible. His education never sent him to the sources he quotes, but left him with interpreters of dubious significance. His anthropology is outdated, his authorities are one-sided, his learning is shallow.

One can laugh at David Wang and the weird bunch of "ex-students" who travel with him. Their morals may be suspect, their sincerity and devotion superficial, their sanity questionable. But as representatives of a small, yet persistent minority opinion in America and as symbols of age-old hatreds they are more than amusing, far less than frightening. Wang and his crew are worth remembering, if only as a proof that there are people like that.

Wang is apparently having difficulties with the immigration officials. He has a chance of being deported as undesirable, but whether he is forced out of the country or actually gets into politics, society cannot simply dismiss him. What he represents has always been a danger to democracy. In meeting the danger in the open, free men have often found their greatest strength.