U of C Reminiscences from Jesse Lemisch, Chris Hobson

to all, from Jesse Lemisch:

I have posted this reminiscence of Steve (below) on Facebook and sent it to some other friends. It is bringing warm responses from people who I haven't seen in years, all of whom share the love, respect and even awe of Steve that we feel.

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I wrote this on December 5. Steve died  December 9, at the age of 69.

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Jesse Lemisch on Steve Kindred and University of Chicago SDS

Steve Kindred, my friend, brilliant SDSer, organizer with Teamsters for a Democratic Union, a leader of the struggle to keep the Stella d’Oro factory in the Bronx open – all this, and a thousand other causes – Steve is, for lack of a better word, “gone,” in a New York hospital, suffering from abdominal cancer, which has spread. Having been close to Steve and having admired and loved him now for 50 years, I am very sad. Other people’s deaths have reminded me of my own mortality. This one focuses me on what we have all lost with Steve gone.

Two clichés come to mind. First, it violates the laws of nature that students should die before their teachers. This applies: I was Steve’s teacher at the University of Chicago in the mid-60s. The other cliche, that teachers often learn from students, also applies. Steve was my student, and contributed to an electric classroom atmosphere which took me from class to typewriter to write “Jack Tar in the Streets” and “The American Revolution Seen from the Bottom Up.” I had grown up left, but Steve was my instructor in the first larger struggle that I experienced in the ‘sixties, a struggle in which we had to anguish over directions and strategies – more than just offering my body for arrest in civil rights and anti-war protests.

In the early 1960s, the University of Chicago was trying to remodel itself as less Jewish, more sports-oriented, etc. My students sat in on the 50-yard line, perceptively understanding what big-time football would do to the place. In my first ecstasies at finally coming “home” to the U of C after ten years at Yale: I danced barefoot on the  Cobb Hall seminar tables, I had warned students of the horrors of becoming like Yale. As for the Jews: the typical undergraduate was exemplified in the invented character of “Aristotle Schwartz.” To cure this condition, the U of C instituted a euphemistically named “Small Town Talent Search.” Steve Kindred seemed to fit: the son of a Methodist minister in Iowa.  U of C knew nothing of its capacity, under the control of a friendly coalition of Hutchinsonians and Straussians, to make radicals out of sons of ministers. (Perhaps Steve, with a passionate and principled father, was already on his way there.) With the draft and the Vietnam war, U of C SDS looked for a way to address these issues in ways that meshed with the highly intellectual undergraduate culture. In this quest, Steve was a central thinker. Chicago had never compiled class ranks; now Selective Service wanted them to do so, and to hand over the lists to the feds as a kind of a death list. U of C SDS brought out  the many ways in which this was a corruption of the educational process, at odds with the U of C’s often repeated shibboleth, ”the life of the mind.” (Chris Hobson gave SDS’s newsletter that name.) As in so much of Steve’s politics, this focus addressed a passionate belief held by the constituency and connected  that belief to the war as well as to the life of the university. For several days we occupied the Administration Building: Staughton Lynd and I taught “history from the bottom up”; Naomi Weisstein and Heather Booth taught Women’s Liberation. It was a memorable and ecstatic time, with volunteer elevator operators crying out, “Second floor – sleeping, Third floor – studying.” The entire sit-in debated strategies and directions in long meetings of the hundreds present, brilliantly chaired by Jackie Goldberg (just out of Berkeley and later a state legislator in California). Noted professors came to the building to tell us that we reminded them of Nazi storm troopers. (Hannah Arendt had earlier responded to my public question in Mandel Hall, saying  that she would not state a position on the war.) I said, in words that turned out to be prophetic, that I would feel myself more honorably treated were I employed by the people in the sit-in rather than the administration whose building we were occupying. This moment of unexpected faculty loyalty, after a parade of accusations,  produced an effusion that I will always remember: I worried lest the standing ovation might disrupt the sit-in.

The time came in the sit-in when it looked as if the Chicago police would evict us if we stayed in the building longer. Steve, Chris and the others wanted to stay in. But we were losing our constituency. Left faculty members came before us with the “you’ve made your point, now go home” speech. A beloved dean wept crocodile tears, expressing his love of students. Always seeking to lead their constituency in more radical directions, but also always seeking to stay with them, we came to the difficult decision to leave. We were outvoted, and we obeyed. Today the building is called Edward H. Levi Hall. It was Provost Levi, later Nixon’s attorney-general, who had told our little faculty group that we could not resist the government’s demands because of what he saw to be the “unlovely” consequences of having to receive a subpoena.

I write all this from memory, having run up against a stone wall in seeking to get the U of C library to establish an archive on student protest parallel to the Savio Archive at Berkeley. The two movements, both fought for student rights, had much in common. U of C, and its present corrupted historian dean, want to erase all memory of that time. Students were so badly treated – 40 or 50 were thrown out in 1969 - – that the Alumni  Office refers to the classes of ’64-’74 as the “lost classes.” No wonder. The outside world knows the place as the home of rotten economic theories; I know it as a place where the Straussians who ruled Sosh I and Sosh II could apply their retrograde views to the snippets of US history that the remnants of Hutchins presented to them in such compendia as The People Shall Judge. When I was fired, it came about through a coalition of the Straussians, who despised me for having sought to teach history and historical context, and the History Department, ruled by the hideous Boorstin, and by William Hardy McNeill, who contributed to the political neutrality of the place by running an on-campus military intelligence unit. “Your convictions,” McNeill told me, “interfered with your scholarship.”

(Chris Hobson recalls that at one point, Steve – near to graduation and not wanting to risk expulsion – formed with others a “Chickenshit Liberation Brigade,” which would undertake an occupation through three warnings and then “throw themselves on their faces and back out of the office chanting, ‘Grovel, grovel, who are we to challenge power?’”)

For a time, Naomi and I lived more or less together with Steve, Chris, Jonathan Kaplan, Ron Tabor and the others next door to 5331 South Dorchester. What a time it was! This was the closest that Naomi and I were to came to communal living until her illness brought nurses into the house 24/7 in the 1980s and since. After Chicago, when we lived in a Buffalo suburb, Steve would appear without notice (this was before cell phones) in block-long trucks that he was driving across the country, signaling his presence with what sounded like a tugboat horn, resonating through lawns and hedges. From an enormous treasury of memories, two stand out. In the spring of 1966, I handed over my car to Steve for distribution of literature and sit-in preparations. It was a Saab, which made a distinctive noise. While these things were going on outside, I presented to a History Department seminar in the Faculty Club the paper that I had just presented at the Organization of American Historians (“Jack Tar in the Streets”)  and that was on its way to being published as a pioneering positive study of the mob in revolutionary America. Boorstin responded, “Jess, those are nice sea stories, but why do you have to talk about class?” At that moment, outside, Steve drove past in my Saab. Hearing the Saab and Boorstin at the same time, I knew which side I was on.

Steve often quoted his father’s almost last words: “We were euchred.” Steve made the error of trying to repeat the 1966 sit-in in 1967. Naomi, Heather and others argued against it. But Steve bulled ahead. It turned out to be a catastrophic failure. The Administration of that sewer sent the teachers of Sosh I and II to take down the names of those sitting in. So much for the life of the mind. Deeply and passionately principled, and fully understanding the implications of such a betrayal of teacher-student relations, Steve cried out, again and again, “You hacks, you  hacks!” In my head I hear his voice and see his face. I think, in the end,  Steve and the rest of us were euchred by a medical profession that often deserves contempt and not the deference that they are usually given. Steve spent six weeks in intensive care at a classy New York hospital. Like his father before him, Steve was euchred by medical misdiagnosis and failure to treat. Despite the heroic and resourceful efforts of his wife,  Ellen Goldensohn,to whom the doctors remained deaf,  they found no cause for his condition, came up with no diagnosis and no intervention.. When Ellen had him moved to another hospital, they did the same tests and came up with the grim diagnosis in two days. Steve, and the rest of us, were euchred by hacks. But let us continue to work, as did Steve, for a better world, and, along the way, let’s rename Edward H. Levi Hall Steve Kindred.Hall.

Jesse Lemisch

December 5, 2013

I want to share two anecdotes because of your own statement, "To him, all were equal--even those society had cast out." 

The first is from February 1970 when Steve, who already knew I was gay, told me there was a planned initial meeting of a University of Chicago Gay Liberation Front. I hesitated over going, because I was well known on campus--if I went, I would be outing myself (as we didn't yet say) whether I chose to or not. Steve said, in his best style of alpha-male bravado, "Well, I'll go--no one will think I'm a homo." (And he did go, reported favorably, and I went to the next meeting.) 

A few years later, 1971 or 1972, at an IS convention, Steve was in some discussion on gay liberation with Stan Weir. As best I can reconstruct, Stan, who certainly was not personally prejudiced, was arguing against "prioritizing" GL because of "strategic" reasons and so on. Steve said, about the opponents of GL, "They're not thinking about any of that--they're thinking, 'That cocksucker.'" And as he said that, his voice thickened up with the rage, fear and contempt that the bigots would be expressing as they said it. In other words, he was both voicing the core issue and also dealing with and exorcising his own remaining male repugnance. Steve always dealt "straight," in the best not the worst sense, with me and others on this issue, from the very beginning when there were few in the left who took homosexuality seriously or even avoided crudeness. It was part of the core decency and equalitarianism you mention.

Chris Hobson

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