BY ED FELIEN
New England is beautiful in the fall. The leaves slowly turning. The summer lingering softly into crisp mornings. And Smith College was picture perfect. “Why, it’s Paradise,” said Jenny Lind in the middle of the 19th century. And, so, Smith College named the pond in the middle of campus Paradise Pond, a suitably bucolic setting to which the ruling class could send their daughters. It was a “sister” college to Amherst College, just down the road, nine miles away, so the children of the ruling class could continue their incestuous intermarriage. While I was teaching at Smith, Julie Nixon was a student (she never took a class from me—though I did have a man with white socks attend one of my lectures; he stood out since he was the only male in a class of 140 females; I’ve always assumed he was Secret Service meant to protect Julie while her dad was busy thinking about becoming President), and David Eisenhower was a student at Amherst.
Teaching was wonderful. I taught a survey course of modern European drama that began with Ibsen and ended with Beckett. I’d spent the last 10 years preparing for that course. It was the biggest class on campus and very popular. And I taught seminars in filmmaking and more intensive courses on Brecht and Beckett. What could be better? Classes were Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday morning. At noon on Wednesday I was free to play guitar, drive down to New York City or plot the revolution.
Almost as soon as I got to Northampton, I discovered a Sunday vigil sponsored by the local Quakers to silently protest the war in Vietnam. I joined, of course, but I was uncomfortable with the restraints. When people drove by and shouted obscenities I shouted back, until one of the women pacifists standing next to me jabbed me in the ribs and said, “You’re supposed to remain silent.”
After one Sunday, I asked some of the other people if there wasn’t something else we could do, something a little more dramatic. That’s when I met Jimmy Cooney. I fell in love with him almost immediately. He became my spiritual father. He had published The Phoenix during World War II. It had been a political literary quarterly that was the first to publish Henry Miller and Anais Nin among others. In the 1930s he had been active with the Communist Party, but they threw him out because he was too much of an anarchist. He participated in overturning lockouts—when someone was evicted from their apartment in Harlem, Jimmy and some of his friends would go in, confront the sheriff’s deputies, put the furniture back in the apartment that the deputies had put on the sidewalk and bust off the lock on the electric meter that the deputies had put there to stop electrical service. He had published one proletarian style novel that went unnoticed.
On Sunday afternoons it became a habit to grab a bottle of wine and head up to Jimmy’s Morning Star Farm on the side of a mountain for chess and political discussions. He thought what we should do is protest at the Draft Board. They met on Monday nights in downtown Northampton. They had refused to give deferments to men who believed the Vietnam War was immoral. Jimmy’s vision was, of course, cosmic. He wanted to protest war, the draft and violence of all sorts. I told him I agreed with him, but tactically it would probably be better to limit the action to more realistic objectives. We would demand that the Draft Board recognize that a person who claimed conscientious objection to the war should be sufficient reason for a legitimate deferral.
I had some meetings with friendly professors and started talking with the local SDS and Quakers. We spread the word, and on a warm Monday night in October about 70 of us marched around in front of the door that led upstairs to the Draft Board meeting. We sent a delegation up to talk to the board. The board refused to meet with our representatives and listen to their request to grant conscientious objector status. The head of the Draft Board was James Faulkner. He was also the city clerk. It was a political appointment. The town was run by the Democratic Party machine, and he was the political appointee responsible for keeping the machine well greased. I told the group, “Fine, he won’t meet with us tonight, then we’ll go to City Hall tomorrow and meet with him there.” There were about 10 counter-demonstrators from Northampton Commercial College.
The next day at noon about 30 of us gathered in front of City Hall in downtown Northampton. We marched around for about an hour, and then I, with a couple of other people, went in to see Mr. Faulkner. The secretary said he wasn’t in. There were about 15 counter-demonstrators. On Wednesday, we were about 20 demonstrators, and there were about 20 counter-demonstrators. On Thursday, we were about 15 demonstrators, and there were about 25 counter-demonstrators.
On Friday there were about nine of us: Jimmy, his son, Gabe, Don Jobes (a wonderfully fanatical vegetarian pacifist), five Smith College undergraduates and me, and there were about 30 counter-demonstrators. We started marching around in front of City Hall, but they kept walking through our lines and bumping into us. There were about six Northampton police there, but, of course, they were very unsympathetic. Finally, the counter-demonstrators started getting dangerously aggressive, so I backed us up against the building. Now we were facing them head on. A cop turned to me and said, “Why don’t you go home?” I turned to him and said, “Why don’t you protect us?” The situation was tense. Then, from behind me I heard the voices of angels. The Smith women started singing “America the Beautiful.” The counter-demonstrators were staggered. They finished singing and I thought we were home free, then Don Jobes started singing “Gonna lay down my sword and shield, down by the riverside,” and then all hell broke loose.
I didn’t see it coming, but Kenny Brandt told me about it later. Kenny and Roger were brothers. Roger had been in Vietnam. Kenny was standing directly in front of me and Roger was standing behind him. Kenny looked me in the eyes, then quickly dropped his hands to his side. I watched his hands and didn’t notice Roger’s right hand with a big ring on it coming from behind Kenny’s head like a thunderbolt aimed right at my forehead. He split open my head. Gabe and Don had also been knocked to the ground. I said, “OK, you win. But we’ll be back tomorrow.”
I went to the local hospital and got the wound dressed. It wasn’t serious. It left a nice scar, but I’m hardheaded enough so it didn’t break anything. The doctor said something similar to the cop about why I shouldn’t be out there, and I said something about how the U.S. shouldn’t be in Vietnam, and we decided to leave it at that.
When I said, “We’ll be back tomorrow,” what I meant was we’d be back on Monday. Nobody was planning on demonstrating on the weekend. Of course, everybody heard about the fight. The Amherst College newspaper put out a special edition, “Felien bleeding from the forehead says, ‘We’ll be back tomorrow.’ ” The mayor was quoted as saying the demonstrators made him sick to his stomach. It was on the radio and there was even a small notice on the front page of the New York Times. I went around to meetings all weekend in sunglasses to cover my black eyes recruiting people to come out on Monday at noon.
We had told people there would be two demonstrations: one to protest the war in Vietnam and the fact that the Draft Board refused to recognize conscientious objector status and a second picket line just to support our right to demonstrate. Over a thousand people showed up. They all marched against the war. There was no second picket line. The 30 counter-demonstrators were shocked. They realized that, somehow, they had caused this, and they were hypnotized by their own powers. We marched around for about an hour and then marched over to the Smith College campus and sat down on the grass and listened to Jimmy and some others explain what we were doing. The counter-demonstrators followed us. They interrupted some of the speakers. The president of the college came out and ordered them off the campus. I stood up and told the counter-demonstrators that we wanted to meet with them. We’d meet them next Saturday. We’d put up notices. And we’d continue these very important discussions, but, for now, let’s end it.
We did meet with the group every Saturday for a couple of months. The Northampton Commercial College students liked it because it was a chance to meet women from Smith. Many of the young women active with us went up to New Hampshire that fall and winter to work for Gene McCarthy in the New Hampshire primary. When he won and L.B.J. dropped out of the race, that seemed like another victory for our efforts.
I had to stop going to the meetings because Jimmy started baiting me from the back of the room. It wasn’t radical enough. We weren’t talking about the slaughter of animals, etc. So, instead of arguing with each other in front of a hundred people, we both stopped going and, with a bottle of wine and a chessboard, we sat in his kitchen and discussed the great events of the day.
I never got any direct criticism of my political activities by my peers on the faculty, but one day I heard that a discussion of the demonstrations was happening in the basement of the Faculty Club. I dashed over. They were being very critical of political demonstrations, saying academics should be aloof and uninvolved so they could remain objective, which I thought was ridiculous. Finally, after they all had their say, I said, “OK, the demonstrations to protest the Draft Board were not perfect. What are you doing?” No one answered. I may have won the point, but I was not acting very collegial.
My response, of course, was an echo of a much more famous New England exchange. When Emerson came to see Thoreau in jail for refusing to pay a tax to support the war against Mexico, Emerson asked, “What are you doing in there?” To which Thoreau replied, “What are you doing out there?”
Months later Kenny Brandt came to see me and explained what had happened on Black Friday. He told me he was now working for the FBI as an undercover agent. He said he had infiltrated the Black Panthers in Springfield. I’m sure he was deluded about his success and his importance to the Bureau, and it was sad to see him still trying to understand his one moment of fame when a thousand people focused on him as the defender of the Vietnam War.
Traveling theater troupes came through Smith College. Staid Smith College was treated to a performance by Julian Beck and Judith Malina’s Living Theatre where, at the end of a dramatic parable of capitalist exploitation, all the members of the audience were invited to take off their clothes and join the actors on stage in a pile of naked bodies. Very interesting. Not much local participation.
Another group from New York City’s Lower East Side was the Pageant Players. They produced a fairly interesting dramatic parable about marketing: “Virginia Slims and the Dancing Bears.” Another group that was touring with them, Up Against the Wall, Motherfuckers, was an SDS off-shoot. I made friends with some of them and visited them when I’d go down to the City on weekends. One time they were performing in Central Park, and they got busted on an obscenity charge. While a couple of the actors were being hauled away, I went over to the next area where Paul Krassner from The Realist was talking. I interrupted and took up a collection for bail money. He was not pleased, but he was sympathetic.
One of the newer groups I met was The Burning City Theater. Two years later I ran into them in San Francisco, joined them, and we performed at The Day After Demonstrations.
My department chairman at Smith told me I was fired at the end of my first year. I told him he couldn’t do that. He’d committed to a two-year contract. A few weeks later he told me he’d been fired. I don’t think it was just me who ended his academic career. He’d had some other bad luck, as well. A guy on the tech staff got killed playing around on the automatic paint frame—an elevator that lifted scaffolding up and down to help paint large sheets of canvas. The guy at the University of Houston called me and offered me the chairmanship of the department for a year while he went on sabbatical. If I wanted a career in academia, that was my chance, but I didn’t. I wanted to go back to Minneapolis and do political work there. New England was pretty and intellectually stimulating but it seemed too tradition bound and restrictive. It allowed social deviance only within certain proscribed boundaries. And Texas seemed scary. I was afraid they’d shoot something or someone they didn’t understand. So, I was preparing to go back home.
In my last year at Smith a professor from India came to see me and asked if I would be interested in producing a play by Tagore in honor of Ghandi’s centenary. I said I’d look at some of Tagore’s plays and let him know. I read a half dozen of his more popular plays. They were all predictable melodramas with some slight taste of social significance, and they were all unremittingly boring. Then I read “Chitra.” I fell in love with it. The story is as old as the “Bahagavad Gita” and taken from the same long poem, “The Mahabharata.” Chitra is the only child of a man who is responsible for guarding the city. She was raised as a man and is a great warrior, but one day she sees Arjuna, the great warrior and archer, hunting in the woods. She falls in love with him, but because she has been raised as a man she feels she lacks feminine graces. Two goddesses intervene and grant her wish to be beautiful and feminine for one year. Arjuna falls in love with her but at the end of the year, her city is under attack and he hears about a warrior princess who could save the city. Arjuna is now more attracted to the idea of a warrior companion, and Chitra reveals herself and the two are married. I thought it was a perfect play with a great lesson for Smith women: you could have it all, a career and still be sexy. A novel idea for 1968.
It was a lovely production, ran for just one weekend to packed houses. Lisa Baskin, the wife of the famous sculptor Leonard Baskin, did sets and costumes, and Leonard did a limited edition lithograph poster for the production that became such a collector’s item I never got one. We used George Harrison’s soundtrack for “Wonderwall”—electric sitar—as the music for the stylized dance and movements. The role of Arjuna was not that difficult, but, as with Pentheus, the actor backed out half-way through rehearsals, and I had to take on the role. We got no support from the department. I was Dead Man Walking at this point.
One of the other traveling theater troupes that came through the area was the Firehouse Theater from Minneapolis. A lot of them stayed with me, and we agreed to find a place together in Minneapolis when I got back that summer.
