History of My Reading: The Beginning Hour

Doug Wilson, 1969 Knox Yearbook

Freshman orientation at Knox College transitioned into the school year that late September of 1964 with choosing and registering first semester classes.  My academic advisor officially was Howard Wilson, head of the English department, but actually it was his younger colleague Douglas Wilson (no familial relation.)  I don't remember that first meeting, but I would soon get to know Mr. Wilson, take classes from him, babysit for him and socialize with him, plus drop in for many informal conversations in his Alumni Hall office.  We've kept up a scattered but longstanding correspondence over the years, the only such relationship that remains.

Sam Moon 1969 Yearbook

I recall registration as a noisy process of finding the correct folding tables where the appropriate class lists were, and filling out forms under bright lights, probably in the huge Knox gym.  I was registering for my English class when the student seated at the table recognized my name and told me to wait, Mr. Moon wanted to talk to me.

 At that point a thin man in a suit jacket, maybe tweed or corduroy, turned around and took me over to an empty table.  He sat across from me.  Sam Moon wore glasses that themselves might be described as "owlish."  But in fact I'd never met anyone who in all respects reminded me so much of an owl--a very kind owl.  I remember this moment and his face across the table as clearly as 54 years allow.

Sam Moon, probably in the 1950s

He wanted to talk to me because I was at Knox on the Scholastic Magazines Writing Awards Scholarship, and he was the de facto head of the writing program.  He wanted to assure me that even though I was there on a writing scholarship, I was under no obligation to take creative writing courses.  I said immediately that I wanted to, and he seemed delighted, but quietly.  I couldn't do so until sophomore year but he said if I wanted to show him anything I was writing this year, he'd be glad to talk to me about it.  It wasn't long before I took him up on his offer.

 But before going creative I was registered to explore academic writing.  One or another of the tests I took meant I skipped freshman English.  Instead I had what amounted to an independent studies course in which I was to research and write a long paper.  I had mixed feelings about this.  My classmates all seemed to be reading The Education of Henry Adams, which sounded interesting, but I was left out of their discussions.  Still, I had plenty to read, if nobody to talk to about it.  Prof. Davenport supervised me, but as I recall I met with him only a few times over the semester.

This was probably the third long or longish paper I'd ever written for which I'd chosen the topic.

The first was for a college prep course I'd taken the summer between my third and fourth years at the nearest public high school.  Hempfield High was just a few miles down West Newton Road. One of the attractions of taking the course was that I got to drive myself to it, in our very cool 1957 Chevy convertible.  Cool to look at but nerve-wracking to drive on narrow streets because it was so huge--the distance between the windshield and the headlights had to be five feet.

 I must have taken two courses that summer, though from the same teacher, because I recall one of them involved some acting improvs--it was probably a speech course.  The paper however was for Advanced Composition and involved research and reading.  It had the grandiose title of "Victorian England and the Organization Man," which was more of a journalistic-style teaser than an academic description.  All of Victorian England was represented by one author: John Stuart Mill.  The Organization Man represented contemporary America.

 I isolated one Mill idea--that the natural state of society is when "worldly power and moral influence are...exercised by the fittest persons whom the existing state of society affords."  (Darwin already!)  Mill didn't think Victorian England was in a natural state.  And I found plenty of writers who didn't think contemporary American society was either.  I quoted Mill that "the betters" in our society are " not their wisers, or their honesters, but their richers."

Why Mill? It's possible that I found a collection of Mill's work called Essays on Politics and Culture in the new nonfiction arrivals shelves I eagerly scanned on each visit to the Greensburg Public Library, since this edition, edited by Gertrude Himmelfarb, was no more than a year old.

  But it's also possible that Mill got favorable mention in Arthur Schlesinger's Politics of Hope, published the same year as my essay (1963.)  I know I found that volume among the new arrivals, and pounced on it because I knew of Schlesinger's role in the JFK White House.

  As for Mill, I quickly found his classic work, On Liberty. Including those three, there are 12 books in my bibliography, and they mirror the places I found books before college as I wrote about them in previous posts: six I found in the public library, three or four were on the shelves at home (including in Readers Digest condensed form), and a couple were paperbacks I found on the supermarket or tobacco store/news stand racks.

 The second paper earned me a brief moment of fame in my senior year of high school, the spring of 1964.  It was my final paper for Problems in Democracy class: a history of the first 100 days of the Kennedy administration.  It was 50 pages long. That's what made it famous--no one in my high school could even imagine a 50 page paper.  It was an instant if short-lived legend. ( Of course no one actually read it.  The teacher involved who spread the news of its length also complained about needing to read all those pages.  But she did bump my final grade up from a B to an A.)

The title of the paper was "The Beginning Hour," taken from the poem Robert Frost wrote for JFK's Inauguration but didn't deliver because his eyes were bedazzled by the sun and he couldn't read the pages. The lines extol "A golden age of poetry and power/Of which this noonday's the beginning hour." 

 The paper itself has disappeared but I do have some pages of draft plus a couple of handwritten page of footnotes, numbered 23 through 161.  It begins: "Inaugural morning in Washington was frigid."  This was one of the few sentences that didn't need a footnote: I'd been there.

 There were few books available (professional historians had not yet written on the subject) so most of my sources cited in this paper were periodicals, principally Time and Newsweek.  Once again, I owe this resource to speech club and debate.  That's why I had subscriptions to these and other magazines, why I knew about the periodical Vital Speeches, and had developed habits of capturing information on index cards, as well as hoarding the actual magazines.  I also quoted television documentaries and interviews, partly because I sent away for transcripts.  I used government documents, mostly from the library (including the Congressional Record) but again some I requested by mail.

I did have one book specifically on the subject.  Let Us Begin: The First 100 Days of the Kennedy Administration was not a narrative, however.  It was mostly photographs, with a half dozen essays by different authors.  Only two were directly about the actual happenings, and I mined these for facts.  (One essay--by Sidney Hyman and Martin Agronsky--is so interesting to re-read in light of subsequent events that it will be the subject of a separate post.)

 Other books cited tended to be about the presidency itself.  JFK had made the presidency a topic of popular interest, and so I could find paperbacks including Ordeal of Power, Emmet John Hughes' book on the Eisenhower presidency, Decision-Making in the White House by JFK's aide and speechwriter Ted Sorenson,  and especially Presidential Power by political scientist Richard Neustadt, a book that President Kennedy praised and used, as obviously Sorenson did.  Neustadt himself took time off from Columbia to be a Kennedy advisor during the transition from the Eisenhower administration.

My 1964 paperback

Even all these years later Neustadt's Presidential Power (in updated editions) remains a classic work on the presidency and is still taught in political science courses.  It explains both the sources of presidential power and its limitations.  It remains a key work to understanding the office, and therefore national politics in America.  Reading the surviving pages of my paper now I find the writing surprisingly good--better than most of the other high school and early college work that survives.  It's a well-organized historical narrative.

  Which brings me to my first semester freshman year paper for English 103 at Knox.  I submitted a first draft and a final draft. The only comment or critique I remember Prof. Davenport making on the first draft was that the paragraphs were too short.  I attempted to fatten them up, but the only comment I remember about the final draft was that the paragraphs were still too short.  I got an A-.

In any case, sometime that year I saw a notice in the Knox Student that a new faculty-student magazine called Dialogue was soliciting non-fiction manuscripts.  So I slipped my paper into the appropriate mailbox outside the bookstore at Alumni Hall.

 It appeared in the first issue of Dialogue, as "Affluence and Adolescents: The Emergence of the New Breed," in between reviews of Norbert Weiner's God and Golem, Inc. by my math prof Ron Hourston and a brilliant senior named Stephen Baylor, and Rowland K. Chase's Last Lecture on his production of Hamlet, which opened the new Center for the Fine Arts that first semester of 1964-5. That's why I still have a copy.

 (I'm not saying it was the only one, but the only discussion I recall having with classmates about my paper while I was working on it happened in one of the college dining rooms.  I was at a table shared by Barbara Cottral and a companion I judged to be her boyfriend.  I believe she and I shared the same academic advisor, which may be why we got talking.  Anyway when she asked me the subject of my paper and I said "affluence and adolescence" she and her friend looked at me with slightly startled expressions.  I had pronounced "AFF-luence" with emphasis on the first syllable.  Apparently the Iowa--or more broadly the Midwestern--pronunciation was "affLUence." I'm not sure if they were impressed or put off, but I felt it was both.  Which is probably why I remember it.)

In many ways, including the books cited (only 42 footnotes this time), my first college paper was a combination and extension of those previous two high school papers. There were important additions, however.

  On adolescents, the major sources were The Vanishing Adolescent by Edgar Z. Friedenberg, and  Paul Goodman's Growing Up Absurd (with its immortal sentence about how young people saw their future: "During my productive years I will spend eight hours a day doing what is no good." )

  Goodman's book was a best seller so I probably got it as a paperback, but I know for sure that's how I found The Vanishing Adolescent.  Though not as well remembered, it was a popular book at the time. I was more impressed by Friedenberg, and a few years later I heard him speak in what I recall as a large classroom at UC Berkeley, where I also saw and heard Tom Hayden.

first edition without dustcover, as it
would have been in the library, and
as I now own it

On the affluence theme, there was of course The Affluent Society by economist John Kenneth Galbraith. It was famous on its own, but I could also have come to it because of Galbraith's association with the Kennedy administration (he was JFK's ambassador to India.)

 The title entered the language, to be used in ways that had little to do with the book's thesis. It isn't about the evils of affluence, but about the inadequacy of economic theories and policies that don't recognize the marked differences between a society of scarcity and a society of abundance.

  Reading it today precisely 60 years after its first publication, its main point rings true, particularly in view of the same obsolete economics still favored by the Republican party, as well as related points on income inequality and the unmet needs in the public sector.  This book also gave us the perennially useful concept of "the conventional wisdom."

Another title that entered the language is The Organization Man by William H. Whyte, Jr.  It also is used to represent the era (as I did it in my Mill paper.) The book itself is a penetrating, carefully researched and well-written study of early suburbia and the large postwar organizations for which suburbia furnished the family homes.

 As such, when I reread it carefully years later, it became a key background text for me in my own researches and writings, particular for a 1980 article on suburbia that was a cover story in the New York Times Magazine, and more generally for my book The Malling of America.  When I met the author around that time, he was a kind and still curious and enthusiastic scholar who had mostly turned his attention to urban spaces, and was said to have been a mentor to Jane Jacobs and others.

But at the time of my freshman paper, the Organization Man was mostly another symbol of suburban conformity.  Providing something of a psychological counterpart to Whyte's more sociological view was David Riesman.  I got his paperback, Selected Essays from Individualism Reconsidered off the racks, which led me to his classic work (which I'd probably read about in the magazines), The Lonely Crowd.  The popular press particularly noted his concepts of "inner-directed" and "outer-directed" people in terms of where they got their values. Though neither book is cited in any of my papers, my reading and scattered understanding of them contributed to my impression of contemporary society.

Many of these books, as well as magazine articles, portrayed conformity and the repression of difference as endemic to the middle-class ethic.  Clearly my interest was in individual development and self-expression, especially my own. That's a thread that runs through all three papers, beginning with John Stuart Mill's championing of eccentricity.  ("Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded.")

 In that Mill paper I also quoted Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. from Politics of Hope noting that "contemporary society... has little use for the individualist" and asserting "Everything that matters in our intellectual and moral life begins with an individual confronting his own mind and conscience in a room by himself."

When Schlesinger became a JFK aide, his point of view became identified with the Kennedy era. Eric Goldman, in the opening essay of Let Us Begin, notes Schlesinger's view that with quantitative improvements largely achieved in the affluent society, attention "should turn to the 'qualitative' development of the individual."

 And of western "man," Barbara Ward concluded in her essay in this volume, "The fateful question remains whether, while gaining affluence, he may not have lost his vision and his soul."  (Barbara Ward, a distinguished scholar and editor, would in a few years take Buckminister Fuller's term "spaceship earth" as the title of her new book, and thereby help popularize the concept.)

 Looking back, I can see that the repression I recognized and was specifically rebelling against was not so much that of the upwardly mobile middle class organization man (I didn't actually know any.) Its source in my life was primarily the Catholic church and Catholic education at that time.  Still, I was accurately picking up this theme in my reading, and from my limited observations it rang true.

 I also absorbed some ill-informed and readymade judgments of, for example, "the beats" and rejected their "nihilistic" alternative to the Organization Man.  I latched instead on the concept of the New Breed (which I recognized as a "dubious" term) as developed by Andrew Greeley in the pages of America magazine.  It's worth noting that Greeley was a Jesuit, and this was a Jesuit magazine.  It still felt more secure to have some Catholic connection, if not imprimatur.

 Greeley's (and Friedenberg's) new breed of young people were both idealistic and pragmatic, valuing honesty and integrity, but also skill and effectiveness.  It was a reminiscent in some ways of younger versions of JFK, the "idealist without illusions." But more specifically it was based on the young Civil Rights activists, both black and white.  I would come to see these characteristics in some of the older students at Knox.  The New Breed, such as it was, now seems a distinctly early 60s model.

It was that first year at Knox that my connection with the Church became more tenuous.

I recall showing up for the Newman Club (an organization for Catholics) as one of my stops on the orientation tour of clubs and organizations, but I didn't join.  I continued to attend Sunday Mass in Galesburg, however. Until one winter Sunday the thread just broke.

 For some reason I saw a familiar sight with new eyes during that morning's Mass: that all the attendees kept their coats on during the service, as if their presence was partial, and they couldn't wait to leave.

 That evening I went to dinner in the Knox student union, where dozens of students had piled their coats on top of each other on the floor in the hall outside the dining rooms. That sight decided me. That's where I was going to find warmth and involvement, maybe even trust and intimacy, and along with books and studies and curiosity, where I might find meaning.

 For in addition to my solitary work on my English 103 paper, I had other classes with students and teachers that first semester, and a growing life outside classrooms, including for pretty much the first time, something like an actual social life.  I had this new world to explore, and I did. And along the way, I had new books to read.