Pusey on 'The Big Lie'

(The following is the complete text of President Pusey's Baccalaureate Address before the Class of '70 in Memorial Church on June 9. Pusey' attack on student radicals gained widespread attention and praise in the national press. About one in twenty Harvard seniors showed up for the Baccalaureate Service.)

I WANT to speak today not about baffling problems of the world outside but of what I take to be a declination in the quality of our life here which I find disturbing. I have chosen to introduce what I have to say by calling attention to a point of similarity between the present situation of Harvard and that which obtained when I returned to Cambridge seventeen years ago to become the University's twenty-fourth President.

I became President here during a very troubled period on college and university campuses. The fears, accusations, strife and excitement which at that time upset academic communities reverberated about the name of Joseph McCarthy. I felt I had something of an advantage over many academics in understanding the difficulties then because I had known the chief enemy- had often seen him face to face. We had lived in the same town for a number of years and had talked from time to time as our paths fortuitously crossed. He was for me not merely a newspaper personality.

Permit me to indulge in a retrospective glance for a moment. The first time Joseph McCarthy sought the nomination for the United States Senate he was defeated. This took place before the conclusion of World War II. After his initial failure- and after the war- he returned to Appleton to become a judge. A little later lawyers in the state tried unsuccessfully to have him disbarred because of his conduct on the bench.

In 1946 he again sought the Republican nomination for senator. This time- contrary to public expectations (one could say, almost to everyone's amazement)- he defeated the incumbent, Robert M. LaFollette, Jr., by some five thousand votes. How this happened is an interesting story, but it is not my subject today. Mr. McCarthy then went on to be elected senator. He did not distinguish himself in his first term, however, and attracted very little attention outside Wisconsin.

Some of us who were not only unimpressed by his record but had come profoundly to distrust him tried next to prevent his reelection. In our innocence we thought we could do this simply by reporting his record to the voters. I offer this confession as a warning to those of you who may imagine influencing elections is an easy matter. Despite our efforts this time McCarthy won reelection by a large plurality and went on to become the national- even the international- figure known to history. Many soon came to think of him as a defender, almost a savior, of our national integrity. Others, including most people in the academic world, took a diametrically opposite view, and came to see in him a symbol of chicanery, deceit, maliciousness, and at the most extreme, diabolical evil.

IT IS NOT my intention today to attempt a reevaluation of Joseph McCarthy's reputation. He was no friend of mine, and I have no disposition to make excuse for his conduct. My first months as President of Harvard were made unnecessarily difficult by the ostensible campaign of hate he was then conducting against universities in general and Harvard in particular (primarily, I am certain, not so much because he disliked or distrusted universities, but for personally profitable political reasons). As long as I remained in Appleton he had taken no public notice of me. But when I came into the light of the Harvard presidency I was quickly numbered among his targets. It was a questionable accolade, but being familiar with the man and the game he was playing, I was not surprised.

I introduce this narrative simply to say that I did not then- nor do I now- accept the theory that all the hideous torment of that time was caused by him. What the historians will have to explain is not Joseph McCarthy. It is rather the reception he was accorded. Millions upon millions of people in the United States needed him and wanted him, or at the very least accepted him, and in so doing in a sense created him.

He certainly was not without blame. He was, and remains in my view, a shameful, cynical politician who discovered how to play skillfully on peoples' emotions for his own gain. But it is much too facile to dismiss the evils and anguish that wracked campuses and country at that time by simply naming him as scapegoat and letting the rest of society off scot-free.

It was said at the time that McCarthy was the first to discover how to use the mass media for personal advancement. I am afraid this is too large a claim, but certainly he raised the practice momentarily to a new peak of effectiveness. The organs of public opinion gave him enormous coverage for years and thus contributed to build his reputation.

In the period of his rapid rise he told a friend of mine in Appleton that he had first glimpsed the secret of political success by reading Mein Kampf. Hitler's technique, he said, rested on the skillful use of the big lie. Tell a whopper and keep on repeating it. In time people will come to believe it. Joseph McCarthy's big whopper was that the communists had taken over the State Department. Hitler's big lie had been that the Jews had almost destroyed Germany.

McCarthy was also a master of telling an endless flow of little lies to sow doubt and distrust and play on peoples' emotions. For him discourse was a tool of exploitation. That is, language was to be used not for clarification and increased understanding, but for accusation, distortion, misrepresentation, denunciation, defamation- in any number of ways to obfuscate and confuse and by so doing to engender and inflame feelings of hate and anger.

It was his cunning intent by playing on peoples' fears and hostile emotions to attract to himself mass support. He built his following by feeding hateful attitudes and by unleashing bigotry, for to the frightened and worried the fears he played on were so real that he appeared to them as hero and savior. He advanced his political career by first inciting a mass public opinion.

He then used this to put pressure on individuals and groups of individuals and institutions- the scapegoats he had identified for society- to make their practices conform to his followers' view of how they should behave. The successes he achieved in this way would in turn serve to maintain and strengthen his political ascendancy. It was not a particularly attractive period in our history.

NOW, less than twenty years later, our campuses are experiencing a not dissimilar period of torment, whiplashed as they are by a resurgence of his hateful technique. Again people are looking for scapegoats. But this time the attack comes not from the outside but from within, from extremist splinter groups of the New Left made up of students and- I am sorry to acknowledge- also of some faculty who for reasons not quite clear to me would like to see our colleges and universities denigrated, maligned and even shut down.

These critics go about their task in a way hauntingly familiar to an older generation. Their aim is to build a following for themselves. They would do this by sowing doubts and suspicions. They hope then to attract sufficient support to be able to enforce demands on those whom they malign and designate as the enemy, using the old means of distortion, accusation, guilt imputed by association, and so on. And they thrive as people lend them credence.

Let me illustrate what I have in mind. During your freshman year this University experienced what I have been told was its first strike by employees. It was occasioned essentially by a contest for control between the leadership of two rival unions. But that is not the way it was reported in what I remember as one of the first of the scores of SDS propaganda leaflets to which we- all of us at Harvard- have since been continuously subjected.

In the view of the author of this early flyer the employees' strike was clear evidence of the University's mistreatment of its worker's ("Harvard University uses scab labor and maintains oppressive working conditions"). You, the students, were called to a show of virtuous indignation to help set the grievous wrong right. And I remember certain young members of the faculty marched with the dissident students on this occasion.

The big lie let loose amongst us began then to take shape; that is, that the University is a hopelessly bigoted, reactionary force in our society which serves the interests of a hideous military- industrial complex by doing its chores and by intellectually emasculating the young entrusted to its care so as in time to turn them over as docile slaves to a contemptible "Establishment." It sounds a bit exaggerated I concede, but, as you can testify, this has been repeatedly asserted during your years in college.

In your sophomore year, you will recall for example, there was a considerable furor over who should or should not be permitted on campus to interview graduating students for possible jobs. The SDS, playing on a dissatisfaction widely held in our community, made an inflammatory issue out of the presence of a Dow recruiter on the campus, implying that his presence proved the University's insidious complicity in the hated war effort.

What should have been the issue, as was ultimately recognized, was the appropriateness of the Office of Graduate and Career Plans, which had been established and is maintained as a convenience to students seeking opportunities for employment or graduate study, and the validity or suitability of its procedures. Unless you are completely unlike the Harvard men who have gone before you, I double that any of you would ever want that office to confront you with an arbitrarily restricted list.

Last year among several egregious examples of distortion and misrepresentation designed to magnify indignation and sow distrust (I cite only two or three examples of a possible many) was the University's alleged "expansion." No attempt was made to understand or accurately report the University's building needs, activities or plans. These are many and complicated, but to our new critics, quite obviously, we were

simply ruthlessly and senselessly exploiting the poor and the oppressed. The word "expansion" was then seized on as a slogan and chanted again and again in mindless fashion to confuse and defame, and beyond this, it was hoped, to impress the confused and by doing so to gain increased support.

THIS YEAR a major accusation has been the University's complicity with our nefarious government through the work- the very fine scholarly work, let me say in passing- of the Center for International Affairs. The fantastic unfairness- not to mention the ignorance- of this accusation is almost incredible to anyone who has made even a small effort to find out what the Center does in fact do.

Repeated efforts have been made to present the evidence in this and other cases for anyone who wishes to examine it, but apparently time for inquiry is short, and this being so, the accusations go on, the chants continue, and doubles conceivably grow. Sadly, a suspicion of this kind once implanted, as McCarthy knew, is dissipated, if at all, only in time and with the greatest difficulty.

One can read through all the leaflets circulated by these extremists who have dwelt among us in recent years, bent an slandering an institution it might have been assumed they would love, or lovingly find fault with, without discovering a single effort to clarify, to analyze, to explain or honestly to represent. Always they insinuate, distort, accuse, their aim being not to identify and correct real abuses, but always rather by crying alarm intentionally to arouse and inflame passions in order to build support for "non-negotiable demands," and by this means, to enlarge their following and enhance their power. Clearly the old McCarthy technique is at work again, but this time- it is a sorrow to have to acknowledge it- by our own, and in our midst.

It is a shameful state of affairs. Nor is it made prettier by present growing tendencies to impose conformity. There is a broadening simplistic conviction among many in our community- in this case not just among the extremists- that there is a "right" way of looking at the various issues of these times and that no agreement with this view is not to be tolerated.

Attempts are made to impose opinions by votes. Issues are of such importance that they and they alone must be overriding concern to everyone. Meanwhile the most extreme of our radical groups- like similar groups in all periods of history- have latterly moved on to a position where they unashamedly work to stifle dissent among their own members- that is to say, they have become less and less participatory, rather, more and more coercive, increasingly disdaining the rights of minorities within or without, and again like extreme rightist groups of other ages, advancing in righteous indignation, have now turned increasingly to violence and force. Ours has been a troubled situation.

LET ME give one more example to illustrate this new and growing tendency to enforce conformity, even among self- styled moderates, recalling that if there is anything which has always been distasteful to free men in the long course of history it is a loyalty or test oath of any kind. When the Congress undertook in 1958 to require such an oath of all those who were to receive funds under the student loan program of the National Defense Education Act a number of us within the world of academe contended with some success, after repeated efforts, to have this requirement removed. Now this kind of threat to freedom, motivated by a desire to impose conformity, grows among us.

A few weeks ago I received a letter from one of our graduate students. In its paragraph he deplored our Federal Administration's actions in Indochina and applauded his faculty's decision to enlighten academic obligations for those compelled by conscience to devote their time to war activity. It is hard to quarrel with this. But then he went on, and I quote: "Two important members of the Administration. . . are presently on leave from the faculty. I respectfully suggest that the Faculty immediately and publicly sever all the connections which these men have with Harvard. The fact the faculty contains many including perhaps yourself, who are personal friends [of these men] would only make more meaningful the faculty's and the University's condemnation of the Administration's actions. I hope to hear from you shortly."

The self- righteousness, the blind lack of concern for the rights and feelings of other human beings, the zealotry and opinionatedness of such a letter- above all in an academic community- are sickening to say the least.

Distortion, misrepresentation, accusation and now increasingly a tendency toward the imposition of unitary views. And this within universities. How have we come to such a pass? It is hard to say, but I suppose many of us must share in the blame: Those of us in positions to have moved more rapidly than we have to correct obvious abuses and shortcomings which have festered too long among us. Those responsible for instruction too long reluctant to re-examine traditional offerings and teaching methods, too little ready, not to abandon, but to enliven courses which have ceased to speak to the condition of the new young and which have failed to make attractive to them the achievement of the degree of freedom we enjoy, so painfully and slowly won. Those of various kinds, militantly on the defensive, disinclined to allow any claims of discontent or to make any concessions to the fierce urgency of the desire for reform that now rages among us, a rage obviously not without justification.

I refer here, of course, to a true decide widely held, not to that deceitful McCarthy kind which merely masks a drive for power. Much of the explanation for the growth among us of intolerant attitudes and the acceptance of destructive styles of behavior which should be anathema in academic societies is undoubtedly to be found in such considerations. But not all of it.

A not inconsiderable part of the explanation for the unfortunate change in this and other academic communities is to be charged to the many in all such groups who, like the honest burghers of the Weimar Republic, peace-loving, tolerant, with no desire to impose their views on others, have been unwilling to pass critical judgment on only of their kind. Where critical judgment fails error quickly moves in.

Many of us have something to answer for here. We have been too ready simply to hope that the problem would go away. Unwilling to find fault, reluctant to look into unpleasant facts and call them by their right names, eager to avoid controversy, trying above all to be understanding, perhaps a majority of us have been less insistent than we might- while continuing patiently to practice restraint- to observe the scholar's inescapable obligation for critical analysis and hard appraisal, or the citizen's duty to work strenuously to improve, but not to destroy, the hardwon structures of our public life. Not unlike those who twenty years ago imagined and deeply hoped there was something to be said for McCarthy. Looked at candidly it seems to me we have contributed unwittingly to the disturbing and unwelcome evil we now lament.

THE ANALYSIS can be carried a step further. It is my conviction that deceitful talk and the tendencies toward coercive action could not have made the inroads they have in academic communities in recent years had all of us to whom they are deeply repulsive been more ready to oppose them. That is part of the story. But only part. Deeper is the fact that underlying and even supporting the many disturbances which have shaken our campuses in recent years is an as yet only vaguely articulated, but nevertheless widely-shared, feeling of revulsion against the values and modes of living of the enlightened society based on reason, tolerance and the advancement of science which humane people have dreamed about, and have through generations been struggling to create.

Somehow in your time for many the taste for this long wished-for kind of life has gone flat. Its authenticity and its attractiveness have lost their charm. In the university world this is a present major problem, perhaps our most frightening one. But whatever the deepest origins of our current troubles, we need not wait on their full explication to acknowledge that their effects on higher education in your time have been, at the best least, jarring.

I am sorry to speak so somberly and critically on this occasion, but I feel I must. Your years at Harvard have been among the most tormented that have ever beset institutions of higher learning in this country. The effect of these years on each of you is something which only you can assess. Probably it will become clear with the passing of time. But troubled as the years have been I cannot believe- at least I do not want to believe- the effect will prove to have been wholly negative.

You have had to adjust rather fast, for it is not games you have been playing here during these years but rather the real thing. Yet amidst the upsetting alarums and excursions occasioned during your years in college by a determined few who have worked consistently to attract attention to themselves by misrepresenting what we are about, as you have gone ahead with your work, you have made clear one hopeful sign. That is, your generation's vigorous assertion that you will not be satisfied with a learning or a way of life whose most convincing credentials are only that they have been accepted before. You have professed convincingly that you will not be content with a learning which has not been freshly authenticated; and you have also made clear that you will have little respect for a learning which does not carry at one time both a dimension of deep personal involvement and social outreach.

No one can fault you here. But we would be disturbed- many of us not of your generation who have gone before- if there were any implication in your valid fresh insight that depth of concern has somehow now made knowledge less valuable, perhaps even unnecessary, or that strong feeling and conviction of rightness have done away with the need for- indeed with respect for- rigorous intellectual discrimination, regard for individuals as opposed to masses of people, and a restraining awareness of the dubiety of all human ends.

The problems which concern you are not different from the problems which concern the rest of us. Nor are they to be understood as being simply ignorantly of our creation. Their origins are deep in the texture of things. Nor are they to be eradicated quickly by demand and demonstration. Relief can come only as they are attacked from bases deep set in exploration and knowledge and with determination to stay on the job.

What then can I say to you at the end of your college years? It must be, I think, that neither unreasoning zealotry nor despair is an acceptable attitude for Harvard men. You have seen much of one and, I suspect, have at least occasionally been tempted by the other. It has been said that your generation is the first in America to have grown up without optimism. This is a sad commentary if true. Personally I do not believe it is, or at least that it need be.

It has been remarked by many, however, that you have a widespread and deep feeling of helplessness because you see so many things that need to be set right and feel so powerless to effect change. If so, such feeling is not without justification. But you must not assume you are the first to have felt this way, for it is a feeling with which the concerned have always had to contend.

In such mood it is easy to denounce, to find fault, to make unjust accusations, to visit the shortcomings of the world, and of ourselves, on scapegoats- even to light fires or throw stones- for personal relief or for exploitation-easy and totally unworthy. It is more difficult to maintain a realistic sense of human limitation, to refuse to become frustrated and angry; to analyze, to assess, to seek to understand and explain; to determine to be adult and fair; and thus to work patiently to improve while refusing to succumb to either cynicism or hopelessness. It is a long way around, but it is the civilized way, and the only way for those who have come truly to understand the role of humane learning.

It is this kind of behavior which Harvard has always wanted to teach- or rather has hoped that it might in some degree exemplify in its teachers and teachings, and so strongly represent that those coming here to learn would inevitably find it for themselves- and finding it, be beguiled by its charm and sign on for life in allegiance to it.

I MAY PUT it this way: there is a world of reason, modesty, charity and trust in the midst of, and opposed to, the oppressive and contentious world of deceit, anger, vilification and self-righteousness now made so manifest all about us again, as twenty years ago, by would-be exploiters. This former world is created and precariously maintained in all generations by civilized men, a world for which in the depths of our hearts I am sure we all yearn.

What I have wanted to say to you today is simply that in my view, as Harvard men, you are called to serve that world.

In earlier days at this baccalaureate service Harvard presidents have tried first to suggest this world and have then reiterated again a requirement to work for it, a basic tenet in our enduring liberal tradition. Life outside the academy was probably no more easy then than now, nor did my predecessors have any illusions about the difficulty and the only limited chances of what they were asking. But finally in a deep intent to be helpful they would go on to say, quite unashamedly, "Go forth and be strong."

Styles change, circumstances change. But from what we have been through together in your years and from what we have now come to sense of the difficulties and the dangers of this time, it seems to me we have earned the right again to speak in such terms.

In a world of violence, deceit and coercive evil- to experience which, most regrettably, you have not bad to wait to go outside- wishing in my turn to be helpful I would first pray for you clarity of vision. Then in a period as troubled and uncertain as any in our history, echoing my predecessors' words. I would say something quite similar to what has been said here so many times in the past, urging you not, from a feeling of helplessness, either to surrender to rage or to succumb to self-pity, but rather to go forth and be strong. Beyond this, since in such enterprise you will surely need help- as others who have gone before you have needed help- I would add a further prayer, that the grace of God may go with you and sustain you wherever you go and in whatever task to which you will be called.

Yours has been a college generation full of difficulty, double and confusion. Yet I would be lacking a fundamental faith in the wonder-working of this University if I were not convinced you will find, in retrospect, your time in college to have been extraordinarily maturing and rewarding. Difficulty brings self-knowledge. Out of trouble springs self-knowledge. Out of trouble springs inner strength and self-renewal. We see now in part only through the darkened glass. It will be your task to help make that vision clearer for yourself and for those near and dear to you through courage, faith, hope and love which have sustained others before you through trials every bit as great as yours. Go forth and be strong.