James Engell: Anti-War Sentiment on the University Campus

In this episode of Houghton75, we speak with James Engell, Gurney Professor of English and Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard, about Charles Eliot Norton and the expression of anti-war sentiment on the university campus.
Find out more about the exhibition and Houghton Library’s 75th anniversary celebrations at http://houghton75.org/hist-75h

Podcast Transcript and Music Notes

[Title sequence background music: Fireworks, Igor Stravinsky, performed by the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra]

Alex Csiszar: Houghton is just this amazing place.
Deidre Lynch: It’s fascinating.
Stephen Greenblatt: It’s yours for the asking, and that is incredible!
Stephanie Sandler: Plus it’s cool.

James Capobianco (JC): Welcome to Houghton75. I’m James Capobianco.

Hannah Ferello (HF): And I’m Hannah Ferello.

[end music]
JC: Houghton Library opened its doors at Harvard in 1942. Throughout 2017, we’re celebrating the library’s world-class collections, and support of research and teaching over the last 75 years.

HF: This podcast is only one of the ways to participate in our year-long program of events that promises a unique glimpse of some of Houghton’s most treasured holdings and the way they inspire scholars and students. Visit houghton75.org for more information.

[background music: Quatuor pour la fin du temps, VIII (Louange à l’Immortalité de Jésus) by Olivier Messiaen. Performed by Matthew Aucoin and Keir GoGwilt. Recorded 7 Nov 2013 as part of “Seamus Heaney: A Memorial Celebration.” From the Woodberry Poetry Room, and accessible on their Listening Booth online]

JC: The Spanish-American War of 1898 was an event of significant controversy on the Harvard campus. One of its most outspoken opponents, Professor of Art History Charles Eliot Norton, publically denounced the war, calling it evil and unjustified.

HF: Not surprisingly, his strong remarks generated a tidal wave of reactions, both supporting and condemning his stance. We spoke with James Engell, Gurney Professor of English and Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard, about Charles Eliot Norton and the expression of anti-war sentiment on the university campus.

JC: As a Harvard undergraduate, Professor Engell studied the letters of Charles Eliot Norton. His interactions with these materials, as well as his experiences as a student during the Vietnam War, led him to select a scrapbook of letters and newspaper clippings containing reactions to Norton’s anti-war sentiment for our current exhibition.

HF: Throughout our conversation, Professor Engell highlighted the connections between collection materials and current and historical events.

[end music]

James Engell (JE): I had got this idea from something I had read about the fact that some people at Harvard had opposed the Spanish-American War. Now, this was particularly germane at that time because Vietnam was going on, and there were separate factions of the faculty of arts and sciences who were caucusing together and the war had become a significant matter of faculty debate. And then it hadn’t occurred yet, but in my freshman year after I’d looked at these materials Cambodia was bombed, and there was a terrible reaction to that bombing, and there was a riot in Harvard Square. And tear gas went into Quincy House, and Harvard Yard was locked with chains, the doors of Widener were locked with chains, there were phalanxes of state police in the yard with large shields, there were policemen on top of Holyoke Center with shotguns, so it was a time of very considerable tension. And I was in part attracted to this issue because it showed division over a war, it showed division within a faculty. For example, Theodore Roosevelt thought the Spanish-American War was just fine. He was in it. And what used to be the freshman union, now the Barker Center, was a building in part dedicated to the Spanish-American War and the effort of the university in that war. But Charles Eliot Norton and some others opposed the war, and said so and came out against it, and thought that it was, if not a concocted war, a war of a kind of imperial aggression carried out under a kind of pretense.

HF: You know, there are several parallels that can be drawn between the Spanish-American War and the Vietnam War. One significant similarity is the presence of a vocal opposition.

JC: I’ve heard stories passed down from faculty and staff about the riot in Harvard Square. Here at Houghton, librarians stayed overnight in the library to ensure the safety of the collections! It must have been a frightening time for everyone on campus. Professor Engell shared more of his memories from that day.

[end music]

JE: This riot was, of course, politically motivated to some degree. It had started with a march that began on Boston Common where there were speeches: anti-war speeches and rallies. And then the people as a group decided that they were going to march to Harvard Square, which is what they did. But there were some people in the crowd, I suspect, who were more than just anti-war demonstrators, or if they were anti-war demonstrators they were a little senseless in what they themselves were doing, because they started smashing storefronts, and setting things on fire, and rocking cars back and forth, and that kind of thing. So by the time this rather large body of people got into Harvard Square, it was a bit of a mob. It was not an organized rally. The police authorities got together and what they did was, well, Harvard Square is a square with lots of streets coming in and out of it. So the whole way that the riot was dispersed was to get police in the center and then push out, and that pushed all of the demonstrators down each of these streets and dispersed them. And some of them ran toward Quincy House and the houses, and there was a lot of tear gas used, and the whole thing was regarded as a time of troubles.

JC; I think most of us are quite familiar with the conflict surrounding Vietnam. It’s still strong in our collective memory. But there are no longer any living witnesses to the Spanish-American War. It isn’t something that we often remember.What did it mean at that time for a professor to take a public stance on a war?

[end music]

JE: There were a group of professors who were against the war and Norton was among them, and I think one of the more vocal ones. There was an open debate about this, and Norton was identified as being anti-war or opposed to the war spirit. That’s no secret of history. It’s just a fact of Harvard history, if nothing else. And you can say, “well, what difference did it make that a group of Harvard professors opposed the war?” And I guess the answer is it sure didn’t stop the war! On the other hand, it gave some people the sense that their own feelings that the war was not justified were shared by others, and that they were shared by people who were teachers, and that it was not a crazy, minority view. It was not a nutty, an unpatriotic view to take.

What this also demonstrates is what I’d call academic freedom. If Norton said what he said and expressed his views, and was in another job, he might have been fired! But one of the wonderful things about what we call academic freedom is that you really do have a right to say what you think. You’re supposed to think about what you say before you say it, you’re not just supposed to give vent to some personal prejudice, but the relationship between academic freedom and freedom of speech in the society at large is a much stronger one than a lot of people realize. As soon as you start to erode one, you will erode the other.

So that kind of academic freedom which is represented here and which a division of opinion in the faculty represented during the Vietnam War, as painful as it may be for an institution to go through, is a very healthy thing. How terrible would it be if you said, “Well, you’re against the war. We don’t want you to be a teacher.” Or, “You’re against the war. You won’t get a promotion.” Or to send signals to students or others that your views are a minority, or not wanted, or ill-considered, or something like that.

HF: Absolutely. As a university, we should teach our students to think critically and form their own opinions. We certainly wouldn’t want to be guilty of deeming certain positions as illegitimate. At the same time, it’s difficult to to teach critical thinking without revealing personal viewpoints. According to Professor Engell, this sharing of opinions is useful as long as it leads to discourse.

[end music]

JE: Very often, students want to know what their teachers think about lots of different things. And that doesn’t mean that they’re going to agree with them either. It’s a university, it’s a place of intellectual inquiry, so you teach different things and one of the things you teach, you try to teach judgment. Judgment’s a very hard thing to teach. Law schools generally don’t have courses called “Judgment,” but what does a lawyer often want to become? A judge. But it’s very had to make judgments about complex things like a war, and I think that a lot of people who spend time with scholarship, whether it’s the fine arts, or literature, or nuclear physics, or economics, they have considered views on things and very often students want to know what those views are. Occasionally students will ask me my views on things that have nothing to do with English literature. Well, I tell them, although I preface it by saying, you know, this is my personal view. I would never want a student to think that they have to agree with me about that kind of judgment.

There is potentially a certain kind of false intellectual superiority inherent in someone who is a professor taking a certain position, but I go back to that whole thing about academic freedom. I mean, there were some darker times for academic freedom, including the McCarthy era, and one hopes that those times don’t return. Pressures change though, memories fade. And one of the great things about something like this if someone looks at it, is they’ll see that the very same pressures, not exactly the same but in kind, very similar, existed in the very kinds of arguments about joining a war or not joining a war, supporting it or not supporting it, denouncing it or not, viewing it as patriotic or not, things that were present well more than a century ago.

HF: Items like the scrapbook selected by Professor Engell reveal the ways in which history repeats itself. The details may change, but the basic scenario returns time and time again.

JC: Providing access to materials that link past and present is central to the work of libraries. Even rare book and special collections libraries like Houghton hold materials that speak to modern issues.

[end music]

JE: Sometimes people think the Houghton has only very old things, but of course that’s not true! It has unique things, some of which are very recent. Now, they’ll become old, but it’s their uniqueness that matters, not just their age. We have lots of things that are relatively recent and they resonate across time. So I found this material, which was from 1898, so this is resonating from 1898 to 1969-1970, and indeed I think it resonated all the way down to the Iraq War.

One of the amazing things about this to me was, I didn’t know exactly what I was looking for exactly. But I think that’s one of the glories of any kind of library. If you know exactly what you’re looking for and it’s there, that’s good. And then you can look at it and probably other people have looked at it, thought they may not come to the same conclusions about it that you do. But sometimes you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, and you just have a kind of general area that you’re looking in. And you may in fact be quite ignorant about what’s available even though you may see manuscript listings or book listings but you’re not familiar with them. And so you call them up and you get them and you sit down with them, and after a while you discover things. And sometimes what you discover is of no particular moment. It’s just of some personal interest. And sometimes you discover something that’s quite significant. So that kind of repository is something that is invaluable. You can’t put a price on it.

HF: We would like to thank Professor James Engell for coming in and sharing his experiences with us today. His thoughts on Harvard, both past and present, have illuminated the ability of this scrapbook to speak to many times.

JC: The music you heard in the podcast was from a live performance of the eighth movement of the Quartet for the End of Time by Olivier Messiaen featuring pianist Matthew Aucoin and violinist Keir GoGwilt, Harvard Class of 2012 and 2013 respectively. We thank them for allowing us to share this recording, which was made at a memorial service for Seamus Heaney held in the Memorial Church at Harvard University in 2013.

HF: To view the scrapbook of letters and newspaper clippings regarding Charles Eliot Norton’s anti-war sentiment selected by Professor Engell, visit HIST75H: A Masterclass on Houghton Library. The exhibition is free and open to the public here at Houghton Library until April 22nd, and can also be viewed online at houghton75.org.

JC: You can also read transcripts and see detailed musical notes at houghton75.org/podcast/
That’s all for today, but whether you are tuning in from near or far, we hope you will join us for the next episode of Houghton75.

[music continues to end]

James Engell: Anti-War Sentiment on the University Campus

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