Issue and inquiry; 7; Beyond the Fringe Plague on Both Houses: Extremism Left and Right

Oh. From Northeastern University the National Information Network presents issue and inquiry. I don't really know Joe of anything that a group a minority group or somebody else couldn't accomplish within the framework of the parliamentary process. If they believed in a deeply enough to stay with it and see it through. What for example has the NAACP failed to achieve that they have wanted to achieve through the courts and although asked they didn't abandon their programs of fighting for first class citizenship of our people and that is a very widespread achievement. This week on issue an inquiry Gordon hall a nationally known authority on extremist groups. This week's program beyond the fringe and the Politics of Extremism. Here is your host Joseph arbiter. Mr. Hall we meet in rather perilous times and the opinion of some commentators I

think we would probably be described as meeting at the twilight of national reason because emotion is fast becoming king of this country. Extremism is fast becoming the order of the day as the solution to all problems. I think that no matter who you are the audience listening to this program as it begins. You would agree that any night you can turn on your TV set switch on your radio pick up your evening newspaper and one of the lead stories of the day will center around one or more of America's political extremist groups whether on the right or on the left or the fringe people always seem to make the news. Now Gordon HALL You're the expert on extremism are these extremist groups the product of mass media ballyhoo or do we really have a problem here and do they really pose a definite threat to American society. Oh they pose a very real threat although they are also a product I think of mass media ballyhooed but surely I think a very serious way and one big reason I think is as a middle is so obsessed with being respectable you know being

this big silent majority whatever that means. Extremists have an enormous advantage in that they can press and press and push and push and step up the militancy and so on and the middle sort of cars in the homes evening you know drinking in Lawrence Welk or something and I really get the feeling that the middles major passion if it could be called a passion is you know what the neighbors think and keeping respectable and this is a very very good weapon almost in the hands of the people on either end of the spectrum. OK. Were part of this question of why the silent majority is silent How long do you think they'll remain silent. My own feeling is that they will continue to remain silent because it's almost in the very nature of what I conceive to be the silent majority and I don't see anything. That will stir that kind of moderate silent majority out of the silence what I can foresee is a rise of the yahoos which would not necessarily be the silent majority the kinds of people for example that one would identify with the

George Wallace thrust for the presidency who are not necessarily that say birches or Klansman or American Nazi Party members but of those guys that vitamin with the things on the back of their cars America Love It Or Leave It. Now that type of Yahoo I can see rising up and answering directly. You know the thrust especially from the militant left and that may be believed by some to be you know the silent majority asserting itself but it won't be that in my mind at all and that can be very dangerous indeed. Are there yahoos on the militant left other kooks that have just as idiotic bumper stickers and just as idiotic Mons on the left Paul without any question. Could you name a few. Oh sure. For example when when when you first began you mentioned the business of extremism in a sense becoming the order of the day and sweet reason going out the window. Let me just quote very briefly from an STF publication. On the subject of revolutionary violence this is the work of Student Alliance wing of STDs which would now be the largest wing. These are

not the Weathermen and these are the kinds of people by the way because the Weathermen it becomes so fanatical and so irrational the press not being very sophisticated about what's really happening on the left or the right seem to believe now that the worker Student Alliance are the moderates you know which is absurd because the I think the basic difference between the Weathermen and the work of Student Alliance is that they would storm city hall if they had three hundred thousand people behind them. But they condemned the Weathermen because the Weathermen only storm city hall with two hundred and fifty but here's just a quick quote here just before we get to that quick quote Gordon I do want you to close but let us for the benefit of those people in the silent majority. Let's let them understand what these words like weathermen are what are these splinter groups on the left wing in America today. Well to begin with when we think of the left. I think the most important thing to remember is that we're talking about a revolutionary as opposed to an evolutionary orbit. The extreme left differs from just about all others and not the least bit interested in patching up the system to democratic reform. The thing that sets them aside and puts in a class

all by themselves is this desire to overturn the system and you have many wings of the extreme left pressing these points home you have the very orthodox Communist Party USA Communist Party the United States of America which is oriented let us say toward the Soviet Union. Whatever the Soviet Union may feel in terms of foreign policy it is usually reflected in the pages of The Daily World and other journals of the Communist Party USA that's an orthodox form of communism and most people who think of communism of the far left. Think of the far left as all being under the control of the Communist Party nothing could be further from the truth. Now you have a large student organization autonomous and very loosely bound in some respects although tightly run and some others known as the students for a democratic society who pose the idea that reform cannot meet the pressing needs of the masses of the people in the second half of the 20th century in America. Therefore you need revolutionary change but they're not necessarily communist in the Russian Orthodox

sense. And the Weathermen happens to be right now at this particular point. The most extreme the most militant of all the STF factions and also the smallest because they've staked out the position. The thing to do is to have violent confrontation in the streets a revolutionary army that will show heroically that you can take on the police and the mayor and city hall and this will rally this mythological proletariat that's supposed to exist not only in the United States but is supposed to be linked up with the proletariat throughout the entire world and they all have common aspirations and common interests. And if the Weathermen can only show the American people that they have the guts to do this the proletariat will ultimately fall in line. Apparently they do see themselves as eventually getting in a fight. They practice hand-to-hand combat. There's a sort of a real militancy about this so-called weatherman section of the left wing student groups. Yes and I think also what some of your listeners may not realize is that you know especially the kind of silent majority of people who say well we don't really have to become involved in cleaning up our

city or thinking about air pollution or any of these other problems of the 20th century because after all extremists are very small look at the White and I understand from reading you know the paper this morning there are only 200 250 to 300 of those in the country. But you don't really need very many people to blow up buildings and to blow up bridges and stop troop trains and and jam up traffic on the great super highways and cause you know I'm told this was a handful of people who had this kind of fanaticism in its dedication whether they be Kook Lux's in the southern part of the United States Minutemen in the southwest in the Midwest or weathermen in Chicago in Cambridge Massachusetts and really chair of the people and they do and this ridiculous notion that so many in the in the middle have that we take comfort from the fact that out of 200 million people you know we only have an estimated five and a half to six million on the extremes or something like that and that's a very ridiculous notion to take. You mention the sort of romantic posturing that accompanies this weather about movement. In fact they dubbed themselves weatherman right out of this

popular folk singer Bob Dylan's song. What kind of a background produces this sort of psychological posturing. While that's a tough question and I'm not so sure that I would have a very precise or good answer but I would think that the type of background as I see it and as I understand it would be relatively comfortable in terms of economics coming probably from the middle to upper middle class this would be an educated guess. And I think a relatively permissive and somewhat sensual background being raised in the suburbs and having all the good things comfortable chairs TV sets the good food the vitamin pills the whole thing that goes I suppose in a system of abundance and relatively little authority you know a car the minute you old enough to get a license you get your own car and that sort of thing. And then heading a college campus and running in for the first time to some serious rules in your life you know the idea that there really are some dormitory rules. There really really are classroom rules whether they're good bad or indifferent is another question. You have to go to

class you have to get your papers in on time and I have a feeling that some of the Weathermen types this is the first time in their life that they've ever really had to knuckle under to any kind of discipline. And in a in what I would think would be a state of almost protracted adolescence which I'm borrowing now from a recent feature piece in The New York Sunday Times magazine section which is first class I thought in terms of. Suggesting that now adolescence is much longer than it is ever bet in American history you know that sometimes people in college till they're 32 and 33 years of age in a somewhat adolescent setting although you know not always and in a kind of protracted adolescence in the United States you have the Weathermen and others kicking about I think there's much merit to that kind of an argument that you don't assume responsibilities any longer in this country because of the affluence until relatively late you see either in your teens or into your 20s or even into your 30s as opposed to what it may have been for example during the Depression when you sometimes assume responsibilities for helping the family at the age of 10 or 12 or 13 or 14 you know delivering the newspapers and kicking in

a piece of the salary and so on. Well if affluence and the lack of discipline during one's early years produces or tends on occasions to produce Left-Wing. Extremists the New Left the new student Love that what produces the right way. Well now we have to deal in you know in sort of collective terms here on that it's always dangerous to generalize but I think that one CAN HAVE to making a study of the extreme I come up with certain kinds of types that gravitate to these movements in many instances it's a kind of religious fundamentalism which is one of the main propellent into these movements you know I had a very rigid Catholic fundamentalist or a very rigid Protestant Fundamentalist which is why for example in an in an organization like the John Birch Society you're going to have hard core followers of the extreme had I Catholic movements around the country working hand in glove with a very traditionalist Catholics who are opposed to having English masses for example and they work hand in glove even though the time that the fundamentalists are

not spending in the John Birch Society they're spending assailing woman Catholic so rationally it doesn't make very much sense but they're both against communism you see or something like that or their version of communism which is very rarely communism and is usually the Kennedy the dollars of the Eisenhower brothers or something like that and I think that this kind of guilt feeling that they have about everything from sex to reading habits and all the rest produces a kind of trauma. And so they wind up you know spending more time really discussing sex in the prologue of his do. But in the name of you know good clean American morality kind of thing and I am convinced totally up to having been around the far right as long as I have that this is indeed a psychological problem it's a mass psychosis this entire movement where you could structure for example a typical right wing movement and take its position papers and I would guarantee you they make no sense whatever. They just are not rational and there's no ifs ands or buts about that that could be documented and I have documented on a number of occasions Gordon we should pause at this point in the

program to let those in the audience who may have just tuned in and know who we're talking to and what we're talking about we're talking with Gordon hall. A man who has spent his entire adult life studying extremism in America and we're talking about just that extremism a cancer which is growing in the American body politic. It was very big news in the 1960s and unfortunately promises to be an even bigger problem in the 1970s. Gordon I wonder if I could ask you whether you think that extremism in the 1960s could be seen as a revolt against middle class values middle class morality almost against the unexciting boring nature of life in this highly affluent world of ours. Yes I think the kind of system that we have ended up with in the second half of the 20th century in my judgment has produced great abundance great leisure and all of us but it has not produced. The masses of people who know quite what to do with the great leisure and the great abundance that they have and I think there's merit to what you just

suggested on several counts. Because I would believe that for some John Birch Society members for example even though they believe that they're in it because they're going to save us from the excesses of the far left. That if you could really get down to it the chapter meeting is probably the most exciting things that they had to do in the course of a month in fact I would. I have one taped interview with a Bircher made by one of my staff members where the man actually admits that before you joined the John Birch Society he spent most of his time you know going to bed very early but now he has much to do. You know for five nights a week he's hustling around trying to Impeach Earl Warren So this is a revolt against what you describe as kind of a very dull sort of you know very broad lower middle middle middle upper middle class life I'd also tell you that. In the fall series that I have done since the lecture season open the lecture season on from the fall until the spring every year and I was speaking at Concord college and I think is West Virginia which is a very small

you know college in a very tiny part of the southern part of West Virginia. And a number of the students there had been chartering buses to go to an assortment of demonstrations and so I took it upon myself to ask questions. Why did you go and almost to a man. The ones that I spoke to said look any chance we can find to get out of Athens West Virginia and to go somewhere where the action is we will do it we don't particularly care whether it's a rally of the Ku Klux Klan of Washington or the March on Washington or something else had something to do. The bus rides are cheap you go and you're saying you have a lot of fun he said ma'am we had a ball and no one even talked about you know the issues of the moratorium and other groups of race which I found very interesting in other words you know again it was a relief from the boredom and tediousness of going to a small college in a very small town where there's a balance of the to do. Gordon I want to push on to the effect an impact of extremists on the universities in our society. And just a moment I want to get your very quick reaction to something you brought up at the very beginning of this program and that was the distaste of many young left

wing radicals for discipline they've been brought up with a lack of discipline in the home. Now how do you balance that with this idea that we have had a view to us all during the 50s and 1960s young people as being the hope of the future. Now if the hope of the future hates discipline and discipline is necessary for any civilized society then what can we say about the cream of the crop our brightest young students. I think we can say two things One the one thing that I'd like to say first in relation to that is that the kinds of people who are going around talking about the same young people you're talking about now as being the hope of the future and being the best for example. That America has produced I wonder whether these people I'm talking now about someone like Professor Galbraith who will say that we shouldn't get so uptight about STDs and these other groups that some of our finest people in these groups Well if this is an example of our finest then we are really doomed and I think I'll pack up and go to Australia myself. This is what we look forward to. But I would think that this poses a grave problem for the

remaining part of the century of the business. You know if they can accept the discipline of getting papers in time in on time or meeting their grades or other requirements how are they going to govern us if they're going to also aspire to run for office and many of them of very politically hungry. And many of them now are entering all sorts of races from Board of Selectmen to city council members to those from the smallest to the highest 74 office and some of these people are going to sneak by in some of these elections in balance of power situations where Republicans and Democrats are not satisfactory because of widespread Malays in a particular community. Some of the third and fourth party candidates will get elected I believe in the early 1970s. And if these are the people to govern us I can only predict that we're going to be and in very very deep trouble I guess I can say kind of almost. Now Nikki setting in even at certain governmental levels where things just don't get done because of the lack of doing ones homework passing very sloppy legislation and all of it. So I'm I'm not at all optimistic for a second to go back just to the

impatient business to I think Joe is a real sign of adolescence where I was like the child he cries he has to have whatever it is you know this instant kind of gratification. And I feel very strongly that the far left in particular needs this kind of instant gratification. I have tried for example to debate several of the other left wing leaders on campuses and it's a waste of time I fell into a debate with Abbie Hoffman this past summer and it was utter chaos. It was the zaniest thing that I have ever done in my life and I felt almost sick when I think it's because we nothing was resolved. There was no attempt to resolve anything was just the instant gratification of my opponent to put me down with hopeless irrelevancies and all the best I think that what you're talking about is serious I think it reflects certainly on the young people and on the other people as well but you see it is hard to have been raise yourself in a restrictive atmosphere and then want to raise your kids in that same atmosphere when you know Americans are brought up with the idea that we give the kids all the benefits that we didn't have. You know our parents belted us in the mouth when we got out of line but we don't want to do that with our own

kids and I think I get where reaping some of the harvest of permissiveness although I think it's much deeper than that. And I think I think it relates again to the fact that we have a lesion and we have the DOn't WE HAVE THE have all the other good things and we don't really know how to handle it. And a lot of people by the way on college campuses proving that they don't even know how to handle the freedom that they're screaming for instantly now now now when they get it they really don't know what to do with it. Let's take a look at the assumption that we've made here on this program and that is that perhaps the younger generation isn't all that it's cracked up to be that perhaps it doesn't know how to handle freedom as you just mentioned when it is given freedom. Now is that the case could not also a case be made that as occasionally irresponsible as our younger generation may be never the less is the one the hope the one breath of fresh air that's blowing through this tired society of ours and that the tactics that they use those sometimes extreme and sometimes irresponsible or whatever was the only way that they can be heard in the status quo oriented

society of ours that the only way that a minority can make its point when it's pushing on popular cause. No I don't believe that those the only way they make that point unless you also assume that the only way that you can say that yes I've been hurt is to have your way. You see if you're pressing home for something and you don't get it by the end of the week you say therefore I can't be heard. Like a young lady who harassed me out at one of the Midwestern colleges. George Washington University in St. Louis Missouri she told me she was fed up with the middle and why don't I go back to Boston where I came from and she's sick and tired of these establishment people coming out here to speak. I asked her how long she'd been in politics and she said two weeks. And that's a true story now you know if you're looking for that as an example you see people aren't listening to them. I would agree with you but I don't really know Joe of anything that a group a minority group or somebody else couldn't accomplish within the framework of a parliamentary process and all of us if they believed in it deeply enough to stay with it and see it through.

What for example has the NAACP failed to achieve what they have wanted to achieve through the courts and all the West. They didn't abandon their programs of fighting for first class citizenship for all of our people. And that is a very widespread achievement now despite the cries of the black militants that no part of us has been made. We don't have tokenism any longer in the United States we have very clear cut examples of first class citizenship from one end of the country to what are these clear cut examples Gordon. What specific changes things you could point to have taken place through the legitimate workings of. The political system for example on the on on the historic decision of the United States Supreme Court of May 17th of 1954 just as won a unanimous ruling that said segregation in the in the school systems is unconstitutional Now I know that you know we haven't achieved all that we can achieve in that area. But if you travel around the south as much as I do the changes are profound but they're simply not reported. It is not uncommon for example for me to go south and be met at the airport and interviewed in a place like Jackson Mississippi by a black newsman which would have happened before I was and

I know now this isn't just one look at this. No no and that's why you know many blacks in very prominent places does not mean that the end of second class citizenship is comparable like Americans. You go out in the south and you just don't see one black newscaster you see black newscasters everywhere you see black hostesses on airlines you see black ticket takers you see blacks in integrated say it is you see blacks in city councils some figure like 800 people were elected to offices in border states and southern states who are blacks in the last election I think what we continue to call tokenism no longer is tokenism. That doesn't mean that it's ended any more than the plight of the poor whites is ended. But we're well on our way to doing something very substantial about this and I think the machinery for this was put under way long before we ever had a black student union. Or Stokely Carmichael or anybody else and by the way whatever happened to Stokely Carmichael was it the machinery of the Supreme Court school desegregation decision which has created so much change in the south. If we assume that there has been so much change.

Or was it riots in the street that put teeth into the Supreme Court decisions that passed the civil rights bills of one thousand 64 65 66 67. Well I think perhaps we've gotten off the track somewhat here in the sense that maybe you are assuming that I think that everything that takes place of a militant nature is ipso facto extreme and I don't for example if you're going to talk specifically now about what has happened in the south we would have to go back to the Montgomery bus boycotts which were peaceful nonviolent and not extreme and not only that but Martin the late Dr. Martin Luther King would violate a local ordinance he would say to the local officials I know that I've broken the law. Put me and put all of my followers in jail because we will pay the penalties we know that in an orderly system you break the law you pay the penalties. And it was that kind of coercion which I don't we got his extremism at all. I'm talking about something which is entirely different. The weathermen. The Black Panthers and that kind of thing which is a separate bag entirely. So I think that

it was the rulings themselves the actual legal pressures Plus the citizen's pressures the early Snick movement for example when it really was a nonviolent coordinating committee it no longer is by the law as well Jay as the point Gordon hall. What does it say about our society that perhaps young people have discovered extreme as young people that within a course of one two or three years formally nonviolent peaceful groups of Americans such as Stokely Carmichael not very well nobody used to be a very peaceful nonviolent Snick member. What does it say about our society that suddenly these people have given up on the peaceful approaches and are talking about throwing Molotov cocktails and rioting in the streets. I say that we have no kind of widespread exhibitionism. Which gets fantastic coverage by the mass media and we know about it because communications have been so stepped up that anybody now can wear their psychoses on the sleeve and the rest of the nation will know about it in very short order.

And this I think has never been true before in American history. Just as for example I can take up a crusade against what I believe to be dangerous anti-democratic forces and I can be in many respects known from coast to coast which is kind of a phenomenon to me so I think it's really a question of the acceleration of the whole communications media that has made us aware of things that might have been only limited to a locale before you know the kind of illnesses and I think what we're talking about here is a disease and an illness of a kind certain type of political paranoia. And instead of treating it that way we have reached the era of the X alteration of the jerk. And we're not we're not really putting the emphasis where I think it belongs. The point here is that. What we're finding out about more really are the particular maladjustment of the individual extremist rather than about the larger society that we live in and I think we reverse the situation. Let's talk about the larger society here Gordon. Last question of the program a little prognostication question for you where do you see the country going to you think will

ever come to a time of the year 2050 when young students will be talking about a second American Civil War. Do you think extremism is pointing in that direction. I think extremism as I understand it is pointing in that direction and is desirous of that. And if the middle again coming back to that if the middle fails and I'm talking now also about a bureaucratic legislative middle two if they don't do something and if they don't measure up to what is of really a fundamental challenge in the last remaining years of the century we are going to have a civil war in this country and it's going to be a bloody mess today. That's a pessimistic note on which to end a program and yet we have a duty in the mass media to not only tell what's good about the country but also to throw some light on some problems and predicting potential problems we can avert these problems cornhole thank you very much for coming on this program. Northeastern University has brought you Gordon hall nationally known authority on extremist

groups. Today's program beyond the fringe The Politics of Extremism. The views and opinions expressed on the preceding program were not necessarily those of Northeastern University or this station. Questions asked were the moderators method of presenting many sides of today's topic. Your program host has been Joseph R. Bader Director Department of radio production. This week's program was produced by Peter Lanza and Carolyn Gartrell. Directed by James and Fred. With technical supervision by canmake. Executive producer for issue and inquiry is Peter Lance. Issue an inquiry is produced for the division of instructional communications at the nation's largest private university. Northeastern University. Requests for a tape recorded copy of any program in this series may be addressed to issue an inquiry. Northeastern University Boston Massachusetts 0 2 1 1 5. 0 now Sir David Hammond.

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